JANUARY 5

  "And God saw the light, that it was good;" Genesis 1:4 first part

When is good good enough?

If you were born in an English speaking country, the chances are that you would have learned the language through usage, rather than through a book. At school English language is taught as a subject rather than the language of English, as a lot of vocabulary is taken for granted. So if a new word is encountered, like ‘superlative,’ I would hazard a guess that few, not all of you might, might not know what it means unless if was used in an example.

The dictionary describes it as ‘an adjective or adverb expressing the highest or a very high degree of a quality.’

So instead of saying ‘he baked a big cake, using a ‘superlative adjective’ you would say ‘he baked the biggest cake in the world!’ Big becomes bigger and good becomes… well it should be best. But I have a scenario for you. If you did a job to the best of your ability and after inspection the customer said “thank you that was good” would something inside of you say, “what about excellent job or maybe superb?”

I recall having a lesson observation and afterwards, as is the protocol, my head teacher asked me how I thought it had gone. I replied that it had gone better than I had expected, to which she replied “I thought it was good.”

My face smiled, but on the inside I was screaming ‘GOOD? SERIOUSLY? ONLY GOOD!’ Praise the Lord I have come a long way since then. Re-reading Genesis has helped.

Did you realise that the superlative ‘good’ is God’s perfect?

So when is good good enough? When God says it is.

Homework (forgive me I am a teacher so it’s an inbuilt response) see how many times in the first two chapters of Genesis God refers to what he has created as ‘good?’

Tomorrow we will look at the first occasion when God said something was ‘not good’. See if you can spot it first.

The music today is for the three tenors, Steve, Bryn and Dave who sang this on their first performance, 'I saw the light'. Do you see it now? To listen, click on the picture.

     Housekeeping details for you

     The point of this short blog will become clear if you decide to use this reading in the way we intend it. Netherfield Seventh-day Adventist Church believes in healthy churches. You can see what that means if you head to the relevant Healthy Churches page of the website. We also want other churches to be healthy. That means you can join in our campaign to create healthy churches, with healthy people serving the people in those churches.

     A healthy church is one where Jesus comes first. A healthy church is one where the people work together to put Jesus first. One thing we are doing is to join people together to spread that news. I would like you to look at our prayer partners page. This will explain how we want you to use this short devotional. Very basically we want you to find a like-minded Christian friend who you will join with to : choose to pray together every day, decide together on a way to serve other people together, to help them grow as Christians - and to invite the Holy Spirit into your life every day. This blog that you will receive every day simply gives a common spiritual purpose. If you are a newcomer and want to join the blog with this object in mind click here