The Call of the Good Shepherd

Preached at Croydon Minster on the Fourth Sunday of Easter. Readings Acts of the Apostles 4.5-12; Psalm 23; John 10.11-18 

‘I am the Good Shepherd’, says the Lord. Alleluia.

 

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At my ordination as a priest I was told, ‘Keep the example of the Good Shepherd always before you’.

 

The person who spoke those words was the Bishop ordaining me who was himself holding a shepherd’s crook, otherwise known as a crozier or pastoral staff.

 

That symbol reflects the call to the pastors of the church to be shepherds of God’s people.

 

The image of the shepherd, and associated pastoral care, is deep at the heart of the church: after all, we are referred to as ‘the flock’.

 

As St Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles to the bishops of the early church, ‘Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son.’ (Acts 20.28)

 

Shepherds and sheep feature throughout the Old Testament. Moses is watching over his father-in-law’s flock when he encounters God in the intense mystery of the Burning Bush. David is a shepherd and a king. The prophet Ezekiel rebukes the negligent shepherds. The psalms speak of God as our shepherd, most notably Psalm 23.

 

And shepherds feature from the beginning of the gospels, watching over their flocks by night. Called by angels they come to behold and adore the very Lamb of God, who is also their shepherd (Luke 2.8-20).

 

Jesus draws on the image of the shepherd in his parables to express the deepest care and attention that the shepherd gives to the sheep so that they are safe, nourished and alive!

 

I am the Good Shepherd. The English word ‘good’ slightly dilutes the original force of the Greek word καλοσ kalos. ‘Good’ just sounds a bit limp to us now. καλοσ translates better as ‘noble, wholesome, beautiful’. That is a shepherd with purpose a shepherd to protect, guide and nurture.

 

And the determining characteristic of this Good, noble, wholesome, beautiful shepherd is that he will lay down his life for the sheep. The good shepherd is totally invested in that care. This is in contrast to the ‘hired hand’ the one who turns up for the money but has no commitment to the wellbeing, safety and health of the sheep.

 

In this sense Jesus is not the only good, noble shepherd. King David was one too. Remember when Goliath, like a ravening wolf, threatened the safety of the flock of Israel David stepped forward to protect his people, highlighting that King Saul was like a ‘hired hand’ who would run away. The shepherd boy David stood and said to the king,

 

³⁴‘Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, ³⁵I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. ³⁶Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.’ ³⁷David said, ‘The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.’ So Saul said to David, ‘Go, and may the Lord be with you!’ (1 Samuel 17.34-37)

 

David was no hired hand. He was a good and noble shepherd. So where does that leave us with Jesus claiming to be the Good Shepherd?

 

Jesus is stretching the image of the shepherd even beyond what is good, noble, wholesome and beautiful.

 

St John’s gospel reflects this beautifully. The phrase ‘I am’ is used by Jesus a lot in John’s gospel: I am the Bread of Life; I am the True Vine; I am the way, the truth and the life; and so on.

 

Hearers will make the connection that the little words ‘I am’ - in Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ego eimi - is how God reveals his name to Moses when he was out shepherding: ‘I am that I am’. That is God’s name: ‘I am’: Being itself, all that is, visible and invisible.

 

The Name is the Name in whose power the Church brings healing and forgiveness on sins, as we heard in the reading from Acts of the Apostles (Acts 4.7-10).

 

The Good Shepherd is leading us deep into the heart of God, because Jesus Christ is the deep, loving heart of God.

 

This Good Shepherd is the knowing shepherd. ‘I know my own’ (John 10.14). As the psalm says ‘O Lord you have searched me out and known me’ (Psalm 139.1). And the knowing shepherd calls us to know him more and more deeply and intimately: ‘my own know me’. This is the call of the Good Shepherd for us to search out and know the ways of God. It is calling us to prayer, to intimacy with God, in Jesus’ words, ‘just as the Father knows me and I know the Father’ (John 10.15).

 

St John’s told us this before. In the preface to his gospel we read, ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1.18)

 

The Good Shepherd knows the Father, and knows you, as our Great High Priest. Christ calls you deeply and insistently to know the Father where you find life in all its abundance.

 

Listen. Hear the call of the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God.

 

 

A sermon preached for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

A sermon preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter. Readings: Acts 2.42-end; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2.19-end; John 10.1-10

The image of Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, is one that many people hold dear.

Today is often known as ‘Good Shepherd’ Sunday because of the Gospel reading of the day, and is associated too with prayer for vocations to the priesthood because each priest is charged by the bishop at ordination with these powerful, inspiring and humbling words, ‘keep the example of the Good Shepherd always before you’. That is the charge to pastoral care.

The ordination rite is peppered with shepherding images.

Some people find the imagery of the priest, or bishop, as shepherd to be unhelpful or even patronising, because of the inference that they, as part of the flock, are somehow dumb, bleating and stupid creatures like sheep. It’s worth noting though that the word congregation comes from the Latin con meaning ‘together with’ and gregis meaning ‘flock’. We come together as a flock even if sometimes we have dumb, bleating or stupid shepherds at the head of the flock!

It is though an image Jesus uses liberally, including charging St Peter with care of the flock, saying ‘feed my sheep’ (cf John 21.15-17) and in our second reading, ‘for you were going astray like sheep’ (1 Peter 2.25a)

Pastoral care is something bishops and priests are particularly charged with – bishops carry a shepherd’s crook, after all – but pastoral care and contact, within the Body of Christ, the flock, is the responsibility of everyone. I hope that you are using this lockdown time to keep in touch with those people you know from church, encouraging them in endurance, faith and hope.

Pastoral care is about being connected in the Body of Christ. And the role of the shepherd is sometimes about showing compassion; sometimes about showing direction; sometimes about nudging or cajoling the stubborn onwards to good pastures; sometimes about making huge sacrifices for the flock, after the example of the Good Shepherd, not like a hired hand, but as a priest, passionate about the safety and well-being of his flock, as today’s gospel implies.

The first letter of Peter speaks of the flock going astray. Flocks go astray when individuals are cut off in some way. And don’t we know that feeling now. The flock is dispersed. We can’t come to be ‘together, with’. We are like sheep scattered across hills and valleys not able to be in the sheepfold of our temple.

Yet Peter also speaks of the scattered flock returning ‘to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’ (1 Peter 2.25b). The return to the shepherd and guardian of our souls is the promise held out that the flock will congregate again, and will be able to know the promise of the Good Shepherd: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10.10).

What a promise. In times where our lives are impaired and limited, because we can’t congregate, the promise of the fulness of life, abundant life, is one for which we yearn, hanker, desire and long.

And this is the great gift of Psalm 23, the Lord’s my shepherd. That deeply loved psalm is like a compass that will guide us on the path to abundance of life. It narrates for us our predicament, sets the bearings of our route out of this and sets our sights on our destination.

Of course the opening line causes some confusion: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want’ can all too easily be interpreted as ‘I don’t want the Lord as my shepherd’, when of course it means, ‘Because the Lord is my shepherd there is nothing I can lack, I shall not be in want for anything’. That in itself is a powerful message of assurance.

And I shall not be in want because he helps me rest in green pastures and leads me on my journey beside still, rather than turbulent waters.

One paraphrase of the Bible renders it like this:

God, my shepherd!

    I don’t need a thing.

You have bedded me down in lush meadows,

    you find me quiet pools to drink from. (Psalm 23.1-2. The Message)

That’s all very well at the moment as we are locked down, locked in and socially isolated. I can’t go into a park, whether a lush meadow or not and lie down, and if I wander around at Waddon Ponds for more than an hour I’ll be moved on.

But there’s something even deeper, ‘he revives my soul’. At the moment many people know the feeling of another psalm, psalm 42 (which begins by describing the desire to drink from living water): ‘why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?’ (Psalm 42.6 passim). Our souls need reviving, ‘like a dry and thirsty land where there is no water’ as another psalm puts it (Psalm 63.2).

Reviving, literally means bringing back to life, and that is a huge flag waving to say this is about resurrection. Christians are people brought back to life through the silent pools of the water of baptism, with souls revived.

And here is the compass for thirsty travellers: ‘he guides me along the right pathways for his name’s sake’. This is the job of the shepherd with the shepherd’s trusty staff bringing strength and protection.

Even walking through ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ evil is no longer to be feared, not viruses not nothing. ‘Perfect love casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18): perfect love is abundant life and fear has no hold there.

And then the destination is in sight. Not for the Christian light at the end of a tunnel, for we walk as children of the light, with the light of the Risen Lord, in this Easter Candle, illuminating our way: ‘for once you were children of darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light…’ (Ephesians 5.8)

The destination and fulfilment of the promise of life is found at a table, the table of the Lord. Here is the anointing, healing love of the Good Shepherd, here a cup is poured to overflowing: this is the abundant life of Christ the Bread of Life, Christ the True Vine.

Psalm 63 says ‘so would I gaze upon you in your holy place, that I might behold your power and your glory’ (Psalm 63.3). That is our yearning - not simply to be in a magnificent building; not simply to enjoy fellowship with one another; not simply to enjoy the splendours of our choral tradition – but to be in our holy place, our place of encounter where the Good Shepherd becomes again the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’

We yearn to gather at that table, our altar, once again for it is where abundant life and hope is brought to us and it points us to a deeper hope beyond, that we might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our life.

O God, our sovereign and shepherd,

who brought again your Son Jesus Christ

    from the valley of death,

comfort us with your protecting presence

and your angels of goodness and love,

that we also may come home

and dwell with him in your house for ever.

Amen.

Rejoice with me: what was lost is now found!

First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster 13th Sunday after Trinity Luke 15.1-10

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This morning’s gospel reading gives us two of the best known parables in the Gospels. It’s little wonder St Luke is traditionally thought to have been an artist, because he paints very vivid images in words. You can picture that woman - probably poor – to whom one coin really matters. There she is, in her little house, searching high and low, pulling the furniture out, getting a torch to look for the coin in dark corners. And Luke’s description has been drawn upon in Christian art associating the shepherd who has found the sheep with Christ, the Lamb of God, bearing the lost sheep on his shoulders.

These parables come from the fifteenth chapter of St Luke’s gospel which contains three parables in all: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son, often known as the parable of the ‘Prodigal Son’. They focus on loss or estrangement, on being lost and, crucially, on being found. Because of that they continue to speak to us today, speaking into our human predicament.

On an individual level these parables speak to a sense of isolation and loss that many people experience in life. Young and old feel cut off. Lost: searching, not for a coin or a sheep, but for meaning and purpose. Often that search is internalised. So rather than looking out of ourselves we look in. Archbishop Rowan Williams often described spiritual death and dying as ‘life shut in on itself’: literally introspective.

We are turning inwards as individuals and a society. We are told that we have the resources to save ourselves. But that’s akin to the woman searching for the lost coin in her purse and looking nowhere else for it; or the shepherd looking for the lost sheep in a barn and not going out to find it. These parables remind us that the search for meaning and purpose is to be found beyond ourselves in God.

Writing in the twelfth century, so this is not new(!), St Bernard of Clairvaux, said,

The whole of the spiritual life turns on these two things: we are troubled when we contemplate ourselves and our sorrow brings salvation; when we contemplate God we are restored, so that we receive consolation from the joy of the Holy Spirit. From contemplation of ourselves we gain fear and humility; but from the contemplation of God, hope and love.

This theme of longing and desire located in God is at the heart of the spiritual teaching of St Augustine of Hippo too. We desire, we search, but we so often search in places where we will never find: in self, in other peoples’ bodies, or in the trappings of ambition and worldly success. Augustine knew that in his own life: ‘O God’, he writes, ‘you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’. God is the beginning and end of our search.

On a societal and global level these parables speak to our disorientation as something that is precious seems to have been lost. Each generation in time ends up feeling something precious has been lost. The message of the prophets throughout the millennia is that we should not nostalgically lament what we thing has been lost but that as a society together we need to look to God, paralleling the personal search, and saying that we must look outwards and upwards for salvation and not get sucked into ourselves.

In a time of reflecting of Care of our Common Home and the giftedness of Creation we might also ponder what we lose as a human family as we inhabit this world with the whole creation: I have in mind lost species, that it seems may never be found again. Loss is real. Nevertheless the pain of knowing something can never be found highlights the joy of finding something assumed to be lost. And we get glimpses of this. Only in this last week I have heard about the huge rise in the Painted Lady butterfly this year, so many more have been found and counted, and the genetic possibility of reintroducing a species of White Rhino.

So in these parables something or someone is lost and something or someone is found.

These are parables of redemption. ‘Redemption’ is one of those words that has fallen out of the day to day language of the church. Quite why this is, I don’t know.

Perhaps it is because we are becoming so terrified of being lost, that we cannot contemplate being found. Our society so often tells us: ‘if you want it you can have it’ or ‘just believe in yourself’. It sounds liberating but in the end it’s saying ‘sort yourself out, and there’s no help beyond you’. That in itself cuts people off – loss and estrangement again - and places a huge burden upon individuals to save themselves.

So what of redemption? Exploring the origins of words often gives us insights into their full meaning and richness. The word redemption originates for the Latin word redimere which means to ‘buy back’. The word’s deeper theological meaning is about deliverance and bringing back from sin. And that may be why we don’t hear the word ‘redemption’ too much now: it sounds as if the church is dwelling on sin. Sin abounds – don’t we know it? But where there’s sin, there’s redemption; where there’s sin, there’s grace!

Redemption needs reclaiming. We need to be proud to be redeemed sinners: found, brought back. The wonderful theologian Gregory of Nyssa reminds us of the healing redemption of Christ, the Good Shepherd:

When the shepherd had found the sheep, he did not punish it, nor did he get it back to the flock by driving it, but rather by placing it upon his shoulder and carrying it gently he united it to his flock.

Each parable ends with the deepest of joy on the coin, sheep and son being found again. Redemption is not punishment; redemption is not blame: redemption releases joy; redemption releases grace.

In each parable the climax is not self-satisfaction or self-congratulation, but rather the redemptive moment - the finding of the sheep, the finding of the coin - is met with absolute delight and gratitude and the impulse to share that rejoicing with others.

The woman, the shepherd, the father, ‘call together’ neighbours and friends for a celebration. This is what our worship is. When we arrive at church we are not simply gathering together as random individuals, but we are, in the Greek of the gospel synkaleo’, ‘called together’ and we become a congregation, which literally means ‘a flock joined together’.

As people who wander, err and stray, but now are found and redeemed - declared worthy to be sons and daughters of the Most High through baptism - let us rejoice that we have been found and are now coming together as the Lord’s flock. Let us enjoy the foretaste of the heavenly banquet in bread and wine, the supper of redemption; a pledge of the fullness of life and hope.

Education Sunday: searching and re-searching God's wisdom

A sermon preached at All Saints, Onslow Village, Guildford, Education Sunday 11th September 2016

Luke 15:1-10.

Lord, you have searched me out and known me, you known my sitting down and my standing, you discern my thoughts from afar. (Psalm 139.1)

+ In nomine Patris…

Today is Education Sunday and as a chaplain at the University of Surrey I have, or at least should have, an interest in the subject.

Of course education is not just about universities, it’s not even about educational institutions like schools or colleges or courses but it is about the way in which we encounter every day as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, about our world and environment, and most significantly about God.

Education is about being led into the mystery of God often just by glimpses, and is a powerful action of the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth, often kicking and screaming and insisting on our own truth. Learning what we do not know is perhaps the most profound education of all!

Learning to live lives that are shaped like Jesus Christ helps us to learn what it means to be a true human being: made in the image and likeness and God and being restored in that image. This is what St Benedict in his Rule calls, ‘the school of the Lord’s service’. (Rule of St Benedict, Prologue, v. 45)

This morning’s gospel reading gives us two particular ways of thinking about education. First there is thinking about the method of education and then there is what the process of education actually is.

Jesus the Teacher - Coptic Icon

Jesus, as we can all agree, is an excellent teacher. If he wasn’t a great teacher then the chances are that we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Without good and clear teaching from Jesus, the first disciples would never have grasped what the gospel was about, and those who received the disciples’ testimony and teaching would never have been able to pass it on themselves. The transmission of faith relies on well taught people communicating the faith that they have received and learnt, even if they don’t grasp every last word.

So Jesus was a great teacher both in his method and content and both the method and content turn us into life-long learners.

His teaching style is characterised by taking questions head on, and, in the typical style of the Rabbis of his time, either to answer with a question or to tell a story.

These stories of memorable teaching are the parables: and we have two of those in this morning’s gospel reading. And in these parables Jesus both asks a question: which of you on losing a sheep or losing a coin would go all out to find that which is lost? And he tells a story: of the shepherd who searches, and finds and brings the found sheep home rejoicing and of the woman who diligently searches her home to pick up her silver coin.

Even if they’re not the best known of the parables many long standing Christians don’t have to trawl the depths of Sunday School experience to recall them. We can picture them and imagine them: the desperation of searching and the joy of finding; we can see ourselves in them.

Parables are memorable because of their pithiness – oh, that the same might be said of sermons sometimes! These parables so brief they are almost proto-soundbites.

But unlike soundbites they unfold layers of meaning and, because they are true teaching, they yield more and more meaning the more they are explored. Otherwise we needn’t hear or read them again; the matter would have been resolved.

So from ancient wisdom and teaching comes treasure ever old and ever new.

The overriding theme of both parables is searching.

The human quest of searching mirrors God searching out and knowing of each one of us. They raise questions of self-examination: what do I truly search for? What do others search for in me? What does it mean to say that God searches me out and knows me, as the psalm puts it? Am I really so precious that Jesus Christ searches me out when I am lost? Am I lost or found?

This theme of searching resonates in my role as a chaplain at the University. First the University is a research intensive institution, searching and re-searching information, knowledge and wisdom. Secondly my role has a pastoral dimension which, like a shepherd and pastor, calls me to search out those who are lost, stumbling or cry out for help.

Searching and re-searching is part of learning and growing, which is the heart of the educative process. We talk about life-long learning and, as Christian disciples (those who learn) this means searching and re-searching the scriptures. In other words, we pay fresh attention to the Bible as the words which are sweeter than honey to our lips.

There is a wonderful ancient method of reading scriptures that is at the heart of our searching and re-searching out of the meaning of God’s word in our lives called lectio Divina. This method invites us to a fourfold way of paying attention to scripture known under their Latin titles: lectio, the actual of reading it; ruminatio, the act of chewing it over, contemplatio, contemplation that leads us deeper into that word, and oratio, the act of taking that insight and praying with it.

A healthy church, or school or university is one that seeks to learn and to grow, that searches and re-searches. True wisdom is a gift of the Spirit who leads us into all truth: the Spirit who leads us in deeper to God’s word; the Spirit who sends us out to search for God’s wisdom, as we delight and wonder in creation, the earth and heavens, in one another and even – shock, horror - in the people we find most unlikeable or annoying.

May we all continue to search out the treasure which is Christ; may we be sought out by the Good Shepherd when we stray from what and who God calls us to be.

Please pray today for all in education, whether formal or informal, for teachers and learners in school, colleges, courses and universities. Pray that we may seek out God’s wisdom every day: a precious treasure. 

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Education Sunday: searhcing and re-searching for God's wisdom

A sermon preached at All Saints, Onslow Village, Guildford, Education Sunday 11th September 2016

Luke 15:1-10.

Lord, you have searched me out and known me, you known my sitting down and my standing, you discern my thoughts from afar. (Psalm 139.1)

+ In nomine Patris…

Today is Education Sunday and as a chaplain at the University of Surrey I have, or at least should have, an interest in the subject.

Of course education is not just about universities, it’s not even about educational institutions like schools or colleges or courses but it is about the way in which we encounter every day as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, about our world and environment, and most significantly about God.

Education is about being led into the mystery of God often just by glimpses, and is a powerful action of the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth, often kicking and screaming and insisting on our own truth. Learning what we do not know is perhaps the most profound education of all!

Learning to live lives that are shaped like Jesus Christ helps us to learn what it means to be a true human being: made in the image and likeness and God and being restored in that image. This is what St Benedict in his Rule calls, ‘the school of the Lord’s service’. (Rule of St Benedict, Prologue, v. 45)

This morning’s gospel reading gives us two particular ways of thinking about education. First there is thinking about the method of education and then there is what the process of education actually is.

Jesus the Teacher - Coptic Icon

Jesus, as we can all agree, is an excellent teacher. If he wasn’t a great teacher then the chances are that we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Without good and clear teaching from Jesus, the first disciples would never have grasped what the gospel was about, and those who received the disciples’ testimony and teaching would never have been able to pass it on themselves. The transmission of faith relies on well taught people communicating the faith that they have received and learnt, even if they don’t grasp every last word.

So Jesus was a great teacher both in his method and content and both the method and content turn us into life-long learners.

His teaching style is characterised by taking questions head on, and, in the typical style of the Rabbis of his time, either to answer with a question or to tell a story.

These stories of memorable teaching are the parables: and we have two of those in this morning’s gospel reading. And in these parables Jesus both asks a question: which of you on losing a sheep or losing a coin would go all out to find that which is lost? And he tells a story: of the shepherd who searches, and finds and brings the found sheep home rejoicing and of the woman who diligently searches her home to pick up her silver coin.

Even if they’re not the best known of the parables many long standing Christians don’t have to trawl the depths of Sunday School experience to recall them. We can picture them and imagine them: the desperation of searching and the joy of finding; we can see ourselves in them.

Parables are memorable because of their pithiness – oh, that the same might be said of sermons sometimes! These parables so brief they are almost proto-soundbites.

But unlike soundbites they unfold layers of meaning and, because they are true teaching, they yield more and more meaning the more they are explored. Otherwise we needn’t hear or read them again; the matter would have been resolved.

So from ancient wisdom and teaching comes treasure ever old and ever new.

The overriding theme of both parables is searching.

The human quest of searching mirrors God searching out and knowing of each one of us. They raise questions of self-examination: what do I truly search for? What do others search for in me? What does it mean to say that God searches me out and knows me, as the psalm puts it? Am I really so precious that Jesus Christ searches me out when I am lost? Am I lost or found?

This theme of searching resonates in my role as a chaplain at the University. First the University is a research intensive institution, searching and re-searching information, knowledge and wisdom. Secondly my role has a pastoral dimension which, like a shepherd and pastor, calls me to search out those who are lost, stumbling or cry out for help.

Searching and re-searching is part of learning and growing, which is the heart of the educative process. We talk about life-long learning and, as Christian disciples (those who learn) this means searching and re-searching the scriptures. In other words, we pay fresh attention to the Bible as the words which are sweeter than honey to our lips.

There is a wonderful ancient method of reading scriptures that is at the heart of our searching and re-searching out of the meaning of God’s word in our lives called lectio Divina. This method invites us to a fourfold way of paying attention to scripture known under their Latin titles: lectio, the actual of reading it; ruminatio, the act of chewing it over, contemplatio, contemplation that leads us deeper into that word, and oratio, the act of taking that insight and praying with it.

A healthy church, or school or university is one that seeks to learn and to grow, that searches and re-searches. True wisdom is a gift of the Spirit who leads us into all truth: the Spirit who leads us in deeper to God’s word; the Spirit who sends us out to search for God’s wisdom, as we delight and wonder in creation, the earth and heavens, in one another and even – shock, horror - in the people we find most unlikeable or annoying.

May we all continue to search out the treasure which is Christ; may we be sought out by the Good Shepherd when we stray from what and who God calls us to be.

Please pray today for all in education, whether formal or informal, for teachers and learners in school, colleges, courses and universities. Pray that we may seek out God’s wisdom every day: a precious treasure. 

© Andrew Bishop, 2016