But He answered and said “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’” Matthew 16:2

Red – “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”  Yes, centuries after Yeshua mentioned this already common bit of folk lore, we still use the same expression.   Of course, Yeshua’s point is that we are quite capable of applying folk lore prophecies about the weather, which everyone knows is as unpredictable as anything on earth, and yet we seem incapable of applying the clear signs of God, which are undoubtedly the most stable things on earth.

With that in mind, perhaps we would do well to recall some of those sayings that help us measure the spiritual weather.

“It is a bad thing to be satisfied spiritually. . . . Our reach must exceed our grasp.  If we have only what we have experienced, we have nothing; . . .”  Oswald Chambers

“The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.”  John Stott

“One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love…”  Henri Nouwen

“Maybe they’d be O.K. if somewhere along the way they’d had true friends, defined as a group of people who share a mutual inability to take each other seriously. Maybe they’d be prepared for what is about to happen if they’d subordinated their quest for immortality to the joys of domestic ridicule.”  David Brooks

“Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.  What we need is to love without getting tired.”  Mother Teresa

“People seek methods of learning to know God. Is it not much shorter and more direct to simply do everything for the love of Him? There is no finesse about it. One only has to do it generously and simply.”  Brother Lawrence

“The Church’s mission is not to accommodate her language to the existing language, to disguise herself so as to slip in unnoticed and blend in with the existing culture.  Her mission is to confront the language of the existing culture with a language of her own.”  Peter Leithart

Topical Index:  citations, spiritual weather, Matthew 16:2