Thought For Today

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Friday morning, the 9th of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in that well-known Psalm, Psalm 23:2: He leads me beside the still waters.” Jesus leads us. Then we go to John 14:6. ”Jesus said to him, “I am the way…” Jesus is the way. He is the one who is leading us. Now, as we look at the new year, 2026, maybe you are walking on a new road. The Lord says to you today, ”Keep on walking.” “Lord, I don’t know where to go.” Don’t sit down, keep on walking. You know the story of the big sailing ship. As long as it is in the harbour, it cannot go anywhere, but when it is put out into the big seas, the wind will take it to it’s destination. Even if the wind is blowing the wrong way, a good mariner will know how to tack against the wind and still get the ship to it’s destination. Do not sit in that harbour.I want to ask you a question. Have you ever been lost in the bush? Now, where I come from, there are tropical forests, and you know, you can walk and walk and walk for miles, and the bush looks exactly the same. You can climb up a tree and when you look out from the top of that huge tree all you see is a green cover of tree tops. So you’ve got no idea where you are going and then you start to panic, and that’s the worst thing you can ever do, and you start walking faster and faster and the worst thing is, after you’ve been walking for a few miles, you find that you are back at the same place. Desperation kicks in.Are you desperate today? Are you my friend, not sure of what you’re going to do this coming year? Where you are going to work? Where the food is coming from? Where are you going to stay? You’re in a panic mode. The Lord says, ”Do not panic.” He says, ”I am sending someone to help you.”Now you know, when you’ve been walking in that bush for a few hours and all of a sudden a local tribesman happens to walk up and you greet him and say, ”I am lost.” And he says, ”No problem, I’ll show you the way.” And he takes you straight to the main road. It is an incredible feeling of relief! Maybe you’re there today. Well, the Holy Spirit knows the way, oh yes! And Jesus says in Hebrews 13:5: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” We need to slow down today. We mustn’t panic. We must keep walking forward and the Lord will open and close doors for us and don’t force the issue. He has got you in the palm of His hand.Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.Goodbye

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Thursday morning, the 8th of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in the Gospel of Matthew 12:30: ”He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.” Very strong words spoken by the Master Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ. Then we go straight to James 4:4, out of the Message translation: ”You’re cheating on God. If all you want is your own way, flirting with the world every chance you get, you end up enemies of God and his way.” Very strong scripture. Folks, we cannot serve two masters. Either we are for Him, or we are against Him. We cannot be undecided.The Lord says in Revelation 3:16, ”I’d rather you were ice cold than lukewarm, but if you are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth.” I really believe that we need to stand up and be counted. We cannot be undecided. Do you know why? Because if we are hunting with the hounds one day, and running with the hares another day, then we’ll be nowhere at all!I read a little illustration by a man of God, which I thought was very special. What he is saying is like the ivy creeper and the oak tree. “The ivy may give the oak a grand and beautiful appearance but all the while it is feeding on the vitals of the oak tree.” He says, ”Are we compromising with the enemies of God? Are we being embraced by the world, it’s honours, it’s pleasures, it’s applause? And in the meantime, this may add to us in the world’s estimation, but our strength becomes lost.” We have to make up our mind, are we going to be for God or not? You see, if everybody is your friend, then you don’t have any friends. We’ve got to be salty. We’ve got to call sin by it’s name and we’ve got to walk according to the word of God if we are going to be effective for Him and not swallowed up eventually by the system of the world.Today, the Lord wants to encourage you and I to stand tall so that people know who we are.Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Wednesday morning, 7th January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in the Book of Leviticus 19:32: “You shall rise before the gray headed and honour the presence of an old man, and fear your God: I am the Lord.” Then we go to the Book of Proverbs 20:29:”The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendour of old men is their gray head.” Then the last scripture is in 1 Timothy 5:1:”Do not rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father…” I want to speak about respecting older people. Do you know it’s the first commandment in the Bible with a promise added to it? “Honour your father and your mother so that your days may be long in the land…” and I want to say to young parents, please teach your children to respect senior citizens, not for the sake of the senior citizens but so that their children will have an easier passage through life. There is nothing worse than to see a badly mannered young child who refuses to stand up when an old person walks into the room, who refuses to greet an old person with respect, who refuses to take their hat off when an old person comes into the room. Why? Because when they go out into the world, they will suffer because they have no respect for age. So for the sake of your children, please teach them.Just before Christmas, we went to the old age home in Greytown and I had a tremendous honour of meeting an old couple. The gentleman is 103 years old and his dear old wife is in her mid nineties. They have been married for 74 years. Amazing! I said, “You make me feel like a teenager.” Aah folks, but to honour them was not hard for me. I greeted him with the greatest of respect, and his dear wife, because they have walked the road. Now, I am only quoting scripture this morning. This is what the Lord has laid on my heart. Please, I know that somebody is saying, ”Ja, but you don’t know what this old mother or father of mine are like.” Yes, they might be grumpy, but they also might be in pain, having suffered a lot of things in their lives, physically and even mentally and spiritually, but honour them because Jesus said so. Have a wonderful day.God bless you and goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Tuesday morning, the 6th of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in Romans 1:17:“The just (or righteous) shall live by faith.” Then we go to the Book of Habakuk 2:4:”But the just shall live by his faith.” Then we go to Galatians 3:11, says the same thing. I think the Lord is trying to tell us something today.Now, as we start the new year, I want to encourage you to ask the Lord to give you a scripture that you can hang onto for the whole year. The Lord has given me this very scripture for this year. Yes, and the righteous shall live by faith. You see, my dear friends, we cannot live without it. In fact, we cannot exist without faith in God, not faith in faith but faith in God. So as we start the new year, we’re into our sixth day, I want to encourage you to discipline yourself and start to live by faith and not by chance or by hoping for the best.Us farmers have a saying. In the Afrikaans language, it is, ”Die Boer maak ’n plan.’ (The farmer makes a plan). Well, I tried for many, many years to make my own plans when I was farming and they never worked. When I started to trust in the Lord, then my plans began to fall into place, but I can hear one young farmer asking me a question, ”How do you get that faith?” The answer is found in the Book of Romans 10:17: ”So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” So if you want more faith, you need to spend more time reading your Bible and that will encourage you to walk by faith.I want to tell you a little story. In 1993, I came back from Scotland. I had been preaching over there and on my way back I felt the Lord tell me, by faith, to write my story. Now I have a limited education. I had never had any experience in writing before, and we wrote a little book called ”Faith like potatoes.” Folks, that book is now in 17 languages. A movie has been made of that book, which is still being shown all over the world. It is a miracle. It is not possible for me to do something like that, but by faith, I stepped out the boat and I trusted the Lord.This year together, let us start to walk by faith and expect great things from the Lord. Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Monday morning, the 5th of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in 1 Samuel 1:10: “And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish.”I am talking about desperate prayer here. Hannah was desperate to have a baby. Then we go straight to the New Testament, Luke 22:42, Jesus speaking: “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”The Lord has laid on our hearts today - He wants genuine prayer from you and me. He wants us to talk to Him. He wants real connection with us. Desperate prayer, He can hear it. C H Spurgeon, the great English preacher said, “Homemade prayers from the heart are the ones that God wants to hear,” He says, “ones that the Holy Spirit helps you and me to pray. Broken words, sentences that are disconnected, God doesn’t mind. Even sometimes, the words are so heavy, you can hardly speak them out. That’s okay too, you can pray in the depths of your heart, but Jesus wants to hear them. You might say to me, “I am not very good at prayer. I can’t pray aloud.” I remember like yesterday, in the little church where I gave my life to Christ, the minister said, “We are going to have a meeting on Wednesday, after that Sunday morning (which I will never forget), and we are going to come together in the evening, and we are going to form little groups and we are going to pray together.” So we went along that Wednesday evening, very nervous, Jill and I and the children, and we were put in a group of about ten, and the leader of the group said, “Now, we are going to pray openly." I had never really done that before. I was extremely nervous, and that man said, “Just pray what’s on your heart,” so off we went. Halfway around the circle, there was an old man. I think his name was John. I could see by his face, John had been a serious drinker of alcohol. He had those war maps all over his face and he had been in all kinds of skirmishes but he had given his life to Christ, like Jill and I had, and all he prayed was, “Oh God, please help me!” A prayer of desperation. I will never forget that prayer and I believe God did help him.Today, speak to the Lord. It doesn’t matter what it sounds like. He knows your heart.Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day,Goodbye.