Thought For Today

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.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Sunday morning, the 4th of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. Just one small verse with powerful impact - I am talking about the Gospel of Mark 6:41, and this is what it says: “…He looked up to heaven,…” Jesus looked up to heaven. Why did He look up to heaven? He was about to feed thousands of people but first He looked up to His Father. Before we do anything this year, we really need to look up, every single morning in our quiet time, look up, spend time with the Lord and hear what He has got to say. Why? Because these good ideas don’t always work, do they? No, I have done many of them, make no mistake. No more good ideas, only God ideas. Now, how do you get a God idea? By spending time in the presence of the Lord. That doesn’t just mean spending time in your quiet time room. No, it means spending time in the presence of God, all day long, everything that you do!We have got to stop buying fish to feed the poor. We have got to start teaching the poor how to fish for themselves. We have got to stop giving farm produce to the hungry and teaching the hungry how to grow food for themselves. Now I want to use an example for you. I am talking about the Bible App. By the way, we ourselves are now on the Bible App. That Bible App was the idea, the God idea, it was realised when a group of these very precious folks, the founders of the Bible App, were standing in a security line in an airport, and the idea came to them. Then Bobby Gruenewald, I hope I am pronouncing his name correctly, started it in 2008. He had 83 thousand downloads which is pretty good, but I want to tell you, just a couple of weeks ago, they went over 1 Billion downloads, installs - 1 Billion! That’s a 7th of the world’s population, Now you see, that wasn’t just a good idea, that was definitely a God idea and it is growing at an alarming rate. Today, please spend time in the presence of God. He will tell you what to do and what not to do, because we don’t have time to keep reinventing the wheel. Listen to the Holy Spirit and then go out and be obedient and you will feed more than five thousand people. Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day,Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Saturday morning, the 3rd of January, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We go to the Gospel of John 12:24, one of the most challenging scriptures in the Bible, for me personally, as a farmer. The Lord says: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” If you want to live, you have to die. That doesn’t make sense, does it? But that is the truth of the matter, probably the greatest of all paradoxes. Living needs dying. It is time this year for you and me to step out of the boat and to start walking on the water. You say, “But I might sink!” Yes, indeed, you might, but there will be One there to pick you up, out of the water, just like Peter. He was the only one that got out of the boat, remember? The other eleven stayed in the boat, but I want to say something to you, my dear friend, and I say this in love - the boat is sinking! It is full of wood-borer and rot. The safest place to be is walking on the water, with Jesus, by faith, and that means you have to put yourself down and start living for God and for your fellowman. As a farmer, if you leave that seed in the storeroom, it is safe there. Nothing will happen. It is safe from any destruction but nothing will happen. It will not grow. It will stay there forever, but when you put that seed, that good seed that cost you a lot of money, into the ground, that seed will die in order to germinate and produce a great crop, sometimes sixty, eighty, a hundred-fold more than when you kept it in the shed. You say, “But it might get eaten by worms, destroyed by hail and drought or floods.” Yes, of course, but it might also produce an abundant crop of a hundred-fold.Jesus says, if we are going to serve Him, we have to die to self. Your biggest enemy, and my biggest enemy, is not the devil, it is yourself, it is myself. We have to put the flesh down so that Christ can live in us, and when that happens…aah, we are looking at an abundant life. Jesus says in John 10:10, “The thief comes to steal, to kill and to destroy but I came that you might have life, abundantly.”Now today, go out and live an abundant life for the Lord.God bless you and goodbye.