International Bible Reading Association - IBRA

International Bible Reading Association - IBRA IBRA is a group of people from across the Church in the UK and around the world committed to daily Bible reading together.

We are in the mainstream but often have a radical twist. Since 1882 we have funded Bible study in developing countries and the UK.

All you inhabitants of the world, you who live on the earth, when a signal is raised on the mountains, look! When a trum...
18/06/2026

All you inhabitants of the world, you who live on the earth, when a signal is raised on the mountains, look! When a trumpet is blown, listen!' (Isaiah 18:3)

Isaiah describes the Cush*tes by their differences: distinctive appearance, a language he finds strange, unfamiliar technology. It sounds - as Robert Draycott notes in today's Fresh from The Word 2026 - like the beginning of a prejudice. They aren't like us. We don't understand them. They threaten us.

But Isaiah's oracle doesn't end in dismissal. Cush is included in the vision of God's purposes. The signal raised on the mountains is for all the inhabitants of the world - including the people who seemed strange to Isaiah, including every people who seem strange to us.

The trumpet blown by God is not a national anthem. It is a universal summons.

📖 Hear the Word that calls every nation understand the Bible more at www.ibraglobal.org.uk

🙏 Ask God to show you a people or culture you find instinctively strange or distant — and to help you see them as he does.

'See, Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins.' (Isaiah 17:1)Damascus is still standing. So ha...
17/06/2026

'See, Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins.' (Isaiah 17:1)
Damascus is still standing. So has this prophecy failed?

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reflection from Robert Draycott takes the question seriously — and opens up something important about how biblical prophecy works. Isaiah was not a newspaper columnist predicting headlines. He was a prophet speaking into specific historical crises, often with partial, layered fulfilments that point beyond the immediate moment.

What remains constant is not the specific geography but the underlying claim: no human city, no political power, no civilisational achievement is beyond the reach of history's turning. Everything is

'There shall be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that is left of his people, as there was for Israel when they cam...
16/06/2026

'There shall be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that is left of his people, as there was for Israel when they came up from the land of Egypt.' (Isaiah 11:16)

Isaiah speaks of two captivities: Egypt in the past, Assyria in the present. Behind both lie real suffering, real displacement, real people longing for the way home. And into both situations, God speaks the same promise: there will be a highway. There will be a way through.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reflection from Robert Draycott draws the line from Isaiah's exiles to our own moment - the millions of people today who are displaced, stranded, waiting for a way home. The promise of a highway is not a metaphor for the comfortable. It is a word for the genuinely lost.

God has made highways before. He makes them still.

📖 Learn about the God who makes ways through: ibraglobal.org.uk

🙏 Pray today for displaced and refugee communities — that they would find safe passage and welcome. Name a specific country or situation.

'The wolf shall live with the lamb… the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.'...
15/06/2026

'The wolf shall live with the lamb… the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.' (Isaiah 11:6)

This is one of Scripture's most beloved visions, the peaceable kingdom, where ancient enmities dissolve and the natural order is reordered by the Spirit of God. We know it from carol services and Christmas cards. But Isaiah wrote it to people living under the threat of Assyrian invasion, for whom peace was not a sentiment but a survival question.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reflection from Robert Draycott invites us to hold the vision in its original weight. This is not poetry about a distant future, it is a claim about what the Spirit of God actually produces: wisdom, understanding, counsel, the fear of the Lord, and a world reordered by justice and faithfulness.

A little child shall lead them. It was always going to be this way.

📖 Encounter the vision that holds - read Fresh from The Word 2026 > www.ibraglobal.org.uk

🙏 Where are you being called to live out something that looks impossible — wolf and lamb — in your own relationships or community?

A new week in Fresh from The Word 2026, and a new voice.Robert Draycott is a Baptist minister who has served in England ...
15/06/2026

A new week in Fresh from The Word 2026, and a new voice.

Robert Draycott is a Baptist minister who has served in England and in Brazil, taught biblical studies in a seminary in Campo Grande, spent eighteen years as a school chaplain, and was a Gamesmaker at the London 2012 Olympics. He brings a lifetime of crossing cultures to this week's Isaiah readings.

Theme this week: The Trumpet Sounds. Isaiah 11–22, with visions of peace, warnings to nations, and the call to listen when God speaks.

'The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding.' (Isaiah 11:2)
📖 Read this week: ibraglobal.org.uk

🙏 Ask God for a spirit of wisdom and understanding this week - for yourself, and for the leaders and communities you'll pray for.

'For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named Wonderful Coun...
13/06/2026

'For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.' (Isaiah 9:6)

After days of prophetic judgment and darkness, these words arrive like a shaft of light through storm clouds. And notice how God answers: not with a powerful army, not with a political settlement, not with an overwhelming show of force. With a child.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reading from Raj Bharat Patta reflects on this stunning reversal. Isaiah's original hearers were living under threat, under shadow, under the weight of what was coming. And the word of hope they received was: a child is given. Authority will rest on small shoulders. Peace will come from an unexpected place.

We know who that child is. The weight of the world rested on him, and he carried it.

📖 Encounter the one Isaiah was pointing toward https://bit.ly/4aR3iQF

🙏 Read Isaiah 9:1–7 slowly today. Let the names - Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace - be more than words.

'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' (Isaiah 6:7)In the year that...
12/06/2026

'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' (Isaiah 6:7)
In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord. High and lifted up. The train of his robe filling the temple. Seraphim crying Holy, holy, holy. And Isaiah's immediate response: I am ruined. I am a man of unclean lips.
The holiness of God doesn't produce pride in those who genuinely encounter it. It produces awe, and then honest self-knowledge.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reflection from Raj Bharat Patta notices what happens next: a live coal touches Isaiah's lips - not to destroy him but to commission him. The encounter with holiness that undoes us is also the encounter that sends us. Purified not for retreat but for mission.

Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?

The question is still being asked.

📖 Encounter the holiness that sends us with our free guide https://bit.ly/4aR3iQF

🙏 Sit with Isaiah 6 today — the whole chapter. Let the holiness, the undoing, and the commission do their work.

'He expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!' (Isaiah 5:7)Isaiah sings a love song about a vin...
11/06/2026

'He expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!' (Isaiah 5:7)

Isaiah sings a love song about a vineyard — tended with every care, given the best soil, defended, worked, waited on. And the harvest is sour grapes. The image is of a God who has invested everything and received nothing in return. Not anger first. Grief first.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reflection from Raj Bharat Patta draws out the social dimension of Isaiah's metaphor. Justice and righteousness were not optional extras in the covenant relationship — they were the expected fruit. When they failed, it wasn't a private religious matter. It was a broken relationship with the God who planted and tended and waited.

He expected justice. He expected righteousness. He still does.

📖 Let the prophets shape your social conscience: Be guided through their words https://bit.ly/4aR3iQF

🙏 Where are you expecting to produce fruit but offering something sour instead? Be honest with God today.

After chapters of judgment, Isaiah turns: a branch, a remnant, a canopy.'A shade by day from the heat, and a refuge from...
10/06/2026

After chapters of judgment, Isaiah turns: a branch, a remnant, a canopy.

'A shade by day from the heat, and a refuge from the storm.' (Isaiah 4:6)

The hope that grows where everything else has been cut down.

Find hope https://bit.ly/4aR3iQF

'For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the LORD.' (Isaiah 3...
09/06/2026

'For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the LORD.' (Isaiah 3:8)

Raj Bharat Patta writes about severe floods in his hometown in India — water rising, families stranded on rooftops, the church building becoming a refuge for a community that had nowhere else to go. Life came to a standstill. Systems failed. Leadership faltered.

Today's Fresh from The Word 2026 reading uses that experience to illuminate Isaiah's warning to Jerusalem: what happens when the structures a society depends on — leadership, justice, community trust — begin to collapse. Isaiah is not gloating. He is grieving. He loved the city he was warning.

The question the passage leaves us with is both political and personal: what do our speech and our deeds say about what we actually believe?

📖 Read the prophet who loved the city he warned. Will you understand his words? https://bit.ly/4aR3iQF

🙏 Pray today for places where systems are failing and communities are being left without support. Name one specific situation.

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