While cultures and world communities vary, in every culture or community I can think of, money is often the determining factor that indicates who has power and control.  And in every culture and world community, it seems that money has control over those individuals.  I don’t think it’s ever been any different.  For years, money has been the counterweight against true justice and equality.  People have often denied doing the right thing if the price was right.  It just took 30 pieces of silver to get Judas to turn on God and Christ to prevent what God wanted for humanity.  It seems that we each have a responsibility to make the right decision when determining what’s most important to us.  If we’re tempted, we’ll deceive ourselves into believing that money is more powerful than the God we serve.  Our choice is simple — justifying ourselves and getting what we want irrespective of obedience to God, selling ourselves out for the sake of money — or getting what God wants for us — to live right and just lives so that what we value does not appear detestable in God’s sight.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to live free from self-deception and the power of money to control my faithfulness to you and what you want for me — the just and right life of your favor.

       Several years ago, the popular comedian named Flip Wilson coined a comedic phrase on his television show denying responsibility for mistakes he made in his tv life.  After making what we’d experience as a comedic, but human error of ethics or morality, he’d say, “… the devil made me do it.”  It was funny because everyone watching realized that the mistake was made out of his free choice or will.  That he deceived himself by not accepting responsibility for his actions meant that he was willing to live comfortably with the lie he was telling himself.  It also confirmed that he wasn’t tempted by God.

The greatest hindrance to receiving what God wants for us rests in our ability to deceive ourselves and our inability to accept God’s truth.  Denying God’s truth is an invitation to deny justice to ourselves and everything God wants for us.  When we live in and with the hope of God’s planned future for us, we willingly accept God’s truth and our decisions, as such, become just in fulfillment of that plan.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, empower me to avoid deceiving myself and live with the hope of receiving every good and perfect gift from above, as you want for me.

       Arrogance is defined as “… an attitude of superiority shown by an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions”.  That attitude can be reflected in a feeling that whatever we do for God should be “good enough” for God, whether or not it’s done in concert with God’s will for us or not.  To presume that we know better and more than God, and to act in a way that dismisses God’s plan for our lives is the ultimate act of both arrogance and injustice that denies any chance for true justice.  In short, placing ourselves above God is the ultimate rebellion and idolatry in which we become the god of our own making.  Only by being obedient to God can we receive justice and get what God really wants for us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, humble me in mind and spirit that my arrogance neither prevents your justice from being applied, nor exalts me above you and what you want for my life.

       It’s been said before: “Pride goes before the fall…”.  We’ve seen it played out in our lives in real time as we’ve watched those filled with their own sense of pride fall and bring everyone and everything down around them — Richard Milhouse Nixon comes to mind.  We’ve seen it occur in the biblical story as Goliath stood before David in all of his pride; as Naaman questioned why Elisha wouldn’t even come out of his tent to honor him, and there are others in the biblical story that indicate how pride can either get in the way of God’s justice or become an example of the self-deception we sometimes practice that inhibits what God wants for us.  In our day and time our pride may well be a reflection of our unwillingness to do what God is calling us to do — the new thing, the just thing and the right thing — whether it’s to do justice by protecting the poor, the widows, the foreigner, the innocent, and the marginalized, or whether it's just letting go of our arrogance and pride long enough for us to receive what God wants for us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, help me to be mindful of myself and others when pride and arrogance stand in the way of what you want for me and your world.

       Humans — above all creation — have the inherent ability to deceive ourselves.  We create situations in our minds where we tell ourselves that what we do, we do for the right reasons.  Our error occurs by how we determine whether or not we’ve been right or just in our actions.  If we’re honest, that error is based on whether or not we’ve gotten what we want for ourselves, or if we’ve gotten what God wants for us.  If we achieve our intended outcome, then we justify our motivations as being just and right even if they’re not.  That proverb credited to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux which states: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, may well be true if our intentions, however good they might be, are based on selfishness and the lies we tell ourselves that motivate us.  Because we tend to be self-assertive and self-protective, it could just be that no matter how well intended our actions are, the outcome may end badly for us.

       And yet, God has determined that there is one thing that’s more important than all the others.  It’s more important than the ritualistic sacrifices (tithes, offerings, and service) we offer that we think honors God and wins God’s approval.  It’s more important even than the outcome of the decisions we make in our efforts to help people.  God sees justice being done when we’re motivated by our desire to do the just thing and the right thing in every situation.  God sees the underlying motivations of our hearts to do the right and just thing as actions which are acceptable to God.  So “the road to hell may well be paved with good intentions …” if those intentions come because we have deceived ourselves.  But the road to God’s heart is paved with the honorable intention and desire to do the right thing and the just thing.  Taking that road will get us everything God wants for us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, thank you for seeing beyond the outcome my actions and decisions have on others into the motivations of my heart. Enable me to always be motivated by the desire to do the just and right things that my life will be acceptable to you.

       Fairness and equity are important if true justice is to be practiced, valued, and respected.  When our decisions are guided by unwarranted and unmerited favoritism or the influence of money, there is every likelihood that true justice is thrown out the window and discrimination, bias, and unfairness are brought into the equation.  This is not the brand of justice that our God wants us to apply in our relationships with one another.  For true justice to be applied to all equally, every precaution and measure must be taken to insure that God’s desire for justice is being implemented in the world.  Anything less than an impartial decision leads to injustice – a false, distorted, and twisted imitation of the true justice that is seen through God’s eyes.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Eternal God may my decisions and judgments always be made, absent the bias and undue influence of money to alter my sense of fairness and true justice in my life.

       It’s not enough for God’s people to only be aware that injustice exists.  Nor is it enough to know that those who make, interpret, and carry out unjust laws which victimize the poor and perpetrate “uncivilized evil” in the communities are able to do so with impunity.  Knowledge that it exists is one of many steps to insure “true” justice.  God’s people are instructed to seek justice.  That requires a vigilance that guards against all kinds of deceit and trickery that unfairly tilts the scales of justice in favor of the rich and powerful.  There is an overt warning that those with power will tend to take care of their own, reaping the rewards of their deceit.  And there seems to be a warning to the oppressed that those who would perpetrate injustices against them are living among them, such that unjust laws that take advantage of the poor should come as no surprise to us.  God’s two edge sword proclaiming the absence of a just world comes both as a warning for those who practice injustice.  It encourages those who are victims of injustice to proactively seek justice and do it.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, grant me the power, wisdom, courage, and endurance to seek your justice such that all who are adversely impacted by injustice may come to know that your justice – true justice – exists in the world.

       God’s sensitivity to the issues and dynamics of power that create systems of injustice is keen.  That we exist in this world of God’s creation and especially as we exist in the relationship between the human constituents of the world is one in which God wants to insure fairness, equity, and justice.  There is a directive in God’s mandate for true justice that warns those with power against using abusive and oppressive laws against to deprive the vulnerable of their rights.  God’s willingness to protect the vulnerable and those often pushed to the margins of life is both righteous and compassionate.  And perhaps that is what “true” justice really is.  In the eyes of God, it is a justice that ensures fair treatment for the oppressed, the orphans and the widows.  True justice seeks to make laws and decrees that don’t unfairly make them the target of powerful people.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Righteous God, guide my actions toward doing your justice. Make me aware of those laws and systems that unfairly target those who have been marginalized by unjust laws that I may take action.

       If we’re honest with ourselves, no one ever benefits when injustice is widespread.  People who suffer injustice are forced to live knowing (or at least believing) that they’ve been treated unfairly.  And whether those who wield the power to make judgement decisions against someone else acknowledge it or not, those with power are aware when their decisions have been weighted too heavily on the side of unfairness and inequality.  But our role as God’s people when injustice has occurred is to give aid and comfort to those who are victims and to discourage them from being vengeful.  It’s important to remember that true justice serves to avoid violent and what might be an unequal retribution against the offender while providing care and assurance for injustice’s victims.  That is true justice – justice clothed in understanding and compassion, and not draped with spite and vengeance.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, help me to always seek true justice by working to comfort victims of injustice while building community and relationship with all persons.

       Things would be much simpler for us all if we could/would just follow God’s instructions.  Our human attempt to achieve fairness and equity through justice are noble, and often set with good intentions.  But in reality, our integrity (and sometimes) our human weakness in our judgement to be fair causes us to act and make decisions based on social, cultural, and societal norms that interfere with true justice.  One’s biased opinion toward justice may influence whether healthcare, housing, and a minimum wage are rights deserved, or privileges given.  It can also impact whether we believe justice is served when a person “deserves what they get”, or justice is meted out fairly when a person “gets what they deserve” according to our personal biases.  The practice of true justice would then depend on whether discrimination based on race, age, gender and sexual orientation, religion and a host of other factors could be eliminated.  True justice brings with it the fair and unbiased evaluation of a situation regardless of social, cultural, or societal norms and tries to see justice through God’s eyes.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Righteous God, enable me to see situations of injustice with your eyes so that true justice can become the standard operating procedure in my life.

       It’s not very often we come across what appear to be contradictions in holy Scripture.  On one hand when a lie is perpetrated against another person, there is the word which demands an “eye for an eye,”.  The old adage “what comes around goes around” seems to be the rule of the day.  On the other hand, Jesus compels us to examine another approach that takes us in a different direction.  Jesus invites us to consider compassion as an answer to dishonesty and evil.  They seem contradictory on the surface.  And yet, we should hold dear to our hearts another scripture that balances the scales of justice for these two seemingly contradictory texts: “Vengeance is mine, and recompense, …” (Deut. 32:25a) and “Indeed the LORD will vindicate his people, have compassion on his servants, …” (Deut. 32:26a-b).

       On the surface it seems that the idea of true justice is in conflict and contradiction with itself.  And yet, foundational to both scriptures is God’s desire for true justice and not a distorted justice based on vengeance or revenge.  True justice comes when people are judged rightly with compassion; not when our actions are reactive; not when we seek to balance the scales of justice without compassion or understanding of one another.  God’s justice – true justice – vindicates all parties, rewarding those who are victims while holding accountable those who act unjustly.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, embolden me to act with compassion and understanding toward others, allowing your vindication to be the true justice that resolves all actions which seem unjust.

       The cries for real and true justice flourish amidst the apparent indifference to what true justice is in the world.  Daily reports reflect the injustices throughout the world as justice is either denied or perverted in favor of the rich and powerful.  Persons are imprisoned and detained under false pretenses without even so much as a fair trial or viable witnesses.  Paul Whelan, a former Marine  and Evan Gershkovich are both arrested and held in a Russian prison under the pretense of espionage.  Cameron Lamb, an unarmed man is shot and killed by a police officer without the benefit of a trial by jury while sitting in his truck on his property.  Women summarily lose the right to have autonomy of their own bodies, even after they vote to do so.  In the meantime, those of powerful political persuasion use their finances and paid legal teams to play legal gymnastics with the courts to pervert justice, avoid justice, promote lies and falsehoods to escape justice in an effort to avoid true justice, while the poor and marginalized are at the mercy of those willing to distort the truth, or punish them for being poor.  That’s not to say that if the poor have violated society’s codes of ethics or morality, they shouldn’t be held accountable.  But when they are found guilty of the same crimes as the rich and powerful, but the accountability standards are different, justice is perverted and often denied.  When true justice — God’s justice — is in play, whether globally or locally, everyone is seen as equal.  Lies and false accusations are replaced by truth.  Truth is the primary standard for true justice for everyone.  True justice brings with it God’s Truth and a healthy dose of grace and accountability.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, enable and empower me to always use Your truth as the standard for my decisions. Lead me into making right and fair decisions in my relationship with everyone so that true justice may always win out.

       God’s laws are clear and succinct about those things we (as humans) are most likely to do in our efforts to pervert justice.  And while these laws are good for cultures and peoples of every persuasion in every age, these words are specifically targeted toward God’s people, while at the same time also defines those elements of justice that we may overlook.  We have to acknowledge that somewhere, someone behind the scenes is able to put their finger on the scales of justice in an effort to deny justice to the poor.  It additionally identifies those who are most likely to be or become victims of injustice in the world— the innocent who are falsely imprisoned, as well as those who see money as a valid reason to pervert justice.  Since our directive is to keep religion real, we have an obligation to avoid our participation in devious schemes that seek to pervert justice, as well as working in the ways God has called us to intervene when justice is being perverted.  Keeping religion real is a two-edge sword that is both proactive and preventative.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to act both proactively and in a preventive manner when justice is being perverted so that I may keep religion real in my life.

       There is no doubt that there is a connection between our faith and our works.  We often see those acts of mercy — feeding the hungry, providing clothes for those who are naked — as things necessary to show God’s love in the world.  They are a real and necessary part of our ministry in the name of Jesus.  What we sometimes miss is the component of injustice that has allowed systems of local, regional, national, and global enterprises to create the needs that we undertake to provide for.  Our efforts to provide mercy ministries is a much-needed response to those systems of injustice.  But they are also acts of justice to the marginalized that fill the gap created by those systems of injustice.  We have a responsibility to keep religion real by making a stronger connection to these ministries as God’s justice in a way  that reminds us that our religion is real and authentic.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, help me to connect the ministries of mercy to acts of justice that others might know and understand that through meeting their primary needs I am keeping my religion real.

       We never think of encountering Jesus Christ in the real sense of the word.  Our visions of him are often other-worldly.  And yet, it is our scripture that invites us to have a living and real experience with Jesus Christ by acts of caring and justice towards others that take us away from the church and out into the lives of those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, and imprisoned.  For Jesus, that is where real justice is done and where real religion takes place.  And for us, doing justice and caring for others is where we can encounter Jesus in the here and now present reality.  It’s also the only way to practice doing justice and keep religion real.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, open my heart, mind, spirit, hands, and feet to the opportunities to do justice and keep religion real by being involved in ministries involving care to others.

       Those of us born into faith beneath the umbrella of grace often give little thought to keeping God’s law as it’s understood in Hebrew Scriptures.  We forget that Jesus said, “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:19)  Even beneath the umbrella of grace, we will always live in a relationship with God where obedience is a mandatory requirement.  Yet, in our practice of religion we have neglected the primary understanding of Law and grace.  It was never a demand that we be faithful.  Being faithful is an expectation of our relationship with God.  But doing justice — that thing that God’s word says will make us happy — is primary to establishing a relationship with others that gets to the heart of God’s law.  Doing always supersedes hearing only and makes religion real.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to be as faithful to the laws of Your word thru grace that moves me from hearing Your word only, to keeping religion real by doing justice as Your will .

       There are times when we’d like nothing more than to separate the law of God from how we respond to each other’s needs.  We’d like to hold on to our traditions, obeying the rules and ordinances of our church, all in an effort to keep our religion pure and undefiled.  But it is impossible.  Caring for one another by performing acts of justice despite the written rules and ordinances of the is a vital and connecting link in our relationship with God.  They are two sides of the same coin.  To love God is to have the freedom to love others and to do justice.  To love others is to take upon ourselves the act of loving God by doing justice or securing justice for others.  There is no separation between our love of God and caring of one another.  And if we’re honest with ourselves, we can’t honestly state that we love God, or our neighbor without seeking justice for them regardless of our written church rules and ordinances. To deny justice based on the appearance of being true to God’s word perverts true justice and prevents us from keeping religion real.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, create in me a connectional spirit that enables me to do caring acts of justice for those who seek it. Allow my efforts to work and secure justice for others as an effort to keep religion real as an expression of my love for and them.

       We live with the ongoing tension between receiving the grace of Jesus Christ and doing or practicing our religion in the world.  Our fear of turning grace into a faith based on our actions, keeps the war raging.  The questions about our actions becoming works-based righteousness (efforts to win God’s approval by what we do) and grace (knowing we are loved without having done anything to earn it)are always at the forefront.  But it’s not supposed to be a polarizing either grace, or actions.  It’s supposed to be a combination of the two.  Others can’t experience Christ’s love of them unless and until justice through religion becomes real for us and we implement those acts of justice by doing caring actions as expressions of God’s grace.  Our blessings come from doing acts of justice that show God’s mercy and care.  That’s what Jesus did for us — served us, and in the end gave us both grace and justice that exonerated us all.  We would be blessed if we did the same for others by making religion real and initiating just acts for them.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower my acts of caring connected to justice as evidence that I keep religion real and end the war of tension between grace only or works only as true religion.

       For many people the idea of being religious is all about believing in God and going to church.  If the subject of going to church becomes a topic of conversation, the most likely response from those who don’t attend is, “Well, I’m not religious.”  However, if we take seriously what it means to believe in God, to have faith in Jesus Christ, and to have heard God’s word to us, then what it means to be religious is more than going to church on Sunday.  It would suggest that hearing — while a vital part of religious life — somehow makes the practice of religion incomplete unless and until we move from hearing to keeping religion real by doing justice for those whom God deems important.  To be pure and undefiled before God would involve connecting God’s word across the centuries and finding that link that makes religion real throughout eternity.  If it’s true that God’s earlier warning — “cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ (Deut. 27:19), is in any way connected to [pure and undefiled religion before God],— “to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world”, then  real religion is transporting God’s desire for justice out of our hearing in the pews and moving it into the lives of those who are God’s targets for real justice (the orphans or fatherless, and the widow) — and making justice and religion real in our life and theirs.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, transform me from someone who only hears Your word into someone who does Your word so others may know Your love and mercy as true justice that keeps religion real.

       The light of God’s Spirit is captured in prayer.  Prayer is needed even more when we assume a role that places us in the position of speaking on behalf of someone else.  The idea of being an ambassador for Christ — speaking on behalf of Him who came that we might be reconciled to God — is not an easy task.  Knowing just what to say, how to present what we say while representing ourselves as messengers of Christ requires understanding what it means to be reconciled to God.  Praying for the wisdom to carry out that work engages us with the Spirit of Christ and becomes a powerful work of grace.  It also becomes vital to the ministry of reconciliation because not everyone is open to the idea of being reconciled.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, empower me to be the person through whom Your message of reconciliation becomes a clear and understandable message of grace to others.

       We get it that Jesus died for us, and we believe it.  It is a vital and essential part of our relationship to God.  But we sometimes remove from his sacrificial death the idea of atonement — making us one again (at-one/atone) with God.  It is that act of making us one with God that is at the very heart of Christ’s ministry in the world.  We are only able to be in a relationship with God because of that atonement — that act in which we were reconciled to God and brought back into relationship with our Creator.  That is the nature of Christ’s ministry in the world — reconciliation.  And Christ has bequeathed that relationship of ministry to us, that Christ’s ministry to the world and our ministry in Jesus’ name become one.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, help me to experience what it means to be reconciled to God, and empower me to seek forgiveness and reconciliation with others.

       At a time when God’s people believed in a wrathful God, to hear Isaiah writing of a God who is desperately seeking to restore a broken relationship and offer the blessing of reconciliation between God and God’s people might be new.  But God’s efforts to forgive us and reconcile the relationship between us and God are not new.  Throughout the history of human experience with God, the olive branch of a restored relationship to God has been and is primary to the very nature of God.  It began from the moment Adam and Eve broke covenant with God and has transcended down through the ages and was revealed as the true ministry of Christ.  Now that Christ has fulfilled his covenant with God, the ministry of reconciliation — Christ’s purpose and ministry has now been given to us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to live in such a way that Your desire to live in a reconciled relationship with all people becomes my message of faith for everyone I encounter.

       The church has long been accused of always wanting money.  But while money is necessary in our culture to efficiently, and effectively do ministry in our communities, collecting money is not our main priority.  That’s especially understandable if and when we come to realize that most important where God is concerned (and more important than giving money to the church is the restoration and reconciliation of our relationship with each other.  Perhaps we’ve gotten it backwards.  We’ve become so anxious and enthusiastic about doing ministry, that we’ve placed more value on money than on the value of restored and reconciled relationships.  But Christ’s idea of an appropriate relationship with God and each other clearly values reconciliation above money.  Reconciliation is the foundation of every ministry we do in the name of Christ.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, teach me how to set my priorities in order. Teach me to place the value of a restored relationship with you and others before the value of any gift I give to You.

       The lengths to which God has gone to extend to us the ministry of reconciliation has been amazing.  It wasn’t just that God offered the life of Christ as a gift in order to save us.  It’s that in that offering God has placed an eternal claim upon our lives so that we no longer belong to ourselves, but to the God that saved us.  And it’s in that precious offering that God claims our lives in and through the ministry of Christ.  It’s claim extends to and from those who had lived and died before Christ was present.  That claim now extends to those of us who believe today  How much more then can we believe that Christ’s ministry of reconciliation extends to those yet unborn?  And how much more importantly does that make our responsibility as ambassadors of the message of reconciliation to tell the story?  The question is not  then, “Are you saved?”  The real question is, “Do you know you have been saved?”  Everything after that is your response to who a person lives for — the Lord, themselves, or some other god.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, help me to understand the breadth, depth, and expanse of Your ministry of reconciliation so I may continue as an ambassador of Your grace.

       Reconciliation is the proof  and the outcome of God’s love for us.  It justifies us and puts us in a right relationship with God.  It’s not just that God’s love has justified us and put us in a right relationship with God.  It’s that because of that right relationship, our own lives have been transformed into a reflection of that reconciliation — the freedom we have to live in and by grace; knowing that God has loved us, forgiven us, and saved us to and for something greater than we could have imagined.  And in that relationship, God has also embraced us and holds us as sacred.  It’s not outside of the relationship that we know God.  It’s inside of the relationship — one that has been restored by Christ and has opened the door of invitation for us to enter into the family of our God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me to express our reconciled relationship as the true ministry of Christ. Let others experience reconciliation through me.

       We often speak of the forgiveness of God, especially as we experience God’s forgiveness in the light of our own shortcomings.  It is central to who we are and what we believe as people who confess and profess Jesus Christ as our Savior.  But forgiveness, as important as it is, is only one part of God’s equation of reestablishing relationships.  To forgive and end our relationships with forgiveness doesn’t quite get at what it means to have a whole relationship with God or each other.   A large part of the equation on what it means to be Christian focuses on the requirements necessary to fulfill our participation in the true ministry of Christ.  Forgiveness is one part.  Reconciliation completes the process.  Without reconciliation — without coming together, restoring what it means to be in relationship, we have essentially aborted the true ministry of Christ and our participation in it.  Forgiveness allows the brokenness of relationships to be cleansed.  Reconciliation allows the cleansed relationship to be reconnected.  That is the true ministry of Christ — a reconnected relationship with God and each other.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, let Your compassion be reflected in my words so others may know Your forgiveness. Enable me to listen so others may know Your care. Work in me and through me that I may experience a forgiven and reconciled relationship with others and with You.

       We have, by our own assent and permission, given ourselves over to the ardent and persistent worship of things. And if we’re honest, today’s gadgets come with no other purpose than to distract us away from those things and relationships that should be given priority over everything.  Yet we continually relegate what should be primary to secondary status.  Yet, the truth is, those things have commanded and demanded our attention, yet they have no life of their own other than the life we give them.  They have no honor beyond the honor we give them, yet, we have come to worship them day and night.  We use them to wake us up and the thought of going without them drives us into panic mode.  And yet, when trouble comes, we don’t reach for our devices, we reach and cry out to the living God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, free my entire being from its prison to the present-day trinkets and shiny gods. Create a panic in me to honor You that is greater than a forgotten cell phone.

       There is a sharp contrast made between the true God who created us and those that are created by us.  The understanding derives primarily from the essence of who God is and who we are.  Are we humans who live and have a spiritual experience, or are we Spiritual people, born of God who are living and having a human experience?  The answer to that question may give us personal insight to who and what it is we worship.  If are answer is that we are humans who live and have a spiritual experience, then any god of our choosing can motivate us to honor it, whether it be gold, silver, iron, wood, or clay.  But, if our answer is that we are spiritual people, whose life is born of the God who created us, then it is the God of our creation who deserves glory, honor and first place in our lives and idols have no place in our lives at all.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, help me to be mindful of who I am and whose I am so that my worship is directed to the true and real source of my being and not some thing that has been created by human hands.

       I’m always curious when I see religious “art”.  Even statues and images of Christ, however inaccurate they might be, arouse my curiosity to some extent.  Whenever I see those images of Christ, I’m always reminded that he lived in history but that he also is alive today within me.  He was real, not just for me, but for historians and theologians all over the world.  There is a different curiosity when I see other images of wood, silver, and gold that have somehow been given the same or more significant honor than Christ.  I have never seen, nor heard of a tree coming back to life once it was struck down or a statue reconstructing itself after having encountered the smelter’s fire.  And while there are stories of a Phoenix rising from the ashes, that story is categorized in its writing as myth.  The story of our God and Christ has real historical and spiritual significance.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, continue to affirm in me the truth that the God that deserves first place honor in my life is the true God of spiritual power and life.

       That God would speak to us in words that we could understand and would write down is transformational.  It’s not the tools used to record what was said, nor is it the fact that we have them that’s important.  What’s important is that a living presence spoke to them, giving life to them just as surely as life was present in the One who spoke to them.  The transformation occurs when we recognize that these thoughts didn’t come from some inanimate object but spoke to us about them when the converse isn’t true.  Idols can’t and don’t speak to us about our God.  That gives our God a higher honor and place than any idol we might allow to take the place above our God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to always give You first place over any object that is a creation of human hands and ingenuity.

       We are a nation of people who are accustomed to tests.  We run tests for everything — to see which car drives the best; to see which food tastes the best.  There is an entire industry set up to compare and tests similar products, everything from electronics to the smallest insignificant gadget.  Ironically, we are the only ones able to do a comparison test between God and gods to see which of them is truly outstanding.  If we run our tests, we would discover that the gods we choose always leave us unable to accomplish or even draw close to being an Award winner.  Only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — our God — will stand out in first place.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, help me to see without a comparison test that You are the only God and that the gods of our own making can never compare to You.

       It’s difficult for us to see clearly when our eyes and other senses are distracted by events and things and tools of their various capacities.  It’s hard for us to see exactly how the constant distractions that we invite into our lives each day actually come between us and God.  Those distractions can become very disrespectful to God.  But for a moment, imagine yourself speaking to someone when, without warning, they suddenly direct their attention to something that has nothing to do with you.  It’s the same situation that occurs when we’re supposed to be acknowledging God as the Award winner, but we get distracted by something else and the distracted thing makes God our 2nd priority.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, cleanse me from the present-day distractions that display an open disrespect of my relationship with You. Help me to award You my full attention.

       We live in a world where, for the most part, we are consumers.  We use all of our senses to experience our world.  We see with our eyes, smell with our noses, touch with our hands, sense the smoothness or texture of something with our skin, hear with our ears, and taste with our mouths and tongues.  All of this sensory data reaches into our life experiences, and, from our very human perspective, affects or desire, inviting us to crave more and more of those things which become an attraction to us — everything from the sweet creamy taste of our favorite ice cream, or the emotional attraction we feel when we see our favorite color, the gloss or glint of gold or silver that hits our eyes, the smell of bacon frying or coffee brewing in the morning — all of those things hit our senses with a power too wonderful to ignore, inviting us — no, luring us — to give more and more of our attention to them.  The truth is that they enter our lives with such a harmless appearance that they subtly, but powerfully command a place in our lives, often consuming us and becoming our god — that thing we worship, pushing out the One who should be first in everything and overtaking our loyalties.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of all creation, help me to see more clearly those gods of all kinds that come between me and full worship of You. Strengthen me so that I can remove any and all barriers that get between me worshiping You with all that I am and all that I have.

       There is a great relief in all things —big and small — if we know in our hearts and minds that we have peace with God.  Somehow, that puts everything else in its proper perspective.  If we can live in a perpetual state of peace with God, then in reality, nothing else should be able to upset the apple cart of our life.  Any and everything else becomes a mere inconvenience — a distraction of suffering in some regards — to remove us from that place of peace.  But living with the truth that we are justified by our God (free to live beneath the umbrella of God’s grace) — then peace with God becomes and is an unmovable and unstoppable force of calm and endurance in our lives.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, empower me to find Your peace, even amid those distractions in life that cause suffering, but build character and allow peace.

       Finding peace in the world comes with some basics, especially if we have an engaged and active relationship with God and Christ.  Of necessity, it means that we will be at war with various enemies of God that creep into our lives.  But what a peace we discover when we find that we’ve submitted and held on to God’s truth, our faith, our knowledge of salvation and the presence of Christ’s spirit to protect us.  And what a “peace” we find when we realize that the gospel of peace (that which offers the contentment of Christ to the lives of people) can actually free them to discover a peace that they had not known before.  There can truly be no greater peace than to live within the shelter of God’s protective grace and truth.  That is a peace that passes all understanding.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, enable and empower me to always find peace living within the context of Your truth, my faith, Your Spirit, and salvation.

       Life’s situations and challenges seem to have the unique ability to take us off our game.  All the peace we know and experience seems to evaporate when death, or some other crisis, or major unplanned even enters into our lives. Finding peace in God (or God’s peace) takes us away from the distractions and events of life that take us off of our game and become game (life) changers for us.  The peace that God gives to us gives us new eyes and a new mind to understand — or at the very least, to accept life’s disappointments in order to find and know God’s peace.  The blessing is that Christ has already deposited that peace with us.  The difficulty comes in trying to embrace that peace on a daily, or continual basis.  When we come to the reality that life’s situations are temporary, it becomes easier to “let go and let God”.  It’s in the release that we learn to trust God and achieve the peace that we so often seek to embrace.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to find Your peace in the world — a peace that enables me to be unmoved by the disappointments and crises of life.

       Perhaps our greatest difficulty in life is getting rid of the things that cause worry and fear preventing God’s power and authority to take control, giving us assurance and peace.  When we’re troubled and anxious — worried about any and everything, it’s difficult for us to be thankful.  It then becomes that much more difficult to focus on God’s word to instruct us, while reminding each other that there is a way  —  a process to follow so that we can experience God’s peace in our lives.  Once we find that peace, it’s normal to break out in songs of praise.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to find that peace of Christ that takes away all of my worries and allows me to break out in songs of praise to You.

       If we were to make a list of the things that destroy our sense of peace, there’s no telling how long that list would be.  And yet there’s a word of wisdom from someone who discovered how to live without being overwhelmed by the circumstances of life.  She said, “I you can control your problems, there’s no need to worry, because you can control them.  If you can’t control them, there’s no need to worry, because you can’t control them.”  How much easier it is to find peace knowing that God is faithful to care for our needs and is always in control, even when we’re not.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to experience the peace of heart, mind, Spirit, and soul that comes from knowing that you have all things under control.

       Finding peace is a fairly simple recipe of life.  There are certain things that should become a part of our daily ritual — our life’s discipline — that not only allows us to find peace in the world, but to live in a state of continual peace.  Does that mean that we won’t experience trials or challenges in life?  NO!  Absolutely not!!  But following the recipe will invite us into that relationship with God where God can do what God says God will do.  If we continually find joy, pray with thanksgiving allowing God’s Spirit to reign, and abstain from evil, God’s peace will make us holy.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable and empower me to follow the simple recipe for finding peace so that my life will be holy and sanctified and acceptable to You.

       Peace is a long sought after, difficult thing to find.  And people have tried to find peace in various ways.  Too often we have believed that peace was achieved when conflict was avoided.  And so, in our efforts to achieve what we believed to be peace, we sought to avoid situations which lead to conflict, believing that if we avoid the situation, peace could be real for us.  Yet, while the immediate situation was avoided, the underlying, inner tension did not create an environment of peace.  But peace is more than the absence of conflict.  And, if we find ourselves thinking about the situation (or person) responsible for the chaos in our lives, the idea of peace still remains far from us.  There are several places, people, and organizations that promise to deliver on the idea of peace.  And I suppose that it’s possible to go to anyone of them to see if their claims to deliver on their promises are true.  On the other hand, there is someone who can lead us to real peace.  And that One not only tells us exactly how and where to find it.  They deliver it and the result is a peace that defies our understanding — and is able to exist even in the midst of personal or global tension, chaos, and the other unsettling events of life.  And if the truth is told, finding it is easier than we think, but it involves a shift in how we go about finding it.  Finding peace invites us to use our heart, mind, and spirit by concentrating on things that are true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.  Or concentrate on God the things of God to find peace in the world.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me by Your Spirit to embrace those things that lead to Your peace within my heart, mind, and spirit. Let me be the presence of Your peace in the world so that others may find Your peace through me.

       It’s not often that we see ourselves as wealthy — as people who live in luxury and pleasure.  And yet, there are those who make a pretty healthy living off of migrant farm workers, undocumented aliens, and others.  The lives of luxury that have come from those who make their profit is but one side of the coin of our relationship with the poor.  The other side displays those of us who benefit from their labor but refuse to stand in support of those who have been victimized by our desire to have cheap labor and cheap prices.  That is not pleasing to God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
Gracious Creator, convict me of my responsibility to help those at my doorstep and empower me to become more sensitive to the needs of the poor.

       It’s difficult for us to think of being generous to the extent that we would give to everyone who begs from us.  That idea flies in the face of a mindset that says a person should be willing to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  It is an easy platitude to reach for as long as the person doing the reaching also has some boots to reach for.  But all too often we see only from the perspective from which our own eyes can see, when the question really is, “What would I have them do to me?”  Perhaps if we saw ourselves as God saw us, we’d realize that we are all beggars in some ways.

• What feelings arise when you hear the words of Christ say, “Give to everyone who begs from you;”?
• How do you respond to these words when you see someone begging on the street?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
Loving God, enable me to see those in need as I would see myself in need and empower me to give what is asked for knowing that only by Your grace can I supply their needs.

       A healthy relationship with the poor has often been strained by our need to characterize them as unwelcome and undesirable.  There are those who capitalize off of the poor because the poor seem to have no voice of power to speak on their behalf.  But that is a terrible accident of thought.  God speaks for them.  It’s not so much that we insult the poor as we insult the God of the poor.  It’s difficult to justify insulting God when all that’s necessary to honor God is to perform those random acts of kindness and respect toward those who are, though poor, children of God in every way. 

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
God of mercy and love, give me the wisdom to honor You by showing kindness to those who live in poverty.

       There are so many crumbs that fall from our tables.  There are even scraps of food that we throw away and waste and let spoil.  I wonder if we ever consider our waste when it comes time to offer something for the poor.  A “Business Week” magazine article estimated that the average household throws away 20 pounds of food each week and American restaurants throw away 6000 tons of food a year.  Those scraps that fall from our tables could feed a lot of poor people — if we would just see them or even consider that they are as worthy of God’s bread as we are.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
Gracious God, enable me to be convinced that the poor who are on my doorstep just outside the gate are worthy of the scraps that fall from my table.

       The Jewish Study Bible uses the term kinsman instead of neighbor, meaning one who is related to you.  The New Revised Standard Version broadens the understanding from kinsman to neighbor – one who is in your community.  For Christians, this is an opportunity to move beyond the boundaries of a tribal – relationship understanding and opens us up to define all humanity as “neighbor”, or of being related to one another.  But we also live in a culture that often has a particularly negative view of the needy.  They are often considered to be leeches and parasites upon society and culture.  The question is does our Christian faith shape our relationship to the poor through God’s view of the world, or have we adopted an un-Christian relationship to the poor by accepting a worldly and cultural understanding of the poor and poverty?

• What sources of information shape and define your views and relationship to the poor?
• On the poor and poverty?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
Loving God, enable me to clearly see my participation in systems of injustice that create poverty. Help me to become an advocate of Your justice.

       In some ways, we are invited to see those who are poor as victims of a system of injustice.  There are times when our political affiliations and loyalties invite us to see poverty and those who are poor as disinterested and lazy, slothful, and unambitious.  And yet, God, who sees all truth in a much more comprehensive way, understands that poverty doesn’t just happen.  God has provided enough for everyone to have if we share.  There is a system that gets in the way of our sharing that promotes, rather than inhibits justice.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
God of Wisdom, allow me to be young and wise enough in heart, mind, spirit, and strength to see the wisdom Your Holy Spirit reveals to the world.

       The Social Principles of our United Methodist Church offer us this understanding about the poor of our world, but specifically our immediate community:

“Because we recognize that the long-term reduction of poverty must move beyond services to and employment for the poor, which can be taken away, we emphasize measures that build and maintain the wealth of poor people, including asset-building strategies such as individual development savings accounts, micro-enterprise development programs, programs enabling home ownership, and financial management training and counseling.  We call upon churches to develop these and other ministries that promote asset-building among the poor.  We are especially mindful of the Global South, where investment and micro-enterprise are especially needed.  We urge support for policies that will encourage equitable economic growth in the Global South and around the world, providing a just opportunity for all.”

• How do we address this issue of poverty and the poor as an act of faithfulness and loyalty to God in a world where God has considerable concern for the poor?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer –
Gracious God, open my heart that I may be as much a helper and protector of the poor as You are. Humble me that I may see them, not because of their poverty, but because they are valuable and precious children of Yours.

       When everything seems to be going all wrong and there’s no logic or reason to explain it, we usually look to our own human understanding of how things should be or should have been.  If everything operated off of a cause-and-effect relationship, we could order our world the way we wanted.  But, the reality is that we can’t.  A lot of things don’t happen because one thing doesn’t ordinarily lead to another.  Things begun with good intentions turn out horribly wrong, and things that look inordinately bad turn out just fine.  Because there is a God who loves us, it’s important for us to be reminded that everything is not always as it appears.  God is in control and is often working out life’s difficulties for our benefit, whether we can see it or not.  Our objective is to learn to trust in the Lord.

• Have you ever been concerned that things were not working out in your best interest only to discover a reversal of fotune at the end?
• How does that inform your faith that “all things work together for good ...”?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, empower me to grow in my trust of You and your faithfulness. Help my belief that You are always working things out for my better good.

       One of the greatest challenges we face in life is understanding suffering.  And the type of suffering is irrelevant.  It could be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual.  Suffering, whenever it happens, is both difficult to understand and to endure.  But suffering becomes manageable when we realize that the One we have trusted to brings us through times of suffering is faithful and true.  When our confidence is secured in knowing that our God is faithful and that we can trust in God, we can find peace in knowing that God will come through for us.

• Have there been times when you’ve doubted God’s presence or whether God really cared for you?
• How do you understand your suffering to be connected to your trust in Christ’s faithfulness and ability to save?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, in the midst of life’s difficulties, empower me to trust in Your power to save me from harm. Strengthen my belief in Your faithfulness.

       There are no words any truer than those that remind us that, “God is a mystery.”  And so, it’s difficult for us to fully understand how God works.  It’s also true that when our lives are in distress, it’s difficult to for us to see things clearly.  Our thoughts are typically clouded and darkened by our inability to see our way out of our circumstances.  It is then that we are compelled to reach out for someone who can bring enlightenment to our situation.  Those of us who are among the believers in God turn to God with prayers hoping to bring light into the darkness of our world.  It is trying to see the world through God’s eyes with God’s understanding that the door of hope is then, opened and we learn that we can trust in God.

• Has a lack of clarity about a difficult situation ever caused you to feel hopeless?
• How does having a spiritual (God’s) perspective bring new hope to that situation and teach you that God can be trusted?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, enable me to have a more God-like understanding of life’s situations. Empower me to see clearly that my trust God fully so that my hope may endure.

       When life is going sideways, the most difficult thing to do is to wait for God.  It’s difficult for many reasons.  We have short term memory about how God has been there for us before.  We feel the anxiety and pressure of our circumstances.  But it’s difficult mostly because we’re never aware of how God is working things out.  We don’t get emails, text messages, or find God connection to us on God’s personal social media platform.  Our only recourse is to go to God in prayer and hope that God’s ears are open to our petitions.  But it is God’s silence that discomforts and disturbs us.  It is God’s silence and the waiting for God to act that works against us, making us doubt God’s trustworthiness.  We often fill as though while we’re waiting on God, that we don’t mount up on wings like eagles, but flop around like chickens with their heads cut off.

• Today, reflect on those times when it seemed like God was silent and that your prayers were not getting through.
• What feelings does that generate in you? How does waiting affect your faith that God can be trusted?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, grant me the strength to endure life’s challenges until I know You’ve heard my pleas and have come to save me. Help me to wait patiently and trust in You.

       I would imagine that it’s pretty easy to feel forgotten or ignored when our prayers seem to go unanswered.  It may even lead us to believe that we’ve fallen out of favor with God — that perhaps we’ve done something that angered God — something to cause God not to respond.  We may even begin to believe that the weight of our sin so angered God that there was no way back to that relationship.  But it seems we have short-term memories.  We often forget that God has a reputation for being merciful.  Also, God has said He would never leave us or forsake us, and that God’s love for us is unbreakable.  What a comfort it would be to think on those things that remind us of times when we questioned God’s faithfulness and yet, afterward knew God could be trusted.

• Have you ever felt that God had forgotten you, or was ignoring your prayers?
• Does recalling God’s promises of faithfulness provide comfort in those times and remind you that God can be trusted?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, help me to remember your faithfulness when I am in distress. Enable Your faithfulness to be my salvation and teach me to trust in You through every trial.

       Waiting for God is the most difficult thing to do.  And we don’t wait alone.  Accordingly, all creation longs to be restored to healing and wholeness.  And if Paul is right, there is a futility about it — about our lives, our prayers, and how God responds in that time of our waiting while everything is made right.  The waiting, however, is not as futile as we think because we wait in hope.  We wait in hope for the one who is our savior who has, can, will, and does save us.  We trust with the past knowledge that our Savior will come and be there when we need our Savior most.  God can be trusted.

• Have there been times when your prayers and times of distress seemed to be wrapped in futility?
• If so, in what ways? If not, what keeps you living with confidence?
• What have you learned about your ability to trust in the Lord when it appears that all hope is lost?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, teach me to wait in patience and faith, trusting in Your faithfulness to save me and all creation from their distresses.

       There are times when there don’t seem to be any answers to life’s challenges.  It’s not unusual at those times that we turn to God.  When the world is closing in on us and there doesn’t seem to be an escape route, we look to God to come to the rescue.  And usually what we’re looking for is a “right now” God.  We want that God that sees our distress and comes to us before we get stressed out.  In fact, we sometimes believe that if we’re in distress, then God has waited too long.  Our prayers become prayers of anxiety and we enter into panic mode, believing that God must be ignoring us, or at the very least, avoiding us.  It’s usually when the darkness is dropping around us like a canopy that we experience the morbid fear of death.  And yet, in the midst of that darkness we are challenged to see God’s light and remember God’s trustworthiness — to remember those earlier times in our lives when God’s goodness prevailed in our lives just when we thought it was all over.  It’s those times when we remember that our God may not come when we want, but God can be trusted and we can be sure and our peace can be certain.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, there are times of distress when life seems to be threatening and I fear You are not with me. Comfort me with reminders of Your faithfulness and mercy that I may fully trust in You.

       There is much more to life than simply disclaiming the principles that Christ teaches us.  Bob Dylan once wrote a song that said, “You’re going to have to serve somebody.  It might be the devil; it might be the Lord, but you’re going to have to serve somebody.”  Even if we choose to believe and follow someone besides Christ (God with us) whose principles advocate ,align with and even embody the same principles of God, what difference does it make if we don’t follow them?  We will either be convinced and life by faith taking care of the poor, or be unconvinced and be convicted by our indifference to the poor.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, direct me in the way of truth that convinces me of my responsibility to minister to those who are poor at my doorstep.

       In some ways, our culture believes in an old adage “Give a person a fish and they can eat for a day.  Teach a person to fish and they eat for a lifetime.”  Seldom do we first ask if those persons we want so badly to fish for themselves are strong enough to hold a fishing pole.  Christ invites us to look at the immediate condition of a person and not look upon them as we wish them to be.  It might be to our advantage to first feed a person a fish so that they have the strength and energy to go fishing themselves.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, fill my heart with Your Spirit, and my mind with Your attitude, and my actions with Your compassion that I may be convinced that the “Golden Rule” is a Godly rule.

       There are many philosophies and ideologies that people aspire to, even if they’ve chosen to reject Christ.  Sometimes it’s because it’s just easier to avoid the criticism that comes from being labeled a Christian.  And so it is that some people claim Buddha, Confucius, and many other people besides Christ.  And yet it has become clear.  What’s important, beyond acknowledging God’s gift in Jesus Christ is for all people to live in love and charity caring for the poor.  God’s message of kindness has not been reserved for one group over another.  Perhaps there is a common thread of God’s truth present in each understanding that should convince us all to care for the poor.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, enable me to be convinced of a global need to care for the poor, but especially those poor who wait for the crumbs from my table.

       There are so many crumbs that fall from our tables.  There are even scraps of food that we throw away and waste and let spoil.  I wonder if we ever consider our waste when it comes time to offer something for the poor.  A business week magazine article estimated that the average household throws away 20 pounds of food each week and American restaurants throw away 6000 tons of food a year.  Those scraps that fall from our tables could feed a lot of poor people — if we would just see them.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to be convinced that the poor who are on my doorstep just outside the gate are worthy of the scraps that fall from my table.

                  It’s not often that we see ourselves as wealthy — as people who live in luxury and pleasure.  And yet, those of us who live in the USA have one of the highest standards of living in the world.  Now, in that, perhaps there’s nothing to be ashamed about.  The question is not only “Did we profit from dishonest gain, but what we have done with that which we have accumulated?”  There is a tendency to disregard those who have been victimized by our desire to get rich.  God does not approve of that kind of behavior.  And it could well be the fuel that ignites workers who go on strike for a fairer distribution of wealth.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Creator, empower me to become more sensitive to the needs of those at my doorstep. Help me to be convinced of my responsibility to help.

       In some ways, we are all invited to see those who are poor as victims of a system of injustice.  There are times when our political affiliations and loyalties invite us to see poverty and those who are poor as disinterested and lazy, slothful, and unambitious.  Sometimes they’re viewed as manipulators and con artists, out to get something for nothing.  And yet, God, who sees in a much more comprehensive way, understands that the poverty doesn’t just happen.  God has provided enough for everyone to have if we share.  There is a system of greed and indifference to the poor that gets in the way of our sharing that promotes injustice, rather than inhibits justice.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to clearly see my participation in systems of injustice that create poverty. Help me to become an advocate of Your justice.

       The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church offer us this understanding about the poor of our world, but specifically our immediate community:

Because we recognize that the long-term reduction of poverty must move beyond services to and employment for the poor, which can be taken away, we emphasize measures that build and maintain the wealth of poor people, including asset-building strategies such as individual development savings accounts, micro-enterprise development programs, programs enabling home ownership, and financial management training and counseling.  We call upon churches to develop these and other ministries that promote asset-building among the poor.  We are especially mindful of the Global South, where investment and micro-enterprise are especially needed.  We urge support for policies that will encourage equitable economic growth in the Global South and around the world, providing a just opportunity for all.

       And of course, this complies with God’s expectation that we feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison.  But it’s also an invitation to seek justice as we are doing those things to diminish and eliminate poverty in our world.  That is, unless we remain unconvinced that meeting the needs of the poor are unimportant.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and gracious God, open my heart that I may be convinced that the poor on my doorstep are persons who need a hand up as well as a hand-out, Empower me to see them in their poverty without judging them because of their poverty.

       The death of old habits and ways do not always come quickly, especially when we’re talking about being transformed into a new creation.  The hardest part of the transition is avoiding the reversion factor where we, from time to time, go back to old ways and habits of doing things.  But, once we’ve made a conscientious decision to never return to who we were and figured out that who we were then is not who we are now, the transition becomes a lot easier.  One of the ways of managing that is to firmly fix in our minds, soul, heart, and Spirit, that Christ is in each of us who believe.  That enables us to strip off the old self and all that we have been accustomed to doing.  It’s not easy, but it is the process that reminds us that Christ has transformed us from the inside out.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy Christ, make me mindful of Your presence within me. Help me to avoid the lifestyle of my past that prevented me from being identified with You.

       The idea that we are a part of a community is a welcoming thought.  That we are connected to one another gives us a sense of belonging and community.  But belonging to the group really means that we are compelled to live our lives in an independent, yet interdependent reality.  What we do, we do for the benefit of the whole.  What we do benefits us independently as well.  Our source of pride will always be what Christ has done in us and through us.  But our pride also comes from our knowledge that what we’ve done we’ve done for Christ that he might be glorified by what we do.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, enable me to live knowing that because of You I am who I am, and what I do is done because of who You are in me.

       In some ways, our culture believes in an old adage “Give a person a fish and they can eat for a day.  Teach a person to fish and they eat for a lifetime.”  Seldom do we first ask if those persons we want so badly to fish for themselves are strong enough to hold a fishing pole.  Christ invites us to look at the immediate condition of a person and not look upon them as we wish them to be.  It might be to our advantage to first feed a person a fish so that they have the strength and energy to go fishing themselves.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, fill my heart with Your Spirit, and my mind with Your attitude, and my actions with Your compassion that I may be convinced that the “Golden Rule” is a Godly rule.

       I have to admit that when I look at myself in the mirror, I’m more likely to see my flaws and what’s changing in this body of mine from day to day.  Changes in hair, skin, and other things noticeable, that which I love and despise are right before me.  It’s not often that I look in the mirror and say to myself, “Staring back at you is the very temple of God.”  That’s a lot to remember and live up to from day to day.  And yet, if I am to believe God and what’s been accomplished in Jesus Christ, that is exactly who I am.  To remember it and internalize it gives me a foundation on which I am being built.  I am becoming a part of the very structure against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and loving God, empower me to awaken to the reality that this human shell is more than that. It is the very temple where You dwell each day.

       One of the songs we sing as children is “Jesus Loves Me.”  The song is simple, but it misses a very salient point regarding who we are as God’s people.  While it teaches us as children that we are weak in comparison to God, and God is strong, it doesn’t lift up the promise that God is with us — inside of us — to be our strength and give us strength.  What the song does not do is help us to understand that our powerful and almighty God has taken up residence within us and gives us our identity, telling us who we really are in this world.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Amazing God, enable me to see Your strength and power present in me and with me each day, giving shape, power, and definition to who I am in You.

       Our character is shaped at times by a very grueling process.  Many of us would like to think that we simply develop into who we are.  But that is not the case.  Our character is forged by the various trials and circumstances that affect our life.  A wise person once said, “A tree is made stronger by contrary winds.”  Another person, motivational speaker, Les Brown, has attributed his success to those days when challenges came.  He called them “character building days.”   If that’s so, then trials we face as people of God only serve to forge our Christian character and define who we are becoming as persons born anew in Christ Jesus.  He will be praised as our strength in him is molded because of our trials.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and gracious Christ, enable the trials that I face each day to forge me into the holy temple You’ve created me to become.

begins to support and give substance to who we are becoming.  Any changes in who we are should then be attributable to Christ, our foundation.  Jesus, then, is the one on whom our identity as people is defined.  He is responsible for who we are becoming unless we highjack our own development and build upon his foundation with works that have nothing to do with Christ.  Just as we were once new in Christ, we now have an opportunity, not to build upon the work of ourselves or another, but to build upon the foundation upon which our work in Christ will rest.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, help me — by the power of your Spirit alive in me — to remember my new life in You which identifies me to others as Your child, and allows my good works to stand.

       Much of what we do in life is determined by how we identify ourselves.  It’s not a one day, one time process, though.  It’s a process of learning who we are, and then acting out of that place of identity.  Sometimes the process can be disturbed if we have claimed ourselves as one person, but then suffer from memory confusion and forget who we really are.  If we live our lives in a way that who we believe ourselves to be internally can give credence to what we do on a daily basis, then the process of identification remains fairly simple.  But, if by our words, and actions, people are left in a quandary about the person we say we are as opposed to the person they might have just met, then they are left with nothing more than an image of confusion.  It really comes down to us being able to integrate what we do and how we live with who we really are.  Those of us who are people of faith are faced with the responsibility of remembering and connecting who we are on a spiritual level with how we act on a physical level.  If there is a connection between the two, then our actions will speak louder than any words we can say.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and Loving God, grant that as I seek each day to live a life to honor You, I may always remember who I really am. Bless me to know that Christ is my foundation and that I am made Your holy temple by the indwelling of Your Holy Spirit.

       We tend to look for the most complex way to solve life’s problems.  Perhaps that’s our human nature — to find the most difficult way into and out of something.  God has provided us with a profound, yet simple solution to the problems we encounter while living in relationships with God and each other.  The burden we carry is trying to find a way other than the which has been provided by Christ.  Perhaps the weight of trying to please God by some other way outside of a simple act of forgiveness is what makes God’s acceptance of us far more difficult than It has to be.  If we are, in fact, trying to find the easiest way of acceptance, perhaps it comes from yoking ourselves together with Christ through faith.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me to grow deeper into my relationship with You so that I may learn to accept the yoke of Your grace as the easier way of a relationship with You.

       Life as we know and live it is not easy.  If we’re honest about our relationship with God, then we live with God’s commandments as responsibilities that yoke us together in that relationship.  That typically means that we are yoked together in ways that obligate us to go in the same direction that the strongest part of the team (Christ) is leading.  However, it’s not unusual, being yoked together, to sometimes drift off course.  The beauty of being yoked together with Christ is knowing that whether we drift into the high weeds of life, away from the quenching streams of water, or we’re on the path chosen by the leader, that Christ will always be with us.  That makes life and living and putting on the yoke of Christ much easier when we know that no matter how difficult the journey, we will never be alone.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful Christ, empower me to be comforted by the benefits of Your faithfulness that come when I take Your yoke upon me knowing that You will always be with me.

       Psychologists have suggested that it takes 21 days of consecutive practice to change a person’s behavior pattern.  That may be true when moving a wastebasket from one side of the room to another, but I’m not certain that is the case when asking people to change from who they are into who they wish to become.  Our human condition seems to add a layer of complexity to the issue of transformation as we seek to move from the physical attractions of life to the spiritual way of living.  What we do and who we are requires something different and more than 21 days.  Yet, we find ourselves knowing what God requires almost immediately, but unable to achieve the standard God has set for us.  Jesus has offered and taught us the truth about forgiveness and grace as a highly radical way of finding acceptance with God, while at the same time providing grace as the much easier way.  Grace is the element that fills the distance between where we are and where God wants us to be.  It is the yoke of God’s grace offered in Jesus Christ that makes a relationship with God easy.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, help me to accept the easy yoke of Your grace as I become transformed from the person I was into the person you have called me to be.

       There will always be perennial questions about how we might come to know God or be in an authentic relationship journeying together doing God’s work.  The obvious answer is we know God as we live in relationship with Him.  Since we can’t know another person’s experience with God, we have great difficulty knowing who is right.  But there is a common denominator.  Others can know us by our relationship with God.  Others can know the degree to which we are in that relationship by what we say and do to honor the relationship.  It is in essence what we practice out of our relationship with God that gives evidence of a faithful relationship with God.  It also speaks to how simple it is to accept God’s way into the relationship.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower Your grace offered to me in Jesus Christ and my acceptance of that grace as evidence of my life lived in a relationship yoked together with You.

       It is impossible to know God without being in an authentic relationship with God.  And there is a difference between “knowing of God” and “knowing God.”  It is possible to know of God without being in relationship with Him in the same way that it’s possible for us to know of someone famous without ever having met them or having been in a true relationship with them.  And of course, how a person’s life is involved with the presence and connection (or yoked) to the other individual would be one way of determining the validity of that relationship.  Perhaps the clearest evidence would be a life that reflected the grace of God experienced from living within that relationship.  In that way simply going through the motions and living life independently of the other absent a true relationship is not being yoked.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, continue to allow Your grace present in my life to be and my willingness to walk with Christ to be evidence that we are yoked together for eternity.

       It is probably a part of human nature to want to do things for ourselves.  God knows we’ve tried.  We have left no stone unturned in our efforts to devise ways to earn God’s acceptance.  All of our ways have been woefully inadequate.  It’s been inadequate because we are not all equally strong emotionally, physically, mentally, or spiritually.  It is because God is wiser than we are.  And it’s out of that wisdom that God has developed a way to level the human playing field of life, creating an easier way to have and maintain a meaningful partnership and relationship with Him.  As foolish as it seems, it’s as easy as accepting God’s gift of forgiveness in Jesus Christ.  It’s much easier to accept God’s grace in Jesus Christ than to continue struggling through the daily challenges of trying not to miss opportunities to love others.  Doing it God’s way by faith is a much wiser and easier way into God’s grace than trying to devise our own plan of acceptance.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, grant that I may continually trust in the wisdom of Your gift of grace in Jesus Christ as the easy yoke of partnership int my relationship with You.

       We somehow forget that our relationship with Christ is one in which we are yoked together.  Perhaps it is because the idea of a yoke, or of being yoked, is foreign to us.  We don’t often see teams of animals tied together at the neck unable to go any direction independent of each other.  But here we are joining together to work with Christ with the yoke of forgiveness and grace, understanding and unconditional love around our necks.  And this grace has freed us from having to pull the heavy wait of the law in order to “earn” our righteousness before God.  Christ’s yoke is there to lead us and guide us through life.  Other yokes can be particularly problematic and difficult for us to live with.  For instance, living a life of always trying to be right is an awfully heavy burden to bear.  It doesn’t leave room for growth or relationship, because for every law we manage to lift, there is another heavier, more difficult law yet to shoulder.  In fact, the laws seem to always leave us in the position of comparing ourselves to others to determine how we fare in winning God’s favor.  But grace frees us to live into a growing relationship with the one who has lifted the burden for us.  When someone else is lifting your burden, the load can be remarkably light.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, help me to know and understand your grace as the easy yoke that is able to lighten the load of my life and strengthen my relationship with You.

       When a miracle occurs in the bible, we tend to point to the powers of the supernatural as the source of our healing.  We point to powers that seem to come from other-worldly places that have somehow creeped into and become active in our world and situation.  That was certainly true in Jesus’ day and holds true in our day as well.  We sometimes fail to acknowledge what is at the heart of our healing when healing occurs in our body.  We overlook the fact that if the medical profession caught our disease and brought us through to our healing, that it was (in fact) our faith that gave them the “go-ahead” to do proceed.  We sometimes forget that prayers were sent up because people believed in faith that if they prayed, God would answer their prayers.  We’re not always willing to acknowledge the miracle that is able to be performed because of a simple act of faith.  And yes, it is God who deserves the credit for our healing whenever it occurs.  But what starts the ball rolling is a simple act of faith.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, teach me to trust in a simple act of faith as the beginning of all my blessings. Help me to know that through my faith You will provide and supply all I need to be healed.

       It’s amazing how our self-image and need to be recognized by God for what we do can interfere with a healthy relationship with God and others.  The fact that we are willing to exalt ourselves above others says something about our own blindness to those places where we fail.  It allows the seed of entitlement to creep in and grow undetected and unattended.  It’s when we feel that someone (either God or other people) owes us that the attitude of entitlement becomes pervasive.  We lose sight of the truth of our situation — that all that we are and all that we have comes as a blessing from God.

       Humility on the other hand enables us to acknowledge those places in our life where we fall short of perfection.  It as much announces to God that we need grace and mercy to be made whole.  It remains eternally true that a simple act of faith opens the door to the healing of our mind and spirit and humility is the key.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, teach me in all things to learn humility as a spiritual character trait, that your blessings of grace and mercy may come to me through a simple act of faith.

       I can remember being in school, and one of the most significant programs of the entire school was “Awards Day”.  That was the day students were acknowledged for almost everything.  “Perfect Attendance”, “Honor Roll”, “Musical Performance” and many other awards were given to students as they had earned them in the eyes of the school administration.

       Being good or working for the approval of others is a human trait that — in some ways — is unavoidable.  We like being honored or rewarded for doing a good thing or for having performed a job well done.  That can be noted by all of the awards shows and programs produced each year.  What is unacceptable is our pride and belief that somehow God should defer to us when we are seeking a blessing for our disease.  Our blessings come when we defer to God, humble ourselves in obedience, so that through our simple act of faith — believing that God is able — God will open the door for our healing to come.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, help me in all things to put aside my pride such that the simple act of faith, trusting in you to provide, will open the door to the healing of my diseases.

       In some ways, many of us are born blind.  We are blind to the beauty around us; blind to the evil around us; blind to the love that surrounds us; we’re born blind to many things that spark our curiosity about our world and ourselves.  We are also born with the desire and need to see.  Most of us come by our vision through experience.  We try things that either work or don’t work and learn from those experiences.  There are other times when we employ a simple act of faith and simply take another person’s word to experience the outcome we desire.

       I imagine the man born blind could have determined that going to the pool at Siloam might have been a lost cause.  But he took a simple act of faith and followed Jesus’ instructions.  God invites us to perform a simple act of faith and trust that his remedy for healing our sins (washing the mud from our spiritual eyes in the pool called Jesus) is sufficient for our healing.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and loving God, grant that I may always depend on the simple act of faith that trusting in Jesus’ blood will open my eyes to the truth that only through faith in him can I be healed.

       The human family is famous for our creativity — our ability to create ways to solve problems of a complex nature.  Sometimes, even our simplest solutions, don’t end with the results we are looking for.  We make a laundry list of things that we believe will make us acceptable enough to receive the approval of God and others.  And in some ways, our pride and faith in ourselves that our solution is the right solution leaves us unclean from the failures of our own design.  This is especially true about our relationship with God.  What’s needed is something that will purge our sins from us forever.  A simple act of faith — washing the robes of our lives in the blood of the Lamb will cleanse and heal us making us acceptable, and presentable before our God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, help me to put aside all of my creative ideas to cleanse myself of my sins. Empower me to take a simple act of faith and wash in the blood of Jesus to be healed and clean in your sight.

       Our disease — that thing which keeps us walking around in darkness and is the leprosy that affects our souls — is the sin which clings to us closer than our skin.  It is the very nature of our separation from the Creator and that which keeps us from being clean and walking in the light.  And, if we’re honest it is an infectious disease that seems to affect everyone.  We pass it on to others by doing nothing more than living with it, whether we do it covertly or overtly.  The covert sins (or sins of omission) — are the things we don’t do or fail to do, and we justify them because we say we are blind to them.  The sins of commission are those things we do openly and claim that “we can’t help ourselves.  We’re only human”.  We therefore continually live with the truth that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” 

       Not everyone has a desire to be healed and made clean.  For some, their pride of believing they have a better way to be healed stands between them and wholeness.  And yet, for everyone, a simple act of faith can cleanse us from our disease.  It takes nothing more than dumping our pride and adopting the faith-act of trusting in the blood of Jesus to cleanse us from all sin.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, I thank you that you have provided a remedy for my healing and wholeness by the simple act of faith of trusting in the blood of Jesus to cleanse me from all my sin.

       We live in a world where accomplished people are everywhere.  And yet, the nature of our accomplishments does not insulate us from a common disease that seems to affect us all.  For Naaman, it appeared that his disease was leprosy, but at its heart, what Naaman’s disease was pride.  We all suffer from the disease of pride that at some level prevents us from becoming healed and whole persons.

       Pride in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing.  It can be borne from our satisfaction of knowing that we’ve done something exceptionally well.  But pride that is borne of arrogance and self-indulgence — believing somehow that because of our accomplishments we always know what’s best for us and should be shown deference when the healing for our disease is at stake can be a recipe for disaster.  Feeling that we deserve more or better can be a hindrance to our blessing.

       Sometimes our healing can come from a simple act of faith — the willingness to put aside our pride and allow that God has provided an unconventional remedy to heal our disease.  For Naaman, it was washing in the Jordan seven times, that he might be healed of his diseases.  For us, God has suggested the unconventional method of washing ourselves once in the blood of Jesus, that we might be cleansed from the leprosy of a separated relationship from God.  It would be a tragedy for anyone to allow their pride to prevent the healing of their diseased relationship with God when all that’s necessary is a simple act of faith.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, grant that I may humble myself, put away my pride, and allow a simple act of faith to become Your way to heal all my diseases.

       Too often we try to make the work of Christ and the church too difficult.  Perhaps we feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.  There are so many hungry, empty, hopeless, needy, impoverished, lonely, desperate, and sick people, that we sometimes forget that the only commandment we are bound to obey is to love one another as he has loved us.  Love is everything.  If faithful followership is anything, it is inviting and encouraging people to join us in partnership with Christ to practice and engage in this ministry of loving one another as he has loved us.  This is the essence of Jesus’ ministry among us and the foundation of faithful followership to us.

• How do you apply the principles of Christ’s commandment to “love one another as he has loved us” in your daily life?
• Do you find it difficult to apply the principles of his new commandment to love in every situation?
• How do you find support and accountability to practice faithful followership as a spiritual discipline?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, enable me to conscientiously practice Your commandment to love others so that my life of loving others gives evidence that I am a faithful follower of You.

       The question of who is in charge is often asked by those seeking to know from whom they should get their instructions, or who’s really in charge.  The element of human leadership is always in question as people can frequently choose to follow or not to follow human authority.  But if Christ has been given all authority by God, then there is no one higher up in the chain of command since the Father and Son are of the same mind.  Regardless of who our human leader might be, our instructions and work assignments come from God through Christ.

• Where human authority and Christ’s authority are both pulling at you, how does faithfully following Christ’s commandment guide you in your decisions?
• Is your decision to follow any authority determined by your faithfulness to Christ?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, enable me to put aside my questions of human authority so that I may faithfully live answering your command on my life.

       Jesus’ words to us have always resonated with the belief that our work is done out of faithfulness to God.   Questions about why we do the things we do are really non-issues.  We’re supposed to do the things we do because Christ did the things he did out of faithfulness to God.  Therefore, our work is not isolated from who God is or who Christ is, or who we are in relationship to Christ.  We are sent into the world by Christ to do what God would have us do (love others unconditionally) in the same way that Christ was sent.  Our obedience in doing what Christ has called us to do gives evidence of our faithful followership.

• How have you accepted Christ’s commission to go into the world in the same way that God sent him into our world?
• Would you describe your response to Christ’s commission to go into the world as passive, or assertive?
• Which do you believe would receive the greatest results?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, empower me to be faithful to Your mission for my life so that I may go into the world, sent in the same way that Christ was sent to accomplish Your divine purpose?

       It would seem that all things in the eyes of God find their center in love.  There is God’s love for us.  There is God’s love for the Son.  And there is a sacred trust between the Father and the Son such that God is willing to put all authority in the hands of the Son.  But there is this obedience issue which we can’t get away from.  Obedience to God is not an option.  Yes, there is freedom to err and grace enough for those times when our good intentions lead to disastrous results, even if our heart is in the right place.  And yet it is our obedience to believe in the Son — God’s gracious act of sacrificial love for us — and our willingness to love others as he has loved us that signals the strength of our faithful followership.  His command to lead others into this relationship of God-love, teaching, and baptizing them to become faithful followers is evidence of the real power of love.

As you enter into your midweek reflection, consider what it means to be obedient to Christ’s command to make disciples and how your life can be a teaching moment.

• What can you do to show your faithfulness to God’s call upon your life to live in obedience through love?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to live obediently by faith so that others may experience Your love through me as an expression of Your love for them.

       Worshiping anyone other than God was typically reserved for political leaders and emperors.  But that has all changed for those who believe.  Worship of Jesus is a sign of his union and communion with God.  It’s offered out of reverence and respect for who he is and what he’s done.  It has now become acceptable — even expected — that those who honor God will honor the Son, and those who worship God will worship the Son .

• How does worshiping the risen Christ give evidence of your faith that Christ has all authority in heaven and on earth.
• When you think about worshiping Christ, what is the most important aspect of your worship (prayer, song, liturgy, etc.)?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, accept my worship of You as an indication of my belief and faith that You are the Son of God, risen and ascended.

       Faithfulness can be a scary thing.  First, one must have belief in what they are being faithful to.  And then there is the issue of obedience.  Once we have accepted the truth of our faith, there is the expectation that we will carry out the duties that have been given to us.  If we fail in our faithfulness, then our mission fails.  And yet, God continues to operate trusting that we will be faithful followers able to carry out the responsibilities of our faith.  Jesus said to them, “Go,” and they went in faith to practice the art of faithful followership.  In all of this time, neither the requirements nor Christ’s call upon us to go has changed.

• As you observe the faithfulness of the disciples, how would you assess your own “faithful followership” to go and do as Christ commanded?
• What changes would you need to make to be a more faithful follower of Christ to make disciples?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Faithful God, as I go into the world in faith, increase my faithful followership through Your trust in me to carry out Your mission for Your church.

       Those who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ are a unique group of people (me included).  We do phenomenal work in the name of Christ, and it’s noble work that needs to be done, and is worthy of celebrating.  Feeding the hungry, tending to the sick, nurturing those who are in need — these are all important works for those of us who follow Christ’s teachings.  But those works represent only one part of being a faithful follower of Christ.  It is in fact, the easiest part.  It is important to note that those things we do are secondary imperatives, not our primary objective of a faithful follower.  While we each have a role to fulfill, being a faithful follower of Christ commands us as an action group to work intentionally in God’s world to accomplish God’s purpose for humanity.  And the words which call us to action are simple words — go, make, baptize, teach, and obey.  The growth of the Christian community is solely dependent upon faithful followership to the original commands of Christ.  We balk at the “go and the making of disciples part” believing that this is the work of specialists.  But our “faithful followership” of Christ is for all who accept the authority of Christ.  And to accept the authority of Christ is to act in Christ’s gives evidence of the reality of God’s love and grace as a global experience that Christ is always with us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, inspire me to become a faithful follower of Christ, intentionally teaching others as a living example of Christ’s love that to love one another is Your great mission for all humanity.

       Our faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God is often in question by those who don’t believe as we believe.  They wonder how we can be so “sure” that Christ is the one.  There are words to an old song that say, “Something within me, that holdeth the reins; something within me that banishes pain; something within me I cannot explain; all that I know is there is something within.”  That something or rather someone, is the presence of the Holy spirit confirming what we believe to be true.  It’s that same spirit that, through our faith, allows us to live satisfied with our relationship to the Holy Spirit.

• Try to recall moments when the Spirit of God confirmed Jesus as Savior and Lord.
• What about those experiences assures you about your faith in Jesus Christ and satisfies you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, thank You for confirming within me, that which I cannot explain but yet, speaks to me in ways that let me know Your truth.

       The Holy Spirit of God dwells within each of us.  That is God’s promise fulfilled.  And it is that Spirit that instructs us about life and living and convicts us when we have strayed from the paths of God’s righteousness.  There is, of course, always the challenge of either listening to the instruction of the Holy Spirit or following the dictates of our own will and mind, do what we want to do.  Living in the Spirit is to be led by the Spirit.  To be led by the Spirit is to trust in the Spirit.  It is in that dwelling place that we receive confidence and satisfaction that our faith is secure.

• How does choosing your will over that of the Holy Spirit affect your confidence in Christ?
• What can you do to submit more easily to the teachings of the Holy Spirit?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Teach me, gracious Christ, to dwell securely in your Holy Spirit as Your Spirit dwells within me. Help me to discern with confidence Your true and perfect will that I may have a satisfied faith.

       I was once intrigued by a television program that was being aired in Spanish.  I listened for some time before I lost interest.  The reason — I don’t speak or understand Spanish beyond those limited common phrases spoken on television.   It seemed foolish to me to continue watching what I couldn’t understand.  In the same way, conversations about spiritual matters must seem foolish to those who aren’t able to communicate with God or Christ on a spiritual level because they haven’t received the Holy Spirit of God.  It is God who (through the gift of the Holy Spirit) opens the door of spiritual understanding.  And if we don’t have understanding, how can we ever be satisfied by our faith. Believing we understand when we don’t is delusional.  But having a clear understanding can bring a profound sense of satisfaction.

• Have you ever encountered a situation which was difficult to understand that was later made clear by the gift of the Holy Spirit?
• Was there a sense of relief/satisfaction once you had clarity of the situation?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, continue open me to an understanding of spiritual things by the gift of Your Holy Spirit alive in me that I may always be satisfied by my faith.

       We are often oblivious to the presence of the Holy Spirit living inside of us.  Because of that, I’m not certain that we consider how the life of the Spirit impacts our lives if we aren’t in decision-making mode.  There are, however, promises from God that are provided to us to satisfy our questions about life, death, and what happens to us following death.  The promises of God are designed to remove our anxieties and uncertainties as we experience our relationship to Christ because of the Holy Spirit.  It is only by faith that we can trust in God’s word and grow in our relationship of trust and satisfaction with God through the Holy Spirit.  And it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that we become satisfied.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, empower my faith (the awareness of Your Holy Spirit alive within me) to grow in trusting your word enough to find satisfaction in my faith.

       God’s people have longed to hear God’s voice above the clamor of the world.  And while we have not always wanted to hear what God has had to say, God has spoken.  But we also express a curiosity about seeing God and knowing what God is like.  God answered our dissatisfaction with our relationship by sending Jesus Christ to reflect the glory of God by his merciful and loving nature.  It is God’s nature to always show mercy, and always to seek being in relationship with us, God’s creation.  The gift of the Holy Spirit to all flesh is God’s confirmation that we’ve been sanctified through forgiveness.  But more;  it has also been given to us to satisfy our relationship to God through faith.  There is no power that can undo what Christ has done, and no satisfaction greater than that which comes through faith.

• How do you experience and understand the gift of God’s Holy Spirit in you?
• Has receiving God’s Holy Spirit changed how you now experience God?
• Does your faith and experiencing God’s Spirit within you satisfy your doubts about God’s reality?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God and Christ, thank You for enabling me to experience Your glory through the gift of Your Holy Spirit and forgiveness revealed in Jesus Christ, the word.

       Our desire to fully know God dates from antiquity.  It’s borne of our desire to experience the fullness of God in all of God’s glory.  But we err in believing that those of us who are mortal are able to see beyond what is physical and view the spiritual reality of God.  To that extent, God the Spirit, remains a mystery.  Moses’ desire to see the immortal, invisible, wise only God, led him to the place of dissatisfaction in his life about him and his relationship to God.  But the revelation of God can now be fully seen and experienced in Jesus Christ.  Because of Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit has allowed those of us who have not actually seen Christ to have confirmation of God’s reality in Christ and in us.  And because of our relationship to Jesus Christ, we can now be satisfied by our faith.

• How does the Holy Spirit complete your understanding of God’s nature?
• In what ways does this give you satisfaction from a faith perspective?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, strengthen my faith that I may be satisfied by the power of Your Holy Spirit alive in me. Bless me that I may see Your presence as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of my life and find satisfaction from my faith alone.

       One of the strongest needs of the human family is the need to be in relationship.  Relationship is the purpose of our creation — that we would be in relationship with each other and with God.  Yet it is and was difficult for people to believe in that which was invisible.  Jesus’ presence (in some ways) spoiled the soup.  He came to be the physical presence of God with us, thus satisfying our greatest need, that of a relationship with God.

Perhaps our greatest fear is losing that intimacy that comes with being in relationship with God.  Those who lived in close relationship with Jesus quickly became attached to the love of God.  When it was time or Jesus to leave, like any of us who have experienced what seems like the dissolution of a relationship, the disciples began to grieve.  Jesus (God with us) was sensitive to that feeling of separation and loss and the dissatisfaction that accompanies the severing of emotional and spiritual ties.  To solve this dilemma, God chose to send an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth to remain with us and remind us that God is always with us.  Knowing that God is always with us can be deeply satisfying.  We can know God by the presence of God’s Spirit, “poured out on all flesh” for the express purpose of uniting and sealing God’s relationship with humanity.  Pentecost represents God’s the active sharing of God’s spirit making it available to all humanity so that our desire to know God is fully met and our need to experience God’s can be satisfied.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to live with the assurance of faith that satisfies all questions about Your reality and truth and confirms Your gift of Your Holy Spirit alive in me.

       A lot of emphasis placed on the importance of being in unity with others.  Solidarity is a valued and honored tradition among those who believe they are working collectively to right a wrong, to bring justice to an unjust system, whether political or religious.  Tragically, the comment is made, “God is on our side.”  It’s said with the belief that God is standing with us in whatever position we take.  And, yet being in unity with God begs another question: “Are we on God’s side?”  When unity with God is in question or doubt, that is the question that requires a more profound answer.  If we seek to make God a partner with us, rather than seeking to be in unity with God, there may be a faith collision ensuing that can place spiritual anxieties on high alert.  In Jesus, we have the assurance that his plan is God’s plan, and both he and God agree.  If we are in unity with God and Christ, then we seek to be on God’s side, rather than seek God to join in on our agenda.

• Where are those places in your life where being in unity with God and Christ are important?
• How can we be certain that our lives are lived to be one in unity with God and Christ?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, thank You for providing the assurance in Christ that no matter what happens, my salvation and eternal safety are not in jeopardy.

       We experience joy in our relationship with the Lord when our cries of distress have been heard.  Out of God’s discernment of our cries and God’s hearing, we can be assured of God’s actions.  And though they may not always be certain about what we can expect from God, God is consistent.  God is consistently our strength in weakness and our protection when we are vulnerable.  When we look back in perspective, we may well come to understand that we have been spared more times that we give God credit for.  It has often been said of those times when we know that God has saved and protected us, “He may not come when you want him, but he’s always right on time!”

• Can you remember a time when you cried out to God out of you desperation and God became your salvation?
• If so, what was that experience like for you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, You and You alone are my protection from the world’s hostility. Continue to hear me when I cry out to You that I may rejoice in Your salvation.

       In the broad landscape of things in life, from the greatest to the smallest, God is truly untouchable.  There is no recourse to be taken against God, for whom we may exhibit human emotions and feelings.  It is ridiculous to even try.  And yet, within that truth is a greater truth.  Not everyone needs to fear any retributive action from God.  God’s gift to us was Jesus Christ who came to provide a hedge of protection throughout eternity.  His hands are God’s hands. If we are in his hands, nothing can take us out.  We need not fear hostility even though the storms of life rage and danger floods in to overwhelm us.  Jesus and God are there as one, and therein lies our safety.

• What comfort do you experience knowing that your present and your eternity are safe with God?
• How is this security expressed openly in your faith?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty and powerful God, thank You for being my protector, offering safety and security from a hostile world that will last longer than eternity.

       Safety and security are hallmarks of human need.  We desire it from the cradle to the grave.  Our desire for security and safety from perceived hostile forces has driven the sale of guns in this nation to unprecedented levels.  That we continue to seek more and more guns to ensure our safety seems to only heighten the presence of our insecurity.  However, it also appears that safety and security are things we can experience in our lives as something more than a desire without guns.  We are typically at the mercy of those we encounter on life’s journey to protect us.  That usually means we’re at the mercy of the stronger over the weaker.

       But God offers us a safety that extends beyond the mere boundaries of our earthly life’s parameters and brings us to a place of safety so secure that not even the strongest can violate its boundaries.  It is a security and safety that even extends beyond death and comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

• What is it that answers your need for safety and security?
• How does God fit into that answer?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of strength and love, enable me to find security in my faith that your omnipotence is my safeguard against hostility from outside sources.

       Sometimes safety is found, not in what you see, but in what you believe deeply in your heart.  The outside circumstances of our life have the potential to change with whatever direction the winds blow. But there is something credible and powerful in knowing something without a doubt.  And that “knowing” is grounded by the reality that you are certain about what you know.   When you are confident about what you know and that knowing is secured by a promise from a higher source, there is a safety that is provided that can fill a believer’s heart with a peace that passes all understanding.

• Can you recall a time when you were truly at peace about God’s promise? (try to remember it in detail)

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and generous Christ, fill me with the security found in your promise of eternal life. Enable me to experience that peace (in faith) that passes all understanding.

       The full identity of Jesus is and has always been a matter of people’s questions and doubts.  From the moment his ministry began down through our own contemporary time and culture, Jesus remains a mystery to some, contested by others, and denied by still others.  But there are also those who see Jesus and proclaim from a place deep within them that Jesus is the Son of God.  Knowing and trusting Jesus as the Son of God gives people of faith a tremendous sense of safety and security, precisely because in Jesus, their term of service under sin is over and their iniquity is pardoned.  The hostility that once existed between God and humanity is ended in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

• What hostility do you find alleviated in your life because of your faith in Christ as the Son of God?
• How did that lack of faith affect you before you believed?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Precious God, may I dwell secure knowing that my faith in the one I call the Son of God provides safety through all eternity from the hostility of the world.

       The world is sometimes a hostile place.  Identify theft has increased our need to protect ourselves from those who would misrepresent us by pretending to be us.  Physical attacks by diseases from within threaten our lives in ways that leave us feeling vulnerable. The lingering effects of the latest pandemic witness to that truth.  Questions about life and its origin, longevity and eternity are always topics of philosophical discussion.  They too, at times, threaten our security about the past, the present, and our future in ways that are not necessarily hostile in terms of violence, but a threat to preconceived ideas of what we know or think we believe.  And yet, there is a God who invites us to find safety in the eternal things where God is and place less assurance on those things which are transient.  I once heard a comedian tell a joke in which he said: “Based on the history of the world, we’ll be dead a lot longer than we will have lived.”  Perhaps that’s why Christ’s invites us to believe in things eternal, where our lives and presence with him are safe and can’t be taken away from him.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and merciful God, fill me with the assurance in the promise of Your eternal protection and safety through my faith in Jesus Christ in a world where hostility comes from without and within.

       Forgiveness is a highly underrated source of power in our world.  Some people think of forgiveness as an act of weakness — something that we do or offer submissively rather than a power we have that allows us to do greater things than Christ.  Forgiveness — the ability to place ourselves and our neighbors in a right relationship with God is the greatest power on the face of the earth and anywhere else.  It is the power of God at work in us and through us, giving us the power to rebuild relationships that centers us in Christ.  Forgiveness allows us to tell the story of a resurrected Christ who forgave us and offers forgiveness to anyone willing to accept it.

• Forgiveness is a power that allows us to do what Christ did. Why is it so difficult for us to do the greatest thing and forgive ourselves and others?
• How has accepting forgiveness transformed you?
• Do you agree that making forgiveness available to others is one of the greatest things you can do?  Why or why not?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and merciful God, empower me to practice to greatest act of all — to forgive others and tell the story of our resurrected Christ through the simple act of forgiveness.

       The very essence of God is revealed in Jesus.  While some people may doubt who he was, those of us who have faith have been affirmed by God’s Holy Spirit that Jesus is and was God’s presence in the world.  To know who Jesus is (that is, to be in a living relationship with him) is to have knowledge of who God is and what God is like.  It’s impossible to experience the love of Christ and believe that he is somehow, different from God.  Our faith provides us with proof beyond all doubt that Jesus and God are one.  And yet, the greatest thing we can do is not to selfishly hold on to that information, but to share the entire story of Christ with others.  That is truly one of the greatest things we can do in this life.

• How are you assured by your faith in Jesus Christ that God was revealed in him and is now present and alive in you?
• How does this affect you when you realize the greatest thing you can do is to share that truth with others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, continue to assure me that you did a great thing revealing yourself to in Jesus Christ. Empower me to do a great thing by sharing who You are and what you’ve done through him.

       I believe it is the deepest desire of all people of faith to want to see the fullness of God.  It seems for all practical purposes that it is impossible.  Moses desired it but was unable to see God as God fully existed.  He did however get to see all of God’s goodness, grace, and compassion.  The blessing of Simeon was that he looked upon the face of the baby Jesus and knew that he had seen his Savior and his God.  The greatness of God is displayed in his presence.  We have been given that authority to be God’s greatness and presence in our time.  Being God’s presence in the lives of people everywhere is perhaps the greatest thing we can ever do.

• What does it mean to you knowing that people can now see and experience God’s goodness, grace, and compassion through your acts of love and mercy?
• How does the realization that God has empowered you to accomplish the greatest thing change your view of yourself?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and loving God, enable and empower others to see You, and that You made me for greatness through loving acts of mercy that I do in Your name.

      Doing the greatest thing in God and Christ comes as a conferred gift of prayer.  It is an essential part of God’s grace.  We didn’t ask for it.  If we are to be honest, there are some of us who may even have doubts about it.  But the initial act of our doing the greatest thing began with knowing and believing the truth about who Jesus is.  That knowledge alone is powerful enough to save lives in this world for the next.  We should be humbled that Christ has chosen us to experience God’s presence in our lives as an expression of God’s truth in the world.  It is not our greatness, but God’s greatness working through us that enables us to share that truth with others.

• Use today as an opportunity to reflect on what it means to you that Christ has empowered you to do the greatest thing — inform the world about his resurrection and God’s act of peace and reconciliation with humanity.
• How will you pursue doing the greatest thing of sharing with others God’s greatness in you, active in your life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, enable others to know the truth about You — that knowing You through faith comes with the built-in benefit of being capable of doing the greatest thing.

       Our efforts to do the greatest thing in the world doesn’t have to come at great expense of time and energy from us.  Once we have acknowledged that we’ve received grace from God, the ability to do a great thing is happens through our understanding of God’s truth.  Doing a great thing — sharing the story of God’s love, forgiveness, and mercy isn’t an act of arrogance.  It’s an act of love.  We come to know God as God has chosen to reveal the truth of Christ to us.  But it is that truth of knowing who Christ is and sharing that message allows us to do a great thing with our lives. We are in him and he is in us.  There is nothing greater than our ability to share that truth.

• How do you envision doing the greatest thing through God’s revealed truth to you change the world as you reveal the truth about God to others?
• How does doing the greatest thing as you understand God’s truth and the importance of sharing that truth with others change your life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Eternal Christ, empower me by Your presence in me to faithfully represent Your truth so that others may know that they, too, can do the greatest thing.

       There are those for whom access to God has been deemed impossible.  For them, the very idea of approaching God sets behind the mental, emotional, and spiritual barriers of their own lack of faith.  If they only knew Christ — who he was and what he did — they could approach God without fear or trepidation, graciously receiving the blessings that come gifted in a reconciled relationship to and with God.  And with that reconciled relationship, they receive power to become children of God, and power to offer the truth about God to others — that they, too, are able to do the greatest thing — something greater than Christ has done.

• How does the idea of bringing the human family together in peace through Christ encourage you to share and practice God’s greatness in you?
• Could working to bring the human family together become the greatest thing you can do?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, empower me to do the greatest thing — witnessing to others about Christ’s resurrection and God’s offer of forgiveness —to become the method by which others may be called to their greatness in you.

       The desire to do great things is an aspiration of many people.  There is also a common belief that in order to do something great, it has to be “off the charts”.  Accomplishing a great thing is sought in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it’s for personal glory.  Sometimes doing something great isn’t sought at all but achieved because of an unavoidable circumstance.  But if we think in terms of doing things greater than Christ, we think of turning to the chapter in life’s book titled, “It’s Never Going to Happen.”  Christ, however, has rewritten the book and edited that chapter out.  He has announced to us and all who are willing to understand that doing something greater that he has done can still be achieved through faith and divine intervention.  It is a part of the Christian’s DNA.  The trouble for us comes in realizing and understanding what we could do that would equal to the things Christ has done, and then realize what we have the ability to do greater things than that.  The greatest that we believe Christ did were the miracles — walking on water, giving sight to the blind, healing the lame — things that Christ did boldly in front of everyone.  Yet his greatest accomplishment was to forgive people and tell them about the love of God.  Our leverage is that we have the benefit of his resurrection as evidence of his greatness and generations to inform a much greater audience.  The greatest thing we can do is to tell others the story of God’s redeeming love through Christ.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, give us the courage to do this one great thing in Your name — proclaim Your resurrection to those in need of resurrection in their lives that they may come to know the saving power of Your forgiveness.

       Life can be described in many ways.  And as many ways as there are to describe it, there are probably ways in which people try to attain it.  Some surround themselves with money.  Others choose objects such as books, recordings from old vinyl to newly streamed.  But once we get past those tangible things that define life, we are left with the spiritual component which is the most important.  That life — real life — comes by faith in Jesus Christ and following him was rejected by those in his day and some in ours.  And yet, it is by faith that we are more likely to hear his voice calling our name and we are more inclined to follow him after having heard him clearly.  And when we have heard his voice and followed him, our life in him will be saturated with his life and ours will be a life both abundant and eternal.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, thank you for allowing me to hear your voice calling to me by faith, and to secure the gift of an abundant life through your name.

       When we accept Jesus as our shepherd and follow him, we also acknowledge and accept David’s image of a good shepherd as our experience.  There is abundant life at every turn.  There is enough food, water, and rest for our sustenance and maintenance.  There is also safety and security, the absence of even the fear of death.  But there is also the promise of abundant life relative to what we can expect to experience in our relationship with our shepherd.  There is comfort in knowing that God’s grace protects us.  There is the additional benefit of knowing that we can be shown favor in the presence of those who despise us.  Lifting up and edifying our spirits leads us to be unafraid of living and dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, I rejoice that you have chosen Jesus to be my emotional, physical, and spiritual support that leads me to life eternal.

       Just as the sheep are supposed to be faithful when they are called to follow the shepherd, there is also an expectation that the shepherd will be faithful to his responsibilities.  God’s expectation from the shepherd is that he/she will act in caring ways toward the sheep, protecting them from danger giving them what they need to live while not exploiting the sheep for their own purposes.  Following Jesus invites us to examine a much different picture of the shepherd than the one where the shepherd is labeled a “thief and a robber”.  Following Jesus is an invitation to follow the shepherd who cares enough to lay down his life for the sheep.  That is the ultimate act of caring a shepherd can provide.  That’s the kind of shepherd Jesus is.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, enable me to clearly hear the voice of the good shepherd calling to me that I may receive the proper spiritual care you have desired for me.

       It’s one thing to proclaim a relationship with someone.  It’s another thing to claim that relationship by utilizing clearly defined objectives and the security that comes out of faithfulness to the relationship.  The renowned preacher Billy Sunday once said, “Being in church on Sunday no more makes you a Christian than being in a garage makes you a car.”  In other words, there’s a correlation to who we say we are and what we do.  If we truly hear Jesus’ voice calling us and choose to follow him, then there is the expectation that if we follow him out of the sheep pen, we are expected to remain faithful to his command as his faithfulness voice.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, empower me to not only hear your voice, but to respond to it in faithfulness to our relationship by doing what you say do.

       Often the liabilities of following Jesus are spoken of in terms of things Christians have to give up.  There is perception that following Jesus is a limiting faith system that takes everything out of life.  But there is another perspective which offers the fundamental realities of following Jesus as something that isn’t a liability, but as a benefit, or as something gained.  Following Jesus means that we come to know Jesus more intimately because he knows us.  It also points to security within that relationship as Jesus affirms that his follower’s future is a secure and eternal present and future life with God.  That’s good news no matter who’s saying it.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, I celebrate and rejoice in the knowledge that you know me and have promised security and an intimate relationship with you.

       Compassion is an integral part of a caring relationship.  It doesn’t mean that the ones on whom you show compassion are necessarily perfect.  It does mean that you may be able to look beyond their faults to supply their needs.  That’s the nature of a good shepherd.  The good shepherd knows that his flock may have some blemishes but is willing to look past those flaws to address them at the point of their need.  As such, it is a gift to be able to see people’s needs above the flaws.  Following someone who has that kind of compassion will rub off on the followers, so that they learn to do the same thing.  And those who become the recipients of that gift of grace, find that their lives have been enriched and abundant.  That’s the ultimate goal of a good shepherd – to enrich the lives of those to whom he had come near.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, as one who is called to follow you, teach me as one being shepherded by you to show compassion and provide abundantly the life which you have freely given to me.

       We live in a world where many voices are calling out to us.  They come from different places and spaces and can be a distraction.  Some of those voices calling us are calling to influence us in one way or another.  “Come, go with me here.”  “Let’s do this.”  “Vote for me.”  “Do this for me.”  Some of the voices we hear calling to us are innocent in some ways, but nonetheless are designed to get us to follow them.  Some of those voices are inviting us to compromise our integrity, even to the point of losing our life.  These persons become shepherds to us in some respect.  When they try to lead us in a direction that strikes against God’s desire for us or seek to satiate their personal need for power or control, then our lives and the extent to which they may become abundant are put at risk.

       On the other hand, Jesus calls us to life.  Jesus calls us to freedom.  Jesus calls us into a life of a caring and being cared for through an intimate relationship with God.  Following Jesus is invitation to enjoy a life free from the religious laws and rules that lead to sin and invites us into a life of freedom by grace.  To follow Jesus is to be invited into a loving relationship where God’s grace abounds and life flows abundantly.  Perhaps the best decision we can make is to hear Jesus’ voice and follow him.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and caring Christ, in a world where there are many voices and distractions calling out to me, teach me to clearly hear your voice calling my name so that I will faithfully follow you.

       One of the most difficult truths to deal with is the reality of our sins.  It’s not that we do them.  We know we do.  Our difficulty comes in letting them go.  We carry them around reminding us of our imperfection and our guilt; or we carry them around to punish ourselves, believing apparently, that God is holding onto them to punish us as well.  The truth of our God is found in many places but has tremendous weight and meaning as phrased in the words of this song:

     My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!

     My sin, not in part but the whole,

     is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.

     Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh, my soul.

     It is well with my soul.

How refreshing to accept God’s truth that we no longer carry our sins.

• How difficult is it for you to come to God’s truth that your sins are forgiven?
• What prevents you from coming to that truth and accepting it?
• What might it mean for you to come to that truth and live as a forgiven person?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, allow me to cherish the freedom I receive when I come to Your truth that you have erased the record of my sins through Christ.

       We don’t necessarily think of suffering as a good thing.  Perhaps it’s because we work so hard in all our lifetime to avoid suffering at all costs.  And yet suffering has a qualitative edge to it.  Suffering that occurs because someone has violated a law has invited the actions of justice.  We find some sense of satisfaction in our belief that “when you do the crime, you have to do the time.”  But when suffering occurs without justification and is made visible for all to see, then God makes it right, and the sufferer is perfected through his suffering.  Christ’s suffering was redemptive and perfected him before God.  It also and was justified by God paying the wages of sin for everyone.  Those who deny God’s truth have essentially chosen to pay the wages for their own sin.  Most agree with God’s truth that the wages of sin is death.

• Is there any comfort in coming to God’s truth that Christ has paid the wages of sin for everyone?
• How do you rely on Christ’s perfection through suffering day to day as God’s truth to encourage you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to accept righteous suffering as verification of God’s truth that Christ is the pioneer of my salvation.

       Ignorance is a difficult thing to justify.  Sometimes ignorance is a choice we make.  It comes from our weakness and refusal to accept God’s truth.  There is a familiar saying that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” That may be true in a world where laws, men, and women rule.  Where ignorance of the law brings punishment from the justice of the world, ignorance of God’s truth brings a much different response.  It brings with it the absence of the knowledge of God’s grace is a world where belief in God’s power may seem like foolishness, makes us seem wise.  But God’s truth reveals the reality that God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.  God’s truth accomplishes things that no human knowledge or wisdom can overcome.

• How does the witness of God’s word of antiquity still speak to God’s contemporary invitation to come to God’s truth?
• Does that ancient witness increase your willingness to invite someone to come to know and accept God’s truth?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, help me to overcome the foolishness of the world to become wiser by living more intently into Your truth.

       Coming to the truth is filled with the blessings of God.  It additionally gives us the freedom to respond to one another in ways that are pleasing to God and imitates the very nature of God present in our lives.  To value others and love others in the same way that Christ loves us is the greatest testimony to God’s truth active and present in our world today.  It’s shown as God’s truth in ways that others can actually see and either accept or reject.  Love is God’s truth displayed in unmistakable ways, proved by public displays of affection (spiritual) showing how great the love by which he loved us.  God asks nothing more than, in coming to God’s truth, we let our actions speak the truth of God in unmistakably loving ways.

• Has coming to God’s truth of Christ’s love for you empowered you to freely share that love with others?
• How can your witness through loving acts of kindness tell of God’s truth to others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, give me the freedom to openly share Your truth with others by the gracious acts of love I do in Your name that my life will be a witness to Your truth in me.

       We do not all come to God’s truth at the same time.  For some, it is revealed little by little until the eyes are opened and the truth stands before them with amazing clarity.  Others come to the truth through the God’s revelation and the faithful witness and words of others simply being faithful and obedient to God’s truth in their lives.  It’s not when we come to the truth that’s important (the earlier the better, however).  It’s that we come to God’s truth, and what we do in response to God’s truth after it is revealed to us.  It’s how we faithfully respond to the truth of God and share that truth from our own experience that others may know the truth and be set free.

• What (person or people) may have been significant in helping you to acknowledge and accept God’s truth?
• In what ways have you been helpful to others to experience God’s truth for themselves?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love, let my life be a living example of Your truth’s power to raise people to new life so that others may receive my simple gift of belief and faithfulness.

       The beauty of coming to God’s truth is that it doesn’t speak just for the current moment.  Coming to God’s truth answers all of our questions and reveals the truth across the ages and pages of history.  It is not locked into a time warp but is as ancient as time and is more current than tomorrow’s news.  And whatever glory comes from that powerful a revelation of truth is glory from the creator alone.  When we come to God’s truth, it is God’s glory which rests upon us and enlightens the truth that we tell others by our lives and glorifies us in that truth.

• Have you found the glory of Christ in God’s word as an intergenerational truth?
• How does coming to that truth about God and Christ affirm your own faith?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, may Your truth (which has existed throughout the ages) continue to enlighten my life and generations to come that they may know and accept Your Grace and Truth.

       Some people would say truth is subjective.  Those who believe that have developed a carefully constructed world in which their truth is the only truth that matters.  There!  Now, we’ve said it; “Their truth.”  It opens the very real possibility that there may in fact be as many truths as there are individual personalities to create them.  But alongside those many truths stands God’s truth — and it stands in front of, behind, above, below, and around, yet superior to all other truths.  God’s truth is the defining reality for each of us despite the truth we promote.  But, of course, the question is: “What does it take us to come to God’s truth — to recognize that with God, there are no variations of fact or discernment.  God’s truth is not altered by our ability to create our own stories of convenience.  God’s truth is immovable and immutable.  God’s truth stands despite all of our clever inventions.  And it is in the light of God’s truth that we are invited to put our truths aside and accept the truth that is eternal.

• Have you ever come to a point where something you held to be true contrasted sharply with God’s truth?
• What result occurs when we hold onto our truths while refusing to accept the truth of God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of truth and love, enable and empower me by faith to come to Your truth in all circumstances of life. Allow Your truth to guide my faith throughout my life that others may find their new life in Your truth.

       The world has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to prove and disprove the events surrounding Jesus’ death.  The Shroud of Turin stands as evidence of one such exhaustive, ongoing examination.  However, Jesus invites us to consider his works — things he’s done that give evidence to who he is.  And our first tendency is to think about the miracles: the blind see, the lame walk, etc.  But there is more tangible evidence as people’s lives are changed because of their relationship with Jesus.  Addicts and those on the margins of life continue to find God’s grace and are made whole.  He still invites us to believe because of the works themselves.  There are myriads of people whose lives have been changed because of their relationship with Jesus Christ, and yet many still demand proof.

• Do you personally know of lives that have been positively transformed because of their faith in Jesus Christ?
• How do you understand that as evidence of who Jesus really is?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, help me to understand the miracle of transformed lives as evidence of the work that Christ continues to do in the world today.

       The difficulty in believing in someone or something that you’ve never seen requires an act of faith. Faith is described as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  And yet, the power of God is that God doesn’t allow our faith to be an empty vessel.  The Spirit of God moves in us to substantiate the reality of that which we cannot see, but that which we know to be real. Our faith in Christ is not an illusion.  It is the evidence of him whom we have not yet seen, but whom we know to be real.  To that end, true faith is an awareness of the presence of God.  Eyes are not a requirement.

• Write down a few things that sustains your faith in a God whom you’ve never seen?
• What importance do you give to these elements in your life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty and invisible God, enable my faith in You to be all the evidence I need to confirm Your reality in my life and Christ as my Savior.

       Faith is our most powerful resource.  Faith is that intangible element that enables us to hold on when everything around us says give up.  Faith is what invites us to continue believing when every piece of evidence points toward doubting and denial.  With faith, we are able to overcome overwhelming circumstances and rise to accomplish what some people believe to be impossible.  This same faith confirms in us the reality of a God who cannot be seen, but who is more real than anyone or anything we have seen.

• What things have you done in life that would give evidence of your faith?
• How do these things give affirmation of the God you cannot see as a foundation of your faith?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and gracious God, empower me to grow in my relationship with You, not based on what I can see with my eyes, but by what I know deep within me.

       We don’t often think of ourselves as having any power to affect things.  And yet, God has conferred upon Christ the authority to empower us.  And with that power we enter into the world just as Christ did.  We are sent with the power of relationship and forgiveness.  We have the power to bring people together and set people free.  This is not something that we do in isolation.  Our power to build up and set free is done in partnership with the Spirit of Christ and invites us to partner with each other to carry out this ministry.  We ae sent just as he was sent, and he is with us in our faith.

• How have you utilized the power of Christ to set others free or to build them up?
• How do you perceive your role as one who is sent for those purposes?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful Christ, enable my relationship with You to be one in which, as one who is sent, I go with joy to do the things You would have me to do in Your name.

       Peace is an elusive quality in our lives.  We are, perhaps, by nature an anxious people.  We’re nervous about life, and nervous about death.  We’re nervous about living and dying and worried about not being able to live life to the full.  And yet Christ comes to us offering us the peace of God.  God’s peace moves beyond the absence of conflict but offers us the presence of a peace that somehow dispels our fears and anxieties.  It comforts us and quiets all of the storms raging in our lives.  The peace of Christ allows us to be a non-anxious presence to those who don’t know God’s peace.

• Is there a situation that has enabled you to experience the peace of Christ?
• How did experiencing that peace impact you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, may Your peace be such a presence in my life that Your love becomes an overflowing fountain or comfort to everyone around me.

       Unexpected experiences of encounters with God literally present in our world often catch us by surprise and frighten us.  Perhaps it’s because we have become so accustomed to what is common, that we no longer expect to experience the holiness of God’s world in tangible ways.  And yet, God invites us into those holy experiences, not to frighten us, but to assure us and affirm our faith.  God allows us to experience these events so that we will ultimately come to know God as the God who invites us to live beyond our fears.  Life lived behind a wall of fear is no life at all, and certainly not the life that moves us beyond the events of the cross or a personal encounter with God.

• Have you ever had a Spiritual experience with God that frightened you?
• Do you know of someone who has had and experience that frightened them?
• What was the outcome of that encounter?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me to move beyond my fears of encountering Your Holy world to live courageously in this world of which I am a daily participant.

       We should not be surprised by how many times we are stopped by life’s events.  We’re fearful and doubtful about many things that go on in our lives.  We’re at times fearful and doubtful of what we see, and doubtful about things we can’t and don’t see.  Things that cause us to be fearful and things in our lives that seem to be unbelievable can stop us dead in our tracks.  The tragedies of life which cause us to freeze in amazement occur as spectacular moments to prevent us from living full, unimpeded lives of freedom.  The invitation of Christ’s to move to life beyond the events of the cross came to those who experienced the resurrection of Jesus that first Easter morning, and to those of us who experience it now.  A powerful event such as the resurrection that changed our relationship with God and humanity cannot stop at death’s door.  There is a new life beyond the cross that says death is not the end of it.  It is a life that begs us to live courageously unafraid of the present and confident about our future.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower and enable me to move in faith beyond those spectacular events in life that can prevent me from experiencing the abundance of life that awaits me beyond the cross.

       The idea that there may be news too good to keep is neither new, nor novel.  From the time that Jesus arrived, the admonition has been to tell someone the good news.  It began with his own proclamation when he picked up the scroll of Isaiah (Luke 4:18) and continues to those willing to hear it today.  News that is too good to keep is typically determined by its overall value and worth to the individual or the people whose lives upon whom it may have an impact.  That the Savior has entered the world is great news.  That the savior has accomplished his God-assigned task is the best news ever.  And that we were and still are the benefactors of that news and grace is ‘news too good to keep’!

• Have you ever experienced receiving news that was too good to keep to yourself?
• Do you believe your story of good news will still be good news to others 2000+ years from now?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and gracious God, enable me to always experience that joy about the story that’s too good to keep to myself so that I might share the story with others.

       There will always be events that happen in our lives that we just will not be able to keep to ourselves.  It might be that a new home for God and God’s people is about to be built after years and years of what may have seemed like forever.  But once the good news comes, especially after a dry season of despair, it is possible to approach the introduction of that good news with a heartfelt desire to simply run and tell someone, and proclaim out loud the blessings of the Lord!  When the Lord adds a blessing that’s beyond understanding and it benefits you personally or corporately, it’s news that’s too good to keep.

• Describe a situation when you received good news and just had to praise God.
• How did your joy impact your attitude about God and life in general?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, allow me to experience the exhilaration in life that news too good to keep can bring. May it resound in a joyful noise.

       Holy Scripture is clear.  Jesus appeared.  And the expected outcome of his appearing was that one day every knee in heaven and on earth, and under the earth would bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.  I cannot imagine every tongue acknowledging  and that confession somehow not be filled with a joyful noise, the expression of news that is too good to keep. And how could we keep quiet knowing that Christ has saved us?

• What part of telling others about the resurrection of Christ gives you the greatest joy?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, empower me to openly confess the news too good to keep to myself right now that Jesus Christ is Lord of all.

       We are, at times, given the occasion to meet someone that creates a circumstance of unexpected joy in our lives.  Because these situations often come as a surprise to us, it’s difficult to maintain our composure.  It could simply be that someone important will be staying at our home.  It was that way for Zaccheus when Jesus wanted to stay at his home.  And it was that way for Rebekah at the bidding of Abraham’s servant.  Sometimes it’s impossible to keep quiet about life changing events.

• Have you ever met anyone whose unexpected presence an occasion of news too good to keep from family members?
• Who was it and how did you handle it?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, allow my experience at your entrance into my life to be the kind of experience that becomes news too good to keep.

       To have good news is one thing.  And perhaps to have discovered something that restores your hope, and replaces something that was priceless is, perhaps, the greatest news of all.  That kind of news can’t be celebrated alone.  It needs to be shared with everyone you know, so that they can celebrate with you.  The event of that resurrection morning fits right into that category.  Once we were lost, but the news of an open tomb and salvation to life eternal is news that requires that we tell somebody.  You just can’t keep news like that to yourself!

• Have you ever experienced receiving news that excited you enough to tell your friends about it?
• If so, reflect upon that feeling once again and imagine how it makes you feel.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
My God and King, empower me to become so filled with joy because of what Christ has done for me that I tell everybody I meet.

       There are times when the news of something special changes our reality.  If it’s really, really good news, we can become so overwhelmed at the reception of that good news that our desire to tell someone about it leaves us speechless.  We may even resort to hand and arm gestures to convey the message without any results.  Maybe this was not the case with Zechariah, but his inability to speak with words didn’t stop him from trying to motion to them with gestures.  Sometimes there is news too good to keep but falls within God’s framework of divine time.  Sometimes we have to wait to hear the good news, even if it is news too good to keep.

Have you ever received news so good that left you temporarily speechless?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, enable me to rise above the limitations of my inability to tell the good news, and empower my joy to tell the story of Your amazing grace.

       There is nothing that moves us like fear and joy.  Fear is often a great motivator because it raises the level of adrenaline in our bodies to abnormal levels.  Joy on the other hand creates an excitement level that keeps the adrenaline going.  When receiving unexpected good news that gives us new hope, it’s often difficult not to connect our emotional high with our need to share what it is that makes us feel so joyful.  The energy becomes much like a capped steam valve, and if we don’t find a way to release the energy, it can create explosive feelings of anxiety within us.  Sometimes we have to fight those feelings of anxiety.  But at other times, it’s normal, even healthy to release it.  This can often be the case when there is news that’s too good to keep quiet about.  Yes.  Those who first found out about the resurrection may have first been overcome with feelings of fear.  But how do we keep within ourselves the news that someone once thought dead, is alive again.  That, brothers and sisters, is truly news too good to keep.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, let me be filled to overflowing with joy at the good news of Your rising that I may tell the world of news that is truly too good to keep.

       The very idea that there is no hope signals the end.  It is the end of everything, for if there is no hope, then there is nothing to live for or toward.  There is no apparent future.  The realities of the past chase after us with its shadows seeking to devour us with bitter memories of what might have been. When we look for someone to save us and they do not come, there is the appearance that all hope is lost.  The curtain of life falls and death takes the seat of the victor.  A good reality check allows us to acknowledge what appears to be hopeless and forces us to look for a light at the end of what might be a very dark tunnel.

• What has your experience been regarding the loss of hope.
• How did you handle the hopelessness of your situation?
• Did someone else help?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and Almighty God, when there are times that it seems like all hope is lost, empower me to greet the darkness as a natural part of life.

       Helplessness is an overwhelming feeling.  It’s as if all time slows down and all activity within that environment becomes magnified in its intensity.  The actions of the people around you tend to become clearer, and there is a greater sense of your own self-awareness.  It is difficult to accurately assess the outcome of one’s life in those closing moments of helplessness.  What is also clear is the reality of a separation from all of the powers of assistance available.  A real reality check is needed in that hour to accurately assess where we are and what is going on so that we don’t become delusional.

• Describe a situation you’ve been in that left you with feelings of helplessness?
• What did you learn about yourself and those around you at that time?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of mercy and grace, enable me to do my own reality check when I’m faced with situations of helplessness in my life.

       The institution of Holy Communion is not to be taken lightly.  While the table of our Christ is an open table, the idea of a person doing their own reality check is crucial to receiving it.  What we do at the table — receiving the body and blood of Christ as a recognition of his New Covenant with us — is a decision that can only be made by those who are willing to come.  But it is a sacred feast.  It was a meal that was good enough for the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

• How does your reality check impact you when you receive Holy Communion?
• Do you deeply reflect on Christ’s presence and command that we remember, or are your thoughts more likely to be faintly passing in nature?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and merciful God, let my reality check always remind of the importance of Holy Communion and that this meal was a meal fit for a King.

       Long before the laying of a cloak over a puddle in the road for a lady to cross was chivalrous, people laid their robes in the dust of the road to act as walking mats for those who were of a Kingly nature. Today, people roll out the red carpet for dignitaries and people of importance.  The parade into Jerusalem for Jesus and his exaltation was more than symbolic in that it represented the people’s proclamation and action that He was their King and their actions were not reserved for just anybody. This was God’s way of making the proclamation clear to those who knew the promise.  Our reality check invites us to examine and explore how we acknowledge that Jesus is King in our lives.

• What ways are used today symbolic of welcoming royalty?
• Could the color of the carpet in the aisle of the church’s sanctuary symbolize Christ’s triumphal coming?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, may the road that leads you into my heart always be filled with the palm branches of my own reality check proclaiming that you are King.

       At a time in history when Jesus was entering the Holy City for Passover, the people shouted, “Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”  At the end of the age when we are in the presence of our Christ, the words will be, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”  In the first instance, Hosanna means “O save us, Son of David”, admitting that Jesus is the Savior.  In the second, it is clear that salvation belongs to Christ.  One is exalted on High. The other is humble and sitting on a donkey.  Yet they are the same King.  Which is your reality?

• Do you identify with Jesus as the King exalted in victory or the one riding on a donkey?
• Is there another image of Jesus as Savior that you identify with?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
My God and King, empower me to see beyond the reality check of this life to the reality of the life to come where all eyes will see Jesus as King.

       When I was a child, my father would, from time to time, say, “Mark my word.”  It was a term used at that time to indicate that what he had said would come to pass.  Many years before Jesus came the prophet Zechariah said that Israel’s King would come to his people in the Holy City riding on a donkey.  I would presume that no one in Zechariah’s time said, “Mark my word.”  And yet, God has been faithful throughout eternity to bring to pass the assurance of the reality of God’s word.  Those in Jesus’ day would have been encouraged by Zechariah’s proclamation.  A reality check invites us to consider those times when God’s word became real in our lifetime.

• Have you ever experienced God’s word becoming prophetic in your lifetime?
• What specific Scripture caused you to do a reality check for your life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, enable me to do a serious reality check on Your faithful promise to Your people. Assure my spirit within me that Your promises are my reality.

       We typically enter Holy Week knowing what’s going to happen.  Unlike those days when it was happening in real time, we live fully aware of the implications of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  And even today there is a certain excitement among us.  Perhaps it’s because we know that a most special day is just around the corner.  Perhaps it’s because this day, like so many other special days, begins the week with a parade (of sorts).  Parades have typically always signaled the beginning of something important.  But on this day, those who were an active part of the parade were out front, celebrating the entrance of their self-appointed King.  There were still others who dared to ask the proverbial question, “Who is this?”  The journey from the wilderness to faithfulness continues to beg us to answer the question.  But it also is an invitation for us to do our own reality check.  The disciples thought they had done everything they needed to do.  We may be with them — needing to do a reality check to determine for ourselves who this might be in the court of our own private opinion.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty and gracious God, empower me to make a reality check in my life about who I believe Jesus to be so that my reality and Your reality agree with one another

       Far too often we only see what our eyes allow us to see.  We have our hunches and our intuition, but at times our hunches and intuitions leave us scratching our heads.  What we don’t often see with our eyes are the promises of Christ’s being fulfilled in our lives or each other’s lives.  We seem to be blind to the presence of God, even though the hope of the world, Jesus Christ, is working in us to accomplish God’s great purposes.  I contend that grace is much easier to see when we stop looking for perfection in ourselves and others, choosing instead to love each other unconditionally.

• What makes God’s grace so difficult to see beyond the physical presence of our bodies and actions?
• What can we do to make God’s grace in us more visible to the world we live in?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to see that we are more than we appear. We are the presence of Your grace active and alive in the world.

       If all we see when we look at each other is who we are physically, then we miss God’s most glorious act of grace.  Within each of us lies the presence and reality of God’s love.  Externally we are encased in the presence of God’s love.  Maybe it is our unwillingness to love others as God has loved us that makes it so difficult for others to see beyond our physical presence into the spiritual reality of God’s love in us.  We are more than flesh and bone.  We represent the presence of God’s Spirit, grace, and love because God through Jesus Christ has placed it in us.

• What more can we do as God’s people “remove our spiritual light from beneath the bushel basket” to display the love of God present in us?
• How does loving others as God loved us enable us and others to know that we are more than we appear?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable and empower me to love others as You have loved me in a way that they might see that I am in You and You are in me.

       We aren’t too far removed from our 1st Century Christian friends.  While fornication literally pointed to “forsaking God, or following after idols”, it has found its way into our contemporary culture to entice us to worship other God’s physically.  In today’s culture sex sells.  Almost every advertisement — print, media, or otherwise — uses some form of sexuality to promote its product (young men and women physically appealing selling things that have nothing to do with how they look).  And yet, we are drawn to that which the eye can see, turning people into objects.  And none that I can think of ever promote the human body as the temple of the living God.  Yet, for those of us who believe that we are the temple of the living God, we have become more than we appear.

• What is it that compels us to see the physical presence of each other and not the spiritual presence of each other?
• What part can we play in helping everyone to give more emphasis to our spiritual development and reality over the physical?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, help enable me to look beyond the aesthetic beauty of the human body to see each person as the dwelling place for Your Spirit.

       The fruit of the Spirit is something that we all hope to experience in our lifetime.  If it’s not something that reflects how we live, then we (at the very least) hope to experience it coming from others.  And yet, if the Spirit is alive in us and we are guided by the Spirit, then the fruit of our lives will reflect something that’s not outwardly visible.  We will be more than we appear to be, and what people will experience when they connect with us are the fruits of God’s presence in our lives being shared unselfishly in their lives.

• Reflect for a few moments today on times when others might have experienced the fruit of God’s Spirit present and working in and through you.
• How did others respond when God’s Spirit was being experienced by them because you were present?
• Were you more than you appeared to be at that time?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to so live that what people experience when they are in my presence is Your presence and Spirit alive in me.

       When James shouted “Adulterers!”, he wasn’t talking about our contemporary understanding of an affair with another man or woman.  He was speaking about an affair with anyone or anything that we willingly pursue taking our loyalty away from God.  What we appear to be is often associated with whom we are loyal to and/or what we stand for.  We sometimes fail our "fidelity-to-God-test” by not asking the right questions, or getting the right answers before we establish our position.  The most agonizing question we can ask may point us back to our loyalty to God and Christ when we ask, “What would Jesus do?”  The answer to that question may determine whether we have remained loyal to our God, or whether we have committed adultery with the world by clinging to the fealty of politics, race, or culture.

• How often do you consider whether or not your decisions are driven by your faithfulness to your relationship to God when you make decisions in your personal life?
• What are some ways that you can discern that your choices are made from a spiritual place, or a place that benefits you on a personal, political, or cultural level?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, give me a discerning Spirit so that my decisions are influenced by Your wisdom. Help me to appear as more than my human form.

       It has been said that right is right.  But apparently there is a distinction between what is right as it relates to the flesh and what is right as it relates to the Spirit.  It would appear that things we do to appease our flesh (this also means our emotional needs) come with the added caveat that our actions and the results of those actions could be corrupted.  On the other hand, those things we do to appease our Spirits have a greater ability and opportunity to inspire and encourage life from God.  Perhaps sowing to the spirit increases the yield of the Spirit, making us more spiritually than we appear to be in the flesh.

• What are the liabilities we might experience from sowing things to the flesh (emphasizing our physical needs above our spiritual gifts)?
• What are the greater benefits we experience in life when we sow things to the Spirit rather than sowing things to the flesh?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to plant and harvest blessings from Your Spirit so that my life will always be more than it appears to be.

       We tend to believe (most of the time) that we are only human.  That is our default.  Whether we’re doing something that displays a great weakness on our part, or whether we’re doing something that shows tremendous courage and strength, our claim is that we’re human.  One is used to mask our faults, and the other is used to broadcast our strength.  Those defaults, however, are typically based on our understanding of who we are from a physical perspective.  We see our parts, both internally and externally, and presume that what we see is all of who we are.  We live with the reality that our bodies will eventually die and that will be the end of us.  And yet God has opened up another reality that we have to accept.  Simply put: “that we are more than flesh and bone who live with a system of default that defines us on a human level but ignores that God-part that is alive in us.”  To that end, we can default toward our humanity or default to our spirituality.  Agreeing with God, God’s definition of us means that we accept that we are more than we appear to be.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to rise above the limiting lifestyle of my humanity to live the spirit-filled life you’ve called me to. Help me to always be mindful that because Your Spirit is alive in me, I am more than I appear to be.

       There’s something about doing something repeatedly that speaks volumes about the impermanence of that thing we do.  And most of us enter into things knowing that nothing is one time forever.  We have to do things repeatedly, at least in our world, in an effort to satisfy our attempts at the permanence of something even though we know that our efforts are temporary.  Thank God that in Jesus, God has brought an end to repetitive sacrifices that have taken the lives of children and animals for our sins.  In Jesus, God has accomplished what we couldn’t do by the shedding of his own blood once and for all.

• What benefits do we receive by not having to make daily, weekly, and yearly sacrifices of our own offering to God?
• In what ways does the ‘once and for all sacrifice’ made by Jesus Christ strengthen our relationship to God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, I thank You for Jesus Christ who offered His own blood as the perfect one-time sacrifice for the forgiveness of my sins each day.

       It is our nature (at least for those who have accepted Christ) to believe that we have no responsibility at all for making a sacrifice to God.  However, while because of Jesus Christ we never have to make a sacrifice, we lose sight of the fact that now we have become God’s sacrifice to the world.  Just as Christ was God’s sacrifice to the world, we have now taken on the role of being Christ-like — living sacrifices for the agenda of God to love everyone unconditionally.  Our spiritual worship is not just believing in Christ, but believing and acting in ways that show that we have submitted to do the will of God just as Christ did the will of God.

• What is it necessary for you to sacrifice in your life in order for you to become a living sacrifice for God and Christ in this world?
• In what way does becoming a living sacrifice enable you to gain a better understanding of God’s good and perfect will?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy God, though my sacrifice be imperfect, enable me to be a living sacrifice for You that I might know Your good and perfect will in my life and live it.

       There is a huge difference between knowledge and application — between theory and reality.  In fact, we have old sayings that help us to understand that wisdom. Phrases like, ‘a miss is as good as a mile’, ‘close only counts in horseshoes’ and ‘almost catch a rabbit don’t make no soup’.  These are all phrases we use to describe what it means to come up short.  We can know what to do and somehow be just short of perfection because we can’t do what we know.  Being not far from the Kingdom of God may come nowhere close to God’s perfect sacrifice offered to us in Jesus Christ.

• What does it feel like to give your best and still come up short of perfection?
• What comfort is there in knowing that God has filled the gap of your imperfection?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, teach me the true understanding of what it means to accept Your perfect sacrifice for those times when I come up short of perfection in my relationship of loving You and others.

       For ages we’ve done things in an effort to appease God, believing that if we offered gifts and sacrifices, they would be acceptable and perfect.  That we had to offer them repeatedly was proof enough that the sacrifice we offered could never achieve that goal of being perfect.  What was better than all the sacrifices in the world was doing God’s will and becoming the people God desired for us to become.  But that could never happen given our nature.  What was needed was a sacrifice that was perfect — someone, not something that was good once for all.

• Take time today to reflect on times when you’ve offered a sacrifice of your own choosing (something you did to make amends to God) rather than accepting the perfect sacrifice God has offered us in Jesus.
• When you realize what God has done in Jesus Christ, how does that affect you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, forgive me in those times when I’ve chosen my own sacrifice rather than trusting in Your sacrifice for me in Jesus Christ.

       I’m not sure we often think about what happens when the righteous die for the unrighteous. Perhaps it’s because we all know deep within ourselves that we never truly get what we deserve.  All of our little hidden sins, both those we knowingly commit that never come to light are only known by us and perhaps the person we offended.  Those sins we commit by omission are known only to God.  And to that extent, we know we have not lived up to our responsibility as God’s children.  So, if the punishment of sin is death, we deserve to die.  But Jesus Christ (the righteous) died for us (the unrighteous), a perfect sacrifice for our sins.

• When you think about the sacrifice of the righteous for the unrighteous, do you ever justify yourself by telling yourself you’re a good person?
• How, then, does a “good person” accept and reconcile Christ as a perfect sacrifice for sin?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to face the truth about my broken relationship with You and trust in your perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ for my sins.

       A perfect sacrifice does more than give the illusion that things are in order.  It sets them in order in invisible ways so that we may lead lives that are visible representations of our redeemed souls.  And perhaps, therein lies the proof.  There is something that happens within us that frees us from guilt caused by the repeated commission of our sins because we can rely on the One who became the perfect sacrifice for our sins.  That doesn’t give us permission or freedom to live out of relationship with God because of our actions.  But experiencing God’s forgiveness through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ has freed us once and for all, and once for all is a tremendous liberation.  It is in every possible way, the perfect sacrifice for sin offered to us by God.

• How meaningful is it to You that God has provided a perfect sacrifice for your sins in Jesus Christ?
• How does accepting this sacrifice translate into a life of service to God for you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, keep me mindful of all that You have done in offering me the perfect sacrifice for my sin. Enable me to always live trusting in Your perfect sacrificial gift of grace in Jesus Christ.

       The idea of giving up something in order to gain something else isn’t a new concept.  It’s actually built into the fabric of who we are.  We have to make up our minds what we are willing to sacrifice in order to get something that’s important to us.  That’s why people work, and why we do it day after day.  We sacrifice our time and energy in order to get those financial rewards that then allow us to find the basic necessities of life.  The fact that no “single” sacrifice of time and energy suffices to bring all our necessities to us all the time means that our sacrifice is not only imperfect, but it also means that what we’ve given in just one day is, in some ways, unacceptable.  Working one day will never be enough to satisfy for all time.  The perfect sacrifice, whether of time or energy — or any other commodity — would meet all of our needs for all time.  Once would be enough.  God, however, has managed to secure the perfect sacrifice in order for us to have that perfect, reconciled relationship with God, (and with each other if we’re willing to follow Jesus’ example.)  God did it by providing the perfect and acceptable sacrifice of love once and for all through Jesus Christ.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, I give thanks to You that (through Jesus) You have provided the perfect and acceptable sacrifice for my sins. Enable and empower me to become a living sacrifice always seeking to do Your will.

       The world is full of peculiar people who constantly look for proof of God's reality, and yet, the proof of God is all around us.  They see people whose lives have been changed yet fail to see that their change has anything to do with the reality or the presence of God.  The same could be said for people claiming to be believers who constantly search for proof of God.  They’ve hardened their hearts, locking out faith in all the things that God has done before, yet searching instead and asking for proof of what God has done for them lately.  God is not a “fast-food” delivery God who responds as soon as we place our prayers on the prayer list.  There are times when the lesson to be learned can only be realized after we’ve faced life’s challenges and come out on the side of faith and trust that God is with us.

• What makes us so insecure in our faith that we constantly ask for proof that God is with us?
• How can we become more confident, knowing that God is with us always?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, enable me to recall and remember Your faithfulness throughout the ages so that my heart is not hardened and l will not continually test You, but trust You.

       It is perhaps our nature to look beyond our behavior as an answer to why we find ourselves in a certain position in life.  It seems that we have found ourselves incapable of living totally obedient lives to honor God.  Yet, when we do it habitually, it is then that we ask the question, “Why is this happening to me?”  While the answer is sometimes not simple, the greater question is, “Why do we persist in blaming God for our discomforted lives?” Why do we resent God for not rescuing us from our predicament when our resistance to God put us there?  Perhaps the answer lies in making decisions that limit our culpability and allow us to trust God in all circumstances of life?

• What is it about us that seeks to blame God when our lives don’t turn out the way we’d like them to?
• How would a deeper understanding that God is not out to do us harm change your faith life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to have a change of heart from blaming You for the life predicaments I find myself in, and to own my part in it all.

       A part of life reminds us that we are not in control.  That realization compels us to seek someone to take responsibility for what happens to us.  And yet, we often forget that our control occurs as we realize we are in a relationship with God.  We can choose to live in a constant relationship with God and  hear God’s voice or ignore it.  It’s not a part-time relationship where we walk in and out, but a relationship which is constant.  Instead of questioning why we left God, we often question why God has left us.  And yet the answer is simply to have a change of heart about the distractions and to return to God.  It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

• What is it that distracts you, causing you to temporarily disconnect from God?•
• What would cause you to have a change of heart without testing God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable and empower me to have a change of heart that compels me to stay with You and avoid the distractions that cause me to stray.

       There appears to be a theme which runs throughout the Bible that suggests that God, more than anything else, wants to be chosen by us.  That God has chosen us is irrelevant at this point.  God’s wants us to make a conscious decision to hear God’s voice over all the others.  There is a sense that if we’re told the same thing over and over again and refuse to change, that we’ve hardened our hearts.  It’s clear that we can’t change our minds about choosing God until we’ve had a change of heart about choosing God.

• Today, reflect on times when you may have heard God’s voice calling to you, yet you hardened your heart, choosing to ignore God’s request.
• How do you feel after you realize you’ve hardened your heart against God?
• What can you do in the future to lead you to have a change of heart?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, forgive me in those times when I’ve chosen other gods and not listened to You. Change my heart that I might hear and come to You.

       There is an old saying not heard much anymore, but just as valid: “You’ve made your bed; now you have to lie in it.”  In some ways that explains many of the predicaments we find ourselves in, especially when we knowingly and willingly defy God.  Hardening of the heart with respect to God can occur instantly or over a period of time when we feel that God is being inattentive to our circumstances.  Like spoiled and brooding children, we cry out for the immediate and instant attention of God.  What brings us out of those situations is when we have a change of heart and remember that God is faithful and has been true to His Word that he would never leave us nor forsake us. Coming to that reality can be a real heart shift for us.

• Can you remember times when you’ve had to lie in the bed of your own making and then resented God for not helping you?
• What lessons do we learn after we’ve hardened our hearts and failed to listen to God or remember God’s faithfulness?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, enable me to know those times when my heart hardens against You. Lead me to have a change of heart to be obedient to you and remember Your faithfulness.

       We are a forgetful people.  Too often, we develop periodic amnesia and forget what God has done for us.  Blind to the presence of God’s activity in our lives, we too often fail to see what God is doing.  Often, we don’t trust that God will be with us in the future because we’re uncertain of God’s “now” presence with us.  This forgetfulness leads us to places where our hearts are hardened.  It’s then that we begin focusing on our circumstances while forgetting to worship God for the awesome deeds that God has already done.  It’s a natural tendency, born out of our human relationship with God.  It is, however, in our best interest to not harden our hearts, but to make a joyful noise to God, celebrating before others what our God has done, and trusting that God will again come through for us.

• Have you ever become disappointed or angry with God and hardened your heart in a way that prevented you from giving true praise and worship to God?
• What are some ways as God’s people to move beyond the hardness of our hearts to true praise of God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, keep me mindful of all that God has done, is doing, and will do so that I may praise God with a joyful heart, not a hardened one.

       It is the nature of the human family (at least those who believe in God) to question the circumstances of our life’s challenges.  The proverbial word question “Why?” seems to leak from our mouths when we don’t have an answer or understanding of life’s challenges.  And out of that word/question ‘why’, we seem to gravitate toward a belief system that says, “We don’t deserve what we’re getting.”  That thought is typically accompanied by feelings of hurt and resentment because we’ve had to endure some situation that has challenged our faith and our memory of God’s presence in our lives.  The tendency — at least for some and not all — is to become so frustrated with God because we haven’t been able to experience life as comfortably as we thought we should.  Those feelings typically cause us to suffer from a fairly common disease called “hardening of the heart.”  Symptoms of this disease are that we become resistant to what God is doing in us and through us.  Protesting takes the place of praise.  Worry takes the place of worship, and we begin looking and asking God for proof that we haven’t been left alone.  It’s perhaps a better idea to search for places where we’ve hardened our hearts, remembering what God has done in the past, praising God for God’s faithfulness instead of living in fear and frustration.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, strengthen and empower me to search within myself to find those places where I have hardened my heart against You. Enable me to make a change of heart to fully embrace all You do for me and worship You.

       There is no doubt that we all depend on something, especially as it relates to our relationship with God.  Many people are dependent upon the notion that they are good people who do good things such that God will reward them for the good works they do.  And while there might be a connection to the works’ we do in the name of God, those works will never earn us the right to be in that relationship.  The plausibility and possibility of any relationship with God comes by virtue of an unearned guarantee from God and no one else.

• What are some of the frustrations we face when we try to do enough good works to win God’s favor?
• How can we become less reliant on doing good works and more reliant on the unearned guarantee of God’s precious grace for salvation?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, lead me to that place in my relationship with You, where living by faith I may come to rely Your unearned guarantee of grace.

       Have you ever really thought about what it is to receive a gift?  A gift is special in that it isn’t earned. If we earn something, it means that we had it coming to us or that we deserved whatever the gift might be.  On the other hand, when we receive gift, it comes to us because the giver wants us to have it.  It’s not earned, but it comes to us (typically) as an expression of love from the other person.  That’s how it is with God’s love.  God gives us the gift of grace.  It is an unearned reward of a relationship built on faith.

• What is it about the gift of God’s grace that keeps you aware that you have not earned it?
• How does accepting God’s unearned guarantee of salvation change your life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, please help me to live my life by faith, yet, keep me open to receive Your unearned guarantee, the greatest expression Your love.

       Uncertainty is a plague of fear.  When we live in uncertainty, we find that we can’t trust much of anything.  We can’t trust or depend on things being where we want them to be or rely on events happening as we would like or expect.  The beauty of God’s promises is that they come with an irreversible, non-revocable guarantee that nails down with certainty all of the things that God promises.  That they are promises from God, not based on the law, but on grace is our assurance and only point of comfort.

• What is it about the uncertainty of salvation that goes away when you/we trust in the unearned guarantee of God’s grace?
• How can we come to believe that God’s unearned grace is enough?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
All-knowing God, enable and empower me to accept the free gift of salvation through faith, teaching me that I never earned the gift I received.

       One of the ways we can dishonor a person’s gift to us is to not use it.  In some ways it’s an insult.  In other ways it’s simply accepting the gift in vain — taking it without any idea of its importance or desecrating the gift as if the lifetime guarantee was of no value.  It may be, in some ways, very much like using the gift as if we earned it, as opposed to using it as if it was not only important, but that we understood its significance and value as a gift. When a gift is unearned, it may cause someone to revalue the gift for their own wellbeing.

• Today, reflect on times when you’ve desecrated a gift, or at least believed that the gift had no value to you and you accepted the gift in vain.
• How does giving value to something you haven’t earned benefit you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, teach me as one who can know and learn the value of a gift. Enable me to honor the unearned guarantee as it is the gift.

       We are forever separated from God because of our stubbornness.  We at times know the right thing to do and don’t do it.  We also know the wrong things not to do and do them anywa9 (read Romans 7:18-23).  We know what to say, and refuse to say it.  Our inability to do right and act right prevents us from establishing a relationship with God in which God is honored.  So, if we can’t earn God’s love and acceptance by our lifestyle, our only choice is to accept God’s guarantee as an unearned gift.  It is through the acceptance of the unearned guarantee that we find salvation and security.

• Have there ever been times when you’ve taken the unearned guarantee of God’s grace for granted?
• How does accepting God’s unearned guarantee ease our stubbornness?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, enable and empower me to see myself for who I truly am — a person in need of the unearned guarantee of Your grace.

       There is no more descriptive and satisfying scripture of truth and freedom than to know we have been saved by some other means than the works we do.  Thinking or believing that what we do somehow earns God’s love dismisses God’s role in holding us accountable for the things we do wrong.  That’s especially good news since we are all differently abled.  Since no one could demand that God justify the situation of our sin and his righteousness, God took it upon God’s self and did it anyway.  God gave us an unearned, guaranteed promise of eternal life through faith and grace for no other reason than God’s unmerited love for us all.

• How does being able to accept God’s unearned guarantee put you in a right relationship with God?
• How does accepting this guarantee affirm who you are in relationship to God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, enable and empower me to see myself for who I truly am — a person in need of the unearned guarantee of Your grace.

       We live in a world where guarantees are an expectation of the culture.  This is especially true when we purchase something.  We expect that there will be a guarantee of the product we purchase, lease, rent, or own that will certifies that the product will be good for a specified time of ownership.  If we’re fortunate, we might be offered a warranty good for the life of the item.  But even then, the guarantee is earned depending on how well we care for the item.  But all of those guarantees (even with their implied and expressed warranties) only cover items that we have purchased or earned.  There is another system in place when we think about entering into a relationship with God and receiving a guarantee of that relationship.  Much to our benefit, a guarantee from God can’t be purchased or earned.  Our ability to be obedient never has the power to make God beholden to us.  God’s guarantee of grace comes to us because God chooses to give it.  We can’t afford to rely on our own merit to be acceptable with God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, humble me so that, in faith, I will only trust in the unearned guarantee of Your grace to live in relationship with You and never rely on what I believe are my own good works to please You.

       Knowing who we are requires a certain action on our part.  It requires that we function according to the persons we claim to be.  To be certain, there will be challenges to our identity.  There will always be the opportunity to live contrary to who we truly are — as a lamp under a bushel basket.  Knowing who we are is integral to living our lives with clarity and integrity.  It’s by knowing who we are that we can serve our true function in the world.

• What are some of the challenges we face as children of God that invite us to live as if we don’t know who we are?
• What are some ways we can grow in our understanding of who we really are so that we might make a difference in our world?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, enable me to see that knowing who I am empowers me to live my life with clarity and integrity as a child of God.

       We don’t often think about it, but self-knowledge is a prerequisite for teaching others how to recognize their true selves. This is especially true when we think about character traits that are in concert with the persons we describe ourselves to be.  It’s difficult to imagine a blind eye-doctor, deaf audiologist, or a speech therapist who can’t speak themselves.  Likewise, it’s difficult for us to teach someone to be a Christian if we aren’t clear about who we are and haven’t taught ourselves to claim our identity.

• How often do you consider that how you live your life is a teaching model for others who want to identify themselves as Christians?
• What difference should that make in terms of how you define who you are?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, lead me into that holy place where I may learn who I truly am in You so that I might live my life as a witness to others.

       Lack of clarity about who we are opens the door to faulty practices of faith that are misleading to us and others.  Perhaps in our culture, it’s appropriate to be divided about who we say we are and what we do.  After all, everyone seems to be doing it.  We even allow it in some circles.  The question is about whether or not these actions lead to integrity of identity, or simply serve to confuse us and others about who we really are.  It seems that knowing and practicing who we are is the key to a life of true witness.

• Where are the blind spots in your life preventing you from knowing who you are?
• Make a list of three things you will do to shed light on your blind spots?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
All-knowing God, empower me to live my life in the full knowledge of who I am in You and with integrity before the world in which I live.

       It is a special privilege to be called a child of God.  It’s not a name that we take.  It’s a name that is given to us.  It’s a name by which we’ve been identified by God and one by which we identify ourselves (or at least should be).  It then becomes a curious lifestyle that we live when claim we have one God who claims us but often give ourselves over to serving and worshiping other gods who have no claim on us at all.  Knowing who we are is a strong inhibitor against serving and worshiping other gods.  It’s also a strong incentive to worship the God who protects us.

• Use the first part of today to reflect on times when you’ve been unfaithful to the God from whom you draw your identity.
• How does our unfaithfulness to God work to undo our knowledge of who we are?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, as one who claims my relationship to You to define who I am, enable and empower me to be faithful to no other God but You.

        We are forever looking for God to do something to prove God’s identity to us. Perhaps that’s a part of who we are — someone always unsure and unbelieving. And yet, unless we live as the people we claim to be, our lack of faith that becomes a challenge (or test) of God will probably do more to identify who we really to those who may be searching. Our identity — who we really are — is proven more by our faith than by our insecurities, doubts, and fears.

• Have there ever been times when your fears or insecurities pushed you to ask God to prove that he was near or really God?
• Does your assurance of who God is and your relationship to God give you a clearer identity of who you are?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful God, enable and empower me to wrestle my insecurities into submission such that my faith in You to do all things defines who I am.

       There may, in fact, be some solace in recognizing that we are not alone in life’s challenges.  It’s in those challenges where we succeed or we fail — where we find affirmation about who we are or live with the doubts of who we are.  It’s also in those challenges that we can claim to know who we are as children of God who are at times tempted, at times succumb to those temptations, but who, through faith in Jesus Christ, can come boldly to the throne of grace to find mercy and help in time of need.  That’s who we are.

• How does being able to boldly approach the throne of God’s mercy help you to identify who you are in relationship to God?
• How does receiving mercy affirm who you are in relationship to God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, I give thanksgiving to you for clarifying my identity to you as one who is invited to boldly come to You for forgiveness and mercy.

       Someone was once quoted as saying about those of us who define ourselves as Christian: “We should so live our lives that when we tell someone we are Christians, they are able to smile in affirmation rather than being surprised by the fact.”  Perhaps people are surprised because some of us live our lives taking advantage of the grace we’ve been afforded rather than making a full faith effort to live according to how we identify ourselves.  It may be that we choose to live our lives with aliases rather that coming to that place where there is consistency with who we say we are and the choices we make about our lives.  One of the key things about how we live, the decisions we make in our life choices, and how others perceive us is knowing who we really are and knowing what it means to identify ourselves as children of God.  We wear many hats throughout the day that define us for a specific moment in time.  But knowing who we are makes a defining statement about who we believe ourselves to be, especially when we are tempted to make decisions that say otherwise.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, enable and empower me to avoid the temptation of living my life with an identity other than the one I claim as Your child. Teach me to choose and live my relationship to You before the entire world.

       Faith has many components.  Of those variables of faith, we are called to respond to God in different circumstances, using those different parts of our faith.  In one instance, faith may simply mean being aware of God’s presence and responding to the needs of those around us.  In another setting, faith may mean trusting that God will provide for us.  But to remain unshaken in our faith leaning on God’s wisdom and counsel gives our faith rock-solid status.  Sometimes regardless of the circumstances it just may be all about being still and knowing that God is God.

• What circumstances in your life have most often invited you to lean on God’s wisdom for direction.
• What have you learned from trusting God’s counsel that leads to an unshakable faith for you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, teach me through Your wisdom to listen to Your counsel so that I may always be unshakable in my faith.

       Too often we think of faith as being nothing more than a spiritual exercise — something which, once the believing is done, then so are we.  But the truth is, faith requires wisdom beyond knowing of God.  Someone once said that knowledge is knowing what to do; wisdom is knowing what to do next.  We all know what to do in our faith.  What we sometimes lack is the wisdom to move past our knowledge and take that extra step that may be more pragmatic than spiritual.  Linking faith and wisdom is the key.  Perhaps that wisdom comes from patiently waiting on God and preparing to receive him when he comes.  Nothing is worse than being called on and being unprepared.  The wisdom of a rock-solid faith is being prepared whenever Jesus should arrive in our lives.

• What things can we do to move our faith past just believing to working to make our faith a rock-solid reality for us?
• What might you do in your faith works that would be the next practical faith step?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious Christ, give me the wisdom of faith to know what to do, and the practical wisdom to know what to do next in serving You.

       There is much religious conversation among Christians about how important it is to know Jesus Christ.  And it is true that our relationship to God through Jesus Christ is critical to our transformation.  But more important than whether we know Jesus or not is whether or not Jesus knows us.  Knowing of Jesus doesn’t certify that we have an intimate and personal relationship with him.  We’ve all heard of famous people and may even know someone who knows someone famous.  That doesn’t mean we know the friend of our friend.  Jesus’ knowledge of us goes beyond whether or not we were in his presence at church or at a fellowship meal.  Jesus knows us through the acts of love and kindness we do for others, through common acts of prayer and devotion.  Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have a little talk with Jesus and tell him all about our trials.

• What acts of grace and mercy do you participate in that Christ might claim to know you by?
• How do you separate the idea that your works gain God’s favor and not grace?
• What acts of an intimate relationship with Christ would allow you to say that Jesus knows you?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Precious Christ, enable and empower me to live knowing Your grace for me in such a way that You will know me through my acts of grace and mercy, as well as my prayers and outcries to you.

       The argument of grace versus works has gone on for what seems like an eternity.  Those who argue for grace maintain that doing works leans toward earning God’s favor and love, which can’t be earned. Those who argue for works suggest that works are those things we do to in response to God’s love which (in turn) allows us to please God.  But God judges our works through the intent of our hearts.  Yes, we are justified by our faith, but people of faith have done egregious things in the name of God, and non-believers have done loving things from their heart.  If not the unmerited grace of God working for us all, then all the kindnesses in the world aren’t sufficient.  Perhaps it is a both faith and works and not each independent of the other.

• As an exercise for this mid-week reflection, think about times when you saw people untied to a religious community doing things that Christians should do.
• What makes the difference between a loving act done by a person of faith and a loving act done by a non-religious person?
• What difference does God make in it?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, change my heart of faith so that my acts of love and mercy are driven by a rock-solid faith that works to please You.

       Sometimes we forget that faith — our faith — is an action taken on our part on behalf of our belief in God.  It is our way of connecting with the Holy Mystery.  And yet our connection to God doesn’t necessarily resolve any of the practical issues that face us in life.  That requires something different.  It requires an act of grace (or unmerited love) that gives evidence that there is a strong faith-filled connection between all humanity.  As such, our faith response is to provide them with what they need, just as God has provided us with what we need.

• In what ways does your faith in God get put into an action that merges your faith into an intentional act of grace toward others?
• What benefits do you receive knowing that your faith and works are connected?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful Christ, enable and empower me to merge my acts of love into a rock solid faith in You that showcases Your love and care for others through me.

       We always live with the danger of people telling us things about God and Christ, and about our relationship with God that are offered in an effort to expand our wisdom and knowledge of God.  Perhaps there’s weakness in us causing us to desire wisdom from that charismatic person who seems to know more than we do.  And yet, sometimes people are more concerned with their own power and persuasion over others than leading them to an authentic and meaningful relationship with Christ. When it’s all about them, it can’t be about Christ.

• What are some tools and methods that you might use to ensure that you were not being deceived or led astray in your faith and relationship with God.
• What actions do you engage in that help you to continue to build on your faith in God without divisiveness?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Merciful Christ, enable and empower me to have discerning ears that the wolves of my generation might not destroy my rock-solid faith in You.

       Faith is the foundation of our relationship with God.  But we must also remind ourselves that at times our faith is shaky.  Our shakiness exists partly because we live with the polarity and tension between believing and doing.  The weight of that tension weighs heavy on the faith side as we are asked to inquire of ourselves if we know Jesus.  The weight weighs heavy on the ‘doing’ side as we work to do things in Jesus name that are pleasing to God.  And yet, it seems that doing things in Jesus’ name isn’t enough.  There’s more to having a ‘rock-solid’ faith than simply doing things in Jesus’ name.  Our faith is solidified by a life of following Godly wisdom — a wisdom that leads us to produce lives that bear evidence, not that we know Christ, but that Christ knows us and is guiding our life and works.  And so, we seek to be in a relationship with God in which our faith has been tried and tested — a faith that has withstood the trials and storms of life and remains steadfast and faithful to Christ.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, empower and strengthen me to act on my faith so that my life bears the good fruit of a relationship with You —one that assures me that by my works You know me and that I have a rock-solid faith.

       There are certain things we do in life, many of which are done to prove we are right.  And I guess there is something to be said for being right.  However, being right usually has the disadvantage of telling someone else they are wrong, which may cause spiritual injury to another.  What may be more important as Christians is that in all of our dealings, we try to give honor and glory to God.  It’s at that point that the glory of God shines in us and through us, making God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ readily available to those we encounter.

• Is God glorified in our actions when another person is being made to feel that they lack understanding or knowledge?
• How might we glorify God at times when our need to be right could hurt others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious and loving God, empower me to do everything I do so that You may glorified by all of my actions, seeking to offend no one.

        It’s amazing that we have so many wonderful gifts to be used to benefit the common good of the world, and yet, we find ourselves lacking in our ability to harness those gifts in powerful ways of transformation.  It is God’s desire that the gifts we’ve received from the Holy Spirit as trustees are shared with the world to be used to magnify God’s presence in the whole world.  I seem to remember a parable about a man who buried his gift and didn’t use it.

• In what ways do you use your spiritual gift to benefit both the church of Jesus Christ and the community of the world?
• Ask yourself this question: How might I share God’s gifts in me more liberally so that the world can benefit from God’s gift in me?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving Christ, empower me to apply the gift of Your spirit given to me as a trustee of God so that others may receive the benefit of Your love in me.

       One of the responsibilities of a trustee is that the thing we’ve been given to take care of doesn’t get abused or used for the wrong purpose.  If what we’ve been entrusted with is the unconditional love of God, then to not use it in ways that foster God’s love to everyone is an abuse of that gift.  As a trustee of God, displaying hospitality should be a hallmark of God’s welcoming nature.  We never know whom we might encounter that might be in need of simple kindness, respect, love, and human warmth.

• Are there ever times when, as a trustee of God’s unconditional love, hospitality to anyone might be difficult to extend?
• How does offering hospitality to others display God’s gift of unconditional love in us?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Holy and merciful God, enable me as a trustee of Your grace to always open the door of hospitality to others that you might be glorified.

       When we think of being trustees of God, we don’t typically think that our range of responsibility reaches to those outside of our faith.  And yet, displaying God’s love in ways that leads others back into the family of faith has the ability to hide those gaps in a person’s life, making them acceptable to us and the God in us.  A part of being a trustee of God is to care for broken and damaged goods so that they may be restored.  That’s what being entrusted with God’s grace does.  It restores others.

• For a time of mid-week reflection, consider those you know who have wandered away from the church, from their faith and their relationship with God.
• What could you have done as a trustee of God to help them find their way back? How might both of your lives have been changed because of your trusteeship?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of grace and God of glory, empower me as a trustee of Your grace to put Your glory on display so that those who wander may be restored.

       As trustees of God, it seems that there is more to life than simply keeping and maintain a trust.  It also seems that we are called as trustees to represent the One who has entrusted us with this very important task.  This is not unusual.  The one who has been entrusted with the care of the house is the onsite representative until the homeowner returns.  The same is true for those who are trustees of God. We represent God and as representatives and trustees, our actions and conduct should be in accordance with that of the owner.

• How is your relationship with God as a trustee displayed in your actions as God’s representative?
• What can you do to become more aware of your actions as a trustee of God?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love, empower me as Your trustee to always be representative of who You are in everything I do.

       One of the most difficult things we will ever encounter is giving up our control.  We live most of our lives trying to become independent.  All of a sudden, we enter into this relationship with God in which we are required to deny ourselves and live for a higher purpose than ourselves, and a higher purpose than we’ve done before.  It’s hard to walk away from the things we’ve lived for to begin living for someone else’s dream.  And yet, as trustees of God, we have a responsibility to put aside our lives momentarily in order to extend love and care for the lives of others.

• What do you believe is the most difficult thing about living for God, and not for yoursef?
• How might you reprioritize your life so that what God wants comes first?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Almighty God, enable and empower me to place your agenda for my life and living above mine. Teach me to understand that when I live for You, I am living for me.

       From the beginning of time, we’ve been designated as the keeper of things.  By keeper, I don’t mean one who saves stuff to be brought out or revealed later.  Some of us fail miserably at saving things.  But, by keeper I mean that we have been given things that we have responsibility for.  We’ve been given keys, cars, objects which seem to have no apparent value to us, and yet to the one who gave them to us, gave them to us in trust.  Whatever the item was that was given, was given with the belief that we would keep and take care of the keys, the house, or the car — whatever item was entrusted to us.  And they trusted that they would get them back in as good or better shape than they were given.  In that way we literally became trustees of whatever we held.

       Our first item of trust as humans was the earth.  God gave it to us that we might take care of it.  And yet the greatest gift of trust given to us by God isn’t the earth, but each other.  We have been given each other as trustees of God with the responsibility to fulfill God’s will that we would take care of each other.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me to live in the Spirit so that I may become Your trustee — a steward of Your grace who lives according to Your will, caring for the hearts and lives of others.

       It is amazing what simply valuing others as an act of caring will do.  It invites us to extend ourselves beyond simply knowing people and adopt ways that offer caring — genuine caring — to others.  It’s not just about using our mouths to tell people about Christ, but it’s about displaying love and caring in tangible ways that make the gospel of Jesus a reality as opposed to an abstract concept.  It’s from our genuine caring that others become valued and valuable to us and the love of Christ becomes real to them.

• How can our acts of caring become a way to share the gospel with others?
• How does genuine caring display the good news of Christ where other ways fail?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, empower me to reach out to others through personal acts of caring so that the gospel is displayed to others in real ways.

A lack of caring and indifference is noticeably present in our world today.  This is not true across the board, but it does lead people in some ways to show apathy towards their brothers and sisters.  But what seems to be a problem in our world is always converted into an opportunity for the members of the body of Christ, the church.  Our opportunity unfolds as an opportunity to show Christ’s loving care in a world that may not be ready to receive it.  Any other way — by sniping and back-biting only leads to bitterness and self-destruction and showcases our lack of care in ways that denigrate Christ.

Conflict in the world and in the church has always created indifference and apathy toward others in some ways.

• How can acknowledging and valuing others be utilized in ways that strengthen rather than weaken the body of Christ?
• What can we do to display God’s glory thru caring we extend to others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower and enable me to see the opportunities in Your world to value others, acknowledging their gifts, while showing care and concern to others so that Your grace may prevail.

       The ministry of caring, actually, goes beyond acts of mercy.  It’s exhibited in ways that simply invite us to offer words of encouragement — to build each other up in spirit.  That is caring for each other in a very different way, and yet, it still says to the other person, “I care about you!  I value you.”  Sometimes a kind and encouraging word can do more to build a person up than a gift of appreciation.  Or it could be said that a kind word as an act of caring is a gift of appreciation.  It can do more to give value to someone else who may be feeling depressed because they’ve been devalued.

• What are you willing to do to encourage or build someone up that will be understood as valuing their gifts and showing that they are needed?
• Can you see how valuing and encouraging others can demonstrate to them that they are needed as an important part of the community?
• In what ways?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love and life, enable me to encourage others and build them up as an opportunity to create a more harmonious community in Your name.

       Empathy is one of the most powerful ways to care for and be emotionally and spiritually present with others.  It allows us to quietly cross the bridge of their discomfort or joy and join with them in deep expressions of their emotional situation.  For some, it’s called the ministry of presence — of being with someone emotionally regardless of the circumstances they are in.  Neither grief nor joy is anything that should be experienced alone.  It is the act of care and caring to share God’s gift to our lives with others. It even means peacefully respecting them when they want to be alone.

• As a mid-week reflection, think about those times when you’ve been present with someone who was going through an emotional time of joy or sadness.
• How did you feel empathizing (being present with them) was a sign of caring?
• Did you consider your presence a use of your spiritual gift?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love and grace, empower me to be sensitive and caring to the emotional needs of others. Teach me the art of valuing and caring for others with empathy and understanding.

There is no doubt in the world that we’re all different.  Science has shown the power of God to create diversity in our lives.  But because we are connected so closely, it’s important for us, just as the various parts of our bodies “acknowledge our dependence on one another”, and to offer the best that we have with what we’ve been given.  Whether or not we know it or understand it, offering the best we have of God’s gift to us and to one another leads to our survival.  It’s not just that I can survive on my own.  As a member of God’s creation, we need each other to survive.

• Have you ever considered that God created and gave us gifts so that we would have to rely on each other for survival.
• How does knowing that “we need each other” (our gifts and strengths) impact your understanding of what it means to care for one another?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and tender God, through our gifts, it is Your will that every need be supplied. We are important to each other and need each other to survive.

       We’ve been created by God differently so that we would come to be interdependent rather than independent.  The value of our relationships with God and Christ depends on how we value and care for one another. We need each other for the success of Christ’s church because none of us can do it all alone.  It’s therefore important for us to embrace who we are as different, and value each other as if we are the same.  We can’t do anything alone, and so we need each other to do God’s work.  

• How do you acknowledge the gifts of others in ways that display your value of them and their gifts?
• How does acknowledgment of their gifts underscore that you care about them and need them?
• What can we do to exhibit acknowledge the gifts of others and show care for those who have different gifts than we do?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, help me to acknowledge the significance of the gifts of those who are placed around me. Teach me to care for them as a ministry of our Christ and Your church.

       Most of us who live our lives in the Christian faith live them unaware of the spiritual gifts that God has given us. Our entrance into the spiritual church from the secular world makes us accustomed to giving value to those who are in leadership positions without recognizing those who work behind the scenes.  That typically leads to value judgments about the importance or lack of importance of certain people within the body of Christ.  However, it also leads us to the place where we become blind to the value of those God-given gifts and why those gifts are given.  God gives us all of these remarkable gifts, not so that we can consider how important we are, but so that we might value the gifts that each person has, acknowledging them in caring ways.  And so, the purpose of our gifts — God’s gifts to each of us — is so that we might dedicate ourselves to Christ in ways that we actually honor, value, and care for one another.  It’s done so that the seemingly insignificant might value and care for those who seem significant and those who seem significant would acknowledge the value and extend care to those who seem insignificant.  It’s both how we acknowledge the gifts that God gives each of us and helps us to recognize that we need each other. 

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Gracious God, teach me to acknowledge and use Your gift to me as an instrument of Your grace to care for others and empower me to acknowledge Your gift to them as a something we all need to be whole.

       For all that we are, and however we might see the world and those around us, we represent those in the world who are waiting to be restored.  It’s a strange irony that God calls us — challenges us to continue the work of Christ by restoring people to life when we, too, are in need of the same healing condition of being restored.  But therein is our glory.  We know and depend on God’s faithfulness to bring us up from whatever condition we are in to restore us.  Our job and Christian duty is to give restoring life by the love of Christ to those who are in need of restoration today.

• Who are some people in need or restoration in our world today? (think about those who are hurting and dismissed by society)
• What are some ways that you can work to restore life in others who are in need?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Merciful God, awaken in me a sense of Your Holy Spirit present with me so that I may courageously restore life to others while I wait for You to restore me.

       God has always been in the restoration business — taken people from one broken state to a renewed state of being.  That’s the nature of restoration.  It doesn’t put us back where we were as much as it gives us a new perspective and way of looking at the world and each other through our relationship to God.  And we all need restoration in some ways.  Ananias needed it to go to Paul and Paul needed it to begin his ministry in the name of Christ.  Restoration energizes us, and when it’s done for others, they, too, feel more energy to live.

• Have you ever known anyone who, after encountering a relationship with God, was restored to a new life?
• What ways might we work to facilitate restoring life to others who are broken?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, open my eyes that I may see the value of restoring life to others in Your love and grace so that they may be energized to serve You.

       Restoring life is not easy.  Sometimes to make people whole again — to restore life to them — it means crossing traditions of faith, culture, politics, class, ethnicity, and law.  And yet, there is no real law against making people’s lives better, especially if it’s done with the love of God at its center.  The question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we willing to violate those traditions and boundaries to restore life to others for Christ’s sake?”  It’s a simple question, but the correct and Godly answers may invoke the anger and indignation of those close to us.  They may even invoke us to anger against God for requiring such a demand from us.

• Have you ever violated a cultural or religious tradition in order to restore life to someone who was lying in the middle of life’s road?
• What are the dangers of going against cultural and other norms for Christ sake?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
God of love and life, enable me to find the courage to stand against any cultural norms in order that I might restore the lives of others in Your name

       The biggest destroyer of life in any age or culture is our unwillingness to embrace those who are different from us.  According to this Scripture, the woman (who is a Samaritan) reminds Jesus he is crossing cultural boundaries because her experience is that the Jews have nothing to do with the Samaritans.  In our world culture it is in some people’s minds a preference that the blacks have nothing to do with the whites, the Japanese have nothing to do with the Koreans, and the list goes on and on.  In what was labeled the “Age of Aquarius” (a period of enlightenment from the 1960’s) a song writer once wrote the words: “There is a green one who won’t accept the blue one for living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one.” And it still continues in our world today.  The road to restoring life begins when we put aside our differences and relate to each other as humans.

• Use today to reflect on ways in which personal and cultural biases have gotten in the way of restoring life to others.
• What can we do to help remove biases that destroy life rather than restore life?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
God of all creation, work in me to remove my biases so that I may become an agent of Your life-restoring powers in my encounters with others.

       We are so good at the art of justifying ourselves.  We want to be right (or righteous), and yet we’re not limited in what we will do to make ourselves appear popular and accepted by those who are closest to us.  What’s clear is that God is not impressed by our self-justifying efforts.  What’s in our hearts is more important than our social or cultural acceptance by groups.  And sometimes our desire to be accepted by others prevents us from restoring life to others in ways acceptable to God.

• Why is self-justification and peer group acceptance such a powerful force against our desire to be accepted by God?
• How can seeking to justify ourselves get in the way of restoring life to others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Righteous God, empower Your Spirit to work in me that I may be justified and accepted by You in ways that inspire me to restore life to others.

       In every act of righteousness toward God, there seems to be a test that comes to us, helping us to determine exactly whose side of righteousness we’re on.  And the test is more than about loyalty.  The test is often one that gives us an opportunity to restore life to someone or to remove it.  Capital punishment is such a hot-button issue because the choices are life and death. The same is true for any man or woman lying in the middle of the road.  Our decision to walk by or to help is life and death for them — restoration or cessation of life.

• Have you ever been tested in ways that you could determine your loyalty to God?
• When given the choice, do you choose to restore life or to end life by walking by on the other side?
• What guides you in making your decision?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious God, when I find myself tested regarding my faithfulness to You, may I always decide in this life to choose to restore life rather than end it.

       We are a people whose characteristic trait is to value life.  It’s when life and lives are broken, or in some ways devalued that we have a responsibility to step up to the plate and do what we can to restore to wholeness that life of an individual or those lives of a group.  It sounds easy enough, but it requires some spiritual growth and resolve on our part.  Many of the lives we encounter are broken because we — sometimes through negligence, prejudice and indifference — are responsible for their brokenness.  It may be because they don’t represent who we are.  It may be because we share our own personal biases against them.  But the biggest reason why people are typically broken and devalued is because we have failed to see them as totally human.  We are sometimes guilty of walking by those in our lives and communities who are lying broken and in the middle of life’s road because we have something more important to do, or we’re afraid to approach them.  But if we are who Christ calls us to be, then our correct response is to be a neighborly one.  We’re supposed to restore life and not dismiss it or neglect it

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, empower me to see those broken and avoided souls on life’s highway in my community whose lives need to be valued. Grant that I may be the Samaritan among those in my community seeking to restore life to others.

       How disappointing it is to desire something and not be able to get it.  It cuts right through to the heart of our desire.  And yet, our desires seem to be motivated by things that have little or nothing to do with God’s will, but more by our own selfish desires.  When we lack wisdom, we lack not only the intelligence to know what’s best for us, but we lack the ability to manage it once we get it.  Allowing wisdom to determine what we want and why we want it could cause our entire world change iin ways that benefit everyone.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving Christ, give me wisdom so that I might know the right things to ask for and the wisdom to be a good steward of all I receive.

       Wisdom — at least God’s wisdom — invites us to come openly to God in search of those things that are hidden in our hearts — things enabling us to accomplish God’s purposes in our world.  And so, if we ask, search, and knock on the door of God’s wisdom, God is more than happy and willing to supply us with whatever it is we need to deal with our issues.  The best gift we can receive from God is the wisdom to live a life that gives honor and glory to our God.  Wisdom is the beginning of pleasing God.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious Christ, enable and empower me to draw from the deep wells of Your wisdom that my every desire may be filled with wisdom from on high.

       “Experience keeps a dear school — a fool will learn in no other.”  Those are well remembered words from Benjamin Franklin.  It begs us to explain why we will not take wisdom at its calling and give heed to it rather than embarking on a journey of the learned experience where pain, disappointment, misery, and a host of other things are the reward for our foolishness.  It seems that if having anything was the deal on the table, wisdom enough to avoid life’s follies would be number one.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious God, give me the wisdom to avoid making foolish decisions in life and to know that Your wisdom saves me from the lack of knowledge.

       Many of our decisions are made without discernment about giving consideration to God’s will.  To that end, we often find ourselves wondering why it seems that our prayers fall on deaf ears.  Knowing what to ask according to God’s will is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter or wisdom.  Wisdom seeks to find and exercise God’s will in our decisions and in our activities.  To do anything else might be based on knowledge, but wisdom acknowledges God in both the present circumstances and the future outcome.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious and loving God, empower me in all of my requests to seek only Your will for my life, both in the present and in the future.

       I play chess occasionally.  Regardless of what people say, it’s a game that requires knowledge — knowledge about the board, about the various techniques, about strategy and tactics.  But knowledge without understanding can lead to foolish and dangerous moves that point the way to defeat and failure.  However, coupling knowledge and understanding allows one to play the game with wisdom.  Employing God’s wisdom incorporates knowledge and understanding that leads to good decisions, enabling us to avoid living our lives as defeated people.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
All Wise and knowing God, enable me to employ Your wisdom when making any and all decisions about my life.

If we could ask for anything, I’m quite confident that wisdom would not be at the top of our list.  When we think of things, we typically turn to creature comforts and security — knowing that we will have a roof over our heads, that we’ll have enough to live on, and that perhaps our children will be secure when we’re gone.  Those things can happen, but we think of them as being an outcome of material wealth, not wisdom.  Wisdom ensures that “IF” we have “IT” we will have everything else we need.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, enable and empower me to know the true wealth of Your Wisdom that I may possess the riches and honor that Your wisdom provides.

        There are many people who live with the dream of being rich beyond their wildest dreams.  This can be determined by the number of people who attend gambling casinos and those who buy lottery tickets.  Each one is hoping to hit it big and have enough to live on forever.  But the records show that having huge amounts of money doesn’t mean keeping it all.  Many who have won it all didn’t have the wisdom necessary to manage what they had.  It leaves one wondering, is it money that we really need, or is it the wisdom of knowing what to do with our money.  I would say that Solomon had the best request: not money, but wisdom.  It’s like Jesus said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and everything else will be provided.”

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Generous God, teach me through the gift of Your Spirit the wisdom of knowing what to do with the resources I’ve been blessed to receive. Empower me to know that the wisdom to know what to do with Your gifts serves me better that having them.

       Being wishy-washy — uncertain of where we stand or what we stand for is almost never an admirable personality trait.  Perhaps it’s borne of the fear of being wrong.  Indecision because we are weighing things out is one thing, but we eventually have to come to a place of decision about where we stand. This is especially true about our faith and convictions about God.  Either God is or God isn’t where we place our trust and faith.  But to move the line of faith in the sand without any conviction at all leaves us with lines drawn all over the place.

• Have you ever known people whose belief and value system seems to change dependent upon who they are talking to?
• How can instability in what we believe make others unsure of our faith position?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to draw a line of decision in the sands of my faith so that my beliefs and my relationship with You are not all over the place.

       There is something reassuring about ordering our lives according to wha t we believe and say while being consistent in that.  Now, of course, we’re human and prone to mistakes. However, to continually say we believe one thing while doing another says more about where the lines are drawn in the sands of our faith.  It is impossible to consistently wear two faces before the crowd before becoming confused about which one is true.  Hypocrisy begins when we tell ourselves and the world where the line of our faith is drawn, but the line is clearly drawn in another, far away from the line we speak about.

• Have you ever been guilty of finding your actions in conflict with your faith in God?
• What can we do to bring our faith and what we believe back in line with our actions and how we live?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, empower me to live a faith that is consistent with where I say the lines of my faith are drawn so that my faithfulness to You has integrity.

       God weeps for us when we have allowed ourselves to be “taken captive” by other gods.  It’s a difficult thing for God to watch as we continually proclaim our faith one way and live inconsistent with that faith from day to day.  We have, at times, chosen other gods and then blamed God and others when our lives hit a bump.  We are typically willing to blame anyone as long as it doesn’t fall on us.  But there is profound truth that tells us that drawing the lines of faith to exclude God’s word is the fastest way for our lives to end up in darkness and destruction.

• What do you imagine happens when a person's faith is consistently inconsistent with how they live?
• Are there other gods in your life that might cause an inconsistency of faith?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love and life, enable me to draw the lines of my faith in the sands of a life that includes You and faithfulness to Your word and will.

       God’s expectation of faithfulness happens because we are chosen to experience it.  There is also the expectation that we will live in a faithful relationship with our God so that God may live in faithful relationship with us through keeping God’s promises.  The relationship of faithfulness is sealed by the promise of God.  And yet, God cannot and will not honor what we do if we have chosen other gods to worship.  God’s faithfulness is predicated in real ways on our faithfulness to live God’s will for our lives in justice and righteousness.

• Today reflect on the ways in which you try to live consistent with your faith. Be honest about those areas in which you struggle and write them down.
• How can you let go of other gods in your life that come between you and Christ?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
God of love, empower me to draw the lines of faithfulness to You in my life so that I may receive the blessings of Your promises to me.

       There are times when we think of God’s requirements as a real pain.  So many times we hear the “don’t do’s” of our faith.  In reality, God wants only that which is for our own well-being.  That’s where the stretch of faith comes in — seeing that God is trying to help us and not hurt us.  Life might be so much easier if and when we could draw the lines of our faith around a principle that reminds us that God is for us.  And if God is for us, God is more than the world against us.  I believe that’s Scripture.

• Have you ever considered God’s “restrictions” on your life as more of a hindrance to living than a method to promote your well-being?
• Have you ever known someone who has chosen to ignore God’s way for us to live whose life ended up in shambles?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving and tender God, help me to see that the drawn lines of my faith that keep me obedient to You are for my benefit and not for harm.

       We can’t imagine what it’s like to be told by God to leave everything we’re familiar with and to go to a place where we would be a total stranger.  And yet the situation is perfect for establishing a faithful relationship and trust in God.  But that trust is only realized when we are able to draw the lines in the sands of our faith, as Abraham did, and trust that God is God, and that God is faithful.  The question will always be before those who place their faith in God, “Where do we draw the lines of faith?”  Hopefully, we can answer, “In our God.”

• Have you ever felt God pulling you in a way that challenged you to draw a line in the sand about being faithful and obedient to that call?
• How can continue to promote integrity of faith as a basic principle of our faith?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable and empower me to draw the lines of my faith in such a way that my actions are representative of my total trust in You.

Loyalty, faithfulness, commitment, core values and principles — these are all human qualities that everyone will reckon with in their lifetime.  The question will eventually come down to: “Where do we stand, and how far will we go before we go no further?”  It is an interesting question that typically comes at the point of decision on our part before the proverbial ‘line is drawn in the sand.’  That same question about where we stand in principle on certain other areas of our lives is equally important where God and faith are concerned.  We surround ourselves with other gods and goddesses, some of them lifeless forms to which we pay homage which ascribe to certain ideals we hold sacred.  Others are human vessels — a group of friends, a political ideology, or perhaps some person of importance to whom we raise to the level of a god in our lives.  And that is where the point of decision is made in our faith as we ask and honestly answer the question, “Who and where are these other gods and goddesses in my life that I am worshiping and being loyal to over the God of all Creation?”  When we have answered that question, we will have sufficiently drawn a line in the sand of our faith, choosing whom we will serve.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer —
Loving God, enable me to clearly see and be honest about those other gods in my life that prevent me from being faithful to You. Empower me to draw immovable lines of loyalty in the sands of my faith so that I may serve You and You alone.

       There is a significant difference in being free from the law of sin and death to practice the law of the Spirit.  The law of sin acts as a constant reminder of our inability to do what is right.  The law of the Spirit blankets us with a forgiveness that frees us from the fear of facing God’s wrath because of a tally sheet of wrong.  The spiritual law of forgiveness doesn’t free us to sin without consequences, but sets us free to live with the grace of God to move forward without fear of condemnation.  Even in our darkest moments, the light of God’s grace shines upon us and is a constant reminder of the forgiveness we’ve received.  It’s our constant awareness of our grace that should remind us to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

How does freedom from the law of sin and death and freedom to practice the law of the Spirit empower you to live differently?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious and giving God, enable me to live my life knowing that through Your generous act of forgiveness, the chains of sin and death are gone.

       The nature of our lives in Christ is really tied to the Great Commandment.  It’s a more powerful connection to our relationship between God and each other.  For some mysterious reason, God has connected our love of each other and how we practice that love to our love of God and how we practice that love so that to say we love God, but to live and act in ways disrespectful of each other is no different than living in disrespect to God.  This is essentially a confirmation of Holy Scripture when John stated, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.  For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. (1 Jon 5:20-21).  Loving and honoring God and each other enables us to reach for the greatness that is within us all and allows the light of God’s glory to shine through us.

• Has there been a time when you may have intentionally or unintentionally disrespected another person?
• How did your acknowledgment of that act show God’s light of love shining forth from you?
• What were you led to do?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious Christ, empower me to live my life that I may see my opportunity to love others as an occasion to reach for greatness of Your light shining in me and show my love for You.

       Perhaps the greatest gift of God is the gift of forgiveness that comes by faith in Jesus Christ. We’re not always conscious of what it means to live each day having 10 commandments and an auxiliary and complimentary set of some 600 plus rules by which our lives are ordered and measured.  It must have been a significant burden to end each day with nothing but a list of failures and the fear of facing God’s wrath and judgment.  Being made righteous by faith ties us to God with the same bonds of freedom with which Abraham is tied.  It is that grace of God in Jesus Christ that allows the greatness of God to shine in our lives.  Thanks be to Christ and our God.

• How has God’s grace enabled you to live for a greater purpose in Christ?
• How do you openly display that transformation for others to see?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Merciful God, Your grace has freed me in ways for which I can never be grateful enough. Empower me to reach for the greatness I’ve received through my faith in You.

       It’s difficult for us to view grace, faith, and law in the same light.  It seems that the law is so restrictive and punitive because it exposes all of our flaws.  At the same time, grace is so liberating because it frees us from punishment by the law.  Faith on the other hand is our ticket to freedom or judgment; freedom if we trust in grace by faith; judgment if we choose to hold ourselves to the letter of the law knowing how often we fail.  And yet, we are constantly faced with the realization that the three are not disconnected.  It’s not a matter of faith only.  It is God’s grace, which offers us forgiveness.  It is the law which reminds us of God’s righteousness.  And it is faith in Christ which justifies us, making us righteous before God.  It’s not one alone, but it is all three together.

• How do you understand the difference between grace, faith, and the law?
• How does your understanding influence your actions toward others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious God, empower me to reach for the greatness in me, always mindful of the faith that justifies me, the law which guides me, and the grace which saves me.

       It’s an overwhelming thought to consider that everything that we did could be exposed and seen by everyone we knew.  And if that were a real possibility, I imaging there would be some significant changes in our behavior or the way we do some things?  My guess is that we would all be greatly affected by an open and uncensored exposure into our lives.  And yet, God’s invitation to us is to live our lives as if we had nothing to hide.  Somehow there is truth in the statement that everything that can be seen becomes light that reveals something about us.  There is real power in living the truth of who we are, bringing our true selves out into the light.  There is also a humbling sense of embarrassment if the truth of who we really are inside was made manifest to the world.  Both can be humbling in the light of God’s truth.

• What feelings arise in you when you think about your life be open to the public?
• What would you change if you believed your life would be put on public display for others to see?
• What’s preventing you from changing it now?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
God of Light, enable me to live my life in a way that, if exposed by light, reveals me reaching for the greatness You have placed in me as Your light to the world.

       It’s not often that we think about whether or not the sharing of our faith has become effective. For the most part, we do what we do as well as we can and what it is — well, it is whatever it is.  That wouldn’t be an acceptable outcome for our work.  It wouldn’t be an acceptable outcome for the way we raise our children.  None of us would keep a lightbulb in the lamp if it wasn’t functioning or being effective.  We would work to make sure it was doing what it was created to do.  Shouldn’t we be that way for God’s work?  Shouldn’t we ensure that if we were created to shed the light of God’s grace in the earth that we are achieving our goals?

• What would you change about your life if a self-evaluation of how you loved others in Christ’s name indicated that you were being ineffective?
• Would an accountability partner be helpful in keeping your light shining?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving Christ, enable me to reach for the greatness of Your grace and love to become as effective at loving others as You are at loving me.

       Almost every person considered to be great in our time and culture has succumbed to certain laws and principle to achieve their level of greatness.  And to be sure, there are certain rules that must be followed to enable them to achieve greatness in whatever form it occurs.  Musicians, artists, athletes, engineers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, bakers, and candlestick makers must first excel at the fundamental laws of their profession.  And it is their expertise that catapults them into the arena of greatness, first among their peers, and widely among the general public.  It is in the perfecting of their craft that their light begins to shine that others may revel in their artistry or talent.  But whatever the level of their expertise, they cannot abandon the basics of the rules.  Those remain sacrosanct to their greatness.

The same is true for those of us who profess Christ.  To be sure, there are certain fundamentals that cannot be abandoned (the law) that keep us true to who we are.  But there are also the fundamentals of grace that breaks through the darkness of intolerance and exclusion.  Once we’ve incorporated and perfected the fundamental rule of grace, it is then that our light begins to shine.  It’s the glorious and radiant light of God-love shining forth from us that enables others to see the greatness of God’s light and what it’s capable of accomplishing.  And if we do it well — let the light of God’s love shine — it can’t be hidden but becomes an attractive light to those around us.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious Christ, empower me to reach for the greatness of Your radiant light shining in me so that the grace by which others experience Your love through me becomes a great light of attraction to all people.

        There are many stories told in the Bible where people were with Jesus and never recognized him. Mary met him in the Garden and didn’t know who he was. Paul heard his voice on the road to Damascus and was unable to determine who he was.  Two disciples were on the road to Emmaus and were blind to Jesus’ presence.

• How many times might we have overlooked Jesus because we weren’t looking for him, or because of his common demeanor, we overlooked him because he was as one of the least of those among us?
• Is there any indication offered that might lead us to have a stronger clue about how to recognize Jesus when he is clearly in our presence each day?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Merciful God, allow my spirit to be open to the reality that you might be present anywhere and I might not recognize you. Teach me to love and serve all people in your name.

       Biblical images of God as judge over his people are laced throughout the biblical text. And the notion of God as judge makes some of us anxious. We don’t like to think that we’ve not been successful or faithful in pleasing God, and yet the ritual of separation as God makes righteous judgments about people seems to be a biblical reality.  In God’s world GOAT has a much different meaning than “The Greatest of All Time.”  And God’s goats seem to face a much different end than those who are esteemed among the people.

• When we know that God’s judgments are righteous, what assurances does that provide for those of us who are believers?
• When we acknowledge the reality of God as Judge over our life and our endeavors, and the ultimate judge of over eternal life, what comfort can we take knowing that God is watching how we live and what we do?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, order my steps that I may be found among the faithful and blessed as you judge righteously between those who have been faithful and those who have not.

There seems to be a concurrent them running through the reality of God’s judgment on humanity.  Those who are blessed by the LORD stand to inherit all that God has promised to them. Those who have missed opportunities to actively care for the needy seem to be headed for a land where they will not have access to God, or in other words, be cut off.  In a faith system that speaks of God’s tremendous grace through Jesus Christ, how can we make sure that we don’t miss opportunities to love others who seem to be our gateway into reconciliation and eternal life

• What can we do to eliminate our fear of the righteous judgment of God that stands ready to separate us from the Kingdom of promise because we missed opportunities to care for our brothers and sisters?
• Do we still comfortably hold on to the idea that we will be blessed while others, perhaps our loved ones, will not inherit the Kingdom?  Why or why not?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Merciful God, lead me into a life of service and faith caring for those who are considered the least of your brothers and sisters that I may find my blessing among those you bless.

There is no doubt that our hearts are often in the right place.  We’d like to see those who are hungry with food, those who are naked with clothes, those who are homeless with shelter, those who are sick with healthcare.  And the list goes on.  There is a part of the equation that makes us more likely to speak a blessing than to be a blessing.

• With the economy in a hole and the numbers of needy increasing, how can we help to be more than a verbal blessing giver in order to make our opportunities more tangible?
• When we look around at the things that we possess, is there any indication that our cups have overflowed to the point that we could let our blessing be a blessing to others?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving Christ, help me to go beyond offering well wishes to those in need to becoming a person whose heart is in and whose hands are personally involved showing love to my brothers and sisters.

       Poor Job.  Not only is he now numbered among the least of these God’s children, but his friends are leveling the charge against him that he is suffering from some large form of wicked behavior.  He is accused of stealing and taking the clothes from the naked, making them thirst, and making the hungry go without bread.  And yet, his friends, while laying the charges at his door, seem to be doing nothing to alleviate Job’s suffering.  It’s as if they believe Job should not only pull himself up by his own bootstraps but should lend a hand to those in his same condition.

• Are there ways in which the allegations leveled against Job could be placed on our doorstep because of our negligence?
• Many people donate food to feed the hungry. Is it possible to build a personal relationship with those who are hungry by only donating food?
• What can we do to avoid facing our own reality of not feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, or clothing the naked?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious Christ, help me to do more than keeping my hungry brothers at arm’s length by only donating food. Empower me to engage in a personal relationship with the hungry.

       The prophet Isaiah raises the issue of how we live in relationship with God and how we honor our relationship with God by living in relationship with others.  There seems to be a strong connection between equity, the implementation of justice, and how we treat others less fortunate than we are.  And, while Jesus lived several hundred years after Isaiah, the problems have not seemed to go away.  The opportunities and God’s expectation that we will proactively engage the “least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters” at the point of their need seems to have fallen at our feet.

• Why is it that we miss the connection between our relationship with God and our relationship with those who are in need?
• Why do you think God has such a strong affinity for those who seem not to have even the bare necessities of life?
• Does God require more or less from us today than was required from those who came before?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Loving God, enable me to see the needs of those around me with your eyes. Fill my heart with compassion that I will do all in your love and power to meet those needs.

       Jesus has something to say about the way we live and the way we care for one another.  Matthew has placed this event at the end of life’s accounting period when all human accounts on the books will be settled.  The people are gathered before Jesus.  And while the separation begins, no clue or reason is given at the time of the separation indicating why.  And then suddenly the books of life are reconciled.  One separated group has a much different fate than the other.  They have seemingly lived parallel existences, each sharing the same experiences and having the same opportunities.  Yet the outcome of their life’s fate seems to be tragically, yet radically different because one group has blindly missed the opportunities right before their very eyes.  The other group receives a blessing because they unknowingly took advantage of an opportunity because a spirit of caring was innate to them.  One group is blessed and invited into eternal life, while the other seems doomed to live with the results of poor life decisions made in the midst of great opportunities missed.  In our world and culture, nursing homes are filled with lonely people who have no one to visit them.  Prisons are filled with people (some of whom have been unjustly judged and imprisoned) with no one visiting them to offer hope except family (and sometimes not even family).  Many people have empty bedrooms just for show and special guest while the homeless are left to sleep in extreme conditions.  Grocery store shelves are lined with food while people go hungry.

• What is the likelihood that Jesus may be among those mentioned above and that we, too, may have seen Jesus and dismissed the opportunity right before our faces?
• Where are opportunities in our day and time to encounter Jesus?

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Gracious God, so that I may live eternally with you, save me from the blindness and indifference in my heart which causes me to miss opportunities to minister to You present in those seen as the least of your brothers and sisters.

                  We often think of the baby Jesus at this time of year.  However, his appearing had an impact on more than those who were aware of his birth.  There were eternal consequences of his coming and the reason for his appearing.  His coming was an invitation to join him in denouncing those things that were not a part of God’s true purpose for creating us.  He was our realized hope to live holy lives, as much as possible, while we awaited Christ’s glorious return, and our restoration to our once perfect state.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Oh God of grace and mercy, grant that I may live my life in a way that honors Christ, my realized hope, until you come again to perfect me.

                  Humanity has lived in a relationship separated from God for a long time.  This might not be the case for everyone.  But it is our nature to separate ourselves from the One who created us because of our self-will.  It was our desire to do our own thing and not God’s will that created the atmosphere of sin with separated us from God.  And that separation could not be repaired by us.  Our continued desire to do what we wanted over what God wanted for us prevented us from closing the breach.  Our only hope was that God would do something to save us.  Jesus came to do what we could not do: to save us from our sins, thereby repairing and restoring us to a right relationship to God.  Jesus became what we only hoped for without achievement — our realized hope.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Holy and gracious God, I thank You that when all hope was lost, You came into the world as our realized hope to save us to be in a right relationship with You.

                  God’s actions are filled with assurance and provide us the certainty that God will do as God has said.  For Simeon, it was that he would not die until he had realized his hope — seen his Salvation with his own eyes.  God was faithful.  And when Simeon had received the promises of God made to him, he recognized the wonder of what he had just experienced.  It may not be a bad thing for us to always be in an attitude of thanksgiving, praising God for receiving the promises made to us from ages past.  God’s faithfulness to allow us to experience realized hope is a true blessing and joy.  It gives us yet more hope to cling to until all of God’s promises are completed.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
Holy God, Your faithfulness speaks Your truth to us. Grant that I may live as a witness to your faithfulness and the realized hope You’ve given through Your word.

                  Not much in life moves us any longer.  We have come to the point where we’ve seen it all, or we’ve either been there and done that and have a T-shirt and coffee mug to prove it.  And yet, there are still those things of God we don’t know that leave us in the dark.  We don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about God.  Nor do we understand why God does what God does.  And yet, when our hope becomes reality and we are able to acknowledge it, there is both a reason for fear and curiosity, as well as wonderment and joy, praising God that our realized hope has come.

Todays Prayer

Today’s Prayer
God of grace and God of glory, enable me to continue to be surprised by the realized hope of God present in Jesus Christ and in my life.