Daily Devotion for January 10, 2015
Prayers
Scripture
Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.
We start back to Saturday Oldies Day with some humor: the Deep River Boys really had some fun with this short film, based on the story from Daniel 3.
Prayer for the Morning
Blessed are you, Lord God of my salvation, to you be praise and glory forever. As once you ransomed your people from Egypt and led them to freedom in the promised land, so now you have delivered me from the dominion of darkness and brought me into the kingdom of your risen Son.
May I, the fruit of your new creation, rejoice in this new day you have made, and praise you for your mighty acts. Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Prayer of Thanks
For the gladness here
where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.
For the laughter of children who tumble
barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.
For the sunset and the stars, the women
and the copper arms that hold us,
Our prayer of thanks.
God, the game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.
Our prayer of thanks.
from Our Prayer of Thanks by Carl Sandburg
Meditation
[Take five minutes and pretend you are God. Write down what He thinks about you.]
Blessing
May God the Father bless us; may Christ take care of us; the Holy Ghost enlighten us all the days of our life. The Lord be our defender and keeper of body and soul, both now and for ever, to the ages of ages.
Think of the day ahead in terms of God with you, and visualize health, strength, guidance, purity, calm confidence, and victory as the gifts of His presence.
Gratitude
In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Exodus 2:1-10 (ESV)
The Birth of Moses
Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.
When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.
Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews' children.”
Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child's mother.
And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son.
She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
Notes on the Scripture
The famous story of Moses in the bulrushes never gets old. His parents were both from the tribe of Levi, which would become a hereditary caste of priests because of Moses and his brother, Aaron. The basket would have been similar to boats made in many primitive cultures. Bitumen is a naturally-occurring petroleum product, liquid asphalt, fairly abundant in the Middle East; it is the “tar” in the La Brea tar pits. Pitch is rendered and thickened tree sap. These were still used in the 19th century as the primary waterproofing for great sailing ships.
The derivation of his name (Moshe in modern Hebrew) is interesting, because it works in both Hebrew and Egyptian. In Hebrew, it can refer to a person who pulls something out or is pulled out, so it has the dual meaning of “being pulled out”, referring to the baby, and “savior”, one who will pull the Hebrews out of Egypt. The Egyptian, as far as can be discerned, means literally “water-saved”: “saved from the water” or even “saved by the water”, again giving it a double meaning.
