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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.

“A Little Prayer”

Let us be thankful, Lord, for little things
The song of birds, the rapture of the rose;
Cloud-dappled skies, the laugh of limpid springs,
Drowned sunbeams and the perfume April blows;
Bronze wheat a-shimmer, purple shade of trees -
Let us be thankful, Lord of Life, for these!

Let us be grateful, God, for health serene,
The hope to do a kindly deed each day;
The faith of fellowship, a conscience clean,
The will to worship and the gift to pray;
For all of worth in us, of You a part,
Let us be grateful, God, with humble heart.

by Robert William Service (1930)

To Love Lost Souls

Lord Jesus, I want to love with Your love those souls that are withering or lost. Enable me to remove any prejudices, judgments, and assumptions from my heart so that I may see them as You do: glorious and beloved children of the Father who have the opportunity for eternal life with Him. Remind me that You love them as much as You do me, and that at some point, You used someone to revive me as I withered and to bring me into Your flock when I was lost.

~ Miriam Drennan

Doxology

And now let me go forth praising you, O Lord, with all my heart, telling of all your wonders, with my words and in my actions. I will be glad and rejoice in you this day. I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.

Psalm 9:1-2

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.

Morality

If you suspect that you are letting your own point of view interfere with understanding God’s intentions, try remembering: “A Christian does not have a moral code: a Christian follows a moral code.”

Romans 1:18-23 (ESV)

The Wrath of God

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Notes on the Scripture

ere, Paul addresses atheism among the Gentiles. Christ has, for the first time, brought knowledge of God to them; but in learning of God’s grace, God’s wrath has also been revealed to them. Is this fair? How were they to know about God’s existence, since they did not have the benefit of revelations and teachings given to the Jews over the centuries?

Proof of God’s existence was all around them, as it is all around us today. You can’t miss it. If someone doesn’t see it, it is only because they are intentionally ignoring it! It lies in the sun that rises every morning, the fruit that grows on trees to feed us, the very air we breathe.

If we were to find an elaborate spacecraft—like nothing made on earth—sitting in the desert, speculation about who had made it would be rampant. We would examine every angle, to try to figure out what the aliens who had made it were like.

But every human who has lived experiences something vastly more fantastic, every day: the world and all that is in it. God holds them responsible for not inquiring about who had created it, but instead, suppressing the obvious truth: There is an almighty God who made us and everything we see. There is no excuse for atheism; it is intentional.

Thus, even the Gentiles are without an excuse for not acknowledging and thanking God. They (or most of them) ignored the plain fact of the existence of an invisible and almighty God. In the pride of their own imagination, they pretended that things they had made were God, rather than vice versa, and claimed to be wise. And their hearts thereby became “dark,” just as one’s face becomes dark when one turns away from the sun.

It is important, at this point, to spend some time considering what the “wrath of God” really means. God is not human and his wrath is not human anger. He does not get red in the face. He does not have an adrenaline rush and become blindly destructive; he does not hate errant humans. It is wrath based in love.

To understand this apparent contradiction, imagine a parent whose child who is secretly skipping school to take drugs, have sex, and break into houses. The parent would be furious at the child; but it is a fury completely grounded in love. The mother or father would be angry at their child because he was ruining his life, because he was choosing a life full of darkness and misery.

But the analogy is only partial. We may not anthropomorphize God beyond a certain point. For unlike (many) human parents, He will actively destroy His creation if it is evil.

Daily Inspiration

“You Can't Fool God”

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