Daily Devotion for November 28, 2025
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.
The wonderful Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir reminds us of how thankful we are for Jesus Christ.
Prayer for the Morning
Compassionate Lord, Your mercies have brought me to the dawn of another day. Vain will be its gift unless I grow in grace, increase in knowledge; ripen for spiritual harvest. Let me this day know You as You are, love You supremely, serve You completely, admire You fully.
Through grace let my will respond to You, knowing that power to obey is not in me, but that Your free love alone enables me to serve You. Here then is my empty heart, overflow it with Your choice gifts; here is my blind understanding, chase away its mists of ignorance.
Prayer of St. Basil the Great
O God and Lord of the Powers, and maker of all creation, who, because of your clemency and incomparable mercy, sent your only-begotten son and our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind, and with his venerable cross tore asunder the record of our sins, and thereby conquered the rulers and powers of darkness: Receive from me, a sinful person, O merciful Master, these prayers of gratitude and supplication, and deliver me from every destructive and gloomy transgression, and from all visible and invisible enemies who seek to injure me.
Nail down my flesh with fear of you. And do not let my heart be inclined to words or thoughts of evil, but pierce my soul with your love, that always contemplating you, being enlightened by you, and discerning you, the unapproachable and everlasting Light, I may unceasingly confess my misdoings and show my gratitude to you: The eternal Father, with your only-begotten Son, and with your all-holy, gracious, and life-giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
Meditation
“As a ring of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a lovely woman who lacks discretion.”
Benediction
May the God of hope fill me and all of us with the joy and peace that comes from believing, so that we may abound in hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
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.
Galatians 2:15-17 (DP Bible)
ow can you, a Jew by birth, first act like a Gentile, and then turn around and urge the Gentiles to live like Jews?” I asked him [Peter]. “You and I were not raised like Gentiles, ignorant of right and wrong, yet we know that following the law of Moses, apart from our faith in Christ Jesus, did not and cannot justify us before God. No flesh will be justified by works under the law. So why hold onto it?”
17 “When we, who were born Jews, preach justification through faith in Christ, we are His representatives. We cannot become servants of sin. If we preach the faith of Christ and then sin, do we not imply that Christ Himself is a servant of sin? This cannot be!”
Verbatim Bible
15 We by nature Jewish and not from sinning Gentiles
16 yet knowing that not is justified man from works of law unless through faith of Jesus Christ, and not by works of law, since from works of law not will be justified any flesh.
17 And if seeking to be justified in Christ we are found also ourselves sinners, then Christ of sin is servant? It cannot happen.
DP Parallel Bible (3-Column) - Galatians 2
Notes on the Scripture
Faith in Christ (Pistis Xristou) (Galatians #17)
Today we need to discuss an issue of Paul’s epistles that is unresolved in the highest circles of Christian scholarship. I apologize for a rather dry and technical commentary today, but it is important to our understanding of salvation and faith.
Paul uses an expression which would be literally translated as “faith Christ” time and time again, in his epistles; and because of grammatical complexities involving the Greek language, nobody can be 100% sure what it means. (See Today in Daily Prayer, below, for a more involved explanation.) This is called the pistis Xristou controversy, a transliteration of the Greek “faith Christ.” We will look today at the four front-runners for how this should be translated: “Faith of Christ”, “faith in Christ”, “faith like Christ”, and “faith through Christ”.
By far the most common translation in English Bibles is “faith in Christ.” We believe that Christ was the Son of God, who handed himself over to death and defeated it through His resurrection. We place our entire trust in his divinity, his power, his love. We have faith in him. We have faith that He can and will redeem us by His sacrifice. And so, when we read Paul saying that we are justified before God by our faith in Christ, it makes perfect sense to us.
The most grammatically probable meaning, however, is something quite different: the faith of Christ! And this has a wonderful theological application. Christ was fully human. He gave up most of the attributes of his divinity to become human. (Philippians 2:5-8) God did this for a number of different reasons; for example, we know that Jesus suffered in exactly the same way we do. The pain he felt was just as agonizing to him as the pain we would feel. He felt so much fear about his impending crucifixion that he sweated blood. It gives us total confidence that God understands exactly what we face.
But being human, he faced the same temptation that we do, including the temptation to question our faith. But unlike us, Christ could resist temptation perfectly. He was human, yet his faith was perfect, absolute, unwavering. He went to the cross, not because he had divine knowledge of his resurrection, but because he had faith in the Father. This is the faith of Christ; and because his faith enabled him to suffer the crucifixion, we are heirs to the fruits of his faith.
So, if we say we are justified by the faith of Christ, we emphasize that we can share in Christ’s complete and total faith in God, the Father. He became human and yet was sinless, by his faith.
The third possibility, faith like Christ’s, would emphasize that Christ was a leader who showed us by his example how we must become before God. Our faith must imitate his own: absolute to the point of death. Indeed, when he says “take up your cross and follow me,” this is exactly what he is commanding us to do: have faith like his.
The fourth reading, faith through Christ, is also valid, both theologically and grammatically. We will see, in Galatians 3, Paul’s assertion that the Law of Moses operated like a prison, to keep us separated from God’s promise of redemption by faith. Only when Christ came among us were we able to access this pre-ordained promise of forgiveness; through his faith, the prison of the law was unsealed and we became heirs to the promises of God. We could not have true faith in God, at all, except through Christ.
There is a theory that solves the problem, a theory of “how to read the Bible”: where there is an irreducible and unsolvable ambiguity in the language of the New Testament, we should treat the ambiguity as intentional, and read the phrase as having all reasonably possible meanings, as long as they are not contradictory. So where we see “faith in Christ” in Paul’s epistles, we can understand an entire new dimension and depth to the phrase. It means not only the simple placing of faith in Christ, but also, a faith that is like that of Christ, the faith that Christ had and exercised for our benefit, and the freedom from the law by a faith made possible through Christ.
