Your Way Is Maybe Known – Salvation Be Known – Praise, Sing, Rejoice, Revere – God Gave The Word – He Bears Our Burdens – Show Your Strength, God – Proclaim the Power

So, my first week without a daily devotional guide was spent in Psalm 68 looking for a phrase and stopping. It does not quite have the randomness of the old devotional, but it’s different. As normal, I’ll attempt to not make this about the underlying scripture, but the phrase I got from reading it.

Your Way Is Maybe Known says to me that there is a question to what your path should be. If our goal as Christians is to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit who was given to us by God to make our way known, how can it not be known? If we are not listening. Our interaction with God is to be intentional. If we get into a habit of thinking we automatically know what God wants us to do and we do not habitually ask God for direction, we will start to act out what is good in our own eyes and miss those opportunities to do more.

Salvation Be Known says to me that surety of our standing before God has a great impact on the decisions we make, and God knows this. He has provided us with curiosity and uncertainty, but He has also provided mechanisms to know for certain that we are saved. When we hear the voice of Satan casting doubt, we can conquer it by the promises in scripture.

Praise, Sing, Rejoice and Revere cover the actions expected of us as Christians. The object of all these is to be as Christ. We watched Disney’s Jungle Cruise and the main character had spent the bulk of his life looking for a way out of the rut that his life became. I have heard that a rut is just a long grave. The great thing about being alive in Christ is that even if you do the same things over and over again (Praise, Sing, Rejoice and Revere) it never seems like a rut. Because of course it isn’t.

God Gave The Word refers to God giving up His Son for us. We did not earn it. We did not perform so well as to achieve anything. He simply gave. Of all the religions that resemble “earn it”, none of them work. I read of an ancient religion in Iran that shares some big picture concepts with Judaism, but it misses the whole concept of the need for a savior and missed the mark.

He Bears Our Burdens and Show Your Strength, God are too related to split for my purposes and indicate that God promises to carry us through the trials He has before us and that it is only up to us to let Him do the heavy lifting to be successful. I have been stressed about an issue for a while and the further I plodded along waiting for God, the more I realized the gap was me.

Proclaim the Power. God did not save the slaves from Egypt solely for them to turn against Him a few days later (and over and over again thereafter). He did so to display His power over the world and to let the world know that the “gods” of Egypt were nothing but worthless pieces of clay and stories made up by people who did not know any better. I believe the esteem that is held by the world today over ancient Egypt is simply evil wishing it was more prevalent among leadership as it was in the heydays of the Pharaohs.

I liked reading the Psalm, but I feel this is only a stop gap until I find another avenue to follow. As I told my friend over vacation, I do this to make myself better, i.e. more like Jesus. I probably ought to go finish that book now that I think of it.