Devotional Thoughts to start the year:

¹²  How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Cleanse me from these hidden faults. ¹³  Keep your servant from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin. ¹⁴  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. Psalm 19:12-14 (NLT2)

If God’s conversational walk with us makes us think we are people of great importance, his guidance will certainly be withdrawn. For we cannot be trusted with it. In the kingdom of God, those who exalt themselves will be abased, and pride comes before a fall. If God speaks to us, he does so to help us become a part of what he is doing in the world to care for and guide others

We lack the simplicity that would enable us to stammer “Abba”. In fact, there is, in us, a resistance to saying “Father” that springs from our longing to come of age. The Father no longer seems to us, as he did to Saint Paul, the guarantor of our freedom, but rather the opposite. What we want is a partner; “father” is too suggestive of “authority”. We are like the younger son who claims his inheritance and no longer wants a father, but only a future that he creates for himself

The Year of our Lord, 2018 is finally over. It was, in so many ways, a tiring, draining, traumatic year.

You might call it the “year of faith” because so many things occured that all that is left, is to depend on God. A lot of people lost people close to them, a mother, a brother, a good friend, a husband. Others had to deal with their sin, no longer able to hide it. People struggled in their marriages, in their workplaces, with their health.

And God was there, crying with us, laughing with us, reminding us that we aren’t equal partners with God, but His people, those His covenant promises bless, because we need it.

Even as the psalmist points out, someo of our sin is unkown to us, yet it affects us greatly. We can’t see it, because sometimes we are too self-centered, and our very focus on ourselves becomes our sin. Sometimes we don’t see it, because we’ve convinced ourselves it isn’t really sin, just a weakness, or perhaps the way God made us.

There is also the sin we know about, that we deliberately commit. As God’s children we can ask HIm to free us from them, To break the bondage of those sins over us, as was done when they were nailed to the cross.

This is how we need to start the year, even as we ended it, depending on God, trusting Him to do what is good and right and necessary to help us live in His peace.

And so, the prayer of the pastor/priest before we beging to preach needs to be our prayer this morning, as our lives begin to preach in this new year.

May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to You, YHWH, my ROCK and my REDEEMER! AMEN!

Willard, D., & Johnson, J. (2015). Hearing god through the year: a 365-day devotional. Westmont, IL: IVP Books.

Ratzinger, J. (1992). Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year. (I. Grassl, Ed., M. F. McCarthy & L. Krauth, Trans.) (p. 9). San Francisco: Ignatius Press.