Day 4 - Wednesday | Daily Devotions | Morning and Evening: Daily Reading | Connect the Testaments | My Utmost for His Highest | Thoughts for the Quiet Hour |

 Morning, December 18 Go To Evening Reading

“Rend your heart and not your garments.”

—Joel 2:13

Garment-rending and other outward signs of religious emotion are easily manifested and are frequently hypocritical, but to feel true repentance is far more difficult and, consequently, far less common. Men will attend to the most multiplied and minute ceremonial regulations—for such things are pleasing to the flesh—but true religion is too humbling, too heart-searching, too thorough for the tastes of the carnal men; they prefer something more ostentatious, flimsy, and worldly. Outward observances are temporarily comfortable; eye and ear are pleased; self-conceit is fed, and self-righteousness is puffed up: but they are ultimately delusive, for in the article of death, and at the day of judgment, the soul needs something more substantial than ceremonies and rituals to lean upon. Apart from vital godliness, all religion is utterly vain; offered without a sincere heart, every form of worship is a solemn sham and an impudent mockery of the majesty of heaven.

Heart-rending is divinely wrought and solemnly felt. It is a secret grief that is personally experienced, not in mere form, but as a deep, soul-moving work of the Holy Spirit upon the inmost heart of each believer. It is not a matter to be merely talked of and believed in but keenly and sensitively felt in every living child of the living God. It is powerfully humiliating and completely sin-purging, but then it is sweetly preparative for those gracious consolations that proud, unhumbled spirits are unable to receive, and it is distinctly discriminating, for it belongs to the elect of God and to them alone.

The text commands us to rend our hearts, but they are naturally hard as marble: how can this be done? We must take them to Calvary: a dying Saviour’s voice rents the rocks once, which is as powerful now. O blessed Spirit, leSpiritear the death-cries of Jesus, and our hearts shall be rent even as men rend their vestures in the day of lamentation.

Go To Morning Reading Evening, December 18

“Be diligent to know the state of thy flocks and look well to thy herds.”

—Proverbs 27:23

Every wise merchant will occasionally hold a stock-taking, cast up his accounts, examine what he has on hand, and ascertain decisively whether his trade is prosperous or declining. Every wise man in the kingdom of heaven will cry, “Search me, O God, and try me,” he will frequently set apart special seasons for self-examination to discover whether things are right between God and his soul. The God we worship is an excellent heart-searcher; old servants knew him as “the Lord which searcheth the heart and trieth the reins of the children of men.” Let me stir you up in his name to make a diligent search and solemn trial of your state, lest you fall short of the promised rest. That which every wise man does, that which God himself does with us all, I exhort you to do with yourself this evening. Let the oldest saint look well to the fundamentals of his piety, for grey heads may cover black hearts, and let not the young professor despise the word of warning, for the greenness of youth may be joined to the rottenness of hypocrisy. Every now and then, a cedar falls into our midst. The enemy still continues to sow tares among the wheat. It is not my aim to introduce doubts and fears into your mind; nay, verily, but I shall hope that the rough wind of self-examination may help drive them away. It is not security, but carnal security, which we would kill; not confidence, but fleshly confidence, which we would overthrow; not peace, but false peace, which we would destroy. By the precious blood of Christ, which was not shed to make you a hypocrite, but that sincere soul might show forth his praise, I beseech you, search and look, lest at last it be said of you, “Mene, Mene, Tekel: thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

 C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening: Daily Readings (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1896).

December 18: Into the Family

Jeremiah 33:1–34:22; Romans 8:1–17; Proverbs 22:1–16

As people once bound to sin and destined for death, our ability to approach God personally—to call Him our Father—should astound us. Yet, we sometimes forget to pray. We can take it for granted that He looks out for our every need.

Approaching God as Father would have been a radical concept for the Roman community. In his letter to the church there, Paul discusses how our former lives without God were nothing but slavery to sin and death, the wages of sin. Christ’s work has freed us from this trajectory: “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received the Spirit of Spirit, by whom we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The SpSpiritimSpiritonfirms to our spSpirithaSpiritre children of God, and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer together with him so that we may also be glorified together with him” (Rom 8:15–17).

Paul’s audience would have used “Abba! Father!” only within immediate family relationships. To call God “our Father” would have been a shocking paradigm shift—especially for Jewish believers. However, Christ’s sacrifice made this relationship possible. He paid our debt and repaired the rift. Because of His work and because we share in His Spirit, we also share in His relationship with the Father. We can call out to God, just as Jesus did. And the Father cares for us, just as He cares for His Son.

We may forget our intimate relationship with God, yet the Spirit continues to work within us to bring our lives into accordance with this relationship with the Father. Pray for insight and gratitude for your new position because of Christ. When you call on God, relate to Him as a child would to a loving father—bringing all to Him and knowing He understands you and what is best for you.

Do you neglect prayer? Pray that the Spirit will inspire you to have childlike faith and trust in God.

Rebecca Van Noord

 John D. Barry and Rebecca Kruyswijk, Connect the Testaments: A One-Year Daily Devotional with Bible Reading Plan (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012).

December 18

The test of loyalty

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God. Romans 8:28.

Only the loyal soul believes that God engineers circumstances. We take such liberties with our circumstances; we do not believe God engineers them, although we say we do; we treat the things that happen as if they were engineered by men. To be faithful in every circumstance means that we have only one loyalty: to our Lord. Suddenly, God breaks up a particular set of circumstances, and we realize that we have been disloyal to Him by not recognizing that He had organized them. We never saw what He was after, and that particular thing will never be repeated all the days of our lives. The test of loyalty always comes just there. If we learn to worship God in the trying circumstances, He will alter them in two seconds when He chooses.

Loyalty to Jesus Christ is what we ‘stick at’ today. We will be loyal to work, service, or anything, but do not ask us to be faithful to Jesus Christ. Many Christians are intensely impatient of talking about loyalty to Jesus. Our Lord is dethroned more emphatically by Christian workers than by the world. God is made a machine for blessing men, and Jesus Christ is made a Worker among workers.

The idea is not that we work for God, but that we are so loyal to Him that He can do His work through us—‘I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine.’ God wants to use us as He used His own Son.

 Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986).

December 18

Cleanse thou me from secret faults

Ps. 19:12

The world needs men who are free from secret faults, and most men are free from gross, public faults.

Selected

 Samuel G. Hardman and Dwight Lyman Moody, Thoughts for the Quiet Hour (Willow Grove, PA: Woodlawn Electronic Publishing, 1997).