Prayer Practice
Cup Prayer – This prayer will help you pour your heart out to God (Ps. 62:8). Begin with your hands folded together like an upside-down cup. Pour out before God all your fears, anxieties, guilt, sin and shame. Tell Him what troubles you. Take time to be specific. When you feel like you’ve poured out your heart, flip your hands over, folding them like an open cup, ready to receive from God. Sit in silence, asking God simply to fill you with His Spirit. If your mind runs back to sin, shame, anxiety or concerns of the day, flip your hands back over and pour it out to the Lord. When you are finished praying, read today’s Scripture and listen as God shares His heart back with you.
DAILY READING
REFLECTION
A New Twelfth Apostle
by Dan Kidd
Our story today begins with tragedy. Peter reports to this crowd of disciples that Judas was killed by his grief. You can hear in Peter’s witness he’s aching from the still-fresh wound of Judas’s betrayal—citing the psalmic curses David sang over his enemy.* What a complex web of emotions Peter must have felt; himself having failed Jesus—but then having been reconciled with the risen Christ, may very well have burned hot over Judas because he saw the worst of his own failures in Judas. In sum, this is a harrowing account of how devastating duplicity and guilt can be.
Judas had died, but Jesus had resurrected, and there was still discipling to be done. Isn’t it interesting that the remaining eleven apostles determined that it would not suffice for them to proceed without adding a new, twelfth member to their band? Be they guided by the Holy Spirit, or by pure intuition, they were certain that the path ahead of them—whatever it would be that came after their being “clothed in power from on high”—required a new apostle; Someone who had followed faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus and his chosen twelve since the beginning of his ministry in the waters of the river Jordan.
Two names came up (or to be more precise, two men with a sum of four names): Joseph-Barsabbas-Justus and Matthias. The apostles, recognizing that this was not a decision to be made without the Lord’s guidance, trusted the wisdom of the Proverb,
The lot is cast into the lap,
but its every decision is from the LORD.
The lot fell to Matthias and he was instated as the twelfth apostle. And now, this band of twelve, and all the disciples with them, would wait on the Lord.
I find this witness about Matthias and Joseph-Barsabbas-Justus fascinating. Apparently, they, and perhaps others, had been attached to Jesus and his ministry from the very beginning and all the way through his execution, and they remained a part of this community of disciples after the ascension. And were it not for the tragedy of Judas, they wouldn’t have even been a footnote in our Bible. I can’t help but marvel at the humility of these guys, and the deep well of devotion they had to Jesus, to have been with Jesus for all of these years—never playing the credited role in any of Jesus’ greatest hits—and yet, here they were. These were thoroughly faithful men, and I’m glad we were told about them. And I wonder if I would have been content to follow Jesus for so long without getting a credited role?
Father, I long to be the kind of disciple we see in this witness: humble and enduring. Keep me close to your side, Lord. I pray too that you would heal the woundedness of sin for us—heal those we’ve wounded along with the wounds we’ve suffered. Thank you for being a God of restoration and reconciliation.
* For the full effect of this, read Ps 69:22-28 and 109:6-20
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