King of Righteousness

JANUARY 1                                                                                      

Scripture Reading
Read Jeremiah 23:1-6 and reflect on the passage.

Happy New Year beloved brothers and sisters in Christ! What a wonderful call to righteousness for 2018; I unpacked the word righteousness and related it to virtue, morality, and honor. I think to be righteous is to lean into the call to “tend” to the body of Christ “unafraid”. To me, tending to the body is to daily take a posture of service; to get down on my hands and knees, in complete humility, to wash my brothers’ and sisters’ feet. 

Luke 9:23 calls us to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily. As a human I am entirely incapable to serve or love, until I pick up my cross- until I am walking beside the Righteous Branch, the Righteous King. I challenge you this New Year to walk this journey with me- to consistently lower yourself to serve the Church. This call to service looks like standing beside the person struggling with porn, walking unfaltering with the struggling teenage couple or doing a new mom’s laundry. I challenge you to wash the dirty, beautiful feet of the Church. To act as a vessel of righteousness, showing honor, grace, and mercy to the lost as well as the found.

QuestionsHow will you intentionally remember to humble yourself and then ACT on this call to service?In what capacity are you equipped and called to serve? What types of people or situations?

Prayer

Lord, help me to humble myself before You to lift my cross to serve and wash the feet of the Body of Christ!

                                                                                                                                    Hannah Gilliam

My One Word

I spend a lot of time worrying about tomorrow.  Will I have enough money? Will there be enough time to do the things I dream of doing? This sermon series has me thinking a little different. I am starting to feel the only thing I need is to get over myself. I am working toward that end.

The word, discipline, has been in my face a lot lately. Each year around this same time, I begin praying about or for, the word God wants to use to speak to me. The words God has used in the past always seemed to coincide with something I need to learn. A behavior I needed to improve or eliminate. He even uses words as an acknowledgement of a season of life I am stepping out of or into.

For example, one year, faith was my word. God wrapped it in scripture verses for an appointed day in my devotional; or plopped it right in the devotion for that day. That year I began to intentionally build my faith, spending an twelve months seeking God's direction and blessing the area of faith.

The year following my husband's death, my word of perseverance. That year I felt God's hand on my life and my hart as I practiced perseverance in spite of the difficulties and obstacles. Today, I find myself praying for my word for 2018. God keeps bringing me to the word discipline. Oh, oh. What is this about?

I recognize that God has been preparing me for this. I know how much I need discipline in many areas of my life. He is preparing me for tomorrow. He is showing me where I need to improve. He is revealing how my focus needs to be pulled away from all those things I want...and they need to be on all those things I have.

I love these words from Proverbs 3:11-12 (MSG)

But don’t, dear friend, resent God’s discipline; 

don’t sulk under his loving correction.

It’s the child he loves that God corrects;

a father’s delight is behind all this.

I am still in the process of discerning what discipline will mean for me moving forward, but I am sure it will be just what I need.

1 Corinthians 9:24-26