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

Turn this Mess into a Message

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. ⁶ In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety.This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Savior.  Jeremiah 23: 5-6

Have you turned on the news lately?  Have you gone on Facebook and scrolled through your news feed?  The world is a scary place right now.  It seems that every few days another tragedy is taking center stage and lives are being forever changed.

It is so easy to feel hopeless and afraid if we only look through the temporal lens.  If we don’t go deeper than what humanity can accomplish, it looks as if all is lost.  Thankfully, God rose up for David “a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land.”

In the midst of evil and despair I have to constantly remind myself that, the LORD our Righteous Savior, Jesus, is still on the throne.  God is in total control.  We are not out of his reach.  His grace is still actively calling to us, drawing us closer to him and reaching those who do not yet know him.

Our response to the evil is to love as he loves us.  Don’t confuse my words please.  We are to love, because God is love and we are love like him.  We are not called to worship love.  Love is not God.  Love is not the answer, God is the answer and he calls us to love each other as he loves us.

How has he loved us? He thought of us first. He gave us Jesus; who left his place in heaven, limited himself by becoming man and ultimately dying for us.  We are called to live like that.  Think of others first, but in order to do that you have to cast off fear and trust that God is in control.

You must trust that God has you.  The mess in this world is not too big for our Righteous Branch.  Let’s let God turn this mess into a message!  Let’s share the message of hope to a hopeless world.