Don't turn to spiritual mush over spring break....keep your head (and heart) in the game.
Spring Break 2011 Devotional Passages
taken from Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God
by Bobby Gross.
Sunday
“You are king, O Lord; let the peoples tremble! You sit enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! You are great, O Lord, and exalted over all. I praise your great and awesome name. You are holy, holy, holy!”
Read Psalm 99. Let this psalm shape your personal worship this week.
Monday
“You have placed treasure- the knowledge of your glory in the face of Jesus- in the clay jar of my humanity so it will be clear that the extraordinary power belongs to you and does not come from me; I am humbly grateful, O Lord.”
Read Exodus 24:9-18, 34:29-35 and 1 Kings 19:11-12. Have you ever been around someone whose encounters with God gave them, at least for a time, a kind of holy aura? Has something like this ever happened to you? Might you find space this week to be still and silent and attentive to the voice of God?
Tuesday
“Shake me awake this day, O Lord, so that I may see your glory and hear your voice and be transformed.”
Read 2 Peter 1:16-21. Allow Peter’s eyewitness account of the glory likewise bolster your confidence in the good news.
“O God, you spoke light out of darkness at creation and you have shone in my heart to give the light of the knowledge of your glory in the face of Jesus Christ; help me now to reflect this light in all that I say or do this day. Amen.”
Ash Wednesday
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Today marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes symbolize our mortality and our moral culpability. Finite beings and sinful persons, we are destined to die. And so we humble ourselves before the eternal God who created us and the holy God who must, if we are to live, redeem us. Ash Wednesday sets the tone for the season: humility, simplicity, sobriety and even sorrow.
During these weeks we become especially mindful of the sinfulness that alienates us from God, indeed, of the human evil that nailed Jesus to the rough beams. And this we lament with sadness. At the same time, we understand that by his death Jesus secured for us forgiveness and eternal life.
In this solitary sojourn, we turn away from our sins and temptations and toward God and his great mercy (aka repentance). We choose a posture of humility and undertake practices that sharpen our spiritual awareness. These include prayer and meditation, moral inventory and behavior change, fasting and other forms of abstinence, acts of generosity and service. As Jesus entered the desert keenly aware of his baptism, during Lent we too rehearse and reaffirm our own Baptismal promises: to renounce Satan and all evil and powers and sinful desires, to trust in the grace of Christ as our savior, to follow Him as our Lord. As we turn inward and turn Godward, we can trust him to turn toward us with spiritual grace.
Prayer: “I turn to you, O Lord, with all my heart, for you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in love and relenting from punishment.”
Read Psalm 51. Let this psalm help you express to God your own humility and repentance and your own desire for a clean heart.
Thursday
“I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me; against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.”
Read Joel 2:1-17. Do you see anything befalling your community that should impel us to collective humility and repentance?
Friday
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions; wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”
Read Isaiah 58 & Matthew 6:1-21. Respond to these verses.
Saturday
“Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior.”
Read 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10. Lent turns us from our self-protecting and self-advancing instincts to a willingness to die to ourselves in order to be alive in God and faithful as ambassadors.
