May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. [Psalm 19:14]
I’m sharing these daily devotions in the hope they will inspire you to read God’s word. I’m praying that they will help you find your way to a closer relationship with God. [Read More ….]
Last February, we celebrated love with the secular holiday Valentine’s Day. We may have given or received flowers, candy, or a card—tokens of someone’s love for us or our love for them. Seven weeks later, however, the flowers are dead, the candy is eaten, and the card in the recycling bin. The day dedicated to “love” is forgotten until next February when the ads for jewelry and flowers remind us.
It was on Valentine’s Day that I read a love letter said to rank among the “fifty greatest love letters of all time.” It was written by the famed composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Intended for an unnamed woman, she is only known as his “Immortal Beloved.” Addressing her as, “My angel, my all, my very self,” the composer continues, “However much you love me—my love for you is even greater. Is not our love truly founded in heaven—and what is more, as strongly cemented as the firmament of Heaven?” The passionate letter continues with Beethoven’s promise that, “I am faithful to you; no other woman can ever possess my heart—never—never.” The ten-page letter concludes with, “Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.”
Beethoven’s is not the greatest love letter of all time because the greatest love letter can’t be found on the internet nor is it filled with saccharine sentiment and romance. While Beethoven wrote words with a pencil on paper, God sent the very Word! Regardless of how beautifully written, no love letter can compare to the one sent by God to His children—Jesus Christ!
When Beethoven declared his love to be greater than that of his “Beloved Immortal,” his words weren’t put to the test but, with His death on the cross, Jesus proved that His love for us is far greater than our love ever could be for Him! Unlike Beethoven’s love for this unnamed woman, God’s love truly was founded in heaven. The composer’s letter was meant for just one woman but God’s love letter was intended for all of mankind. While Beethoven promised her his undying faithfulness, history tells us the composer always was in love with some woman or another. God, however, is not fickle and there’s nothing we can do to make Him love us less or more! Sadly, while God always is faithful to us, we have not proved to be so faithful to Him.
Although Beethoven wrote that he wanted to post his letter immediately, it was found in his belongings several years later after his death and appears to never have been sent. In contrast, we are blessed that God’s love letter arrived here 2,000 years ago. Beethoven may have failed to send the letter because it was a clandestine romance but there was nothing clandestine about God’s letter to us. The Hebrew Scriptures are full of Messianic prophecies and Jesus’ arrival was heralded by angels, welcomed by Magi, and announced by John. While not everybody received Him, Jesus didn’t conceal his love as would a couple of secret lovers.
Perhaps the letter wasn’t sent because Beethoven loved his lady from a distance and she never knew of his love for her. God, however, has never hidden His love from us. Even before Jesus’ arrival on earth, God openly announced his love with every sunrise, birth, butterfly, wildflower, rainbow, and breath taken!
Tomorrow is Good Friday—the day we remember how God showed His love by sending Jesus to die on the cross for us! That dark Friday 2,000 years ago was a day of agony and anguish, torture and degradation, betrayal and abandonment, along with sorrow and sacrifice. Nevertheless, the overwhelming message of that horrible day is one of love! Because of His sacrifice for us, God’s beautiful love letter remains with us forever. Indeed, He is our Immortal Beloved!
By the cross we know the gravity of sin and the greatness of God’s love toward us. [John Chrysostom]
I am never afraid of exaggeration, when I speak of what my Lord endured. All hell was distilled into that cup, of which our God and Savior Jesus Christ was made to drink. [Charles Spurgeon]
Although the common position for prayer was standing, Jesus fell to His knees that night in the garden of Gethsemane. Luke describes Him as praying so intensely that His sweat dropped like blood. Having used the word hósei, meaning “as if it were, like, as, as though, or much like,” Luke may have meant Jesus sweat so profusely that it dripped from Him like blood. Nevertheless, Luke was a doctor who paid great attention to detail; he may have described hematidrosis, a rare medical condition in which the capillaries rupture causing blood to seep into the sweat glands and then out onto the skin. It’s caused by high blood pressure, a bleeding disorder, or extreme distress or fear, such as facing abuse, torture or death on the cross! Whether Jesus’ sweat poured off his body as if it were blood or He literally sweat blood, the Lord’s prayer was so intense that an angel came and strengthened Him.
In Jesus’ prayer that Thursday night, we clearly see His two natures—that He was both fully human and fully divine. While the divine and human natures were united in Jesus, the two wills were not. As fully God, Jesus was in sync with His Father’s plan and walked willing to the cross to suffer and die, to bear our sins, and to redeem us from the gates of hell. On the other hand, Jesus also had a man’s will—a will like ours—one that could be tempted—a will that freely chooses whether or not to walk in obedience to God. We can be sure that Satan was attacking Jesus with false promises, doubt, and fear that night.
By beginning His prayer with, “Father, if you are willing,” Jesus acknowledged both His Father’s right to determine the answer to His prayer and His power to do so. Jesus then asked, “take this cup away from me.” The cup He wanted taken away was the horror that lay ahead for Him—not just suffering on the cross, but death itself. Fully man, Jesus must have trembled at what being the sacrificial lamb who bore the sins of the world would entail. As this fully human man grappled with being obedient to God’s horrific plan of torture and death, Jesus may have sweat real blood.
When Satan tempted another sinless man in another garden long ago, Adam said, “My will be done,” and sin entered the world. In Gethsemane, Satan tempted the second sinless man to say the same thing. Had the enemy been successful, the lamb of God would not have taken away the sins of the world. But, instead of saying “My will be done,” Jesus prayed these beautiful words: “Not my will, but yours, be done.” Like any man, Jesus would have preferred avoiding the physical, emotional, and spiritual agony awaiting Him; nevertheless, His words were ones of complete and unqualified submission to God’s will. Could we have done the same? Thank you, Jesus!
Fowlers are professional bird catchers. In ancient Israel, they supplied the market with wild pigeons and doves destined for sacrifice, small birds (like quail) for food, and doves and other birds for caged pets. Since most of us get our poultry at the grocery, we’re probably unfamiliar with the fowler and his methods. To capture birds, fowlers spread nets or set traps and snares on the ground, camouflage them with natural materials, and cover them with grain. Tempted by the food, the birds leave the safety of the sky and come down to the ground where they are caught.
The fowler studies his prey’s behavior to find the best way to trap it. He wouldn’t hunt for a heron in the middle of a forest as he would for a dove, bait an eagle’s snare with seeds as he would for a sparrow, or use ground level noose traps for swifts as he might for quail. Sometimes the fowler used decoys by taking young birds from their nest and raising them by hand. Once tame, they were confined in hidden cages so that their voices would call others of their kind to the spot where they’d be trapped or killed. Knowing this about the fowler and his snares or traps, we can see why they frequently were used metaphorically in Scripture and likened to Satan. The enemy was the fowler, his schemes were the fowler’s methods and snares, and people were the silly birds with neither sense nor strength enough to escape the fowler’s snare.
When the prophet Amos asked, “Does a bird land in a trap on the ground if there is no bait for it?” [3:5] he wasn’t speaking of sunflower seeds and sparrows; he was speaking of the bait Satan uses in his snares. Each of us is tempted by different things—it could be pride and resentment for one person and gambling and anger for another. Whether it’s selfishness, wealth, hypocrisy, appetite, indolence, lust, envy, or something else, Satan knows what appeals to each of us and his traps will be placed and baited accordingly. Like the fowler’s bait, the lure Satan uses promises pleasure but delivers disaster! After all, a few bits of millet is all the trapped quail gets before it ends up as someone’s dinner!
Just as the fowler knows, “It is useless to spread a net where any bird can see it,” [Prov. 1:17], Satan’s snares don’t look like the traps they are! Few of us would deliberately step into a “den of iniquity” but things aren’t always what they seem. Like the fowler, Satan uses decoys to bring others into his snare. The influence of the pagans remaining in Canaan became a “snare and a trap” for Israel just as bad examples, friends, acquaintances, influencers, or associates can lure us into Satan’s snare.
The fowler doesn’t stand by his traps and shout out his plans and neither does Satan. Like the fowler, he uses trickery, deceit, distraction, and disguise to keep his prey from realizing the danger. We, however, are far smarter than little birds and God has not left us defenseless. Satan may be laying traps, but we don’t have to be his prey. Along with God’s word to light our way, we have God’s protection and the power of His Holy Spirit—when we’re dwelling in the “shelter of the Most High,” our “Maker’s care” will keep us “from the fowler’s snare.”
He that hath made his refuge God Shall find a most secure abode,
Shall walk all day beneath his shade, And there at night shall rest his head.
Then will I say, “My God, thy power Shall be my fortress and my tower;
I, that am formed of feeble dust, Make thine almighty arm my trust.”
Thrice happy man! thy Maker’s care Shall keep thee from the fowler’s snare;
Satan, the fowler, who betrays Unguarded souls a thousand ways. [Isaac Watts]
Over a period of 3,000 years, ancient Egypt’s pantheon of gods numbered between 1,400 and 2,000. During that time, some faded in prominence and new gods appeared. Often depicted as part human and part animal, Egypt’s gods had names, unique back-stories, and their own domain and expertise. Each god/goddess was responsible for a certain part of daily life, from motherhood to music, record keeping to funerals, and cosmic order to hunting. While the ten plagues God sent Egypt through Moses and Aaron may seem somewhat arbitrary to us in the 21st century, every one of them was a direct attack on one or more Egyptian god. They were the ultimate “smack-down” between God Almighty and Egypt’s deities.
When Moses struck the water of the Nile and turned it into blood for seven days, it was a direct attack on the crocodile-headed Sobeck, whose job was to be the Nile’s protector, as well as Khnum, the god of water and life, who was to guard the river’s source. The fouled river also was an affront to Osiris whose bloodstream was said to be the Nile. The plague of frogs who came up from the Nile and into people’s homes challenged the frog-headed goddess Heget who was in charge of regeneration, rebirth, and fertility. Aaron striking the dust of the earth to make gnats/fleas/lice immediately appear that covered both man and beast was a direct attack on Geb/Seb/Keb, the god of the earth and soil. The fourth plague, teems of flies or biting insects filling the air, challenged the power of Shu, the Egyptian god of air, and brought shame to any insect-headed god like Khepri whose head was that of a scarab beetle. With this affliction and the ones that followed, God distinguished between Egypt and the people of Israel. Remaining unaffected by the plagues, the people of Israel did not suffer these annoyances and hardships! While the God of Israel protected His people from the flies, Shu and Khepri couldn’t protect theirs!
The plagues intensified with the fifth plague, a deadly disease affecting cattle and livestock. The deaths of Egypt’s cattle was an insult to Apsis, the god of fertility (often represented as a bull) and the cow-headed Hathor, the goddess of love and protection. The punishment continued when ashes tossed by Moses became festering boils on both man and beast. This was the first direct strike on Egypt’s people and skin diseases and boils were seen as a sign of divine displeasure or judgment. Both Sekhmet, the goddess with power over disease, and Isis, goddess of healing, were helpless in the face of this challenge. The punishments increased with a devastating hail storm and continuous lightning, an attack on Seth/Set (god of wind and storms), Nut (goddess of the sky), and Osiris, the crop fertility god. The assault on those deities continued with the eighth plague, an east wind that blew in swarms of locusts. The false gods couldn’t prevent the locusts from consuming any vegetation that survived the hail storm.
The ninth punishment brought three days of complete darkness to the Egyptians. The most worshipped god in Egypt was the sun god Ra/Re, but both he and Kepri, the god of the dawn, were powerless in the face of Israel’s God. The final plague was death to the firstborn of both man and beast. Even Pharaoh’s son, believed to be a divine birth, died. These deaths challenged the power and authority of Isis and Osiris, the protectors of life, as well as Pharaoh, the god-king believed to be the son of Ra.
Revealing them as the powerless worthless idols they were, each of the plagues challenged, defeated, and shamed the false gods of Egypt. The God of Israel proved Himself to be the one true God—sovereign and superior in all aspects. While directed at Egypt, this message of Jehovah’s supremacy also was meant for the people of Israel as well as the rest of the world.
There is no need to go to heathen lands to find false gods. We can find them right here in our own country (and possibly in our own homes). Anything that gets between us and God is a false god and no more worthy of our devotion and worship than were Ra, Osiris, or Sekhmet. That we don’t depend on Seth to protect us from storms or bow down before statues of the bull-headed Apsis doesn’t mean we’re not guilty of idolatry! Nowadays, we worship the far more subtle false gods of the 21st century—things like wealth, power, influence, property, fame, pleasure, beauty, popularity, education, comfort, science, sex, money, and self. Never forget that our false gods will fail to serve and save us just as easily as Egypt’s false gods failed them!
What each one honors before all else, what before all things he admires and loves, this for him is God. [Origen]
A Latin word, lorica originally meant armor or breastplate. Because of an ancient practice of inscribing a prayer on the armor or shields of knights who then recited the prayer before combat, lorica came to mean a prayer of protection.
Although there are many such prayers, the most famous is the Lorica of St. Patrick (also known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate). Legend has it that around 433 AD, St. Patrick wrote this prayer for protection. As the story goes, on Easter morning, Patrick led his fellow missionaries in a procession to the court of the pagan King Laoghhaire. Suspecting that they would be ambushed by the army of his pagan adversary, Patrick took his men through the woods while chanting this prayer/lorica. Rather than seeing the missionaries amid the trees, their enemies saw a mother deer followed by twenty fawns and let them pass. Having been brought safely through the ambush by God, Patrick and his companions marched into the king’s presence while chanting: “Let them that will, trust in chariots and horses, but we walk in the name of the Lord.”
Whether the story is fact, legend or, as I suspect, somewhere in-between, this beautiful hymn (also known as The Deer’s Cry) appears to be the first one ever written in Gaelic and quite likely by the beloved Patrick. In 1889, Cecil Alexander produced a metrical version of the prayer from an earlier English translation and the resulting hymn was set to traditional Irish tunes. Called “I Bind Unto Myself Today,” this beautiful old lorica can be found in the hymnals of many denominations and heard on You Tube.
Prayers for protection and deliverance are found throughout Scripture. Moses, David, Ezra, and Nehemiah all prayed for protection for themselves and others and Jesus prayed for the protection of His followers. We may not be facing Druids in the woods, but we enter into battle against evil every day. While we don’t wear armor or carry shields, we can proceed as did Patrick and his men: by wearing the armor of God, binding ourselves to Him in prayer, and walking in the name of the Lord.
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three. …
I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard. …
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
I bind unto myself the name,
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.
By whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
[St. Patrick’s Breastplate (Attributed to St. Patrick)]
When we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, I suspect the revered bishop who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 5th century wouldn’t recognize this day in his honor. Originally a religious feast, it’s now a day for parades, sales, “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirts, corned beef and cabbage, music, dancing, and lots of green (including hair, cookies, the Chicago River, milk shakes, and kegs of beer). St. Patrick, however, would recognize the common symbol of the day: the shamrock. Of course, to Patrick, the shamrock, with its three leaflets bound by a common stem, was a metaphor for the Holy Trinity. The shamrock’s three leaflets also came to symbolize faith, hope, and love.
“The luck of the Irish” may trace back to the thousands of superstitions in Irish folklore. (Getting married in May is bad luck but seeing a white horse in the morning is good!) The “lucky” four-leaf clover has its origins in ancient Celtic folklore. Irish and Celtic myths and legends also tell of fairies (Aes Sídhe) and pesky goblins (Púca) who were known to hand out both good and bad luck to humans. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see how a people who were invaded by Vikings, suppressed at the hand of England, suffered mass starvation during the Irish Potato Famine, failed at every revolution, and were treated like third class citizens upon their arrival in the U.S. could be called “lucky.”
According to Edwin T. O’Donnell of Holy Cross College, “the luck of the Irish” originally was a derogatory phrase here in the United States. During the silver and gold rush days of the 19th century, some of the most successful miners were Irish or Irish/American. Saying a miner’s success was “just the luck of the Irish” meant that it was mere happenstance and had nothing to do with the hours of drudgery the miner endured, the danger he faced, the sacrifices he made, the loneliness he suffered, or his skill with a pick and shovel.
Anne, a woman in my Bible study, mentioned her daughter’s recent school assignment. The girl and her parents were to paste pictures of the things that made them lucky on a large green construction paper shamrock. A woman of faith, Anne didn’t want to be one of those parents who make a mountain out of every molehill encountered in public school. Nevertheless, she credits God (not luck) with her family’s blessings, so she and her daughter pondered how to proceed with the assignment in a way that honors God. They pasted photos of their family on their “Lucky Family” shamrock and then wrote these words: “No luck involved! We are blessed by the grace of God to be a happy family!”
Attributing their happy family to luck would be as insulting to God as saying the success of a miner who’d struggled in difficult circumstances to stake his claim was just “the luck of the Irish.” Nevertheless, that construction paper shamrock with its three leaves also symbolizes what enables Anne’s family to live with joy, peace, forgiveness, and confidence: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who govern and fill their lives. Moreover, the happiness of her family has to do with their faith, hope, and love (both for God and for one another). There was no “lucky” fourth leaflet on their shamrock because luck has nothing to do with it; God, however, does!
Devotions of the Heart 