Monday, February 6, 2023

Light On My Path

Monday, February 6, 2023

Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path.  I’ve promised it once, and I’ll promise it again: I will obey your righteous regulations.  Psalm 119:105-106

Habits, either good or bad ones, are formed in memory.  This morning’s text is one of the first I learned as a child.  In those days memory verses were part of Sunday School; we memorized and discussed a different verse each month.  Now, many years later, that verse still calls to me.  That calling is not because of what I must do in parish work as a pastor, (prepare sermons, counsel, help form the life, ministry, and worship of a congregation), but rather God’s Word calls me to Him in the ordering and worship of my own life, one breath at a time.

This devotional blog was born out of a dissatisfaction with my response to the calling.  A decade ago I felt a lack of discipline, a void of orderliness in reading and reflecting on God’s Word.  I felt unrest, blindness, and dissatisfaction.  So, I did what Scripture offered – (re)committed my mornings to the light that guides my pathway.  This was a two-fold commitment:

Private Commitment – I wanted solitary time.  I’m an introvert by nature, and, with all those thoughts bumping around in my brain, its difficult enough to concentrate; I need solitude.  So the choice was to get up an hour (or three) earlier than anyone else.  As I put these words on paper this morning (or the computer screen), the only sounds are an occasional wind whipping by my window, and the gentle snoring of my dog on the floor mat, next to my desk chair.

Public Commitment – knowing my track record of beginnings, and fizzled attempts at routines, I needed some accountability.  Early-on I started publishing these early morning thoughts/reflections on God’s Word for the congregations I served.  In this way I (somewhat ruthlessly) tapped-into my introvert-born dread of public humiliation.  A private promise to self can be rationalized-away; a public promise to others before God, is much more problematic…especially if a preacher wants to keep his job.

Well…that’s enough therapeutic confession for today.  What’s the point?

The point is Psalm 119…God’s Word as a guide…a light that opens up the truth of what’s on the path ahead.  And who wouldn’t rather have insight when the darkness of uncertainty is all around us?

For You Today  

Dark times of economic uncertainty, pandemics, changing morality, and questioning our existence, planetary extinction possibilities, war, aging, and what is in all those classified documents we all thought were so well guarded – isn’t it joy to your soul that God’s Word is unchanging, unparalleled truth you can depend upon, and the best love letter ever written to you, and me, and everyone?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Finding a Straight Path  and  John Wesley - Homo Unius Libri  and   The Secret to King David’s Greatness – Part 4

This is an updated version of “So Much Anger” published on Rocky Road Devotions January 16, 2014

Images:  Title Pixabay.com   Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translatio 

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