Forward Movement is an official, non-profit agency of the Episcopal Church whose mission is to create compelling content for Christian living. Since 1935 we have published the quarterly devotional Forward Day by Day, as well as pamphlets, booklets, and books that encourage and nourish people in their lives of prayer and faith.
WEDNESDAY, June 16 (Joseph Butler)
Romans 1:28--2:11. Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.
Why do you suppose people to whom God has given an innate knowledge and awareness of himself "see fit" to rid their minds of that knowledge and choose for themselves a mind minus that knowledge? One explanation is that such people (and they seem to include just about everybody) want freedom from the knowledge that we are born to serve and obey God rather than our own selves. To that rejection of God from our mind, heart, and primary concern, Paul attributes all the pain and woe of this perishing world.
Who will say that he is wrong? Yet who among us can say that we do not have to struggle with the temptation to dismiss God from mind whenever his presence there seems to threaten what we consider our God-given freedom to be ourselves?
I have been reading a new book about C. S. Lewis in which someone who knew him well reports hearing him say: "I was not born to be free--I was born to adore and to obey." He knew the truth of the paradox that in God's service is perfect freedom. Let us be sure that we know it too, and hold God ever in our minds in adoring love. (1986)
PRAY for the Diocese of Western Kowloon (Hong Kong)
Ps 119:97-120 * 81, 82; Numbers 11:24-33(34-35); Matthew 18:1-9
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...I don't want to admit it; but, this meditation convicts me.