Daily Grace
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
A Request for an Invasion
There is a difference and it matters. A call can be personal and private and interior. A commission is a job. It has a task attached and someone gave it to you and they expect it to get done.
"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10)
We are not merely called. We are commissioned, and the difference matters. A call can be personal and private and interior. A commission is a job. It has a task attached, someone gave it to you, and they expect it to get done. Notice what the disciples asked for: Lord, teach us to pray. They wanted a technique. They wanted words. And he gave them a kingdom.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. That is the second thing out of his mouth, right after the Father's name, and it is not a request for a rescue. It is a request for an invasion. He taught them to pray for the world to start looking like the throne room, for heaven's order to press down into this street, this house, this hour.
And a person who prays that sentence honestly, every day, for years, cannot stay uninvolved in the place where he lives. It will not let him. He will find himself building something, and he will not entirely remember deciding to. That is the design. You do not pray that prayer and stay the same, because you cannot ask God, day after day, to bring his kingdom here without eventually becoming one of the ways he answers it. Pray it, then, if you dare to, and be ready to be commandeered by your own request.
What the Fear Is Pointing At
The thing that frightens you most is the thing you have been trusting most.
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:21)
The thing that frightens you most is usually the thing you have been trusting most. Sit with that, because it is a diagnostic and it does not care about your feelings. If money keeps you awake, it is likely because financial security has quietly become the thing holding your whole world together. Not God. The money. God is in there somewhere, and you would say the right things about him if asked, but the load-bearing wall is the number in the account. If it is your children, then somewhere their success became the measure of whether your life counted. If it is your health, you are finding out how much you were leaning on a body now that the body has stopped cooperating.
Fear is a floodlight. It swings around in the dark at two in the morning and lands, without asking permission, on the exact thing you built your house on. Which means your fear is not simply your enemy. Your fear is telling you the truth about your foundation. The only question is whether you will listen to it, or spend another decade trying to make it be quiet. So do not only pray for the fear to lift. Follow the beam of it to the place it keeps landing, and ask honestly whether that place can bear the weight of a life. Most of what frightens us is simply the sound of a foundation that was never God admitting it cannot hold.