For all of today’s readings, click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
For better or for worse
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Genesis 17:7-9
To Abraham, God said, “I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you
throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now staying … On your part, you and your descendants after you must keep my covenant throughout the ages.”
It almost seems like an afterthought, the second part of God’s statement to his friend Abraham. And we have treated it that way. We expect God to be faithful to us, but we can be very careless with our commitment to God.
God’s motivator is always his love for us. Our motivators are various and mostly ineffective: guilt, shame, family history, promises of prosperity, and … the good one: love.
By the rivers of Babylon God’s people sang, “How can we sing King Alpha’s song in this strange land?” Graham Nash wrote, “You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.” We need the strongest motivators we can find, because otherwise we will become lost.
God never becomes lost. Lost is not something God does. We do not understand his ways, but we can be sure that God is not lost. And we can be sure that God loves us. This is what Jesus came to share, and he called it the Kingdom of Heaven.
Always when I think of God’s love I want to ask, “What is my part?” But I’m not sure if that’s the right question. I can spend time with God, learn his precepts and apply them as honestly as I can, refrain from dishonesty and selfishness. I can give more rather than less to others, and receive with grace what they have for me. I can release my fears to God, laugh more, relax, and run the race I’m given to the last step. This is some of what I can do.
And then I die. Enough? Often it doesn’t feel like enough.
But God does not die. God sustains his covenant with us through my diminishment and death, as he has through the life and death of all our ancestors, as he will through the life and death of all our descendants. God isn’t going anywhere. God does not get lost, and God does not die.
Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father; there is no shadow of turning with thee; thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not; as thou hast been thou forever will be. Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see; all I have needed thy hand hath provided; great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1469
