the way, day 6

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 25

Scripture for the Day: Mark 1:14-20

Reading for Reflection:

The door, then, speaks of the beginning or the crisis, while the Way speaks of the going on.  Both are fully provided for in the Lord Jesus.

     Now if there is one thing more important than entering by the Door, it is going on in the Way.  Having entered by the Door, the walk is going to occupy us right to the end of our days.  But it is just this which is our greatest difficulty.  Compared with the ease with which we entered by the Door, the walk seems hard indeed.  It seems difficult to maintain that fresh fellowship with God which was so vivid when we began.  It is hard to maintain His peace in our hearts.  It seems difficult to make the means of grace work; and prayer, the Bible, and worship become unreal to us.  We find it difficult to be effective witnesses for Christ, and to manifest the sweetness and holiness we should.  The truth is that many of us who have entered by the Door are not really walking the Way at all, though we still have our faces Zionwards.  We have slipped off the Highway that has been divinely cast up, and are painfully dragging our steps through the swamp that abounds on either side.  Sometimes I have heard a Christian apply to himself the expressive word “stuck” when he is in that condition.

     Basically this difficulty is due to the fact that we are not seeing Jesus as the Way, but are trying to make other things the way, and they just do not work. (We Would See Jesus by Roy and Revel Hession)
 

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Come and Welcome

From the cross uplifted high
Where the Savior deigns to die
What melodious sounds I hear
Bursting on my ravished ear
Love¹s redeeming work is done
Come and welcome, sinner, come.

Sprinkled now with blood the throne
Why beneath thy burdens groan
On my pierced body laid
Justice owns the ransom paid
Bow the knee and kiss the Son
Come and welcome, sinner, come.

Spread for thee the festal board
See with richest dainties stored
To thy Father¹s bosom pressed
Yet again a child confessed
Never from His house to roam
Come and welcome, sinner, come.

Soon the days of life shall end
Lo, I come, your Savior, Friend
Safe your spirit to convey
To the realms of endless day
Up to my eternal home.
Come and welcome, sinner, come.
Come and welcome, sinner, come.


Closing Prayer:
May those without hope take heart in you, O Christ. May those with no home find shade at your right hand. May those near the end see beginnings; may those at the last become first. At the foot of your cross, O Christ, I come in prayer. O Christ, be my help, O Christ, be my hope. Amen. (Pamela Hawkins, Weavings Volume XXVI, Number 2)