Daily Devotionals
June 29, 2019
Everyone | June 29, 2019
DAILY READING
FIELD NOTES
We are reading the Bible with a lens that is over 2000 years further along in human history and development. Our circumstances are not the same as those faced by Jesus and his disciples and yet the truth-telling in the Bible we find still informs our lives today.
Jesus asks his disciples, “And you—what are you saying about me? Who am I?”
That question is our question today. Who do we say Jesus is, not just theologically, but in our living…in our understanding of God, in our relationships and in our personhood?
Are we prepared to follow Jesus’s example and leadership, yielding our self-formed identities and laying bare the true self that God intended for us when we were formed in his image? A portrait of intimacy with God is found in Psalm 139: 1-18.
1 You have searched me, LORD,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
QUESTIONS FOR THE FIELD
- We have spent 8 weeks focused on the Great Commandment, especially engaging in loving our neighbors. In what ways and how many times have you said ‘yes’ to the call to walk as a disciple during these weeks, sharing your true self and God’s love?
- What story or encounter will you remember for a long time?
PRAYER GUIDE
23 Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting. Amen