The Wednesday after the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on November 13, 2024 by under
Scripture: Exodus 33:11-17 (NKJV)
33:11 So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. And he would return to the camp, but his servant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, did not depart from the tabernacle.
12 Then Moses said to the Lord, “See, You say to me, ‘Bring up this people.’ But You have not let me know whom You will send with me. Yet You have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found grace in My sight.’ 13 Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight. And consider that this nation is Your people.”
14 And He said, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”
15 Then he said to Him, “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.”
17 So the Lord said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have spoken; for you have found grace in My sight, and I know you by name.”
Devotion
“So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.”
This principle of being separate is found throughout the Bible, even in the New Testament. 1 Peter 2:9 says that Christians are a “peculiar” people. 2 Corinthians 6:17 (quoting the Old Testament) admonishes us to “come out from among them and be separate.” Some Christians, misunderstanding the Lord’s meaning, have created for themselves their own “good works” in order to be different from the world and, in theory, pleasing to God.
Inventing our own good works is not pleasing to God. Listening to what He tells us good works are, these things we should do. And if we did what He said, if we were people among whom there was a faithful daily devotion to God, a respectful obedience to authority, no sexual immorality, no gossip, we would be quite different enough, without concocting man-made good works. God grant us so to love the salvation we have in Christ Jesus, that we would faithfully live out the gift of our holiness and so be discernibly different from the rest of the world.
Collect: Almighty God, we beseech Thee, show Thy mercy unto Thy humble servants, that we who put no trust in our own merits may not be dealt with after the severity of Thy judgment, but according to Thy mercy; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
