Wednesday after the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on November 6, 2019 by under
Scripture: Habakkuk 2:1-4 (NKJV)
2:1 I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected.
2 Then the Lord answered me and said: “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.
3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, it will not tarry.
4 “Behold the proud, his soul is not upright in him; But the just shall live by his faith.
Devotion
The souls of the proud are not right: they glory in their own working, seeking their own profit—even in generous actions. Whether looking good before men or simply feeling good about their works, it reflects the same lack of trust in the Lord as the actions of those who grab onto money or power and cling to it as if it would endure forever. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away” (“But the word of the Lord endures forever,” 1 Pet. 1:24-25; cf. Is. 40:5-8).
Who, then, are the righteous, if not those who do great works and appear materially blessed by God? The just person knows himself to be a sinner, set in the midst of a fallen world full of others who are like him in that regard. Each one lives with his particular trials: one with the affliction of want, another with the affliction of abundance, each faced with the question of in what or in whom he shall trust. More, he not only sees this about himself, but in Scripture he sees also what Yahweh has promised: that it would become clear, as the final age was ushered in by the incarnation of God the Son, that the only way to have life would be by entrusting his life to that Son.
We pray: Lord God, only through faith are we declared just and righteous by You and given life. Keep us in such thankful confidence in the forgiveness of sins in Christ, by Your Holy Spirit, that this saving trust may always shape our lives to Your glory and our neighbor’s good. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
