Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Receive, Lord

Saturday, March 26, 2016

From Isaiah 55 and Romans 6
Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call him while he is near. My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, declares the Lord ... My word shall not return to me void but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it ...
We who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, so that we too might live in newness of life.

This is the day of Easter Vigil. In Jerusalem, waiting ended Friday on Golgotha. When Jesus died there was no sense of expectation, no idea that he would rise again after three days. But we know what's about to happen. As preachers proclaimed yesterday, "It's Friday, but Sunday's comin'!"

At the end of this second day, baptisms and confirmations mark the end of waiting. Christ-followers commit their lives to Jesus. In monasteries new monks lie prostrate and face down before their broth-ers, as they have for centuries, and recite the "Suscipe":

Receive, Lord, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will.
You have given me all that I have and all that I am, and all of this I return to you.
Dispose of me now entirely according to your will.
Give me only your love and your grace.
With this I am rich enough, and this is all I ask.

The Suscipe (Latin for "receive") is for all of us. Moses and Jesus said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and mind and strength." So much of loving is about giving and being given to. "All of this I return to you."

I don't need to second-guess God's love for me, but sometimes I do anyway. Then "my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will" get in the way of our relationship. But all these come from God. I've been GIVEN to. So I can give it back.

In When the Well Runs Dry, Thomas Green says that disciples of Jesus can reach a point where they "have no will of their own and yet they are intensely active. The will of the sea which is God has be-come the dynamic force of their lives, and all their energies are spent in responding fully to the ebb and flow of the tide.

"What is lacking in their life is tension ... Where there is one will - God's will - there is order. It is only where there are two wills - God's and mine (even when we have the same goal) - that tension and disorder prevail."

So, no lethargy or passivity marks this day of Easter vigil. Our wait for Jesus is intensely active, as Green says. We want to be as available as we can be to the will of our Father in the lives we have been given by him.

Dispose of me now, Lord, entirely according to your will. Give me only your love and your grace. With this I am rich enough. And this is all I ask.

Devotions Archive

Receive, Lord

Saturday, March 26, 2016