Daily Office - Tuesday, March 31

Silence and Stillness before God (2 minutes)

Scripture Reading: 1 Samuel 17:38-40, 45
Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them.
"I cannot go in these," he said to Saul, "because I am not used to them." So he took them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine.
David said to the Philistine, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied."

Devotional
Even as a young man, David knew both himself and God. Having taken off Saul's armor, he went up against a nine-foot Goliath with only his slingshot and a few smooth stones, confident in the living God.
Unlike David, however, the vast majority of us go to our graves without ever really knowing who we are. We unconsciously live someone's else life, or at least someone else's expectations for us. We are so unaccustomed to being our true self that it can seem impossible to know where to begin. Thomas Merton describes what we so often do:

I use up my life in the desire for pleasures...power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self ... And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible  to myself and to the world, as if I were in an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation... And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness. -Thomas Merton

The path we must walk to remove the layers of our false self is initially very hard. Powerful forces aound and inside us can smother the process. At the same time, the God of the universe has made his home in us (John 14:23), and the very glory God gave Jesus has also been given to us (John 17:21-23).

Question to Consider
What might be one false layer or bandage God is inviting you to remove today?

Prayer
Lord, grant me the courage of David to resist the temptation to live a life that is not the one you have given to me. Deliver me from the "Goliaths" in front of me, and from the negative voices I hear so often. Help me to listen and obey your voice today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)