Daily Devotional • March 10
A Reading from Deuteronomy 8:11-20
11 “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes that I am commanding you today. 12 When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them 13 and when your herds and flocks have multiplied and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, 14 then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15 who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock. 16 He fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you and in the end to do you good. 17 Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. 19 If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.20 Like the nations that the Lord is destroying before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.
Meditation
What prosperous human beings do to God is nothing short of highway robbery. We rob God of his rightful place in our lives—both as the sovereign God of creation and the object of our worship. The first is called the sin of pride and the second the sin of idolatry.
It’s not as if we set out to dethrone God in our lives—we simply slide into it “naturally.” We gradually become more and more impressed with ourselves and our achievements until we come to a point where we really believe that we have caused our own good fortune. Losing our focus on God, we end up focusing on ourselves. That is called pride.
Along with a self-centered focus comes the motivation to make all our decisions based on what is best for us. For the Israelites in the Promised Land, God was good for national security and overall peace of mind, but when it came to a good harvest, Baal was their god. Likewise, in our compartmentalized lives, life becomes, consciously or unconsciously, a matter of choosing a god for each compartment. Although we might not divide our allegiance among Jesus, Allah, and Vishnu, we certainly might throw in a little Yoga, New Age Spirituality, and secular humanism into our mix with Jesus. That is called idolatry.
As Moses called on the Hebrews in the wilderness, God’s Word calls on us in our world to repent of our pride and idolatry and return to him. If we want to enjoy an eternity with the Father, we must come to him now and come exclusively to him. God alone is life.
Chuck Alley is a retired Episcopal priest (St. Matthew’s, Richmond, Va.), and an adjunct associate professor of anatomy on the medical faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University. Avocationally, he is an avid woodworker.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Trinity Episcopal Church, Red Bank, New Jersey
The Diocese of Malakal – Province of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan
The Rev. Dr. Chuck Alley, former rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, teaches anatomy at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical School.
