This week's devotions are written by Vicar Steve Bond.
More from Marva Dawn's Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God…
Just as powers overstep their bounds and become gods, so our power becomes a rival to God. As the Psalms and Isaiah teach us, God's way is not to take us out of tribulations, but to comfort us in the midst of them and to "exchange" our strength in the face of them. By our union Christ in the power of the Spirit in our weakness, we display God's glory.
Maybe it was easier to name idolatry back in the days of the prophets - if you made yourself a statue, called it Baal or Molech or Asherah or some such name, and prayed to it, you were worshipping an ido. More challenging, but still relatively easy to do is the prophetic task today of identifying and questioning the monolithic "isms" out there in the world - nationalism, racism, capitalism, and individualism (the pantheon of isms goes on and on) - when we see them as objects of worship in society at large. Most difficult of all, perhaps, is recognizing our own tendency to trust in what is not God, and then to name those idols as obstacles to God's work in us.
"What I really need, God, is more money (or insert "the approval of others," or "my candidate in office," or any of a host of other objects of our affection) - then I will be secure," we say.
"No," says God, with a voice at once so powerful that it smashes to pebbles all our idols and yet so gentle that it comforts our anxious hearts like a whisper at our ears, "what you really need is me. And I give you myself."
Connection: Today we are given the gift of honesty - to expose in our lives and in our world those things opposed to the Reign of God as the idols they are, and to come with empty hands, without pretense, before the living God.
Our Father in heaven, let your will be done in us as you work in our weakness. Deliver us from ourselves, and give us this day what we really need.
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