Monday, July 11

To read this morning's office, click here. [The online readings are still one week off. So, this reflection is from The Divine Hours, pp. 222-223.]

In The Prayer Appointed for the Week we find a thought that shapes everything.

... grant that I may know and understand what things I ought to do, and that I also may have the grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.

Each day the Divine Hours is designed to bring us into contact with God's Word and God's People reciting them so that we may develop the discipline of being formed by God's Word. Such formation comes to us through God's grace: "grant that I..." and "that I also may have the grace and power...".

For years I have believed that we Christians, by and large, don't have a problem with "knowing" God's will so much as "doing" God's will. And "doing" God's will is not the result of mustering our inner forces or working at it, but the result of "surrendering" to it. In such a way do not surrender who we are but we become who God made us to be.

John Stott, Rector Emeritus of All Souls London, provides the paradoxes we need to hear:

Only if we serve, will we experience freedom.
Only if we lose ourselves in loving, will we find ourselves.
Only if we die to our own self-centredness, will we begin to live.

The delight in the Lord's will we all so cherish comes from surrendering to the grace that can re-make us and the power that can re-energize us. Let us turn to the Lord over and over and simply ask for his grace.