DAILY READING
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PRAYER PRACTICE
Cup Prayer
This prayer will help you pour your heart out to God (Ps. 62:8). Begin with your hands folded together like an upside-down cup. Pour out before God all your fears, anxieties, guilt, sin, and shame. Tell Him what troubles you. Take time to be specific. When you feel like you’ve poured out your heart, flip your hands over, folding them like an open cup, ready to receive from God. Sit in silence, asking God simply to fill you with His Spirit. If your mind runs back to sin, shame, anxiety, or concerns of the day, flip your hands back over and pour it out to the Lord. When you are finished praying, read today’s Scripture and listen as God shares His heart back with you. _______________________________________________________________________________________
REFLECTION
Hope for Dry Bones
by Pastor Jeff Morlock
Part of being human is that we are always coming to terms with the limits of our own power. If you’ve ever tried to make positive change in your corner of the world and were met with resistance, if you ever tried to please someone and failed to make them happy, if you’ve ever poured your best efforts into a project or a dream only to see it fall apart, then you know what I mean.
But God is not like us. He is not constrained by unmanageable situations or uncooperative circumstances. He is not foiled by hostility or indifference. The Lord created the universe out of nothing, and there is nothing in all creation that can spoil his plans or resist his purposes.
Yet God’s power is not to be understood as simply brute force. God’s power has a particular character and trajectory. Today’s reading from the prophet Ezekiel gives us a clear picture of how God chooses to use his omnipotence. It shows us that God’s signature move, the most perfect expression of his divine power, is resurrection.
God calls upon the same power that brought the sun, moon, and stars into existence and harnesses it to give life to the dead. If you want to encounter the awesome power of God, look at the piles of dry bones all around you. Look to the place in your life that has no breath in it – the unchangeable situation, the hope that withered, the dust in your hands. Then with the courage of faith, invoke God’s resurrection power. Call upon the Holy Spirit, whose nature is to give life, to be poured out over you and your circumstances. Pray with Ezekiel, "Come breathe into these slain, that they may live."
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