Saturday, August 18, 2018

Romans 8:5-6

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Life and peace

Breathe and feel the air flowing into your lungs ... giving you life, a gift, always, again and again. Freely bestowed.

Life in the Spirit begins with the realization of the giftedness of one’s life, for here the truth of God is known. God gives. Breath. Life. Spirit.

God’s delight is giving life to you and to all that is. The divine heart wants the life in you to be full, which means you are intended to bask in the joy and freedom of those who know they are infinitely loved by and Infinite Love, who attends us every single step and moment of our lives ... until the day we are received back into ultimate intimacy with God.

Knowing this gives life and peace, joy and the freedom. So set your mind on the Spirit. Let the Spirit of the Great Love fill you and evaporate every regret of the past and every anxiety about the future.

Do not live according to the flesh, which is to say according to your anxious, threatened ego with all its fears of being hurt, used or disrespected.

Our egos clothe themselves with titles, degrees, wins, accomplishments, real or feigned, so that we look good. It’s all a futile effort to convince our anxious hearts ... and others ... that we are good, important, to be taken seriously. This but a façade for the vulnerability, the weakness and our anxiety of being “less-than” which we feel within.

This is what it means to live according to the flesh. There is no peace there, no freedom to live and love and share your heart’s truest desires and hopes.

That happens only when we know the Love God is. So know. Today. Breathe, and set your mind on the Spirit.

Pr. David L. Miller

Monday, August 13, 2018

Psalm 104:31-34

 May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
   may the Lord rejoice in his works— 
   who looks on the earth and it trembles,
   who touches the mountains and they smoke. 

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
   I will sing praise to my God while I have being. 

May my meditation be pleasing to him,
   for I rejoice in the Lord.

Song of the morning

We are made for praise, for joy. Never forget this truth. It is essential.

The Holy One rejoices in creation, delighting in the earth, the planets, stars and the entirely of the cosmos—and in you. For you are the delight of God’s eye. You are the smile of joy on the divine face.

It is not right, I suppose, that I should think of you, Loving Mystery, as if you are a person with a body and face. You are beyond all that and beyond everything, truly everything I can think or imagine.

Yet, I relate to you and think of you as I can, and I know the delight, the gentle smile of purest pleasure that fills me when I look on the face of my beloved, when I hear their laughter and know all is well with them. Joy fills my being.

Can it be wrong then that I, fashioned in your image, should imagine you smiling, taking pleasure, filled with joy at the greening of the earth on a summer morning as the world awakens, cardinals’ call and golden flowers bask in sunlight?

Even more, you delight in me, in the love I know and share, in the moments when morning delight carries me away and my heart is one with the song of the morning, praising you.

It is for this that we are made: to know you in all things and to praise you, to reverence the Love you are and to serve this holy cause of living and caring for the life that surrounds us at every hand.

Fill me, today, with the joy of knowing and loving you, and I will sing your praise ‘till evening falls.  

Pr. David L. Miller