This Daily Devotion is to help our members and others reflect on the understanding of Christian service to our Lord.
Devotion for Thursday, January 9, 2025
The Rt. Rev. Archimandrite, Msgr. George Appleyard
An Invitation to Prayer
On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry
announces that the Lord is nigh.
-Wake up and listen, for he brings
glad tidings of the King of kings.
Psalm 65/66:16-20
Come and listen, all you who fear God,
and I will tell what great things he has done for my soul.
I cried to him with my mouth,
and praised him with my tongue.
If I harbor injustice in my heart
may the Lord not hear me.
But God has heard me.
He listened to the voice of my plea.
Blessed be God who has not dismissed my prayer,
nor kept his mercy from me.
A reading adapted from Basil’s, Homily on Proverbs 1;1-5
This fear is the kind the prophet prayed for when he said, “Settle (καθηλωσον, literally nail) my flesh with fear of you.”Ps 118:120 Where such fear abides, an all inclusive purity of soul results, all wickedness and unholy actions are expelled, and the parts of the body-since they are settled with fear-are unable to tend toward any immoral activity. For just as a person pierced through with real nails is prevented from doing anything because of the pain, so too the person who is fastened with fear of God is not able to use an eye for what is inappropriate, nor a hand for forbidden actions, nor to do anything great or small other than what is proper, since that individual is transfixed by an expectation of what has been threatened, as if by a kind of pain.
A Prayer
In my baptism I committed myself to you, Lord Jesus.
In my investiture in this Order I reaffirmed that commitment.
In spite of my human weaknesses and sins, keep me fastened to you
so that, with the experience of true repentance for past misdeeds
I will become wiser and more humble,
and be fitted out to sit with you in your Kingdom.
Amen!