Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord our God,
and worship at the Temple, his footstool.
He is holy. ~ Psalm 99:5 (NCV)
Praise the Lord! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God. ~ Revelation 19:1b (NLT)
Lord, I want to add my voice to the great crowd of people praising you. Praise you, Lord! And I really mean it. Even when I don't feel like worshiping you, my praise for you is genuine. I confess, though, that sometimes the praise that flows from my life toward you is interrupted. This happens when I get caught up in all the bad and good things happening in my life. Then I start to think mostly about myself and how everything affects me. And then -- well -- I forget to praise you. So, I desperately need your Holy Spirit to keep me focused on what is important. Help me to practice holy indifference toward the things which might distract me from spending my life offering praise to you. Amen!
Challenging Words
- interrupted -- You are interrupted when someone or something causes you to stop doing what you were doing.
- holy indifference -- Indifference is lack of concern. Holy indifference is when scripture or the Holy Spirit guides you to be unconcerned about something. For example in Matthew 6:25-34 Jesus says that we would do well if we showed a kind of holy indifference about food and clothing.
*ABOUT THE
DAILY TEXTS
The Daily Texts have been published by the Moravian Church since 1731. In 2015 I started posting these Bible verses for my spiritual formation students at Pacific Islands University. In the process of responding to the verses, I found the rhythm of looking for a common thread and writing a prayer based on that key idea to be helpful for my own soul. The prayers are more or less modeled on the TRIP method, which is what I ask my students to do in their journaling. ~ Brad Boydston
TRANSLATIONS
ABP = Authorized Boydston Paraphrase -- a freestyle biblical adaptation -- somewhere between paraphrase, commentary, and sermon
CEB = Common English Bible (©2011, the Common English Bible)
CEV = Contemporary English Version (©1995, American Bible Society)
MSG = The Message (©1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson)
NIRV = New International Reader's Version (©1996, 1998, Biblica)
NIV = New International Version (©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011, Biblica)
NLT = New Living Translation (©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, Tyndale House Foundation)
