ADORATION – Reflect on God’s Greatness
PATIENCE OF GOD Divine patience is the power of control which God exercises over Himself, causing Him to bear with the wicked and forebear so long in punishing them.
Nahum 1:3 The Lord is slow to anger and great in power.
Praise God for His Patience
Praise God that he was and is patient with you. Thank God for his patience. Praise God that patience is no struggle for Him. He exercises patience without great effort.
CONFESSION: Confess your sins to God and receive his continued mercy.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9
THANKSGIVING: Giving thanks to God for his specific blessings in our lives.
“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” Psalm 100
SUPPLICATION: Bringing our requests to God.
- Bring your personal prayer requests to God.
- Pray for your friends and family who do not know Christ. Ask God to use you to make the gospel known.
- Pray for our friends serving overseas. Pray for Sarah. Ask God to encourage Sarah and use her to make the gospel known.
- Pray for the Uyghur people who are being persecuted in China. Ask God to reveal this gospel to this Muslim minority group./li>
SCRIPTURE READING:
1 Corinthians 2 – New International Version
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
God’s Wisdom Revealed by the Spirit
6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—
10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16 for,
“Who has known the mind of the Lord
so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
SCRIPTURE REFLECTION:
How can we “know”? What are the options? We can use reason and discovery to understand how combustion works. We can use experience and “know” things even though we can’t fully understand them. We can know fire is hot even if we don’t know how fire works. But what are the things that truly matter to humans? What questions defy reason and experience to answer them?
How are we here? Why are we here? What is our problem? What is the solution to our problem? What happens after this life? Is there meaning in this suffering? Is there meaning in this joy?
How have you seen your own “wisdom” fail you? How have you seen the wisdom of men fail this past year? How crucial is the message of the Cross to your own understanding of life? It was the centerpiece of Paul’s “knowledge.”