Daily Devotional. Anyone Hungry?

Should Christians do a daily Devotional out of duty? Our little checklist of dos and donts? If you do it out of duty, don't bother. Duty is the last line of defense. Do it because you want to, and if you don't want to, pray to the Lord that He makes you want to. And if you still don't want to, something is wrong. Don't take no Doctor to tell you that. A hungry person wants to eat.   

For in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray for our "daily bread." Anyone with even a scant knowledge of the Bible knows that bread is both a physical reality and a spiritual reality. One for the body, one for the soul. Think of Jesus's teaching, the Lord's Supper, etc. If really daring, go to the Old Testament and put it altogether with Bethlehem being called the House of Bread and the like. To most Christians, the Old Testament is a strange land. So, they don't visit. It is modern day Marcionism.  Evangelicals get a bit queasy in the OT.   

Most Contemporary preaching has taken the nutrition and bulk out of preaching. More like white Wonder Bread. Full of air, porous, inoffensive, but hardly nutritious. Can be gummed down the hatch. Takes no teeth, no jaw. More like jello. We eat but are not full and wonder what is up. And we whine. Boy, do we whine. Bunch of babies. Pampered and in Pampers. 

So, we eat more. And are still hungry. All the while the body and soul cry out for true food. Not 21st century corporate frankenfood. Or frankenpreaching.  So, we pick and choose verses like an old folks' home does with Bingo. B 15!

When we eat an old-style piece of bread, with all of bran and etc. included, we start to get a better picture of the Bread of Life Jesus. A Brown God-Man of the Mideast. No Blue-Eyed Aryan Wonder Jesus. 

I just tossed into the trash last year's Devotional. Roughly coinciding with my birthday, I begin anew each October.  Very Yom Kippurish, I might add. Not bad for a Gentile who is 3/4 German Ancestry and 1/4 Irish. No Native American, sad to say.  Although I do have high cheekbones.

I take a lot of notes in the Devotionals and make comments in the spaces on the pages. I would be embarrassed to share what I think to another so I think it best to toss and forget. I can be churlish and snarky. I figure that I had better let it out early in the morn like gas in private lest it come out in polite and dainty company.

The Devotional, as manna in the wilderness, to not keep it another day lest it turn moldy. Into the trash! Frankly, I struggled and grapple a lot with the scripts of the devotionals. The last year's was fine scripture-wise (it wasn't heresy) but is also hit the same themes over and over again. It got old and it seemed like the writers just cranked it out like sausage. Very little depth and flavor. Maybe more like a multi-vitamin. Centrum Christianity. 

The main point? The past is the past. OK, I get it. Maybe God just needed to hammer this home. So easy to utter this with our mouths, so hard to hold this in our hearts. Let the past go because it is already gone. What we are holding onto with the ropes of regret is our hurts and misplaced hopes. And it is tethered to a memory that might as well be a grave stone.

To be fair, I also tossed the year-before-lasts Devotional of John Calvin's writings. It was more doctrinal but lacked some application. Although, I was pleasantly surprised about how pastoral it was. Usually Calvin is portrayed in the popular thought as a cold logician who wrote his Institutes as a polemic against the abuses of the Catholic Church. I did tear out one page that seemed to be Calvin's best thoughts and saved that.       

I have moved onto another Devotional. I already like it better. It was published back in 1982--so very long ago, that it is even before I was out of high school and certainly no Christian. And get this, the Devotional itself was a republish of a Devotional written a century before. I am already taking to it better than the last tome. I think a hundred or so years ago, and for centuries since the creation of humanity, those who have come before us, if faithful, understood that God is good, life is hard, Hell is hot, and we are worse than we think. Talk about roughage! That will clear you out.

Maybe, as Brian Wilson sings, I just wasn't made for these times. Although I do love my iPhone. God has given us a place for a time in this world. And we need food for the way. Make sure to feed both your body and soul with something that can sustain you for the journey. Or starve.