Read an Upper Room daily devo – tap green link, then tap Daily.

Post a prayer on the Prayer Wall, tap the green link then tap Prayer.  https://www.upperroom.org/walktoemmaus

Talk 6: Growth through Study

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8).

As A is to Z, so Alpha is to Omega. Christ is Alpha. Christ is Omega. The beginning and the end of all things and everything in between.

When you were young, you were an “abecedarian.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary says that an abecedarian is “a person learning the rudiments of something such as the alphabet.” Children learn their ABCs in order to communicate with their world.

When we study God’s words in the Bible, we too become “abecedarians”—we learn the fundamentals of the language of love. We need to know the syntax of the language and how to communicate it. We must learn it completely so that we can witness, and witness well. Learning the language is essential to all aspects of life. When we were young, we practiced over and over until we could recite the alphabet. We printed line after line on our writing tablets, making sure each letter we printed was the right height above and below the line. We made sure that each circle was in correct proportion to other letters with circles. We practiced; we memorized.

If we are to know our Alpha and Omega, we must continue to grow in God’s Word. Jesus is our Good Word. He is our God Word.

Remember your ABCDs: Always Be Christ’s Disciple.

Question for Reflection: How can we be Christians in the world without knowing our Alpha and Omega?

Reprinted from Walking Side by Side: Devotions for Pilgrims by Joanna Bultemeier and Cherie Jones. Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. For more information, visit bookstore.upperroom.org.


Talk 3: Priesthood of All Believers

Whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith (Galatians 6:10).

Jesus never let an opportunity go by to teach in parables, using the familiar objects and life examples of his hearers. He healed. He stood with and forgave the woman caught in adultery. He was open to the leading of his Father’s will and was, therefore, able to seize the moment and the opportunity to do good.

The word opportunity comes from an Old English phrase ob portu which means, basically, “at just the right moment.” I have heard that sailing ships approaching British Isles ports dropped anchor just before they reached the rocks surrounding a port, and a designated sailor watched the tide carefully. At just the right time, as the tide began to rise as much as forty feet, the sailor would shout Ob portu! and the ship would pull anchor and safely ride the rising tide into port.
 
Jesus calls us to live our lives by taking every opportunity to care about others, and he is our High Priest and example. We are commissioned to stand in the gap with Christ for the sake of others, to work toward justice where injustice occurs, to seek freedom where oppression rules, and to pray for the world’s sins of hatred, greed, and the love of power.
 
Each of us is reminded weekly in our group reunions that being a priest is fundamental to living a life in partnership with Christ. On our service cards, we are directed to consider what opportunities arose the past week when we were “called to discipleship,” and what opportunities were placed before us when we “denied our call to discipleship.”
 
Like Jesus, never let an ob portu pass by to do good.
 
Questions for Reflection: Do you look for ways you can be a priest to others? When has God ever used you unexpectedly as a priest to someone? Think of those who have been priests to you.
 

Reprinted from Walking Side by Side: Devotions for Pilgrims by Joanna Bultemeier and Cherie Jones. Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. For more information, visit bookstore.upperroom.org.
Talk 2: Prevenient Grace

I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you (Jeremiah 31:3).
 
“Who can say when, in any child, the dance with God begins?”1 Walter Wangerin, Jr. addresses this question as he discusses God’s pursuit of us in his book, The Orphean Passages: The Drama of Faith. Wangerin continues, “Not even the child can later look back and remember the beginning of it because it is as natural an experience as the child’s relationship with the sun or her bedroom. And the beginning, specifically, cannot be remembered because, in the beginning, there are no words for it. The dance, then, the dance with God, begins in the mist.”2 That time in the mist, dancing with the Unknown Other, is another way of describing the experience that theologians call “prevenient grace.”
 
Prevenient grace is God’s wooing us from before our birth to our acceptance of a loving relationship with God. It is the time we spend with God when we are not seeing clearly, dimly sensing—not yet ready to return God’s embrace.
 
The clear picture that emerges in scripture is that the God revealed in the pages is One who is passionately in love with humankind. God has loved, does love, and will love each person with a constant, undying, unwavering love. Whatever your priorities are, God’s priority is to love you. Or as one pastor notes, “You are condemned to be loved by God.”3 And because of this love, God seeks to be united with us. Exactly why God wants this so much remains one of the great mysteries of the universe before which we stand in silent amazement.
 
God waits for us, seeks us, and constantly creates opportunities for us to recognize the One in the mist. God takes the divine initiative with us. Our choice is not whether God will love us, but whether we will accept and embrace that love. Several years ago I heard a story on the evening news about a linguistics professor who teaches persons with Downs Syndrome to communicate with the aid of a computer. One of her students, a fifteen-year-old girl named Christine typed, “I can hear God’s finest whispers.” When asked what God whispers to her, she responded, “He says that He loves me too.”
 
Prevenient grace allows us to hear these finest whispers for the first time. Thanks be to God!
 
Questions for Reflection: What is your first memory of God? Can you identify times in which prevenient grace has been at work in your life? What finest whispers of God do you hear?
 

Notes: 
1. Walter Wangerin, Jr. The Orphean Passages: The Drama of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 20.
2. Ibid.
3. This quote is from the Reverend Stephen Bryant, Publisher of The Upper Room. This is a frequent comment used in his Emmaus talk on prevenient grace.
 

Reprinted from Walking Side by Side: Devotions for Pilgrims by Joanna Bultemeier and Cherie Jones. Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. For more information, visit bookstore.upperroom.org.

Talk 5: Life in Piety

Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor (Proverbs 14:31; 22:9).

In 1910 Agnes was born into a poor peasant family in the primarily Muslim country of Albania. Agnes’s Christian mother taught her to walk with God. After taking her first vows as a nun, Agnes was sent to teach in a convent in India.

For fifty years Agnes, known as Mother Teresa, walked the streets of Calcutta, ministering to the poor, carrying those destitute, dying, emaciated bodies to the Home for the Dying (Nirmal Hriday), a home for persons whom no hospital wants; a home for people who have absolutely no one to take care of or to care for them.

A typical case was a woman who had been brought in from a sewer. She was a beggar who had fallen into an open manhole. She was barely alive. She was covered with maggots. Mother Teresa put her to bed, and while gently washing the woman, pieces of flesh broke away from her body and fell into Mother Teresa’s hand. The half-conscious beggar asked Mother Teresa why she was doing this for her. She answered that she was doing it for the love of God. She honored God through her loving acts of agape.

When a reporter asked her how she could possibly go into that home day after day, she replied that she can only go in because she takes Jesus with her Mother Teresa lived a life in piety each day. Her relationship with Jesus, her love for Jesus, her compassion and empathy for those half-alive sons and daughters of God, displayed the qualities of a pious life. In her servanthood, Mother Teresa daily shared the Bread of Life with the poor. Too often, we think of piety as a negative quality, a “holier than thou” attitude. But a life in piety is a whole life and a state of being where our relationship with God is our priority. Being good and doing good are our responses to a life lived in connectedness with God. We live in obedience to God’s will.

We cannot each be Mother Teresa, for God made her who she was. But we can take the qualities of a life in piety and adapt them to our own everyday world.

Questions for Reflection: Do you put your hand in Jesus’ hand and take him with you wherever you go and in whatever you do? If you’re not doing all the good that you can, how can you do more?


Reprinted from Walking Side by Side: Devotions for Pilgrims by Joanna Bultemeier and Cherie Jones. Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. For more information, visit bookstore.upperroom.org.