Luke 1:74-75 “To rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
and to enable us to serve him without fear
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”

Several places in the Bible it talks about God’s overarching purpose in interacting with people, and this is one of the more compact of those. Japanese is different enough grammatically from both Greek and English that this passage is listed as “verse 7475,” rather than trying to make the divisions identical. The point of this is that we are created to serve God in holiness and righteousness. We need to remember that God doesn’t “need” our service, in the sense that He would be in trouble if we didn’t follow through, but He enables us to serve Him so that we may become His children indeed. That’s where the righteousness and holiness come in, because God is perfectly righteous and holy, and apart from His grace, we have no hope of being either. Too many Christians today think God’s plan of salvation is just to give them nice stuff, all the way to eternal life (if they even think that far). That is a sad deception. As has been said, God is far more interested in our character than our comfort. He’s constantly working on that righteousness and holiness, and the more we resist that, the more we suffer.

God has been working on us a lot over the past year, but then He never stops working on us, drawing us closer to Him and transforming us into the likeness of His Son. (2 Corinthians 3:18) The past week has had some intense moments, and we aren’t through yet. I need to remember that my responsibility is to serve God faithfully, in righteousness and holiness, and the results are up to Him. That can be difficult at times, because I long to see good fruit from my labors, but God is the Fruit Inspector, not me or anyone else. Like Paul, I need to deal with both abundance and lack, hard times and easy, knowing that God will enable me to deal with whatever comes my way. (Philippians 4:11-13) There are indeed many things, in my life personally and in the world at large, that I would like to be different, but God has assured me that He feels the same way, and at the right time everything will be made new. (Revelation 21:5) That must be enough for me.

Father, thank You for Your good plan for me, and for this church. Help me not deviate from that plan, either by action or by inaction, by lack of faith or by presumption. Help me be quiet before You knowing that You are God and You have all things in Your hands. May my obedience give You pleasure and glory. Thank You. Praise God!