June 6

“We must set aside our own wisdom and righteousness in order that Christ may be made wisdom and righteousness and sanctification for us.  Thus if I want righteousness of any kind I must not try to lay up a store of it within myself, but must draw my supplies of righteousness, moment by moment, from the Lord.”  Hannah Whitall Smith, Daily Secrets,6/6

Lord, if someone had sat me down and looked me in the eye when I was yet a child and said these words to me, would it have made a difference?  Would I have been saved from a life of trying to be perfect?  Or would I have dismissed their wisdom as pie-in-the-sky unobtainable?  Would it have been so foreign to me that I would have thought them misdirected or even crazy?  Or would I, in my stubbornness, just have refused the idea because then I couldn’t be Lord of my own life?  But what about now?  Now I know better yet I find excuses to hang on to my own righteousness, my own wisdom.  After all, I’ve spent a lifetime acquiring it!!  I’m sitting here thinking about the clutter in my basement and attic---out with the old, in with the new is what is running through my mind.  I can never have room for the new if I hang on to the old.  I guess it’s that in-between period where there might be emptiness--the unknown--that keeps me from doing it.  We’ve been giving a lot of our old belongings to our son for his new house.  It feels good to put it to use while acquiring newly freed-up space in my home.  Is that what I need to do, Lord, with my old way of life?  Chalk it up to experience that has brought me to today?  In Your economy nothing is wasted.

“So also David pronounces a blessing upon the man to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works.” Romans 4:6