This Daily Devotion is to help our members and others reflect on the understanding of Christian service to our Lord.

Devotion for Saturday, February 18, 2023

The Rt. Rev. Archimandrite, Msgr. George Appleyard

An Invitation to Prayer

The offering of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord,
but the prayer of the upright pleases him. Cf. Prov. 15:8
—Deliver us from our sins, O Lord,
    so that our prayer may be effective and pleasing to you.

The Canticle of Moses, Deuteronomy 32:23-27

“I will collect harm against them,
and use up my arrows on them:
wasting famine and devouring birds,
and unabated deadly pestilence.
I will send man-eating animals against them,
to drag them away ferociously.
Outside the sword shall deal death,
inside there will be terror
for young men and young women,
for the infants and the elderly alike.
I planned to reduce them to nothing,
to wipe out their memory from all people
except that their enemies might gloat,
that the foe might misjudge and say,
‘Our own hand accomplished this,
none of this was the Lord’s doing.’”

From Basil’s “Lakizois” Homily

Now I must review all the passions and admonish you, so be attentive and reap some gain from my words so that—stripped of your skin as a snake sheds his—you may return home both naked and yet clothed with justice, the last possible only because of the first. This is a synod. Our ancestors established these meetings so that when we gather together each year in a general convention, we might learn what we cannot learn on a daily basis because there are so few teachers and preachers. After this meeting concludes we should safeguard the exhortations and instructions received here for the next time, keeping each of them fresh in our memory, as well as flee sin and pursue the work of justice.

A Prayer

O Holy Wisdom, O Spirit of Jesus without whom we cannot know him, be the lamp of my mind to assess everything to which I am exposed, to recognize the useful and the good and to store them in my mind and heart, and to recognize the useless and the wicked to reject them. By your power may I make this a constant state of mind and thus walk unencumbered through the gates of Paradise. Amen.