From Serenity to Self-Help
Good Morning Friends,
The original serenity prayer is derived from untitled prayer by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs and is designed to help all of us have a correct understanding of God’s grace…to become secure in the blessed assurances of God.
The best-known form is:
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
The message of the prayer takes us From Serenity to Self-Help.
Scripture: Paul wrote, “[The Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you, because power is made perfect in weakness.'”
2 Corinthians 12:9 (CEB)
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5:1-5 (NRSV)
Message: Have you ever read a self-help book? They have been around for a long time. Except for the Bible, if you count it as one, I have never found them to be of much help really. They become lists of things to do and for me a burden. One of the first self –help books was written by a pharaoh to his son and the title essentially was How You Too Can Become a Pharaoh. But the Bible says that our help does not come from a list of things to do but comes from the Lord’s love. So in honor of that love we look at the paradox of Grace that Paul wrote about to the Corinthians. In review, paradoxes are realities that do not seem to make sense until they are understood. I have written about them before. In this place of paradoxes we discover that by losing we can find what we were looking for, by being humble we can be exalted, in small things we can find greatness, in weakness we find strength, in serving a chance to rule and by dying we can discover life itself. The journey is one of discovering grace…. of discovering we are loved. There are two sides to the coin. Do you have the wisdom to know which side you are on?
Pray we do not become professional sufferers falling short of hope realized in our practice of acceptance. Pray when we are knocked down we are not knocked out. Pray we eat of the fruit that is never out of season. Pray we discover both love and joy.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 