Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 107 verses 7 and 8:
7 Our fathers, when they were in Egypt,
did not consider your wondrous works;
they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love,
but rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.
8 Yet he saved them for his name's sake.
Earlier this year Dr. Gardner Taylor, the great "dean of American preaching" and mentor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. passed away at 97 years of age. Many years ago, just after I was first ordained, I drove down to Georgia to hear him speak for several days at a convocation for pastors. One thing Dr. Taylor spoke of there in Georgia has remained with me, shaping my prayer life very deeply ever since. It was Dr. Taylor's reflection upon the psalmist's understanding of being saved for God's name's sake.
I really have no right to claim my own deliverance. I'm a wretch like any man. God owes me nothing, and what I do deserve I surely don't want!
Nevertheless, I do pray for my own deliverance; but ask for it for God's name's sake and not for my own. As Dr. Taylor put it in his lecture we who were following behind, "For God's name's sake I pray I never do anything to defile or humiliate myself, my family, or my ministry."
I know I really don't deserve to be spared the wilderness or rescued from its trials and temptations. Yet I do pray that I be led not into temptation and delivered from evil. For His is the kingdom and the power and the glory; and for His name's sake we are saved.
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