Today Daily Devotional

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son. . . .

— John 1:14

Many Christians have sung praise to Jesus for his beauty in these words by Joseph A. Seiss: “Beautiful Savior! King of creation! Son of God and Son of Man! Truly I’d love thee, truly I’d serve thee, Light of my soul, my joy, my crown.”

Jesus is the King of creation. He was present at the beginning of time, and he now rules over all things. And when Jesus came to live among us, to die for our sin, and to rise again in victory over death, we saw his beauty and his glory. We saw the beauty and glory of God revealed to us in Jesus.

The gospel of John begins by telling us about “the Word,” which is how John describes Jesus. “The Word became flesh,” says John—and this means that we can know the glory and beauty of God because we know Jesus, who became human like us.

John states that “no one has ever seen God.” But John also explains that God’s perfect beauty doesn’t have to be just a distant concept or an unreachable mystery to us. In Jesus, God offers us his beauty. In Jesus, we are invited into the beauty of God forever. We can respond just as the hymn says, by promising to our beautiful Savior that we will truly love him and truly serve him.

“Beautiful Savior! Lord of the nations! Son of God and Son of Man! Glory and honor, praise, adoration, now and forevermore be thine!”

Jesus, our Savior, Word-made-flesh, hear our thanks, we pray, and receive our praise. Amen.

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.

— Psalm 51:10-11

Sometimes we use fancy language in our prayers to God. It can sound as if we are trying to make a good impression. Other times, though, we are direct and brutally honest in our prayers, confessing our sin with a broken heart because we know we have failed.

Psalm 51 is a brutally honest prayer. The psalmist describes sin as a great stain on his life. He knows that the sin he has done messes up the beauty of his life. Sin is offensive to God, and it needs to be washed away.

Just as surely as sin stains a person’s life, God has the power to wipe that life clean again. The psalmist prays for forgiveness, asking God to cleanse him and make his life beautiful again. The honesty of the confession is possible because of the trust that God will hear and forgive.

Because of the grace of Jesus shown to us on the cross, we can also pray to God with brutal honesty, confessing the stain of our sin and asking God to give us pure hearts again. God promises to cleanse us and make us beautiful again. God promises to take away our guilt and shame and to renew our spirits. Our honest confession is met with God’s faithful grace and love.

God, I need your forgiveness. When I’m honest, I know that I have sinned against you. By your grace and love, take away my sin and restore me to beauty and wholeness. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

The life of mortals is like . . . a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone. . . . But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him.

— Psalm 103:15-17

Like many insects, the mayfly has a lifespan of less than a day. Even if it is healthy and isn’t squashed by someone’s shoe, the mayfly will not live more than 24 hours. This seems so brief to us! But in the grand scope of the universe, human life is also brief. Compared to the age of our planet, a human life of even a hundred years seems short.

Psalm 103 uses the example of flowers in a field to describe how short our life is. These plants are beautiful, but they last for just a season, and some of them bloom for only a day.

The same is true for us. Even though our lives have value and beauty, our bodies will eventually die. This can feel frightening to us. It can make us feel insignificant, and it shows us we have no control over the circumstances of our own death or when it will come.

But Psalm 103 assures us that we can place our hope in God, who created us and watches over our lives. “From everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him.” This promised love will last longer than we could imagine. The beauty of our lives will fade, but the beauty of God’s care, protection, and love for us will last forever.

Eternal God, I confess that I can be frightened by the briefness of my life and of the lives of people I love. Teach me to rely on your love, which is “from everlasting to everlasting.” Amen.

Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink into the miry depths. . . .

— Psalm 69:1

Imagine being a sailor or part of a fishing crew at the time the biblical psalms were written. The waters are important for your livelihood, but they can also threaten you. The waters of a river, lake, or sea can turn dangerous and chaotic. Stormy waves can be scary, and heavy rains can bring dangerous, destructive flooding.

Psalm 69 uses this imagery to describe troubles and hardship that threaten to turn God’s beauty and order in our lives into chaos. Our own sin and the sins of others can disrupt our lives so much that it can feel like we are drowning.

Some of us know from experience what it’s like to deal with flooding or with a storm at sea. And all of us have seen destructive threats to our own lives and in the world around us through broken relationships, addiction, violence, division, and disease.

When we are threatened by such chaos, we can cry to God for help. The writer of Psalm 69 prays, “In your great love, O God, answer me with your sure salvation.” God’s salvation is sure indeed, even when we feel afraid. The threatening ­waters of sin and brokenness will not overwhelm us in the end, because God promises to keep us safe.

Rescuing God, sometimes things in this world and in my own heart threaten to overwhelm me like a flood. Save me, Lord, by your great power and love. Amen.

Some wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a city where they could settle.

— Psalm 107:4

One way to understand the beauty that God created is to understand its opposite: the ugliness and sorrow of being separated from God. Because of our sin, this world is not the way it ought to be. Sin has brought hardship and ugliness into our lives and into this world, though God designed it all to be beautiful.

We know that God has restoration in mind because we don’t feel “at home” in a world broken because of sin. We are homesick for a world of peace and beauty. We are homesick to be with God. When we’re stuck in brokenness and facing the ugliness of this world of sin, we feel homesick for God’s world of goodness and beauty.

Psalm 107 points out the sorrow and longing of this homesickness. The world can feel like a wasteland, providing no place where people can rest, no place where they can settle and be at peace. But the Lord, whose “love endures forever,” offers redemption. The Lord hears his people cry out in their trouble caused by sin, and he delivers them from distress. God brings them to a place where they can settle and live in peace. “He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”

Ultimately we know that all of life’s goodness and beauty will be restored when Jesus comes again, and the new life he provides us even now gives us hope for eternity with God.

Lord, we feel homesick for you and for your peace when we struggle with the hurt and brokenness of this world. Bring us near to you, we pray. Amen.

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. . . . He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness.

— Psalm 96:9, 13

God is perfectly beautiful “in the splendor of his holiness.” The more we know about God’s perfect holiness, the more we realize that we are not perfectly holy and beautiful. We realize we don’t live up to the way God created us to live. We don’t love other people the way God wants them to be loved. We don’t live the way God designed us to live. Our sin separates us from God, because sinfulness cannot stand in the presence of God’s perfect, beautiful holiness.

Psalm 96 describes the greatness and splendor of God, who is perfectly holy and calls us to come before him with an offering. We are called to “worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness,” and yet we know how often we have failed to live as God commands. How can we truly worship God if we are not holy?

The good news that we know today is that God deals with the imperfection of our sin by giving us his perfect grace. God chooses to get rid of our sin—not by punishing us—but by taking the punishment on himself in Jesus. The more we see God’s perfection, the more we know our own imperfection. And the more we know our own imperfection, the more we are grateful for God’s perfect love, which accepts us by grace through the gift of Jesus’ life for us.

Holy God, we confess that our lives do not reflect the perfect beauty of who you are. We need your forgiveness and grace to bring us back to you. Amen.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”

— Genesis 1:28

In earlier parts of the creation story in Genesis 1, we are told that God looked on his work and “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:9, 12, 18, 21, 25). God knew that his creation was beautiful and good, and God affirmed that goodness as he created new things.

Then, after God had finished creating everything in this world, including humankind, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

The very goodness of God’s creation is good for us to remember as we hear the command that God gives to the man and woman in Genesis 1.

God told people to be fruitful, and he told them to subdue the earth. We are often tempted to hear this command as a mandate to use the earth in whatever way we might wish.

But God wants us to care for the beautiful earth that he declared to be “very good.” As the story continues, we learn that God placed humankind in the garden “to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). So our calling is to preserve the earth and to tend it well, celebrating the beautiful place God made it to be.

Subduing the earth and ruling over it is something we do with humility and gratitude, giving honor and glory to our creator for the very good place he has given us to live.

Mighty God, we praise you for creating the world to be very good. Give us humility and grace to care for your world and to tend it well, to your honor and glory. Amen.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!”

— Job 38:4-5

In a poem, the Dutch writer Corrie Ten Boom compares her life to a tapestry woven by God. She says that God weaves both joy and sorrow into her life, and it is as though she sees only the back of the tapestry. She says she cannot understand how the strands could ever make something beautiful. But God understands and has a plan for how everything in her life will come together for his beautiful purpose.

Job, to whom God is speaking in our reading today, is a bit like that—seeing only the back of the tapestry of his life. Job has had to deal with terrible suffering and tragedy, and he does not understand why it all happened. God responds with a poetic speech about the creation of the world. God is the one who created everything, including things that are so mysterious that we don’t even know how to speak about them. God reminds Job of this in order to both challenge and assure him. God challenges Job to be humble about his own knowledge. And God assures Job that he has a plan, even though it may be hard to under­stand.

We are like Job in this way too. There are many things about God’s purposes that we do not understand. But God promises to provide for us and for the world he has beautifully made.

Provider God, you have assured us that you love us and are at work in our lives. Give us confidence to trust in you. Amen.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

— Psalm 139:14

It’s easy for us to think that we lack beauty. For example, you may feel that you don’t meet the beauty standards set by the world today. If you don’t look like a fashion model, maybe you feel less beautiful than others. Or you may feel that your life doesn’t meet the standards of a beautiful life. Maybe you have made mistakes in the past that you continue to regret. Perhaps your family and professional life haven’t turned out the way you had hoped. Or you may have habits and behavior that you aren’t proud of. You may also feel that you don’t have much internal beauty either.

But God has something different to say. In Psalm 139, God assures us that we are “wonderfully made.” God’s creative power was at work not just in forming galaxies at the beginning of time, but also in forming each unique part of you. God made you beautiful.

Psalm 139 assures us that the God who formed us before we were born is still intimately involved in our lives. The God who made you beautiful at the beginning continues to show you grace and to restore you to beauty every day. By God’s grace, you are not defined by the mistakes you have made or the ugly parts of your life. You are defined by the love of the God who created you in beauty.

Ever-present God, you know everything about me, even my failures, and yet you love me. Thank you for creating me to be beautiful. Thank you for your grace that sees me as beautiful still. Amen.

How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

— Psalm 104:24

Some of my friends have gotten into birding in the past few years. They keep a list of every type of bird they see. They travel to parks and other special places where they are likely to see a new species of bird to add to their list. When they tell me about it, I am amazed at the number of different species of birds that are out there to be seen. This is true across the animal kingdom: scientists say that the number of different types of creatures on the earth is in the millions.

This vast diversity is a beautiful part of God’s creation, as Psalm 104 shows. In his wisdom God made so many different animals and plants that we haven’t been able to count them all. And in his wisdom God made many different cultures and people as well. This psalm uses poetry to tell about the powerful and beautiful way God made the world. It invites us to praise God for such diverse beauty and for creating the world in the best way possible.

Each of us brings our own type of beauty to the world. Each little brown sparrow sings just a few notes. And God combines with that the huge variety of sounds and other signs of beauty in this world. In all these ways God displays his love for his creation. Let’s praise God for creating a world that is so beautiful and diverse!

Creative God, I praise you because you knew exactly what to create to make the world so beautiful. Thank you for this world that bursts with more variety than I can understand. Amen.