Monday's Meditation
"Devotion is neither private nor public prayer, thought public and private prayers are part of devotion. Devotion signifies a life given or devoted to God.
"The devout, therefore, are people who do not live to their own will, or in the way and spirit of the world, but only to the will of God."
"Many people are strict when it come to times and place of devotion, but when the service and the church is over, they live like those that seldom or never come there. In their way of life , their manner of spending their time and money, in the cares and fears, in their pleasure and indulgences, in their labors and diversions, they are like the rest of the world."
The term devout often brings stuffy and fussy images to our mind; if not completely difficult to be around because the "devout" are so focused on telling us what lousy people we are. But here, William Law, paints a different sort of picture of the "devout." The way I read Law in the above passages, the devout person is humble - the sort of humility that causes a person to neither think highly nor lowly of oneself. But, the thing that stands out to me the most about the sort of devotion lived out by those labeled as being devout is the focus on hearing and obeying God.
posted by MoLak Jedi @ 12:38 AM
