A Promise to Exiles

Daily Reading: Lamentations 4

 He will keep you in exile no longer. (Lamentations 4.22)

Devotional Thought: Exile is an awkward, unfamiliar place.  People do things that feel strange … believe things that don’t align with our beliefs … speak a language that is peculiar and unknown.  They observe unfamiliar customs and behave in bizarre ways.  When we’re in exile, we feel clumsy … out of sorts … like everyone else is marching to a drumbeat we can’t hear.

Lamentations 4 is an acrostic poem (the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are used in succession to begin each line) that captures the grief and feeling of exile … the loss of orientation … the confusion at some things going on that are so curious and strange … the emptiness that results from being uprooted and displaced.

But near the end of the chapter, in v. 22, the prophet says, “He will keep you in exile no longer.”  To the people of that day, this was a promise that God would someday bring this time of bewilderment and confusion to an end.  But to us—to people who profess allegiance and devotion to this same God—it’s both a note of assurance and a divine calling.  For those of us that feel exiled by this changing society—a society where school prayer is belittled and respect for Kingdom values is diminishing—it’s a reminder that one day the Lord will come back and set everything right.  But until then, it’s a calling—a calling to be people who offer genuine acceptance to those who feel unsettled and displaced by a pluralistic and secular society.

Am I a person of acceptance, and is my church a place of acceptance?  I hope so, because there’s no lack of people who feel ostracized and exiled in today’s world.

John Whitsett

Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank you for the sense of rescue from exile you offer me and all those who profess you.  May I individually, and we collectively, offer that same acceptance to those who feel uprooted and entangled by life.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Psalm of the Day: Psalm 18.19-24

19 He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.

20 The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.

21 For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God.

22 For all his rules were before me, and his statutes I did not put away from me.

Iw was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt.

So the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.