Today’s Devotional
If you have ever sat in a service and mouthed the words to a hymn you stopped hearing years ago, you already know how praise can become wallpaper. The melody plays, the lyrics scroll, and your voice participates while the rest of you drifts somewhere else entirely. Glory, majesty, power, authority. The words land like coins dropped into a jar you forgot was there.
Jude closes his letter with this declaration, and what strikes me is the span of it. “Before all ages, now and forevermore.” He is stating coordinates. Glory is not something God receives when we finally get around to noticing him. It existed before anything we could name, it holds right now in this ordinary moment, and it will continue long after our attention moves on to something else. The praise is not fragile. It does not depend on whether we feel it.
That might sound like it lets us off the hook, but it does the opposite. If God’s majesty does not need our amazement to be real, then our amazement is not a performance for his benefit. It is a recalibration for ours. The cynicism that creeps in after years of familiar faith is not proof that the words have gone hollow. It is a sign that we stopped looking at what the words were pointing toward.
Time to reflect
Sit with these questions honestly before moving on:
- When was the last time a word about God surprised you, and what had to happen for that surprise to get through?
- Which of these four words, glory, majesty, power, authority, feels most distant from your actual experience of God right now?
- Is your familiarity with faith language protecting you from something you would rather not feel?
- What would change in your morning if you believed these words described something happening right now, not something that happened long ago?
Prayer Of The Day
God, we have said your name so many times that it sometimes passes through us without stopping. We have sung about your glory in rooms where we were thinking about groceries, and we have read about your power on screens we scrolled past a second later. We are not proud of that, but we are honest about it. Teach us to see what Jude saw when he wrote these words. Not a formula for closing a letter, but something so real that the only response was to name it and say amen. Interrupt our familiarity. Let the old words carry their original weight again, even if that weight is heavier than we expected. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Strengthening Faith
Let these words move from your screen into your day:
- Read Jude 1:24-25 aloud, slowly, three times. On the third reading, pause on every noun and let it settle before moving to the next one.
- Pick one of the four attributes, glory, majesty, power, or authority, and spend five minutes writing what that word means to you right now, not what it is supposed to mean.
- Tell someone today about one specific moment when God felt real to you, even if it was a long time ago. Say it plainly, without hedging.
- Read Psalm 145:1-7. Notice how David circles the same ideas Jude names. Let his language refresh the vocabulary you have grown used to.
- Before you eat your next meal, say a prayer that uses none of your usual phrases. Find new words for the same God.
- At some point today, step outside and stand still for sixty seconds. Do not pray. Do not think. Just notice what is already there.
Today Wisdom
Familiarity is not the enemy of faith. Complacency is. The words glory and majesty have not gotten smaller. Our willingness to look at what they describe is what shrinks. And the looking can begin again on any ordinary afternoon, without ceremony, without permission, whenever you decide the old words deserve your full attention again.
