Category: Devotion of the Day

This is the Day!

This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118:24

The Psalmist does not mean some special day or holiday nor must we limit this to Sunday or some rare occasion. Any day and every day is the day which the Lord hath made. Therefore any day and every day is the day in which to rejoice and be glad. All days are not alike. Some days are ore troublesome than others. But the most troublesome may be the most triumphant.

New Year’s Day has a bad reputation because it is the birthday of so many resolutions that die in infancy! It is not the day that is so important but the God who made it. Any day is somebody’s birthday, and every day really begins a new year. The God who made them all is the Great I Am and lives in a timeless Now. Any day you can begin a new life in Him. “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (II Corinthians 6:2).

And every day you can know Him better, for He is “the same today” (Hebrews 13:8).

The daily devotions are from Day By Day by Vance Havner. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1953.

“Happiness or Happen-ness?

The things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the Gospel.
Philippians 1:12

Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say, Rejoice.
Philippians 4:4

“WHICH HAPPENED” is not in the original, but the idea is. This world’s happiness should be spelled “happenness,” because it depends on what happens. Paul’s joy was not over the things which had happened unto him, things the world would call calamities. Yet he was happy because he knew that all things work together for good to the Christian. What men mean for evil God turns to good, as He did with Joseph.

So amidst all these adverse “happenings” Paul can write from prison, “Rejoice in the Lord, alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” What this world calls happiness is not what God calls joy. His joy is the bequest of a Man of sorrows acquainted with grief, made available to us by His death on a cross. It is a deep, strange joy that may fill the heart when eyes are filled with tears. It is a heavenly joy beyond the tyranny of what happens and whims of circumstance. It abides even when our feelings call us liars.

Thank God for “happiness – whatever happens.”