Matins Devotions: September 3-5, 2025

WEDNESDAY

1 Kings 19

It’s understandable why Elijah is so despondent in our text for today. For some time, he’s been dealing with the wickedness of Queen Jezebel. She has led his people astray into the worship of her idols. And despite having just slaughtered the prophets of Baal and having clearly demonstrated that his God is true and hers is false, she isn’t giving up. She’s still pursuing him, still seeking his death, and doing so even more ravenously. She’s not giving up and she has armies. Elijah has nothing, he thinks, and so he figures he might as well die. What else is there to do when you can win?

But Elijah most certainly does not have nothing. In fact, he has something far greater than the armies of Israel and the strength of Jezebel. He has the faithfulness of the one true God, the same God who swears to Elijah that every enemy he can’t seem to defeat will not escape divine judgment. Even if Elijah doesn’t have strength enough or days enough to conquer the unconquerable foe, God will conquer her through those who come after Elijah. And so, Elijah has something far better to do than give up and die. He can keep going. He can anoint kings and prophets who will carry on the battle after he’s gone, the battle that God Himself will win.

And so it is for you. Satan, like his daughter Jezebel, is relentless. He keeps pursuing you, trying to drag you into temptation, trying to fill your heart with despair. And no matter how many times you receive the gifts of God, the devil just keeps getting back up. So why should you bother soldiering on when this isn’t going to change? Because you have something far greater than whatever strength the serpent has. You have the strength of God, the strength of the One who crushed the serpent at Calvary. You have the strength of the One who already conquered the devil when He destroyed your sins at the cross, just as you have the strength of the One who will eternally conquer the beast and toss him in the pit on the last day. So get up. Keep going. Anoint kings and prophets by teaching your children, your children’s children about the love of Christ. Anoint kings and prophets by inviting your neighbors to church, by sharing your faith with the next generation, those who will keep fighting the good fight after you’re gone. Don’t despair. Get up. Keep going. Jesus has won and will win. 

THURSDAY

Ephesians 4:1-24

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I remember having a conversation with my friend Justin about fashion trends. We were noting how it was easy for people in what was then our current era to be embarrassed by the big hair of the 80s or the flannel shirts of the early 90s, but nobody seemed to know what we’d be embarrassed by in ten years. Justin guessed that one thing would be those oversized trucker hats guys used to wear. That turned out to be an accurate prediction, something I attribute to my friend’s strong sense of self-awareness. But I don’t think your average person would have that kind of foresight. For most people, whatever is trendy at the moment never seems like a trend. It always seems the unshakable way things will always be.

So it is with fashion. So it is with theology. In our reading from Ephesians, St. Paul urges us to ‘no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” Ok, well, what do these winds of doctrine look like? It’s always easy to see it in hindsight. It’s easy to see how people in the 90s were deceived by the trendy end times false doctrines found in the Left Behind books, and it’s easy to see how people in the 70s were led astray by their embarrassing flirtations with the charismatic movement. But what about today? How do we know what trendy doctrines today will look embarrassing in a decade? 

Well, I think there are two signs we Lutherans can typically use to identify our contemporary trucker hat doctrines, signs that we also found in the charismatic and dispensationalist movements. The first is that these doctrines come from outside of our circles. And the second is that the people who talk about this stuff all the time very much seem to want to talk about it more than they want to talk about Jesus. And while there may be many issues that feature these signs, two issues  that come to my mind, two issues that I think we will all find a bit dated and embarrassing in the future are the debates over Christian Nationalism and women’s headcoverings. I’m not saying that there is no point in discussing these issues, of course. Any theological questions people ask in good faith are worth discussing and holding up to the Scriptures. But I am saying tha it’s not worth tearing ourselves apart taking sides in fights started by Reformed or the Trad Catholic voices that are often far more interested in discussing Christian kingdoms or Christian piety than they are in talking about Christ Himself. Likewise, we shouldn’t bind ourselves or others to a certain position on issues where we are entirely free because Christ has set us free, no matter how loudly people insist otherwise.

Women, veil or don’t veil. But whichever option you pick, do it in a spirit of humility, knowing that the veil separating men and God has been lifted by the blood of Christ. Men and women, believe that it’s best to have a secular state or a Christian one. But whichever option you pick, live your life focusing on the greater citizenship in heaven purchased for you in the atoning sacrifice of God’s own Son. Don’t take hobby horse issues put into your brain by fools or false teachers  and then turn them into the lens through which you see the entirety of the Scriptures. Keep Christ as that lens. Orient your theological thinking in a way that always keeps you hungering for and feasting on the mercy of Jesus. To paraphrase St. Paul, grow up, take off the trucker hat and put on the robe of Christ’s righteousness, the only garment that will never fall out of fashion in the Kingdom of God.

FRIDAY

Psalm 56:8-13

When I was in my early twenties, I think I’d just finished college, I was sitting on the front porch with my mom who had noticed that I seemed rather despondent. She asked me what was wrong and I opened up to her about how I was frustrated that I was single. I had tried pretty hard for a few years to meet someone. I’d gone on dates, and I’d met a couple girls that I fell rather hard for. But they didn’t fall back.

“Don’t worry,” my mother told me. “You’ll meet someone eventually.”

I knew she was trying to comfort me, but I angrily barked at her, “you don’t know that. You can’t know that.” It was a terrible way to speak to my mother, something I still regret. But in that moment, she could see that my pain was deeper than I’d been letting on, in typical male fashion. You see, I didn’t want a girlfriend because I wanted the status or wanted someone to take to the movies. I wanted a girlfriend because I was deeply and profoundly lonely. I wanted a girlfriend because I wanted to be loved. And it’s an excruciating thing when you try and try and try to find someone to love you and nobody wants to.

So for a few years, every now and then, I'd strike out and then I’d lose sleep at night or I’d cry, wondering what I did wrong with the girls who would lose interest in me after a bit, wondering why I wasn’t worthy of love. And after awhile, it just seemed like all of that sorrow was in vain, that it had no purpose. It wasn’t giving me more success. It didn’t look like I was any closer to being healed of the pain. It seemed like God wasn’t paying attention to any of my sorrow. It seemed like all my tears were just leaking into the darkness and that I had no real reason to think this would ever change.

How I wish that, instead of yelling at my mother, I would have found comfort in David’s words from Psalm 56. “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” In other words, here, David is proclaiming that when we are kept awake at night with troubled hearts, our troubles do not, in fact, leaking into the darkness, never to be known or seen by God. When you weep, the number of our tears is not unknown to our Father in heaven. He sees all of this. He keeps track of it. He measures all the residue of our suffering and He does so in order to fulfill His promise to take all our griefs away forever. He knows the number of your griefs so that He can multiply it and give you a far greater measure of joy.

In this life, God would soon drive away all my loneliness. Within a year, I would meet the woman who became my wife. But even if God hadn’t given me the greatest woman I’d never known, even if I’d died a lonely bachelor, my agony would not have been in vain. Because Jesus died for me, because He gave up the blood from His veins to forgive my sins and make me worthy of the kingdom, then I wasn’t unworthy of love. I had already been covered in that worthiness in the waters of my baptism. And so I had the promise that my loneliness would one day be gone forever and that the God who kept count of all my sorrows would give me belonging and peace in numbers ten thousand times greater than my suffering.

This God, this same loving Father, He will do the same for you. Even if He doesn’t take away your afflictions in this life, He most certainly will in the life to come. Trust in Christ, and on that day, He will show you the bottles filled with your tears so He can show you the ocean filled with His undying love for you.