Daily Devotions from the United Reformed Church will be sent out by email every day from the First Sunday of Advent. A team of writers from different places and perspectives in the URC are reflecting on a reading and offering a short prayer each day for us to use in our own journeys of discipleship. In order to sign up please simply go to: http://tinyurl.com/URCDailyDevotions and complete the form.
Each day we will send out a reading, short reflection and prayer which helps us reflect further on our discipleship. We may be challenged by a new perspective, moved to prayer, urged to action or bemused by a thought we’d not encountered before. The purpose is to encourage us in our daily journey of discipleship as we resource God’s people.
During the first week of Advent we are going to be reflecting on the passages in St Luke’s Gospel about John the Baptist’s birth (and the prophecies of it), the Annunciation and the Magnificat – passages we often tend to skip over in Advent but are worth exploring. We then move on to look at the women in the Messianic line. There are some interesting women in Matthew’s genealogy. We explore the social context of these women who were defined by their ability to find life despite the deathly patriarchal mores of their times. In the third week of Advent we look at the prophecies of the New Age to come and, in the final week we look at the O Antiphons – which we know now as the haunting hymn O Come O Come Emmanuel. An antiphon is a short response generally used in the setting of a psalm. The O antiphons are used from Dec 17th to Dec 23rd and all use, in Latin, an attribute of the expected Messiah. Using the initial (Latin) letters of these titles in reverse order on Dec 24th they spell out Ero Cras, which means “Tomorrow I come”.
We hope these prove a useful resource for you as we enter this season of waiting and expectancy.
Some people have found that a devotion was a great tool to start an Elders’ meeting or Bible study, others used them in worship or other small group settings. The team of over 80 writers are pleased that their work can be used in a variety of settings so please feel free to be creative.
Andy Braunston
Daily Devotion Co-ordinator.
