January 10 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading

Devotional

We must tell our needs to God. However, we cannot tell God anything he does not know already. God knows our needs before we ask. It takes much grace and years of experience before we know our own needs.

We're not very good at finding out what our needs are. For one thing, we always get our "wants" and our "needs" confused. Besides, we often deceive ourselves. Some husband may think that he needs another wife, whereas he really needs to learn how to be a husband. Psychiatrists can be helpful because they can show some people what their real needs are. Our emotional lives are often so murky that we need help straightening out the tangle of wishes and disappointments and guilt feelings.

There is great comfort in the thought that God knows our needs. Once a lame man was taken to Jesus. When that pitiful, paralyzed person looked at Jesus, you would think that the Master, along with everybody else, knew the lame man's greatest need. The need was crying out: the man needed to be healed! Yet Jesus said to him: "Your sins are forgiven." Christ knew of a need that was more basic than any need we could discern.

Often our God must be wearied when we tell him our needs. He must say to himself that these are not our real needs. That's why Jesus, when he instructed us in prayer, told us to ask that the Father's name be hallowed and that his kingdom come. Those are our needs as he knows them.

The question is still whether we know that these are our needs. We must not simply say these first lines of the prayer out of politeness, so that we can proceed to our own daily needs. If that's our (unconscious) reasoning, we still have a long way to go, for our real need is God.

Reflections

Try praying the first two petitions of the Lord's Prayer in your own words.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven's Daylight, a modern devotional classic, was originally published by Paideia Press in 1977. This updated edition is copyright 2009 by Faith Alive Christian Resources. You can order a copy of this revised version of the book directly from the publisher.

A man of many accomplishments, Andrew Kuyvenhoven is probably best known for his contributions to Today (formerly The Family Altar), a widely-used monthly devotional booklet associated with the Back to God Hour. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations for this updated edition of Daylight are from the Holy Bible: Today's New International Version copyright 2001, 2005 by the International Bible Society.