URC Daily Devotion 31 July 2026

Reflection 
Yesterday we explored how God calls. Today we see that just as God calls, so too does Jesus. Peter and Andrew, James and John, leave their livelihoods and family and follow Jesus.  We share in a small and different way that sense of being called to follow Jesus. Election (or choosing) in Reformed spirituality has always been ‘for’ something, to share in God’s work, to live the life of Christ’s kingdom so that his rule may determine how we live our lives.

When I was doing some research a few years ago, I read the obituary of one of our ministers who had recently died. I knew nothing of him. I’d never met him. I discovered that he had  been a scholarship boy who had gained a first in maths at Liverpool University and gone on to work with Ernest Rutherford as a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1920s when mathematical physics was in one of its greatest and most exciting periods of development. He was responsible for a good part of the maths that lay behind the splitting of the atom. He went to a meeting at church and heard an appeal for someone to go and work in Malawi as a missionary, mainly in education. He heard the call of Christ and went. The PhD remained unfinished, and the glittering prizes of a career in Cambridge mathematics were laid aside without demur. Somewhere there is the reality of the Reformed doctrine of election.

Election is ‘for’ something. Ours is a spirituality of joyful and serious engagement with the world with all its problems and opportunities. Karl Barth once said that when we pray we should do so with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. We are disciples ‘for’ something!

Prayer
Lord God
You have a work for us.
Open our eyes that we may see it.
Free our minds that we may understand it.
Enliven our wills that we may do it,
and to your name be the praise and glory
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen