The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone;
the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.
—Psalm 118:22–24
How we enter a new day is generally how we will experience the entire day. For over twenty-eight years I have begun the day by reading and reflecting on the passages provided in the “Daily Service,” a two-year lectionary found toward the back of the Book of Common Prayer.
Jonathan Aitken had reached the pinnacle of a political career in Great Britain that put him in contention to become the next prime minister. Then his world fell apart; he was arrested for various crimes and he found himself in a jail cell with the lowest of the low. He had fallen from the top to the bottom, losing everything, but in the midst of his despair, he discovered the Bible and soon enough discovered a lectionary that put him in touch with the Word of God for the first time in his life.
In an article on “the Lectionary Life,” Aitken quotes Thomas Cranmer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: “Blessed Lord who has caused all holy scripture to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them…”
Aitken goes on to say, “the point of the lectionary is that it guides readers through well-trodden paths of Scripture with unseen companions, conservatively numbered in the hundreds of millions, from all parts of the body of Christ around the world.”
This is exactly what happened in my own life; on February 13th, 1991, I joined millions of Christians on a journey of joy in discovering daily that indeed “all Scripture is breathed out by God and (is) profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:18). I had entered not only a new day; I had discovered, along with Jonathan Aitken and millions of others, a new world and a pathway to a better one.
Think biblically.
—from Eric Kampmann's, Signposts