Week 1, Day 1 - Celebrate the Jubilee

"Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you." Leviticus 25:10

REFLECT

This is day one of a fifty-day journey. This time may be a kind of personal spiritual inventory for you. It may be a time of discovery. It should be a time of renewal - because if "Jubilee" means anything, it means renewal.

We all need seasons in life when we come back to the first things, the central truths, the top priorities. That's what all the different kinds of Sabbath's did for God's people in the Old Testament. Jubilee was celebrated once every fifty years, a kind of super-Sabbath, which God wanted the people to have so they could really stop, look at the compass of their lives, and see what direction they were going.

The word "Jubilee" means the sounding of a trumpet. In Old Testament times, that trumpet was not a polished brass instrument, but the ram's horn, the "shofar". When blown, the shofar makes a loud, haunting, arresting sound - like something out of the wild, something that startles. Jubilee is a moment when God arrests our attention. It is a time when God can get us to stop doing the petty things, the temporary things, the things that won't last, so that we can learn again about life lived for eternity.

Jubilee was a time to "proclaim liberty" because God's work frees us from all bondage, to practice rest (in context to not plant the fields for a year) so that we can be restored and evaluate our work; to heal wounds of the past, and to make a new commitment to justice. It is these themes and others that will be our focus in the seven weeks of the fifty-day spiritual journey.

Make It Real

Take five minutes sometime today to read Leviticus 25:8-31. Don't worry if some of the concepts seem strange now. Just ask the Holy Spirit that he will use these fifty days in your life to challenge, to heal, and to direct your ways. Decide now when and where each day you will read each page of the devotionals so that you will faithfully follow along for the duration. ENJOY!

Day 2