Be Thou My Vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship (Wheaton: Crossway, 2021) is a delightful surprise. Edited by Jonathan Gibson it is arranged in a cycle of 31 days and on each day it includes:

• A call to worship,
• Words of adoration,
• A reading from God’s moral law from various places in Scripture,
• A confession of sin borrowed from the 1552 Book of  Common Prayer and other sources,
• A passage of assurance of pardon,
• A historic Christian creed,
• A response of praise, a place for a reading from the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Shorter Catechism,
• A prayer for illumination drawn from various sources,
• A place for Scripture reading (following McCheyne’s Bible Reading Plan),
• A prayer for intercession drawn from various sources,
• A place for making one’s petitions,
• And the Lord’s Prayer.

This is not the “quiet time” guide I was given in 1976. I wonder how this might have aided my spiritual development as a young Christian.

This guide to daily worship draws from some marvelous sources, is well and carefully organized, and serves to give creedal context and structure to the Christian’s prayer and Bible reading. The author faces directly and answers a question that might trouble thoughtful Bible readers: where does Scripture command us to “have a time of worship each day either as an individual or as a family”? In fact, Gibson admits, “there is no explicit command” to have devotions and yet it is something that Christians have done since the beginning of the Christian church. Gibson surveys several passages from the Old and New Testaments and concludes, “the habit is certainly assumed or implied in a number of places.” In Matthew 6:6 our Lord did say, “when you go into your closet.” The implication is that we do this and we do so not in order to earn or keep God’s favor but because we have received God’s favor freely, in Christ, through faith alone. We come to him as adopted sons, in the Son making our prayers and supplications known.

This guide may be used individually or with the whole family. It is a wonderful introduction to historic Reformed habits of worship. It is also an excellent introduction to the historic Christian language of prayer.

The volume is well bound in cloth, with 3 ribbon markers for the major sections of the book, and reasonably priced. It comes in a protective box for shelving.

Crossway provided this volume for review.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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