Daily Devotions
Friday, July 25, 2025
This devotion pairs with this weekend’s Lutheran Hour sermon, which can be found at lhm.org.
Luke 11:1a – Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when He finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray ….”
Getting the talk started—that was the most important thing they did. But he only realized it later.
He didn’t notice it at the time because it was like how a fish doesn’t notice the water he’s breathing. It was all around him but escaped his notice. “It was too big,” he said, “as central to our work as our respiration was to our lives.” Every day, as they went about their normal business, the main business was always to “get the talk started.” Because without the talk, people condemned to death “have a nasty habit of going insane.”
Those are the observations of the narrator in Stephen King’s novel, The Green Mile. When we meet him, he’s an old man telling us about his work in the death house of the state prison, where, over the course of his career, he supervised the execution of 78 persons. The title of the novel, The Green Mile, refers to the hallway on which the condemned walked on his or her last day. The walkway was only about 60 paces long, but it felt like a mile. And green? That just happened to be the color of the linoleum. Years later, the old man muses about this mile, sitting in the solarium of the nursing home that every day feels more like a death house: “We each owe a death,” he says. “There are no exceptions. I know that. Sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.” And even more so if you’ve got no one to talk to.
One of the hard facts of life is death. And one of the hard truths of Scripture is that death is “the wages of sin” (Romans 6:23a). Ever since Adam and Eve rebelled against God, we’ve all been under the same sentence: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19b). For those baptized into Jesus, death has already come. You all have been baptized into His death, the Bible says (see Romans 6:3-5). And because we’ve been united with Him in death we also trust that we will be united with Him in a resurrection like His. But that future resurrection of the body is still to come. And the long, Green Mile is still ahead of us. Walk it we must. But we do not walk alone. God is with us and central to His work is getting the talk started with us.
God’s talk is different than our talk. God’s talk doesn’t even need hearers to be effective. God’s talk makes hearers where there were none. God’s talk makes the deaf hear and the dead live. And God wants to get this talk started with you. Jesus called it “prayer.” He even gave us some good words to pray to get us started. So, talk to Him. Talk out loud, in your heart, and on the way. Talk to Him in Scripture, in song, and in fellowship with other believers. Talk to Him from the valley of death’s shadow and the cold linoleum of death’s house. And He will be there, now, and when the long Green Mile is behind us, when the dead are raised, when God’s kingdom comes, and prayer becomes the air we breathe.
WE PRAY: Dear Jesus, teach me to pray. Amen.
This Daily Devotion was written by Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Speaker for The Lutheran Hour.
Reflection Questions:
- What helps you stay focused on God’s commands and promises while you pray?
- Pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly. If you were to pick one part of the prayer and let it be a “launch pad” for more prayers, which part would it be?
- Who is someone you could pray for today? Who is someone you could pray with?
Today's Readings:
Psalms 93-95Philippians 4