“Please stand, and place your hands over your hearts …”

What are some of the things you have memorized?

• Your phone and social security numbers?

• Your anniversary? (Guys, if you get that one wrong, you’re headed for the dog house!).

• Maybe your license plate number?

• A dozen or so passwords for website access?

• A sales pitch?

• Some people have memorized lines — even whole portions of dialogue — from their favorite movies.

Here’s one most of us will know from memory: “I pledge allegiance, to …”

You know the rest of it.

Usually when we say the pledge of allegiance, we unthinkingly recite something we memorized when we were a kid. Our recitation often isn’t accompanied by sober pondering and heartfelt devotion to what we’re saying, it’s usually something we say from rote. Yet, if we were put into a position of being questioned about what we’re saying, we would likely affirm true allegiance to what we cite.

But how about this one:

“Therefore, let us offer through Jesus a continual sacrifice of praise to God, proclaiming our allegiance to his name,” Hebrews 13:15.

When the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to “… proclaiming our allegiance to his name,” it’s not a hollow pledge made by rote that he has in mind, especially when we consider what “allegiance” means. Dictionary.com defines “allegiance” as “the loyalty of a citizen to his or her government or of a subject to his or her sovereign.”

Have you proclaimed that kind of allegiance to God, a pledge of your loyalty to Him as your sovereign? Is your pledge to your Creator a solemn statement of devotion, or just another memorized sentence?

Scotty