Saturday Reading: Ruth 1:15-16
Key Verse: Ruth 1:16
16 And Ruth said, Do not beg me to leave you, to return from following after you. For where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Devotion:
How much of an impression do you make on people when you tell them about something? Are you one of these people that would make a really good sales person because you can convince others of just about anything or are you one of those people that can only tell it how it is? It does take all types to make up this world and it certainly needs all types otherwise we would never be able to learn things from each other. So when you tell someone of a friend of yours, do you think they would want to get to know your friend or do you think they would want to run in the other direction?
You see, when you start to tell someone about someone else, that first impression may well be what counts when they think about befriending them or not. How many people have you not even tried to get to know just because of what someone else said about them? So how do we go about describing God to others? How do we tell others about Jesus and about Christianity? Do we make it sound like a total bore and something that they would never want to get close to or do we make it sound like something that is never to be missed? Or are you aiming for something in between?
Which ever way we look at it we are going to be making those first impressions by the way that we tell them about our relationship with God. What comes out of our mouths is going to depend on that relationship that we have with Him; we could end up describing our best friend or we could end up widening the gap between Him and them. Naomi made such an impression on Ruth that Ruth wanted to stick by her; it was not just because she had nowhere to go but because she knew that Naomi had a God that she could trust – and that was just from her impression of what God was like. In order for us to be able to make that sort of impression on others, we have to have a relationship with God that others would want to strive to have too. There is nothing more encouraging that seeing a strong relationship grow stronger...
Points to Ponder:
How do you describe your friends?
How do you describe God?
