Friday Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:13-15
Key Verse: 2 Corinthians 5:14
14 For the love of Christ constrains us, judging this, that if one died for all, then all died;
Devotion:
There seems to be two ways of looking at Christians when looking in from the outside world: either we are out of our minds and we are thinking of all manner of outrageous things, or we are totally right. This is where we can either get very confused and hide in a hole, or we can give our burdens to God and allow Him to work things out. As long as the rest of the world is thinking that we are nuts, the only thing we can do is to make sure that even though they think that of us, we must be consistent in lifting up God. We may be regarded as the nuts, but when they see all of us ‘nuts’ doing the same things and lifting up God... maybe they will eventually see there is actually something in this! No matter what the world thinks of us, our actions are going to count.
We can give God the glory through everything that we do and that should be our aim. It should be the fact that we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds that drives us forward so that we can lift His name up in our stead. As long as we all tell the same story, that Christ is the Son of God, came to die for us, rose from the dead and paid for our sin debt, then people are going to have to listen. It is when we fracture our witness and each tell of something different that we get others lost. It is the very fact that the bible stands up for itself that has drawn us to it in the first place. It is through those coherent accounts that we have come to the conclusion that it is the truth.
Eventually people will be able to work it out for themselves; so long as we give a consistent account of what we do believe. If two so called eye witnesses came forward to defend someone in court, the person will most likely be defended properly if they agree. But if they disagree then none of the jury will believe them because their stories differ. God made sure that the people who He chose to commit His Word to paper were people who would all be able to recall the truth.
Points to Ponder:
Do you lift up the truth?
Is your witness in agreement with God’s Word?