Sunday 1 Apr 2012

Sunday Reading: 1 John 4:5-8

Key Verse: 1 John 4:7
7  Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

Devotion:
One of the things that we will always come up against is the difference between how we live as Christians and how the world lives. The more we live for Christ and the more that we want to be able to please Him, the more that we find that our lives are so very different from the people of the world. When Jesus said that we should be separate from the world it cannot be displayed any better than by looking at the differences between our lives and the lives of those people around us. If we find that our lives are exactly the same as of the people of the world, then I fear that we have lost our direction and we are following the ways of the world instead.

So when someone says that I am weird or that I have a very different life to them, I am often quite pleased about it because I then know that I am showing others that I am different! When we then try to describe why we live the lives we do, they look at us as if we are from one the old shows like “Tales of the Unexpected”. In reality, though, we are beginning to understand the events around us in a very different way because we are beginning to look at things from God’s perspective rather than just our own view.

God is the one who has first showed us that He is very different by showing us through the example of Jesus Christ. When we see just how He lived His life, we marvel at the things that He did but also at the way that He acted. His ways were to love those people around Him in such a manner as to make them stop and think about that love. God is love. That is to say that everything that He does is out of love and is therefore an example of love. So if we are seeking love, then surely we need to start by finding Him first of all.

I am so very thankful that I do know Christ and that I have been able to understand just one small portion of that love that He has shown me. Through that understanding that He has given me I am able to move forward and to embrace the world around me in a whole new way; not as the rest of the world sees it but more along the lines of how God wants me to see it. God sees the truth and He sees all the lies and pretence that we lift up to hide behind. Being able to identify the truth and to live for Him in a whole new way is something I continually hope that I am able to teach others.

Points to Ponder:
Do you stand out from the crowd?

Do you fit it with Christ’s ways?