Sunday 16 Sep 2012

Sunday Reading: Romans 11:17-21

Key Verse: Romans 11:18
18  Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.

Devotion:
Conflict arises at places even when we think that conflict should be a thing of the past; when we have people that should be celebrating success or happiness we also have people that seem to want to bring that success to an end. Then there are the people who think that they should be the ones being at the centre of the success and not the ones who have been working toward that success. Or, another way of looking at it is that life just does not seem to be as fair as what we think it should be.

There always seem to be much debate about things written down many years ago and God’s Word also gets more than its fair share of people who would try to impose their own beliefs or interpretations on what is written down. Though we cannot hope to be able to get inside the mind of the people that actually wrote the words down for us to read, we can compare what they have written with the words that others have written and come to an informed opinion of what God wants us to understand.

There is absolutely no doubt that God chose the Jews to be His people and that He promised that they would always be a nation that should actively seek Him. There is no doubt that they went through many tough times and that they chose to reject Him in many cases as well. We also know that God said that His Word would be taken out to all people around the world and not just the Jews. But just because there are many more Christians in the world now than there are Jews living in Israel, it does not mean that we have now replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people; just because many Jewish leaders have chosen to reject Christ does not mean that everyone has rejected Christ.

As branches get their nutrients from the trunk and that in turn gets the nutrients from the roots, we are looked upon as the branches and the Jewish people as the roots. Whilst we may not consider that we are getting ’nutrients’ from the Jews, we would not be in the position of enjoying a relationship with Christ if it were not for Christ choosing the Jews in the beginning. We do have a lot of history to absorb as to what God has done for us (the human race) through what He has done for the Jews. Let us therefore never think that they owe us anything or that we are the chosen people in their stead!

Points to Ponder:
Do you like to think of yourself as someone special?

Where would we be without God’s Children?