Thursday 27 Dec 2018

December 27: John 7:14-19

Key Verse: John 7:18
Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.

Devotion:
How many times have you seen or heard people telling you of how great they are or how you should listen to them because they know everything? Maybe they have spent their lives learning something and when you ask they anything to do with that subject they cannot but help tell you how good they are at it! I’m sure we have all met people like this at some stage... and do you find it hard to believe them – even though they may well have learned a lot!

We seem to have our own preconceived ideas about how much knowledge each one of us should have, and anyone who is outside of those bounds is either stupid or is in some way pulling the wool over your eyes; that is just the way we see it! We expect people who have spent a long time in universities to be intelligent. We expect people who drop out of school to not be intelligent. But even though we may think of someone as intelligent, what they say may well make us think they are telling us something other than the truth – we need some sort of easy reference to be able to check up on their stories! Well, we do have the internet now which allows us to validate almost anything, but it’s not always to hand.

So what happens when someone starts to tell you about God? Should be believe everything they say and go along with it or should we validate that as well? This is one area where we certainly do need to validate what people tell us because there are people out there pretending to be Christians and pretending to support God. If what they say does not to agree with God’s Word, then surely they have made their own word up and are following that instead of God’s teaching. When Jesus was teaching others, He taught them what God wanted them to hear and not what He wanted to say or what they wanted to hear. If we stick to God’s Word we will not go against Him and we will always find the truth! We need to seek His Word so that He can get the glory instead of ourselves taking that glory away from God. Far too many people think they can do it better than God! It is not our word but His that we need to teach!

Points to Ponder:
How often do you try showing people how clever you are?

How often do you show people God’s Word?