The Well
The Well |
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Connecting Hope to the Hurting | |
Wednesday
January 2, 2008
Obey God because you are his children. Don't slip back into your old ways of
doing evil; you didn't know any better then. But now you must be holy in
everything you do, just as God—who chose you to be his children—is holy. For he
himself has said, "You must be holy because I am holy."
And remember that the
heavenly Father to whom you pray has no favorites when he judges. He will judge
or reward you according to what you do. So you must live in reverent fear of him
during your time as foreigners here on earth. For you know that God paid a
ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And
the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver. He paid for you with the
precious lifeblood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him
for this purpose long before the world began, but now in these final days, he
was sent to the earth for all to see. And he did this for you.
Through Christ
you have come to trust in God. And because God raised Christ from the dead and
gave him great glory, your faith and hope can be placed confidently in God. Now
you can have sincere love for each other as brothers and sisters because you
were cleansed from your sins when you accepted the truth of the Good News. So
see to it that you really do love each other intensely with all your hearts.
I Peter 1:14-22
One of these days I am going to do a search on how many times God told His people that in His Kingdom obedience is better than sacrifice. This truth began to reach my heart nine years ago, and I would love to say that it grows "sweeter as the days go by," but I haven't reached the state of perfect obedience — yet! Oh, how our Father desires that we love and serve Him with a heart cleansed from selfish motives. He knows the joy our hearts will feel when we stand clean before Him, spotless through the blood of the lamb.
In the devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers, the writing for January 30 is highlighted with yellow and underlined with pink. I hope these words speak to you in the same way they have to me and hopefully they will add some clarity to today's scripture: "Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be proclaimers of the gospel of God¼Reality is not human goodness, or holiness, or heaven, or hell — it is redemption¼as long as our eyes are focused on our own personal holiness, we will never even get close to the full reality of redemption. Christian workers fail because they place their desire for their own holiness above their desire to know God¼God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character. Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose — to proclaim the gospel of Christ."
Such is the desire of God for us, to be hopefully abandoned to the goal of reaching the lost and hurting with His message of hope. We can genuinely sing, "Lift up your head, your redemption draweth nigh." We are ransomed, redeemed, bought from the grasp of Satan and delivered into the hands of God. He can be trusted to teach us to love with His love, we simply need to surrender all!
