Category: Devotion of the Day

THE BEST PROMOTER

Promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.
Psalm 75:6,7

Promotion in this world is by no means based on merit. Not even in the religious world. Some of the best preachers hold forth in obscure places, while some who cannot and never will preach occupy important pulpits.

God’s system of promotion does not follow the pattern of this age. It may look like anything but promotion, as when the Spirit sent Philip out of a spiritual awakening into a desert. God “hides” some of His best talent in unknown corners and buries some of His ablest servants in the depths of heathenism. He seems to waste some of His choicest men. They get scant recognition in this scrambled church world today, where servants ride on horses and princes walk as servants. Today, as ever, the prophet walks in the steps of his Lord, without honor in his own country.

It comes to this: which kind of promotion do we seek? A smart politician who knows the “right” people can attain to considerable eminence down here. But the man who lets God promote him is spared all that fever. God may set him in a high place to the chagrin of some of his contemporaries. If he never gets a newspaper headline he will lose no sleep over it, for any place is a “large place” if it is God’s place.

“BY HEART” OR “BY HEARSAY”?

Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.
John 4:42

The Samaritans “believed” (v. 39), and now they knew the Saviour “by heart,” for themselves. There is a second-hand, by-proxy knowledge of the Lord as a report but not as a reality. Andrew and Philip were not content for Peter and Nathanael to know Jesu by hearsay, they brought Peter and Nathanael to the Lord Himself. We have heard and believed the report of Him, and we must, for “faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” But how many in our churches have had a personal encounter with the Saviour?

The Samaritan woman, like Philip, said, “Come and see.” Much of our personal work, our Sunday-school teaching, our preaching, falls short of that. We disseminate information about Jesus, but we often fail to clinch the matter by bringing men and women into His presence. True, they cannot see Him as the Samaritans saw Him. But they can believe on Him and know Him “by heart,” as they did.

And how often is the “deeper Christian life,” or whatever you may call it, hearsay? We have heard it in a sermon, read it in a book; but that is all. Job knew it “by heart,” not hearsay, when he cried: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear but now mine eye seeth thee.”