Category: Devotion of the Day

What’s In A Surname?

And Simon he surnamed Peter.
Mark 3:16

Our Lord had two outstanding apostles, Peter and Paul. Peter He surnamed and Paul He renamed. To Peter He said, “Thou art Simon…..thou shalt be called Cephas.” A lot had to happen before the handful of sand become a rock. But Jesus saw not merely the man he was but the man he was to be. Not that our Lord went around “seeing the good in everybody,” the latent possibilities, calling out “hidden powers.” He knew what was in man.” He saw within Simon nothing that Simon could make of himself, but rather what God would make of him.

To educate the old Adam is to make him doubly dangerous. To polish him is to render him far more deceptive. To make him more religious is to leave him tenfold more the child of hell. When Jesus saw Simon, he saw Peter, not by reformation but by transformation.

“Thou art…thou shalt be.” Move out of your name into your surname! Come to Him just as you are, and by His grace be what you may become! What’s in a surname? Everything, when it means that! “And Simon he surnamed Peter.”

“Some Through The Fire”

And I will bring the third part through the fire.
Zechariah 13:9

Why some lives move along in story-book fashion to happy endings, while others are a long tale of woe-that is one of the puzzles we shall have to let eternity explain. We know only that, while some pilgrims seem to travel mostly in green pastures and beside still waters, others must know flood and fire.

“God leads His dear children along,” but while they arrive eventually at the same destination, they do not fare the same en route. We are often perplexed but we need not be in despair, for even though the furnace be heated seven times hotter there will be with us one “like the Son of God.”

If you seem to have been “chosen in the furnace of affliction,” “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial that is to try you as though some strange thing happened unto you, but rejoice,” because it brands you as a partaker of Christ’s sufferings.

The Great Refiner is at work, and His “refined people” do not get that way along flowery fields but in fiery furnaces.