Category: Devotion of the Day

WOUNDED AFRESH

What are these wounds in thine hands?…These with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.
Zecchariah 13:6

Our Lord’s most grievous wounds are suffered at the hands of professing Christians, those who claim to be His friends. Judas was not the only man who has betrayed Jesus, nor is Peter the sole disciple who has denied Him. He is daily crucified afresh by those who call Him Lord, Lord, and do not His commands.

The present-day dens of iniquity, the liquor shops, theaters, the card playing and gambling, all the big, booming business of sin would practically be out of business if all church members withdrew their support. Staggering bums in the gutters are of little value to the devil. He prizes most the men and women who wear the livery of saints and live the lives of sinners.

Indeed, our Lord is wounded by this foul and blasphemous world. But His deepest scars He gets at the hands of those who dare to claim His Name. Shame on us who sing of His cross on Sunday and crucify Him afresh all week!

THE BELOVED UNSEEN

Whom having not seen, ye love.
I Peter 1:8

Walking with a little four-year-old, I said something about loving Jesus. “But how can I love Him,” she asked, “when I can’t see Him?”

Thus she posed a problem which has occupied not a few grown-ups. Peter had seen Jesus. He was writing to Christians who had not. Yet they loved Him, anyway, and though now they saw Him not, yet believing, they rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

We cannot see Him, but He lives and we can believe. And if we trust Him the Spirit makes Him real and the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. And we make our way through this evil world in love with One we have never seen. We are not infatuated with a hero of fiction, a memory or an ideal. We love a Living Person who was and is, and we shall be like Him, for one day we shall see Him as He is.

Yes, we can love Him though we cannot see Him.