Category: Devotion of the Day

PERSONALIZING THE PROGRAM

Ye shall be witnesses unto me.
Acts 1:8

What we say is a witness, too, but people are moved by the living witness as well as by the spoken testimony. It is slow business getting a congregation warmed up to a missionary program. But let a real live Spirit-filled missionary embody that program and see the difference! We have degenerated into money-raisers for a project or a budget, and what a weariness it is! “Next Sunday we must raise an offering for the orphanage, the church paper, the college.” The causes of Christ do not strike fire until we incarnate them. Dutifully soliciting funds for a church enterprise is hard going. One orphan can be more eloquent than an hour’s speech about the orphanage.

Christianity suffers today because it has become merely a big business in the minds of some and now we must raise the funds to keep the business going. It goes best when it is embodied in flaming witnesses. Christ is a Person, and He reaches other persons through persons, not merely through plans and propaganda. We are propagandizing the faith instead of propagating it.

WE ASKED FOR IT

Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, when he led thee by the way?
Jeremiah 2:17

Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?
Deuteronomy 31:17

Our plight today is our own fault. We asked for it. All our modern evils are come upon us because God is not among us. Of course, He is omnipresent, but He is not among us in that we have not His favor, the smile of His approval.

God has been among us in blessings unnumbered, but we have forgotten Him. And to be lost it is not necessary for a nation to blaspheme God. “The wicked shall be cast into hell and all nations that forget God.”

Even God’s people sometimes ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?” And in the absence of Him we are faced with the presence of evils galore.

We have lost the sense of God in the nation, in the churches, in our lives. The biggest business of the hour is to draw nigh to God that He may draw nigh to us. His presence with us is too often an assumption in our heads instead of an awareness in our hearts.