Devotion of the Day

The Crowd Or The Christ?

And every man went unto his own house. (But) Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
John 7:53; 8:1

Our lonely Lord, beset by the Pharisees, despised and rejected of men, took to the solitude of the Mount of Olives, while men returned to the comfort of their homes. He had nowhere to lay His head, having come to His own, who received Him not. Many a night He spent in prayer, while even His disciples slumbered.

This world still goes “every man to his own house.” Alas, even we Christians do, for “all week their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s.” We pursue our own interests, we live our own lives, we know nothing of the Mount of Olives= concern for the plight of our hearts, the condition of the church, the state of the world. We pay God our respects on Sunday, but we return to putter around our own premises. We sing, “I=ll Go With Him Through The Garden,” when the olive trees would never recognize us, for we never accompany our Lord there.

Our Lord was a solitary figure in His day, and to this hour the deeper Christian life is a lonely life. You will never “follow the crowd“ to the Mount of Olives, for few go that way.

You can follow the crowd or the Christ, but not both, for they go in opposite directions.

Quote of the Day

There is a nervous, unstable segment of the religious world today, ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Like the Athenians of Paul’s time, they are forever seeking some new thing. Every time a new theologian comes out with some novel slant on God or the church or the world, every time a new translation breaks into print, they cry “Eureka!” The Bible must be viewed in “in the light of” every fad that blows into town, in the light of science or psychology or philosophy or current events. Isn’t it about time to turn things around and view these things in the light of the Bible? After all these centuries, must the Book of books be put on trial every few days while a panel of churchmen pool their ignorance in a symposium? I do not get excited when a physicist, for instance, endorses the Bible. It gives me a little more faith in the physicist but not necessarily in the Bible. When Bob Ingersoll was lecturing on “The Mistakes of Moses,” somebody remarked that he would be interested in hearing Moses lecture on the mistakes of Ingersoll! It would be comical if it were not so pitiful-this trying to make the Word of God pay tribute at all the little toll gates of this befuddled age. Let us feed the meat of the Word to hungry-hearted people who never heard of existentialism and let theologians pick the bones.