Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to negotiate with Adolf Hitler, but you couldn’t do business with that madman. The times called not for a Chamberlain but a Churchill. It was compromise or confrontation, and compromise, as always, did not work. Confrontation is an ugly word in religious circles today. We are developing diplomats, not prophets. We are on Carmel and there can be no summit conference with the priests of Baal. It is Baal or Jehovah, and in the showdown, the God that answereth by fire, let Him be God.
Devotion of the Day
What Are You Looking At?
Looking unto Jesus.
Hebrews 12:2
We hear a lot these days about “looking up,” “keeping your chin up,” and other exhortations, by which this poor world tries to whistle its way past the graveyard. But the value of the uplook depends on what you are looking at. Looking up avails little if it is only a forced optimism starting at the blue sky.
The Christian look s and lives even as the snake-bitten Israelites were healed by a look at the brazen serpent. “Look unto me, and be ye saved,” is God’s invitation (Isa. 45:22). Then we live the Christian life, “off-looking unto Jesus” (Heb. 9:28). But the value of faith lies in its object, and our look of faith has meaning only if “we see Jesus.”
A lot of our present-day looking up sees nothing, for it is not looking at anything. Any object other than Jesus is only a disappointment. He is the only satisfying object of the soul’s gaze. “They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed” (Ps. 34:5). “Looking up” and “smiling through,” with a Micawberish hope that something will happen will never get you through. Fix your eyes on Jesus!