Devotion of the Day

Living A Double Life

They feared the Lord, and served their own Gods.
II Kings 17:33

The Lord was the God of their lips but not of their lives. And their number is legion today who give God the allegiance of lip but not life. Our Lord described them, quoting from Isaiah: “The people draweth nigh me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.” He asked, “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” Paul writes of those “who profess that they know God; but in works they deny him.”

It is an awful hypocrisy that declares with the lips what it denies with the life. We lie when we profess to fear the Lord at 11 A. M. on Sunday after we have served our own gods all week. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” Worship and work must bear the same witness. It is what we serve that tells the tale. The shame of too many church members is that they lead a double life; they fear the Lord and serve their own gods.

Quote of the Day

The whole creation is on tiptoe…” (Romans 8:18, Phillips) and groans awaiting the redemption of nature. Who can listen to the robin’s “all clear” in springtime, or the wood thrush at sundown singing his vespers, without sensing the longing of creation for a better time to come? Was Goethe thinking of this when he wrote, “Often have I had the sensation as if nature in waiting sadness entreated something of me so that not to understand what she longed for cut me to the heart”? Dr. A. T. Robertson wrote “This mystical sympathy of physical nature with the work of grace is beyond the comprehension of most of us. But who can disprove it?” John Keble put it this way:

It was not then a poet’s dream
An idle vaunt of song,
Such as beneath the moon’s soft beam
On vacant fancies throng,
Which bids me see in heaven or earth,
In all things fair around,
Strong yearnings for a blest new birth
With sinless glories crowned.