Category: Devotion of the Day

BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW

Our fathers worshipped in this mountain…I know that Messias cometh.
John 4:20, 25

The Samaritan woman was living between a golden past and a glorious future, but in a bleak and sinful present. She could look back to great days, when her fathers worshiped God, and to greater days ahead, when Messias would come and tell all things. Yet how little did she know that morning that this day would be her greatest, for then she would come to see and know the Master for herself!

How many of us live looking back or ahead, between a holy past and a holier future, but in a hollow present! Some sigh for the good old days when our fathers worshiped in this mountain. Some long for a better day ahead, when the Great Avenger shall vindicate us of our adversaries. But we need not stand at Jacob’s well with our souls unsatisfied. The Messiah has come, He lives today, and He will meet us now where we are and as we are. We cannot go back to the fountains of yesterday nor drink at the springs of tomorrow. But the Living Christ offers living water today which shall be in us a well of water springing up into everlasting life. And we shall leave our old waterpots which we would fain have filled at earth’s broken cisterns to tell others what we have found in Him today.

THE BEST PROMOTER

Promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.
Psalm 75:6,7

Promotion in this world is by no means based on merit. Not even in the religious world. Some of the best preachers hold forth in obscure places, while some who cannot and never will preach occupy important pulpits.

God’s system of promotion does not follow the pattern of this age. It may look like anything but promotion, as when the Spirit sent Philip out of a spiritual awakening into a desert. God “hides” some of His best talent in unknown corners and buries some of His ablest servants in the depths of heathenism. He seems to waste some of His choicest men. They get scant recognition in this scrambled church world today, where servants ride on horses and princes walk as servants. Today, as ever, the prophet walks in the steps of his Lord, without honor in his own country.

It comes to this: which kind of promotion do we seek? A smart politician who knows the “right” people can attain to considerable eminence down here. But the man who lets God promote him is spared all that fever. God may set him in a high place to the chagrin of some of his contemporaries. If he never gets a newspaper headline he will lose no sleep over it, for any place is a “large place” if it is God’s place.