Category: Devotion of the Day

Fair-Weather Repentance

The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance.
Romans 2:4

We ought not wait for the hour of trial, the time of chastening to set our house in order, to take stock of ourselves, to have our commission renewed. God’s goodness not His scourging alone, is meant to lead us to repentance. The day of blessing should bring us to the mourner’s bench, and then we might avert the painful discipline. If we judged ourselves in the sunshine we might not be judged in the shadow.

Thatch your roof in dry weather. Do not wait until the storm breaks. While you have health and loved ones and prosperity, let the Great Physician give you a check up. Do not wait until you are grievously smitten.

Though most of us come to conversion and confession and cleansing in the house of desperation, it need not be so. God’s goodness ought to melt our hearts and break us down and shame our lack of faith and our love grown cold.

Fair-weather repentance might save us many a cloudy day.

Not Now But Afterwards

What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.
John 13:7

Our Lord’s saying goes deeper than the immediate application of this precious word. God trusts some of His saints in the dark. To some He allows chapters that defy all explanation, that do not make sense, that seem to contradict all we have been taught to expect. From some He seems to withdraw His presence; some He lets pass from this world in strange and sinister ways. We must never make too much of deathbed stories, for some choice saints have had anything but a shouting exit.

We must take account of this, for all lives do not follow the ocurse we would have anticipated. Paul dropped from height to depth in the same chapter (II Cor. 12), from third heaven to thorn in the flesh, and God may give us along with a mountain-top vision a dark valley where deliverance is not granted.

Some chapters are to be experienced now and understood hereafter. It is well to be forewarned about them and forearmed for them, even if they do not come, lest Satan overwhelm us as he sought to do with Job and Peter.

God marks across some of our days, “Will explain later.”