EPIPHANY IV - SATURDAY

LESSON: 1 Corinthians 12:4-11

God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work. 2 Corinthians 9:8

To impute absolute perfection and sinlessness to the saints is a fruit of carnal thinking and devotion. On this basis, men do not measure the saints by God’s grace, but according to their own person, worthiness, and grandeur. This is quite contrary to the way in which God measures men. God measures men in accordance with His gifts. God never allowed John the Baptist to perform any miracle such as many lesser saints are reported to have performed (John 10:41). In short, He has often performed through lesser saints what He has not done through the great saints.

When Christ was twelve years old, He concealed Himself from His mother and allowed her to be mistaken and lacking in knowledge (Luke 2:43). On Easter Day He showed Himself to Mary Magdalene before He showed Himself to His mother and the apostles (John 20:14). He spoke to the Samaritan woman (John 4:7), and even with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:10), in a more friendly manner than He showed towards His mother. Peter falls and denies Christ, but the murderer on the cross acknowledges Him and believes in Him.

In these and similar remarkable examples He wants us to estimate the saints according to His indwelling Spirit so that we should not simply judge them according to their person. He wants to dispense His gifts freely, according to His good pleasure, as Paul declares (1 Corinthians 12:11), and not according to our ways of thinking.

SL.XI.484,14-15

AE 76,287

PRAYER: All that we are and have, O Lord, is of your mercy and grace alone. Pour out your Spirit upon us that we may ever continue to live in the light of your grace, in and through our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.