Guidelines For Living Devotional

Have you ever had the urge to just break out in song?  It may have been inspired by a beautiful morning, or the check that arrived in the mail, or the phone call from a best friend.  You felt like shouting something that Handel would have written, something that would praise God from the depths of your being.

When a friend of many years became involved in an affair, Annette Lawson began asking, "Why do people walk out on good marriages for someone who is totally different from themselves and the kind of a person they would live the rest of their lives with?"  Finding answers to that question led to more than a decade of exhaustive research.  When this sociologist was asked, "What advice would you give to someone contemplating an affair?" she replied, "One thing that hasn't changed about adultery is the danger.  It really is a risky undertaking that can leave people's lives in ruins." 

When I asked the Episcopal Bishop of Liberia what was the greatest problem facing families in his country, he immediately responded:  "Unfaithfulness in marriage, in at least 90% of our homes."  The bishop gave me a straightforward answer untainted with excuses or justification.  He could well have said, "You know, we really can't help what's happening here ‑‑ it's our culture!"  Or he could have told me, "Our problems here are the result of the media and the role models which have been imported.  The rest of the world is destroying us here!"

Loving what God loves and hating what He hates never comes easy.  Do you know why?  Most of the time, our agenda and His are not moving the same way.  It's the age-old conflict of a child's will versus the will of his father.  When our first grandson began to talk, one of the first phrases that he mastered clearly was, "I want...."  But the way the youngster voiced it made it clear that he didn't need any encouragement to be assertive.  He had his own agenda, and he was intent on getting his way.

When a certain worker got too much money in his paycheck, he said nothing, thinking that he had indeed encountered some good luck.  The comptroller, however, found his mistake and deducted the overpayment from the next check.  This time, however, the worker loudly complained, "You made a mistake; you didn't pay me enough money."  The comptroller said, "Look, last pay check, I overpaid you, and you didn't say anything then.  Now, why do you complain when I deducted the amount of the overpayment?"  Embarrassed, the worker began to blush and replied, "Look, I can overlook one mistake, but with two mistakes I had to say something."

When a Japanese Christian came to San Francisco for a visit, he attended a church service where Ralph Sockman spoke on the Life of Jesus.  Asked by a friend how he enjoyed the message, the guest replied, "Well to hear him tell it, Jesus was an American, a Methodist, and an Armenian. But everyone knows that it is not true, for Jesus was really a Japanese, a Baptist, and a Calvinist."  Right!

From the impressions made on the walls of the catacombs of Rome to the mansions of the wealthy, Jesus Christ has been the inspiration for the world's great art, and the face of Jesus has been the inspiration of all the world's great artists.  Rubens, Raphael, DaVinci, Titian, Michelangelo, and thousands of others, have all taken brush and pallet in hand and painted the face of Jesus as they pictured it in their mind.  The painting of the face of Christ done by Warner Sallman hangs in many homes, yet, when I finally cross heaven's threshold, for some reason, I do not expect Christ to look just like the person portrayed by the artists. 

It's an amazing fact, yet true: the writers of the four Gospels never gave to the world an actual description of what Jesus Christ really looked like.  Nevertheless, there is an actual description of the appearance of Christ.  One of the few that has survived the centuries is said to have been written by the governor of Judea, Publius Lentulus.

Author Philip Yancey grew up in church.  But he experienced a lot of confusion over what he learned about God and what he experienced in life.  He wrote a book that shatters a lot of our cherished ideals and the images we have grown up with. He called the book, The Jesus I Never Knew.

"Seeing is believing," so goes the old saying, yet from God's point of view, the very opposite is true.  Believing brings spiritual vision, which clears the brain of fuzzy negative thinking.  I've been thinking of the incident which took place as Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, where He was to die.  He knew this.  A sense of urgency drove Him towards the Holy City.  Jesus sensed that what would take place in Jerusalem was the very purpose for which He had come.   What would happen was the main event of the ages.  But as Jesus was leaving Jericho to take the road up to Jerusalem, He encountered a blind man—actually two of them—who cried out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!"  When Jesus heard this, He stopped.  From a social standpoint, they weren't important.  They really didn't count, but they counted with Jesus.