Publishing His glorious deeds! —Psalm 96:3
Have you ever struggled with your spiritual gifts? Does yours seem insignificant? Do you want other gifts? Paul helps us with these thoughts and teaches us how to enrich the gifts given to us.
Christ’s church is outwardly diverse by design. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, makes this abundantly clear. The Spirit of God inspired Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, stating that the body of Christ is made up of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, for example.
Continue reading “Gifts of the Spirit!”Have you ever thought, “I would never do that?” Many have seen the danger in such a statement, yet they, too, eventually fell to temptation. How do we overcome this?
Great caution is needed in the Christian life. We must be mindful of the pride that makes us think we are too strong to fall or too big to fail. It’s the age-old struggle against the notion that it will never happen to me.
Continue reading “Overcoming Temptation!”The Corinthians were distracted. Is our day any better? Paul desires that they attend to the Lord with as few distractions as possible. Is there a truth here that can benefit us today?
Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, addresses several issues in today’s reading, including pride, lawsuits, immorality, marriage, and food offered to idols. A verse from chapter 7 stood out to me: …I want you to…serve the Lord best, with as few distractions as possible. (1 Corinthians 7:35, NLT)
Continue reading “Freedom from Distractions!”Through the message of the cross, God confounded all the world’s wisdom. What does this mean for Christians?
Paul the Apostle opens 1 Corinthians with a big statement. He writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18 that the Gospel is foolishness to the lost. He also quotes Isaiah 29:14, saying that God will destroy the wisdom of the wise. He will completely confuse the wisdom of this world through the message of the cross. According to Paul, the message of the cross is the wisdom of God. Paul then poses a question in verse 20 to the philosophers, the scholars, and the debaters: where does this leave them?
Continue reading “Foolishness That Confounds Wisdom!”The Gospel has a way of upsetting the applecart of false religion. On his third missionary journey, Paul is in Ephesus, the home of the Greek goddess Artemis. Today’s reading clearly shows the true nature of false religion.
In Acts 19:23-24, we see that false religion is the backbone of the Ephesian economy. Demetrius, a silversmith, employs many local craftsmen who manufacture shrines and related trinkets of Artemis. The Gospel is disrupting the false god super-market, and revenue is rapidly declining. Demetrius organizes an emergency meeting of the silversmith’s guild and says in Acts 19:25-26, “…Gentlemen, you know that our wealth comes from this business.” (NLT) In other words, false religion admittedly traffics in the souls of people. Demetrius gets to the bottom line; the Gospel has exposed that Artemis is a fraud. (Acts 19:27)
It is easy for this account in Acts to seem distant from our current day or for false religion to be relegated to far-flung regions only missionaries visit. But false religion of this nature can be everywhere the Gospel of Jesus Christ is compromised and commercialized. Even Christianity, in many (not all) contexts, has become compromised into a business, a machine that constantly needs feeding with revenue from the latest “Christian” marketing gimmicks. The Apostles had none of this, yet the Scriptures say it was the testimony of many that the Gospel had turned the world upside down! Imagine doing that with no shiny “anything.”
I am reminded of the simplicity of Jesus’ words—words that get to the bottom line: Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:16, KJV)
Thank you for joining me as I read and journal chronologically through the Bible! This devotional reflection comes from Acts 18:19-19:41