God's Word for You (Saturday, Feb 27, 2010)

A Daily Devotion by Pastor Tim Smith

1 John 4:4-6

4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.  5 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.  6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. (NIV)

The “They” in verse 5 are the folks who preach a reasonable message that the world like to hear. But is that God’s message? A reasonable message might be…

  1. That we need to complete the good work God began in us.
  2. That God’s message will always make sense to us; it must be understood by human reason.
  3. That God loves us, and that our idea of love (getting along, coexisting in the world) must be God’s goal.
  4. That God chose us to be his children because of the potential faith or good he saw in us.
  5. That because God promises success to his Old Testament believers in the conquest of Canaan, he promises success to us in our “conquests” (love, business, war, etc.) as well.

But if we trust any of those reasonable messages, we’ve been deceived. The Bible doesn’t say any of that. The Bible’s message can be hard. It isn’t an easy thing to let the Bible to tell me that I am a sinner—but it does. And I am. But the beauty and the truth of Scripture is that it also tells me, tells us all that our sins are forgiven in Jesus.

That’s a message the world doesn’t want to hear, but the world needs to hear it. There will be some who gnash their teeth and shriek at us, “What gives you the right to impose your beliefs on other people!” That’s a person who has just rejected God. But we still share our faith, and test the spirits to see whether they speak the truth.

We know that we have not been deceived because we haven’t put a filter on the word of God. We take the word of God as it lays there in print, just as it is, from the pens of Moses and the Prophets, from the Apostles and Evangelists. There is no hidden code in the Bible. There is no secret mystery that could only be uncovered by a genius or a madman. God’s word is truth. And God’s word works in our lives.

Pastor Tim SmithPastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.


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