Day 12 of 40 days of devotion
Written by John Evans
C S Lewis writes: “Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”
We may have met people who are so gripped by the love of God that what they do points to all that Jesus is. They are, somehow, visible signposts yet, at the same time, completely transparent. These people seem to have fully understood that “Love is not just a sentiment. Love is a great controlling passion, and it always expresses itself in terms of obedience” (Martyn Lloyd Jones).
I have noticed that they sometimes possess an exquisite personal modesty whilst somehow leaving with those they meet the impression of God’s holiness, power, wisdom, love. I have come to know that they are not always so and that there are times when the impression of God becomes fractured, smudged, disfigured and near invisible as it does with me! These times, I imagine, remind them – even if it doesn’t always remind me – particularly powerfully that they can not give anything to God.
I think we most often recognise this awareness of, devotion to and gripping by God in personal interactions. Are we are less likely to recognise lives given to His service when the individual responds to a call on their lives that propels them into a public and, quite possibly, a contested arena? I think so. Christians in these arenas of service need particular prayer.
The fact that devoted servants of Jesus Christ called to serve God in the public arena through, perhaps, science, conservation, medicine, prophecy, teaching, humanitarian service, dentistry, politics or business may find themselves in disagreement with other Christians does not excuse me from attempting to understand their calling and convictions.
Tough for me: tougher for them but as Oswald Chambers writes in his devotional My Utmost for His Highest: “…if I obey Jesus Christ in the seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God”.
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