Daily Devotional 8/5/22

You have a message, and you are constantly delivering it. You may not even know what it is. It may be a message of redemption or of guilt, of confidence or of insecurity, of faith or of doubt. But one way or another, your life is an embodied message of whatever you believe to be true.

That’s frightening, isn’t it? We can handle the thought of delivering a message when God tells us to, but the thought that we are always implicitly living a message means we may have preached the anti-gospel many times. Every time we sowed seeds of discord, every time we got comfortable with sin, every time we said something that minimized God’s goodness or exaggerated our own, we gave a false message. We might think we’ve never presumed to speak for God, but as creatures made in His image, we have. We may have spoken truth, or we may have spoken lies, but we have spoken. Wearing the name of “Christian,” we have made some kind of impression—positive or negative, sometimes both—on this world.

God’s words to Jeremiah are words to all of us. “Get up and prepare for action. Go out and tell them everything I tell you to say.” It isn’t that we can be quiet until God tells us to say something. We’re already saying something. And God wants us to live the message He gives, not the messages we hear from ourselves or others. He wants us to be incarnations of truth.

IN DEED

Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? It really isn’t. That thought may give us lots of regrets about the past, but when we realize the opportunity before us—not one day, when God picks us out of a crowd and gives us a special assignment, but right now on this very day—we can live with purpose. We already have a message to deliver. We can stand up wherever we are in our world and be authentic human beings—not perfect, of course, but Kingdom citizens who are redeemed, restored, and remade in the image of God.

ADDITIONAL READING: Ephesians 5:1-2

Our task as laymen is to live our personal communion with Christ with such intensity as to make it contagious.

PAUL TOURNIER