Good Wednesday morning! Where are you this morning? If you are where I am, you will keep thinking that this is Monday morning. For you corporate monkeys that is just the most horrifying of thoughts. Thank God there is only one Monday each week! What if your week had nothing but Mondays? You could look over each day and praise God for the week ahead, the services you can do for your neighbors, and the glory you can give to God the entire new week. Ah, the entire week starting today to bring glory to God the Father!
Of course, we know that it does not have to be a Monday for us to seize the day and give the glory to God. Be it Tuesday or Saturday or whatever day this is, you and I can go forward knowing that people will see the light of Christ in us and give the glory to God. Now that isn't what I wanted to write today. Today, I felt the strong urge to beat y'all with a scripture bat, to pronounce a good helping of doom and gloom upon us all, and to crush our spirits with a conundrum of Calvinism (I might have to look that one up). If Jesus said that he came into the world not to condemn it but that through him it might be saved, why do I sometimes have the feeling that doom and gloom needs to be heaped upon the devotional?
While it is true that the Good News has a component of guilt to help us realize our need for salvation, we can become tempted to crush the congregation with a conflagration of Christian condemnation. When God gives us a little authority, we try to go play with the power. The time that Jesus gave his disciples the authority to cast out demons, I can imagine that one or two of them may have tried some things that didn't make it into the scriptures. James and John, the Sons of Thunder, may have done a little misbehaving with their newly-given power. You and I might have done the same in their place.
Perhaps before we give in to the urge to condemn, we should take the time to remember what it means to be saved. Before we dive bomb the depraved with a depth charge of doom and demonology, we may want to remember the price Jesus paid to redeem us. Before we set out to scramble the sinner with our scripture bat, let us instead kneel down before God and lift up that sinner in prayer to the one who can gently save the lost.
...and while you're at it, sing a song of praise to God today!
Bucky
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