Daily Devotional
Be different!
September 25, 2022
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Day by day, God still searches, tests, and tries me, as Psalm 139:24 says, seeing “if there is any offensive way in me,” and leading me “in the way everlasting.”
That is why you will often find me quoting from memory the general confession from the Book of Common Prayer, which I memorized as a young child growing up in the Reformed Episcopal Church:
“Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.”
I love that confession, but I also hate that confession. I love the old familiar words and the many memories that accompany them. But it’s a grief to me that this confession remains so true of my own heart.
Too often it is an accurate snapshot of my soul, and I long for the day when it will finally (and forever) change.
Over the years I have written quite a bit about the life to come and how much I look forward to a new body that jumps, dances, runs, and crunches through autumn leaves on heaven’s country lanes.
And yes, that will be glorious beyond words—a great fringe benefit of having been invited to Christ’s coronation party. But that’s not what I’m looking forward to most.
I want a new heart. I want a changed heart that fits right into heaven.
I want a heart that no longer twists the truth, resists God, looks for escapes, gets defeated by pain, tries to justify itself, or becomes anxious and worried about the future.
That will be heaven for me. As the old hymn says, “Oh, that will be glory for me, glory for me, glory for me, when by his grace I shall look on his face.”
It will be glory to have a new heart, and it is a glory today—right now—to have a heart renewed and made clean by Jesus Christ.
This is the message our ministry brings to hundreds of thousands of suffering people: people with disabilities; diseased, injured, sick people who have longed for physical healing but never received it.
There is a profound, deep-down-to-the-soul healing in Jesus. As James 3:2 says, “We all stumble in many ways,” but there is forgiveness, release, and an almost-indescribable renewal in a relationship with the Son of God. And in the heaven to come, that healing will be permanent.
Going Deeper
If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us.
But if we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable and straightforward—he forgives our sins and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil.
1 John 1:8–9 (Phillips)
Think of all the clean things you love most: clean sheets … crisp, clean clothing … a clean, shiny house … a sparkling clean car, right out of the carwash … a clean, windswept blue sky … the clean white of fresh-fallen snow.
Now take the time to think about the miracle of a heart washed totally clean by the blood of Jesus Christ, shed for us on the cross. Praise him and thank him for the price he paid to make that possible.
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