12/23/2023 – “Approved to God” daily devotional // 2 Timothy 2:15/ Illustration included.
This is from the December 15th devotional from Oswald Chambers: “My Utmost for His Highest”:
“If you cannot express yourself well on each of your beliefs, work and study until you can. If you don’t, other people may miss out on the blessings that come from knowing the truth. Strive to re-express a truth of God to yourself clearly and understandably, share it with someone else. But you must be willing to go through God’s winepress where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle, experiment, and rehearse your words to express God’s truth clearly. Then the time will come when that very expression will become God’s wine of strength to someone else. But if you are not diligent and say, ‘I’m not going to study and struggle to express this truth in my own words; I’ll just borrow my words from someone else,’ then the words will be of no value to your or to others. Try to state to yourself what you believe to be the absolute truth of God and you will be allowing God the opportunity to pass it on through you to someone else.
Always make it a practice to stir, you r own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study. The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly.”
Soli Deo Gloria!
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I had a brother that questioned the biblical veracity of the series: “The Chosen”. When I asked him for an example, he presented the scene that Jesus “rehearsed” his sermon on the mount with Matthew, noting: “The Son of God does not need to rehearse.” So, we exclude the possibility that Jesus would be doing it as a teaching moment for Matthew, a future Apostle? Is it not consistent with multiple biblical accounts? The instruction of this scene speaks this particular devotional theme.