To hear this Morning Devotion, please click here —
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After reading today’s section in the One-Year Bible, I had initially decided to write about the glaring lack of repentance teaching today in many “feel good” churches perhaps driven too much by consumerism.
After all, the word “repent” in one form or another appears 53 times in the NIV New Testament, but rarely in many worship services.
What about in your pastor’s sermons?
And we wonder why the Church is slowly growing weaker in its influence upon the world.
In Luke 24:47, Jesus clearly indicates that He was raised from the dead so that repentance and forgiveness would be preached in His name.
I pray that your preacher/pastor/minister and those teaching classes in your congregation are each faithful to this mission in obvious and frequent ways.
Remember that without repentance, the bad new of our sinfulness can never be replaced with the Good News of our salvation.
Without repentance, there is no forgiveness.
And without forgiveness, there is no salvation.
Acts 2:38 and 3:19 are poster child verses for this truth.
As I read before and after Luke 24:47, though, I saw something else that God’s Spirit knitted tightly into my heart and mind in a very vivid manner.
That’s why the balance of this Morning Devotion will consider verse 51.
“While He was blessing them, He left them and was taken up into heaven.”
This, of course, involves Jesus Christ as He was preaching to His followers after the resurrection.
It was an amazing time for them all, these weeks between the resurrection and the ascension.
It was a time filled with the blessings of transformed understanding and reformed views of self.
There were miracles. There was a flood of spiritual affection and counsel for ministry direction.
It was an amazingly dramatic time for all involved, particularly the apostles.
But it could not continue or the whole purpose for the Church could never be fulfilled.
That’s why Jesus had to go home.
Before doing so, though, He made sure to pour blessings into their lives.
There is no specific list of blessings mentioned in Luke 24, yet I believe that these were present:
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love
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godly teaching
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nurturing fellowship
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anointed prayers
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evidence of God’s power flowing through Him
We know that these blessings provided the powerful impetus for the believers to remain faithful in the days that followed.
This is to be our pattern as well when the Lord takes us home.
We won’t leave the way that Jesus did, of course. But we WILL leave.
Whenever the Lord takes us, we should be in a season of blessing others.
Blessing them with love and godly teaching and nurturing fellowship and anointed prayers and evidence of God’s power flowing through our lives.
Whether our graduation to glory occurs when we’re vibrantly healthy or when we’re barely hanging on physically, we can still be busy with offering these blessings to others whenever our clock stops.
That’s my goal — to leave a legacy of blessing when I fly away to the land of eternal blessing.
I pray that goal becomes yours, too.
As always, I love you
Martin
