Body

Devotions

“Make Straight My Path”

Gary Wilkerson

Do not listen to false teachers who would have you believe God can be used like a genie to grant your wishes. Don’t ever put a dollar in a church offering hoping to get more back. God is grieved by that kind of false teaching and by the parishioners who embrace it. Our prayer can’t be, “Lord, bless me,” but rather, “Lord, align me. Set my heart right. Make straight my path. Then no lion can devour me and I’ll have Your authority to do the works of Your kingdom.”

It’s always best to run from corruption before it can happen. Over and over in the Bible we see God removing His people from corrupt situations. When He commanded Noah to enter the ark, it was to remove His servant from a corrupt world. When He led Israel into the Promised Land, He was removing them from Egypt’s oppressive bondage.

Yet it’s not just a fallen world or false church leaders that corrupt. There is the issue of our own sinful hearts. When popular preachers tell us, “You can have a prosperous life today,” something inside us stirs — especially if we feel our life has been disappointing. But our motive for approaching God cannot be, “Can I get something from Him?” If it is, we are pursuing the wrong god.

I don’t say things like this very often. But I can’t backtrack on anything I’ve written here. Friend, run from the Bible study that exists only to make you feel good. Avoid the relationship that takes you deeper into pleasure-seeking and away from Christ-seeking. Find a different faith community if yours labors to get you inside the building and then fails to train you to take Jesus everywhere. Run — and know that God is pleased with your obedience.

The Purifying Fire

Jim Cymbala

In the second-floor lobby of our church hangs a large painting of an early 1900s Salvation Army street meeting in New York City. The war cry, or motto, of the Salvation Army was “BLOOD AND FIRE.” Blood represented the blood Jesus shed to save all people, and fire represented the Holy Spirit, who was sent to equip believers and transform lives.

Catherine Booth, wife of William Booth, the founder the Salvation Army, understood the importance of fire as a symbol for the Holy Spirit. Known as the mother of the Army, Catherine became very famous in her own right. I once read something she said that has stuck with me, although I must paraphrase it because I cannot remember the actual source. Around 1890 she said, “I travel around the country, and I hear a lot of eloquent words and many sermon masterpieces. But what my soul longs for are burning words.”

Catherine wanted anointed messages that penetrated, stirred, and produced brokenness of heart. She felt her need and knew that change happens from the inside out. She was a leader who taught God’s Word and understood the difference between sermons that are just words and those that God had inspired to change lives.

The prophet Malachi wrote, “[God] will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver” (Malachi 3:3).

When the Holy Spirit searches our hearts, He is like a purifying fire. Just as a good fire burns out dross and impurities, unworthy things are burned out of our lives when we allow the Spirit to do His work.

Jim Cymbala began the Brooklyn Tabernacle with less than twenty members in a small, rundown building in a difficult part of the city. A native of Brooklyn, he is a longtime friend of both David and Gary Wilkerson. 

Resurrection in the Here And Now

David Wilkerson

I received an e-mail from a pastor who had quit his church. This poor man had fallen into deep sin and lost his wife and children. His whole life fell apart and he found himself staring at death.

In his darkest hour, he fell on his knees and cried for help. Jesus came to this broken, desperate man and breathed new life into him. Soon afterward, the man’s wife called him, saying, “I miss Jesus. Can we try again?”

Today that pastor works in one of our drug rehabilitation centers. Consider Ephesians 2:1–3: “And you [the Lord] made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins... you once walked according to the course of this world… among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath.”

Perhaps this describes your experience. Before you knew the Lord, you were doing your own thing. You were caught up in the spirit of the times, trying every sin and pleasure. You thought you would “put God off” until later. You believed your good works and donations would save you.

Then the Lord came to you. “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4–6).

Beloved, this is all about getting new life, which can be found only in Christ. Paul is not talking here about the final resurrection. He is describing what God does on earth — resurrection in the here and now!

Only Jesus Provides Life

David Wilkerson

God means it when He says, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

Throughout Romans 8, Paul outlines the destructive realities of sin. He states, “If you live after the flesh, you will die. To be lust-driven, to live only by the senses, leads to death. The body is dead because of sin.”

In short, death means having no life. And only Jesus provides life, declaring, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).

Because nonbelievers lack life, everything they pursue leads to death. This is the reason so many turn to alcohol and “recreational” drugs. Getting high is no longer a party for them; rather, it is an attempt to numb the pain created by sin, a pain caused by real emptiness.

“Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:18–19).

What a horrible condition Paul describes. He is saying, “Such people are so given over to the world of pleasure, they are past feeling.” In short, they have become numb to any sense of God or life. In His mercy, the Lord reaches out to every numbed soul.

Paul contrasts the condition of those in Christ’s Body: “But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:20–23).

Paul is making his message plain: “You can be resurrected. You can be changed. You can come into new life.” What a hope! 

He is Faithful to Deliver

David Wilkerson

On one occasion Paul was preaching in Ephesus, a city that worshiped the goddess Diana. The silversmiths in Ephesus had made fortunes selling little replicas of the goddess. But when Paul came on the scene, he preached, “Your god is false. There is only one true God. And His Son lived and died so that those who are dead in sin might live.”

Enraged, the silver merchants realized their livelihood was at stake. So they stirred up a mob to take hold of Paul, determined to kill him (see Acts 19:24-31).

Paul was convinced he was going to die and even at the very brink of death, he confessed, “We were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so much that we despaired even of life” (2 Corinthians 1:8, my italics). He added by way of explanation, “We had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead” (1:9, my italics).

Tell me, have you ever been way down as Paul was, far beyond your power? Have you ever been past all remaining strength, down so deep you despaired even of life? When Paul said, “I despair of life,” he was saying he faced a death sentence: “We had the sentence of death in ourselves.”

But God came on the scene and delivered him. Having experienced a miracle, Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus: “I have been resurrected from the dead. The Lord took me out of the grave. I stared hell in the face, but God resurrected me!”

Paul testified, in essence, “The Lord delivered me from a great death — He keeps delivering me — and He will be faithful to deliver me in the future.”