Devotional Song: … GO TO THIS LINK … Please take the time to take in a video of Jason Gray singing… Glowing In The Dark, … expressing how we, being born anew in Christ, can shine His light into the world anywhere and at anytime for His glory.
Highlight Passage: Acts 9: 18 [NKJV] …
18 Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized.
… Saul into Paul … a new creation in Christ
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Highlight Context – Acts, Chapter 9 [NKJV] … USE THIS LINK …
… Saul … a man transformed into the Apostle Paul
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Reference Passage #1 - 2nd Corinthians 5: 17 [NKJV] …
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
… God’s truth, from Paul, as to the newness we can reflect into the world when we’re truly born again and shining the newness into the world.
My Journal for Today: Today’s Our Daily Bread author, Randy Kilgore, relates a personal story to illustrate his teaching. He writes: Early in my work life I had a coworker who seemed to delight in using God’s name as a profanity. He mercilessly taunted Christians who were new to their faith or who tried to talk with him about Jesus. On the day I left that job to move to another community and a new place of employment, I remember thinking that this man would never become a follower of Jesus. Two years later I visited my old workplace. He was still there, but never have I witnessed such a dramatic change in a person! This man, so antagonistic to faith, was now a walking, talking example of what it means to be a “new creation” in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). And now, more than 30 years later, he’s still telling others how Jesus “met him where he was—sin and all.”
I relate very personally with that story because some three + decades ago, I was one of those lost, angry souls, a self-labeled “agnostic,” trying to show my Christian co-workers up as hypocrites. But after a dozen years of this lost cause, God’s Spirit pursued me, broke me, and transformed me into the man who writes this blog, … a born-again, ordained Minister of the Gospel.
And I also identify with the highlight passage above of the conversion and transformed life of Saul of Tarsus into the Apostle Paul, the man who once persecuted Christians even unto death and then became one of greatest living missionaries in the new church, writing two-thirds of the New Testament and spreading the Gospel message into much of the known world at the time.
PLEASE take the time to mediate on today’s Scriptures and to see the video of the linked song above; and I will pray that we’ll go out today and shine the newness of Christ into a world who desperately needs to see the new creation we’re becoming.
My Prayer Today: Oh, my Lord, …I am the newness of Christ; and so, let all who join in this transformation show it off to a world who desperately needs You. … Amen
Blogger Note: Everyday during this year, my daily devotional blogs are influenced by the reading and study of the online devotional blog entitled Our Daily Bread, distributed online via email by RBC Ministries. If you GO TO THIS LINK on the date of my blog, you can read/study the ODB blogs; or you can subscribe to the blog via email at that site.
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