Today's Devotional

March 30, 2005

Subject:  Contamination Of The Cure

James 1:27 - "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

I realized it much later.  Before, I was a light-hearted congenial guy who, when passing anyone, belted out an enthusiastic, "good morning," or "how's it going today?"  However, after a couple of years of receiving frowns and scowls in return for my jubilant greetings, I became quiet.  Not only did I not greet passersby on the sidewalk anymore, I found that I had begun to give the scowls that I used to so resent.  What happened?

The verse above exhorts believers to "keep himself unspotted from the world."  In other words, don't let the world taint you with its ways.  See the world is cruel and cold.  In fact, it is diseased by sin.  However, God's got a cure for this world.  The cure is called, "believers."  He put us into this sin-sick world to be the cure.  However, as my example shows, we often instead become contaminated by the culture.  We take on the ways of the world.  We respond like the world when a crisis hits.  We respond like the world when someone wrongs us.  We even respond like the world when we attend church.  At times it has just become another meeting place.  All of these things show that the cure has become contaminated and if the cure becomes contaminated, the disease spreads rapidly.  

Today as we look at our world and realize that it is sick, let us take a personal look into our lives to ensure that we have not become contaminated by it.  Our Doctor is into preventive medicine.  It's called His word.  

Carlen