June 3 I Wednesday
2 Chronicles 19-20
John 13:21-38

“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.” —Romans 10:9-10

After I finished preaching my sermon one Sunday, a man approached me at The Peoples Church in Toronto, Canada to tell me his story. He had been in the church for 52 years. Then I found out that he was 52 years old, which meant from the time he was born, in a beautiful Caribbean country, to a devout family, he went to church. Eventually, he moved to Canada and one of the first things he did was find a church. When he did, he went week after week until over time, going to church became increasingly tedious to him. Then one week, he stopped going altogether.
On Sunday mornings,
instead of going to church, he would be doing other things. However, on one particular Sunday, as he was lying on the couch scrolling through channels on his TV for something good to watch, he stumbled onto “Living Truth” from The Peoples Church and stopped on that channel to listen. As he listened, he felt something going on inside of him. He felt this was something he had never heard before. By the end of the program, he was kneeling beside his couch asking for Jesus to come into his life. From that moment on, his life changed.
As this man told me his story, his wife began to weep. They had had an evangelical Christian religion all their life, but no real Jesus. Does this phrase describe some of us reading this devotion? Some of us may have given up on the church because there is no real life in our own hearts, where Jesus Christ is supposed to be present and active. Others may be reading some of these devotions for the first time and realize that they do not know anything about Christianity.
At church, we never preach Christianity, we preach Christ, a living person who we were designed to know. The author of Hebrews tells us, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 4:7). Every moment, God is drawing people into intimacy with Christ, a relationship that is much deeper than attending any church. It is a relationship with Christ, where we begin by acknowledging our need of Him. Then we confess to Him our sins. And finally, we thank Him that Christ died on the cross to satisfy the judgment of God for our sins and was raised again to come and live within us by His Holy Spirit. We have life flowing through our hearts because Jesus is alive in us.
Prayer: Dear God, I need You and I confess my sins to You. Thank You that Christ died for my sins so that I can have a relationship with You. Praise You!