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Daily Devotionals
Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time
“Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God.”.
God has irregulars in His army, and very often these are the ones who win the greatest victories. In their zeal for the Lord they seem eccentric. They use original methods instead of sticking to the traditional ones. They are always saying and doing the unexpected. They can murder the English language and violate every known rule of preaching and teaching, yet see great gains for God’s kingdom. Often they are dramatic, even electrifying. People are shocked, but they never forget them.
These irregulars are a constant source of embarrassment to the staid and conventional, to those who shudder at the thought of violating cultural norms. Other Christians try to change them, to make them more normal, to put out the fire. But fortunately for the Church, their efforts are usually in vain.
It is hard for us to believe that our Lord seemed peculiar to His contemporaries. “So zealous was He in His work that often He had no time even to eat, and His mother and brothers wanted to take Him home because they thought He was going ‘off his head’. They said, ‘He is beside himself.’ But it was Jesus who was the sane man, not his brothers” (W. Mackintosh Mackay).
It is apparent that people accused the Apostle Paul of being strange. His answer to the charge was: “Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God” (HYPERLINK "javascript:" .)
We have all heard of one of God’s irregulars who wore a sandwich board with writing on the front and back. On the front it said, “I’m a fool for Christ’s sake.” Then on the back it read, “Whose fool are you?”
The trouble with most of us is that we are too much like the ordinary to create any stir for God in society. As someone has said, “We leave the average where it is. We are like Peter, standing outside the judgment hall where Christ was on trial, just ‘warming himself.’”
Rowland Hill, the great London preacher, was eccentric. So was C.T. Studd. And Billy Bray. And W.P. Nicholson, the Irish evangelist. Would we want them to have been any different? No, when we consider how God used them, we only wish we were more like them. “Better a thousand times effective peculiarity than ineffective ordinariness. First love may sometimes be peculiar, but, thank God, it is effective; and some of us have lost it” (Fred Mitchell).
'Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time' Copyright 2007 © William MacDonald. 'Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time' articles may be reproduced in whole under the following provisions: 1) You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
