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Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time
Devotional: October 13th

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“What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?”

The question calls for a negative answer. Ordinarily a father wouldn’t give his son a stone in place of bread. Certainly the Heavenly Father would never do it.

But the sad fact is that we sometimes do that very thing. People come to us in deep spiritual need. Perhaps we are insensitive to what is really troubling them. Or we put them off with some surface panacea instead of sharing the Lord Jesus with them.

E. Stanley Jones illustrates this with a story he tells on himself (it takes a great man to tell a story that discloses a personal failure). “When the (Indian) Congress members in their newly acquired powers were sometimes using these powers for themselves instead of the country’s good, it was proving too much for Jawaharlal Nehru to bear. He said he was thinking of resigning the Prime Ministership and going off to regain his inner spirit. I saw him at that time, and at the close of the interview I offered him a bottle of tablets of the cereal grasses, containing all the known vitamins. He took the bottle with thanks but added, ‘My problem is not physical/ implying that it was spiritual. Instead of offering him grace, I offered him grass. He asked for bread, and I gave him a stone… I knew I had the answer, but I didn’t know how to say it. I was afraid of offending the great man. I should have remembered the motto on the Sat Tal Ashram wall: ‘There is no place in which Jesus Christ is out of place.’ But I didn’t. I remembered my hesitations and they prevailed.

“I offered him grass tablets when he really wanted grace—the grace and power that would heal him at the heart. Then he could have said, ‘I am healed at the heart. Now let the world come on—the world of impossible problems. I’m ready.’”

I am afraid that the experience of Dr. Jones is all too familiar to many of us. We encounter people who have deep spiritual needs. They drop some word that provides a wide open door for us to minister Christ to them. But we fail to take advantage of it. We either suggest some band-aid remedy for a spiritual wound or we change the subject to something of trivial value.

Prayer: Lord, help me to seize every opportunity to witness for You, to enter every opened door. Help me to overcome my hesitations, giving bread and grace where they are needed.

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