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Daily Devotionals
Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time
Devotional: November 22nd

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“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity (love)…”

After a young soprano had made her debut on the opera stage, a critic wrote that her brilliant performance would have been even better if she had ever loved. He detected the absence of love. Apparently her singing was technically correct but it lacked warmth.

We too can go through life, doing everything according to the rules. We can be honest, dependable, righteous, generous, energetic and humble. Yet all these virtues cannot compensate for a lack of love.

Many of us have a hard time knowing how to give love and to receive it. I read recently of a celebrity “who could do everything except express what he felt for the people he loved.”

In his book, People in Prayer, John White wrote, “For many years I was frightened of being loved. I did not mind giving love (or what I thought was love), but I grew ill at ease if anyone, man, woman or child, showed too much affection for me. In our family we had never learned how to handle love. We were not very expert at demonstrating it or receiving it. I don’t mean that we did not love one another or that we did not find ways of showing it. But we were very British. When I was nineteen and leaving home to go to war, my father did something quite unprecedented. He put his hands on my shoulder and kissed me. I was stunned. I knew neither what to say nor what to do. For me it was very embarrassing while for my father it must have been very sad.”

One day White had a vision of Christ standing before him, with nail-scarred hands outstretched toward him. At first he felt helpless to receive Christ’s love. Then he prayed, “O Lord, I want to grasp your hands. But I can’t.”

“In the quietness that followed, there came to me an assurance that the defensive wall I had built around me would gradually be dismantled and that I would learn what it was to let Christ’s love wrap around me and fill me.”

If we have built defensive walls around ourselves, hindering the flow of love to and from us, we must let the Lord dismantle those walls, and deliver us from the fears that make us cold Christians.

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