JMD Devotional 211 Titus 2:7,8 License to Be a Fanatic

And show your own self in all respects to be a pattern and a model of good deeds and works, teaching what is unadulterated, showing gravity [having the strictest regard for truth and purity of motive], with dignity and seriousness. And let your instruction be sound and fit and wise and wholesome, vigorous and irrefutable and above censure, so that the opponent may be put to shame, finding nothing discrediting or evil to say about us.

Men, in particular, are so adept at compartmentalizing every aspect of their life. Work goes into one box, family into another, and religion into its box and so forth. At the last election, Jim Kerry publicly stated that his personal religious convictions had no bearing on his political platform and principles! Now that represents compartments having walls thicker than a vault! But the counsel of the scriptures was not intended to be isolated in a ‘religious’ corner of your life; but to permeate the whole person to include their life at home and work and in the world at large; and down to their innermost being. The fruit of this migration into every compartment of our soul is coherency of purpose and consistency in ethics, with faithfulness, righteousness, and integrity. The World is put at ease when the truth is minimized and treated as an abstract, philosophical and distant concept: but God has called us to make the Truth personal, up-front and close to home whether it makes people comfortable or not. We should not be, and we do not need to be belligerent, pushy or ungracious: just earnest about the importance of the Truth we carry.

Dear God,
Your people are so diverse, and you have given us so much liberty that I cannot begin to comprehend the limits of human expression in the world today; the potential is a gift! Thank You! May our freedom not be sinful license, and may our abundance not obscure the testimony of our salvation! While in the scriptures yeast has been used as a metaphor for evil and good; please remember a parable Jesus gave to us of the Kingdom of God in which that kingdom is described as a little yeast worked into a large lump of dough that made the whole loaf rise. Please work Your holy influence through the dough of our being and out into our community, so that everything we engage will rise also, reflecting Your glory.
Amen

All (but*) quotes are from The Amplified Bible, published by
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*New International Version (NIV)
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**Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. (Eugene Peterson's easy-to-read, contemporary Scripture translation)

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