Week 9—Sunday John 3:2-4
“I STILL HAVE JESUS”
A Christian woman lost her son and then her daughter and then her husband. And then to cap it all, she lost her eyesight. The doctors said that the eyes were so badly infected that they would have to be taken out and glass eyes put in. A minister sat beside her bed after she got the news. He told her how sorry he was for her. But she replied, “Brother Wilson, don’t feel too bad about it. I still have Jesus. They cannot take Him away.” Her Christianity was not in what she had around her but what she had in her. It was a part of her—inseparable.
Here was a girl who had bad eyesight. It began with the death of her father. The shock of her father’s death made her confused. She couldn’t see spiritually, so she transferred the spiritual confusion to a physical symptom, and her eyesight went bad; but when she found a conversion, her spiritual eyesight cleared up and the physical insight, too. When she worked life in a Christian way, it worked.
I once said to a hard-boiled newspaper reporter, “If you don’t believe in the Christian way, why don’t you put it to the test? Go out and try it out for a week. Think the unchristian thing, say the unchristian thing, act the unchristian thing, and be the unchristian thing in every situation for a week and come back and tell me how you got on.” “Shucks,” he snorted, “you’d be bumped off before the week was over.” If someone didn’t bump you off you’d feel like bumping yourself off! Then turn it around. Go out and for a week say the Christian thing, and be the Christian in every situation and come back and tell me how you got on. I’ll tell you now. You will come back and say with joy, “This is my homeland. For once I’m at home.”
O dear Lord, save me from beating my life out in impossible ways of life. You are the Life of my life, the Soul of my soul, my All, my Everything. In you I live—live to my fingertips, and out of you life is not worth living. I know. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Put to the test, the Christian way stands up, the unchristian way breaks down.