Day of Praise

Fri, 06/23/17, "Day of Praise"

"From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another." - John 1:16

From where I sit, my parents have always been very generous. Christmas and every possible chance for gift-giving has always been exciting. 

But the best blessings from my parents have always been the stories. True stories from their upbringing about modest clothes and dangerous roads. About fireworks on the old lady next door's porch when dad was a kid and baseball games at the school that's now torn down. My dad wrote down a lot of his stories in the years before he died. I really appreciate that, just as I appreciate my mom's story telling too.

Stories are blessings that help us to know someone's heart and their life and their treasures. 

When, in today's Bible verse, we hear that "we have all received one blessing after another" from the fullness of God's grace, the greatest blessing that God has given us is God's stories. Ya know, the ones in the Bible. The stories are blessings that help us to know God and God's heart and God's life and God's treasures. They also help us to see God wondrously at work in the story of our lives today. 

If you're reading this devotion, thank you. I'm honored. But please remember two things in no particular order: 1) almost all of you who reply to me always thank me for sending God's word to you because it's God's stories that touch our hearts like no other story can, and 2) I started this devotion to pass God's stories to my kids as I tried to speak God's stories into the story of their own lives. 

I ask you to remember those two things because I want you to remember that all those blessings from God's grace (John 1:16) are most vibrant when you are, what the great modern-day radio-preacher, Alistair Begg, calls, a self-feeder. A self-feeder is someone who certainly reads devotions like this, but they also go directly to the Bible for themselves and then look for God in their own lives so they can tell others their personal story, which is otherwise known as their witness or their testimony. 

Hey, I hope I can write this thing for many years and that you keep reading it and passing it along to others. But rest assured that I have failed and that you will spiritually starve if our original source and ultimate end for strength and hope and inspiration is not the living God himself, who wants to work most of all through his stories in his Bible and through the story of your life. 

Read your Bibles; look for God; receive his grace; tell your stories; pass it on. 

Praise God!