Devotional Guide
For the week of January 30, 2005
ROMANS 1:16
How big is gospel power?
To Read: Malachi 1,2
To Know:
"For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to
every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." Rm. (1:16)
The armistice to end World War I took effect at eleven o'clock in the
morning on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. So powerful were
the armies of the twenty-eight nations embracing more than nine-tenths of
the earth's surface that history itself was believed to be in jeopardy if
the war wasn't stopped. To symbolize this dread consequence it was decided
to end hostilities at 11 AM on November 11th. Since that time Armistice Day
has been an American holiday.
Early in the 20th century the world feared its own destructive power.
Tragically, the war broke out a second time twenty-one years later. Hitler
plunged the world into devilish combat. This time a power even more
devastating was unleashed over the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Not
since 1945 has the world dared to wage all-out war for fear that the earth
might be rendered uninhabitable.
Powerful as the weapons wielded by the world powers during the last century
were, they are weak in comparison to the power of the gospel. The gospel is
the exercise of divine power. Paul is not ashamed to preach the gospel of
God. To the Corinthians he wrote, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of
the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God
through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save
those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we
preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God
and the wisdom of God.
(1 Cor. 1:20-24)
To Do:
History proves that nothing in the human mind and heart can save our race.
No generation has arisen that has not repeated the sins of the fathers. Only
God is the savior. He saves by the gospel Paul preached so unashamedly.
01315$-01315
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