Word for the day by Christian Education Forum
Youths: Inheritors of Faith
Acts 6:1-7“They chose Stephen a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit”
Acts 6:5
We live in a time when the world revolves around showcasing every aspect of our lives for the praise and honor of man. We crave for man’s honor and build our identity on what the world says. Sin makes us covet the Glory that belongs to God alone and cause us to live for ourselves. We demand to be at the center of the universe, the One place that should be for God and God alone. We take credit for what only God could produce. We want to be sovereign, and we want to be worshipped. We tell ourselves that we’re entitled to what we really don’t deserve, and we complain and grumble when we don’t get whatever we want. And so, we end up in an unrelenting cycle of never being satisfied.
In the life of Stephen, we see a stark contrast to what the world teaches. We see a young man who was both content and lived a life of peace. He sought for the audience of One - His Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And he sought that praise in the inner crevice of his heart where none could see. It was purely a daily surrender to the will of his heavenly father, by the power of the Holy Spirit to dethrone the self and enthrone Christ as Lord over every aspect of his inner life. We can learn much in the days of our youth from this young man’s life. He heeded the words of Christ, “Be careful to not do your acts of righteousness to be honored by men, for if you do you have no reward from your heavenly father” Matthew 6:1. And so Stephen found the Pearl of Great prize for which he laid down all of the self at the feet of the Lord and received the Greatest of all rewards which was the Lord Himself. This is what enabled Stephen not to be embittered even when he was chosen to wait at the tables. He saw each task as divinely assigned to him by his Lord and so made it his aim to serve Christ by serving others. He knew and understood his deep-seated identity, unshaken by what the world said.
God’s grace alone has the power to defeat the glory war in our hearts. In our constant daily battle of life, we tend to revert back to self-glory because we believe the self-deception that created things can satisfy what Our Creator alone can do. Let us humble ourselves and admit we are a complete zero before the Lord and daily depend on Him so that the Joy of the Lord would be our strength and there at the foot of the cross we would find the ‘Life of peace and rest’
Prayer
Father, thank you for sending your Son to die for us and liberating us from the bondage of the self. Enable us by the power of your Spirit to enter into this life of peace and rest by denying the self. In Jesus' Name we pray Amen.
Thought of the day
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You”
- St Augustine
Dr. Justeena Jess George
W/o Rev. Jess M George - Youth Chaplain