2 TIMOTHY 3:16-17

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

TO PONDER

I spent 5 years at university to gain two degrees (Science and Engineering). When I got my first job, the first task given to me was to design a small sub-system of a communications system to be used for interconnecting telephone exchanges. A wonderful opportunity for applying my 5 years of study to a real problem. After a couple of days of effort and not really getting anywhere, one of the more senior engineers came to see how I was going. After reviewing my pathetic efforts, he shared with me the standard design they had been using successfully for many years. Yes, it had to be customised for each specific application, but it gave me a big boost in developing a design. As I progressed in my career, I realised that developing successful solutions always came from using a combination of theoretical knowledge, practical experience and ideas contributed by others.

When looking at my life as a child of our Heavenly Father, I see that there are parallels with my experience as an engineer. The theoretical knowledge I had acquired at university is like learning theology. The Bible is full of theology, or knowledge about God, and I did acquire quite a bit of this while growing up. But I must confess, that the biggest impact on me was a sense of guilt and failure in not living up to what I thought a Christian had to be. In an effort to become a better Christian, I joined a group of Christians street-witnessing in King Cross, the red-light district of Sydney at the time. This came to an abrupt end one night when I was having a discussion with a bikie and I realised I had absolutely nothing to offer him as a Christian.

What I was missing, was the practical experience of living as a Christian. This is the day by day living in a relationship with the Heavenly Family, having the security of knowing my life was safely in God’s hands, and having Holy Spirit guiding me in living out God’s purpose for me.

As with my engineering experience, this is an ongoing process of learning to hear God’s voice and responding to it. Again, the Bible is full of advice on how to hear God speaking to us and how to respond, and we have so many examples in the Bible of how other people went through this learning experiences.

Which brings us to ideas contributed by others. As we read in the Bible of how God worked in the lives of people, it opens our minds to possibilities of how God may want to work in our lives. (It doesn’t mean that God will work in our lives in the same way He has worked in the lives of others, since God treats us all individually according to our specific situations.)

What a treasure we have in our Bibles, with all the resources in it to help us live in the relationship our loving God wants to have with us.

Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank you for revealing yourself to us through Your word, and for also revealing how you want us to live in our relationship with you. We want to grow in the security of our relationship with you so that we joyfully follow where you want to take us. Amen

Today's devotion written by Charles Bertelsmeier, LifeWay Epping.