Pinedale Student Ministries

Today’s passage
1 Corinthians 11:1

Experience
One of the greatest experiences of being a parent is watching your child take his or her first steps.  Watching their chubby little feet try and catch up with their massive heads is a sight!” But no parent with any sense is going to criticize their kids for falling when they are just learning to walk.  In fact, we’ve got video footage of my daughter taking her first steps; it wasn’t ten minutes later and my wife had posted it on Facebook for the world to see.  We cheered both our kids on for their smallest independent steps.  When they were able to walk without assistance, we congratulated them like Olympians! 

But no parent would feel alright with a twelve-year-old who insisted on crawling from place to place.  Learning to walk is good for a toddler, but eventually a child must grow to run.  In a similar way, God is pleased with our response, our movement toward Him.  But He will not be satisfied until we have become like Him. 

Jesus is the means and end to everything we hope to accomplish with these daily devotions.  Our prayer is that you would surrender your hearts and minds to Christ daily so that God can progressively change you more and more from the inside out.  The greatest compliment you or I could ever receive is to have someone come up to us and say, “I’ve seen Jesus, and He is you.”  There isn’t a person alive that at some point doesn’t want to emulate another person; after all, it’s how trends are set and why my son loves superheroes.  Anyone can purchase the latest trend and call it different – But at its essence, it’s just another temporary fad in a long line of normalcy. 

Understand, the greatest change doesn’t come from the outside-in. Nope, the greatest change comes from the inside-out. It’s a life that daily cooperates with the Holy Spirit by accepting God’s invitation to draw near and make room for Him to work.  One of the key ways we allow this to happen is by obeying His will, which is His word.  And so the reasoning follows, that in order to obey His will, we’ve gotta what?? Yeah, know His Word.

God’s heart is not that we would pursue the next American Idol, but that we would come to know the humble King who went to the cross so that we might have life – Real Life!  The apostle Paul pursued that life, and I hope you will too, over the next forty days and beyond!