#JESUS2019 - Daily DevotionalsSample

At the beginning of the year I had eye surgery done. An injured area needed to be removed and a healthy piece of cornea sewn in. Because I only had local anaesthesia, I could follow every move of the doctor’s hands. The whole time I was filled with the worry that I wouldn’t be able to see as well as I had before, the hope that perhaps I would be able to see better, and the feeling of powerlessness that I could do nothing to affect the outcome.

At the time, the question of who Jesus really was was on everyone’s lips, but there were all sorts of answers. Some people said: “We know him personally, he is a totally normal person, we know his story, his parents, his past. Why would he possess some special gift for satisfying people as the ‘bread of heaven’?”

What do people who have known you since childhood say about you? That you are ordinary? That you are not someone who could make a difference? That you are still the same as back then? And yet deep down you feel that God has put something inside you that is not of this world. A special gift, an extraordinary calling.

Jesus was from Nazareth. And yet he was also from heaven, sent with a divine calling. Both assessments of who Jesus is are correct, but what they depend on is a person’s perspective. God opened the eyes of some people to see the spiritual truth of who Jesus is. These people saw not only his human side, which they were familiar with, but they also saw him as the Son of God, which is how God wanted him to be known to his people.

How can we learn to judge things not just according to what is visible? How can we get sight of the spiritual dimension?

We see that Jesus forbids the disciples from speaking negatively and complaining. Instead he encourages them to let him bring them closer to the father.

Maybe they felt just as helpless as I did during my eye surgery, when I was not able to influence anything. We may have a blurry picture of what God has planned for our lives, and perhaps we would like to get clarity, but we can’t speed this up by ourselves. God draws people to him. God deliberately reveals spiritual things to people at the right time.

ACTION STEP:

Try to evaluate everything you have experienced today. Not by what is humanly visible, but according to what God wants to reveal to you through it.

Stefan Hänsch – ICF Berlin