Daily Devotional for Sunday, October 22

Jesus and the Blind Man

“And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way,” Mark 10:52.

It is common in our churches for someone to respond to an altar call, profess salvation, then seemingly fall off of the planet. While we ought to tread carefully in casting any judgments about a person’s status with Jesus, this type of conduct certainly makes the rest of us wonder if their conversion was real. The problem is who is the focus of our salvation? If we respond to an altar call and our sole purpose is to get our ticket to Heaven punched, then our motivation is pointed the wrong way.

While God loves us all, we are not the real point of His glorious salvation. As with all things, the purpose of the restoration of mankind is to showcase God’s glory and to give Him honor. We are saved, not for the purpose of getting us into Heaven, but so that we might spend our lives, and later our eternity, serving God. This blind man did things the right way. Made whole by his faith, he saw clearly what he should do and followed Jesus. The simplicity of the words on our devotional phrase is quite striking, really. Reading between the lines, we can see that this man just dropped everything and went with Jesus in the way.

It is interesting, really, that this seems odd to us. The simple fact is that this ought to be the norm. When we are granted eternal life, we also should be ready and willing to drop our old lives and begin our new lives by following Jesus. Yet, some never even submit in baptism or join with a local church. What about you? What have you left behind to follow Jesus?

JUST A THOUGHT: Jesus taught us to give up everything, pick up our cross, and follow him. Sometimes we act like Jesus should follow us instead. 

Wally Fry