Daily Devotional for Sunday, September 18

Walk by Faith 

A lady I know told me she lost her dad to COVID, and the next week lost her husband. That statement hit me with the intensity of a well swung bat though certainly not with the ferocity that the circumstances of life had left this young lady. I was on a call out with the police department. I could hear the despair as she continued. She had not had an easy life and what she described, seemed to me, more than a light suffering. 

Paul was in a similar situation when he penned these verses. “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8, 9). Despite everything he had been through, his encouragement to the people of Corinth was to look to the weight of glory awaiting in eternal things. These things are not yet seen. There is evidence of their existence, there is substance to the things for which we hope. All of life, as weighed down as we are by it, pales in comparison to what God has for us in eternity. This life is temporary, along with its troubles and is born with our eye on our future with the King of Glory. 

In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul talks more about being weighted down with the trials of life. In his discussion, he shares that when “we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (for we walk by faith, not by sight:) . . . willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (verses 6-8).

REFLECTION: Are you looking at temporary events without a hope for the future? Jesus is our hope for the future. We must walk by faith.

David Thompson