Today's New Testament verse is Acts 11:17, "If therefore God gave them the same gift as He gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?"
The response of Peter to others who challenged him and his decision to visit Cornelius and other Gentiles came down to this bottom line, who are we to challenge God and His decisions? Peter was wise in his discernment of the vision he received to accept the conversion of the Gentiles to Christianity, and we should model our life after this. We need to guard against only accepting into our fellowship those we consider "to be like us" because no matter what they were, God has made them clean with the blood of the Lamb and they are no longer "common". This actually relieves me in knowing that my only task is to accept a person that is my brother in Christ. It's up to God to determine their heart, their attitude and judge accordingly. All I have to do is love them.
Guidance today comes from Proverbs 4:25-27, "Let your eyes look straight ahead, And your eyelids look right before you. Ponder the path of your feet, And let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or the left; Remove your foot from evil."
My New King James study bible provides additional commentary on various passages, and I thought the article associated with these versus is good.
Many of us are so busy that we never take time to consider where we are going -- or why. Yet we humans are the only creatures that God created with the capacity for self-reflection. We can think about ourselves, evaluate our lives, and make changes in light of what we see.
Proverbs encourages us to stay on the path of wisdom, to be careful not to stray "to the right of the left." Is that the case for us? Consider the following for your life:
* Have you genuinely touched someone and changed their life for the better?
* If you work for another 10 years as you have been, what will you gain? What will your life look like in 10 years?
* What 3 things have you done in the last year that brought glory to God? How do you honor him at work, in your home, in the community?
* What have you done to say "no" in the past year to "remove your foot from evil"? What did it cost you? What did you gain?
* What one characteristic do you have that distinguishes your from non-Christians?
* Can you name 3 specific ways in which you have grown or changed for the better in the past 10 years? Have you stepped backward?
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