Monday,
January 9, 2023
When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray
to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I
pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner
strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his
home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and
keep you strong. And may you have the power to
understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how
deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ,
though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the
fullness of life and power that comes from God.
Ephesians 3:14-19
Paul is writing final letters to
his dear friends. His days as a prisoner
were coming to an end, and it was not to be a parole; Paul was under a sentence
of death. One of the purposes of the
letter was to absolve from any guilt this group of believers in Ephesus whom he loved
deeply, and doing so, to draw them more deeply into Christ’s love. Paul’s singular charge from God was to spread
the Gospel to the Gentiles. He had developed
a reptutation as a heretic among the Jews, a traitor for saying God’s love was
for everyone.[1] The Jewish leaders pulled every
string they could to silence the apostle.
This letter was a last testament
of his love for his Ephesian family. And
in this text Paul’s prayer for them is for spiritual insight, that God would
reveal the scope of God’s love to them, developing in that body of believers
the kind of fullness of the Christian life they would need to carry-on the work
Paul had begun with them. The apostle
was passing the baton to the next generation!
Mentors do that. There are many people who influence your
life, folks who reveal important things.
But, truth be told, there are fewer mentors, people who go out of their
way to befriend, teach, counsel, and inspire.
This is passing the Good News baton to the next generation.
Being a mentor, a passer of the
baton, means several things are in place:
First, some valuable learning must have taken hold in your life, if you’re
going to pass along truth. If you don’t
have a baton to pass on, your leg of the race is worthless. And before you just give up because you
judge your ministry…that’s not up to you…that’s God’s prerogative.
Second, there must be a longing beyond your reach. As effective a missionary as Paul was, his
most lasting dynamic was his willingness to leave it all on the field for
someone else to pick up.
Third, you must be willing to let go of the reins. Let’s face it…nobody drives like anybody
else. If you won’t trust God to work in the
life of someone who looks up to you as mentor, you didn’t have a ministry,
you had an agenda.
Most of us will not have to face
the executioner’s axe, like Paul did, to realize the time of passing the baton
was at hand. Letting go to trust God’s
hand is the supreme act of faith.
For You Today
I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to
what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the
heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. Philippians 3:13b-14
There are about 2,000 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions
library. To dig deeper on
today’s topic, explore some of these:
Understanding the Danger of Peanut
Butter and Measuring the Love of God
Images: Title Wikimedia Commons - public domain Images without
citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted
from The New Living Translation©
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