Image Management
By Jon Walker
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’” Luke 18:13 (NIV)
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Two men: one confident he was righteous; the other confident he had sinned.
One prayed, “Thank God, I’m not like other men”; the other cried, “Oh God, I am a man who needs your mercy.”
One thinks he’s earned a hearing from God; the other knows he’s only heard by God because of heaven’s grace (Luke 18:9-15).
We are like the first man when we try to make ourselves appear more than what we are, failing to grasp that God loves us because of whose we are and not because of what we’ve done.
The light that shines within us is put within “our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6 NIV).
We sin when we try to put our own “shine” on our simple jars of clay.
We maneuver and posture to make our jars look better; we decorate the outside with ecclesiastical vain glories that we call image, power, position, or wealth.
We do this because we think our power, which is easily surpassable, somehow makes us strong when, all the while it is in our weakness that God shows himself the strongest. His light shines through even greater when we acknowledge we are God’s jars of clay.
The glory that shines from within us is not our own; it is God’s glory and his alone. He is glorified as he re-creates his creations into blameless and pure children “without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe” (Philippians 2:15 NIV).
You, my friend, magnify the glory of God by simply being you and letting him shine through you. May God “make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you” (Numbers 6:25 NIV).
If you’d like to receive these devotionals regularly, you can sign-up at www.gracecreates.com/subscribe/. Jon Walker writes from www.gracecreates.com. He is a Zondervan author, and the former writer/editor of the Purpose Driven Life On-Line Devotionals. This devotional is copyrighted 2009 by Jon Walker. Used by permission.
