Reading your Bible for today August 17

August 17: Luke 1:1-4

KJV Key Verse: Luke 1:4
4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Devotion:
How often have you been frustrated by other people who have not told your story properly. I mean, here you go, trying to explain things properly to one person, and they go off and tell someone else something different and have the cheek to say you told them that! I am sure we have all been there at some stage, and may well have been the one who got the story wrong too!

Luke must have got a bit frustrated by the “broken telephone syndrome” when he would do his best to go out and preach God's Word as it was told to him only to have others get it wrong and then for them to explain it incorrectly to others. He decided to make sure they got the whole truth by writing it all down and giving it to the church as a written document; that way they could not get it wrong! If only things were as simple as that in real life!

No matter how much we write things down and explain it to people, some will always come up with their own ideas. Some will even think their ideas must be better than yours and start telling others their own ideas in preference to the truth. That is just part of human life – each one of us seems to want to be known in some better way than others. Until we can let go of that need to be recognised in some way more than others, we will continue to bend the rules, bend the truth and go off on our own ideas!

God wants us to come forward humbly to accept His Word as the truth and to faithfully recount His word to others. This does not mean we have to stick to reading His Word directly from the scriptures and nothing else... What it does mean is that we need to find out the truth before we start spreading it to others. What good would it be if I started to tell you how to make birds nest soup if I did not even know what ingredients to use? We need to find out the truth by reading all of it so that we can understand it, only then can we get to grips with telling others about it...

Points to Ponder:
Do you like talking to others about things you know nothing about?

How much do you actually know about God's Word?