Advent Devotional for Dec. 2
Tuesday, December 2 Acts 20:7-12
Healing helps us to be humble.
Pity poor Eutychus, the young teenager who had the misfortune of nodding off during the Apostle Paul’s lengthy midnight sermon while seated near a window. As he slept, he tumbled out of the window, down three stories and on to the ground below, where he was picked up dead. This is one of many reasons our church sanctuary is on the ground floor…Yet Paul took him up in his arms and said “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” And sure enough, when the Apostle touches him, the boy lives!
We pity Eutychus; how sheepish he must have felt. Yet there was a hidden gift in his embarrassment. You see, we have to be humbled before we are healed. If we spend our lives showing everybody how we have it all together, how we are doing just fine, how we are in no need of anybody, we can never know healing. Jesus said that he did not come for the well, but for the sick; and if our lives are about demonstrating our competence, we cannot ever be healed in the way we need. But when you hit a Eutychus moment, when you’re tumbling through the sky, heading for a crash, and worse, you know it’s all your fault: then you can be healed.
Perhaps you are in a Eutychus moment now, or perhaps you just fear you will be soon. You fear the lack of control; you fear the inability to manage your destiny. If this is where you are, take heart: it is when you fall like Eutychus that God can raise you up.
Healing helps us to be humble.
Pity poor Eutychus, the young teenager who had the misfortune of nodding off during the Apostle Paul’s lengthy midnight sermon while seated near a window. As he slept, he tumbled out of the window, down three stories and on to the ground below, where he was picked up dead. This is one of many reasons our church sanctuary is on the ground floor…Yet Paul took him up in his arms and said “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” And sure enough, when the Apostle touches him, the boy lives!
We pity Eutychus; how sheepish he must have felt. Yet there was a hidden gift in his embarrassment. You see, we have to be humbled before we are healed. If we spend our lives showing everybody how we have it all together, how we are doing just fine, how we are in no need of anybody, we can never know healing. Jesus said that he did not come for the well, but for the sick; and if our lives are about demonstrating our competence, we cannot ever be healed in the way we need. But when you hit a Eutychus moment, when you’re tumbling through the sky, heading for a crash, and worse, you know it’s all your fault: then you can be healed.
Perhaps you are in a Eutychus moment now, or perhaps you just fear you will be soon. You fear the lack of control; you fear the inability to manage your destiny. If this is where you are, take heart: it is when you fall like Eutychus that God can raise you up.
posted by Michael Jordan at 6:00 AM
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