God said

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

GOD SAID

Luke 1:18-20

18 Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." 19 The angel answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. 20 And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time."

NIV

Believing beyond human understanding can be difficult. What the angel, who now we know is Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, told Zechariah was the same thing Sarah laughed at when Abraham was told they would have a son. We would think Zechariah would have remembered the promise to Abraham and how that occurred in their old age. Even the fact that an angel was actually standing in front of him surely would have prompted him to believe he and his wife would have a son, but it did not. He just could not believe, even though he was a priest who served the Lord and they both lived upright before the Lord. This is indeed our life lesson here. It does not seem to matter how much we walk upright before the Lord. It seems it does not matter how many good deeds we do, or how much we serve the Lord. What matters is do we believe the word of God. Do we believe when God speaks to us? We really do not even need to have an angel appear to us, as we have the whole bible filled with words spoken by God, as we are told every scripture is God breathed. We either believe it or we don’t. We cannot choose to believe some of it, and ignore the rest of it, or rather not believe it. If we do not believe the whole then are we not like Zechariah? Do we read the word of God and think, “How can I be sure”?  And if we are like him in our disbelief, then like him, are we struck dumb in some sense? The point here is to believe. We need to believe everything God has said, and if we ever do get a visitation we had better make sure we believe. We cannot pick and choose which verse we believe and say, “Well that was just for them” or “That was for a special time” or simply just ignore that verse and never apply it to our lives. God said he would do, he promised to do all that he said. He will provide for us, he will heal us, he will lead and guide us, he will, the list goes on and on, and we need only believe. But if we, like Zachariah do not believe, we will be crippled Christians, hampered, unable to live a normal life in Christ. It comes down to, God said, thus we believe.