Daily Devotionals
Devotional: September 24th
“I have learned by experience.”
Laban had learned by experience that the Lord had blessed him for Jacob’s sake. It was a good lesson to learn. Experience is a great teacher.
I am impressed by the way that experience often helps us to understand verses in the Bible. We may be acquainted with the verses intellectually, but when we pass through some new experience, the verses come alive. They seem to stand out in neon lights. We have a new appreciation of them.
Martin Luther’s wife said that she would never have known what certain verses in the Psalms meant if God had not brought her under certain afflictions.
When Daniel Smith and his wife were missionaries in China, a robber band cut a wide hole through the side of their house one night. While the Smith’s slept, the robbers cleaned out the drawers and cupboards. If the missionaries had not slept soundly, they might have been killed. Later, in describing the incident, Mr. Smith said, “I never understood HYPERLINK "javascript:" until that morning. ‘Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’” What it means, of course, is that you can’t fully enter into Habakkuk’s joy in calamity until you have experienced the kind of loss that he described.
When Corrie Ten Boom was in a concentration camp, she had to appear before the judge. “The judge…still had his job to do, and there came a day when he showed me papers that could mean not only my death sentence but also the death sentence of family and friends.
“‘Can you explain these papers?’ he asked. ‘No, I can’t,’ I admitted. Suddenly he took all the papers and threw them in the stove! When I saw the flames destroy those condemning papers I knew I had been guarded by divine power, and understood as never before HYPERLINK "javascript:" : ‘Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.’”
The new insights we gain in the sacred Scriptures through the experiences of life make those experiences tremendously worthwhile.
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