You Must Be Born Again & Again, Again, & Again


Yesterday, I had to do the Devotional equivalent of the two minute drill in football. It was the first day of the 2nd semester (we are on Block Scheduling with a Fall and Spring semester like college). The day is pretty much the first day of school redux.

As such, I needed to get out the door early in order to be ready for the mass of humanity awaiting in Guidance, yearning for schedule changes--a good deal of them because of failed courses.

Also, some kids pleading for easier courses, a few asking for harder classes. Think Deli counter with a very long snaking line. Teenagers tend to get unruly in large audiences so it is best for me to proceed quickly through the line.

Since I could not do my typical 40 minute Devotional of reading and prayer and meditation, I pulled out My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. This devotional is as a concentrate. Powerful, hard-hitting, not exactly the pabulum served up these days. Chambers wrote something in yesterday's devotional that really spoke to me and was quite an encouragement for a day of new beginnings:

"Being born again of the Spirit is an unmistakable work of God, as mysterious as the wind, as surprising as God Himself. We do not know where it begins, it is hidden away in the depths of our personal life. Being born again from above is a perennial, perpetual and eternal beginning; a freshness all the time in thinking and in talking and in living, the continual surprise of the life of God."

Have you flunked some classes, real or metaphorical, in life? When you look to the past, do you see a heaping serving of "F's?" Or, are you pleading with God for him to just make it easier and you get a firm "No" which is indeed an answer to prayer, but not the one that we wanted? Good to know God wipes the chalkboard of past life (or white board, to be more 21st century) clean everyday if we seek his erasing mercy and his newly scripted grace each day. He gives us the courage to be better, to be born anew. To rise to the challenge...to be our utmost for His highest.



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