From Ordinary to Extraordinary
Devotion for Thursday , July 02, 2009 |
|  |
| Previous Next Selection Taken From:
From Ordinary to Extraordinary: A Yearlong Devotional to Discover What God Wants to Do with You by John MacArthur What do a tax collector, zealot, widow, and two
sisters have in common? They were ordinary people
who accomplished extraordinary things for God!
Profiling the Bible's most significant figures,
MacArthur's rich blend of teaching and inspiration
drawn from his best-selling books offers daily
encouragement as you strive to follow Christ.
Padded hardcover.
Used by permission. Adapted from From Ordinary to
Extraordinary, A Yearlong Devotional to Discover
What God Wants to Do with You by John MacArthur
(Thomas Nelson Publishers, Copyright 2009). |
NO SIN, NO GRACE
For if we have been united together in the
likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be
in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this,
that our old man was crucified with Him, that the
body o f sin might be done away with, that we
should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has
died has been freed from sin. - ROMANS 6:5-7
Some of the scholastic rabbis just prior to Jesus' time became embarrassed by the fact that a woman with Rahab's background was spared destruction and brought into Israel as a proselyte. They proposed a different understanding of the Hebrew word for harlot, which is similar to a word meaning "to feed." They suggested she was merely an innkeeper. Unfortunately, the Hebrew word can mean only one thing: "harlot." In the Septuagint, the Greek term is porne, from which we derive our word pornography.
The biblical record doesn't need sanitizing. Remove the stigma of sin, and you remove the need for grace. Rahab is extraordinary precisely because she received extraordinary grace. The disturbing fact about what she once was simply magnifies the glory of divine grace, which is what made her the extraordinary woman she became-just like the disciples! That, after all, is the whole lesson of her life.
Click here to send this devotion to a friend!
