Today's Daily Bread

 

 

                                                                                

All Spruced Up

January 18, 2014 — by Joe Stowell

Our Daily Bread

 

 

Read: Jude 1:20-25

[Jesus] is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you faultless. —Jude 1:24

 

Bible in a Year:
Genesis 43-45; Matthew 12:24-50

Getting our children to look good for church was always a challenge. Ten minutes after arriving at church all spruced up, our little Matthew would look like he didn’t have parents. I’d see him running down the hall with his shirt half untucked, glasses cockeyed, shoes scuffed up, and cookie crumbs decorating his clothes. Left to himself, he was a mess.

I wonder if that is how we look sometimes. After Christ has clothed us in His righteousness, we tend to wander off and live in ways that make us look like we don’t belong to God. That’s why Jude’s promise that Jesus is “able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you faultless” gives me hope (Jude 1:24).

How can we keep from looking like we don’t have a heavenly Father? As we become more yielded to His Spirit and His ways, He will keep us from stumbling. Think of how increasingly righteous our lives would become if we would take time in His Word to be cleansed with “the washing of water by the word” (Eph. 5:26).

What a blessing that Jesus promises to take our stumbling, disheveled lives and present us faultless to the Father! May we increasingly look like children of the King as we reflect His loving care and attention.

 

Lord, thank You for the blessing of being clothed
in Your beautiful righteousness and the promise
that You will keep me from stumbling and present
me faultless before Your Father and my God!

 

 

To reflect the presence of the Father, we must rely on the Son.

 

Insight

Jude’s beautiful benediction has been widely used in church services for hundreds of years (vv.24-25). It is a word of praise to God for His wonderful works of preserving and perfecting believers. The high priest Aaron similarly blessed Israel as a nation by reminding them of God’s character (Num. 6:24-26). Likewise, in the Pauline epistles we are admonished to praise God for both His provision to sustain our faith (Rom. 16:25-27) and for His unsearchable wisdom in providing our redemption (Rom. 11:33-36). Each of us is likely to stumble in our words and actions, but Jude’s admonition indicates that stumbling does not mean defeat. Instead, God’s power can pick us up again and move us forward.