May 17

Will I be accused in the end? In today's reading of John 5:25-47, we find some sobering words. That one day when we all stand before God to give an account of our lives, we will face questions about how our lives followed in action what we professed to have believed.

Jesus is accusing the people of His day for saying that they believed in the writings of Moses but yet their lives were a contradiction to those writings, specifically rejecting Him as the Messiah about whom Moses and all the other divinely inspired authors of the Old Testament wrote. One cannot read through the Old Testament and not see that Jesus is the fulfillment of all that God has promised. This is Jesus' complaint against His contemporaries who rejected Him.

Will we be accused? I have met very few people who have rejected Christ, but I have met many who although accepting a belief in who He is, their lives are rejecting what He taught by their actions. These words in John 5 stand as a timeless reminder that it is not enough to just give intellectual ascent, there must be a devotion of the heart, willingness for that which we believe to be life defining, moment by moment governing.

Who will accuse us on that day...what will they say? May it be for you and me that although we will never be perfect, that the testimony of others about us on that fateful day will be that we lived up to the truth that we professed and where we failed, we always possessed a penitent heart!

Pastor Fred