Call on me! - Devotion for 11/12/08

Call on me! – Devotion for 11/12/08

There seems to be a natural instinct in us that when we are in a class and the teacher asks a question, almost everyone does everything they can to avoid eye contact with the teacher. I’ve seen this even when I’m teaching Bible Study, and I’m not even giving grades! We have this built in fear of embarrassment, and answering the question incorrectly in front of the whole class would be embarrassing, so we do what we can to avoid having to even try. I always had a fear that maybe I somehow misheard the question, and so if I answered the question that I thought I heard then I would be completely wrong. I eventually developed a tactic that never quite worked: I would initiate eye contact with the teacher when the teacher asked the question, and then I would suddenly glance at someone else as if that person had the answer. Yes this tactic actually worked a time or two, but not nearly enough for my liking (however, it was more than enough for the poor saps that the teacher did call on).

Christians know that we are called to share our faith with others; however we don’t always know how to do it. So sometimes we live as though we are trying to avoid being called on by God to share what we have. Truthfully, there are a lot of so-called Christians that I wish would try to avoid their sharing tactics a little bit more, as it seems they almost do more harm than good. However, this morning in my devotion time I read from Colossians 4:2-6, and I was reminded that we need to earnestly devote ourselves to prayer, and pray that “God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ” (Colossians 4:3). We need to pray for the opportunities to be called on, and when we are, “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned, as it were, with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.”(Colossians 4:6)