January 18

DEAL OR NO DEAL

Father, thank You for bringing me to this place and this time today. I ask You to speak to me right now, and to let Your Word breathe life into my heart. Please use these next few moments to bring me to more of a fullness of You and to learn more of Your Glory and how to leave the footprints of Jesus everywhere I go today. In Jesus Name I pray. Amen!

Read Matthew 1:18-23

Very little is preserved from the life of Joseph of Nazareth. I suspect though, he was much like many of us. Verses 18 and 19 of Matthew chapter 1 lead me to this conclusion. Here we find Joseph wanting to make the responsible and right decision.

Tonight as I write, I am casually watching a popular game show on NBC, in which the contestant has to make a series of decisions about cases of amounts of money. The contestant this particular evening admitted she sometimes struggles with decisions, and in the end she made a rather quick decision to take the $97,000 offered by the banker. I had said to myself that I would have taken the offer a couple of rounds earlier, when the amount reached 6 figures. I thought she was making a responsible decision when she took the money. Had she kept going to the end though, she could have walked away with three quarters of a million dollars. She acted somewhat too soon.

I am so thankful Joseph did not act too quickly. Sometimes it is easy to act and make a swift decision when it seems the right and responsible thing to do. It would make sense that saying yes to almost $100,000 is responsible. It would also appear that maintaining our social standing, while protecting the reputation of a loved one would be a correct decision. The problem is we base decision such as these on our perspective and not God’s. Had Joseph done what was considered right by worldly or even Jewish standards, his life would have been drastically different. Mary would have still had Jesus, and Jesus would have still died for us. Joseph though, would have missed out on a lot. He would not have been blessed by being part of Jesus’ life, and would have not been included in God’s plans. Joseph’s life was fuller by not acting quickly; he instead listened to God and went with the somewhat surprising option. The game show contestant from earlier probably would have liked to have $750,000, instead of just under $100,000, but where Joseph did listen to the voice of the angel, this contestant did not listen to the voices of her support group.

Today I encourage you to leave His footprints by listening closely for God’s voice, even when the decision at hand seems like a cut and dry one.

Leave His footprints as you walk today!