Day 98: Who Shames You?

Luke 9:26 :

For whoever will be ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed, when he comes in his glory, and the glory of the Father, and of the holy angels.

Once again, on this theme that we have been going over together, Jesus contrasts the choice we have between something that we either must deal with now or wait until later. There are some things that we cannot get ourselves out of. All we can do is delay them, and usually, delaying things makes them worse than dealing with them right away.

The issue we are dealing with here is the issue of shame. Once again, Satan has tuned this world in such a way that those who dare to do good things for God now will seem shameful. I recently had this experience myself at my job. I was looking at a news report when someone there read that it came from “Evangelical Christians” and they immediately decided that it must be false. Somehow, the minds of many people have been tuned to think that “Evangelical Christians” are liars. Now, it is true, that some who claim to be evangelical Christians are liars, but that is a very bad way to think and, indeed, if I were to think that way about any other group I would probably lose my job. Somehow, this world thinks it’s excusable to speak and think evil of Christians.

God gave me the power to speak up and say that I was an evangelical Christian and take the shame with my fellow believers. This is a verse that warns me that it is now time for me to take shame for Jesus. I have to do it because if I don’t it is pretty clear that when He returns He will be ashamed of me.

The question is: “Who would you rather have be ashamed of you?” We can choose from those in the world that are deceived temporarily about what’s really happening, or we can choose to please God instead and possibly get shamed by the world. I don’t believe that we lose our salvation, but I do believe that we can be shamed as God’s children. I believe some will be very ashamed for how they have acted or not acted as believers. This is a warning to us to go back to what is right and do good even if it is shameful in this world.