His Glorious Truth Can Shine

October 25

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you,” John 15:13-15.

Parents go to great lengths to keep adult conversations out of the hearing of their young children. Sometimes hushed tones go silent when little ones appear within hearing range. The caring adults do not wish to distress their youngsters with weighty matters that are impossible for them to comprehend.

In the passage above Jesus illustrates much the same attitude on the part of masters toward their servants. Those subject to the master were presumed to have little knowledge of the weighty things in the mind of the master or little need to know them. Jesus tells His people that they are neither children nor servants but friends—adults with whom He willingly shares the truths of eternity.

In II Timothy 3:15-17, the Apostle Paul expands this need for knowledge by saying, “and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

The precious truth that Jesus shared with His apostles and through early Church leaders are foundational to the equipping of the saints and must begin from an early age. It is imperative that believing parents gird their children with the truth of the ages that they might be enabled to profit in the things of eternity. A child who is schooled merely in the strategies for temporal success will be wanting on that great eternal day when all men’s works are tried by fire (see I Corinthians 3:13).

And we are commanded that we must not be mere “hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word,” James 1:22. It profits us little if we are mere repositories of the truth the Lord has entrusted to us. Rather, it behooves us to share the truth we have with those round about us, to be “living epistles, read of all men,” II Corinthians 3:2, as well as to be lampstands (see Matthew 5:15 and Luke 11:33) upon which the Light that is Jesus may set and from which His glorious truth can shine to all the world.