Remaining in ChristSample

Day 5 Devotional:

Conclusion

During World War II, a group of British soldiers were captured and imprisoned in a prison camp by the Japanese Army. At the end of a day of forced labor, the guards counted the shovels that the British prisoners had used for their manual labor in the prison camp, and they found that one shovel was missing.

A furious Japanese guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one British prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, “I did it.”

This British soldier then stood quietly at attention as he was beaten to death by the Japanese soldiers. When the British soldiers got back to the camp, and they counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. That one soldier, in other words, had sacrificed himself to save his friends.

This soldier’s sacrificial death for the other soldiers reminds us of what Christ tells the disciples here in John 15:13: Greater love has no one than this, that a man would lay down his life for his friends.

Let me point out to you, however, the big difference between what the British soldier did and what Christ did. You see, the British soldier died for his fellow soldiers who were his friends. Christ, on the other hand, laid down His life for us, who were not His friends, but who were His enemies.

We were His enemies because our inherent sinfulness and rebellion against God made us the enemies of God, and yet Christ laid down His life for us, His enemies!

Rom. 5:8 reminds us of this by telling us that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This is the great good news at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The gospel reminds us that, because Christ suffered such pain, such injustice, and such a cruel death for us who did to deserve it, we can trust Him, and it shows us that it is indeed worth our while to remain in Him.

Christ used the word remain ten times in this passage. This emphasizes the urgency of remaining in Him so that the Holy Spirit develops in us the joy of Christ that we need to face all the painful pruning the Lord will bring us through in our Christian lives.

As the Lord guides us along the hard pruning roads of our Christian lives, may these 3M’s from this Plan encourage all of us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to remain in Christ, and to bear much internal and external spiritual fruit.