True Grit

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God 

He lay there in a pool of his own blood. They thought he was dead. But he got up and went back to the city from which he had been stoned, dragged to the side of a road, and left for dead. Yes, I’m referring to the Apostle Paul, and it happened in Lystra.

Be honest: If you had been pelted repeatedly with rocks and left for dead, would you go back to that city and spend the night? You’re probably laughing at the thought, right? Not so with Paul. He was a man on a mission from God. He was determined to stick it out. We say of someone like that, “He has true grit.”

That’s because Paul didn’t operate solely from a horizontal viewpoint. If that were the case, he would have been miles away when the sun peaked over the horizon the next day. But Paul had a vertical perspective on things. With that mindset, you stick it out. You don’t quit. And, for heaven’s sake, you don’t throw a pity-party. You do what you’ve done night after night — you keep trusting the God who called you, convinced that he will keep you in His sovereign care. Welcome to authentic Christian ministry — true grit!

True grit is not fickle. True grit rejects being enshrined as a god (that’s what the city folk wanted to do with Paul and Barnabas just before Jews from Antioch and Iconium came and talked them into stoning Paul - see Acts 14.11-13). True grit is relentless through periods of intense persecution. True grit hangs in there, no matter how perilous the threat. Paul and Barnabas dripped with it. 

I think of the many Christ followers outside of the U.S. who demonstrate this same tenacity of ministry. I pray for them. And I pray that if God should call me to that kind of ministry, that I would have the same grit they are made of!

True grit delivers the truth of God, no matter how perilous things become.

Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe. Acts 14.19-20