Friday July 14, 2023
John 20:20
When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side.
Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.
Many a disciple of Jesus sits alone with his sorrows and doubts. He has lost sight of Jesus.
Worst of all, you yourself are to blame for it all. It is your unfaithfulness and disobedience which are responsible for His disappearing from you, and they are the reason why you do not receive answers from Him any more.
You feel lonely and forsaken, as though every door were closed to you—even the door of heaven.
Yes, without any doubt you and I are ourselves alone to blame that we have lost sight of Jesus. If we were to receive according to our own merits, we would be forever excluded from the presence of God.
But He does not deal with us according to our sins. And therefore He comes through closed doors to His frightened disciples. He points to His wounds and says: “Behold, I have atoned for the evil that you have done. Therefore I can now forgive you all that you have done without upbraiding you. If a mother could forget her infant child, I could not forget you.
“The disciples therefore were glad,” it says—so glad that they went out and preached the gospel of the crucified and risen Savior. They did it even in the very midst of Jerusalem where the bloody executioners of Jesus were breathing out threatenings and murder.
Jesus needs confident and glad disciples today as well as then. Especially in our God-distant and doubting generation.
The world is waiting to meet disciples who come directly from a meeting with their Savior and who can say: “We have seen the Lord!”
Believing friends, let us ask the Lord to breathe upon us every day, that we may bring a direct message from Him to the people we meet on our way. That we may be a savor of life unto life in this dying world.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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