Saturday, January 24, 2009

ADULT BEHAVIOR - Devotional for January 23, from "Good Seeds"

Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself. (Dan 1:8)

The apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, and reasoned as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11). While just a lad, Daniel was carried away from his homeland and family by the Babylonians. But then he and a few others were hand-picked from among the captives to be trained for high service in Nebuchadnezzar’s court. Their faces were stripped of Judean dirt, their bodies stripped of Hebrew clothing, and their Jewish identities stripped away with changed names. All these things the boys endured without protest. But then one day the brain washing commenced, not just into a new culture but into a new morality. The boys’ silence ended. Daniel spoke up, not in defiance but with an assertive appeal, informing his trainers that he would not be able to comply with the diet he was being served. He knew that the moment he gave in he would be turning against everything he believed in and stood for. Up to this point Daniel was just a boy, but he became a man that day, when he put childish things away, when he decided to make decisions for himself, in line with his convictions. To be a child means to operate on the basis of meeting your own primal needs of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Adult authorities make decisions for you and you more or less comply, since they are presumably older and wiser and know right from wrong better than you do. To be a man is to understand that what others may expect or prescribe may not be right, or good for you, and in such cases you must disagree and walk away. Oh to have more adults in the world, with convictions like that! How many chronologically mature individuals are still children when it comes to making choices based on what’s right rather than on what feels good? To fight this tendency toward childish self-indulgence when facing moral questions, we must not only ask, “What’s wrong with it?” but then move on to, “What’s the right thing to do?” (for there’s no point in doing well what should not be done at all!) These rules define adult behavior. But these days the word adult seems to have taken on a totally opposite meaning: when used as an adjective before words like entertainment, movies, humor, etc, it connotes not adult maturity but childish self-indulgence. Don’t let things that defile you define you! Let’s be adults, like the boy Daniel, and make up our minds ahead of time that we will not eat or drink or speak or participate in anything that will defile us, inside or out – for we, too, are hand-picked…by the One who has captured our heart!

2 comments:

  1. Pop,

    Where are you getting the order of your passages for you devotions? I don't see a patter yet, if there is one.

    Jason

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  2. Jay-son,
    No, there's no order. At first I was going to alternate between testaments, but I'm not even doing that so much now. Sometimes an idea for a devotional pops up, from something I've read or heard, as with Saturday's entry, my friend Greg's experience at the blood bank. More often than not I simply thumb through my old, falling-apart Bible, and let my eyes be drawn to passages I've underlined, or notes I've written in the margin. As with my poems, I just almost never experience "writer's block." The ideas come quickly, and then the words just flow (not that I don't spend considerable time on each one. It's much harder than sermon writing because of my rule to limit it to one page, 6 X 9). Thanks for asking. Pop

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