Faith For This Moment Devotional By Rick McKinleySample

Day Three

Faithfulness in Exile

Scripture: Romans 12:2

God’s people throughout history often found themselves in times and places that were hostile to their faith. They survived moments when they were marginalized at best and persecuted at worst. There were also times when God’s people found themselves in powerful cultures, such as that of Babylon, whose wealth and power threatened to enculturate them and turn them away from faithfulness and toward apathy and idolatry. These moments were known as exile. 

Exile in Scripture is both a historical reality for the people of Israel in the Old Testament and a metaphor used by New Testament writers to help Christians understand how to faithfully follow Jesus in inhospitable times and places. Exile is a way of getting our minds and our hearts around understanding how to be faithful to Jesus in the current cultural moment. 

Ours is a hurting world, and our country is fractured and polarized, but God has chosen this time and place for us to live out our faith and faithfulness. The people of God have an opportunity in the midst of our cultural moment to create civility in the public square. We are called by God to love our neighbor and our enemy, to embrace rather than demonize those whom we disagree with. 

We are all broken and sinful in deep places within us, and we will never follow Jesus perfectly, but I am convinced that there is a deeper faithfulness we can discover. There is a way of living by faith that allows us to be distinct in our world, transformed by our King, and a blessing to all people as we announce the good news that Jesus is Lord of all.

May we discover what it means to be the people of God now, right here in our fractured moment, and with this discovery become the salt and light the world so desperately needs. In a moment like ours, the church can be a force for healing and hope. So as we look back to the past and see God’s faithfulness to His people in exile and the people’s response to their God, it is my prayer that we will find a way to be faithful to Jesus in our moment of exile. Because when we stand before Jesus, faithfulness to Him is really the only thing we will answer for. 

In what ways do you feel you are in exile in today’s culture?