May 15 Daily Devotional

Ye shall be my witnesses

I remember once reading a phrase in an article written by a man about a meeting in which he had listened to two speakers. It was a political, not a religious, meeting; but what he said about those two speakers came to me as a conviction from the Holy Spirit.

He said that as he listened to the two men, he felt that this was the main difference between them: the first had spoken brilliantly as an advocate; the second had spoken as a witness. And I asked myself, which am I? Am I an advocate of these things or am I a witness?

You can be an advocate of Christianity without being a Christian. You can be an advocate of these things without experiencing them.... You can present all the arguments.... And it may sound wonderful.

But you may be standing outside the true experience of it the whole time. You may be talking about something which you do not really know, about Someone you have never met. You are an advocate, perhaps even a brilliant advocate. But note what the Lord said to the apostles: "Ye shall be my witnesses."

... What the Holy Ghost does with His authority is to make us witnesses.... After the resurrection ... our Lord came to these men who had been with Him for three years and said: "But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses..." (Acts 1:8)....

Here were men who had been with Him for three years. They knew Him intimately; they had listened to His sermons; they had seen His miracles. They had stood there and had watched Him as He died upon the cross. They had seen Him buried.... They knew that He had risen from the dead... (see Luke 24).

If ever men were in a position to testify to the resurrection and to all the facts about the Lord, it was these disciples. And yet what our Lord told them is that they would be quite unable to do it until they had been baptized with the Holy Ghost.

Authority, pp. 82-3

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Comments on D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, A First Book of Daily Readings

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