Faith You Can See | Farm Sunday Devotional

You can usually tell what somebody believes by watching them, not by listening to them explain it. When I think about the people who shaped my own faith, hardly any of it came from a conversation. It came from watching somebody show up. I never had to wonder what they believed. I could see it.

Our faith and our actions fit together like a hand and a glove. Faith by itself, without action, is dead.

3 John, verses 5 and 11, gives us two good examples of how our Christ-like faith is to be put into action.

Watch this week’s devotional

Make your faith visible

Dear friend, when you extend hospitality to Christian brothers and sisters, even when they are strangers, you make the faith visible.

3 John 5, The Message

A visible faith is one that others can see, notice, and experience. John says we make our faith visible to others especially when we are demonstrating acts of hospitality, kindness, and service that are so good, and of such high quality, that they are worthy of God Himself. In fact, scripture elsewhere reminds us that as we act toward others, we are simultaneously acting toward God Himself.

Model the good

Friend, don’t go along with evil. Model the good. The person who does good does God’s work. The person who does evil falsifies God, doesn’t know the first thing about God.

3 John 11, The Message

John reminds us to model the good, because those who do good are doing God’s work. In this verse, John is contrasting those who do good with those who do evil.

Good works include demonstrating the love of Jesus Christ, helping others in need, and being generous in providing basic resources. As we do these things, we become their companions and partners in spreading the Truth of Jesus Christ.

Evil works include an endless hunger for power, an unwillingness to obey and follow biblical advice and counsel, spreading malicious and slanderous lies, failing to welcome and embrace others, and worst of all, turning people off and away from the Truth of Jesus Christ. John says those who do evil falsify God and reflect that they know nothing about God.

This week, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to guide and counsel us in making our faith in Jesus Christ visible to others, and also to show us how to model the Good News about Jesus Christ.

I wrote about this same passage a while back in Visible Faith Through Hospitality, if you want the hospitality piece on its own. And What It Takes to Be a True Friend comes at the showing-up part from a different direction.

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Scripture quotations are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.