Day 29 - Issue 22
Genesis 1:26 NLT
…They will reign…”
Exercising responsibility is a challenge. As a newly appointed school prefect, I entered into conversation with myself over the exercise of my new-found power. I could by virtue of my prefect status penalise people I didn’t much like. Responsibility is always a challenge.
God by choice entrusts the ordering of the creation to humanity. We have the ability to design and implement political structures through which we can determine the quality of life for fellow image-bearers of God. We equally have the capacity to use such authority to benefit ourselves. Of course, such corruption can only ever leave us feeling naked and ashamed as we hear the voice of God calling.
The invitation from Jesus is to choose to learn to resist the corrupting influence of living in a fractured world. Each one of us has the capacity for wrongdoing. Equally we have the capacity to resist. If I take Jesus as my model, his apparent influence on earth was minimal; born in a backwater, leading a group of twelve, itinerant without an office in sight, and unwilling or unable to penetrate the sources of power, the Sanhedrin and Roman. It is little surprise that the power elite who devised a corrupt plot to destroy him might have anticipated his swift eradication from history.
His enduring legacy was that he represented an altogether different way of living. This involved truth-telling, living for the interests of others and a willingness to give up life itself rather than be compromised through collaboration. I have found it hard to resist the temptation towards corruption. I had choices from fiddling my expenses when working, through to suppressing principle for advancement. I know I have made bad choices, yet the softened conscience that I chose not to silence has enabled me to return in repentance and choose God each time. I am not necessarily a good man, yet I know not as bad as I might have been and often wanted to be. Each of us is tested in this world ahead of exercising authority in dominion throughout eternity.
QUESTION: How do you deal with the yearning towards corruption in your own life?
PRAYER: Lord, lead me not into temptation but deliver me from evil.
