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Putting Your Best Foot Forward
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Acts 10:3-4 One afternoon at about three o’clock he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, “Cornelius.” He stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” He answered, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God.”
Listen to the radio broadcast of Putting Your Best Foot Forward
Download audio fileWe live in a world where everybody is trying to get noticed. Everyone it seems, is in the business of putting their best foot forward.
Have you ever been for a job interview? You carefully prepare a resume that tells your prospective employer what a wonderful person you are. You pay particular attention to your appearance. You make sure that you’re on time. You shake hands, look the interviewer in the eye and try your best to impress them.
And out there in the digital world, every body is publishing in social media. There are literally billions of blog sites; everybody putting their best foot forward. Everybody speaking, publishing, trying to get noticed. Trying to become an instant internet sensation.
It’s an interesting thing these days trying to get noticed. We live in such a cluttered media marketplace, with hundreds of TV channels, the internet, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram … and whatever the next new thing is going to be.
Man how do you get noticed?
Well, the reality is that you have to do something pretty spectacular – something incredibly talented, incredibly good, incredibly funny … or incredibly bad even, to rate a mention. And so the easiest thing in the world is to imagine that God’s like that – He’s a busy Guy and we have to do something incredible, something that really stands out, to get His attention. So, how do you get God’s attention?
There was a man called Cornelius who was chosen for a special task by God.
One afternoon at about three o’clock he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, “Cornelius.” He stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” He answered, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God.” (Acts 10:3-4)
It seems that Cornelius, a Roman Centurion – not even a Jew, not even one of God’s chosen people but a gentile, a heathen, a “dog” as the Jews used to refer to him as – wasn’t so much into the flashy, spectacular, sensational things of getting noticed.
He was just going along, quietly through life. Praying to God and giving to the poor. And those two, simple, faithful, decent things, things that he’d been doing very much in secret no doubt, had, according to this angel at least “ascended as a memorial before God”.
In other words, Cornelius had grabbed God’s attention.
I wonder, what do you imagine that you have to do to grab God’s attention? What are you doing to get God’s attention?
Because what Cornelius did, well it wasn’t all that spectacular was it? But as things turn out, God isn’t so much interested in the flashy stuff. Just the simple things will do Him.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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