Going Up While Going Down

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." 
2 Corinthians 4:16 (NIV)

I had a neighbor named Mike who wanted nothing to do with me or with God, (I shared more of his story in yesterday’s devotional). Then he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I knocked on his door, shared the Gospel. Then I watched him kneel on a walker and give his life to Jesus.

What happened next is what I want you to see.

Two months later, the day before Mike dies, his wife calls to say the end is near. I go to his house, and she tells me his priest came that afternoon to give him the last rites. What the priest gets instead is Mike telling him he doesn't need last rites and then sharing his testimony of what Jesus has done in his life. Then she tells me the rest. Mike has gotten permission for me to preach at his funeral in his church. The priest has agreed. And Mike wants every neighbor on the street to be there.

He is going down physically and going up spiritually, all the way to the end. Paul described it in today’s verse, "Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." That was Mike.

That funeral gives me a chance I never had while Mike was healthy, to preach the Gospel to nearly every family in our forty-two-home neighborhood.

That is what God can do, even in suffering. He creates a genuinely converted life. With Him, trials and trouble don’t shrink your faith. They expand it outward, toward the very people who have been watching you from a distance. Maybe things are closing in on you right now. What if God is not shrinking your world, but expanding your reach?

Write down the name of one person who has watched your life up close. Let what God is doing in you become the story that opens a door you never could have opened on your own.

Prayer: Father, I praise You for Your steadfast lovingkindness, extended toward me today. And I confess, it is easy to want out of hard seasons. But I know that going up can mean going down first. Use whatever I am walking through right now to reach someone who would never listen any other way. In Jesus' Name, Amen.