Father, thank You for the improvement in my eyes, and my cough is lessened today. I realize that my abdominal muscle will just take time to heal. Little by little You are getting me through it! All praise to You, Father!
Acts 12:20-25 (<<click here to read the passage)
Maybe you’ve heard this one before but here’s a shortened version.
A lady, new to the community, had volunteered to bake a cake for the church bake sale. The thing is she forgot about it until the last minute. The only thing she could find in her pantry dropped flat and lumpy when she attempted to bake it
She so wanted to fit in at her new church and in her new community of new friends, but with no time to bake another cake, she decided to get creative.
She looked around the house for something to build up the center of the cake and found it in the bathroom: a roll of toilet paper. She plunked it in and covered it with icing. Not only did the finished product look beautiful, it looked perfect!
Before she left to drop the cake by the church and head to work, she woke her daughter, gave her some money, and specific instructions to be at the bake sale the minute it opened at 9:30 and to buy this cake and bring it home.
When her daughter got there, she found that the “cake” had already been sold! She immediately called her mom. Of course, she was beside herself with horror! Everyone would know! What would they think of her? She would be ostracized, talked about, ridiculed.
She barely slept that night but forced herself to not think about the “cake” the next morning in that she was attending a fancy luncheon/bridal shower at the home of a friend of a friend.
She didn’t really want to attend because the hostess had more than once looked down her nose at her because she was a single parent and not from one of the founding families of the area. But having already RSVPed, she couldn’t think of a believable excuse to stay away.
The meal was elegant, the company was definitely upper crust…and to her horror, her “cake” was presented for dessert! She started out of her chair to rush to the hostess and tell her all about it, but before she could get to her feet, the Mayor’s wife said, “What a beautiful cake!”
Still stunned, she sat back in her chair when she heard the hostess (who was a prominent church member) say, “Thank you, I baked it myself.”
We can definitely laugh but taking credit for someone else’s work can end badly, and in the case of King Herod [Agrippa I], it ended very badly. When a simple speech led people to give him a great ovation, and shout, “It’s the voice of a god, not of a man!” he should have stopped them right then and there. But instead, he accepted the people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God.
Instantly, an angel of the Lord struck Herod with a sickness… So he was consumed with worms and died. NLT
Josephus, a highly respected Jewish historian, recorded that Herod’s painful sickness ended after five days of suffering in A.D. 44. A terrible way to go, and all because of arrogance and pride.
Lord Jesus, may we be humbled by these stories. May we seek to give credit where credit is due…especially when it should be attributed to You!
Apr 20th, 2022, Wed, 12:55 pm
