Daily Devotional Details

Date

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21

These are difficult days. Sixteen years after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the threat of terrorism still hangs over our country and over freedom-loving people around the world.

After years in which many had hoped for progress, anger and violence over issues of race have reached a new intensity. Loss of civility and manners in public life is producing a meanness of spirit that is making life increasingly unmanageable in the classroom, the work place, and in the home.

Our nation is deeply divided over issues of life, marriage, gender, and increasingly, over death. Having lost the sense of living under the authority of God, our culture now sees fit to take the great issues of life into our own hands and to do with them as we please. And all over our country, believing people are asking, “What in the world are we to do?”

When you find yourself saying, “It seems that our freedoms are under threat and that morality, as we know it, has been swept away,” remember that Christians have been here before. What we have in Romans 12 are the words that God spoke to his people in Rome after they had endured the excesses of Caligula and while they were enduring the nightmare of Nero.

How are Christians to respond in times of rapid social change? What does God say to these Christians and therefore to us today? Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.

Do God’s words here inspire you? Give you hope? Leave you discouraged? Why?