Gospel to Go!

KINGDOM CREDENTIALS

Devotion #54

Gospel Reading:  Matthew 21:33-46           Go! Verse:  Matthew 21:43

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.

            John Calvin wrote, “The first duty of the Christian is to make the invisible kingdom visible.”

David Livingston was a man of God who possessed kingdom credentials.   Dwight Edwards in his book Revolution Within, tells the following story about a journalist by the name of Henry Stanley, who headed to Africa in pursuit of the infamous missionary. 

Stanley headed into Africa’s uncharted interior to find Dr. David Livingstone, the famous explorer and medical missionary who for years had been cut off from contact with Europeans.  Upon finding Livingstone ten months later, Stanley would go on to find something more, as he himself recounted:

I went to Africa as prejudiced as the biggest atheist in London.  But there came for me a long time of reflection.  I saw this solitary old man there and asked myself, “How on earth does he stop here – is he cracked, or what?  What inspires him?”  For months after we met I found myself wondering at the old man carrying out all that was said in the Bible – “Leave all things and follow me.”  But little by little his sympathy for others became contagious, my sympathy was aroused; seeing his piety, his gentleness, his zeal, his earnestness, and how he went about his business, I was converted by him, although he had not tried to do it.

            Later Stanley wrote, “It wasn’t Livingstone’s preaching that converted me, it was his living.”  

            It is men and women of faith like David Livingstone who are true fruit bearers of the kingdom.  Their kingdom credentials are discovered in the fruit of their lives.  Missional actions born on