Watch
Somebody

Devotional

A Faith You Can See

Paul says something in verse 17 that would sound arrogant coming from almost anyone else. Join together in following my example.

He isn’t claiming perfection, because he told us two verses ago that he hasn’t arrived. He’s acknowledging something we’ve largely lost. Faith is transferred by watching more than by explaining. You can teach information in a classroom, but a way of life gets caught by proximity to someone who’s living it.

Most of us have never asked anybody if we could watch them. We consume teaching constantly, from podcasts and books and sermons, and we can go years without ever being close enough to a mature believer to see how they handle a disappointment, an argument with their spouse, or a Tuesday when nothing is going well.

Then Paul turns to the warning, and notice how he delivers it. He says it with tears. This isn’t a man enjoying the opportunity to denounce anyone, and there’s real grief in his voice.

His description in verse 19 is worth slowing down on. Their god is their stomach, which means appetite has become the thing they finally obey. Their glory is in their shame, which means they’ve stopped being embarrassed by what once would’ve embarrassed them. And the summary line is that their mind is set on earthly things.

That last phrase is the diagnosis underneath the other symptoms, and it isn’t primarily about immorality. It’s about a mind that has quietly narrowed its field of vision until nothing beyond this life is really in view. A person can be entirely respectable and still fit that description perfectly.

So the honest question isn’t whether you’re living some scandalous life. It’s what your mind is set on when it isn’t being supervised, which is usually revealed by what you think about in the first ten minutes after you wake up.

Find someone worth watching, and become someone worth watching. Both are commands here, and neither of them happens by accident. Proximity is the entire method, and proximity has to be scheduled.