June 22 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"...the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus..." (Heb. 13:20).

Devotional

How beautifully God's Word associates these two blessings! God is now truly the "God of peace"—the pacified God, the reconciled Father—and the evidence of it is his raising up his dear Son from the grave.

What a bright view of God this truth thus unfolds! When you rest in yourself, you see much to engender dark views of God, and fearful feelings towards him. But when your faith travels to the grave of Jesus and you see it empty, then you have such an overwhelming evidence of the perfect reconciliation of God, of his thoughts of peace towards you, that instantly faith triumphs. All your gloomy, trembling apprehensions of his character vanish and disappear. You see him as the "God of peace" because you see Jesus as the risen Savior.

And to the degree that you lay hold by faith of the resurrection-life of Christ, you will have the foundation to sustain you upon which rests the whole of salvation. As you experience the power of the Lord's resurrection in your soul, the peace of God will fill your heart. It is the power of Christ's resurrection that gives a sense of pardoned sin, that gives the understanding of complete justification, that gives the living hope of eternal glory. Jesus saves to the uttermost all who come to God by him precisely because he is a risen Savior who ever lives to make intercession in behalf of all his people.

Oh, deal believingly with a risen, living Christ! The same resurrection-power that brought the Head of the church back to life again is exerted in effecting the spiritual resurrection of the church herself. The true believer is already risen. He was once dead in sin. He was entombed in the grave of his iniquities. But a power—the same power that awoke the death-slumber of Lazarus—has darted from the tomb of Jesus, and has raised him to a new and a deathless life.

Oh, if only you more directly trace the mighty energy of the Eternal Spirit in your soul, raising you from death to life and immortality, to that stupendous fact of redemption—the resurrection of Christ from the dead—then how it will exalt your view of its importance! How it will fill your soul with its glory!

What must the power of our Lord's resurrection be that it can even now awake the profoundest sleep of spiritual death! When the Spirit of God puts forth his own grace to raise a soul from the grave of sin, oh, never forget that it is in virtue of the risen, living Savior. Thus, do not despair of the spiritual life of any, even though they may have lain in spiritual death so long as to have nearly quenched all hope of their conversion. Why not? Because Christ has risen from the dead and is alive to give life in answer to the prayer of faith. "The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45).

Jesus lives, and so shall I.
Death! thy sting is gone forever!
He who deigned for me to die,
lives, the bands of death to sever.
He shall raise me from the dust:
Jesus is my Hope and Trust.

(Christian F. Gellert, 1757; tr. by J.D. Lang, 1826)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2025.