Daily Devotional: Good Father, Wicked Son

​How can you teach a child the right way to go, and he still chooses evil?

​Picture: Manasseh had to be bound and taken prisoner to Assyria before he acknowledge God.

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II Chronicles 33:1-13

​“Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was God”

Manasseh knew the miracles God did for his father Hezekiah. Yet he undid all the spiritual progress his father had made by rejecting the faith and reinstituting idol worship. He could not recognize that the Lord was God until after he experienced God for himself.

How easy is it to listen to testimonies and not realize what they mean? The witness of Christ is all around us. Creation itself reveals God. Yet people ignore the witness of creation and of the redeemed.
Are our hearts so blind that we cannot understand God until we experience Him? Yes, for Paul tells us that without the Holy Spirit we could know nothing of God (II Cor. 2:10-11). We must surrender our minds and thoughts to God that we may understand who He is.

Only when we choose to lay aside our own understanding and seek the knowledge of God can we really ever learn anything useful. We can only learn to be righteous when we learn what righteousness is, and we only learn that through the revelation of the Holy Spirit. How much deeper and wondrous could our knowledge of God be if we only listened!

• Reflection: Do you ignore people’s testimonies, or do you consider their witnesses to deepen your understanding of who God is? Leave a comment below to share what God is doing in your life.