Of course, your former friends are surprised when you no longer plunge into the flood of wild and destructive things they do. So they slander you. [1Peter 4:4]
I remember that night in the Spring of 1976 when I showed up to bowl with my friends. We were teammates. We all loved to bowl and drink beer together. Yet something happened to me a few days earlier. I was born again. I stopped drinking. My abstinence was noticed that night at the bowling alley.
For months my friends had been seeing a change in me. My language had been changing. The influence of my wife's transformed life was affecting me. Then in an instance of surrender my heart was transformed. And I found myself acting differently. No one was surprised more than me.
When I consider the way that I once lived, I am reminded of the nights when I plunged myself into drunken stupors. Such wild and destructive living is symptomatic of a man in pain. A bitter soul living without hope. Yet hope came into my life that day when I was born again. And I have never been the same.
Help us Lord to be those who outwardly witness to the transformation that has happened within.
... this devotion is part of an ongoing series on the epistles of Peter.
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