Week 5 June 2025, Impromptu Devotion

Fast delivery is my love language

True, I’ve been “In a relationship with Amazon Prime” for years, but until I saw this slogan the other day, I had no idea I mattered so much to Jeff Bezos. According to Forbes he’s worth $195 billions, and I probably haven’t padded his nest egg much even with my many purchases of Purina “Fancy Feast Chunky Turkey.”  Still, there are plenty of “fat cats” throwing their what-ever-kind of weight around in today’s fractured, Me-First society.

What would it take, I’m suddenly musing, to come up with an eye-catching saying to promote a Christian world view, one quite distinct from any popular sales pitch. The story of Lazarus in John 11 is not exactly slogan material, but I think I just found our perfect catchphrase: “Delayed Deliverance is My love language.”  This, of course, is Jesus speaking who dearly loves His friends in Bethany.  But when Mary and Martha send word that their brother is critically ill, He deliberately waits days to go see for Himself.  Rather than being fazed that the patient is now dead and buried, their Lord sticks to the initial claim spoken to His worried disciples, “It is for God’s glory…”  What if the biblical injunction to “Grow rich toward [this kind of] God” makes us squirm?  No generation before ours has become so culturally conditioned to expect gratification at the click on the device that masquerades as our servant, but in fact is a crafty master.

If Forbes were to hazard a guess as to how rich God is, it couldn’t compute “the unsearchable riches of Christ” on public record in Ephesians 3:8.  What really would send those poor folks over the edge could be blamed on the Apostle Paul.  In 2 Corinthians 8:9 he stated, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through poverty might become rich.”  In essence, God became fully man to make us earthlings His forever treasured and “special possession.” The price tag was His death as God’s Son on the cross. 

Our nation is critically ill and God’s delayed deliverance is also a matter of His ultimate glory, but not denial as some might fear.  On the same day of discovering the Amazon Prime slogan, I read the following story by Katara Patton in “Our Daily Bread.“ In the early 1900s, laws restricted Black people and new immigrants from renting or buying property in Coronado, California.  A man born into slavery had earlier built a boarding house and rented to an Asian family, then having them buy it to stay clear of the long arm of the new law.  Nearly 85 years later, appreciative relatives sold the land and donated the proceeds to help Black college students. The devotional quoted Leviticus 25:35, “Help the poor as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you.”  Political tyranny marked by widespread discrimination is ripe for plucking by the “Love Language of God’s Justice.”  His “Season of the Suddenlies” may be surprisingly near.  When two beaten and bloodied Christians praised God in jail at midnight, a strong earthquake suddenly struck Philippi.  The just as suddenly suicidal jailer and his whole household were set free to fear God more than the Roman authorities, and they began to taste at once the freedom of eternal Salvation.