Morning Devotional

July 5, 2003

“Wrong Number”  

by Don Emmitte

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“Don't be troubled. You trust God, now trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father's home, and I am going to prepare a place for you. If this were not so, I would tell you plainly. When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know where I am going and how to get there.” “No, we don't know, Lord," Thomas said. "We haven't any idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had known who I am, then you would have known who my Father is. From now on you know him and have seen him!” (John 14:1-7 NLV). 

One of my responsibilities at work is to oversee all of our media and advertising. A part of this is evaluating and negotiating our various media contracts. Recently when renegotiating one of these we changed some of our toll free tracking numbers. The company we deal with for this service deleted some of the numbers before changes were made in our newspaper ads. I’m sure people tried to call the phone number published in the ad, but we never received the calls because they had been changed. It was a minor disaster. No sales were made from that ad! The customers never got through. 

Just as people may have sincerely tried to call us, many spiritual seekers never get through because they are sincerely dialing the wrong number. But God has published His number in Bible print. Anyone who tries to get Him this way will get through. In the midst of a thousand theories about how to reach God, the only One who can really tell us how is God Himself and He has.

In our reading today, Jesus makes it very clear what the “number” is. Whether or not we reach our Creator is all wrapped up in what we do with Jesus, not with His teachings or the religion named after Him but with Jesus Himself. We can't understand what it takes to reach God until we understand what keeps us from reaching Him. We have this wall between God and us called sin which means we have made ourselves our own god by choosing to do it our way instead of God's way. All our religious and moral efforts to reach Him are deadly wrong numbers.