High Places 

Pastor Duck's Devotional 

Taiwan Church News 2637, September 15, 2002 

Translated by David Alexander 

...but the high places were not taken away. (I Kings 15:14) 

While he was a graduate student, Brother Pan became a Christian. His new faith gave him a structure and direction for his life. The fellowship of the campus group and the church he joined provided him with many friends. The Bible he began to read gave him a new set of heroes, whose examples he would follow as he encountered difficult times. But he had trouble with a set of "rules for Christian living" that were suggested to him by a foreign missionary who helped lead the campus group. Some of the things on the missionary's list made great sense to him, like sexual purity and not being drunk with wine. But other items had been his habits for years, and, try as he might, he could not see any reason to give them up. He still enjoyed social dancing, and horror movies, and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. 

Someone suggested that he wasn't yet "completely Christian." 

Brother Pan found a hero in the Bible, King Asa of Judah, whose heart was wholly true to the Lord all his days. Asa had become king after his father and grandfather, who had disrespected the Lord. Asa was different. He cleaned the idolatry out of Judah, but he left the high places, where people went to worship stars and spirits. 

Brother Pan reasoned that if Asa was wholly true to the Lord, though high places remained in Judah, then he was "completely Christian", though he still enjoyed some things that the missionary opposed. 

Asa never declared that the high places were centers for worship of the Lord of Hosts. Brother Pan never declared that everything in his life was Christian practice. Both had some "high places" remaining . What are yours? 

Prayer: Lord of all places, meet us wherever we may be. AMEN