“LET NOTHING MOVE YOU.”
“Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm.
Let nothing move you.
Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord,
because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
1 Corinthians 15:58, NIV
I will be short and sweet. What is your nothing? Paul says, “Let NOTHING move you.” If anyone could write those 4 words, Paul could. Beaten. Shipwrecked. Jailed. Stoned. My goodness. I have never been persecuted in such fashion. And, yet, after everything Paul faced, he still wrote this admonition. How in the world do we do this? How can we live in such a way that nothing moves us? Could the secret lie in perspective—vantage point? When I think of Paul, I think back on his Damascus Road conversion, as recorded in Acts 9. As this chapter unfolds, we read, “But, Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light . . .” A light from heaven flashed around him. A voice called out to him.
Saul became Paul that day. Somehow in the midst of that flashing light from heaven, Paul was transformed. His entire perspective—vantage point—changed in that flash. From that moment on, nothing circumstantial moved Paul. Only Christ moved Paul. During Paul’s three days and nights of blindness (Acts 9: 9-18), he became intimately acquainted with Jesus Christ. Oswald Chambers writes, “God is in secret, and He sees us from the secret place. He does not see us as other people see us, or as we see ourselves. When we live in the secret place it becomes impossible for us to doubt God, we become more sure of Him than of anything else.”
Paul was more sure of God than anything else. He moved 4Word by letting nothing move him. May we imitate Paul.