Daily Devotional

When Jesus dismantles the Pharisees’ oath formulas in Matthew 5:34-36, he is doing something quietly devastating. He walks through their carefully labeled boxes and shows that each one contains the same thing: God. Heaven is his throne. Earth is his footstool. Jerusalem is the city of the great King. Even your head, with its uncontrollable hair color, is not really yours. There is no neutral ground to swear by, because there is no place where God is not.

Doriani and France point out that the Pharisees’ system depended on the assumption that they could find pockets of the universe where God was not looking. Jesus says those pockets do not exist. Every word you speak, you speak in his presence. The Reformers called this Coram Deo, before the face of God. The Christian life is not lived in compartments where God watches in the church and looks away at work. It is one life lived entirely in his sight.

Apply this to your speech today. Every text message, every email, every comment on social media, every word with your spouse and your kids and the cashier at Publix is spoken before the face of God. If that is true, the question is not how careful you can be when others are watching. It is how careful you become when you remember that God has not stopped listening for one second of your life.