Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 27 · January 27
No Greater Joy
“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.”
We all keep a quiet record of what we have to show for our lives. The things that felt important at the time do not always read so well later: the promotion, the house, the argument we won in 2019.
An old man who calls himself "the elder" writes a short note to his friend Gaius, and he sums up his own record in one line: "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth." He says no greater. Whatever else he had seen in a long life, this is what he puts at the top.
These children are not his family. Paul uses the same picture with the church at Corinth: "though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers." They are people someone led into the faith and kept caring for afterwards.
Look at how little the old man needs in order to be glad. He only heard about it: "the brethren came and testified of the truth that is in thee." His greatest joy in life is a report, passed on by other people, about someone's ordinary daily living in a town where he is not even present.
"Walk" is the right word for that kind of living. It describes what you did today and will do again tomorrow, one step after another, at the same steady pace.
So may somebody hear a good report about you this year and be glad in a way you never find out about. May the people you have helped into the faith still be walking with God when you are too old to check on them. And may the record you keep of your own life slowly give way to the elder's kind of joy, the joy God gives when His children walk in truth.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 27 is Simple Faith (Psalm 116:6).