Read 1 Peter 2:24–25

The Velveteen Rabbit is a book for children with a message for adults. It’s essentially a revealing nursery dialogue between a new toy rabbit and an old skin horse. As they are lying side by side one day, Rabbit asks Horse:

“What is REAL?... Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

Going through a lot of activities? Staying busy? In too big a hurry, most of the time? Your squirrel cage gaining speed? Seldom pausing to ask why? Still reluctant to be loved...to be real? Keeping a distance between yourself and your family members? Still substituting doing for being? What’s it going to take to stop all that? What do you need to get real?

You need more than a nursery rhyme. What does God suggest? He tells us where to turn to find the inner healing we need. And where’s that? To Jesus, that’s where.

Here’s how it works:

He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed. Once you were like sheep who wandered away. But now you have turned to your Shepherd, the Guardian of your souls. (1 Peter 2:24–25)

Jesus Himself received the deep and painful wounds of our sin so that we could be healed and made real. From deep hurt comes genuine healing. It’s the way of Jesus. When we choose to follow Him we are signing up to be bruised and spent for His name—so others might experience His healing grace. Great stuff happens when you turn to the Shepherd and Guardian of your soul.

Devotional content taken from Good Morning, Lord...Can We Talk? by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.

The full devotional can be purchased at https://www.tyndale.com/p/good-morning-lord-can-we-talk/9781414380681.