My wife’s parents had an interesting dog named Feller. Whenever he did something wrong, he’d lower his head and show his teeth in a grin. If he’d dug a hole in the yard or gotten on the furniture, he’d show that grin. You could read him like a book. People are that way too. We have good Christian friends from San Diego. The wife recently told us she knows when her husband is trying to pull a trick on her because he gets this gleam in his eye. She can read him like a book.

God often uses His children to be read like a book! The Lord told Isaiah: “…Go and loose the sackcloth from off, thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot” (Isaiah 20:2). As an illustration of the kind of impending divine judgment God was going to send upon the Egyptians, God’s man Isaiah walked completely naked for three years. How would you have liked that job? It was difficult and unusual, but it was an effective message. The Lord said to Hosea, “…Go, take…a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land [or the people of Israel] hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord” (Hosea 1:2). Men, how would have liked this job? This, too, was difficult and unusual, but it was likewise an effective tool in sending a message to Israel about their wretched spiritual condition. The Apostle Paul said: “For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men” (I Corinthians 4:9). Paul felt like he lived in a glass house where everyone, including angels, could see every aspect of his life, including his impending death from persecution.

Did you know that God is similarly using every believer today? Paul says: “Ye are our epistle …known and read of all men” (II Corinthians 3:2). We are the only message from God that many people will ever read. Lost souls are reading our lives every day even when we don’t realize it. That makes how we talk, react, treat people, act at work, and live very important. What kind of living epistle are you choosing to be? Make your life a good book for others to read that will draw them to the Author of The Good Book.