Good morning. Today is Saturday, August 15th!

🥳 Congratulations on starting today with God, and thank you for letting us be a part of it.

📖 Verse Of The Day

— Romans 3:22

🧠 Devotional

There’s a quote from R.C. Sproul that goes like this:

“Christians have nothing to be smug about; we are not righteous people trying to correct the unrighteous. As one preacher said, ‘Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.’”

It sounds straightforward, but this quote actually gets mixed reactions from Christians. Most of the disagreement comes down to two words: “beggar” and “righteous.”

Some Christians don’t like calling believers beggars. Their argument is simple: a beggar is someone without bread, but Christians have found the Bread. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). God provides for His children.

So if we’ve found the Bread of Life, are we really still beggars?

Then there’s righteous. Sproul says we aren’t “righteous people trying to correct the unrighteous.” But Scripture says believers receive righteousness through Christ. Romans 3:22 says, “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Christians are also called to pursue righteousness.

So critics have a point: Christians aren’t spiritually starving people with no righteousness at all.

But we’re not here to tell you to pick a side.

Like so many things involving Scripture, context matters. Instead of pulling two words from the quote, look at what Sproul was trying to communicate.

His opening sentence tells us: “Christians have nothing to be smug about.”

And that sounds a lot like Jesus.

In Luke 18, Jesus tells of a Pharisee who trusted in his own righteousness and thanked God that he wasn’t like other sinners. Meanwhile, a tax collector simply prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said the tax collector went home justified before God.

That’s the heart of Sproul’s illustration.

Christians have Bread, but we didn’t make it.

We have righteousness, but we didn’t earn it.

We have salvation, but we didn’t save ourselves.

The Bible teaches that our identity changes when we come to Christ. We become children of God (John 1:12), and we receive righteousness through faith. So beggar isn’t meant to describe everything about who a Christian is.

It describes where our salvation came from and how dependent we are on grace.

When we share Jesus, we aren’t standing above someone saying, “Look how much better I am than you.”

We’re standing beside them saying, “I needed Him too. Let me show you where I found Bread.”