Welcome to today's encouragement from our daily bread.

I'm Bill Crowder, and I called our reading Instruments for Good.

The criminal had been apprehended, and the detective asked the perpetrator

why he had brazenly attacked someone with so many witnesses present.

The response was startling.

I knew they wouldn't do anything. People never do.

That comment pictures what is called guilty knowledge,

choosing to ignore a crime even though you know it is being committed.

The Apostle James addressed a similar kind of guilty knowledge saying,

If anyone then knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them.

Through His great salvation of us, God has designed us to be agents of good in the world.

Ephesians 210 affirms, for we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,

which God prepared in advance for us to do.

These good works aren't the cause of our salvation, rather they are the result of our hearts being

changed by God's Holy Spirit taking up residence in our lives. The Spirit even gives us spiritual

gifts to equip us to accomplish those things for which God has recreated us. As God's workmanship,

may we yield to His purposes and the empowering of his

spirit so that we can be his instruments for good in a world that desperately needs him.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Ephesians chapter 2 verses 4 through 10.

But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.

It is by grace you have been saved.

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming

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