Wayne Cordeiro, pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship O'ahu in Honolulu, Hawaii, writes:

Some time ago some wonderful people in our church gave Anna, my wife, and me a dinner certificate to a nice restaurant for $100. We thought, Wow, a hundred bucks. Let's go for it. We found a free evening. We dressed up. I took a bath, used deodorant and cologne—the whole thing. I even washed and waxed my car, because we wanted to take it through the valet, and I didn't want my Ford Pinto to look bad. The night came, and we were excited.

We went to this ritzy restaurant and walked in. They gave us a nice, candlelit table overlooking a lagoon adjacent to a moonlit bay there in Hawaii. Oh, it was nice. And we thought, for a hundred bucks for just the two of us, we could eat high on the hog. So we ordered the most expensive thing there. It was wonderful.

When the bill came, I said, "Honey, why don't you give me the certificate."

She said, "I don't have the certificate. I thought you brought it."

I said, "You have to have it. You're supposed to have it. You're the wife!"

She said, "I don't have it." And I thought, We are in deep yogurt. Here we are. We look rich, we act rich, we even smell rich. But if we don't have that certificate, it invalidates everything.

There are times in our lives when we can look holy, we can act holy, we can smell holy. But without a relationship with the Lord, we've forgotten something. It's relationship that validates everything else.