“Blessing and cursing come out of the same mouth. My brothers and sisters, these things should not be this way.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
We planted a garden this year. We try to do one every year. We don’t put a whole lot in our garden, but we do have some staples. Squash and zucchini are two of those staples. This year, we planted three squash plants and two zucchini plants. But, once the vegetables started coming to bear, four plants were yielding squash. Do you know what we said? It’s a miracle!
“Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.” — Romans 12:2 (CSB – Read the chapter)
We’ve talked recently about how to counter bad religion with the help of some things James, Jesus’ brother, wrote. Christians often have a reputation that we’ve unfortunately worked hard to earn that all we are concerned about is policing the behavior of the people around us. If we really put into practice what Paul says here, we will go a long ways toward fixing both the perception of ourselves and of our religion.
This past Sunday, we continued our new series, Being Useful, by looking at the first character trait on Peter’s list that will make us more useful to Jesus. Item number one: Faith. What is faith? What does it look like to have faith? And how does growing in faith make us more useful to Jesus? Read on to find out.
Making God Happy
We were sitting in
a restaurant the other day and over my shoulder a family had been seated at a
pretty large table. They needed the
space. The waitress came over like she
would for any customer and took drink orders.
Not long after, they called her back.
They wanted to make some special requests. Then they called her back again. Then she came to take their food orders…and
they made some special requests. Then
the drinks came out. And those weren’t
right. The appetizers were wrong
too. So was their dinner. The manager came to the table at least once,
maybe twice. It took a couple of trips
by the waitress to get dessert ordered and right too. Now, this was a busy restaurant and certainly
mistakes are occasionally made in the industry.
But as we looked around the room, we didn’t notice anybody else getting
the amount of specialized attention they were getting. Now, they were never ugly that we could tell,
but the fact that just about all of their stuff wasn’t quite right began to
suggest a pattern. The pattern wasn’t a
restaurant that couldn’t get its stuff together. The problem was a family that was hard to
please.
“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I’ve said many times before that context is king when it comes to understanding the Scriptures. I’ll continue to beat that drum until I have you dancing to it in your sleep. But there aren’t many verses for which such a reminder is so important as this one. Taken out of context, this verse threatens to unravel our whole understanding of salvation and seems to justify the stifling legalism that has given Christianity such a bad name in so many places. How do we get this right?
“For whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
We like for things to be incremental. We want to be able to advance toward pretty much everything in life in a step by step fashion. Every big store offers payment plans for their big ticket items. Cars get paid off over three or four years (and increasingly more). Houses take 30 years even though few people live in one place that long anymore. Why can’t the same be true with getting into Heaven?
The Nexus 