Tag Jesus

The Likeness of Christ

Todd R 1 Comment

As told in Genesis, Joseph served Pharaoh faithfully.  Even after being wrongly accused and imprisoned, he served while in prison and eventually rose again to prominence in Pharaoh’s kingdom.  When Pharaoh dreamed of famine, Joseph interpreted the dream, and under God’s direction, came up with a plan to survive it.  “And Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find a man like this, in whom is the Spirit of God?” – Genesis 41:38

In the gospels, Peter and John began as uneducated fishermen, yet they were personally discipled by Jesus for 3 years.  In Acts chapter 4, these former fishermen forcefully proclaim the gospel, and about five thousand people came to faith in Christ.  “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” – Acts 4:13

Pharoah recognized the Spirit in Joseph and people noticed Peter and John were different – do people notice the Spirit in you?  Can they tell you’ve been with Jesus?

“A Christian should be a striking likeness of Jesus Christ.” – Charles Spurgeon

The Priorities of the Good Samaritan

Todd R 1 Comment

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well-known, even by those who aren’t Christian.  Briefly, it goes like this: a man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the side of a road.  First a priest, and then a Levite, passed him by, offering no help at all.  But a Samaritan, a member of a group despised by many Jews, stopped and helped the man, even bringing him to further help and paying the necessary expenses.

There is a lesson in the story about priorities – what this Good Samaritan put first, and what he didn’t.  But before covering his #1 priority, here are some things he did not prioritize, even though these aren’t necessarily bad things:

His first priority was not to fight for stricter laws against robbers.  What the robbers did was probably already illegal, and definitely not morally right.  We don’t know the fate of the robbers in the story, but they might have gotten away with this near murder.  In modern times, if criminals are getting away with bad behavior, a movement sometimes grows to make something that is already illegal “more illegal.”  If robbing is against the law, some might lobby to make the punishment harsher, or to focus laws on particular victims or perpetrators, but if they’re getting away with it now, how will these changes help?  The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority.

His first priority also was not to raise public awareness of violence along the highways.  He didn’t create posters and social media hashtags (I write as if those things existed then).  Such a campaign can have benefits.  It could help people be more careful when traveling, it might encourage the government to allocate more of its limited resources toward highway safety, but it will never completely solve the problem. The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority either.

Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash

So, what was the Good Samaritan’s priority?  He focused on what he could control, and any other concerns came later.  He focused on the problem right in front of him – a man beat up and near death on the side of the road.  Sometimes we can focus so much on advocating, that we lose sight of doing.  (I worry about that for myself as someone who spends so much time blogging.)  But the Good Samaritan “proved to be a neighbor”[1] by taking care of the neighbor right in front of him.

We can also be deluded into thinking that our government and other institutions should be able to solve all of our problems if only we fight hard enough for it.  However, they never will be enough, because any and all institutions are made up of people who too often deny their own responsibility for the problems of the world. Especially on social media, we often get the illusion that we can offload our responsibility for the world to others, and that what’s happening somewhere else is more important than what’s right in front of us.

While advocacy can be a good and necessary thing, God wants us to prioritize doing, which is what everyone in heaven will do!  In heaven, everyone will be like the Good Samaritan (and like Jesus), and therefore we won’t need better laws, awareness campaigns powered by advertising and hashtags, or stricter enforcement of laws.  The bloody victim by the roadside won’t exist.  And that is something to look forward to!

In the meantime:
“I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.” – C.S. Lewis

[1] Luke 10:36

Loveless Words

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“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” – 1 Corinthians 13:1

The church in 1st-century Corinth was divided over spiritual gifts, particularly the gift of speaking in tongues.  The apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 13 as a gentle rebuke to the misuse of gifts and the arrogance that came from competing over them.  The first verse above could be paraphrased as “you can be speaking the most impressive-sounding things, but if you’re not saying it to benefit those who hear, you’re just making noise.”

Photo by Jeremy Horvatin on Unsplash

But not just any noise – Paul purposefully chose two specific instruments.  In a symphony, an appropriately timed cymbal or gong has a glorious impact that perhaps no other instrument can match.  However, although you might not catch one bad note from a clarinet, you won’t miss a gong or cymbal played at the wrong time, even once!  To God, the only one with a truly perfect ear, that’s what loveless words sound like.

“If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?” – 1 Corinthians 14:7

Work, Labor, and Steadfastness

Todd R 3 Comments

Many are familiar with the Biblical triad of faith, hope and love from 1 Corinthians 13:13, which says: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”  In this verse, Paul is calling these 3 characteristics the most important, with love above the other 2.

In another of Paul’s letters he joins this triad with another one.  1 Thessalonians 1:2-3 says, “We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”  He’s saying that faith and works go together, that love and labor go together and that hope and steadfastness go together.  But how do they fit together and do the 3 relationships have anything in common?

When I think of these verses, I see faith, hope and love as the causes of the other 3 characteristics.  Faith motivates works.  Love motivates labor.  Hope motivates steadfastness.  Without the first thing in each pair, it’s hard to consistently have the second thing.  Let’s look at them in order.

The interaction between faith and work is a tricky one, but paraphrasing John Calvin, we are saved by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone.  In the New Testament book of James, he wrote “someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”[1]  Our Savior spent His life on this earth ministering to others, and if we believe in Him as who He actually is (our God), our faith in Him will naturally result in us ministering to others as He did.  Thus, faith motivates us to work as Jesus worked.  Otherwise, it is a dead faith.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Paul also noted the Thessalonians’ “labor of love.”  The “love” here is more than an emotion or feeling.  It’s the love (agape in Greek) that is a self-sacrificing concern for others.  Any others.  G.K. Chesterton said, “the Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”  True love is hard, like labor.  Strong’s Greek dictionary describes the word translated “labor” as toil that wears us out or even causes us pain.  A labor of love is when we serve people so much in love that it wears us out.    Agape love motivates us to labor for others.

The last pair is the “steadfastness of hope.”  In my experience, hope is only useful when it is steadfast.  If we lose hope when things go wrong, we lose the ability to see beyond our current circumstances to our future in Christ.  Its only when we are able to keep our focus on Christ even in tough times that our hope is steadfast and shows its true value.  In the 2 letters he wrote to the Thessalonians, Paul referred to the second coming of Jesus at least 6 times, which would remind them that their hope is sure and won’t fail them.  Just like the Thessalonians, we need to be reminded again and again of where our hope lies in order to keep living for God.  Hope motivates steadfastness.

Today, if Paul were to write a letter to your church, would he note their “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ”?  I pray that for my church, including me, he could.  Pray the same for you and yours.

“We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

[1] James 2:18

Weeds are Good for You

Todd R 2 Comments

Are there people in the church, either in your own church, another local church, or somewhere in the global church, that seem a bit un-Christian?  Perhaps their doctrine is different than yours, or perhaps they behave differently.  Maybe they dress differently or have different standards in music.  They could have different political beliefs.  It could be anything.

Within a parable Jesus told in Matthew 13:24-30 is some wisdom about “those people.”  The parable is:

“He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.  And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

For this post, the key phrase in the parable is “No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.”  The wheat in the parable represents God’s people, and the weeds represent unbelievers in the midst of them.  The servants ask the master whether they should pull up all the weeds immediately, which seems like a sensible thing to do.  Weeds are bad for crops, right?

The surprising response is that the servants should “Let both grow together until the harvest.”  Why?  Because in the master’s judgment it is better for the wheat if the weeds are allowed to grow.  In other words, removing the weeds before the harvest – when God will separate the wheat from the weeds – would be bad for the wheat harvest.  Until the harvest, the master warns that we could “root up the wheat along with them.”

In Matthew 25 where Jesus tells of the final judgment in verses 31-46, it’s strongly implied that some of the “wheat” will be surprised about being wheat and some “weeds” will be surprised about being weeds.  In verses 37-39 Christians say: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”  In verse 44, unbelievers say: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”

Therefore, if the wheat and the weeds themselves can be unsure which they are, how can anyone else definitively decide who doesn’t belong, especially to risk damaging those who do belong.  There will always be true and false believers in churches until Christ returns, so remember: According to the Master, the wheat is better off with the weeds than without.  Especially if sometimes what we think are weeds actually aren’t.