A Dozen Sayings of Jesus That Will Change the World—If Christians Ever Believe Them
When I began to write this post, I looked for a dozen passages in the Scriptures that Christians in the West largely ignored in practice, despite mentally assenting to the truths contained therein. But what scared me as I delved into this was that far too many passages of the Scriptures are simply ignored.
So I started focusing. Eventually, I narrowed down a dozen sayings of Jesus from the book of Matthew alone. A sad state of affairs, indeed, that I can cull a dozen passages from just one book that are largely ignored by enlightened Evangelicals. But there you have it. Perhaps if we were more serious about the Scriptures, we’d spend more time putting these words into practice and less time obsessing over the petty little kingdoms we build in our own names.
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ReplyDeleteAll great, of course. #8 speaks to me more than anything else, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
ReplyDeleteI think we need to spend a lot more time in the gospels and absorbing what Jesus did and said, and trying to apply that to our own context. There are many christians who live and speak as if it was Paul who is the Son of God not Jesus (slight exaggeration). If you actually ask the question "What Would Jesus Do?" from a close reading of the gospels you can come up with some very disturbing answers!
ReplyDeleteI was reading John 2 a few days ago - the wedding at Cana. Verse 5 got my attention, when Jesus' mother says to the servants 'Do whatever he tells you'. What a great idea - liberatingly simple perhaps in a hard to follow through kind of way. I agree we (I) need to spend more time in the gospels, otherwise is it a case of 'the Jesus we never knew'?
ReplyDeleteThe hard thing I find is to stop and ask "What do you want me to do here Lord?" Most of our lives are spent on the auto-pilot of learned behaviours.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that you should say that about Paul. Last weekend I was sorting out my taxes on a massive spreadsheet and someone on TV was talking about Paul being the messiah. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it because it seemed a little silly and I was busy, but maybe some people actually believe that.
ReplyDeleteI think many christians are more familiar with Romans than Mark, for example... mainly educated people who like structured arguments. Then there are the ones who can tell you more definitively what Jesus will do in the end times than what He did in the gospels.
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