A few months back I was blessed with the opportunity to visit my home church from our last duty station. The pastor had asked me if I’d share a bit of what God had been teaching me with the ladies there and after a lot of prayer and searching He gave me a message. Now, I have no grand delusions of being considered a bible teacher, but I do know that God gave me this message, it is from Him. So, I thought I might share it here. If there’s only one person whom God ministers to through it, all the time spent will be totally worth it! Because of it’s size, it’ll be broken up into 4 or 5 parts.
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Let’s kick things off David Letterman style shall we? (This is totally supposed to be lighthearted fun!) I present to you the Top 10 Reasons People Give When Asked Why They Follow Jesus.*
- 10 – “I’m less likely to get lost if I stay on the narrow path.”
- 9 – “I hate disease, drought & locusts. Especially locusts!
- 8 – “I’m bored on Sunday mornings, and there’s nothing good on TV anyway.
- 7 – “Cause I need a friend, and He loves anybody!”
- 6 – “He gives freely, and I love free stuff!
- 5 – “Church potluck night! Those ladies can cook!”
- 4 – “He’ll make me a nicer person, which is nice.”
- 3 – “Two words…. Christmas … presents!!”
- 2 – “Cause I’m scared of the dark, and someone told me He is the light of the world.”
And the #1 reason people have to follow Jesus….
- 1 – “Heaven? Yes! Hell? No!”
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So, as I had mentioned before, I was asked to share something that God had been teaching me. This is sometimes hard, because if God was having to teach it to me, that meant I was lacking. And sure enough I had just come out of a huge weak moment. You see, I’ve been a born again Christian since 1998. At this point in my life I’ve read my bible, done countless bible studies, and desired to emulate Jesus and follow God’s will in my life for more than a decade. I was supposed to be solid in my faith ready to follow my Savior to the ends of the earth! And yet just a few weeks earlier, I was sitting on my living room floor telling God that I was done with doing things his way. I wasn’t going to follow Him any more. I had been patient, I had prayed, I did all the things a good little godly woman was supposed to do, and yet it was getting me no where! The prayers hadn’t been answered, the pain hadn’t gone away, the situation hadn’t improved. So, I was quitting.
While I bawled my eyes out, I said “I love you, I acknowledge that you are God, but I can’t do this anymore, and I’m not walking this path any longer.” I kid you not, it felt like I was breaking up with him. I could feel the enemy doing a victory dance. Every bone in my body said that this was bad. This was wrong. But He wanted me to continue down a painful path that I was fatigued of traveling on. I stayed that way for a couple of days… and here come my two favorite words…
BUT GOD
But God was not going to let me go that easily. Boy did he turn up the heat in my life! Things went from bad to worse. He made it so I had no choice but to run back to him and beg him for His interference in my situation. As I returned to His Word, he brought me to Matthew 13.
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Let’s set the scene… People are following Jesus all over the place. He is teaching about some of the different aspects of heaven, and he is using parables to do so. His disciples have a question for him…(verses 10-16)
And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. “For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. “Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. “And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive; For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should heal them.’ “But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear;
A parable compares something unfamiliar to something familiar, the goal being to help us understand a spiritual truth by using everyday things familiar to us. But there’s a catch. You have to have ears that are willing to hear and a heart that is awake and ready to receive. I like how Matthew Henry put it: “A parable is a shell that keeps good fruit for the diligent, but keeps it from the slothful.”
Look closely at what Jesus’ said. He says that they are fulfilling the words penned by Isaiah. They have ears, yet they do not understand. They have eyes, yet they do not perceive. Their hearts are dull and they do not understand the spiritual truths that He is giving them.
And then the million dollar question hit me. If these people who are following Jesus around don’t really understand what he’s saying, then why on God’s green earth are they following him? I mean seriously, lets think about this. If Jesus were physically here on this earth in human form today, it wouldn’t be all too difficult to follow him around from place to place. We have nice big vehicles with air conditioning that could go the distance. We’d have to stop every now and then to fill up the gas tank, but hey that’s a good opportunity to grab a drink and some snack food. We’d have a big ol’ caravan going down the highway right? Well, the people of Jesus’ day didn’t have those luxuries. They most likely walked everywhere they went. And we know from other passages that people were hungry. I think it’s fair to say they were sweaty, dirty and stinky too!
So, if they’re not getting anything out of His teaching, then why on earth are they following him around? Well, they didn’t have TVs to stalk all the newest celebrity news… maybe they wanted to be entertained. Was he their version of American Idol? Or maybe it was the cool tricks he did… you know, heal the blind, and the lame. Let’s not forget raising the dead. Was he their equivalent of a really good magician on America’s Got Talent?
While I was pondering that, God spoke up and asked me a question. “Why do YOU follow me Denise?” And again, “Why do you follow me?”
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That question started me on a discovery in Matthew… I hope you’ll join me as I share what He revealed to me.
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* Top 10 list is not completely origional to me. Some were my thoughts, many I found on the internet. (I know some of them are kinda lame.) If you’ve got a good one, send it to me, I’d love to put it in there.
