How can those who have known God’s rescue still chase worldly compromise that looks so much like success? That is the exasperated cry of Isaiah 1:21 as the faithful city becomes a harlot—once full of justice, now only murderers, its silver turned to dross.
Even after turning our lives over to Christ, we can still pray as though God were there to serve our wants and protect our plans. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Ask, seek, and knock,” raising a searching question for daily prayer: When we belong to Him, what should we be asking our Father to give?
We see lots of details but miss the main point when we come to Jesus mainly to eliminate problems here and now. In Matthew 9:18–26, two people reach out to Jesus with needs very much like the ones we have and must wrestle with the deeper point of Jesus’s ministry — just like we do.
We’re good at looking pure—saying the right things, following the right rules, putting on the kind of life that earns approving nods—and that’s precisely the trap Jesus names in Matthew 5:8 when he calls the pure in heart blessed, not the pure in appearance.
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
Clear words can still sail right past us when they aren’t the news we want. In Luke 18, Jesus tells the Twelve exactly what’s about to happen to Him, yet they were just like us: they didn’t want to hear.
We can be inclined to delay approaching God, too busy obsessing on our doubts to come, much like Thomas in John 20. But Thomas did come and so should we.
Pastor Gene’s son Jacob turns to Psalm 118 to help us think about what happened on the first Palm Sunday and how we are called to praise our God.
When we’re desperate for direction, we tend to reach for whatever voice sounds most confident, be it horoscopes, politicians or just about anyone who seems to know something we don’t. Deuteronomy 18 speaks to our searching, reminding us God has never left His people without a trustworthy voice to follow, and what He promised there points somewhere specific.