When the old broken software finally gives way to something that works, the last thing you’d do is press every button just to break the new one on purpose. Yet that same impulse faces us in the Christian life, and Paul confronts it head-on in Romans 6:14-15: since we are not under law but under grace, shall we sin?
We crave freedom, but Bob Dylan was right when he sang, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” No matter how strong that craving, we’ll find ourselves serving either righteousness or unrighteousness.
When things feel urgent and broken, we want a solution that works right now—and that impatience is exactly what Luke 19 puts on display as the Palm Sunday crowd shouts “Hosanna” at Jesus, certain he’s about to deliver the instant fix they’ve been waiting for.
We all know what we think we need—food, security, respect, a life that finally comes together—but Jesus in John 6 cuts straight to the question underneath: what do we really need, and why do we keep mistaking the temporary for the eternal?
What’s the mission of Jesus’s church? What’s His mission for each of us? That’s what we are considering on tonight’s Steadfast.
We too often forget that the source is joyful and accept the far more mundane or depressing secondhand source.
Even good things we pursue can drift from their real meaning into empty gestures that change nothing. Sin whispers the same trade—“focus on me and I’ll give you what you want”—yet Paul answers it in Romans 6: do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, but present yourselves to God as those brought from death to life.
Sin makes us sick over and over, yet we keep charging right back to the buffet—unlike food poisoning, which at least teaches us to stay away from the contaminated food. That’s the human struggle Jesus faces head-on when He teaches us to pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” in Matthew 6:13.
Most of us have something we’d rather not put on the table before God—something we’re holding just tightly enough that we hope He won’t notice. In Luke 18, a ruler who has kept the commandments since his youth comes to Jesus asking what he still must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus names exactly the one thing he isn’t ready to hear.
We all reach for something we can actually recognize and hold on to—some concrete person or presence we can truly know, not just a philosophy about. That hunger is exactly what John 1 puts its finger on: the Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.