Do the people in your family trust that God’s way is the best way for people to live? What about your neighbors? Do you friends and co-workers believe that Jesus actually lived the best possible life?
Do they think to themselves, “Jesus is amazing! I want to learn from him how to live!”? What we have been seeing in our nation over the last 40-50 years is that fewer and fewer people care about living like Jesus. In other words they don’t trust that Jesus, God, the Bible or the church are sources of truth to guide them on the path of life. Would you say that is true based on what you know of the people in your life?
If it is true, why is it true? Why do people not trust that Jesus’ way is the best way?
It could be that people simply do not know Jesus’ way. They might not have an accurate understanding of who Jesus is, let alone how a person could live now in our world like Jesus lived in his.
Perhaps they have a faulty view of what exactly the way of Jesus looks like. This faulty view of Jesus may very well have come from people calling themselves Christians, but who are not living like Jesus. For example, in the book Jim & Casper Go To Church, Jim (a Christian) and Casper (an atheist) visit a number of churches across the country, and Casper often asks Jim the question, “Did Jesus tell you guys to do this?” What Casper means is, “Does Jesus really want his disciples to spend millions of dollars building church buildings with expensive sound, video and lighting systems?” That one hits home for me because my church family just spent $40,000 on a new A/V system in our sanctuary. We know that Jesus never told his disciples to build buildings. So how much is it our fault that people in our community have the wrong idea about Jesus?
Or could it be that people disagree with the way of Jesus? Jesus calls for his disciples to love their enemies, and some people might think that is a terrible idea. Consider also that Jesus calls us to die to ourselves and follow him. Even we Christians might admit that we can have a hard time applying that to our lives. Those are just a few examples.
The result can be that people do not trust Jesus to be their guide for how to live. As we continue our sermon series through Ezekiel, chapter 24 includes two important principles that we’re going to learn, each of them requiring trust that Jesus’ way is the best way to live. These two principles might be difficult, especially in a culture that often tells us to think about life from a different perspective than that of Jesus. So check out Ezekiel 24 ahead of time, and see if you can discover the two very difficult ways God asks Israel to trust him. Then join us on the blog next week as we discuss it further.
Or start now…comment below…how do you find it difficult to trust God?
Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash
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