Saturday, April 11, 2015

What Do You Want?

It was such a seemingly harmless request of James and John.  “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”  We too have this way of going about our business.  It is in fact the essence of much Christianity.  God is the god of doing for us what we ask.  Whether it be honor, achievement, affection or some sort of toy, we expect God to give us something so that we can have a good religion, a comfortable religion.  The Christian world leans into stuff as much as the sensible unbeliever.  We have seen it; much of the Christian world grabs and gathers just like all the good neighbors who never open Bibles.  When Jesus asked the brothers if they could drink the cup He was drinking and be baptized with His same baptism, James and John hardly blinked.  “Of course they could”, they insisted.  It turns out they were going to drink from the same cup and be baptized with the same baptism but they were as dumb as doorknobs when it came to realizing what that meant.  And fortunately for us, so are we generally when we enter into real discipleship.  This is when many good Christian people start to fade into the shadows.  They slip away into the night.  Are they willing to take rejection, loss, painful ministries or isolation?  Will they absorb as Christ did the damage brought by world sin?  A famous missionary once wrote, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  How many Christians believe that?  Is there much real sacrifice and painful holiness in the Church or are most of our claims of following Christ lip service.  Many name Christ as a giver of good things but stop short of taking up the cross.  How many of us will drink the cup He drank and not squirm out of His baptism?  Will you be His disciple and not a caricature of what one is?  The call is clear.  Come follow me!  To do so means that you must take the path through Gethsemane and into Golgotha before you will ever make much progress with Christ as Lord.

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Mark 10: 45 NIV

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