Go to the home page: Do You Need A Winning Game Plan For Your Life?
Part two of three parts on Luke 17:1-19: Serve Above and Beyond
Luke 17:5-9, Romans 13:8-10, I Timothy 6:9-10, 17-19, John 15:11-14
In the Luke passage, the disciples asked Jesus to give them more faith. You can sense Jesus' frustration when he said you don't need more faith. You either have faith or you don't and you exercise your faith muscle with every action you take as you go about living.
Jesus then tells the story of a servant who knows what he is to do in his work but still comes to his master and asks, "What do you want me to do?" Jesus is explaining to the disciples that the servant should not ask, the servant should do what he agreed to do when he started in his position. Jesus is saying to all of us that we have the 10 Commandments given from God and we have the new teachings from Jesus like, love your neighbor as yourself.
Your faith will grow as you do what you know to do. We have talked recently about what a faithful life looks like. A Godly person is humble, sensitive to the pain of others, gentle, trying to do the right thing, compassionate, keeps a pure heart, is a peacemaker and willing to suffer for the cause of Christ. From Paul, in Galatians 5:22-25 we see that a person walking with God will have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Jesus expects all of us to know these things and live our lives with these qualities. This is the basic bar he sets for all of us. When we take the entire New Testament as our instruction manual we see that not only is God's basic expectation of us counter to our human nature, God comes to us in the form of Jesus and challenges us to take on more. Jesus raises the bar.
What Jesus says here about money is challenging. Jesus was speaking to Jews who knew the Old Testament teaching that requires they give 10% of everything they had to God. That means one of every nine sheep, one of every nine acres, etc. Now Jesus comes along and demands that we give more and that we should know that 10% is the baseline. If you are not giving to those in need then God can't bless you. If your heart is so hard and so stingy that you can't feed the hungry or cloth the naked, God will simply let you shrivel up. It's your choice. Give beyond the required 10% and thrive or be ordinary. We don't know until we trust God with what we have what he will do.
If Christians do not step up to lead and to be the best at what they do, how are we different from people who don't seek after God? Jesus says with this passage that we are to take initiative and not only do what is expected but to exceed the expectations of God and of every person we touch.
Are we to be driven to greatness? Yes. If you are average, you can't lead. However, there are warnings about making celebrity, power or money your motivation. If, as you seek to excel, you follow the Christ teachings, you will bring others along with you. The people God has put in your life will benefit from your achievements and you might become wealthy which means everyone around you becomes wealthy. It is selfishness and greed that spoils the life of a top-producer in any field.
In Romans 8:10 we read, "You can't go wrong when you love others." In I Timothy 6:9 it says, "The lust for money brings nothing but trouble." And, in the verse 19 it says, "be rich in helping others and be extravagantly generous."
And, the most audacious instruction from Jesus comes in John 15:11-14 where he says, "be willing to lay down your life for friends."
You are called to greatness and greatness is a team sport.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
How Do You Breathe?
Go to the home page: Do You Need A Winning Game Plan For Your Life?
Part one of three parts on Luke 17:1-19: Be Thankful
Luke 17:11-19
God made us and everything in our world. He made us humans to function efficiently and gave us everything we need to live. How do you breathe? God made you to breathe and gave you free air to breathe and in return most of us walk around acting as if there is no God. While we should be thanking God for every breath, we are struggling to make our lives work while all the time forgetting to give God the praise he deserves and expects.
In Luke 17 you can read about just one of the miracles Jesus performed in his short time on earth. This event took place as he was walking toward Jerusalem and near the border between Samaria and Galilee. A group of 10 lepers had heard about Jesus and even though they were ostracized, they decided to boldly call out to Jesus for help.
Jews believed that a person with leprosy was being punished by God for bad deeds. The person with leprosy was not simply stricken with a terrible problem that was a mystery, the person had clearly gone against the laws of the established religion and deserved to live in isolation with other lepers. No fine upstanding person of the day would be seen with a leper. For food, lepers had to depend upon family or former friends to leave scraps for them outside the village.
The lepers knew that they lived in hell on earth. They were to keep to themselves and they had no right to seek out this teacher they had heard about. Since their lives were so horrible they decided things could not get worse for them so when they saw Jesus approaching, they called out to him for help. They called to him, "Master, have mercy on us."
We are all lepers. To be healed by the great God who made us, like the lepers in the story, we have to know we need healing and we have to ask for help. We have to recognize that we are living in hell on earth if we are shuffling along on our own pitiful power.
The Bible, cover to cover, is the story of how our great God saves us from ourselves and this story is just one more example of redemption. Jesus sees these lepers and the sad state of their lives and he recognizes that they knew they needed a miracle. They cannot change their lives on their own. Jesus hears them and gives them what they ask for in a surprising way. He says, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." In complete faith, they turn away from him to follow his orders. While they are in this act of obedience, they are healed of their hideous disease!
They were not healed on the spot and then told to go to their priests. They obeyed Jesus and because of their trust in his instruction they were made whole.
Out of the 10 who were healed, only one took the time to go back to Jesus to say thank you. And, to make the point even more poignant we learn that it was the foreigner, the guy who was not only a leper but the guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Had he not been part of the leper group, the others in the group would never have associated with him. The thankful leper was the one who came from nothing while the other nine had some social standing before they contracted the disease. They were Jews and the thankful leper was a Samaritan and considered a low-life by the Jews.
When the Samaritan came back to Jesus, he kneeled at the feet of Jesus and called Jesus, Lord. This man realized that he was healed by God, not by some crack-pot, homeless preacher.
Jesus said to the Samaritan, "Get up and go your way. Your faith has healed you and saved you." By saying thank you, the Samaritan received the greatest blessing from his Lord and Savior, the Christ, the son of God. Where were the other nine? We might imagine that they ran to tell the most important people in their lives; the people they had lived apart from since becoming infected. They were so excited to get to these loved ones that they forgot to thank the one who had healed him. Most of us are like these nine.
As many motivational speakers have said over the years, live with an attitude of gratitude. Start now by thanking God, your creator, for the very breath you are taking.
Part one of three parts on Luke 17:1-19: Be Thankful
Luke 17:11-19
God made us and everything in our world. He made us humans to function efficiently and gave us everything we need to live. How do you breathe? God made you to breathe and gave you free air to breathe and in return most of us walk around acting as if there is no God. While we should be thanking God for every breath, we are struggling to make our lives work while all the time forgetting to give God the praise he deserves and expects.
In Luke 17 you can read about just one of the miracles Jesus performed in his short time on earth. This event took place as he was walking toward Jerusalem and near the border between Samaria and Galilee. A group of 10 lepers had heard about Jesus and even though they were ostracized, they decided to boldly call out to Jesus for help.
Jews believed that a person with leprosy was being punished by God for bad deeds. The person with leprosy was not simply stricken with a terrible problem that was a mystery, the person had clearly gone against the laws of the established religion and deserved to live in isolation with other lepers. No fine upstanding person of the day would be seen with a leper. For food, lepers had to depend upon family or former friends to leave scraps for them outside the village.
The lepers knew that they lived in hell on earth. They were to keep to themselves and they had no right to seek out this teacher they had heard about. Since their lives were so horrible they decided things could not get worse for them so when they saw Jesus approaching, they called out to him for help. They called to him, "Master, have mercy on us."
We are all lepers. To be healed by the great God who made us, like the lepers in the story, we have to know we need healing and we have to ask for help. We have to recognize that we are living in hell on earth if we are shuffling along on our own pitiful power.
The Bible, cover to cover, is the story of how our great God saves us from ourselves and this story is just one more example of redemption. Jesus sees these lepers and the sad state of their lives and he recognizes that they knew they needed a miracle. They cannot change their lives on their own. Jesus hears them and gives them what they ask for in a surprising way. He says, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." In complete faith, they turn away from him to follow his orders. While they are in this act of obedience, they are healed of their hideous disease!
They were not healed on the spot and then told to go to their priests. They obeyed Jesus and because of their trust in his instruction they were made whole.
Out of the 10 who were healed, only one took the time to go back to Jesus to say thank you. And, to make the point even more poignant we learn that it was the foreigner, the guy who was not only a leper but the guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Had he not been part of the leper group, the others in the group would never have associated with him. The thankful leper was the one who came from nothing while the other nine had some social standing before they contracted the disease. They were Jews and the thankful leper was a Samaritan and considered a low-life by the Jews.
When the Samaritan came back to Jesus, he kneeled at the feet of Jesus and called Jesus, Lord. This man realized that he was healed by God, not by some crack-pot, homeless preacher.
Jesus said to the Samaritan, "Get up and go your way. Your faith has healed you and saved you." By saying thank you, the Samaritan received the greatest blessing from his Lord and Savior, the Christ, the son of God. Where were the other nine? We might imagine that they ran to tell the most important people in their lives; the people they had lived apart from since becoming infected. They were so excited to get to these loved ones that they forgot to thank the one who had healed him. Most of us are like these nine.
As many motivational speakers have said over the years, live with an attitude of gratitude. Start now by thanking God, your creator, for the very breath you are taking.
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