“Don’t think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” – Matthew 10:34
Is your life hard right now? Join the club, sister.
As our Ladies’ Bible Study works through “The Carpenter King,” a study of Matthew by Max Lucado, I was a little ticked off at him this week for focusing on a passage I’d like to ignore. You see, Matthew 10:24-40 is a very tough teaching. It lets us know that we aren’t on an easy road. Expect rejection from the world, and (even worse) from those you hold closest to your heart. It’s counting the cost: “A person’s enemies will be members of his own family” (v. 36).
Sometimes following Christ pits us against friends and family. What could be worse than that? The truth is we often will disagree with loved ones. The difference is how we handle that disagreement. Jesus spoke of enemies here in Matthew 10, but he never treated his enemies in the “eye-for-an-eye” way of the world.
Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for them (Matt. 5:44). Love them into the fold when they’ve strayed far from the right path, like he did with the woman at the well. Love them when they turn away from us, like his call to the rich young ruler. Love them when they betray us, like when he restored Peter who denied ever knowing him.
He calls us to a radical love that means we don’t put anyone ahead of him. Not our spouses, not our children, and not our parents. We look first to Him for strength through His Word and prayer, and then serve our families. Loving Jesus first means we love others better than we ever could on our own. In denying our own wishes and following Him, He meets our needs and gives us the power to serve others.
In his look at this difficult passage, Max asked us to reflect on highlights and lowlights in our time of following Jesus. It forced me to examine the fact that I’ve been traveling a rough road for a long time. I haven’t been blogging at all lately because life’s been hard. I’ve had challenges at home and at work. This week was a reminder to me that I can’t check out on what I believe God has called me to do.
While I’d like to escape into mindless diversion of TV or surfing the Web, I realize that what I’m really doing is sulking. I don’t like the way things are going, and it’s hard. Matthew 10 is telling me to suck it up, sister. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how these trials will turn out. But life is more of a battleship than a cruise ship. Jesus is asking us to follow Him into battle. And guess what? We’re going to get hurt. When others inflict pain, we need to go to the one who will never forsake us.
This “pull on your combat boots and join the battle” message keeps popping up:
– To the procrastinator (that’s me!) from Ann Voskamp who says it so beautifully: http://www.aholyexperience.com/2015/01/dear-you-who-doesnt-want-to-do-that-hard-thing/
– And from Desiring God:
http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/lay-aside-the-weight-of-not-feeling-like-it
And finally, this prayer from Max Lucado: “Help me resist the common but erroneous notion that following you will be anything but hard.”