Skip to main content

Hard Sayings

If you want to follow Jesus, you can't just pick the cozy things, you have to take all of His teachings. Last time on my blog I was talking about family.  Jesus said some difficult things about family. In Matthew 10 He says,"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Then He quoted from the prophet Micah.  "For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household."  Then He says that we must love Him more than we love our family members.

  Always Jesus must come first in our lives.  If we have family members who do not believe they will not be able to understand our loyalty to Jesus and there will be an inevitable distance between us.  We should, of course, do all we can to tell them of their need to believe in Jesus but we should not allow ourselves to be drawn away from Jesus and whatever He wants us to do.

  Many people in Jesus' time on earth turned away and left Him because they found His sayings too hard.  What will you do?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why do many disasters happen?

I have written in previous posts about disasters. In the case of Concorde, decisions by people, plus other factors were directly to blame for the event.  In the case of the Penlee disaster it may have been avoided if someone had made a better choice in the time beforehand and as a consequence brave men and the ship's crew and the captain and his family died. 9/11 was certainly the result of wicked men committing a terrorist act, but even in this there was heroism notably by another Cornish man, Rick Rescorla who helped many to safety and left it too late to help himself.  In situations like this we see what the human spirit is capable of both good and evil. What of disasters that come on people because of the earth restless movement of tectonic plates.  Often people live near volcanoes because the land is rich and fertile and they have the chance of a better life there when the volcano is resting.  We cannot blame them for that but sometimes people become complacent...

Optimism conquering experience

I watched The Detectorists tonight. I have not watched it before. It is about a group of people who use detecting equipment to discover old coins and other things of archeological interest. This was the last in the series and had a bitter sweet feel to it.  One of the main characters asked,"Why do we do it?" and the other replied,"This is the nearest you will ever get to time travel." You have to be an optimist to do metal detecting.  There is always the attraction of making a big find or an important discovery.  Among all the tin cans and coat hangers found there is the hope of a Saxon hoard, or Roman gold. Optimism keeps them going.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is usually a sudden pleasant memory triggered by a present stimulus.  The other day I opened a new bottle of bath creme which immediately sent me back to my youth.  The scent was described as lilac but to me it was the scent of violets and especially reminded me of the violet flavoured sweets we sometimes had.  I think my brother once used some to try to disguise that he had been smoking! Not a good move, whoever heard of a teenage boy wanting to smell of violets.  Nostalgia is usually a pleasant but maybe bitter-sweet thing. The smell of Astral soap always reminds me of a childhood holiday at my uncle's farmhouse.  Sometimes it is not possible to know why these triggers happen.  Do you often have nostalgic moments?