Even If i Walk Alone

Instructing and encouraging you to live your life as a disciple of Jesus

Matthew

God is Not Safe

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Our God is not safe, but we like to pretend that He is. The Western version of Christianity has become fat, lazy, and oblivious to what most of our brothers and sisters in Christ face on a day-to-day basis. Not only has our version of God become perhaps irreparably skewed, but we export that version to other countries, leaving them ill-prepared when persecution comes to their door.

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I’m not sure who first came up with the idea that following Jesus would dissolve all your problems and leave you happy, healthy, and wealthy. But they obviously did not read God’s Word. Jesus was clear that the world will hate, persecute, and kill us (Matthew 10:17-22). When we read Jesus saying He came to bring a sword and not peace (Matthew 10:34), isn’t it clear that God is not safe?

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Not by Bread Alone

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An oft-quoted but seldom lived verse in the Bible is Matthew 4:4. The scene was Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Knowing Jesus was hungry after forty days of fasting, the devil encouraged the Son of God to turn the scattered stones into bread. As the Creator of all things, this would not have been a difficult task for Jesus. A little later in His life, we will see Him making five loaves of bread multiply into enough to feed over 5,000 people.

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So, certainly, the task of creating bread was not beyond Him. Jesus’s reply to Satan was one we all know well. He said, “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”. The answer stopped the devil in his tracks. Truth has a way of doing that. Jesus knew what we all must learn: we find life in the Word of God, not in anything else.

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Speak His Truth

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In a culture that is ironically becoming less tolerant in the name of tolerance, disciples of Jesus must remember He calls us to continue to speak His truth to a world floundering in deception. Our calling is not to espouse political opinions or to pontificate on economic policies. Our calling is to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and to bathe the world in His love (Matthew 28:18-20).

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It’s not wrong to hold opinions about things outside of God’s Word. Having opinions is part of what makes us human. But when we saturate our speech with more political rhetoric than Godly truth, we are going too far and fighting battles the Lord does not intend for us to fight.

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The Truth about Self-Gratification

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In a recent sermon, David Platt asked, “Will we live for self-gratification or God-glorification?” Those are our only two options. We will live for God or we will live for ourselves. Living for ourselves is a more palatable way of saying we will live to glorify Satan. That sounds harsh and shocking. We don’t want to think in those terms, which is why we mask it with words like selfishness and self-gratification.

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But know this, there are only two powers in the spiritual realm: God and Satan. Jesus spoke plainly when He said we cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). We will love the one and hate the other. Every time we say no to Jesus, we say yes to the devil. This is the uncomfortable truth that applies to every decision we make, word we speak, or action we take.

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Blind Spots

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It’s easy to point fingers at the failures of others while ignoring our shortcomings. Jesus warned against this tendency by advising us to remove the log from our eye before commenting on the speck in the eye of our brother (Matthew 7:4-5). Sometimes, as we are refining our walk with Christ, we become blind to our less developed disciplines. It is common for us all to gravitate to certain portions of Scripture that resonate the most with us.

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Too often though, we do so to the detriment of studying other parts and we develop blind spots. It’s a good practice to read some passages with which you don’t frequently engage to see what you might be missing and identify any blind spots you may have. I don’t get through many mornings reading Scripture without being convicted of something.

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