Rest is really hard for me to commit to. I have a hard time grasping the fact that rest is an  intentional part in God's plan for us. I often think that a life filled with Jesus and serving the Lord is a life full of active service; full of commotion and constant hands-on work. 

 Our service to the Lord doesn't just mean physical acts of service. It means taking time to sit at the feet of Jesus, give Him all we have, and allow ourselves to be overcome by the power of God. Taking time to rest in His presence is vital to our relationship with Him. 
Comparatively, not much happened today. And that's okay.

If you liked yesterday's passage, you're going to love today's passage. This passage includes what is referred to by Christians as the Seven Woes which is basically Jesus calling out all of the religious leaders. We'll move through them as we read this passage, so don't feel like I'm throwing a whole chapter at you (because there's a lot more reading as the week goes on). 
I think so often we read this and begin to point fingers at other Christians. We tend to forget that we are in the same boat as them; just as sinful and just as in need of a Savior. It's so easy to try and distance yourself from the bounds of sin when we don't want to address our sins.  

Jesus first calls out Pharisees for gatekeeping the Kingdom. We sometimes start to think that certain people 'won't like Jesus' or 'aren't the Jesus kind of people'. I heard a pastor say a few years ago that to keep the goodness of God from anyone is to commit the worst offense as an evangelist. We don't get to determine if people won't like Jesus; our only job is to show people Jesus. 

Jesus then calls them out for assuming the presence of God. Y'all, I unfortunately fall into this all the time. I think that if I do, say, or think bad things in church it "means more" than if I do them outside of church; as if the Creator of the universe isn't always present and watching me. Our intentions matter whether we're in church, bible study, class, or with our friends. We don't get to act like a Christian on Sundays and then act however we want on other days. Our lives as Christians never stop. Our lives following Jesus don't hit pause. 

Jesus starts calling us out for tithing. (wait what?) Jesus reminds us that if we're tithing to get into heaven, it won't work. The Message version says "Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that's wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?" We do these things like tithing in response to the Lord's gifts to us, not to look better in the eyes of God.

All this to say: we can't keep pointing the finger at other Christians when we suffer from the same sins. We, most days, are the Pharisees of today; propping ourselves up to be the better people of society when in reality, we are broken people. Jesus tells them that they spend too much time trying to look righteous rather than trying to be righteous. 
Let's stop comparing ourselves to other believers and non-believers and just focus on Jesus.
Focus on repentance. Focus on loving others. Focus on being faithful followers of Jesus.
​That's how we show the world the goodness of God. 

It's Monday. You wake up to the sound of birds chirping and a bustling city center. Why? It's the first day of Passover in the greatest city in Judea. You had just witnessed what you believe to be the Messiah enter into the city yesterday, and are overjoyed. As you step out of your house you begin to notice some commotion around the temple. The man you saw yesterday triumphantly riding on a donkey (LOL) is now causing outrage in the temple courts. Is this really happening?

Jesus in this story sets a really unique precedent for the future of the Church. So often we see this text used to justify the feeling of anger. However, I think this means more than that. So often we see people take Christianity and the name of Jesus and twist it to make their own idea of freedom; taking the freedom that the Lord grants us and running with it. This cheapens and dilutes the Gospel into something that is made for our own pursuit rather than glorifying the Father and to those who celebrate their freedom in Christ intentionally:

For someone like myself that has truly been transformed by the Gospel, all I want is for people to know Jesus. Yet when people claim to know Jesus but not respect the Lord; when people claim to live by His freedom but refuse to honor Him: it angers me just as Jesus was angered in the temple. 

Galatians 5 talks about living a free life motivated by the Spirit. We, as disciples of Jesus, cannot live a life of freedom motivated by our personal desires and pursuits.  Even so, we cannot use Jesus to pursue our own flesh-led desires. By doing so we are cheapening the gift of freedom through Christ Jesus and we are reciprocating to the Father that we don't care about the transformative power of His presence. 

The love that the Lord has for us is a love that is like none other. He strives and pursues us in every way possible so that we may experience life with him. Although we will never be able to reciprocate the gift of eternal life, we as Christians ought to respect and pursue the Lord consistently and intentionally.

When we honor our freedom in Christ, we respect and honor the Lord.
We honor the Lord inside the church building and out. 
We respect the church and respect its members, for it is the body of Christ. 
We start to act more like Jesus and less like the world.
We start to look more like Jesus and less like the world. 
We start to look less like the vendors in the temple and more like an angry Jesus in the temple. 
​Why?

I absolutely love Holy Week. Whenever someone asked me what my favorite Christian holiday was, my answer was always Palm Sunday. I could only imagine the pure joy and celebration in the air the day that Jesus entered Jerusalem. Their King had arrived.  

The story of Palm Sunday and Holy Week reminds me of what it's like going to church. Perhaps this was foreshadowing the attitude of our hearts in the future, or perhaps the conclusion that I'm drawing is one that wasn't intentional. I want you to imagine what it's like to be in church on Sunday, or church whatever day you attend. We gather and praise Jesus, our King who has come to deliver us from the sins we cannot atone for ourselves. We shout in adoration, we listen intently, we pray communally. It's pure joy and celebration. 

After witnessing and praising the power of the Lord, we retreat back into the darkness. We go back into the world and thus begins our journey of disbelief. Much like the Jewish people of that time, even after witnessing the power of Jesus, we still would not believe. And those that do believe like myself, we would hide our faith for fear of others like the Pharisees of that time because we crave human praise rather than Godly praise. 

We now come to a point in which we don't realize that we are about to reject and defile our Lord. Although we don't know it, Jesus knows our hearts will betray His power. And yet, He still stands up, removes his garment, and begins to wash our feet. Even still, we refuse to acknowledge his service and love for us. We continue and continue to betray Him in our hearts, in our actions, in our words.  

When we go throughout our week denying His presence in our lives, He still retreats back to the love from our heavenly Father. He still calls us His own, and He reminds us that even in our sorrow and betrayal, we still have a place in the Father's kingdom. He reminds us that we will have the Holy Spirit to guide our hearts even though our human flesh rejects Him. He reminds us that what we will endure, He has endured first. And although we do not in any way deserve His love, He still grants it to us. 

I cannot begin to explain how much we do not deserve the amount of love Jesus has for us. Within one of the darkest weeks of His life, He takes time to pray for us. Every time I get to this passage, I get teary eyed; not just at the intentional words of the Father, but at the fact that He in his sovereignty prayed for each and every one of our hearts. He watched His disciples betray Him. He watched His disciple pay for His death. He watched people deny Him, and yet: He wants us to be with Him.  

"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in the and that I myself may be in them." John 17:25-26

I love Palm Sunday and Holy Week because it reminds me of the fact that even though I am completely in love with Jesus, I will fail. I will deny Him. I will betray Him.
And yet, He knows. He forgives. He sacrifices Himself for my failures, and He still calls me home. 
His Love floors me every single day. 
Happy Palm Sunday, and happy Holy Week. 

There's a lot of things that modern Christianity is obsessed with. Last week we talked about how we're infatuated with relationships; this week we're talking about how we are infatuated with prosperity. It is mind-boggling to me the way that we are so obsessed with prosperity and comfortability ( and by prosperity, I mean WORLDLY prosperity; we will forever prosper in Jesus). We not only see church leaders flaunting wealth and prosperity, we see influencers thriving in worldly prosperity and equating that to a healthy relationship with Jesus; intentionally AND unintentionally. 

I think that the fault of this falls in different places. The first of them being that we have a warped view of prosperity. As followers of Jesus, we are now called into eternal life. We are NOW called; not when we die, but when we accept and follow Jesus. This detail is important because I think so often we have this assumption that eternal life is something that happens in the future rather than in this moment. This life with Jesus, this eternal life we get to live with Jesus, is the life we are living right now. Therefore, our prosperity is found in the eternal presence of God.  

The second fault is that we start to view our relationship with God as transactional and finite when in reality, it is relational and infinite. 1 John 3:1 reads:
"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him."
You and I: we are CHILDREN OF GOD! (you better be saying Amen through the screen). 
God exists to create, to love, to guide, to comfort, to bless, and to nurture His children. When we follow Him, we're not there to say thank you and move on. God wants a relationship with His children, so why do we treat Him like our CEO instead of our Heavenly Father?
​When reading through scripture, it may look like if we do A, B, and C, we get a nice end result. However, like we stated before, the end result is eternal life with Jesus. So if our end result is eternal life with Jesus, our pursuit of our goals never end. We never stop following God's instruction and we never stop trusting in His sovereignty. 

The last fault is simply this (thank you Dad for this one):
Jesus came to present the Gospel of GIVING, not collection. 
sheesh. 
Worldly prosperity is purely rooted in collection and reservation, while eternal prosperity thrives off of generosity WITHOUT reservation: the ultimate sacrifice. 
At the end of the day, the Gospel is a story of ultimate sacrifice. Not only did God sacrifice His one and only Son for His children to experience abundant life with Him, our abundant life with Jesus consists of sacrifice. When you're done reading this, take a quick look at the video I included. The story of Job is one that we use a LOT within Christianity, and for good reasons too. Job's story highlights an important facet of our faith that is relevant to prosperity:
Abundant life with God does not look like worldly prosperity. 
Abundance in Christ is not measurable in the slightest, and I'm so grateful that it isn't. 
It's a gift that we could never repay and a life that is so gracious, it seems too good to be true. 
Let's stop trying to compare our prosperity as a way to measure our trust in Jesus. Our prosperity is immeasurable because our wealth in Christ is immeasurable. God intended for it to be this way from the beginning, and praise Him that it will reign true forever.