Even when we have the truth, we need to figure out how to convey it in love. Conveying truth in love involves caring about how the person we’re speaking to will hear it because of how we say it and when we say it.
Most of us have something we’d rather not put on the table before God—something we’re holding just tightly enough that we hope He won’t notice. In Luke 18, a ruler who has kept the commandments since his youth comes to Jesus asking what he still must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus names exactly the one thing he isn’t ready to hear.
When we’re ready to accuse others of missing the mark of righteousness, are we prepared to explore the differences between ourselves and the righteous person too?
We’re drawn to people who seem useful, impressive, ready to contribute—and in Luke 18, the disciples felt the same way when they turned away parents bringing infants to Jesus. But Jesus stopped them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
We constantly seek to strive for the better position in society, but what if we stopped trying to see ourselves as important and instead saw ourselves humbly?
It’s easy to look across the room and thank God we’re not like that person—the failure, the compromiser, the obvious sinner. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable to confront such self-righteousness in us.
Believing that God will ultimately triumph over the grave is one thing; knowing what to do with yourself in the meantime is another. Ruth 3 presses that question through people who have lost everything and choose to prepare rather than wait it out—and what their ordinary faithfulness looks like, in the daily grind before the story resolves, may be more unsettling and more freeing than expected.
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
How can we envy given what God has given us? Paul has us think about our impulse to envy as we wrap up Galatians 5.
As we near the end of Galatians 5, Paul calls us to live as those without strife. Can we take strife-free living into our communities this New Year?