Holy Rambo

  On any given day, you will find people on social media who will proudly proclaim “Jesus never said he was God.” You will hear several different kinds of people with different motivations who make the claim. There is the ill-informed atheist who shouldn’t really care what Jesus did or didn’t claim, since he doesn’t believe in God in the first place. The exvangelical who has “deconstructed” his faith to the point that it is difficult to put back together again. Then there is the Muslim who believes Jesus was a prophet and, as such, could not claim deity. While it is true that Jesus didn’t go around proclaiming Himself to be God with skin on, there are numerous places where he made claims where he equated himself with God, whom he often identified as “Father.” Today’s passage includes one of these. Explanation In this short passage, Jesus arrives in Nazareth (his own city) and encounters a paralytic who had been brought to him. He is moved by the faith of this group, but says ...

  HIGHLIGHT “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34 NASB 1995) EXPLAIN At the top of the hierarchy of needs are food, clothing, and water. Threaten any one of these and your whole life becomes focused on that one thing. It is almost like the same way a physical injury will focus your attention on that pain. Before the highlighted verse, Jesus has run through a series of admonitions to not be divided in our attentions. Our focus is to be on God and His Kingdom and not on the accumulation of wealth. He brings the section to a definite point beginning in Matt. 6:25-34. In a series of illustrations, He displays how mindful God is of not just the needs of all His creation, but how He supplies both sufficiency and beauty. Are you worried about food? Consider the birds. They don’t plant, harvest, or store. Yet they are fed. Worried about clothing? Consider how beautiful the lilies are, even though the...