7. We conveniently forget that “Jesus saves.”
We know He forgives and we love to sing about it. What we have pushed to the back burner, however, is the fact that He came to save sinners (see Matthew 1:21 and Luke 2:11 for starters) and that is to be our business too.
We who devote ourselves to feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and so forth, sometimes think we have fulfilled our assignment. Not even close. We fail people when we give them bread but keep silent about the Savior who can meet their true needs, fill their deepest hungers and heal their greatest hurts.
8. We forget that, with Jesus, change is the norm.
Luke 5:36-39 presents new wineskins as the Lord’s pattern for His disciples: strong, flexible, faithful, and growing.
We do love our status quo. Physicists call it “inertia,” the tendency of a body to go on doing whatever it’s doing at the moment, moving or remaining stationary. However, the Lord does not play this game with us. He is forever calling us out of our comfort zones, away from our customary methods, into new ways of seeing and doing and achieving. No one unwilling to constantly be changing and adapting can follow Jesus Christ for long.
9. We keep forgetting that the object is not to keep rules.
When it comes to the things Jesus said the object is obedience to the Lord, not slavishly keeping the rules. Many of the Lord’s well-intentioned children miss the fine line between those two.
“The letter of the law kills, the Spirit gives life” (II Cor 3:6). Anyone who requires a demonstration of that proof needs only to drop in on a legalistic church and hang around a few weeks. He or she will be heartbroken over the way rule-keepers “omit the weightier matters” in order to “tithe mint and dill and cumin” (Matthew 23:23).
Recently, while I was preaching in a church located near a sizeable Amish community, the pastor had stories about the interesting ways of these neighbors. One man had disinherited his adult sons for buying a car. Yet, that same man would hire a car and driver to transport him to Nashville where he would board planes to take him all over the world.
To the legalists who were twisting God’s laws into shackles for their neighbors, our Lord said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27).
I say, without fear of contradiction, that every church in the land has members (and often leaders) who need constant reminders of this.
10. We keep forgetting to read all the Word and not take a verse or two out of context.
“Here a verse, there a verse.” I stand before you today to confess that I’m as guilty as anyone I know. We do love our verses, don’t we? They fit so conveniently on bumper stickers and in our tweets.
