10 Big Things Jesus Said That We Keep Forgetting

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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, growing, etc.

We do love our status quo. In science, they 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, abandoning our customary methods, and finding 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.

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 (Second Corinthians 3:6). Anyone who requires a demonstration of that proof needs only to visit a legalistic church for a few weeks. They will be heartbroken over the way rule-keepers “omit the weightier matters” in order to “tithe mint and dill and cummin” (Matthew 23:23).

While preaching in a church located near a sizeable Amish community, the pastor had stories about the legalistic ways of his neighbors. One man had disinherited his adult sons for buying a car. And yet, he 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 suspect every church in the land has members (and often leaders) who need constant reminders of this.

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Joe McKeeverhttp://www.joemckeever.com/
Joe McKeever has been a preacher for nearly 60 years, a pastor for 42 years, and a cartoonist/writer for Christian publications all his adult life. He lives in Ridgeland, Mississippi.

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