November 5
Scripture focus: When Jesus arrived in the villages of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "What are people saying about who the Son of Man is?" They replied, "Some think he is John the Baptizer, some say Elijah, some Jeremiah or one of the other prophets." He pressed them, "And how about you? Who do you say I am?" Simon Peter said, "You're the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus came back, "God bless you, Simon, son of Jonah! You didn't get that answer out of books or from teachers. My Father in heaven, God himself, let you in on this secret of who I really am. And now I'm going to tell you who you are, really are. You are Peter, a rock. This is the rock on which I will put together my church, a church so expansive with energy that not even the gates of hell will be able to keep it out. "And that's not all. You will have complete and free access to God's kingdom, keys to open any and every door: no more barriers between heaven and earth, earth and heaven. A yes on earth is yes in heaven. A no on earth is no in heaven." He swore the disciples to secrecy. He made them promise they would tell no one that he was the Messiah. Matthew 16:12-20 The Message
Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God. --A. W. Tozer
Who do you think Jesus is?
In yesterday’s devotional, my interpretation of the story of Martha and Mary was influenced by my experiential and theological understandings of Jesus. It made no sense to me that Jesus would play one sister against the other. I don’t believe that Jesus shames anyone in an attempt to get them to behave.
All of us have some theological understandings of who Jesus is, but according to Tozer, what we think we believe and what we experientially accept as true may be two different things. If so, to the extent that our experiences don’t match up with our theology, we are going to live out of our experience.
Children are taught, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so…”
But if a child has been traumatized by abuse or neglect, it’s possible that they will say that Jesus loves them, but experience Jesus as distant, inattentive, disinterested, or even harsh.
It’s my prayer that each of us will live more consciously aware of not only what we say about God, but what we are actually experiencing in our spiritual journey.
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