Promotion.

I'm reading Luke 24 right now and something stood out that I had to work through. In verse 19 the disciples who'd walked with Jesus through so much began to call him a prophet, rather than the messiah that they'd believed him to be. Two verses later it says, "We'd hoped that he would have..."

The thing that I can't ignore is that because Jesus didn't do what they'd hoped he would, they demoted him.

In their discouragement they went back to their old life- they went back to fishing. After three years of walking with Jesus they went back to their old life, just because he hadn't done what they had thought he would... what they'd expected him to do.

What have I gone back to simply because God didn't do what I'd hoped He would?

Maybe it's time for me to promote Jesus back to his rightful place: worthy of my trust.

Hope in pruning.

It seems that the season of pruning continues...

Today I asked God, "What is it that you're pruning now?" I was hoping that the answer would help brace me for what ever impact came next.

He answered with, "Your ability to celebrate others." That surprised me.

He answered that he was pruning my "ability", not my in-ability. I was expecting that he would be cutting off what was bad. But what he is doing is developing, crafting and caring for what is good... so that what I do, I do better.


That made this season a little more exciting.

When my head needs to take the bench.

In a dream, I'm taking a walk with God. I don't care for a single moment what we're talking about, I just know that He's close. It's in His closeness that all the problems that He could fix by saying something, just don't matter.

He reaches down to pick a flower and gives it to me... I know His nearness.

Then I wake up. I look down and see that in my hand is the flower that He'd given me in my dream. My head races to figure out how this could be, but it's my heart that knows what to do with it. My heart just knows that He is near.

There are some things that my head doesn't know what to do with... but my heart does. In those moments I need to let my heart do what it is uniquely capable of doing.

The gospel of Jesus is like that for me. My head's not entirely sure what to do with God becoming man and that him being executed forgives me of my sins. My head isn't what I was given to deal with this reality. It was my heart that was given to me to rest, to trust... to believe.

In John 12 there's a woman who breaks an alabaster bottle of perfume over Jesus. Judas cries out that what she'd done was foolish. Jesus stands up for her and says that what she'd done was good and actually counted to her as faith. He then goes on to say that this faith has saved her.

This is really interesting to me because Jesus says that she had a "saving faith", but he hadn't died yet. When someone asks me if I believe in Jesus I assume that they're asking if I believe that he died on the cross, rose from the grave and paid for my sins. But none of this had happened yet and she was saved by her faith. So I have to ask, what did she have faith in? What did she believe?

My head responds with an answer that she believed the prophecies about the messiah and that the miracles that she'd seen have convinced her that Jesus was that savior. But my heart responds differently, and I think it was her heart that carried the faith that saved her. I think she just believed that he was worth it.

When I'm in a moment that gives me a choice to respond with a character of Jesus or the nature of this world I'm presented the question of, "is he worth it?" Is Jesus worth re-presenting in this moment... Do I believe in Jesus?

It is when we believe in Jesus that others will discover how near God is.