Father, thank You for helping me get as much done as I did today but I am calling to You for more help tonight. I am weary and would really like to crash but we need to spend some time together. I’ll just lean on You, OK?
Mark 6:14-15 (<<click to read the passage)
I read a more extended passage but a statement in the notes of my Life Application Study Bible New Living Translation stopped me right there! It reads, “Today people still have to make up their minds about Jesus. Some think that if they can name what he is – prophet, teacher, good man – they can weaken the power of his claim on their lives. But what they think does not change who Jesus is.”
God made man in his own image (Genesis 1:27). It has not been uncommon from that point until now that we have a great tendency to re-create God in our own image. That line, “some think if they can name what he is…they can weaken the power of his claim on their lives”, fits well right here.
From a very early age – before we really even know better – we want things our way. How many toddlers have you seen who upon learning to walk want to push their own stroller? Independent. Defiant. And you would think that maturity would mellow that out some…but it doesn’t.
That same attitude and mindset carry on in most of us until our dying breath. “I don’t need help! I can do it my self! No one can lay claim to my life!” But we’re wrong. There is Someone who can lay claim to our lives. David laid it out in Psalm 139:13 AMP,
“For You [our Creator] formed my innermost parts; You knit me [together] in my mother’s womb.”
We are only fooling ourselves and the other fools around us if we think that we can weaken the power of his claim on our lives. For, and this is where that last sentence fits so well, …what we think does not change who Jesus is.
I have quoted this passage of Scripture before but this is the way it will be, and we truly have no say in it.
For this reason also [because He obeyed and so completely humbled Himself], God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow [in submission], of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess and openly acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord (sovereign God), to the glory of God the Father. Philippians 2:9-11 AMP
Herod Antipas, the king…John the Baptist…Elijah…you…me…it really makes no difference who we are, every single one of us, our knee shall bow and our tongue will confess…that Jesus Christ is Lord.
For what we think does not change who Jesus is.
Mar 26th, 2019, Tues, 6:11 pm
