{"id":207,"date":"2014-03-19T10:05:04","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T10:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parkwood.org\/blog\/?p=207"},"modified":"2015-03-03T18:45:59","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T18:45:59","slug":"an-inconvenient-faith-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/an-inconvenient-faith-13\/","title":{"rendered":"An Inconvenient Faith (13)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“As they were walking along the road, a man said to Him (Jesus), ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’\u00a0 Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.’\u00a0 He said to another man, ‘Follow me.”\u00a0 But the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’\u00a0 Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.’\u00a0 Sill another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.’\u00a0 Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.'”<\/em> (Luke 9:57-62)<\/p>\n

Jesus was always straight forward when talking about the cost of discipleship.\u00a0 It was one of the reasons that Jesus didn’t have more followers.\u00a0 After reading the Scripture above one could wonder why anyone would follow Him.\u00a0 Whenever anyone asked what they needed to do to follow Him Jesus would respond honestly and with authority…sacrifice.<\/p>\n

To follow Jesus means to be willing to sacrifice the comforts and security this world has to offer, “the Son of Man has no place to lay His head”.<\/p>\n

To follow Jesus means to be willing to sacrifice taking care of the things that are temporal in order to focus on the things that are eternal, “let the dead bury the dead…proclaim the Kingdom”.<\/p>\n

To follow Jesus means to be willing to sacrifice the way things used to be (looking back) in order to move forward in His service.\u00a0 Paul expressed it this way:<\/p>\n

“But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”<\/em> (Philippians 3:13, 14)<\/p>\n

To say “yes” to Jesus is to say “no” to the things that would distract us from His Kingdom work.\u00a0 It is saying “no” to the things that compete for our affection, attention and loyalties.\u00a0 For the rich young ruler it was his riches.\u00a0 For the Pharisee it was his religious rituals.\u00a0 For Nicodemus it was the opinions of others.\u00a0 For Peter it was his overconfidence in his strength.\u00a0 For Judas it was greed and a warped expectation of what the Messiah would be.<\/p>\n

Today, meditate on the Jesus who modeled for us a life of unselfish love and sacrifice.\u00a0 A life more concerned about personal character than personal comfort.\u00a0 He calls us to put our hand to the plow and not to look back.\u00a0 What are the things in your life that you need to say “no” to.\u00a0 Ask the Lord to point them out.\u00a0 This could be uncomfortable but remember…living with a Kingdom mindset is living an “inconvenient faith”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“As they were walking along the road, a man said to Him (Jesus), ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’\u00a0 Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-an-inconvenient-faith-2014-lenten-blog","category-all_posts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parkwood.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}