I'm really paraphrasing the questions David posed this morning to us at Emmaus to "why do our actions not match our words"? Is it laziness, a lack of will, our own desire for ease and convenience gets in the way, a lack of an ongoing encounter with God and His power? Is it the fact that we live in a "me" centered world where our default setting is self? Yes, on all accounts, guilty as charged.
Now, I could start the blame game in order to slide out of actually feeling the implications of this. We live in a world that is focussed on appealing to our nature to be served and catered to. Watch any commercial, read any newspaper, look around you and start counting how many things you see that appeal to our self serving nature. Heck, even listen to our worship songs and count how many times the songs are all about us. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful what Jesus has done for us and we can't fully lay down our lives until we experience the ramifications of his ultimate sacrifice for us, but maybe, just maybe, we dwell too much on how much we are loved, blessed, healed, rescued, saved, protected, etc and not enough on daily taking up our cross and following the Lord.
Jesus had thousands of hungry people who followed Him because he fed them and healed them and took care of their needs. When the rubber met the road, how many of those followers were there for what they could get out of Jesus versus in response to what they had received from him? I want to be like the woman who used her tears of love for Jesus to clean his feet. She was overcome in her emotions and captivated by His love. In that place, she didn't give a rip about what others thought about her or her actions, she only cared about what Jesus thought about her and what she could do to please Him and Him alone. It's a lot easier to say than to do but Lord help me to live that way.
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