HELP OR HINDRANCE?

Matthew 16:21-25

Peter, who had just declared Jesus as “The Christ, the Son of the Living God”, now begins to rebuke and correct Jesus after He was telling His disciples about what is going to fulfill His mission here on earth.  Rebuking God is never a good idea and takes great pride and hubris. 

Jesus first identifies the real culprit…”Get behind me Satan!”  Jesus knows his ways because they are the same tactics he used in the garden with Eve and in the wilderness with Jesus.  Satan’s MO is to doubt God and follow your own mind and desires. Abandon God and build your own cisterns.  It is the error that has passed down from the beginning of time and continues right up to today.

Book after book after book that I have been reading is being written on the failure of Christianity, Religion, the Church, and then offers new ways and changes are being heralded to fix the problems.  Most of them question all that has been done by the church in the past, question the Bible and expressing the need to reinterpret and rewrite it to make it relevant to our times, and changing our understanding of Jesus and God altogether.  Doubting God and what He has been actively doing throughout time takes a great pride and hubris, and never turns out well.  I love and respect many of these people but they are seen as the best people in the field they are all people at best. 

After I read Jesus’ rebuke of Jesus, “Get behind me Satan”, I hear Jesus call Peter a “hindrance to Me”, and I feel sad on one hand (poor Peter) and concerned on the other by how I and others think.  Jesus doesn’t hide the motivation.  “You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man”.   Then He goes on to talk about denying oneself, taking up one’s cross, and following Him; not forfeiting one’s soul to gain the world, and so on.  How much of what good people who really love God, just as Peter did, are less than helpful and more of a hindrance to what God is doing in the world and His church?

I am not without guilt in this.  I have been critical of Christianity, Religion, and the Church in things I have talked about and written about.  I have many “great ideas” to make things different and better.  I enjoy being in the “conversation” about “re-imaging the Church”.  Lately I have been more and more convicted about thinking, talking, and writing about it.  How is the Spirit convicting me…through the Scriptures, these in particular…

Isaiah 55:6-13; Psalm 127:1; Matthew 15:13, 14; Matthew 16:18, 23.

The last thing I want to be is a HINDRANCE to the work that God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is doing in the world today, in the Church today.

Yes, I have done my 10,000 hours that entitles me to be an authority on certain things.  But in matters of God He is the ONLY TRUE AUTHORITY.

So, my solution is simple.  BE STILL AND KNOW GOD IS GOD.

I love God with all my heart, mind, and soul and my one desire is to be what He is about, not what I think He is about in this world.  Enough said.

My Prayer for myself:

Ecclesiastes 5:1,2

“Guard my steps when I go to the house of God.  To draw near to LISTEN is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.  God is in heaven and I am on earth.  Therefore

LET MY WORDS BE FEW.”