Today, welcome guest blogger, and one of the people I admire most: Caitlyn Martinez.
If Jesus were to come down to earth again and explain to the leaders of a typical church that everything they hold as important (EG: coffee stands, good worship music, perfectly clean bathrooms) is worthless, nobody would believe Him.
Jesus would be a laughingstock, and maybe even accused of trying to mar the very foundation that the church lies on. People would say that this man was simply trying to stop the Christian church from growing; that he has no idea what it takes to draw people into a church these days.
Similarly, the Pharisees laughed at Jesus for His teachings. They did not want to be told that their sacrifices and age-old temple practices were worthless to God. They knew that there was something deeper to be understood, but their fear of being completely wrong kept them from willingly understanding Christ. They didn’t want to stretch their thinking.
Sometimes it seems that the same fear that the Pharisees had, has overtaken us today. Usually, we find ourselves valuing status, money, or even aesthetics. These things are not bad, but what if God wanted to do something different in these areas of our lives?
Would we be willing to let Him shift what we value? If we are forgetting to let God have the final say in everything, we are accidentally taking the reins from Him in our lives. It’s important to remember to not allow our own understanding to be what keeps us from seeing what Christ is trying to show us. God has a tendency to stretch our thinking, but if we cannot accept God’s ways we will miss out on what he has in store.
Therefore this week has a personal challenge: ask God what areas of your life He desires to stretch, whether it is your thinking, actions, or something else. Once you’ve asked, invite Him to stretch you in those area, because the more we stretch, the more flexible we are to do whatever God asks us to do in life.
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Caitlyn Martinez is currently an aspiring writer, and studying for her BA in Biblical Studies at the School of Urban Missions. Click here (ifIperishIperish2.tumblr.com) to view her blog.
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