His Burden is Light

It occurred to me today that the New Testament is all about being like God. It begins with Jesus who is the exact image of God and it moves on to tell us that through His atoning death for our sins, burial, and resurrection from the dead, we can be born again and receive His Spirit, which means we can become the sons of God and walk even as He walked. This is absolutely tremendous, but I thought about it from a slightly different angle today. Jesus taught His disciples to be perfect and that means going beyond what is 'just enough' to what is full and overflowing . It may be 'just enough' to greet those who are your friends and like-minded, but it is full and overflowing to greet those who are outsiders and differ, as well. He gives a number of examples to illustrate this but at the heart of His message is that we should be like this because our Father in heaven is like this. We are truly His children if we walk in likeness to Him. But the scandal of it occurred to

When the Lord Jesus was talking to the Pharisees, he pointed out that they tithed even of their garden herbs. In other words, they were very scrupulous about this down to the last mite. However, they ignored the more important matters of the law, as Jesus said, judgment, mercy, and faith. They strained out a gnat but swallowed a camel (Luke 11:39-42, Matt 23:16-26). Christians are not automatically immune from falling into the same pattern of blindness. If we were immune, the Lord would not have warned us to beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees and the Sadducees (Matt 16:12). There are many important lessons to be learned from this parable but the part that I want to talk about today is the curious conclusion of Jesus' teaching: He said that they should have paid attention to the weightier matters of the law and also not neglected to tithe of their garden herbs. So Jesus is not reproving the Pharisees for their fastidious attention in tithing, He is reproving them for their negl

You might think this is impossible to know but it is possible! It is amenable to Biblical discernment. As we elaborate the answer we will see that many verses in the Bible encourage by agreement our developing conclusion. This is how we can know that we are still on the right track. And of course the answer to a question as fundamental as this will tell us a lot about the world, the state of fallen mankind, and most importantly, about Christ in His difference from the first man Adam. This study is particularly for those who are already familiar with the Bible, and have true faith in Christ. Otherwise there's no way you're going to agree. We start not in Genesis but in 1 Timothy 2:14! "And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." The key here is that Adam was not deceived. That means he ate the fruit knowingly. Now we must go back to Genesis. When God told Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,