Hating Your Mom and Dad

Luke 14:25-27 – Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

I have to hate my family? How can God tell us to love and respect and obey our parents while at the same time tell us to hate them? So what is Jesus telling us to do?

The answer, though clear, is not easy. Jesus warns these people, and therein He warns us, that if we follow Jesus around like fans following their favorite sports team, actor or musician, but we fail to choose Christ, then we haven’t really made a decision for Him after all. You must first make a conscience decision to choose Christ above all.

Jesus calls us to hate our families, but not in the way we use the word today. Not even close. Love is the message of the cross and of the Bible. So that means that this passage about “hating” our family isn’t about our family at all. What Jesus is calling us to is a higher form of following. He longs to have our hearts and our lives. And He longs to have us seek Him with all that we are. This passage, though confusing at first perhaps, is all about choosing Christ over everything. We are to love God more than anything else we could ever imagine loving. We must follow so hard after Christ that even if our families choose to disown us for our beliefs, we will remain on our path to Love God and Love People. We don’t hate them in the way that we are mean to them or disrespectful to them. We “hate” them in the essence that God comes first. Period. End of story.

So the question is: are you willing to lose everything you have ever loved, including your family, for the sake of knowing Christ and making Him known? Does Christ come first in your life above all else?

From the Inside Out

I remember getting ready to graduate from high school. It was a crazy time. It was a hectic time. I was scared. I was nervous. I was excited. And if I had only known what God had in store for me, I would have been even more scared, nervous and excited than I already was!

On Wednesday evenings we have been discussing what it means to live a life transformed. Romans 12:1-2 says:

Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

College is a place to be different. A place to start over or a place to re-establish. It is a place to try new things and gain new hobbies and interests. It is a place to meet new people who will help you to grow into the person you have always wanted to be, or the person you never wanted to be. My caution and my encouragement to you is this: don’t become so well-adjusted to the culture around you that you fit into it without even thinking. Regardless of what culture that may be.

God gave you a brain, and it is an incredible muscle, and the great thing about muscles is that they can either get bigger and stronger or they can get weak and atrophy. So regardless of what group of friends you find, never just assume they are making all the right decisions. Paul says that we need to test and approve God’s perfect will. We need to dig deep and see what God has in store for us. And I can tell you from personal experience that what God has in store is always, always, always more rewarding and amazing than anything we could’ve planned for ourselves.

Remember that you are called to be a living sacrifice for God. You are called to be an ambassador for His cause. And He has an incredible plan for you as you move forward into this next phase of your life. And remember, that He loves you and wants to be a part of your ordinary everyday life…your sleeping, eating, walking around, going to work life. And if you do, you will be changed from the inside out.

Lingering Jesus

"The refusal to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering in human life. It works in this way--if we love a human being and do not love God, we demand of him every perfection and every rectitude, and when we do not get it we become cruel and vindictive; we are demanding of a human being that which he or she cannot give. There is only one Being Who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ." 

       -- Oswald Chambers

In the moments when we feel like Jesus is waiting to answer...

In the moments when we feel like Jesus is refusing to answer...

In the moments when we feel like Jesus is not even wanting to answer...

In the moments when we feel like Jesus is lingering across the Jordan while we are dying in Bethany...

In those moments, it is entirely too "easy" to allow doubt to creep in and to allow ourselves to rely on those around us whom we can see and hear and touch instead of the One who said He would be with us always.

In those moments, we lose faith. Maybe not totally. But we lose faith.

In those moments, we place pressure on our loved ones to pull us up and help keep us above the torrential downpour of water that never seems to cease.

In those moments, we make choices and those choices don't just affect us and our faith-walk, but they affect the faith-walk of the people in whom we misplace our trust. We become "cruel and vindictive."

In those moments, we expect perfection from an imperfect being

In those moments, we expect imperfection from a Perfect Being.

In those moments, we forget that God is Sovereign, and that He will actually truly make a way where there seems to be no way.

In those moments, Jesus might linger, but we must not falter. Jesus might linger, but we must not falter!


In those moments, we must remember: "There is only one Being Who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ."

In those moments, we need to break free from our disillusions.

In those moments, we must never forget that, "It is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it."