“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” – Matthew 9:13

Thank you, Jesus!!! You came for us! We’re all sinners and none of us are righteous by our own efforts (despite what we may think sometimes). Jesus came for us and through His death and resurrection He makes us righteous by God’s grace through faith in Christ alone.

We who follow Jesus must remember this truth well. Our greatest responsibility is to likewise call “sinners” – those who don’t know Jesus. We must be extending the mercy and love of God to those who are most vulnerable, confused, and spiritually lost. We must be investing our time and resources in those most unlike us.

We must never let our preferences and passion for religious practice fill our minds and hearts to a greater extent than the needs of those outside the church to learn about Jesus. We must have a greater heart (evidenced by money spent, time invested, emotion expressed, and energy expended) for the eternal fate of those outside Christ than we do for the spiritual comfort and well-being of those already in the family of God. This turns traditional church life upside down, but it’s why Jesus came and we must be about His business!

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” – Matthew 7:24-25

Storms and floods, both literal and figurative, will come in your life. We’ll all experience seasons of pain, loss, stress, sorrow, suffering, deprivation, and difficulty. For some these may be relatively brief. For others they may be extraordinarily intense and last for years. The question for each of us is upon what will we build our lives?

We all build our lives on something – it could be money, power, pleasure, status, comfort, safety, security, talent, hard-work, discipline, career, family, or faith. Will the foundation of our lives withstand the disasters that inevitably come? When we listen AND obey the teachings of Christ, we build our lives upon the rock that cannot be shaken. When we truly follow Christ, the storms will still come, but we’ll have all we need to endure.

When we build upon faith and obedience to our suffering Savior, we build on the infinite strength and ongoing presence of a Savior who withstood every temptation, suffered unimaginably, yet triumphed over all the forces of evil and death. In hearing and doing the word of Christ we build our lives on the wisdom and promise that Jesus Christ is with us all the days until He returns or we pass away into His visible presence. Upon what is your life built?

“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” – Matthew 7:11

We all have our moments of frustration, anger, selfishness, or shutdown. Yet we still delight in giving good things to our kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, even when they drive us crazy. If we’re like that, despite our very serious problems, imagine the delight and generosity of God, our perfect Heavenly Father, in giving gifts to us.

God pours out blessings and delights in doing so. This is why we can be 100% confident that He hears every prayer we lift up to Him. He doesn’t always give us what we ask, because He may have something better in mind, but we should never doubt His love for us, His delight in our prayers, and His passion for giving us good gifts!

So don’t be afraid to pray with honesty and boldness. Because of what Jesus did for us on the cross, all who believe in Him are invited to come before God’s throne with confidence, laying all things before Him in prayer, and receiving the peace and blessing of our perfect and loving Father.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.” – Matthew 6:19-20

Jesus was quite concerned over our relationship with money. He well understood that either we own our stuff or our stuff owns us! Money and possessions aren’t bad in themselves, but too easily they come to dominate our hearts and thoughts. Good and godly people can have a deeply ungodly relationship with money. It too often becomes the primary thing we think about when we have very little and when we have plenty.

All the treasures of this earth will inevitably leave our possession one day. This is 100% certain. They will get spent, lost, spoiled, stolen, taxed, traded, or we will die and they will belong to others. However, we can choose to have a different relationship with our money and the treasures we receive in this life. We can choose to invest heavily, generously, and sacrificially in the work of God’s Kingdom: supporting local churches, planting new churches, supporting those who take the Gospel to the far ends of the earth, caring for the poor and most vulnerable, expressing the love of Jesus Christ.

When we do these things in the name of Jesus, our treasure leaves our grasp, yet far greater reward awaits us in heaven. Yes, we will be “poorer” in terms of our bank balance, but our lives will be much richer in terms of those we have blessed. We will have less money, but will have more peace because we know it was used well for God’s glory!

“For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil may not dwell with you.”
– Psalm 5:4

This is both good and bad news! The good news: God is good, righteous, just, and holy. We can trust Him for these reasons. We can believe in everything He says without fear or doubt and we know that He is worthy of our worship and love.

But here’s the bad news: when we’re honest with ourselves we recognize that we each have evil within us. We have our moments, our breakdowns, our setbacks, our failures, our sin, don’t we? There are the actions we shouldn’t have taken, the words we shouldn’t have said, and the thoughts we shouldn’t have thought. So as good as God is, the bad news is we can’t dwell with Him.

But here’s the really good news: God still wants us to dwell with Him, He still loves us despite our sins and evil, and He is merciful, kind, and gracious. So He provided a way to deal with the evil within us, that we may live with Him forever. He sent His eternal Son Jesus into this world to live the pure and holy life we cannot and to die as an atoning sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sins. Through His death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead, Jesus paid off the debt of sin for all who believe in Him. The record of evil is wiped clean, the power of evil is broken over our lives, and we receive eternal life in the knowledge and presence of God.

While God indeed does not delight in wickedness, through faith in Jesus Christ, God sees the righteousness of Christ within us and He delights in us!