You see dissonance is when who I am no longer lines up with who I had hoped to be or how I hope others see me. It happens so often and so subtly that most of the time you and I don’t even realize it’s going on. We all know that major dissonance (or compromise) doesn’t crop up overnight. It starts small. So small that we might not recognize it in ourselves or want to acknowledge it. This morning we’re going to open to the Book of James, chapter one.
He could have let Jonah die a slow painful death being digested by a giant fish. Now aren’t you glad that God shows mercy to Jonah? I know I am. Because I need the sort of God who lovingly pursues me. I need the sort of God who will be merciful towards me. In spite of Jonah’s disobedience, God uses this situation to make His name great. God could have used someone else to witness to the Ninevites but God’s actions here would seem to indicate that God desires Jonah. This is good news. Even if we give up on ourselves, God doesn’t give up on us.
We have taken our relationships to a much more social-media-infused format and we have traded real-face-to-face relationships that require focus and authenticity for fake-relationships that are based on pretense and social media.
While we might think that God’s grace is super-abundant in that we could have more than we would ever need or want, we act like it will run out, that there won’t be enough. Much like the Christmas cookies or hot water for a shower on a Sunday morning we might think we need to grab what we need/want before someone else takes it all and there’s none left for us. But God’s grace is more than sufficient for your or my every need.
We talk a lot about grace. We insist on how we need to give each other more grace. We even insist on how people ought to give us more grace. We might even tell ourselves that we ought to give ourselves more grace. But is it possible we missed the point of grace? Maybe we got grace wrong.
We seem to be caught in a vortex of articles on the internet suggesting what the church needs to do differently or better, to remain relevant. They often sound vague and like there’s someone, somewhere else that needs to do something differently about the problem. But when we talk about the church, we’re not talking about a building or somebody else we’re talking about ourselves.
It’s so easy to let your self-worth be based on how you esteem yourself. When we self value and esteem our worth of who we are based on what we think we have the tendency to either think too highly of ourselves or too little of ourselves.
Jesus is resurrected. His body healed, complete, perfect in all ways except one. His scars remained. His scars remain to prove that He went through that awful ordeal on the cross. His scars remained to tell a story. His scars remained as proof, as evidence of who He was and the miracle to top all miracles for all time.
We know that knowledge alone won’t make us better Christians. We won’t love God more by just knowing more facts about Him. We won’t love our neighbors like Jesus by just understanding that it’s something we “should do”. We need to apply the Bible to our lives. We need to live out the Bible. So today I want to give you some keys to putting God’s word into action, to applying the Scripture to your life.
Highlighting your Bible is not something that you’ll read about in your Bible, nor is it a tool the Jewish Teachers, Catholic Priests or early Protestant Pastors ever thought about. I highlight to help me interact with the Bible.