FBC Daily Devotional – January 22, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a happy Friday to you, end of the week at last, and looking forward to the weekend.

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I hope you can look back over this week and say, boy, this has been a good week, and looking forward to Friday wrapping up, and wrapping up a productive, a fruitful week, and just seeing the way the

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Lord has worked in your life this week, and rejoice and be glad in it. Are you rejoicing in what you're reading and how you're learning, what you're learning and how you're growing in the reading of the

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Scripture? I hope you are, and I hope that today you were able to read in Matthew chapter 18, and in this passage, verses 18 to 34, it was in our reading today, there are several rich points to ponder.

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I just want to highlight a couple of them. The first is the interaction between a couple of disciples of Jesus.

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Now, we don't really know the extent of everybody who claimed to be a disciple and all who were a disciple.

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Remember, a disciple, in its most fundamental meaning, is one who is a follower of a teacher, and so a lot of people would be followers of Jesus.

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They would be disciples of Jesus, whose depth of discipleship and commitment to him was not all that great.

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You remember reading, perhaps, another place where there were followers of Jesus, but when he said things that were hard for them to swallow, they forsook him and left.

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All right, so anyway, Jesus, in this passage, has a little interaction with two of these disciples.

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One of them is a scribe, and remember, the scribes were in the sect of the

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Pharisees. The scribes, Sadducees, Pharisees, they were mostly Pharisees, these scribes were.

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Anyway, this scribe comes up to him after Jesus is dismissing the crowd, and he gives orders for his disciples, get in a boat, we're going to cross over to the other side of the sea, of the lake.

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The scribe comes up to Jesus and says to him, teacher, rabbi,

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I will follow you wherever you go. Okay, so there's one disciple who's expressing a pretty solid level of commitment.

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And then another disciple, we read in verse 21, it says, another one of the disciples said to him, Lord, I'm going to go,

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I mean, this is the implied statement, I'm going to go with you, but Lord, let me first go and bury my father.

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So he expresses, anyway, a measure of commitment as well, he wants to go and follow

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Jesus, but he needs to go and bury his father. Well, these two disciples and their level of commitment, and Jesus' response to them, raises a couple of challenging questions for us to ponder today, don't they?

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So this first disciple, the scribe, he says, I'll go with you anywhere you go. And Jesus says, well, let me tell you something.

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The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but Son of Man, he has nowhere to lay his head.

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He's going to show that in a little while, he's out on a boat, and the only thing he can do is go to sleep in the back of the boat, it's like he doesn't really have a good place to lay his head.

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So the question is this, to the scribe and then to us. You say you'll follow

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Jesus anywhere, but are you willing to yield your creature comforts in order to do so?

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Well, then the other disciple comes along and he says, I'll go, but let me first go and bury my father.

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And Jesus responds to him, follow me and leave the dead to bury their own dead.

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Now, that may sound harsh, but just to understand the cultural context here, it's not that this disciple's father had actually died and they needed to have the funeral service the next day or something like that, no.

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It's that he was waiting, he was going to go to his father's house or the family compound, a homestead, if you will, and wait until his father passed away and then bury his father, and then he was going to come and follow

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Jesus. That's really what was going on here. So Jesus responds to him and says, you say you'll follow

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Jesus anywhere, you'll follow me anywhere, but will you surrender your priorities or perhaps the priorities that others place upon you, will you surrender those priorities for mine to follow me,

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Jesus asks. That's a good question for us to ponder, isn't it? You say you'll follow

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Jesus anywhere, but will you surrender your priorities for his? Jesus says, follow me and let the dead bury the dead.

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So you're looking at that, looking at that interaction causes us to ask those questions and to ponder them.

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But then look at the disciples who did affirm that, yes, they would, they would sacrifice their creature comforts to follow

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Jesus, and they would surrender their priorities to follow Jesus. These are the ones that actually got in the boat.

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And they get in the boat and they're heading out toward the other side of the lake and a storm comes up on the sea, and the storm is so fierce, the wind is raging so fiercely and the waves are crashing and so forth, that they're scared to death, while Jesus is in the back of the boat, having no place to lay his head, and he's sleeping.

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So here are these men, they've lost all their comfort, but will they trust him in this storm?

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Would you, would I, under these circumstances? And you're seeing the connection here between, it's just a slight one, but a connection between what's going on on the sea and what

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Jesus just confronted the disciples with before they left. Will you sacrifice your creature comforts?

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All right, here is a total loss of comfort. Will you trust him now? And let the dead bury their dead, and now here they are thinking they're facing death.

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Will you trust him now? Will you trust him now? Would you or I, if we were in the disciples' position?

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Now Jesus addresses their fear, and he says, why are you afraid, oh you of little faith?

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And he zeroes in on their faith, he confronts their faith, or their lack of it.

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Now they have enough faith to follow Jesus, and to have said, yep, I'll go even if I don't have a place to rest my head, and I'll make your priority my priority.

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But here they are, Jesus is on board with them, and he confronts them about their little faith.

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Does that seem harsh? Well, let's get the bigger picture. These individuals, these disciples, they've just recently witnessed some tremendous, miraculous power on the part of Jesus.

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He has healed scores of people. They've witnessed as individuals who were possessed of devils had those demons expelled from their lives.

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They witnessed this leper cleansed when Jesus just said, I will cleanse you, be clean.

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And he was cleansed. And they witnessed his testimony or his statement to the centurion, you've got great faith, go your way, your servant is healed.

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And the servant was healed. Well, then also these disciples who have witnessed this tremendous power of the

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Lord Jesus, they have forsaken everything to follow him, everything, their livelihood, their priorities, their creature comforts, they've forsaken everything to follow him because they believe him to be the

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Messiah. And there he is with them in the boat. Now here's the thing.

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Here's why Jesus says their faith is a little faith. If their faith were greater, they'd connect the dots.

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He, Jesus, can't perish like this. He can't perish and go to the bottom of the sea.

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He's the Messiah. He's the promised Messiah. So if he can't perish in the bottom of the sea, this boat isn't going down.

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We're not going to perish with him, with us. We're safe with him. Well, they didn't connect the dots.

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They needed Jesus to say peace to the sea, both the stormy sea and the stormy soul, to say peace, be still.

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And their reaction, the disciples' reaction after the storm is stilled indicates that they've still got a ways to go in the growing of their faith, right?

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It says, the men marveled, saying, what sort of man is this that even the winds and the sea obey him?

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They still needed to grow in their faith. Now, I don't know about you, but I do too.

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I do too. So let's keep going. Let's keep growing in the grace and knowledge of our

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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, our Father and our

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God. How much we need to grow. In the grand scheme of things, how little is our faith.

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Oh, Lord, make us a people of great faith, we pray. Grow us up in grace and knowledge of Christ.

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And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, to help us do that, I hope you'll gather on the

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Lord's Day as we open the Word and worship the Lord together, Sunday morning at 1030.

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I have in -person services. If you can make it for that, you're welcome to do so, if you're comfortable doing it, if you're concerned about the

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COVID disease and all that, I understand that. Try to mitigate it as much as we possibly can, but you have to do what you feel safe doing.

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So if you can't make it out to in -person service, join us here online at 1030,

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Sunday morning. In the meantime, have a good rest of your Friday, and I trust the