Reading Matthew with Missional Eyes

Too many people have found total devastation in making an unwise  financial investment.  One day you are comfortable and well off. The next, you are bankrupt and bereft. It is a deeply unsettlingly experience that has long-term implications. It is something we all seek to avoid, but to avoid it we must monitor our situation and make wise and careful choices. If we realize our investments are headed in the wrong direction, we must do all we can to exit them before they are completely worthless. This is common sense. 

It therefore ought also to be common sense that if we hold to an idea, doctrine or teaching that we later realize is not godly, that we abandon it too. All the more so, because ideas and doctrines and teachings are what we build our lives on. They have a far greater impact than money. A fortune can be regained. The years of your life cannot. 

When He was told the Pharisees were offended by His words, Jesus said, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.” That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, until you consider that He earlier told the parable of the weeds. Jesus is making it clear that He considered the Pharisees and what they taught to be ‘weeds’ in His Kingdom. 

As Leon Morris puts it, “He [Jesus] proceeds to a horticultural metaphor to bring out his total rejection of their position, and speaks of the fate of plants that the heavenly Father did not plant. Whether the plant refers to the teacher or the teaching, Jesus is saying that the heavenly Father […] has revealed truths; his word may denote the truths themselves or the people to whom the truths have been revealed. Either way the point is that what God has made known is the significant thing. What God has not made known and what people like the Pharisees teach so confidently and authoritatively has no future. Because it is not divine truth it will not last. In due course it will be rooted up, another horticultural metaphor, this one speaking of plants torn up by the roots. This signifies final and complete destruction. In this way Jesus makes clear his contempt for the teachers who so confidently claimed to know the ways of God, but who had not been “planted” by the God to whom they so brazenly appealed. So far from being reliable expositors of the kingdom of God, the Pharisees were not even in the kingdom.”

That which is not of God does not survive to His everlasting Kingdom. We see that all around us. Almost everything we set our eyes to is temporary – it all dies, falls and rots away. But that which is of God – the things He created – live on as the earth and sky persist- perpetually made new by the seasons, cycles and storms of life. 

As God’s Word persists, God’s truth also persists. A life that eternally matters must produce fruit that lasts, and fruit that lasts cannot be based on temporary ideas or false foundations. This is true wealth; That we build our lives on God’s truth, not human teaching or false doctrine.

Those who invest in God’s righteousness, invest in eternity. What wonderful encouragement for those of us who live surrounded by corruption!

Tokunboh Adeyemo

APPLICATION: Intentionality

How are you managing that which belongs to God? 

Jesus has made another statement that clearly reveals the Pharisees as having   misinterpreted God’s Word. “Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” 

How could the Pharisees not be offended? They had studied God’s Word as their career. They had dedicated their whole lives to a cause they deeply believed in – that God’s ancient Word was better understood through the established tradition of hundreds of years of Jewish religious leadership. Then, along comes this upstart Rabbi, who is telling them to their faces that they have it wrong. In doing so, he is not just insulting them, but all those upon whom their careers stood. Jesus is effectively saying that Jewish leadership has been wrong for generations. As one commentator put it, “…what was so intolerable to these self-appointed leaders of the people was the fact that Jesus took this leadership from them and here taught the people the direct opposite of what they had taught.” 

Would we not similarly be offended? If a visiting minister were to come to our church and teach the congregation the exact opposite point to the last sermon series, it would be profoundly embarrassing for church leadership. More than embarrassing, it would be profoundly offensive. 

Ironically, the disciples are likely offending Jesus even in making that observation. Of course He is aware. Jesus is God the Son – He was not unaware of what He was doing. He deliberately said what He said, where He said it and purposefully said it to whom He knew was listening. 

Recall that the Pharisees in question were the ‘big guns’ from Jerusalem who had been called in by the locals to help deal with this young upstart, who seemed to have a solid rebuttal for every argument leadership brought to him. Knowing they think they are wise in their own eyes, Jesus has deliberately punched a huge hole in their worldview. Confronted by them about the importance of washing one’s hands prior to eating, Jesus deliberately uses the fifth commandment to demonstrate their hypocrisy. Then He brings to them a charge made by Isaiah – someone they no doubt studied at great length but never applied what he wrote to themselves. To top it off, in a single sentence He does the very thing the Pharisees prided themselves on being able to do, but were not doing at all; He teaches the crowd the profound truth of the spiritual nature of Mosaic law. 

Our sense of offence is a lot like our sense of pain. It is there to alert us to something that – should we not take immediate corrective action – will truly hurt us. Except where our sense of pain alerts us to outside threats, a sense of offence alerts us to an internal threat. Offence is a call to examine why we feel offended. 

As every painful impulse, it is a call to move from our present position. As every emotional impulse, it is a call to prayer. How much more then, when it is the Lord’s own Word that offends us? 

Be offended with God, and you will be offended with everyone who crosses your path.

Elizabeth Elliot

APPLICATION: Thankfulness

Someone once said that if God never does anything that upsets, frustrates and confuses you, then you are not looking at Him – you are looking at a mirror. 

Fifteen hundred years before Jesus, the Lord had said to Aaron, “You must  distinguish  between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean, and you must teach the Israelites all the decrees the Lord has given them through Moses.” Then, after giving Moses a lengthy list of instructions on what was clean to eat and touch and what was not, the Lord said through Moses, “You must distinguish between the unclean and the clean, between living creatures that may be eaten and those that may not be eaten.”  In fact, Leviticus 10 and 11 (where the above quotes are found) use the Hebrew word for “unclean” almost three dozen times. Clearly, understanding what was ‘clean’ and what was ‘unclean’ is an important aspect of following God Most High.

It also sounds a lot like legalism, which Jesus denounces in His argument with the religious leadership. Helpfully however, Jesus tells the crowd how to rightly understand God’s original instructions to Moses: “Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’ ”” 

As He had done before with various aspects of the Jewish Law, Jesus takes what was formerly thought to be a strictly physical commandment and interprets it as a moral and spiritual commandment as well. Jesus is not saying that Moses was wrong, or that God was changing His mind as to what was physically fit for consumption and touch and what was not. Rather, Jesus is applying the terms ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ to the whole person – including mind and soul – and not just their physical body.  

As an ancient physical commandment given to a people who did not have refrigeration or a modern understanding of how disease and illness propagate, the commands to avoid ‘unclean’ aquatic and land creatures are helpful. Anyone who has suffered food poisoning knows that unclean meat has a high probability of making you sick. Very sick. Knowing how to avoid that is helpful. But the spiritual ideal of knowing the difference between holy and unholy is far more helpful. 

This is what the Father had said to Moses, “You must distinguish between the unclean and the clean.” Jesus knows that what the unclean meat does to you physically is but a shadow of what being unclean spiritually does to your mind and soul. It is one thing to be violently ill for a few days. If you are healthy, you can recover. It is quite another to be spiritually or mentally blinded, oppressed in spirit or in spiritual shackles on account of unclean thoughts, words and actions. No matter how physically well you otherwise are, you cannot recover from that until you are released and/or healed, and you cannot do that by yourself. Humankind has no remedy for sin-caused soul-sickness. Nothing we can do and no amount of time we can wait can wash that sin away from us. 

Only the blood of Jesus does that.

The man who thinks he can know the Word of God by mere intellectual study is greatly deceived. Spiritual truth is spiritually discerned.

Samuel Chadwick

APPLICATION: Intentionality

Is there anything ‘unclean’ in your life?

Jesus has charged the religious leadership with the spiritual crimes of  hypocrisy and  heartless worship. But there is one more charge He quotes from Isaiah 29:13, “Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.” This is the most devastating of indictments. Jesus charges the religious leadership with legalism. Legalism is the reduction of God’s glory, for it takes worshipful living and reduces it to following a large and odious collection of rules. It trades the freedom and abundant life of following God for a restrictive and narrow life of being right in the eyes of one’s peers. Rather than multiply God’s glory or even add to it, it reduces God’s glory. 

When our hearts are conflicted, we often try to live the Christ life under our own power. Refusing to acknowledge our brokenness and come to God in repentance, we tell ourselves we’ll just do it better. Effectively, we try to worship God half-heartedly. The end result is legalism. We are no longer following God out of our desperate love for Him. We are doing something because we desperately want Him to love us. But such behavior cannot bring about the Lord’s favor, and woe to us if we teach that it can. 

Christ came to establish God’s Kingdom, and to do that He was anointed to, “…preach good news to the poor, […] proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Legalism does the exact opposite. It is not good news to know there are many restrictive laws you have to follow. As a system set up to ultimately appease human leadership instead of God, legalism is anything but freedom. It blinds the people to the wonder and joy of simply hearing and obeying God, and because it is not of God, it lacks His power to release anyone from their bonds. In that respect, legalism leads into slavery instead of away from it. Instead of freedom on account of our experience of love for Him, we find bondage on account of our fear of other people. 

In some ways legalism is worse than no relationship with God at all, for it inoculates against expecting God to be anything more than a demanding tyrant. The Bible does not reveal God as that. It reveals God as a loving Father and a gracious King. A Father does not place unreasonable demands on His children, and a gracious King does not burden His people unnecessarily. In fact, the whole of the Jewish history was one of God being gracious, kind and longsuffering to the patriarchs, and delivering Israel from the tyranny of Egyptian slavery. God is wonderful, and wonderful to all who follow Him. 

We do well to remember the most important thing; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” If we struggle with half-heartedness, we must give our half-heart to God rather than fall into legalism. He can heal us. Proverbs says, “My son, give me your heart and let your eyes keep to my ways,” and the Psalmist prophetically wrote, “I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart.” So let it be. Amen.

Legalism never produces genuine holiness. It only creates fear and encourages hypocrisy.

Tokunboh Adeyemo

APPLICATION: Worship

Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom – freedom to worship Him, and freedom to obey Him unreservedly.

When Jesus called the religious leadership “hypocrites”, He was rightly  pointing to the  fact that they accused Him of breaking with human tradition, while at the same time committing and teaching treason against God on account of tradition. “Whereas the priestly Sadducees taught that the written Torah was the only source of revelation, the Pharisees admitted the principle of evolution in the Law: men must use their reason in interpreting the Torah and applying it to contemporary problems.” To this end the Pharisees were closely tied to their traditional interpretation and application. Ironically, that tradition itself was a fairly recent development, because the Pharisees only emerged as a group some 160 years prior in Jewish history. Their “tradition” wasn’t that old. But the Jewish leadership had long been misapplying God’s law by means of cultural misinterpretation. In fact, Jesus’ accusations against them tie their behavior back to seven hundred years prior. Jesus quotes Isaiah 29:13, “The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.”” 

God’s charge through Isaiah hundreds of years earlier was that of sedition. Obviously sedition is far more serious than mere hypocrisy, but the two are closely linked. For to come into the King’s presence and say the right things but not believe your own words is  – at best – wickedly deceitful. Will God not truly know your heart? Then how could anyone approach him with words that claim to seek His face only to lie to His face? It is tantamount to treason, for all crimes begin in the heart long before they get acted upon, and treason begins when one no longer acts as one believes. From Christ’s viewpoint, such behaviour was a real tradition of Jewish religious leadership, and it couldn’t be interpreted as right any more than tradition can make sedition right. 

Without a heart set on glorifying God, our worship is in vain. 

You cannot worship what you do not love. You can love partially and worship partially, but you cannot worship wholeheartedly through acting out what you do not hold in your heart as true. The rest of the congregation might believe you are sincere, but you and God will know it is only a play. Like a spy pretending to be in the King’s service, your voice and actions say one thing, but your heart says another. 

Such a heart condition is not cause for worship. It is cause for humility. It is cause for repentance. It is cause for heartfelt prayer and much soul-seraching. But it is not cause for worship until the Holy Spirit finishes His work of rooting out the lies you have come to believe about who God is and who you are. 

Yet the disciple in such a position has hope, because they know there will be cause for worship once they’ve made a fresh commitment to honour God for who His Word says He is. 

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.

Job (from Job 19:25-26)

APPLICATION: Thankfulness

As long as we breath, there is a path back to the true worship we were created for. PTL, He forgives, redeems and restores! 

Matthew continues recording the interaction of Jesus with the Pharisees  and teachers of  the law from Jerusalem. They ask, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,’ he is not to ‘honor his father’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”” 

Jesus’ response is harsh. But one must think of God’s viewpoint: When God created humankind He was fulfilling His stated intention, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule…” The pluralism of that intention (the use of “us” and “our”) demonstrates not only that the members of the Godhead were all involved, but that God intended those He made in His image to also exist within relationship. As God exists in intimate relationship between Father, Son and Spirit, so part of our inherent nature is our identity within family. 

We see this again in the actual creation account; God’s first blessing on Adam is the blessing of marriage. His first instruction post-blessing is to increase in number. God’s plan for us meant that humankind must know – even from our earliest days – the priority, intimacy and boundaries of family. That starts with understanding and honouring the role of our physical creators. It was to this very point that He said, “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Honouring God starts with honouring those He made like Him, and that starts with honouring our parents, who made us.

Moreover, God’s instruction to honour our parents wasn’t a suggestion, but a command. To this end He also laid out the drastic consequence of dishonouring our parents, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.” Dishonouring our parents is a serious crime, for it mirrors the treason of dishonouring God our Father. 

This background in mind, one can almost feel Jesus’ intense displeasure at the virtually insane hypocrisy the teachers of Israel had. For they accused the Son of breaking with human tradition, while at the same time committing and teaching treason against God on account of tradition. 

Worse, for them to tell people to disregard one of the commandments was effectively to rank themselves above God Most High, for they were deciding that their own tradition outranked God’s explicit command. The astonishing thing in reading Matthew’s account of this interaction is not Jesus’ particularly sharp rebuke, but His restraint!

Love of God is a work on which love of neighbor depends.

Andrew Karlstadt

APPLICATION: Intentionality

The Lord’s commands are to be taken most seriously. Does anything need to change in how you apply them to your life?

Almost every part of our culture is tradition, because the very definition of   tradition is the transmission from generation to generation of a widely accepted way of behaving or doing something that is specific to a particular society, place, or time. The same can be said of the church. Every church and every denomination also has traditions. Cultures overlap, meaning that you might have the culture and traditions of a Canadian, but you also have the culture and traditions of your particular denomination and church, your sports club and your family line. 

Like culture, traditions are rich with meaning, and different people within the culture attach different levels of importance to those meanings. For some, the fact that hymns are played on the organ is a deeply meaningful fact. For others, the fact that hymns are played is far more important than what they are played on. But for both, that hymns are played is an important tradition. 

But while tradition may be important to us as individuals and a key part of our shared culture, it must not supplant what God has commanded. Jesus once challenged the Jewish authorities on this very point, “Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?”

Jesus’ question conveys His deep displeasure. For Jesus, it is obvious that God’s commands are in a completely different category than man’s tradition. That is because tradition by its very nature is not mandatory. It cannot be mandatory to all people, because only some people created them. God’s commands are mandatory to us as people because He created all of us. So it is a grave misjudgment to put our tradition – whatever its form and whatever the subject – above God’s specific and written direction.

As a function of fact and rational thinking, that is much easier to agree to than to actually practice. The practice of putting God’s commands first obligates us to regulate the deeply personal meaning of our tradition; Our feelings must not have priority above spiritual truth. As rational beings, we get that. As emotional beings, we struggle with it. 

Just how much of a struggle that can be is revealed to us every time our church changes its music style!

The command of the Lord is, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs,” and while definition of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, the intent is clear. Our worship must lift up the Name of Christ and edify those who participate in it. If it truly does that objectively, it fulfills God’s command. If it does not, no matter how much we enjoy it or how long we’ve been enjoying it, it is at best mere tradition; meaningful to us, but not to all. Subsequently, as new people come into our church and older ones leave, it is inevitable that much of our shared tradition slowly decays into personal spiritual baggage – things that are unhelpful in leading the next generation into deeper relationship with God.

We …who confess this doctrine [of the inerrancy of Scripture] often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word.

R.C. Sproul

APPLICATION: Intentionality

To love tradition is not error. To love tradition above truth is error. What do you love? 

In our culture, it is considered appropriate to wash your hands prior to eating. Everyone knows that you pick up a multitude of microbes everytime you touch an unclean surface, and that those microbes can and will be subsequently transferred to your food (or anything else you touch) if your hands are not cleaned. Hand washing before eating was also the tradition of the Pharisees in Jesus’ time. 

But Jesus didn’t always practice that. Matthew notes that “Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”” 

While handwashing was a tradition (according to those who came to meet Jesus), it was not Scriptural. The Scripture only spoke about hand washing in regard to uncleanness in Leviticus 15. In that case, the hand washing was prescribed for someone who was unclean through bodily discharge, and who spread their uncleanness via touching others prior to washing. Of course, Jesus knew that, because He knew the Scripture forward and backwards. So He would be able to quickly discern that this wasn’t really an argument about what was clean and what was unclean. This – along with the fact that the people accusing Him were from Jerusalem – meant that this was a much larger argument. 

As one commentator noted, “For some time, Jesus had attracted a following from regions far and near, including Jerusalem. But this was the first time Matthew specifically recorded a confrontation between Jesus and any of the religious leaders from Jerusalem—the spiritual capital of Israel and the authoritative center of Judaism. It is possible that some of the religious leaders in previous encounters had been from Jerusalem, but this was the first time Matthew made specific mention of them and where they were from. Many of Jesus’ previous conflicts had probably been with local synagogue leaders in the various cities he had visited. His notoriety and the Pharisees’ frustration with him had grown to the point that Jesus’ opponents were now calling in the “big guns.””

Those “big guns” had chosen to begin their confrontation with Jesus on a very small issue. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate that Jesus was off in the small things regarding the law, so should not be trusted with the bigger things of the law either. But while your average Rabbi might fall into such a trap, Jesus is not your average Rabbi.  Jesus not only knows the Scripture, He knows how to listen to the Father, and regularly spent time in dialogue with Him via prayer. Recall His own witness of this in John 12, “I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.” 

Jesus’ practice of knowing the Word and speaking to the Father meant that He would not fall into a trap of debating minor traditions when God’s glory is at stake. 

Knowing the Word and a habit of prayer are key to keeping our life purpose on track too! 

[The Lord] is telling us that if we want to be taught and led by God, we must get into the habit of looking to him regularly.

James Montgomery Boice

APPLICATION: Intentionality

Only you, your journal and the Lord truly know where your primary “go-to resource” actually is when find yourself in a pinch.   

What God says, God means. So God repeats something in Scripture, it means that it is of   highly significant importance. Rev. Dr. David Chotka once wrote, “…to the Hebrew mind, anything said once by God was a “fact,” though it could be altered. For example, Isaiah the prophet was told by God to warn King Hezekiah that he should set his house in order, for his death was about to happen. Hezekiah prayed, asking for a longer life. God spared him and he was given fifteen more years (see 2 Kings 20:1-7). Here a “fact” uttered by God was issued as a word of warning. Here prayer moved the heart of God and God changed the “fact.” Anything repeated twice was underscored in an urgent way; this would be an established fact that could not be altered, as when Pharaoh had two dreams and Joseph the patriarch interpreted the message for him. Joseph indicated that something repeated twice meant that God was at work and the matter would occur speedily (see Genesis 41:32). Anything said three times was so profound that it was impossible to underscore it any further.”

This in mind, consider that at the end of Matthew 14, the writer notes, “People brought all their sick to him [Christ] and begged him to let the sick just touch the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.” The scene is reminiscent of the women who had been subject to bleeding, who thought, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Sure enough, she was healed. 

But it was not just Jesus’ cloak that healed. It was Jesus who brought healing. Even from the beginning of His ministry we learned, “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” In Matthew 8 we read of how He healed the centurion’s servant, and later, “When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick.” Just before the feeding of the five thousand, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Again, one can recall the man with the shriveled hand and the demon-possessed man who was both blind and mute.

Over and over again we are told that Jesus healed. These things are not just written as historical narrative. They are written that we might know that Jesus is our healer. These things are repeated that we might know that this is an unalterable fact: Jesus heals. 

Matthew’s readers surely know that by now. Neveretheless, it is good to be reminded of that fact from time to time. As William Barclay said, “The most tremendous thing about Jesus was that he taught men and women what God was like by showing them what God was like. He did not tell them that God cared; he showed them that God cared. There is little use in preaching the love of God in words without showing the love of God in action.”

That’s not just good advice for us to take into our souls. It is good advice for us to actually act on.

We must do the thing God has called us to do, and do it in his power and for his glory.

Warren Wiersbe

APPLICATION: Intentionality

What is the Lord reminding you about? 

The disciples had been rowing very late into the night. When Jesus met  them by walking  across the open water, they worshipped Him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” Subsequently, it was in an attitude of worship that they finished their crossing of the Sea of Galilee. “When they had crossed over, they landed at Gennesaret. And when the men of that place recognized Jesus, they sent word to all the surrounding country. People brought all their sick to him and begged him to let the sick just touch the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.” 

In saying that, Matthew tells us the key to all that Jesus did at Gennesaret; “And when the men of that place recognized Jesus, they sent word to all the surrounding country.” 

There is a particular blessing that came when the people recognized Jesus. When the people of the land believed in the person of Jesus, and when they confessed that He was the One by spreading that news, healing came to their land. Those who drew near to Christ were blessed. Those who watched others draw near to Christ were also blessed, for those they knew and love were changed by His presence. The land itself was blessed, for its inhabitants were no longer under the curse of imminent judgment.

What we are reading is a partial fulfillment of God’s well-known promise in 2Chronicles 7, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 

It has always been this way. The blessing of the Kingdom is for the people of the King. When you are not in right relationship with God – be that on account of your own sin or the ignorance of your people – there is no overt blessing. There is only the general care God has for all sinners made in His image – as Jesus Himself said, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Those who have not yet repented and called on the Name of God have only circumstance and the collateral blessing of His Spirit’s work on those around you (as Potiphar was blessed on account of Joseph). But when the people receive Him as a people group – then the people of that land can be legitimately called the people of God. Then the direct touch of God becomes evident as they (the people) draw close to Him in both confession (telling others about Christ) and action (seeking Him for healing). 

This promise is meant for all the earth, for the whole earth belongs to the Lord, and all those who live upon it. Yet it does not come to all the earth because the people of our land do not recognize Jesus. Even when the body of Christ is here and has been here for decades – if His body (the church) does not look like Him or sound like Him, the people will not recognize Him. That’s catastrophic, because you cannot confess what you do not know. If the people cannot see Jesus on account of His body’s presence, then they cannot confess Him. And if they cannot confess Him they cannot be known as His people, so the blessing of His presence cannot be realized.

Some hear, and others hear not.

Henry D.M.S. Jones

APPLICATION: Intentionality

How are you recognizing Christ in this season of your life? How are those around you recognizing Christ in you in this season?