Jesus is consistent...Matthew 16:1-12...Another warning from Jesus

 

Another trip up to the summit of Mount Ida but this time with Stephanie.  12,889 ft with a 5 mile hike up the last 2500 ft from the Milner Pass trailhead.  For a moment we had the summit to ourselves except for the picas and the marmots!  We are embracing where God has put us.  This is only a small part of us living where we do.  The larger part is the work of the gospel through the local church.  Today I finished with a group of men the weekly study of the whole of the Bible we started in April of 2024.  Today Stephanie will gather with a group of women who are going through the book of Hebrews.  We are walking through the life of Jesus through the book of Matthew on Sundays that we started in March of 2024 and have reached chapter 16.  We are walking daily alongside of our church family as we and they experience the challenges of this life and in hope of the next with Jesus face to face.  Hopefully our physical endeavors are an extension or picture of our spiritual endeavors.  Perhaps they are a metaphor to our striving hard for Christ in this mountain town on the western range of the Rockies.

Our passage on Sunday included a warning from Jesus to His disciples and also to us.  We think many times of the promises of God and we even sing about them like "Standing on the promises of Christ my King..." But do we also cherish the warnings of Jesus who shares them with us because of His love for us?  In a round about way, the warning is shared 3 times in this passage.  Jesus, the great Teacher, also uses common illustrations, a recent history lesson and the restating of the warning to help His disciples and us to get on the same page with Him.  He is speaking of something spiritual while the disciples are focused on something physical.

How many times have you been on a different page with your spouse or someone else you are conversing with?  It is like you are speaking 2 different languages and many times you are not listening to all that they are saying and vice versa.  Until you turn off your selective hearing you will not hear the content of the message conveyed.  The disciples of Jesus just heard the lone ingredient of physical bread, leaven, and not the spiritual warning Jesus was giving them about the sin spreading teachings of the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Herodians.  The Lord was patient with them to put it together that He was speaking of the spiritual over the physical.  

We so many times focus on the physical without consulting the spiritual.  The disciples conversed among themselves over the physical problem of no bread instead of consulting the spiritual one, Jesus, who is the multiplier of bread to the thousands twice, was in the boat with them.  We do the same so many times by forgetting to go to Jesus first or sooner rather than later.  Maybe the physical situation we are dealing with is really a spiritual situation that we need to see.  The focus on the spiritual leads to the fulfillment of the physical need in a way that glorifies God rather than us dwelling in the arena of worry and anxiety warned about in the Sermon on the Mount.  The recent 4000+ Gentiles in the region of the Decapolis focused on the spiritual to be with Jesus for 3 days and He provided the physical need of food from the 7 loaves and a few fish.  The spiritual came before the physical and this is another order that is important to implement.

The leaven or sin of the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Herodians is still alive today and the warning of Jesus to take heed and beware of it is still in effect.  Man made rules over the most important Jesus relationship; a watering down of who Jesus is; and the compromise of Scripture to favor our comfort over His commitment are still alive and well in 2025.  May we cherish His warnings as much as His promises and unto the apex of the Matthew gospel in the next couple of weeks.  Jesus will continue to shepherd His disciples into who He is and what it means to follow Him.

Adam





A simple man serving a great God and the local pastor of Stillwater Community Chapel (stillwater-chapel.org). We are in our 39th year of full time ministry. God directed us to this local body of believers on the Western Range of the Rockies to grow with them in mission and mindedness of Christ.

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