By His grace, what the radical life of Christ should look in an American context!

thinks we should be compelled by God’s abundant, intimate, and detailed love for us to love Him in return. Mat 10:30 @WeeManWest

wants his walk to line up with his talk in such a way that the people he encounters can’t help but glimpse Christ. Mat 10:32-33 @WeeManWest

loves it when Satan’s plots backfire and instead wind up multiplying the work that Christ is doing in this world. Act 15:39 @WeeManWest

thinks that if we had a renter in our property who rebelled against our lease we would boot them out, yet God doesn’t! Psa 24:1 @WeeManWest

Matthew 10:22 Jesus makes it clear that those who believe in Him and follow Him will be hated by all people, this extends even to siblings and parents. We shouldn’t be surprised when we are hated especially if we are living righteous lives. The righteous life is an insult to this world who would rather destroy the righteous than be made righteous themselves and have freedom from their slavery to sin.

I struggle with the fact that apparently so many of us who claim to follow Christ don’t live righteous enough to draw the ire of the watching world. We look more like they do than like our Christ.

Matthew 10:22 Do we really endure? How often do we stop at compromise with this world? I believe this is a message of hope, not despair. Christ is assuring His people that if they are His they will endure and be saved. Such is the mark of His people.

Matthew 10:28 We should not be afraid of those in this world who seek to take our lives for righteous living. They only speed up our reward. They have no power over our soul…unless we do fear them and leave the faith. How often do we alter or omit what God has commanded us because we are fearful of those who have power only to harm the body but not the soul?

Matthew 10:30 God intimately loves us. He knows everything there is to know about us in detail and yet He still loves us. Why can’t we trust in a love like that? He loves us vastly more than we love ourselves. I have no clue how many hairs are on my head. Yet, He knows.

We should be overwhelmingly compelled by God’s love for us to love Him in return and so often all we return to Him is spite. Then on top of spite we blame Him for our problems and treat Him with disdain and ignore Him…yet He still loves us like this?!

Matthew 10:32 I don’t believe this is referring to lip service alone. I believe we acknowledge God before men as we live by His laws in our daily lives lived before them. Are we obedient to Christ and His law? People are watching our lives.  It is no good for us to claim the name of Christ and live totally backward from Christ. Such is not truly acknowledging Christ before men.

Does our walk line up with our talk? If it doesn’t then we are not truly acknowledging Christ before men.

Matthew 10:34 Herein lies the expectation. Jesus didn’t come into this world to make peace with it through compromise. He came to make peace with it by conquring over sin and Satan. Sin will cause divisions, conflicts, wars, etc. All one has to do is establish righteousness in the midst of sinful people.

We tend to snarl up at holy people rather than emulate their lifestyles. Jealousy and back-biting tend to flow from our hearts rather than true compassion.

The Gospel turns the world on its head and sets the household at war within as the constant conflict is over whether our King approves of how we are living. These battles even rage between husband and wife.

Matthew 10:38 BREAKING NEWS: None of us are worthy of Christ…that is the whole point. We will have conflict rather than peace because we are sinners in need of a cure. Only when we die to ourselves and our sinful nature will we find peace with God.

Matthew 10:42 I believe this text is one of the most taken out of context passages in Scripture. The context is that God will surely reward those who receive and care for righteous people. This is not implying that our service to Christ is bound up in giving cups of cold water.

Just as God promised Abraham that He would treat people with blessing or cursing depending on how they treated Abraham and his seed (Genesis 12:3) so also this treatment now extends to those who follow Christ who is Abraham’s seed (Galatians 3:16) and the heir of the promises made to Abraham.

This is further assurance to His people that He will be the final judge of men’s works. Not the court systems of man that are filled with sinful people, but the sinless, righteous Judge will make the final decision on these people.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t give a cup of water to help others (Matthew 25:35), I’m just saying that this particular verse is dealing with how other treat followers of Christ.

Acts 15:29 What the Jerusalem council decided was quite simply that circumcision, and by extension keeping the whole of the Law, is not necessary for salvation. However, they did see fit to give the Gentiles some moral guidance as to how their walk should change as followers of Christ.

Acts 15:39 Satan sought to use John Mark as a divide to prevent the further mission work of Paul and Barnabas. Yet God defeats Satan’s plot and instead uses the issue with John Mark to send TWO mission teams out instead of one.

Psalm 24:1 The earth and all that is in it, including rebellious mankind, are God’s property. It is His to do with as He pleases. How many of us with rental property and a tenant would linger long with a tenant who destroys our property and violates our lease? Yet our merciful and compassionate God lingers long with us working diligently to bring us to repentance.

Psalm 24:4 We need to see and be certain from Scripture after Scripture that the common theme is that we are not worthy of God. Something has to happen to make us worthy. We don’t have clean hands, nor a pure heart. We have lifted our souls up to falsehood and sworn deceitfully.

We are not worthy to ascend the hill of God and stand in His holy place.

We are not worthy of being blessed and having His righteousness poured out on us in salvation.

Yet, if we seek Christ, if we follow Christ in repentance from our wickedness, then the salvation He earned for us through His clean handed, pure hearted pursuit of truth will be imputed on us.

Psalm 24:8 Who is this King of glory? None other than Jesus Christ. May our hearts open like these ancient gates and allow Him His rightful place on the throne of our existence. As Psalm 24:1 states, we are His property and owe Him the due allegiance. He purchased us with the blood price and is worthy of anything and everything we can offer Him.

Exodus 1:11 The plan of Pharoah is the enslavement of the Israelites. Satanically inspired leaders will always seek to enslave the masses mentally, emotionally, and physically in order to diminish the threat they hold against their power.

Our leaders have done the same. I’m not talking about the President and Congress, but about the shadow mongers who are rightly a League of Shadows who use wealth and influence to get the President and Congress to legislate their agenda of enslaving the masses. God will have His reckoning!

Exodus 1:12 Let this biblical principle sink in: the more we are persecuted the more we prosper. God multiplies us in our persecutions.

Exodus 1:17 The midwives feared God and instead of obeying Pharoah they obeyed God. What a statement of bravery and courage that they would defy one with the power to take their lives because they feared the One with power to destroy their souls.

Exodus 1:20-21 God dealt well with the midwives for their acknowledgement of Him and their fear of Him more than of Pharoah. He gave them families because of their faithfulness to the people of God as Genesis 12:3 states that those who bless His people will be blessed.

Israel continues to grow strong in the land of Egypt.

Exodus 1:22 I believe with all of my heart that people and institutions that place themselves are war with babies will eventually find themselves at war with God Himself.

Pharoah seeks to have male Israelite babies killed for the second time now. He sees it as a means of controlling the population of the Israelites (Exodus 1:9) whom he sees as a threat to the nation.

I’m amazed at how blinded we have become to this tactic in our modern day. Satan still attacks babied, he has just started his assault earlier (in the womb) in what we call abortion. What a perilous perch we stand upon as a nation as we murder the innocents for the gods of convenience, license, and greed. God will have His reckoning on our nation just as He had His reckoning on Egypt.

Exodus 2:3 It’s sad how few Israelites even balked at Pharoah’s command. I wonder how many Israelites cast their male children into the Nile to their deaths in compliance with the Satanic authority of Pharoah?

Yet this one, just like the Egyptian midwives, defied Pharoah. When she could no longer hide the child she made a waterproof basket for him. She placed him in the basket among the reeds in seeming hopes that the reeds would keep the basket from overturning.

This one mother sought to preserve the life of her son and she would be rewarded by God for her faithfulness.

WE who call ourselves followers of Christ should take great care to the going along with the ways of this world instead of spending our time being light to dark and exposing the deeds of darkness for what they are.

Exodus 2:14 Moses sought to impose his own timing on God’s will for his life. Moses would indeed deliver the Israelites, it just was not the time. Moses needed some character development.

He could not deliver the Israelites as a prince of Egypt. He needs the humility of a shepherd.

Exodus 2:22 Gershom means foreigner and Moses said, “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.”

Exodus 2:25 God knew. In every trial or struggle you have endured please understand that God knew and was working out your deliverance. He knows us intimately!