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

believes religion is incapable of providing us with our greatest need which is to know God and to be known by Him. Mat 7:21-23 @WeeManWest

thinks we need to apply Peter’s lesson, no person is common or unclean but all are sought to enter Christ’s kingdom. Act 10:28 @WeeManWest

Matthew 7:15-20 Everyone is capable of playing the role of the good christian, however, we have no control over the fruits that flow from our lives. Christ alone can produce fruit in us through the Holy Spirit. We should be admonished over the fruitlessness of our lives. We should expect fruit if we truly belong to Christ.

This passage was also involved in my conversion. I realized that no fruit was coming from my life.

Matthew 7:21-23 So many fail to realize that the underpinnings of religion are irrelevant with Christ. What matters is whether or not God knows us and we know God. Do you have a relationship with God? If you do not then it is likely that you’ve missed the core of the Gospel message.

We are quick to do religion: saying the right words, doing the right things; yet we hesitate when it comes to relationship. We live as though we are afraid of what God might ask us to do if we were to really truly enter into a relationship with Him beyond religion.

I realized during my conversion, that I had been very religious, but had drastically missed the point of entering into a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Matthew 7:24-27 Everyone who hears Christ’s words must realize that we are totally, absolutely incapable of keeping His words without Him doing so within us. We can’t keep Christ’s law, hence we need a savior. Christ shows us where we should be so that we will realize that we have a need because we can’t fully obey.

Matthew 7:29 Jesus taught with authority as one would expect God to teach. In Christ we walk in that same authority.

Acts 10:28 Peter learned the lesson of his vision/dream. God doesn’t call the Gentiles unclean or common but instead desires that they have a share in His kingdom.

We need to intently to apply this to our understanding. No person is unclean or common, all people matter to Jesus Christ and He desires that all of them come into His kingdom. We must stop judging people unworthy of the Gospel, it is not our call, but Christ’s.

Acts 10:47 The lesson learned is that Christ is greater than the religion of Christianity. Jesus had totally superceded the entire structure that the church was practicing. He went outside of the Jews, He spoke in a vision, He led by an angel, He responded to a charitable heart, He gave the Holy Spirit outside of baptism or laying on of hands. Jesus worked outside of religion to reach Cornelius.

Religion cannot bind what Jesus is doing with the Gospel. We tend to attach too many unnecessary connotations to the Gospel when the Gospel is powerful enough to speak and work all by itself.

Psalm 18:6 I think David was referreing to something other than the tabernacle here. He says that God responded from His temple. No human eye has yet to see the beauty and spectacle of God’s temple in its fullest glory.

Psalm 18:7-15 Here we see the coming of the Lord associated with darkness, storms, and terrible things. The Jewish culture had a different construct for how they viewed the coming of the Lord in judgment versus the actual presence of God coming into the earth. Two different concepts.

Psalm 18:16-19 Christ has done this for us all. He rescued us from the over whelming enemy of sin that we were defeated by and has placed us in a much better place.

Genesis 39:2-6 & Genesis 39:21-23 I hope so that this is our testimony in the jobs that we work and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. May God work in us a consistent and faithful heart and fill our work with the fruit of His blessings that others cannot help but notice what God is doing in our lives and receive glory for how we handle ourselves.

Unfortunately, we are too often lazy and lax in our work as though secular employment is a secondary thing to God’s kingdom when in honesty and actuality our secular employment may just be a launch pad for God’s kingdom work among us.

Genesis 39:19-20 Joseph has been falsely accused and imprisoned. We don’t read that had made a spectacle trying to prove and assert his innocence. Here again his life becomes a type of Christ’s life who also did not cry out and battle for his own innocence but rather accepted God’s will. God was actually going to use the prison to propel Joseph into His plan for his life.

Genesis 40:5-8 The cupbearer and baker of the king each had dreams and who is here but the “dreamer” who understands that dreams and their interpretations come from God.

Genesis 40:9-13 & Genesis 40:16-22 We see that God allows Joseph to interpret their dreams and then God fulfills exactly as they had dreamed. God is working to exalt humble Joseph.

Genesis 40:14-15 & Genesis 40:23 Joseph had requested the cupbearer to remember him before Pharoah. Unfortunately, the cupbearer did not. Joseph would have to wait for God’s timing.

So often we hope that our timing is God’s timing when it is not. We MUST wait for God. He will make the circumstances work to reveal His timing and He will do so for Joseph.

Amazingly, God continues the avenue of dreams in Joseph’s life. Pharoah’s own dreams are soon to propel Joseph to the place of which he dreamt many years prior.