Knowing Your Place in the Kingdom – Lk. 9:46-62
So we’ve been talking a lot about faith and belief in recent weeks. My hope is that those of us who have been going through this book together now have a firm grasp of what they both are, what they have in common, and how they differ. Today, our text will have us looking at what we do with faith and belief once we have it. And it’s not so much action that we’ll look at, it’s attitude.
Are you familiar with the song ‘Who You Say I Am’? I’ll be honest and say I despise that song. I hate the fact that the church considers it worship. It’s not. The subject of the song is the singer, not God. If you don’t believe me, check out the lyrics and count the number of times ‘I’ appears. The song is more Christian psychotherapy than worship.
I bring this up because we humans have a bad habit of making everything about ourselves. In the church, we take faith and belief and make it about what God can do for us. Faith and belief are the key to receiving blessings, right? They are the ticket to health, wealth, and prosperity, right? We have taken tools designed to help us please God and turned them into tools of self-service. We’ll see how Jesus deals with that in today’s text.