Just Jesus Only
From the Dashboard >
The human heart is capable of serving more than one God. It’s why God calls Himself “jealous,” and why He despises lukewarm faith. He wants all of us, or nothing at all. It’s also why Satan works overtime to divide our loyalties, distract our vision, and cloud our reasoning.
Never has that been more evident than it is in 21st century America, where there is no shortage of false gods to serve. The American Dream lures us in, unwittingly at times, to a slavish pursuit of money and all it promises to bring us. We worship it in the sense that it controls our decisions, manipulates our time, sets our priorities, and consumes our thoughts. I’m as guilty of that as anyone of you reading this right now.
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And it’s not just money, power politics does the same. We become faithful adherents of party line religion. Our neighbors become our enemies, lost souls cease being a mission field to reach, and start being our cultural opponents to defeat. And ideological causes? Oh my, all the causes and crusades that animate us and stir us into panic, rage, and fear. We fuel them and follow them no matter how much evidence compiles to tell us something is off.
Take an issue as seemingly benign as the environment. Consider all the people (many of them educated) who allow themselves to be manipulated by hysterically hyperbolic arguments that have been recycled for decades now:
If politics were a mere hobby, public policy a mere interest, something like that video would embarrass and shame those who still buy into the hysteria. But this is religion. We plug our ears and close our eyes when contradictory evidence confronts us. Power becomes the object we must have – if not personally, we at least must secure it for “our side.” And when we don’t, a sense of loss overwhelms us when it slips between our fingers. Call that whatever you will, it’s idolatry.
But let’s not stop there. Adjacent to politics is the gender and sexual revolution that shows no signs of slowing. Its idolatrous nature is more than apparent. Gender and sexual identity have become the core, defining characteristic of many individuals. They aren’t integrated into a larger framework, but rather become the dominant lens through which everything is interpreted – including God and His Word.
If you can stomach it, here’s what I mean:
I want to be sure to give proper attribution. That sermon is being delivered by a transgender minister Brigid Dwyer (a man dressed as a woman), a Postulant for the Diaconate from St. George’s, Maplewood.
Now, we are all guilty of sometimes reading emotion into a passage that might not be there, or reading an exchange in Scripture that probably isn’t precisely how it really went down. That reality causes me to exhibit patience for some of Dwyer’s statements like, “His voice shaking when He asks.”
Obviously, we know Jesus spoke with authority, not timidity, because that’s what Scripture tells us. There’s no reason to believe, contextually, that Christ’s voice was shaking, uncertain, or fearful in this exchange with His disciples. But like I said, things like that can be said with the best of intentions. Interpretation errors are real, and as someone who speaks from and on the authority of the Bible often, I’m thankful for grace in that regard.
But what is happening here in Dwyer’s speech isn’t interpretation. It’s intentional fabrication. In this Matthew 16 account, Jesus is not looking for affirmation from the twelve. He is