Jesus Doesn't Make Life Easy

Where do you store your treasure? We all have treasures we store.  My grandson has discovered finding GEO-CACHEs.  To find the cache and get some treasure.  My granddaughter is fascinated by acorns, and she picked up tons of them and wanted a safe place for her treasures. Two questions: what do you treasure, and where is the safe place you put your treasures.

You punch me, so I punch you back. I read it in the Bible. It’s called the lex talionis or the law of retaliation. Of course, one of the problems is that, if you punch me, I don’t want to just punch you back; I want to punch you back just a bit harder than you punched me. Rather than revenge, how do we instead move to reconciliation? Jesus will stretch us in this teaching about proper payback.

Adultery has become part of our entertainment. Modern media has hardened us to the pain of adultery for all parties involved. We’ve not spent much time on heart adultery. What will it mean to guard our hearts and minds? Jesus’ imagery is pretty drastic when he says we’d be better off with our eye gouged out than for our eye to lead us down adulterous paths. How do we guide our thoughts to keep clear of easy adultery?

Is there any acceptable murder—any risk of any of us acceptably murdering anyone? When we think of murder strictly in the realm of physically taking another’s life, then we should hope not! However, Jesus expands the concept to being out of sync with a brother—being angry, calling someone an idiot, or cursing someone. We may have never thought of these things as murder.  The safeguard is reconciliation. How do we get there? How can we be reconciled when another doesn’t want to be?