Republished by Blog Post Promoter. Jack is an author and pastor at the Mulvane Brethren church in Mulvane, Kansas. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. Bio Latest Posts. This question was answered not in the earthly context but the heavenly. Yes, we can say that even the earthly context could still have been correct, but Jesus was not interested in earthly matters but concentrated on those things that could lead us to eternal life.
Jesus is teaching us that being a blood relative or kin to Him does not matter, what matters most is if you are doing the will of Our Heavenly Father. What is the will of our Heavenly Father? God created us so that we can know Him, love Him, serve Him, praise and glorify Him so that at the end of time we can live together with Him thereafter.
Miles March 05, Advanced Search. Tip: to find an exact phrase or title, enclose it in quotation marks. Academic Article. Book Review. Featured Articles. Singleness In this passage Jesus challenged another ancient family value—the expectation that every respectable person should marry. In allowing believers to remain single and challenging married people to renounce the self-centered way in which they lived together, Jesus reminded us that God created human sexuality as a blessing : So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Family Responsibility Jesus did not intend for his disciples to abandon their biological families altogether, but rather he challenged them to abandon the self-serving family structures—especially when these old allegiances interfered with their higher duty to serve God. Throughout this passage, Jesus upholds the caveat that divorce is permissible for the innocent party.
Bartchy, p. Marriage, Sexuality. From Issue:. Get news, updates, and free resources Sign up for our newsletter to receive our most up-to-date news, articles, and information Sign Up. I was mesmerized and horrified by the most ubiquitous of them: This Was Your Life.
In it, a man is visited by the grim reaper, then taken by an angel to his appointment with judgment, where he watches as though on a movie screen every sinful moment of his life. In the end, even though people thought he was a good person and he went to church on Sundays, he is tossed into the lake of fire. This punishment seems to be the direct result of enjoying a cocktail, telling a dirty joke as a teenager, and wondering who was winning a football game instead of paying attention to a sermon in church.
The last few pages of the tract depicted an alternate life for this man, in which he prays to receive Christ, visits the elderly, reads the Bible to children, and witnesses to the unsaved. The back included a prayer one could recite and thereby attain salvation. I said the prayer every time I saw it, just in case. Ironically, those of us in that movement really thought we got it, thought that we more than anyone understood the gospel and all of its implications.
The one comfort was that as far as I knew, those who left did so by choice, not by force. This proved to be the case with my biological family, too. Shortly after the eighties began, my father left us for good, returning to Pennsylvania without a California testimony. The final nail in the coffin of idealized seventies Christianity, for me, came in the summer of A news report came on: Christian singer Keith Green—who I idolized, and had seen in concert—two of his children, and nine other people had died in a small-plane crash while Green was showing off his Last Days Ministries property.
Where did that leave us? In the suburbs, eventually, where we moved when my mother remarried. We still attended and participated in my childhood church, but it was different. With people moving out of the city and having kids and real jobs and real money and real mid-life crises, home gatherings were no longer so convenient. Efforts were made. It was just that other things were now allowed to get in the way.
And, as it turned out, you could fight with your church family as readily as with your biological family. It was frighteningly easy, in fact, to lose touch with anyone you wanted to lose touch with, or anyone who wanted to lose touch with you. Minor or major doctrinal differences, arguments over whether or not to invest in new chairs or hymnals, the content of Sunday school curriculum, plain boredom…anything could be an excuse to leave if that was what one wanted.
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