RESPECT
Do we truly love and respect God?
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:25
Have you ever noticed how many people you see walking around with some sort of Christian related jewelry on? It may be a cross on their necklace, or earrings. It may even be some sort of scripture tattooed on their body. But then at the same time, we see these same people do and say things that make us cringe. Their actions are the direct opposite of the symbols they are wearing. Not throwing stones, because we all have acted in ways that are not befitting a child of God. Does this make us liars? Are we not who we say that we are? Are we hypocrites? Or, could it be that we do not respect God the way that we should?
In our scripture above, Jesus is talking to a large group of people. He is teaching and preaching to them in ways that they have never heard before. These groups tended to follow Jesus wherever He went. Almost like fans of Jesus. If you asked them, they might even say they were “followers” of Jesus. I guess literally they were, in that they followed Him physically wherever He went. But how far would they go? Jesus was testing them. He was getting their attention so they would realize how important the matter of truly loving and following Him was. Jesus wanted them to know that He was not in need of “fair weather fans”. There’s no room in heaven for those type people. Here today while it’s good. Gone tomorrow when they are not interested or don’t feel the need. As a TRUE Christian, we should not be willing to pick Jesus up when we think we need Him or according to how we are feeling. Only to drop Him when we think we can handle things.
If I am a TRUE dedicated fan of a team, I am cheering them on, wearing their hat or shirt, and supporting them in the good times and the bad. I’m not jumping from team to team according to who is successful and who is not.
God deserves are respect and dedication. Jesus was telling this crowd (and us) that our love, dedication, and respect towards God should be so strong and sincere that it makes it look like we hate our family. That’s pretty strong. Nobody wants to be accused of hating their family. Especially their mama. In the South, that’s sacrilegious. And Jesus is not saying to hate them. He is saying that our love, dedication, and respect for Him should make it appear that we do.
We need to take a self-evaluation and see how we measure up to what Jesus is saying. I’m going to say that we all far short majority of the time. I submitted a post on this site January 4, 2019 called “Putting Pencil to Paper”, where we actually talked about doing the math to see how much of our time that we give to God. I encourage you to revisit that post. This post is about the heart. Where is the love for God? Where is the dedication to God? and Where is the respect for God? We could be at church 24/7 and still be lacking in these areas. Jesus was telling us to not take this lightly. It is a major commitment. It is the reason why He refers the church (which is all His true followers) as His bride. He is eternally committed to us as we should be to Him.
How committed are we to God? How much do we truly respect God? If we truly respect Him, then the things of God are not the first things that we sacrifice when they don’t fit into our schedule. We will skip church, tithing, praying, studying His word, etc. way before we remove others things of life. We will remove the things of God simply for convenience purposes or because of lack of comfort. We will put off the things of God for money, power, and fame. We have even gone so far as to delete the things of God from our lives in the name of excuses that seem very worthy on the surface such as time with our family.
We don’t respect God. We expect God to respect us. We expect God to take what He gets and don’t fuss a bit. He should be grateful to get my attention for 1 hour a week. He wants me and my family spending time together having fun. I love my family. God is love. So therefore going camping, to ballgames, fishing, and other activities with my family means I’m loving God and He is good with it. If He’s not, He should be.
Of course these words never come out of our mouths physically, but they do come out of our lives. God is no dummy. Actions speak louder than words. He is all knowing. Which means He knows the deepest darkest areas of our hearts and lives. We cannot fool Him. God is great. God is good. He deserves the utmost level of our love, devotion, and respect.