We can say all the right things about Jesus and still expect the wrong things from him. In Luke 19, the crowd welcomes its King with praise, peace, and glory—but what happens when the Savior we celebrate does not pursue the earthly victory, security, or power we wanted?
We’re drawn to people who seem useful, impressive, ready to contribute—and in Luke 18, the disciples felt the same way when they turned away parents bringing infants to Jesus. But Jesus stopped them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
We’ve all looked at this world and thought, it just doesn’t seem like God’s will is being done. Underneath that thought is a deeper fear that God’s reserve of will and ability runs dry the way ours does. That fear is exactly what Jesus targets when He teaches us to pray “your will be done.”
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
We all arrive at Advent carrying something broken—a diagnosis, a fraying relationship, a season that feels anything but joyful—and our instinct is right: we want God to fix it. In John 6, the crowd feels exactly that after watching Jesus feed five thousand people, so they move to do something about it. The question the passage presses on us is whether we actually understand what problem he came to fix.
We like life easy, so when following Jesus brings bumps instead of the smoother path we expected, we wonder what went wrong. Luke 9 reminds us that Jesus never promised following him would meet that expectation.
The Lord’s Prayer encourages us to see how we should related to God, His Kingdom and our needs.
Most of us have never gone without a meal, yet Jesus in Matthew 5:6 calls us to feel that ravenous, stomach-aching hunger—not for food, but for righteousness. Do we feel that craving?
When life feels unpredictable, we reach for security blankets of money, health, and plans that promise safety. Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount by telling us we’re seeking security in the wrong places: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Most of us carry a ready answer to “I’ll be happy if…”—the promotion, the healed relationship, the life that finally settles into place. That hunger is exactly what Jesus addresses when he sits down on a hillside in Matthew 5 and declares blessed the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, and the persecuted—people whose lives look nothing like what we’d put in that blank.