LIFT Renewal Ministries

Jesus, You Ask Too Much

In terms of the ordinary world around us, Jesus sometimes asks too
much.  Take for example his teaching in Luke 6:27-38.  It is filled with
wonderful, idealized thoughts about the Kingdom of God.  But who
really lives like that?  Forgive wrongdoers?  Love our enemies?  Pray for
the welfare of our abusers?  ABUSERS?  It’s all well and good for an
hour of inspiration on Sunday morning, but who really lives like that?
This is some of the most straightforward teaching in the Bible, yet it
is also among the hardest to hear.

One reason we have trouble hearing this word is because Jesus never
really explains this teaching.  He just lays it out there—all of the
morality and ethics of God’s Kingdom—and lets his hearers wrestle with it.
Apparently, the Kingdom of God is about turning cheeks, and giving to
whoever begs, and never expecting loans to be repaid, and being kind to
the ungrateful and the wicked.  To the ungrateful and wicked!  What
does Jesus mean by that?

I think he means the Kingdom of God is about turning cheeks, and
giving to whoever begs, and never expecting loans to be repaid, and being
kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Literally, this is what it’s all
about.  Such a life seems unrealistic, unattainable, perhaps
completely impossible to most believers.  And that’s the point.  The Kingdom
Jesus preached is not built by humans.  It’s impossible for humans.  It
is built by the grace of God.

Every so often we members of the church get to feeling self-sufficient
and start trying to impress God by doing our own version of the
Kingdom’s work…as if God were on vacation, and left us to toil all alone
among the rest of the ignorant fools who “just don’t get it.â€?  We can have
an “A� for effort on those days, but I never really get past the sense
that the kind of Kingdom work Jesus describes can only truly be done
when we have come to the limit of our human resources.  Only the grace
of God will accomplish it. 

So I find it to be a hard truth: in terms of loving and serving the
ordinary world around us, Jesus asks too much.  Yet what is impossible
for humans….