Seasoned!

Seasoned!

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:10 KJV

We refer again to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus took out time away from the crowd to teach those who chose to follow and submit to Him as disciples. It means that today's message is not for the crowd, as it was not addressed to them, even if they heard the words. It does not matter if you spend your entire life on the church altar; living in line with God's will takes more than just location or outward devotion. He calls for a deep consciousness of what is at stake: what the present reality will be and what is ahead.

He warns ahead of time that all who decide to follow Him WILL, not MAY be persecuted. It is only a matter of time; all true disciples will be proven. Unless I am good at blending in and not rocking the boat, following Jesus is not popular. The principles of Jesus don't follow popular opinion, and the world will always fight those who go against its own rules. The question then is: does the world see me as its own? Is there anything in me that makes the world embrace me? 

This is important because I have to know who I am serving and why I am going through these experiences. Just having morals isn't enough; Cornelius was known by all men as a 'good' man, yet something was missing. Even Jesus loved the rich young ruler, who claimed to have kept all the law since his youth, yet could not understand what the daily denial of self really meant. NOTE: this is not a call to deliberate poverty, but a total surrender to and acceptance that God holds and owns all that I have, and when He calls, I must answer. If it means going through the valley of the shadow of death, so be it. If it means the loss of all that I thought I could not do without, so be it. As hard as this may sound, it is God's standard of the terms of engagement. If there is anything more important to me than my walk with God, I cannot really be God's disciple. 

If I am willing to submit, God says I am blessed. It is not just blessing that is good for this present earthly life, but also for the life that is ahead. At the end of the experiences that He has promised down here lie heaven. There is nothing down here that can be compared to what is ahead. If I take God at His Word for my daily sustenance down here on earth, how can He fail when it comes to His own dwelling place? If He says He is preparing me for eternity with Him, it means He is preparing a place like that. All I can do is get guidance for my life from Him, and trust that no matter what He allows to come to me, He is taking me to heaven. Nothing can beat that. His time of favour is here.