Resistance or Revulsion to Jesus’ call to “Repent and Believe in the Gospel” ?
Good morning,
Although I am on the road in Virgina Beach this morning and won’t be producing “Bible Study with the Cincotti’s” this morning, I have been up praying, studying the Bible, and reading devotionally like I normally do as part of my daily spiritual practice and while I don’t plan to put this on YouTube, or the podcast, I did want to share the following verses and quotes to address the issue of our resistance to Christ’s call on our lives.
The below Bible verses make it clear that Jesus calls us to surrender our lives to His lordship but even when we acknowledge what He was calling to do it can be difficult to fully accept His commands in relation to how we live our lives.
Why do we resist? Why does a part of us almost cringe in revulsion to the ideas of serving the kingdom of God or by trying to live a holy or righteous life?
I have been reading through John Mark Comer’s Live No Lies, and I am sharing a quote from it to help us to possibly understand why we resist living a Christian life, and to encourage us all to trust in God and to pick up our crosses and follow Him.
Matthew 16:24-26 (NKJV) Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
Galatians 2:19-20 (NKJV) For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
Mark 1:14-15 (NKJV) Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship
“To believe the good news is to trust, commit to, to live in unswerving fidelity to Jesus. To enter his kingdom, we have to trust that Jesus’ mental maps are the accurate and true guide to the life we seek.
“Why else would the devil target our trust in God above all?
From Eve in the garden to you and me today, his fiercest assault is upon our confidence in Jesus. Because without a deep trust in Jesus, we will never take up our cross, which means we will never enter the kingdom.
Why is it we resist crucifying our desires? Why this gut-level inner resistance to Jesus’ call?
It’s not necessarily because we are evil or even narcissistic: it’s because we’re scared of losing something we value, something we think (or feel) we need to live a happy life.
Until we come to the place where we genuinely trust Jesus’ mental maps over our own intuition or feelings, and trust that God is a loving and wise Father with good intentions for our joy, death to self will remain an unwinnable war of attrition between the torn factions of our fragmented souls.
To win, we must release our hearts to Jesus in radical surrender .”
– John Mark Comer – Live No Lies
Comer’s excellent book on the world, the flesh, and the devil brings us to this realization – we have been lied to – and the reason why we may have failed to follow the Lord more fully or been able to “get unstuck” from the recurrent patterns of thoughts and behaviors that trouble us is because we have been immersed in a culture that speaks to our greatest fears – that we can’t trust God and that His way will deny us from the things that we believe are necessary for our happiness.
But that’s a lie. God is a love. all good things flow from Him and He wants you to know what true peace, love, and joy really are.
So submit to God, resist the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil and the enemy and all your fears will fell from you.
Be bold and courageous, trust in God, and follow Him into the life of abundant peace that He has for you. – M.T. Clark
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