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In the Middle of our Life II ...

Thursday, August 24, 2017. How do we know that God wants to be in the Middle of our life? How do we know that he is there? What is it that makes us believe? In the New Testament Jesus says to some of his disciples who had their difficulties to understand his death at the cross: “And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24) What does that mean for us today and for our quest for God?

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Too slow to believe …

Jesus refers to our heart, when it comes to faith. The heart is the image of our existence, of all what drives us, of our will, our decisions, our trust. Our heart is the center of what is important to us. It is the center of what we value, how we see ourselves and others. Our heart is where our love and our hatred is located.

Jesus wants to be in the middle of our life - with everything. When you look into the Sermon on the Mount, you see that he touches basically each and every part of our life. It is about relationships, but also about our work, our values, our thoughts, our will, our posessions, our trouble, our words, our friends, our enemies … It is about our body, our health, or illness, our perspective, our death, … and about eternity.

21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. (from Matthew 5, 12-22)

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Our Heart …

God wants us to trust him. We are to trust him with all what we are. That is the most important part. It is not just about rules, not just about doing this or that. Of course, it will be relevant to what we do. But that is what Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount. He pulls behaviour from rules to “existence”. He touches our attitudes, our thoughts, our emotions - not only the external layer of our actions. He does not want us to pretend, but to be!

Jesus wants to touch our heart. He touches all what we are, the center of our life, our existence, our trust, our will.

Christian faith is not just an ethical system. It is, indeed, no system at all. It is the encounter with the living God, through his son Christ Jesus. It is much more than mere ethics!

It is good when we ask ourselves: do we trust him? Where are we? Do we understand? Do we believe in him? Do his words reach me, do they reach my heart, my life? If no, we should ask him to come and give us more insight, to talk to us, to touch us! We can ask him in prayer. If yes, we should tell him, we should trust our life into his hands, explicitly, by telling him that we want him to be the Lord and God of our own personal life. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts

jn_en_2017_08_24.txt · Last modified: 2017/08/25 08:04 by potthast