Posts

Showing posts from August, 2024

Loving Christ When Obedience Costs

-
by Bart Denny Most of us don’t struggle to admire Jesus. Who wouldn’t admire His courage, His wisdom, and the way He held truth and love together? Who wouldn’t admire His compassion, His purity, and His strength? That’s not usually where the struggle begins. The struggle begins when what Jesus commands conflicts with what we want. It begins when obedience costs us something we’d rather keep, our comfort, our approval, our control, our preferred timeline, or our pride. That’s where John 14:15–21 lands with unusual force. Here, we come to a passage where Jesus makes something painfully clear: loving Him means  more than admiring Him. It means obeying Him when obedience gets expensive, relying on the Spirit He gives, and trusting that He won’t leave us alone. And that is a word many of us need to hear. Loving Jesus feels wonderful... until obedience gets expensive.  This passage isn’t mainly aimed at people who hate Jesus. It’s aimed at people who really do ...
Post a Comment
Read more

But some doubted...

-
Image
by Bart Denny “The eleven disciples traveled to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted.” —Matthew 28:16–17 (CSB) I try to be faithful to Scripture when I write or preach. I want to draw out lessons and apply them to daily life without saying more than the text itself says. My goal is to dig deep into God’s Word and share what I find—without putting words in God’s mouth. But I can’t help wondering—have you ever heard someone really focus on that last phrase in Matthew 28:17? “But some doubted.” In the very presence of the risen Christ—after seeing Him crucified, buried, and now alive—the disciples worshiped. And yet… some doubted. That moment has always fascinated me. We often say, “seeing is believing.” But here were disciples looking at Jesus with their own eyes, and still, something inside them wavered. Was it too good to be true? Could it really be Him? After everything they’d seen—the horror of the cross, the...
Post a Comment
Read more