A simple parable, one of the favorite teaching tools of Jesus and in this case leaves those who would try to trap and discredit him the victims of their own trap. In Matthew 21:23 the chief priests confront Jesus…questioning his authority. Jesus cleverly gets by their trap by asking them to first answer a question for him. 

Matthew 21:23-25   (NLT)

23 When Jesus returned to the Temple and began teaching, the leading priests and elders came up to him. They demanded, “By what authority are you doing all these things? Who gave you the right?”24 “I’ll tell you by what authority I do these things if you answer one question,” Jesus replied. 25 “Did John’s authority to baptize come from heaven, or was it merely human?”

What about John the Baptist…did he have the authority to baptize others. This type of verbal sparing Jesus excelled at. Parables were addressed to and mainly concerned the chief priest, elders, and the Pharisee. It was these groups who had opposed Jesus, and whom He had just thwarted. They would not answer his question, knowing full well it would expose them as hypocrites or displeasing the crowd .Jesus then declined to answer their question (Matthew 21:27) before telling them two parables. He had given them the opportunity to speak their opinion, because of their refusal maybe they would give their opinion about a story…a parable. Jesus told them two parables, the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-30) Here we address the ‘do or don’t’. Neither of the son’s involved in these parables were perfect, both showed disrespect…a point to remember here is that the first son refused to do as his father asked but later repented and complied with his father’s will. The other son was deceitful when he agreed to do as his father asked and never went to work in the vineyard. The point is one son repented for his disrespect, and did the father’s will, the other lied and did not do his father’s will. Then Matthew adds Jesus’ response to the priests’ and elders…Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you. What is notable here is that Matthew was a tax collector when the Lord called him. Many sinners and prostitutes upon hearing the good news repented of their sins. These religious leaders like the other son pretended to respect and promised obedience but did not go and do the will of God. Isaiah spoke to this… Isaiah 29:13…

And so the Lord says,
“These people say they are mine.
They honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
And their worship of me
is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote.

In this parable, John’s “baptism” and Jesus’s authority “to do these things” were both from God. Do we go through this life allowing old habits and distractions to be our guide? Or do we choose to seek the will of GOD, repent and do the Father’s will?

Life is Good

jk

There is an obvious cool in the early evening air here on the back porch. The few trees we have around here have an early Fall tint in their color but here we have mostly Cedar trees, well really, lots of Cedar and rocks. Where I am at if you are in the business of developing properties for a sub division or town homes the ground prep will require a time of blasting and hauling off a substantial amount of surface rock. Hope I got that right, I am not a developer so the lingo is an attempt to look like I know about such stuff. Clearing my mind tonight concerns a series of troubling increase in attitudes and behaviors that have overtaken society at large. Have you noticed lately it seems people are mad all the time. Actually it would not be over the top to say we have reached a stage of just plain angry. There are many synonyms for  the word mad and right off one of the very first is just plain angry. Now being just plain angry ain’t a good thing. I view that as and action verb because if that is where you are, a few well placed words won’t do the job. If your mad you can avoid whatever it was that you encountered, ignore the situation or just pout…don’t laugh, even men are some of the best pouters around…ever seen a Vol fan after a significant loss. Put it this way. Someone pushes you, you push back… then their push becomes a shove. When I was in high school a shove required a punch and so on. I think it kinda goes like this. Life can and usually pushes you around every day and you can go with the flow or find another way around. Now a shove interrupts forward progress, it is upfront and personal and disrupts your direction and you stumble forward into anger. Anger has no reason or judgment and often leads to violence. 

I am asking a question I have no answer for. What has brought all segments of society to this point…why are we so angry? Have the videos, movies so desensitized us to death and violence that we have lost all sense of worth as to human life. It seems as though we are oblivious to others pain and the corruption of our moral standards. I don’t believe we are going to hell in a handbag. There is not a bag big enough for all of us.    

Come back next week…in the meantime…Be nice to someone.

jk

Another book I don’t get to often enough. In these verses from Mark 10 we encounter a human trait that requires Godly guidance. Ambition that is driven by the possibility of personal gratification and reward will find no place in the Kingdom of God or in the earthly works of God’s people. We pick up here on a difference we find in Matthew’s account that tells us something about Mark.

Matthew writes that Jame’s and John’s request to sit on the left and right of Christ on his throne was not made by them. It was requested by their mother Salome. Most likely Matthew thought that such a request was inappropriate for an apostle and to save their reputations he attributed such ambition to their mother. From this story we are shown the honesty of Mark. No need to but I will point out that it did not go over well with the rest of the disciples. We sometimes forget that these were not a company of saints, they were ordinary men that had set out to do quite an unordinary thing…change the world…and they did. But we just can’t leave this hanging…they were, John and James, both ambitious.They knew well the task ahead of them and they were confidante of victory and their intentions were to be Jesus’ chief ministers of state. We have wrote these were ordinary men, so perhaps they were reading something more into what might lie ahead because it is fact that Jesus often included them in his inner circle of three. There are a couple of other reasons for their behavior but their ambitious approach to Jesus still reminds us of earthly failings we all succumb to. Now that other stumbling block. They had by now walked and been with Jesus for a bit now and they still could not completely rid their minds of the idea of a Messiah of earthly power and glory. As we read on there is still the wonder of their faith…Confused  as they might be, they still believed in Jesus. 

We should always be aware that Jesus never left any doubt in the minds of his followers. Instead of rebuking them he ask them a question…‘Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?’ Here it is important to realize what type of baptism Jesus is speaking of. This was not what we picture baptism to be. Jesus is saying is, ‘Can you bear to go through the terrible experience which I have to go through? Can you face being submerged in hatred and pain and death, as I have to be?’ They would in the future experience just that but at that time I don’t think they knew what they were saying yes to. So…what do we take away from these verses? All Things are of God and the final disposition of such an issue was God’s prerogative. With Jesus it was always the ‘will of my Father’. Jesus spent his earthly life in total submission to God’s will and he knew in the end that will was supreme.

Life is Good

jk

Missed the porch last week, so much going on. Have a seat, and let’s ponder a bit, people and things come and go… some leave a mark on time some just fade away as the years go by. Lost my brother-in-law last weekend, fact is as we get older it seems like death is a great stimulater of change…planed or not. I will miss him not because of the things we did together at times but because he was good man and we are losing to many of those these days. With me it is a quiet type of emotion, I am not a sack cloth and ashes type of man. Instead I ascribe to the fact that he is with the God he served and that is my comfort at such a loss. But what about things? You see I believe that death is a natural outcome for those who are blessed to live out their appointed time… we start dying the very second we take our first breath, then life happens and who knows what, when or how? 

Now about those things. We all have or have had something in our lives we never took the time to be happy about until it is gone. This is a hard one for me but one reason I come out to the back porch is to clear my mind and I guess to ease my conscience. I had the privilege of working for a great company, they paid me well affording me a living that my education would never have allowed. There was so much turmoil in my personal life and I’m not using this as an excuse for by behavior at that time. I didn’t have God in my life and there was no sense of direction in my life or standards of behavior. I went to work there in 1965 and somehow by the grace of God 38 years later I retired. Two of my employers favorite words were order and arrangement. I was taught discipline, accountability, dependability and in a very sneaky way which many of us would never admit to…a pride in what we did because of the standards we were expected to adhere to. We were just ordinary guys and gals just off the street that were expected to develop a skill that would produce a… here is another phrase that was also a favorite…World Class Product! Well we did just that. 

Then about 1985 things started to change. We had gone through Jimmy Carter and record inflation and a lot of things in the overall world market also changed. Textile fibers had changed, many of the plants that were into textile products were unable to compete with the new world order of manufacturing. What we didn’t see at the time had nothing to do with world market…we had become a victim of the new social order that looked upon discipline, accountability and dependability as a discriminatory tactic to hold people back. Now I am trying to be nice here as to what happened. Individual accountability was replaced by the Team Approach… we went to the mountain and lay on our backs looking at clouds, climbing towers and swinging on ropes, we went from doing your job to ‘well somebody needs to do it…oh I know it’s a team responsibility.’ Then came the nail, as they say the last one in the coffin. Welcome to the world of self management! I knew wage roll just like me that had a meeting calendar, can you imagine? I soon got to where I actually said to an Area Supervisor at one meeting I was at and I am ashamed to admit it but I too had fell under this new things  spell.… ‘who the hell is putting product in the box’? We never saw it coming. We lost our focus, our discipline and respect for those who would lead us. In short the inmates had taken over the asylum, crude but true. Tonight here on the porch as I write this I regret that I behaved as I did toward management. I never disrespected them or did anything to compromise the quality of the product…What I did was much worse. I did not support leadership and remained quite when I should have said Yes Sir… I remember when I went to work there we had within a year 5200 people employed…when I retired 38 years later there was just 800 left. Today we are seeing the values and customs, discipline and a great nation slowly going back to that mountain looking for something to turn us around. Instead of looking up to that mountain we should be on our knees, tying our shoes, getting ready to run a Good Race.

To put this in perspective… There is no accountability, no responsibility, we live in a do it your self world, as Frank would sing “I did It My Way”… and even Hobby Lobby doesn’t have the tools to get it done. 

jk

A parable well known but little understood tool of learning. The forgiveness of a certain man’s debt of such large proportions that he had no hope of ever repaying it in full and his seeking the forgiveness and then denying that same thing to one that owed him an infinitesimal fraction of what he himself had owed which had been forgiven and freed him from such burden and responsibility.

The Parable lays before us the mercilessness and total rejection of any forgiveness for the debt owed by another to him. In Matthew 18:22 we read the reply of Jesus after Peter asked him how many times are we to forgive a person, which Peter had calculated to be seven times. …Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” One of the lessons here is that we must forgive to be forgiven. Jesus said ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy’ (Matthew 5:7). We can acknowledge that man is capable of evil and it is in the nature of man to seek revenge. In these verses Jesus presents the alternative to the evil desire for revenge. Justice and mercy can only come about through forgiveness. We must strive to learn that we are all God’s own servants; and the day is at hand in which our Master will settle accounts, inquire about our work, and pay us our wages. Romans 6:23 ‘for the wages of sin is death’….  Or you could say two wrongs don’t make it right. How did this man present himself to his master? First he fell down to exhibit his humility. He asked for more time to pay his debt, he promised to pay it all. We know his master was moved to pity him and forgave his debt in full. There is a valid comparison here as to those who come to Christ seeking forgiveness. How should we come before the judgement seat? 

1. Deep humiliation of heart – on our knees
2. Fervent prayer.
3. Confidence in the mercy of God  
4. A firm purpose to devote our soul and body to your Maker

To bring this altogether consider the following. The master’s judgement against the man for not extending mercy to another who owed him money was harsh…again we are confronted with the truth that we must forgive others as God has forgiven us, or we can hope to find no mercy. We must always strive to make our hearts a place of love, peace and mercy. Some of this blog may seem extremely repetitive but the other truth is we can’t really say it enough. To Be Forgiven …We Must Learn To Forgive.  

Life is Good

jk

In 2016 I published a blog remembering 9/11. I have decided to insert some of that blog here today. I also include some excerpts from another blog written in July of 2021. Time has not been kind to us as a nation the last few years and Pogo said it best “the enemy is us.” I would never attribute something as atrocious as 9/11 as being God’s will…a punishment so to speak to us as a nation. It is true that we can no longer truthfully say we are a nation under God. So…on to the subject of the day.

There will be many words today, few will be able to capture the impact in loss of life and the realization that our enemies now had the ability to bring the horror of war to our soil. Here are a couple of things I take away from that day.   Death is never an easy thing to cope with and I don’t hold much with the advice that “things will be better in time; every day it will get a little better.” Don’t believe that, I believe we just learn how to live with it or for lack of a better term tolerate the loss. Like everyone else I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. Been  a few years now and I still can close my eyes and see those people jumping from the towers. Now after all these years’ history is slowly being rewritten in that many films have been edited to remove those pictures. Why is that important? To me it is important because while I can’t say what was in their mind at that time, I prefer to believe in that moment of extreme despair they chose how they would die. First take away, how much easier is it for us who only have to choose how to live. After all this time we still are not doing a good job of that. We right now are in a world of hurt…as us old folks would say. But guess what? It is not the political state of things but rather the state of or souls, and the soul of our nation. Church people say ‘we are the church’…When it comes to our nation… ‘we are our nation’ and we need God.

One of the first things that happened after it was determined that this was not a terrible mishap but was indeed a deliberate attack, was a no fly order issued for the whole country. All flights except those of military origin were grounded throughout the USA. I remember standing outside at work that afternoon and the next few days and looking up at the sky above. My second take away was that those contrails left by planes were absent from the sky. How odd it seemed. Just as a room becomes quite, no one speaking, their absence marked the silence of the skies. It was as if I was waiting to see something there that would tell me everything was going to be alright. My third take away is perhaps the one that is most imprinted on my mind and heart. As the towers fell the dust and debris of this awful destruction blotted the sun from the sky and blinded all those trapped by it. Everyone was covered to the point that there was no way to distinguish skin color or ethnicity, all were caught in a world of gray horror, dependent on the help and mercies of those closest to them. Somehow the need to take or offer a hand, to cover and shield another from the debris, to offer self in defense of another was the most striking thing I saw. We came together as a people, there was no time to shout USA, USA as would be heard much over the next few days. This may not make sense and I stand to be corrected. I believe on that day we were Americans all and in that moment we all became God’s children. (Matthew 22:39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”)

There is no way I could ever put to words the sacrifice of NYFD or Police, EMS or the hundreds of medical and civilian responders, there are no words that could do honor to their sacrifice. So how or where do we go from here? As a nation and a people we need to return to the good way, we need God and there is only one way…..John 14:6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. 

Life is Good…God Forgive and Bless our nation…

jk

As I get older it seems that the simpler things are… the happier I am. I have even got to where there are times I say yes just because it is simpler and takes less energy because most times no requires a sustaining energy that I am lacking… Just keep it simple. When it comes to simple one of my favorite things…and yes it is about food, would be Vienna Wieners. That is what I said!  Take a moment and let that sink in, Wieners…Vienna Winners. What are Vienna Wieners? Well they are for lunch, supper or a quick snack and even breakfast if there is any adventure in you. Roll them around in a fry pan and serve them with your eggs and toast. The American version of Vienna Winners made their way to North America in 1903. We keep this simple by just writing that in parts of Europe back in the day they consisted of pure pork with an edible casing, they were smoked and not always in a can. We should note that in parts of Europe they were made of chicken or turkey because a number of that population could not eat pork for religious reasons. When they were brought over here they were changed as to content and put in a can with a gelatin packing. The following from Wikipedia:  ‘North American Vienna sausages are made similarly to pork wieners, finely ground to a paste consistency and mixed with salt and various spices, then The sausages are stuffed into a long casing, sometimes smoked, always thoroughly cooked. Beginning in the 1950s, the casings were removed. The sausages are cut into short segments for canning and cooking.’

There are just a few companies that make them about four major brands. I don’t go by brand, any can will do but I am particular about the different flavorings preferring the…you got it…the simple original recipe. This folks is as simple as it gets…open the can by pulling on the tab, drain off or if your really into this drink the liquid and then remove the Wieners. There will be seven in the can I don’t know why that number, maybe a law…who knows. It is at this point that Murphy’s Law comes into the picture. You can just turn the can upside down and shake them out, or use a small fork or knife to gig one and pull it up…the Wiener will most likely break apart, forcing you to do a more aggressive gig to remove the rest. After that it is pure pleasure. Roll it in mustard, or any kind of sauce, wrap it in bread or just keep it simple and add a Dr Pepper and three saltine crackers and go at it. Now about that can. That can will go anywhere in any kind of weather, small enough to put in you pants or coat pocket and if you are one of those sneak a snack folks you can eat them anywhere, why just pop the top, drink the liquid and pull em out one at a time with your fingers while hiding behind a barn, tree or walking fast to avoid you wife or Jenny Craig. Life should be simple and fun and sitting in a rocking chair, keeping the rhythm going, holding an open can of wieners and trying to get that first one out…oh also holding onto that Dr Pepper…that is a challenging thing for those of us a little long in the tooth, or in the woke vernacular, Age Challenged. Oh yes, don’t throw that can or lid away, it is small enough to fit most any trash can or public collection bin. Vienna Wieners…Food on The Go…Or Rocking Chair Compatible 

Come Back and Sit a Spell

jk

In the book of James we are reminded that we often look in the mirror, turn and walk away, and forget what we look like. I am sure over the years we have read John 16: 25-33 and like that mirror we’ve  left the words on the page not really understanding what we had just read. I call it surface reading because in our busy world today our brain can only process and retain so much and the truth is the brain is selective it its retention. Jesus takes the disciples to school so to speak with some timely advice and information. He tells them that ‘I have spoken to you in sayings that you might have found hard to understand’. Jesus knows the urgency of the hour and sets about speaking plainly…about the Father. We do not know the time nor place and only the Father does, yet these verses should encourage us to stay close to God. The Parables was one of the ways Jesus communicated with his disciples. In these verses Jesus takes the veil off and speaks clearly in truth and clarity. It would be hard for us to really know how the next thing Jesus shared with them was received…for His next revelation was  a tremendous claim – that he is the Son of God and that the cross is not for him a criminal’s death, but the way back to God. Jesus tells his disciples that they do not need him to to approach God directly…because we have loved him, Jesus, God loves us and we may take our requests to God directly. Today even, we think of God being angry and Jesus the Son being gentle. Through Jesus we see the true God…this is the God that sent his Son to die for us because he loves us so much. 

John 3:16 NIV

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 

It is worth noting that Jesus says all that even before he went to the cross.A very simple truth is here before us. Jesus knows his work is done and soon he will go back to the Father by way of the cross. The way to God is open to everyone because those who love Jesus… are  the beloved of God.

In verses 29-33 it is as if a light bulb got turned on in each of their collective heads…the disciples have this sudden epiphany and give credit to Jesus speaking clearly and saying ‘you know all things, and that you do not need that anyone should ask you anything.’ Because of this they believe Jesus did indeed come forth from God. Jesus answered by asking a question… ‘so you believe at this moment?’ The time will come when each of you will run back to your own homes, and you will leave me alone. That time is now. We have always been told that God knows our hearts and minds, better than we do. Jesus being of the Father knew the weakness of his disciples and he knew that they would let him down when he needed them most and yet he still loved them; and his actions even with this knowledge showed he still trusted them. One of the wonderful things that Jesus teaches us is the ability to forgive, and how to trust those who were guilty of failure. We should learn from these verses…

-You will never be alone when you stand for what is right…God is with you always.

-We must learn to love people as they are…just as God loves us.

-People will hurt us at times…but we must realize that the hurt they have caused us has awaken the regret and sorrow of their aching heart. We must have mercy and forgiveness as our God has shown to us.

-We must live in such a way that we too can ‘possess the courage and the conquest of the cross.’ 

Live is Good 

jk