Reflective Bible Study

As we keep moving through Jesus’ last big message to His disciples on the night He was arrested, we come to an interesting idea that many Christians today either miss or choose to ignore. This idea is one that is both counter-cultural, as well as one that pushes against our human nature, even if we can see on the surface that it is logical.

Let’s dive in and discover what Jesus told His followers after describing and reemphasizing His command to love one another. Our passage for this episode is found in John’s gospel, chapter 15, and we will be reading from the New American Standard Bible translation. Jumping into Jesus’ teaching in verse 18, He tells the disciples:

¹⁸ “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. ¹⁹ If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. ²⁰ Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. ²¹ But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me. ²² If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. ²³ He who hates Me hates My Father also. ²⁴ If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. ²⁵ But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause.’

Let’s pause briefly here to draw our attention onto a big counter-intuitive idea that we might be tempted to believe. This idea is simply that a side effect of following Jesus and loving others is that other people will love us in return. Jesus never hints at the idea that His followers would be loved or even liked by the world. Jesus tells His followers very clearly that the world would hate His people, but that shouldn’t bother or surprise us because the world hated Jesus first.

Jesus faced the worst death imaginable during that era of history, and He tells us that because He was persecuted, we should expect nothing less than persecution as well.

Why does the world hate Jesus and His followers?

Some people have claimed that the Bible is filled with hate and because of this, all those who follow the Bible are filled with hate, but this in itself doesn’t translate into a reason to hate the Bible, or those who follow it, as a response.

There are plenty of reasons that someone could hate Jesus, the Bible, or His followers. However, the last phrase we read before pausing is fascinating to me. Verse 25 tells us that those who hated Jesus fulfilled the prediction in a very specific way. This verse says that “They hated Me without a cause.”

This verse and phrase gives us two frames of reference for the hate the world will throw our way.

The first is that they hate us because they don’t understand us, nor do they want to understand us. They may have heard or seen someone claiming to be a follower of Jesus who acts in a hateful way, and then conclude that every follower of Jesus is like this. In a similar way, they could have read a verse or story from the Bible that depicts God or His people as unloving and conclude from this that God is hateful and not worthy of love. In this frame of reference, there might be a reason for someone to hate Jesus, or some of His followers, but this hate is based on faulty assumptions. It might feel like hate in this way is justified through logic, but it is not. Hating someone based on what someone else has done is illogical at best.

The other frame of reference is that it is simply easier to follow the crowd and if someone is vocal about their hate for the Christian faith, then it is easy for someone without knowledge or an opinion of it to silently side with the vocal opinion. People who hate Christianity because the culture has placed a target on Christians are guilty of hating Jesus without cause. Open the pages of the Bible and search for a reason to hate Jesus. It is better to hate Jesus with a reason than to simply drift with culture. Drifting is easy, but it will never lead you to anywhere positive.

However, Jesus isn’t finished sharing with the disciples. He wants to emphasize and remind His followers that even if they will be abused and hated like He was, they will never be alone. Picking back up in verse 26, Jesus reminds His followers of the promise He shared earlier. Jesus tells them:

²⁶ “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, ²⁷ and you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning.

^16:1 “These things I have spoken to you so that you may be kept from stumbling. ² They will make you outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God. ³ These things they will do because they have not known the Father or Me. ⁴ But these things I have spoken to you, so that when their hour comes, you may remember that I told you of them. These things I did not say to you at the beginning, because I was with you.

Let’s stop reading here. Jesus tells us that His followers will be hated and killed, and He tells us that when this happens, those filled with hate who are doing the abuse will believe they are serving God. They do these things thinking they know God, but the reality is that they do not know God or Jesus. We can see hinted in these verses a warning against anything that tries to come between us and God.

If we let any person, idea, tradition, or logical idea filter our picture or opinion of God and the truth He reveals in the Bible, we are warned in these verses that we might ultimately become the guilty party thinking we offer a service to God when we don’t really know Him. Those who don’t know Jesus and who have not placed their belief in Him are susceptible of believing anything and everything, regardless of whether it is valid.

The solution to this dilemma is one reason why I challenge you every episode to pray and study the Bible for yourself. Through prayer and Bible study, God will lead us personally through the guiding of the Holy Spirit, and He will teach us what He wants us to learn. Learning directly from the Bible is the safest way to know God and to be lead by Him!

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As always, be sure to seek God first and place Him first in your life. Be sure to place God ahead of the ideas and traditions in the culture you live in, and be sure to stay focused on His command to love others. Don’t worry if people hate you. Don’t be surprised when it happens. Jesus warned us that we will be hated because He was hated, but we can look past the hate and abuse to a world where sin has been destroyed and is gone forever.

Also, be sure to always pray and study the Bible for yourself to grow that personal relationship with God. While a pastor, speaker, author, or podcaster can give you ideas to think about, filter everything through the simple reading of God’s Word, the Bible, and don’t use other people’s ideas to cloud your picture of what the Bible teaches. As a side-note: I designed Reflective Bible Study as a way to study with as little bias as possible, because this is how I wanted to study personally!

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, chicken out of, or drift away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

As we move through Matthew’s gospel, we come to two events that I am having a difficult time choosing between. One event is an example of Jesus being very different from how we usually see Jesus, while the other event seems similar to one of our previous events, but it has a few details that are significant to pay attention to.

Because of this, I’m not going to pick. Instead, let’s read this passage and both of these events. Our passage is found in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 15, and we will read from the New Living Translation. Starting in verse 21, Matthew tells us:

²¹ Then Jesus left Galilee and went north to the region of Tyre and Sidon. ²² A Gentile woman who lived there came to him, pleading, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! For my daughter is possessed by a demon that torments her severely.”

²³ But Jesus gave her no reply, not even a word. Then his disciples urged him to send her away. “Tell her to go away,” they said. “She is bothering us with all her begging.”

²⁴ Then Jesus said to the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep—the people of Israel.”

²⁵ But she came and worshiped him, pleading again, “Lord, help me!”

²⁶ Jesus responded, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.”

²⁷ She replied, “That’s true, Lord, but even dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall beneath their masters’ table.”

²⁸ “Dear woman,” Jesus said to her, “your faith is great. Your request is granted.” And her daughter was instantly healed.

Let’s pause reading here, at the end of this first event, because what Matthew includes for us is amazing. While many people focus in on Jesus and how His comments are insensitive towards the woman, I want us to focus for a moment on how Jesus’ actions don’t match Jesus’ words at the beginning of this event.

In verse 21, Matthew tells us that “Jesus left Galilee and went north to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” Jesus makes this trip away from Galilee to the region of Tyre and Sidon which are close to the Mediterranean Sea. While He and the disciples are in Tyre and Sidon, we only have one event recorded for this trip, which is what this first part of our passage focuses in on.

While I think other gospels allude to other people being healed, the miracle that takes center stage is the one Matthew focuses in on in our passage. The interesting idea that I want us to pay attention to is that while Jesus tells the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep—the people of Israel,” Jesus made the trip all the way to the region and city where this woman lived like He traveled there to help only her.

I think that the details in this event point to Jesus challenging the disciples with the lesson that God will sometimes call us to help people who are not like us, and we should help people who ask for help regardless of what they look like and regardless of what our preconceived ideas and stereotypes are.

Following Matthew including this miracle, Jesus leaves that region and returns to Galilee. Picking back up in verse 29, Matthew writes:

²⁹ Jesus returned to the Sea of Galilee and climbed a hill and sat down. ³⁰ A vast crowd brought to him people who were lame, blind, crippled, those who couldn’t speak, and many others. They laid them before Jesus, and he healed them all. ³¹ The crowd was amazed! Those who hadn’t been able to speak were talking, the crippled were made well, the lame were walking, and the blind could see again! And they praised the God of Israel.

³² Then Jesus called his disciples and told them, “I feel sorry for these people. They have been here with me for three days, and they have nothing left to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry, or they will faint along the way.”

³³ The disciples replied, “Where would we get enough food here in the wilderness for such a huge crowd?”

³⁴ Jesus asked, “How much bread do you have?”

They replied, “Seven loaves, and a few small fish.”

³⁵ So Jesus told all the people to sit down on the ground. ³⁶ Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, thanked God for them, and broke them into pieces. He gave them to the disciples, who distributed the food to the crowd.

³⁷ They all ate as much as they wanted. Afterward, the disciples picked up seven large baskets of leftover food. ³⁸ There were 4,000 men who were fed that day, in addition to all the women and children. ³⁹ Then Jesus sent the people home, and he got into a boat and crossed over to the region of Magadan.

In the second event of our passage, we discover another miracle of food multiplication, this time taking seven loaves and a few small fish and turning it into a meal for over 4,000 people. Most people see the similarities between the miracle of feeding 5,000 and feeding 4,000, but each event includes a key difference that makes each event uniquely powerful and distinct. This detail is where the food came from that was eventually multiplied. With the earlier miracle where Jesus fed over 5,000 people, the food came from one of the people in the crowd, specifically from a boy offering his food to Jesus. This later miracle of feeding over 4,000 has the food coming from the disciples own food reserves.

This distinction is important for us to pay attention to. This distinction tells us that sometimes God will send us the supplies we need to help others from someone or somewhere else. However, sometimes God challenges us to supply what is needed for a miracle to happen. The earlier miracle happened because of a boy’s gift of food. This later miracle happened because the disciples gave up what they had left for themselves.

As we look at Jesus traveling to heal a Samaritan woman’s daughter and Jesus feeding a large crowd in a wilderness, we have a shared underlying theme that we can place our trust, our faith, our hope, and our belief in Jesus, who is more than willing to help us when we need help.

Jesus traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon to heal this woman’s daughter, and He traveled to Galilee to heal and help thousands of others. Jesus also knew that after three days, the crowd had chosen staying with Him over leaving and getting food, and the crowd’s need prompts Jesus to give them one more amazing miracle.

God is willing to help us when we need help, and while sometimes He is waiting for us to ask, and push past a few challenges, other times, He is more than willing to supply what we need without us even needing to open our mouths to pray.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, be sure to seek God first in your life. Intentionally place your faith, hope, trust, and belief in Jesus. Move into your life claiming God’s promise that He will help you when you need and ask for help. God is more than willing to supply us with what we need, and when He does, remember to show Him gratitude and say thank You for the blessings He has given to us.

Also, continue praying and studying the Bible for yourself to grow your personal relationship with God stronger. Discover through your own study time what God wants to teach you, and while other people may have good things to say, never let your relationship with God become dependent on anyone else’s relationship with Him.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or walk away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

As we continue moving through the last things Jesus tells His disciples on the night of His arrest, Jesus shifts focus from obedience, which we talked about in the last episode, and onto a new word-picture. It’s likely this new word picture and the idea Jesus wants to teach us is connected with everything we’ve talked about so far in these last few podcast episodes.

Let’s read the next portion of Jesus’ teaching, and discover the next big ideas He wants to share with His followers. Our passage is found in John’s gospel, chapter 15, and we will be reading from the New International Reader’s Version of the Bible. Starting in verse 1, Jesus continued sharing, saying:

¹ “I am the true vine. My Father is the gardener. ² He cuts off every branch joined to me that does not bear fruit. He trims every branch that does bear fruit. Then it will bear even more fruit. ³ You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. ⁴ Remain joined to me, just as I also remain joined to you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain joined to the vine. In the same way, you can’t bear fruit unless you remain joined to me.

⁵ “I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain joined to me, and I to you, you will bear a lot of fruit. You can’t do anything without me. ⁶ If you don’t remain joined to me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and dries up. Branches like those are picked up. They are thrown into the fire and burned. ⁷ If you remain joined to me and my words remain in you, ask for anything you wish. And it will be done for you. ⁸ When you bear a lot of fruit, it brings glory to my Father. It shows that you are my disciples.

Let’s pause here for a moment to focus on what Jesus has just described. In a simple word picture, Jesus tells us that God the Father is like a gardener, Jesus is like a vine, and all of Jesus’ followers are like branches on this vine. However, while this illustration is easy to understand, it gets challenging. Jesus describes God-the-Gardener looking over each branch and trimming the branches that are bearing fruit, and cutting off the branches that are not.

In gardening, this makes perfect sense, but when you or I are represented by branches, the emphasis here is that being fruitful is the only way God will let us stay connected with Jesus. Being connected is one thing, but staying connected is another. This illustration challenges us with the dual ideas that in order to be fruitful in God’s eyes, we must be connected to Jesus, and in order to stay connected to Jesus, we must be fruitful, otherwise God-the-Gardener will cut us off.

Jesus ties this illustration to the illustration about prayer that we focused in on earlier in this conversation with His disciples, and He shares how He is happy to answer prayers and requests of those who are joined to Him, and in this context, those who are joined to Him are those who are being fruitful.

It’s worth pointing out here, before we move forward, that if you don’t believe you are being fruitful in your life, the most important prayer you can pray is one asking for help to be fruitful. I believe God is happy to help Jesus’ followers be fruitful, and this is why we also see God-the-Gardener trimming the branches that are being fruitful. Trimming fruitful branches clears distractions away and it helps focus the branch on its task of bearing fruit.

God touching our lives is not optional. Either He will trim us to help us be more fruitful, or He will cut us off if we are not fruitful. Being fruitful brings glory to God and it shows that we are Jesus’ disciples.

Continuing in verse 9, Jesus switches focus slightly to tell His followers:

⁹ “Just as the Father has loved me, I have loved you. Now remain in my love. ¹⁰ If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love. In the same way, I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹ I have told you this so that you will have the same joy that I have. I also want your joy to be complete. ¹² Here is my command. Love one another, just as I have loved you. ¹³ No one has greater love than the one who gives their life for their friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵ I do not call you slaves anymore. Slaves do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends. I have told you everything I learned from my Father. ¹⁶ You did not choose me. Instead, I chose you. I appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit that will last. I also appointed you so that the Father will give you what you ask for. He will give you whatever you ask for in my name. ¹⁷ Here is my command. Love one another.

Let’s stop reading here and focus on what Jesus has just emphasized. While many commands Jesus gives are important, Jesus tells His followers that the one command they should remember and emphasize above all the others is loving one another.

Yes, love for God is crucial too, but many hateful things are done in the world today through the filter of “loving God”. If we are to accurately represent God to the world, our lives must display a love for all humanity. This means that if you are white, you love those who are black, and it also means that if you are black, you love those who are white. This means that you love everyone from every other racial background, and you love everyone else regardless of who they are. Love starts with God, it was shown through Jesus, and we are called to carry this banner of love forward.

Loving others does not mean we agree with everything they are doing. Jesus did not agree with people who wanted to persist living in sin. However, loving others means that we respect others because God has given them life. Because God has given someone breath, we can trust that He has a plan for them and that He loves them.

Jesus loved people and He called them out of sin.

Jesus had no issue spending time with sinners, because we can read about plenty of examples where He spent time in the homes of a wide variety of people.

Jesus has called His followers to model this love for others, and the example Jesus gives us for love is the love He showed for us, a love that placed humanity ahead of himself.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to love others, and when we love others, we are being like Jesus, and we are being obedient and fruitful in the eyes of God.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

Always seek God first and place Him first in your life. Show that Jesus is first in your life by obeying Jesus’ command to love others. Other faiths demonstrate hostility towards those who don’t believe the same as they do, but Jesus has challenged His followers to show love towards everyone, regardless of who they are. We are to love others because we are representing God’s character, and God loves us so much that Jesus came to die the death we deserved.

Also, be sure to always pray and study the Bible for yourself and grow your personal relationship with God even stronger. While getting ideas from other people can be helpful, don’t let your relationship with God depend on someone else’s relationship. Intentionally grow your personal relationship with God through regularly praying and studying the Bible.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, chicken out of, or drift away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

As we continue moving through the gospel of Matthew, looking at Jesus’ life, we come to a place where Matthew tells us some Pharisees ask Jesus a question about the behavior of His followers. Before even knowing what this issue is, it is interesting that Jesus isn’t challenged about His own actions, but about the actions of those around Him.

Seeing how this passage is framed seems to tell us that Jesus actually obeyed the custom that the Pharisees were concerned about. Otherwise, these Pharisees would challenge Jesus and His followers on the idea that they all were breaking the custom in question.

What custom were the Pharisees concerned with? Let’s read the passage and find out.

Our passage is found in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 15, and we will read from the Contemporary English Version. Starting in verse 1, Matthew tells us that:

¹ About this time some Pharisees and teachers of the Law of Moses came from Jerusalem. They asked Jesus, ² “Why don’t your disciples obey what our ancestors taught us to do? They don’t even wash their hands before they eat.”

³ Jesus answered:

Why do you disobey God and follow your own teaching? ⁴ Didn’t God command you to respect your father and mother? Didn’t he tell you to put to death all who curse their parents? ⁵ But you let people get by without helping their parents when they should. You let them say that what they have has been offered to God. ⁶ Is this any way to show respect to your parents? You ignore God’s commands in order to follow your own teaching. ⁷ And you are nothing but show-offs! Isaiah the prophet was right when he wrote that God had said,

⁸ “All of you praise me
    with your words,
but you never really
    think about me.
⁹ It is useless for you
    to worship me,
when you teach rules
    made up by humans.”

¹⁰ Jesus called the crowd together and said, “Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. ¹¹ The food that you put into your mouth doesn’t make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean.”

¹² Then his disciples came over to him and asked, “Do you know that you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?”

¹³ Jesus answered, “Every plant that my Father in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. ¹⁴ Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch.”

¹⁵ Peter replied, “What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?”

¹⁶ Jesus then said:

Don’t any of you know what I am talking about by now? ¹⁷ Don’t you know that the food you put into your mouth goes into your stomach and then out of your body? ¹⁸ But the words that come out of your mouth come from your heart. And they are what make you unfit to worship God. ¹⁹ Out of your heart come evil thoughts, murder, unfaithfulness in marriage, vulgar deeds, stealing, telling lies, and insulting others. ²⁰ These are what make you unclean. Eating without washing your hands will not make you unfit to worship God.

In this passage and challenge, some Pharisees come with a somewhat innocent sounding question about hand washing, but Jesus understands that their question is really a question about why He teaches them to disregard tradition and custom. Jesus answers their underlying challenge while also warning people to stay away from this style of belief.

The big truth we can learn from this passage and from Jesus’ warning is that any tradition that disagrees with God’s Word must be ignored, adjusted, or discarded in favor of obeying God’s Word above anything else. And, while it is more difficult to do, we only truly know what God’s Word says when we study it for ourselves. This is why I repeatedly challenge each of us on this podcast to personally pray and study the Bible for yourself. It is too easy to simply follow someone else because they sound like they know what they are talking about.

An emphasis on tradition over God’s truth leads people into the exact trap Jesus warned against in this passage. Jesus describes these Pharisees in verse 6 as people who “ignore God’s commands in order to follow [their] own teaching.”

The other temptation in this passage is to think Jesus was strictly talking about food and clean verses unclean foods. This is not the case. Instead, this passage is focused on being fit for worship, and the food we eat does not change how fit we are to worship God.

In the Old Testament, God gave the Jewish people detailed instructions regarding clean and unclean foods, and while this teaching gets wrapped up as a spiritual message, the primary reason for this is more for health than it is for spirituality. Jesus does not make the dietary regulations in the Old Testament void with His statement. Instead, He draws our attention to the truth that our diet does not impact how fit we are to worship God.

In Jesus’ challenge to the people present, He places the emphasis on worship. This doesn’t mean that we ignore what we put into our mouths. Instead, this means we must be extra careful about what comes out of our mouths, because what comes out of our mouths comes from our hearts. When we worship, we offer our hearts as a gift to God, but we also want our gift to be pleasing to God. This means we must protect our hearts from things that would taint, stain, or damage our hearts, because this ultimately damages our gift to God.

A similar example is giving a gift to a friend. If we purchase a brand new item at the store that our friend really wants and needs, would we take this item home, open it up, use it many times, stain it, damage it, break it, and then ultimately package up the not-so-perfect-anymore gift for our friend. Would our used and abused gift show our friend how much we value his friendship?

Or, would we purchase this item, and save it in as perfect as a condition as we can until we can give it to our friend in its new condition.

I hope you would agree with me that we would try to keep our gift in as great a condition as we can. It is the same way with our hearts. While not everyone wants to give their heart to God, when we choose to place our faith, hope, trust, and belief in Jesus, we are giving ourselves to Him and we are promising Jesus our hearts. While our hearts may be stained, damaged, and abused by sin already, when we come to God, we can ask Him to create in us clean, new hearts, and God is willing to repair and recreate our hearts from the inside. When God has created new hearts for us, we now have a gift that is worth protecting. Our new-heart-gift from God is valuable to God, and we are called and challenged to keep this gift safe.

God has called us to follow Him, to place our faith, hope, trust, and belief in Jesus, and to obey His commands. We are to place following God above the rules and traditions of humanity. While there are many areas where we can do both, whenever there is a conflict between God’s rules and humanities rules, the safest choice from eternity’s perspective is to choose God’s way and to obey Him, regardless of what the consequences are in this life. No matter what consequences come in our lives because we chose to follow God, they will be worth it when Jesus returns and gives us our rewards.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, intentionally seek God first in your life and place His Word, His will, and His ideal ahead of ourselves. Choose to obey God’s rules over humanities traditions, and if there is ever a conflict, choose to obey God rather than man. Humanity’s rules change each year, each decade, and each generation, while God’s rules are eternal. When we obey God’s rules and we live a life of God’s love, we keep our hearts clean and pure and fit to offer God as a part of our worship to Him!

Also, continue praying and studying the Bible for yourself to grow closer to God each and every day. Focus on growing a personal relationship with God and intentionally make your relationship personal. While other people can give us ideas to think about, always take these ideas to God in prayer and ask Him if they are worth paying attention to. Above everything else, trust God’s Word as He has revealed it in the Bible because if you trust God to keep you safe for eternity, He is more than capable of keeping His Word safe for a few thousand years of human history.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or be ridiculed out of where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!