The debate is long standing in Christendom about what exactly ”sanctification” is and how it comes about.

It was not until after much reflection that it slowly dawned on me what an intriguing and perhaps prophetic word this is from the mouth of Jesus.

The image Jesus is alluding to here is familiar from many sermon illustrations. The farmer guiding his single plow behind donkey or horse or ox desires to plough a precisely straight furrow from one end of the field to the other.

Count the cost and Don’t look back are in a sense two ways to say the same thing.

At first glance, this may seem but a restating of the command we considered previous to the last. Are we splitting hairs to differentiate between the two?

It will be unpopular, in this time when obedience to the marital commands of Scripture has grown so lax within Christendom, to read this command from the mouth of Jesus as strictly forbidding divorce.

The profound example of the Apostle John’s life is as powerful as the words he recorded of Jesus’ farewell conversation and charge to his disciples in the upper room.

Here we encounter another of Jesus’ well-known Commands. The parallel with snakes, however, is troublesome because we usually associate snakes with evil.

The ongoing debate between how ”literal” one is to take the accounts and Commands of the Bible is filled with pomposity, self-righteousness, and thorough inconsistency on all sides.

Back in the Jesus Movement days of the 1970s, putting out fleeces before the Lord, according to the example of Gideon in Judges 6, was a popular method of determining God’s will.