We seek God in the wrong places because we have the wrong system of values. And because we don’t know what has worth, we miss God’s greatest gifts. God’s greatest gift was not kingly rule or earthly power, but the simple God-in-flesh baby who was born to save humanity from their sins. God must interrupt our rule and flip our idea of what has value on its head for us to see it. But when we do, and when we find Christ, how else can we respond except with worship and sacrifice?

We tend to get frustrated with God when life interrupts us. We fail to realize that every interruption of our plan is God using life’s interruptions to move us into his plan. Every encounter with God is an interruption of our plans. God interrupts our plan to bring us into his plans. God is sovereign over every single one of life’s interruptions, and he uses them as opportunities to bring us into his redemptive story. There is no greater interruption than the cross. But it was this interruption that made a way for us to be brought into God’s redemptive story.

We hate it when God (or anyone else for that matter) interrupts or disrupts our lives and our plans, and so we hardly ever get to see what God is up to. God does His greatest work in the midst of our hardest interruptions. The lineage and coming of Jesus shows how God uses disruptions to accomplish His divine purpose. If the interruption of the cross in Jesus’ work could bring real life, then God can use any interruption to bring His abundant life. 

People are dying daily and we are not doing anything about it. Jesus died so that all the nations would know him and have salvation. And the church has to do something about it. What will it take for us to say yes to the calling?

Because we hate suffering, we end up avoiding the one thing that most releases the power of the Spirit of Christ in us. Our self-preservation ends up destroying us. Christ experienced the supernatural power of the Spirit because He obeyed the Spirit completely and immediately. But his obedience was learned through suffering, a suffering that took him to the cross. When we follow his example and die to self, we experience the “greater things” power that Jesus promised us. The power of God is on the other side of the insane decision to obey even if there is a chance of suffering in the obedience.

When we aren’t willing to live with insane faith in an insane (from the world’s perspective) God, we miss the insane power of God in our families. The best way to care for our families is to live insanely for God. His insane plan was to give up His only Son for us, and that made us family. When we give up our families for Him, we end up seeing His insane power in our families.

We naturally tend to seek glory for ourselves over anything or anyone else. The gospel teaches us that we were made to bring glory to God but we couldn’t do this on our own because of sin. Jesus defeated sin so that we would gain access to the spirit who is the one who can help us fulfill our purpose.

We do not know the Word of God well enough to test our thoughts against it and to find the author of life in it. Because of this, we suffer confusion at best and wickedness and death at worst. Christ died so that the Word wouldn’t just be a book we read but a living power that transforms us and comes inside us. Thus, we need to commit not just to reading the word of God but ingesting and memorizing the word of God.

We struggle to hear the voice of God, because we don’t want to hear what he has to say. It is hard to hear a voice that calls you to selflessness and sacrifice when you are selfish by default. Jesus calls me to walk in what he walked in. He calls me to the end of myself. Choosing to follow Jesus isn’t giving up my wrongs, it is giving up my rights and emptying myself of my will for the sake of us will. It is in daily remembering the gospel that puts me in position to hear the voice of God, because belief in the gospel makes it my will to do his will. It is from this place that I can hear the voice of God, because I have already told him yes before I hear what he has to say.

Because we think the will of God isn’t knowable, we choose to live according to our own will and desires, and that always leads to destruction.

Christ died not only to redeem our souls but also our spiritual ears, so we could hear his voice and obey his will. When we listen and obey, we experience intimacy with Christ, blessings from above, and power through His Spirit.