When I was a little girl, my family lived on top of a hill in the middle of the woods. Our driveway was a little over a quarter of a mile long. It went straight up before turning dramatically and continuing straight up again. Living in the Midwest, we were no strangers to severe weather or experiencing all four seasons in one day.
Toward the end of the winter months, it wasn’t uncommon for us to have 30-degree temperature swings–it could be 75 one day and 45 the next. As our driveway was lined with pine trees, the sun didn’t hit much of it directly. This meant that once our driveway froze and became covered in ice, it could take weeks for it to thaw.
During one of these strange weather events, we woke on a Sunday morning, got ready for church, and quickly realized that our driveway was covered in ice. It wasn’t just the hill where the pine trees loomed that was covered, though. The entire parking area in front of the garage was a sheen of ice. Actually, it was more than a sheen. It was solid and several inches thick.
My dad was already in his dress clothes as he went out to the garage and began to work on the ice. We had a wood burner at the time, and we commonly threw the ash from the stove onto the ice in our driveway to make easier work of the thawing. This was no exception. My dad threw the hot ash onto the drive. Nothing. The ice was so thick, the ash barely made a dent in the melting process.
Before long, my dad was on the ice with a pick axe attempting to break up the ice enough for us to get our truck out so we could make it to church. Eventually, enough of the ice was broken up that he thought we could get a vehicle out of the garage and make it to church–even if we were a little late.
At that time in our lives, we never missed church. Even if we were out of town or on vacation, we would either make it back before Sunday morning or find a church wherever we were to attend. While our church didn’t formally take attendance, weekly attendance was expected. As a result of this expectation for church attendance, I grew up believing God expected me to be at church just like the leadership at my church expected me to be at church.
This mindset became such an important priority in our lives that we used to joke about doing things to earn church skips. We would talk about how volunteering at a stressful event, dealing with a difficult church member, or taking groups to conferences earned us “church skips.” The sad part of this is there was an element of our thinking and faulty theology that believed we did have to justify our rare absences from church.
My husband, Russ, is a huge fan of dad jokes. One of his favorite dad jokes is to mispronounce words by putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, or like he so commonly says “putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle.” In so many ways, the drive toward church attendance that I felt during all those years of my life was putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. If we’re not careful, we can do that with so many things related to religion and spirituality.
Simple Practice
We’ve been working through the book of Luke to determine what Jesus DID when he was here on earth, and this week, we’ve arrived at the end of chapter 6. This is the last lesson Jesus teaches his audience of his newly appointed apostles, his disciples, and the Gentiles from the region of Tyre and Sidon. He ends his teaching to this diverse group of people with this statement followed by a parable:
“What good does it do for you to say I am your Lord and Master if you don’t put into practice what I teach you? Luke 6:46 TPT
Jesus spent this time with his new apostles, his disciples, and these curious Gentile listeners teaching these things:
Be spiritually humble.
Don’t chase worldly success.
Love your enemies.
Give graciously.
Pardon instead of judging and condemning.
Choose who you follow wisely.
Focus on your own issues/shortcomings before focusing on other people’s issues.
Good trees produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit.
Then, he tells them it isn’t enough for them to call him Lord and Master without putting into practice what he has taught them. What he has just taught them is everything on that bullet-pointed list.
I sat in a room with a woman from our women’s ministry last week. She had so many great questions–questions many of us have struggled with in the past and still struggle with today about who to follow and what to believe. She’s encountered some wolves in sheep’s clothing who have convincingly taught her some terrible, terrible theology. She wanted to know how to know what to believe and how to know she was good in her relationship with God.
I kept coming back to these teachings of Jesus. I kept pointing her away from manmade teachings and back to the words and examples of Jesus, and I encouraged her to continue to do this digging for herself–to dig into who Jesus was, what Jesus taught, and what Jesus did.
There are so many teachers and leaders out there who have become so caught up in traditions, theologies, and rules, they have lost sight of who Jesus was and what Jesus taught completely. If we want to do more than simply say Jesus is our Lord, we have to focus on putting these teachings into practice, friends.
We have to shift our focus from those things that constantly distract us:
Over-the-top elaborate services
Church rules
Man-made expectations
Traditions
Faulty theology
It’s so easy to become distracted and focus on things we like, we know, and we desire in our lives and our churches instead of these things Jesus was teaching as important. When we do that, we’re putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle.
Building a Foundation for Simplicity
Jesus ends his teaching to this crowd with a popular story. If you’ve been in the church for a while, you’ve probably heard this parable and will start singing the song in your head as you read it here today:
“Let me describe the one who truly follows me and does what I say: He is like a man who chooses the right place to build a house and then lays a deep and secure foundation. When the storms and floods rage against that house, it continues to stand strong and unshaken through the tempest, for he built it wisely on the right foundation. But the one who has heard my teaching and does not obey it is like a man who builds a house without laying any foundation at all. When the storms and floods rage against that house, it will immediately collapse and become a total loss. Which of these two builders will you be?” Luke 6:47-49 TPT
I heard this story in Sunday School class when I was just a little Pre-K student, and it has stuck with me forever, probably because of the catchy little song that so often accompanies it. Interestingly, though, I never heard a lesson where the teacher/preacher went back into the scripture and looked at what Jesus taught right before he told this parable.
Now, though, I know the context. I know Jesus just taught so many lessons that should be the foundation we each build our house on. For years, I was taught to build my house on a solid foundation, but no one talked about what that foundation looked like aside from “Jesus.” Thankfully, Jesus is much more practical than that and does give us direction. Again, his direction looks like this:
Be spiritually humble.
Don’t chase worldly success.
Love your enemies.
Give graciously.
Pardon instead of judging and condemning.
Choose who you follow wisely.
Focus on your own issues/shortcomings before focusing on other people’s issues.
Good trees produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit.
Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he continued to teach and preach. I find it so encouraging, though, to know that Jesus was so straightforward about what we need to build our foundation upon.
Simplicity in Life
I watched a Joyce Meyer simulcast last week about discovering your purpose. One of the things she repeated throughout her teaching was that we get so caught up in the details of finding God’s will for our lives that we miss God’s will in our everyday lives (my paraphrase). I kept thinking about Luke’s discussion of Jesus’s teaching from chapter 6 as I listened to Joyce. I think we do the same thing when it comes to following Christ or trying to figure out how to build that solid foundation he talks about in this parable.
We make it so hard when Jesus sought to make it simple:
Be spiritually humble.
Don’t chase worldly success.
Love your enemies.
Give graciously.
Pardon instead of judging and condemning.
Choose who you follow wisely.
Focus on your own issues/shortcomings before focusing on other people’s issues.
Good trees produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit.
Friend, I pray this is as encouraging to you as it is to me. I pray that you can quiet the noise in your life and avoid the distractions that keep you from following Jesus in this way. I pray that you stop putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle and start placing the emphasis on the details Jesus taught and preached that day to those crowds.
Keep it simple, friend.
Reflections:
What distracts you the most often?
What parts of church/religion do you find cumbersome and distracting?
What do you need to shift in your life to be able to follow these teachings of Jesus?