A Faith That Can Be Rebuked
Then Jesus answered and said, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to Me.”
Matthew 17:17 (NKJV)
After descending the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus is confronted by a scene in which a boy is possessed by a demon that His disciples had tried to cast out. Their attempts were unsuccessful and the boy’s father pleads with Jesus to help because the boy is suffering.
Unlike other conversations that Jesus had in the Gospels, this time Jesus doesn't commend what faith is present in those gathered. He doesn’t express the impression that their faith motivates Him to speak or act. He doesn't challenge their faith or invite them to expand or stretch their faith.
No, in this instance, He rebukes the faith of those who are gathered there.
What I mean by rebuke is not that He shuns it or that He dismisses it, but that He strongly corrects it.
Jesus essentially tells them, “What a generation this is: no real sense of God—no focus to your lives. How many times do I have to go over these things with you? How much longer do I have to put up with this? Bring that boy to me. And after all that I sought to teach and the faith I’ve invited you to live with, this is what you have to give Me? Attempts based on your own strength? You are using only the outer edges of My messages and demonstrations, and all the while, you are missing the inner power that really makes things happen. You’ve had proximity and access, but still haven’t discerned what really drives the mission or creates the miracles. Bring the boy to Me.”
My friend, your faith has to be more than just commended and inspired and challenged in order to grow. If you want your faith to mature and have a truly life-changing impact, both for your own life and for the lives of those around you, you have to possess a faith that Jesus can rebuke.
The rebuke Jesus gives is because He wants your faith to step up to the level of more than presence and potential, but at the level of power.
Do you have a faith that can withstand Jesus’s rebuke?
His Compassions Fail Not
Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.
Lamentations 3:22 (NKJV)
The Gospel of Matthew gives us a good picture of how Jesus spent much of His time during His years of ministry. In chapter 15, verses 29-32, we read,
“Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel. Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may collapse on the way.’”
We could go on to read how Jesus provided for them by feeding them with miracle food that He multiplied from very little. But today I want to stop here and focus on Jesus’s motivation for doing these things. He said, “I have compassion for these people.”
It's not a time issue. It's not a supply issue. It's not a logistics issue. It's not an issue of duty or demand. It’s a compassion issue. He really does have a heart for the people. And guess what? He has a heart for you as well.
The Lord really does care about what concerns us. His compassion is stirred by your plight today—and this compassion moves Him to action.
Be encouraged by the fact that because of the Lord’s mercies you will not be consumed, because He has compassion for you.
Transfigured
Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves;
2 and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.
Matthew 17:1 (NIV)
Devotional writer Oswald Chambers wrote, “On the Mount of Ascension the Transfiguration is completed. If Jesus had gone to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration, He would have gone alone; He would have been nothing more to us than a glorious Figure. But He turned His back on the glory, and came down from the Mount to identify Himself with fallen humanity.”
That day on that mountain, the heavens opened and Jesus’s life became enraptured in the light of God's express presence. Key and pivotal servants from the past, Moses and Elijah, joined Jesus on the mountain to restore His sense of mission, to remind Jesus of both the cost and the value of the sacrifice of His life for human redemption.
The three disciples—Peter, James, and John—that were invited to make the journey up the mountain and who witnessed these transfiguring moments, had to be awestruck during their descent, trying to put it all in perspective.
“What did we just see and how are we to appropriate it? When the others ask us what happened, how do we put it into words? How do we describe an experience that so far exceeds rational thinking that it stuns you speechless? The other disciples will no doubt ask us, after looking into our eyes, ‘What happened to you up there?’ and our response is going to have to be, ‘It was pure glory! We saw why we must continue to live convicted about our belief in Jesus. It’s absolutely no accident that we are pulled from among those we have lived with and set apart to learn from Him in close proximity. We are different. We need to learn how to steward that difference—because what we saw up there is so majestic and eternal and salvific and redemptive that we cannot let a single human being miss the opportunity to accept an invitation to know Jesus personally.’”
You see, when you are a witness to God’s glory, it transfigures your life. It alters your perspective forever. And it gives you renewed zeal to share His message with the world.
Repetition Has Value
Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people. They all ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was four thousand men, besides women and children.
Matthew 15:36-38 (NIV)
While many who study Scripture have tried to suggest that the feeding of the 4,000 is the exact same episode as the account which numbers the people at 5,000, it is crystal clear to me that these two incidents are totally different.
In this instance, the supply came from seven loaves and a few small fish, not five loaves and two fish. Here, the leftovers filled twelve baskets. In the other instance, only seven basketfuls of fragments remained.
I think these details are given to us because God must want us to notice that these are two different—yet repetitive—events. Why? Why would God repeat such a similar narrative?
It appears to me that God is teaching us that repetition is powerful for our learning about Him, about us, and about God's purposes in and for our lives.
I have sometimes wondered about—and have also counseled many who struggle with—the repeated experiences of life. The things that seem to keep happening. The hurts that keep resurfacing from certain toxic interactions. The haunting thoughts that follow us no matter how elevated our positions in life. The cycles we thought we had broken. The decisions we keep making. The resulting stresses and strains that often come from them.
When you follow Jesus, you wonder in faith why God heals some things but lets others repeat themselves over and over again. Why does God bring total resolve to some things while letting other things keep revisiting us?
What is the spiritual value of experiential repetition?
I declare to you that we don't ever go through repetitive experiences where God has not attached spiritual meaning to them. He attaches purpose to each and every one of them.
So don't let the struggle of it, nor the familiarity with it, make you ignore it or take it for granted. I know it's not easy when the pain of the last cycle greets you again in the current cycle. You may not feel like you have the energy or the stamina or the faith or the spiritual fortitude to repeat a season. But I'm suggesting to you that God sometimes allows repetitive experiences and conditions and interactions and altercations and thoughts and experiences for this reason: They are necessary for shaping you into the person He wants you to be.
Some of the most important lessons we learn in life are learned through repetition.
A Future and a Hope
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11 (NKJV)
Jeremiah had the painful mission of being the minority prophetic voice to a people that found his message unappealing. His message was an attempt to turn Judah towards spiritual repentance, and he repeatedly announced to the people that it would be a wise choice if the nation would make the decision to rid the land of idolatry.
Now, God had warned Jeremiah that the people would ignore him and that they would be sent to captivity by their own spiritual rebellion. And as a result of Jeremiah’s unpopular message, he was never short of naysayers. He was never short of adversaries who were always lined up to make attempts at taking his life. And more than a few attempts were made to kill the tenderhearted prophet.
Of course, as you would imagine, this had a deep emotional effect on the prophet of God. He was God’s mouthpiece, but he was also human. As best as he could, he attempted to manage isolation and rejection and hurt. When you read his reflections, it is all too easy to discern how tired he was from being the daily laughingstock of the city and the constant target of cruel communal mocking. And yet he kept prophesying. Over and over again, as he declared the word of the Lord, he was thrown into prison. And the vicious cycle followed him throughout his entire ministry.
If anyone faced nothing but hopeless struggles, it was Jeremiah. But even though he faced those constant trials, he knew God would deliver him someday. And knowing that kept feeding his hope. He bleeds this blessed hope in chapter 29, verse 11 of the book that bears his name. In reflection about his calling versus his constant isolation and mistreatment, he tells us that God said to him, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you…thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
Can you relate to Jeremiah? Are you weary from the constant trials, the pain of rejection, or the emotional rollercoaster of life? The words God spoke to Jeremiah can also be said of you: God is thinking about you. God’s thoughts about you are of peace and not of evil. God wants to give you a future and a hope.
Cling to that hope today.
