Jesus, what really doesn’t make sense is how you say this on your first big stage. Here you are speaking from a first-century arena, on a mountain with your main guys in front and crowds filling in behind. Son of Man, people are seeing you and thinking this is like Moses bringing down the Big Ten from God’s mountain. They want to know again what God is going to do for them as a nation and in their own lives. And all you have are these platitudes?

There’s the narrative, and then there’s the context of that narrative. Should the writer have been more specific, this message may have been banned and burned before its distribution. Ruling powers control the narrative and won’t allow what makes them look less than the shine on their crowns. Sound familiar?

Jesus, you dump on us that which doesn’t seem like anything until we get a peek at what’s underneath. That’s why we stand off on the side, find it hard to trust what you say, who you are, if you’re real. Yeah, make it easy on yourself, let us slide by this one with our eyes shut.

Here we are, the first full week of a new year, and do we ever need one. Sure, much has happened that we didn’t see coming, but we’re almost too familiar with that now. The thing is, are we willing to accept, buy into, focus on what that means? Will we have influence, impact, or at least be open to any newness of life in the coming months? Or again, will we passively accept what has been without resolution to change? Life must be positioned for change. Prepare to Pivot.

The Trouble with Jesus: Most of the world thinks religion is meant to tell people how to find God. No wonder it doesn’t ring true for most. Magi tell the other side of the story. God comes to find us in quiet, unseen or unexpected ways

We never get what we want for Christmas. That’s what we think God should do, and almost always, God never does...In a real way though, this is likely the closest to God’s Christmas we may ever know. If we are still as church mice on Christmas Night, we just might see a strange sight through the frosted windowpanes of our souls. God shows up, not how we want, not bringing us all we want. God’s plan is not to fix everything that is wrong in the world, but to meet all the wrong in the world with Love.

The Trouble with Jesus is how scandal reverses itself by the scandal in his own life.

Doubt not only questions but gets the hand ready to turn the knob, determined to walk and slam that door shut...Doubt struggles between the God we want and the Son of God who came asking, “Do you believe this?” The Trouble with Jesus is that to be Savior is not to be rescuer from all that is wrong in the world.

The Trouble with Jesus is found in the uninhabitable, forbidding, empty regions of life where God speaks to the soul.

This is one of those things that might very well hurt your head but take two of your favorite OTC and go with it. Mortals experience time chronologically, like from the nanosecond to millennials. God’s got another sense of time which is kairos. So when Jesus said no one knows the day or hour, he was speaking of kairos, God’s time.