NT24 FastSample

Day 2 by Jeremy Shuck, Pastor of UPPERROOM Frisco

Today’s Reading: Matthew 15-28

Dear friends, since I think it's impossible to summarize this section briefly, I've highlighted some moments. Still, maybe more importantly, I hope to describe something I feel the Spirit is trying to impart from these passages. Since knowledge puffs up, but LOVE builds up, I believe in an impartation of His heart, not a conveyance of information.

Jesus… what an amazing, mysterious, accessible wonder of a leader, friend, savior, and God. He can go from offending the religious to comforting the broken in a moment. He goes from performing miracles to talking about His death.

Life with God never looks the way we anticipate. The path is never perfectly predictable. I'm sure Jesus' friends never imagined the greatest victory would come through the cruelest death. It was too audacious to grasp even after He told them what would happen to Him. Jesus told them to take up their cross before He ever laid eyes on His own, telegraphing the reality that He was, is, and will always be the Lamb Slain from the Foundation of the World. Only by laying down our life will we be able to live real life. He died as a thief for the thieves. As a singer-songwriter, John Mark McMillan sang…

"On Friday a thief, on Sunday a king,

Laid down in grief but awoke with the keys

To hell, on that day, the firstborn of the slain

The man Jesus Christ laid death in His grave."

Jesus swallowed our wrath and manifested God's mercy. Jesus absorbed our violence and manifested God's healing. He took on our infirmity and put on us His perfection. He uttered not a word of defense. He threw no punches. He finally had the moment He had been looking forward to ever since the day He lost His kids' hearts long ago - the greatest opportunity to prove His love and disassemble our insanity. He carried the curse of the thorns of our delusion on His own perfect brow. The cross saw the worst of humanity collide with the best of God. In the same way that Mary's oil poured forth, the blood of Jesus was the best heaven had to offer to anoint us all for burial.

The humanity of Jesus was the bait to get the grave to swallow down the divinity of Jesus, which death cannot digest. Love is stronger than the grave. In the act of baiting Satan to put Christ on the cross, the undoing of death was put into motion. The great swindler serpent of the garden was swindled by the Lamb. The words "take and eat," which once brought death, would become the words that bring us eternal life.

Jesus, freed from the garments of the grave, sets us free from our fear of death, making clear that resurrection is our destiny. Although we once were enslaved through deception, we now know with all clarity that the tree Jesus died on is more powerful than the tree Adam ate from. The unpredictable path of Christ was to submit to the death we deserved, dying, not only for us but as us, raising again that we all would be raised to everlasting life in Him. No greater story has ever been written.