Seeds for 08/08/2023 - Matthew 10:32-33
Scripture: 32 “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.
Observation: Christianity is a covenantal relationship, not a transactional religion. There’s a difference. A transaction is about exchanging things of value, like goods or services for a form of payment—money or bartering. You know you’re in a transactional relationship when someone can make sense of it by saying, “Well, follow the money.” This isn’t wrong, it just is. I’m in a transactional relationship with my grocery store. I have money, they have goods. As long as the value matches, it works and we’ll likely continued doing business together.
A covenant, however, is about relational faithfulness. It’s a whole different kind of value. It’s the thing of greatest value because it doesn’t boil down to value in the transactional way.
Jesus’ logic is simple. How we regard Him before others is how He will regard us before His Father in heaven. It comes down to relational faithfulness. To acknowledge that “Jesus is all the world to me; my life, my joy, my all,” is to prize one’s relationship with Jesus. To disown Jesus before others is obviously to deny the relationship. As the saying goes, if we show Jesus what we think of Him, we can’t be surprised when He says He believes us. This is the very basics of faithful relationship, and that’s what Christianity is. There’s not a tit-for-tat transaction in the world that can fix a broken relationship. But there is sacrifice, forgiveness, pardon, and grace on the one hand, and conviction, contrition, and confession on the other. It’s tough on the ego, but it’s much simpler than trying to get the scales to balance or figure out if we’ve worked off some wrongdoing.
Paul emphasized this very point about faithfulness when he wrote to the Roman church, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.”
Being ashamed is embarrassment at a relationship. To not be ashamed is to be faithful to a relationship because of what that person means to you.
Here’s one more bit of good news. Jesus longs to restore and He gives us every opportunity to respond. Peter denied and disowned Jesus three times. Jesus died for him as a gift of love and sought Peter out in order to restore him. This fact leads me to believe that Jesus’ tough words here are true and real, but in an ultimate sense. Peter had once acknowledged Jesus big time. But under big time stress, he denied. Jesus sought Peter out so he could acknowledge Him again, that is, to repair the relationship. After all, that’s what Christianity is.
Application:
When does it seem hard or costly to acknowledge Jesus?
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, I acknowledge you as my life, my hope, and my all. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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