I\u2019ve heard so many people give me opinions of what Jesus was like who have obviously never studied the Bible.\u00a0 They say silly things like he was a great teacher and he loved everybody and taught tolerance.\u00a0 But you usually don\u2019t see people clamoring to execute nice teachers who teach tolerance.\u00a0 Jesus was a hard man.\u00a0 He was full of compassion and kindness, but his teachings were not soft and tolerant in the slightest.\u00a0 He said things that made people want to kill him.\u00a0 And they did kill him.\u00a0 And he told his disciples to expect it.\u00a0 And he told them if they were going to follow him they should expect the same kind of treatment from people.<\/p>\n
I think too many church people think that being a Christian is about putting on a happy face and singing songs and getting along with everybody.\u00a0 But Jesus said that his teachings would cause people to hate your guts\u2014even your own family members sometimes.\u00a0 And he said if you\u2019re not ready to be hated by your own family, if you don\u2019t love me enough to give up everything else you love and prepare yourself for death, you\u2019re not ready to be my follower!\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t sound like the friendly tolerant Jesus that a lot of people talk about does it?\u00a0 But I dare you to read through the Gospels and then prove me wrong.<\/p>\n
One of the things Jesus said over and over is \u201cTake up your cross and follow me.\u201d\u00a0 In other words prepare yourself for extreme difficulty.\u00a0 Before it became a popular piece of jewelry, the cross was an implement of bloody, humiliating, painful, horrible death.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t pretty.\u00a0 And when people came to follow Jesus he said you\u2019re not ready to follow me until you\u2019re ready to die for me.\u00a0 Until you\u2019re ready to sacrifice yourself for the cause of saving other people from Hell, you\u2019re no good to me.<\/p>\n
Jesus never deserved to die.\u00a0 He never did anything wrong.\u00a0 But he condemned sin and hypocrisy, and people don\u2019t like it when you do that to them.\u00a0 And the crazy thing is, he died to offer even his executioners a way to find forgiveness and new life.\u00a0 He died to save people\u2014including everybody who wanted him dead at first.<\/p>\n
How about you?\u00a0 Are you ready to die to save anybody\u2014much less somebody who hates your guts.\u00a0 Are you ready to love your enemy and try to bring him salvation.\u00a0 Because if not, Jesus said, \u201cIf you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. \u00a0If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.\u201d\u00a0 Check it out in Matthew, chapter 10.<\/p>\n
Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a> (Duration: 42:20 — 19.4MB)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve heard so many people give me opinions of what Jesus was like who have obviously never studied the Bible.\u00a0 They say silly things like he was a great teacher and he loved everybody and taught tolerance.\u00a0 But you usually don\u2019t see people clamoring to execute nice teachers who teach tolerance.\u00a0 Jesus was a hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[154,151,69,6,77,155,152,79,153],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","tag-blood","tag-disciple","tag-discipline","tag-jesus","tag-mission","tag-sacrifice","tag-take-up-your-cross","tag-teaching","tag-the-cross"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":447,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}