When Jesus received His followers out of the world, He got something besides their raw untrained persons. They had come to have certain deeply entrenched views of how to relate to Rome and Israel’s story. They wanted to follow Jesus without these views being changed or challenged. Though they claimed Him as Messiah, they wanted to shape Him to be the kind of Messiah they always envisioned. They wanted Him to bring the politics of their views into the coming new age. That old wine would not go into new wine skins. This all had to be changed to be His disciple. We must reject shaping Jesus after our ways and allow Him to shape us after His ways.
Lord, we admit that our agendas are often in rebellion against Your way of doing and being in the world. Truth is, sometimes we might think that Your Sermon on the Mount is not realistic for the world, so we have sought to domesticate You to be more palatable to our taste. Forgive us for these sins that distort You and Your Kingdom. Amen!
