CRUX Sundays – Luke 15
Randall Creasey teaches from Luke 15 about the parable of the prodigal son
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John 7
Jesus cried out in the midst of the congregation that if any man thirst, to let him come to Christ and drink. Can you picture that? The Jews celebrating the longing for Messiah, and Messiah coming Himself to the celebration. The problem was however everyone just starred at Him. They didn’t take His words seriously. Do you take Christ seriously when He says that if you thirst, come to Him.
Have you come to Christ? Or is Christ just an idea, or a thing sitting in the corner in your room, or just some character in a book on your bookshelf? Is Christ a reality to you. That God sent His only son to this Earth to fulfill the law perfectly then have Him die a substitutionary death. Christ died a death we deserved. He died in our place. Let that sink in.
The reality is we all thirst, and Christ is the fulfillment of our thirst. He can satisfy what our soul needs, and what our soul needs is reconciliation to a holy and righteous God. Our soul longs for something we can’t provide. We have to look outside of ourself to give our soul what it needs. The only one who can reconcile our soul to a holy and righteous God, is God Himself. That is why He came to this earth Himself. He made a payment we couldn’t pay. He gave our soul something we couldn’t – reconciliation.
If you haven’t come to Christ today, you need to. There is nothing you can do in and of yourself to reconcile yourself to God. Look to Christ and turn from your sin.
Randall Creasey
True Food and True Drink
John 6:55
- “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:54-55).
With these words Jesus went from the “cool guy” who gave food miraculously to five thousand people to a controversial character whose teachings were “hard sayings.” And that’s all in one chapter! First, from here we might recognize that drinking his blood and eating his flesh is a part of communion, which we sometimes partake at church with the juice and the cracker (Luke 22:19-20). But that only is a representative of what happens when Christ give us salvation. Communion is not the “real thing.” Eating juice and crackers in itself doesn’t save us. Communion is a teaching tool to reveal to us the things that take place spiritually.
When Jesus feeds the five thousand, he senses that many follow just for the benefits: just for the food. So he clears it up: it’s not the food that sustains eternally, but him. All humans are made with an inward desire for eternity and meaning (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but we recognize that we are sinners and are separated from God for that same eternity, and we need righteousness to be reacquainted with Him. Thus, Jesus said “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6).
Anything other than righteousness will not satisfy nor will it get us into heaven. He doesn’t just give salvation: Jesus is salvation. He’s trying to let them know that they need the righteousness that he has; therefore they have to go through him. We don’t have to literally eat him, though. He used the illustration for the sacrifice he went through on the cross, so that just by confessing that Jesus is Lord of your life and that God raised him from the dead, we will indeed be saved (Romans 10:9).
Though it’s a small prayer that we can say for salvation, that doesn’t mean the sacrifice was small.
Blessings,
Jared
The Thirst for God
JOHN 4
The Lord has blessed all of us with a multitude of gifts which allow us to survive and prosper here on His earth. One of which is thirst. We all have a thirst for water, which gives us the desire and drive to search out and find water when we need it. An example would be as follows:
Imagine if you will that a man became shipwrecked on a deserted Island in the ocean. Very quickly he would become thirsty, and thus be motivated by his thirst to find life sustaining water. Without his thirst he may put off finding water until it is too late, then he would perish. What is also very important is that he satisfies this thirst with pure water; because it may be tempting to simply drink the sea water, which would seem to satisfy for a little while, however death would soon follow.
In today’s passage Jesus meets a woman at a well, and He used her obvious understanding of the human need for water to help her understand our need for something which we need far more than water, from an eternal perspective. Check out what Jesus says as we read John 4:13-14 (Jesus answered and said to her “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”). You see this women not only had a thirst for water, but she had a thirst that only a relationship with god could quench, however she was trying to satisfy it by having a multitude of relationships with men.
This is the deal: Whenever Adam and Eve sinned, all of creation was effected, and all who came after them were born sinners (meaning having missed the mark, or imperfect). For this reason, from birth we are all spiritually dead, and without a saving relationship with God, therefore not headed for heaven, but for hell. However God had already provided a way for our salvation, by predestining His one and only Son to die on the cross to pay the price for our sins. To make it easier gave all of us a “hole”, so to speak of, or a thirst which can only be filled and satisfied by God Himself.
- Ecclesiastes 3:11b declares, “He has put eternity in their hearts”
The problem is as follows: Because of our sinful nature we become enticed into trying to satisfy our eternal thirst, (which can only be truly quenched by God) with so many other things of this world. And just as our analogy illustrated, it is like a man on a deserted Island trying to satisfy his thirst with sea water; it may seem to quench the thirst for a while, but it will end in tragedy.
With this thought in mind today, let us all ask ourselves a very important question:
- ARE WE SATISFYING OUR THIRST FOR GOD WITH GOD HIMSELF (Prayer, Bible study, fellowship, and witnessing)?
- ARE WE FILLING OUR HEARTS PRIMARILY WITH OTHER THINGS (Relationships, video games, facebook etc.)