1 - Introduction - Living like a real Christian 4 - Blessed are the meek | Page 8

who have any right to throw anything at any one amongst us. Meek people are
the slowest to judge and to condemn.
Prayer Thought: Let us be intentional as we pray today about putting on the
mind of Christ. Won’t you pray that you will learn to see people the way Jesus sees
people and determine in your heart (because it is a choice) that you will guard
your lips from complaining, criticizing and condemning.

Friday
Reading: Psalm 119 v 89 – 112
Evidence FIVE: Meek people accept Christ on His terms.
There is a tendency in our churches today to try and modify the radical
teachings of Jesus so that they fit into our desired lifestyle. We have an
incredible ability to minimise the teachings of Jesus and make them less than
what he intended them to be. By human nature we try and contemporise the
teachings of Jesus and we try to make them less as we seek to “bring them up to
date”. It is so easy to rationalise the teachings of Christ. We look for excuses to
make them not as applicable today in our culture as they were back then in His.
We also tend to euphemise many of the statements of Jesus to make them more
palatable and less offensive. When we try and over-contextualise the teachings
of Christ, we water them down to making them suggestions as opposed to
commandments. The final enemy on my list is that we try hard to generalise the
teachings of Jesus so as to make them broader and for us a whole lot more
“grey”.
Accepting Christ on His terms is so important for us to understand to a greater
extent the radical nature of our faith. When Jesus says love your enemies and
bless those who curse you, He means love your enemies and bless those who
curse you. When Jesus says turn the other cheek, He means turn the other cheek.
When we make these radical teachings of Jesus less than they really are, we do
our faith a radical injustice. There are, I believe, as we look across world
religions, no religions with more radical teachings than those of Jesus. But if we
are honest over the course of the years we have so watered down the gospel and