Matthew 9

Continuing to go through the book of Matthew one chapter a day with one thought for the day. Today is Matthew chapter 9

Matthew 9:9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”
-Dallas Willard (The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship)

“If you don’t have a teacher you can’t have a disciple.”
-Dallas Willard

“…we [should] intend to make disciples and let converts happen instead of intending to make converts and let disciples happen…we are not talking about the duties of full time ministers, but the duty of a friend, a neighbor…”
-Dallas Willard

Out of Context

“I can’t help but wonder which came first: the impulse to sanitize and tame Jesus by encasing him in abstract theology, thereby removing our motivation for discipleship, or our natural repulsion toward discipleship that forced us to domesticate Jesus to let us off the hook. Either way, when Jesus is just true light from true light, ethereal and otherworldly, we are only ever called to adore him. But when he is true human, one who loved and healed, who served and taught, who suffered and died and rose again, he becomes one we can follow.”
p32 Exiles, Michael Frost