Vance Havner said: “A wife who is 8

Vance Havner said: “A wife who is 85% faithful to her husband is not faithful at all. There is no such thing as part-time loyalty to Jesus Christ.”

In relation to our gospel reading today, Jesus says: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” You know the‘sword,’ in Hebrew it is hereb and its Greek equivalent is machaira or rhomphaia, is an offensive weapon most often mentioned in the Bible. It may be short and straight or longer and slightly curved used for stabbing and slashing respectively.

But why Jesus says, ‘I do not bring peace but the sword?” And yet Jesus in the gospel is pictured out as a man of peace and the bearer of God’s peace; during His birth the angels sing of peace to men of goodwill (Lk 2:14); He exhorts His twelve apostles to wish peace to whatever house they enter when sends them for a mission (Matt 10:12); and after His resurrection, He wishes peace to the disciples and gives them His peace (John 20:19).

Actually Jesus requires His disciples, including ourselves, to have a complete dedication to Him. He reminds us of the seriousness with which we must take our relationship with Him. He forces us to make some fundamental and basic options in life. No one can be indifferent to Him. We are either for Him or against Him. Christ is such a challenge to our pride and love of comfort that we either love Him and hate our selfishness or cling to our selfishness and wind up becoming indifferent and opposed to Him. In other words, dedication, as somebody said, is not a certain thing or set of ‘things’ we do but a way of doing everything else. Dedication is functionally an adjective rather than a noun. We should make ourselves marked-and-practiced Christians for the Lord.

As additional realization, an unknown author said that Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) distinguished three stages in the spiritual development of a person: the aesthetic, the moral and the spiritual. The first stage a person is governed by the senses, impulse and emotion; the sphere of imagination and desire; you want nothing to limit your field of choice. His religion is about beauty and intense sensations. But if he is a serious person, he has to leap to the second stage: the stage where he begins to take moral standards and responsibilities seriously. But after struggling here he realizes it is impossible to be a moral person if he attempts only to be a moral person. His religion would be a very self-righteous one: judging and resenting others, with the danger of only pretending where he cannot succeed. He becomes more keenly aware of his alienation from God. The third stage is when he takes a leap of faith in God. God has to come to him from beyond all his efforts. Only this will open his heart and reveal to him what faith really is.

In connection to this Kierkegaard’s distinction, somebody said that Kierkegaard’s analysis is still relevant to our times. We can detain ourselves for years at the aesthetic level, reading beautiful books and yet taking few or no steps to lead a spiritual life. Many people become locked in stage two and their religion remains hard and grim and judgmental. But God will take us beyond it: one great day we will get the grace to “take up our cross and follow Him,” “to lose our life for his sake