Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.  “He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.

John 14:23-24

What are the teachings of Jesus?  What are the lessons that He gave us?

Have you ever stopped to consider the parables?  Do you know what they mean?

Christianity today has done a good job with the main parts.  Jesus is the Way, there is no other.  No one comes to the Father, but by Him…   But, what of the rest?

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Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Matthew 8:20

What does it take to dissuade someone from pursuit?  A little hardship, a little persecution?  Lack of a comfortable home?

Jesus said,

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for My name’s sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life.

Matthew 19:29

What you lose is only temporary, what you gain is worth it.  It is Good News.

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Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

Mark 16:15-18

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Matthew 7:13-14

Each of these scriptures is a part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Each one of these passages was spoke by Jesus, given to the Apostles written for the disciples, and is absolutely relevant to us today.  If it was not, there would be no reason for the book.  Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

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If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.

Luke 14:26

The way of discipleship is the way to follow the cross.  The requirement of discipleship is to never look back.

Jesus said that the Kingdom was like a precious pearl, that, when found, a man sold all he had and bought it.  There is something about finding something that is worth it.  If you can see it, if you can recognize what you see, and correctly appraise it, it is not a hard choice to lose everything else to obtain the best. Read more…

Matthew 13:3-8

Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

Proverbs 4:23 says to keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issuings of life.  Jesus, when confronting Peter after His  resurrection, after that Peter had denied Him, asked Him three times, “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-17).  Three times, He asked Peter if he loved Him the way He himself loved Peter, unconditional, undemanding love.

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Many in the church would like to go deeper, they honestly would.  Despite modern church culture being filled with the seeds of the devil with false wisdom such as “Don’t be so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good”, or “God doesn’t want us to be perfect”, or, even the more scripturally documented lies such as “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and He is pleased with them.” and “God isn’t going to judge.”  (Malachi 2:17), despite these, many people would actually like to get free from the sin in their lives.  Some people are actually still grieved by the sin that they cannot seem to get free from.

Keep thy heart with all diligence; For out of it are the issues of life.

Proverbs 4:23

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A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher.

Luke 6:40

In this life of hungering and thirsting for the Lord, when will it ever be enough?  Jesus answers this clear enough:

A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master.  It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher, and the slave like his master. If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign the members of his household!

Matthew 10:24-25

It is enough to be like him.  For the slave to be like the master.

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Matthew 13:24-30

Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.  But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went away.  But when the wheat sprouted and bore grain, then the tares became evident also.  The slaves of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’  And he said to them, ‘An enemy has done this!’ The slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?’  But he said, ‘No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them. ‘Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, First gather up the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them up; but gather the wheat into my barn.

We are not in the barn yet, that one thing is for sure.  So, the wheat and the tares stand side-by-side.

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I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony.

John 3:11

One of the tenets of the Gospel is faith.  This can mean many things to some people, but a Bible definition goes something like this:  Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1).  While many people claim to have a “faith”, their claims prove to be nothing at all.  They are houses built upon sand (or worse), and they have no ability to stand up for the Truth.

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[A]s He is, so also are we in this world.

1 John 4:17 (portion)

The Kingdom is like yeast that fills a whole lump.  The Kingdom is like a seed, which grows to an entire tree.

No where in scripture is the Kingdom ever depicted as incomplete, nor as coming in multiple installments or dispensations.  In fact, from the parables of Jesus, the entirety of the Kingdom is completely contained in its inception, just as with a seed, or with a bit of yeast.

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