Explosive Seeds

Remember those vacation bible school lessons? Remember that happy jesus with the smiling face and the thumbs up? Remember how his teachings had all the gravity of a Veggie Tales video?

“And the moral of the story is…. Be nice to people! Now here is your cookie and Kool-Aid. Gobble it down and go play red rover.”

This misses the gravity of those stories. Treating the words of Jesus as good teachings with a happy ending misses the power, the punch and potency of the Living Truth.

God has come enfleshed in Jesus to speak what prophets and kings and angels longed to hear. He sowed explosive seeds that were looking for good soil. The Good Samaritan is not a quaint moral story for kids. It’s the sharpest of knives flung strongly by Jesus. It is a theological nuclear bomb, a philosophical land mine-all wrapped up tidily in this simple story. The more you handle the story, the more you get cut and encouraged and challenged and enlightened and humbled.

God in the Flesh
Don Everts
p74

I fear that people everywhere are still in that mode. They grow up and just wind up filling the seats of ‘big church’. They listen to the reading, hear that nice moral message, get their treat and skip off to play whatever games they played before entering into the church for the weekly dose of Jesus.

But God’s word is much more than a nice message. It’s more than a fable with a catchy slogan at the end. It’s life changing and powerful. It demands the Christ-follower to climb inside and transform.



Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides souls from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12


Everywhere we look we see hurting people. There are those hurt by the actions of others. We see friends in bondage to drugs, alcohol or sex. We find people destroying their lives to change the way they look because they hate themselves, inside or out. They need love, they need help, they need a powerful medicine that this world isn’t giving them.

How to Save a Life
The Fray

Let him know that you know best
Cause after all you do know best
Try to slip past his defense
Without granting innocence
Lay down a list of what is wrong
The things you've told him all along
And pray to God he hears you
And pray to God he hears you

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

What can change lives? What can drag people from the edge of ledge looking down and bring them back to hope? What can stop a life of pain and hatred?

There are many fancy programs and treatment centers for whatever ails you. I think most of them are positive things that help people straighten out their issues. But if you want REAL change... if you want your problems really washed away, there is only one councilor, one doctor, one program to try.

But friends, here is the warning. Jesus won’t just fix you a little. He won’t just cure one little thing that ails you. He wants to restore you completely. Sometimes this is scary.