Jesus did not practice what he preached. More accurately, he preached what he practiced. He lived it before he ever taught it. I heard a sermon once from a man (can’t remember his name right now but it was on sermonindex.net) who decided he would only preach on those things that he lived. It became difficult for him to find things to preach on, but when he did preach on what he believed he was truly living, he had a powerful anointing in his words. This practice slowly began to revolutionize his Christian life.
I was reflecting on this and thinking how easy it is to teach/preach on our convictions, but how much harder it is to preach only what we know we are truly living. But this is the way of Jesus. In fact the book of Acts begins with “In my former book Theophilus, I wrote to you about all that Jesus began to do and to teach.” Doing came before teaching. And I find it here in the words of Jesus himself in Matt 5:19: “Whoever practices and teaches these commandments will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Practicing…then teaching.
Clearly doing comes before teaching. But if I am to only teach what I live and believe and not just my convictions, on what subjects would I teach? Hmmm…..
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Memorization Journey
According to the schedule, today is review day of Mt. 3:13-5:48. I was able to go ahead and review chapters 1-5 and did find some areas that I do need to iron out. But I would give myself about a 95% so pretty good overall! It’s definitely a nice feeling of accomplishment.
Once again I’m reminded that we can do so much more than we think we can. We’re mainly limited by our beliefs. We say unwise things such as ‘I’m not good at memorizing,’ ‘I can’t memorize,’ or ‘I don’t have the time.’ But none of those are true. In fact, I just took a brain areas analysis and memory was my lowest score. Go figure. In the last 13 days I’ve memorized 5 chapters of the Bible. I’m glad I didn’t listen to that test. We really can do much, much more than we think.
