Bear Each Other's Burdens

I have a friend who shared some family issues and I tried to encourage her and we prayed together. She told me the next day for the second time that she so appreciated it. God is awesome, because even though the situation has not changed she felt comforted, by the Lord. I am really bad at asking for help, because I ask the Lord when I am struggling. There has been times when I have asked friends to pray for me due to medical issues or I feel overwhelmed. God is always gracious to give me His peace.

I pride myself in being Superwoman at work. I can take on more than other people, while doing it better and faster! Arghhh! Do you hear the pride in that !? This week, I reached out to my bosses and staffing office to say “help! My boat is taking on water! I’m going under! My mouth is filling with water! Can you help me?! Will you take some of this off my plate?” This was hard for me to admit, much less to show to others that I am not superhuman after all! They did kindly help me and vowed to keep the water bailed out as I am busy training my new partner and we move at half (superhuman) speed. Yesterday they added 2 more buckets of water to my boat instead of keeping it bailing! I pray that I can continue to ask for help instead of my knee jerk response of “sure! Pile it on! I’ll Git R Done!”

Was being lead in a direction and it seemed as if God was changing directions. But being in the flesh I was not sure what and or where God was leading I reached out to a brother in Christ talked it out with him and he prayed along with me and my wife. Two days later God gave his answer and what a relief to see his will. It was not easy to come out of myself and ask for a brother to pray along with us but I believe that made the difference. By sharing our burden God was lifted and we where blessed with his divine leadership

My sister in law and I had a falling out recently that was a bigger falling out from my husbands family all together. I actually combined both of these challenges together to apologize for my part of the issue and asked her for help watching my 9 month old son which was such a blessing to all of us!

Our understanding of sexuality reflects a deep sense in all of us that we need to be made full. Sensing that we're incomplete, unholy, lonely, and cut off from something that was once part of a whole, we feel a deep disconnection within us. And part of what Jesus is showing us in his teaching and ministry is that this disconnection isn't ultimately sexual, it's spiritual. Anytime we think sex is going to be the thing that truly fulfills us truly satisfies us, we've made the common mistake. We've mistaken the model for the real thing, because ultimately the frustration, the yearning, the incompleteness we feel isn't for a sexual partner, but is for our creator. When Jesus walked this earth, he didn't just call himself the Christ; he called himself the bridegroom. By calling himself the bridegroom, Jesus is saying, “I have come to seal the deal. I've come to put some rings on fingers. I've come to make you mine. And to bring you into that marriage relationship with me”. And so, Jesus is showing that he is the only one who can fulfill the deepest needs in our hearts. It is important for us to remember that the most fully human and complete man who ever walked this earth was Jesus Christ. He was never married. He was never romantically involved. He never had sex. And so, the moment we think any one of those things is essential to being a complete human being we're saying that Jesus was not fully human. If we have Jesus, we ultimately lack nothing, because he is the one who ultimately satisfies us.

Jesus knows when you or anyone is looking at another person lustfully, and it matters to him how his children are thought about. It matters to Jesus how your sexuality is treated by other people. And this is precisely because Jesus has a high view of our sexuality. Jesus is protective of our sexuality, precisely because it is worth something and has high value. We may be sexual sinners, but we are still sexual sinners made in the image of God where we reflect of his dignity in this area of life, just as in all other areas of life. Now, this is in stark contrast to how many people think today in society. It's easy for people today to say, “Well, sex is just physical. It's just biology.” But sex was always designed by God to be not just physical. It was always meant to be about so much more than that. And so, Jesus is dignifying of it. It matters. God cares who you sleep with because you matter to him. But the final thing I want us to see is this, that Jesus is uniquely satisfying. If it's true that we have to lower view of sex culturally where we say it's just physical, another mistake, and we make it at the very same time, is to have too high a view of sex. We sometimes hear and make it seems as though sex is actually the key to being fulfilled, complete, and whole as a human being. And so, if society’s mistake is to say the sex doesn't mean anything, the other mistake is to say the sex means everything. 

Jesus explains that adultery encompasses much more than these listeners initially thought. It's about what you look at. It's about what you do with your mind. It's about how you think about someone. Jesus says, if you look at someone lustfully, you're breaking the commandment, because what you're doing in that moment is you are treating someone else's sexuality as a commodity. You're treating it as something that exists to be consumed by you, something that is there simply to satisfy your desires and meet your appetites. And here's why this matters. Jesus isn't simply quoting the commandment from the Old Testament, and he's not saying you're breaking some arbitrary rule from thousands of years ago. Jesus is saying, “When you look at someone lustfully, you're actually contradicting how God has designed things to work.”  We tend to think that sex is primarily about self-fulfillment or self-expression. But in the Bible, sex is primarily about self-giving. It's a means of fusing two people together at the very deepest level in mutual self-giving. That is what it is meant to be doing within a marriage.  Sex was created by God to be a way of giving yourself exclusively, permanently, and fully to another person. It was designed in the Bible to involve the whole aspect of who we are, the totality of ourselves to be given to someone else. If we're giving ourselves in that way to this other person, we're not giving ourselves in that way to anybody else. The kind of bond this creates is not designed to be broken without severe pain.

In Matthew 5 verse 27 and 28, we read that Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said that you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus would have been speaking to an audience of Jewish men at this time. And he's quoting from some of the 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and Jesus is showing people how there's a mismatch between how they've understood those commandments and what those commandments really mean. These men listening would have known this commandment likely by heart. And the vast majority of the men Jesus was speaking to would have been thinking, “I've not cheated on my wife. I've not messed around on anyone else's marriage. When it comes to this commandment, I'm actually feeling pretty good.” But the purpose of the 10 commandments was never to give us an opportunity to prove ourselves. That's not what the 10 commandments were given for. They weren't given by God so that we could all show God how great we are at living up to his standards. Instead, Jesus is saying the real purpose of the 10 commandments, the real purpose of God's law, was to show our natural incapacity to live as God designed us to. The whole point of those laws was to show us the only basis on which we could have a relationship with God would be the basis of his forgiveness and of his mercy and grace.