By implication, those who are His family members by faith would be closer to Him than any family members by blood who do not trust in His name. Moreover, this is not a privilege only for men but also for women, for He takes believing men as His brothers and believing women as His sisters Mark — John Calvin comments that Jesus "admits all his disciples and all believers to the same honorable rank, as if they were his nearest relatives.
Consequently, Jesus is not more willing to listen to Mary, His mother, than He is to any other disciple. James and Joseph do not have an inside track to Christ that no one else shares. Jesus accepts all believers as equal members of His family—faith in Him is what is critical. Calvin comments that "every one who is regenerated by the Spirit, and gives himself up entirely to God for true justification, is thus admitted to the closest union with Christ, and becomes one with him.
By grace, He guards all of His people as members of His family. Teaching Series. Conference Messages. Tabletalk Magazine. Gift Certificates. We heard constantly in sermons, small groups, and conversation about the rapture, the anti-Christ, the mark of the beast, the tribulation, the millennium, the second coming of Jesus.
The horsemen and trumpets and Christ himself would be glorious, if I could remain faithful. If, in my own Peter-esque moments, I was strong enough to claim Christ and not deny him. When all my unbelieving friends were lining up to receive the mark of the beast, would I have the courage to say no? Only those who actually do the will of my father in heaven will enter. My angst over backsliders including, possibly, me was not helped by the Jack Chick tracts that surfaced everywhere during that time.
I was mesmerized and horrified by the most ubiquitous of them: This Was Your Life. In it, a man is visited by the grim reaper, then taken by an angel to his appointment with judgment, where he watches as though on a movie screen every sinful moment of his life. In the end, even though people thought he was a good person and he went to church on Sundays, he is tossed into the lake of fire. This punishment seems to be the direct result of enjoying a cocktail, telling a dirty joke as a teenager, and wondering who was winning a football game instead of paying attention to a sermon in church.
The last few pages of the tract depicted an alternate life for this man, in which he prays to receive Christ, visits the elderly, reads the Bible to children, and witnesses to the unsaved.
The back included a prayer one could recite and thereby attain salvation. I said the prayer every time I saw it, just in case. Ironically, those of us in that movement really thought we got it, thought that we more than anyone understood the gospel and all of its implications. The one comfort was that as far as I knew, those who left did so by choice, not by force. This proved to be the case with my biological family, too.
Shortly after the eighties began, my father left us for good, returning to Pennsylvania without a California testimony. The final nail in the coffin of idealized seventies Christianity, for me, came in the summer of A news report came on: Christian singer Keith Green—who I idolized, and had seen in concert—two of his children, and nine other people had died in a small-plane crash while Green was showing off his Last Days Ministries property.
Where did that leave us? In the suburbs, eventually, where we moved when my mother remarried. We still attended and participated in my childhood church, but it was different. With people moving out of the city and having kids and real jobs and real money and real mid-life crises, home gatherings were no longer so convenient.
Efforts were made. It was just that other things were now allowed to get in the way. And, as it turned out, you could fight with your church family as readily as with your biological family. It was frighteningly easy, in fact, to lose touch with anyone you wanted to lose touch with, or anyone who wanted to lose touch with you.
Minor or major doctrinal differences, arguments over whether or not to invest in new chairs or hymnals, the content of Sunday school curriculum, plain boredom…anything could be an excuse to leave if that was what one wanted. Some wanted to prolong and duplicate past experiences; others wanted to get out and start fresh somewhere else.
Jesus is not being disrespectful or rude to His mother or His brothers. Perhaps after He said this He went outside to speak with them. It would be obvious if we were obeying His Father, God the Father, in heaven. My Father in Heaven, please show me Your will. I know much of Your will is revealed in the Bible Rom 12; 1 Cor 13 , and if Your written will is revealed to me, I know that I should be doing that because it is pleasing to You.
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