The Healthy Tension
You can ignore it, you can outright reject it, you can give in to it, or you can commence a study of it to seek greater understanding.
Season 5, Episode 29 · The Healthy Tension
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The story behind the idea
Maybe a great way to illustrate this would be to talk about health in your body. Everybody knows that your body needs to be under some form of tension in order to develop and grow. You walk or you run or you stretch or you lift weights, you feel that burn and pain, you put it under weight, you push its limits, muscles tear down and regenerate, and you grow.
What stands out
When it comes to the concepts of Jesus or the teachings of Jesus or what it means to be a Christian, there are a lot of very challenging things left for you to learn. You may spend your entire life working on them, and that is exactly the kind of tension that pleases God. Many times you will be challenged to seek balance between almost conflicting sounding concepts when it's a whole lot easier to just ignore one of them and fall to the other side. When you are facing concepts like that, there is your tension.
Why it matters
Ultimately, I think it will challenge you and me to realize that it's not who He is that ought to draw all of our attention, but who we are as we approach Him. As we see in most of those stories, Jesus is reacting to the hearts of the people in front of him. Maybe we would do well to work some healthy tension in contemplating our own character so that we can experience great and tender mercies when we encounter His.
A faithful way forward
We read things in scripture about the effective prayer of a righteous man and the way that God heals people, and then sometimes people we love aren't healed. The scripture and the message of God is asking us to balance really difficult concepts, his power to heal, and the giving of life with the effects of sin on this world. You add to that the story of Job that says that sometimes trials have some intended outcome that we don't even understand.
Put it into practice
I guess today I just love this term because it says it's okay not to have all the answers. It's okay to be a seeker who's learning and growing and changing for my entire life. Being stretched and challenged, even on my most settled of ideas, is good for me. I will finish with this, and I really wish I had more time.
Take the idea with you.
- 01What idea from this study most needs my attention right now?
- 02Where does this challenge the way I am currently thinking or living?
- 03What is one faithful step I can take this week?
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