Daily Blast - The Book of Matthew: Chapter 3
Scripture
“I baptize you with water to show that you have repented, but the one who will come after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. He is much greater than I am; and I am not good enough even to carry his sandals”
Reflection
Matthew 3 is split into two parts. We’re going to focus on the first part, which talks about John the Baptist. He’s baptising people and challenging the religious leaders of the time to ‘prove by the way that [they] live that [they] have… turned to God’ (v8) and not just rely on the fact that they’re Jews. We can see a lot of what is to come in stories about Jesus mirrored in this section of chapter 3. Jesus is going to start setting apart the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff’. The wheat is the bit of the grain that can be used, and the chaff is the wasted part that cannot be used for food and will get thrown away.
The idea behind the wheat/chaff image is that those of us that really truly believe in God and have asked Him into our lives are the wheat, and those who have not accepted God into their lives and who have deliberately turned against Him/aren’t following His ways will not get to go to heaven.
The thing about this section is that John talks about how the religious leaders – the people that seem so ‘holy’ and ‘perfect’, actually might miss out on the whole point of Jesus coming. Sometimes people can get caught up in the label of being a ‘Christian’, but not actually let God into their heart and change them to be more like Him. The great thing about Jesus coming to die in our place is, we don’t have to earn our salvation. This is what John is getting at. When we accept this, our behaviour and our thoughts change.
Challenge
The amazing thing about God is that just by saying ‘yes’ to Him and accepting Him into your heart, that’s the only thing He asks for. We can come to Him exactly as we are and He accepts and loves us, even with our rough edges, tempers, and broken parts. But the plan is not to leave us like that – God wants to make us more and more like Him. The only way He can do that is if we don’t hide the parts of us we’re ashamed or afraid of from Him. He won’t change what we try and keep from Him.
Sit down for a minute and close your eyes and ask God to show you any part of your life that you haven’t given to Him. It might be something really small that you didn’t think was important. It might be something really big that you’ve known you’ve been trying to deal with by yourself for a long time.
This next part is hard and might take you a few attempts (or many) to do, but I encourage you to give it to God. Literally. All that needs to be done is to say to Him, ‘here God, (fill in the blank here) is yours now. I don’t want it anymore. Use it to make me more like you’. It can literally be anything – a situation, a friendship/relationship, a difficult feeling or emotion, an illness, anything. Don’t dress it up or feel like you need to make it elaborate – a simple handing over of the situation/thing to God is all that’s required.