"How Far Will You Go?" Matthew 2:1-12
Delivered to Smith Chapel UMC on January 4, 2009
Part One
Part Two
What I Didn't Say
Radical--When I was a young Christian, we took great pride and pleasure in saying we were radical Christians. When I look back now, it seems a bit arrogant of us. And yet, we really were radical in some ways. In other ways, we were probably just weird. But we were on the right track.
I say that because at least we understood one thing. That one thing was that Jesus didn't call us to be just like everyone else in the world. He wanted us to be more like He was.
When we do square roots in mathematics, we do it in a bracket called a radical. The word radical connotes getting to the root of the matter. That's what Jesus did, and that's what we should do. Too often we want to live on the surface. If we're following Jesus closely, we can't get away with that. He leads us into the root, or the heart, of the matter. It's there that we confront the real issues of life.
