Are flashing red lights, danger signs, or the words “Hot: Do not touch” rude or mean?
No. They are warnings designed to protect us from harm.
The first word in Matthew 6 is “Beware”. Jesus is about to give us a warning that will protect us from something most dreadful. What’s the warning? What does he want us to avoid at all costs?
Using our relationship with God to glorify ourselves. From a biblical perspective, relationships are never intended for self advancement or self-promotion, but always as opportunities for self-giving love. So, using any relationship, let alone our relationship with God, as a way to glorify ourselves, is a contradiction in terms.
Though in Jesus’ day there weren’t nearly as many ways to use our relationships to advance and promote oneself (think social media), the broken tendency was still very much alive and well in the human heart. Listen in as we explore the problem and the prescription to this tendency in our effort to steadily become like Jesus from the inside out.