The Joshua Victor Theory

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Jesus and John the Baptist are talking through messengers in our reading. John, like many others in history, “played second fiddle” to someone more famous, namely Jesus. But John took pains to show that he was content with this role—he wasn’t seeking attention for himself. His proper focus was on elevating Jesus. As Jesus first publicly took the scene, John announced: “ He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30). But even though John knew his secondary role—Jesus shows how great this role was. John was more than a prophet , he is the very messenger prophesied seven centuries earlier by Isaiah and four centuries earlier by Malachi. The one to “prepare the way of the Lord”. Just think that faithful Israelites had been anticipating John’s coming for 7 centuries! That’s more than twice the history of the USA! And by waiting for his coming, they were ultimately waiting for the Messiah whom he would announce. ...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Today Jesus says that a little faith can do incredible things. ” If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you.” Elsewhere Jesus describes a faith that can cast mountains into the sea. If it only takes the faith of a tiny grain of mustard seed to do these amazing things, perhaps some of us are wondering why more Christians aren’t throwing trees and mountains into the ocean to demonstrate the power of their faith? Maybe they don’t even have faith this small? Unfortunately, however exciting that might be to see, Jesus doesn’t seem to be telling His disciples to throw more trees into the sea, or that it’s His Father’s will for them to do this. Rather, Jesus is instructing us about faith. He’s saying faith is needed for even more difficult and important jobs than tree-tossing and mountain throwing. And it’s not a gia...

1. Matt. 18—several teachings all about pitfalls to our salvation. Embedded parable of the one lost sheep; Jesus seeks after it because “it is not the will of [His] Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” In this chapter, Jesus is doing the work of a Good Shepherd to guard His sheep against the pitfalls that would cause them to perish, or keep them from the kingdom of heaven. Sheep wander, and in our blindness or error, we can get separated from the flock, and fall into personal harm or injury. Spiritually, the stakes couldn’t be higher, as Jesus illustrates through several examples in the reading. 2. Disciples walk into the first pitfall, of pride and exalting oneself. Who is the greatest? Jesus teaches humility—not to think highly of yourself, but to count others more significant than yourselves (Phil. 2:3). Humble like a child is the only way into the kingdom. Jesus turns the disciples’ (and our) paradigm upside down—adults are not the model of faith, b...