Yesterday at camp was Epiphany. God’s manifistation upon the world, His revealing of himself to the Gentiles…
In adult Bible study we went through all of the possible gospel texts for Epiphany. Small groups read and discussed the readings, then we reported back to the whole group.
One of the texts the group I was in read was the Matthew 5 section where Jesus explains and expands the 10 Commandments. He starts “you have heard it said ‘do not commit murder’, but if you think bad thoughts about somebody, you have committed murder in your mind.”. And he continues. As the group read this, we pondered where the epiphany was, we wondered how God was revealing himself to us in this passage, we wondered where the gospel was. It sounded all like law! And to make it even better we were sitting by a window to the kitchen, and the kitchen staff at camp had tunes playing while they work, and the song that is playing is Jonny Cash’s Ring of Fire. We started laughing about hiw God was revealing himself to us in the text and the song, you’re going down in a burning ring of fire, while the flames keep getting higher…
But really we talked about it some more and discovered that the law Jesus is giving us is gospel. The thing that not thinking bad, lustful, mean, dishonest thoughts towards others leads us to is right relationships. God has given us the gift of a right relationship with him, now he is trying to help us have that same relationship with each other. Live the gift!
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