JUNE 29 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#21 “What do you think about fish, taxes, lost sheep, forgiveness, and your fellow servants?” (Matthew 17:25, 18:12,33)

JUNE 29  THE JESUS QUESTIONS  JQ#21  “What do you think about fish, taxes, lost sheep, forgiveness, and your fellow servants?” (Matthew 17:25, 18:12,33)

LIVING FOR JESUS  Daily Prayer   

JESUS, no other name but the Name of Jesus carries the weight of eternity for every soul that ever lived! Every soul ever created by God has uttered or will utter the name “Jesus” and Lord we know that when Your Precious Name is spoken from the heart in true humility that You will respond with Peace, Love, and Joy that can only come from speaking that Name given by the Father Himself that every soul that utters that Name with Respect and Honor will be Respected and Honored in return by adoption into the Family of God through God’s Plan of Salvation. O Precious Name, Jesus, Jesus, JESUS!!! May my life reflect the Glory and Grace and the Mercy that has been extended to this sinner because of the Power of the Name of JESUS!     AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

Jesus Teaches us so many side Lessons while He is Teaching a specific Lesson that we must always stop and look at all the circumstances involved with each Jesus Question and we must also keep in mind that the “Question” is being asked by One that has Supreme Knowledge of all things, He knows the deepest desires of our hearts as well as all the thoughts we think inwardly, even though those thoughts are so deep in our selfish desires that they do not even surface to our own consciousness — yet He still knows every thought that we have!?!? This knowledge is revealed to us if we will look at the circumstance surrounding this specific incident and the most unexpected way that Jesus resolves the issue with the most unusual use for fish and faith that we will ever encounter. First we must look at the “characters” involved and they are: (1) Jesus, (2) Peter [Simon Bar-Jonah], (3) Tax collectors from the temple at Capernaum, (4) a fish, and (5) a piece of money. Let’s look at each “character” separately to get the full impact of this scenario and the miracle produced from the most unlikely source of tax revenue ever recorded! First to consider is Jesus — Jesus has been casting out demons, raising people from the dead, feeding the multitudes, giving sight to the blind, healing every sickness brought to Him, walking on water, calming storms, and teaching about the “Spiritual” life being lived in our “eternal souls”, our “physical” bodies being temporary, the eventually of standing before Almighty God and the Final Judgement, and the reality of both Heaven and fellowship with the Father and of Hell and our eternal separation from God Himself, and the scary reality IS that our eternity will be determined by how responsible we are with the Gift of Free Will bestowed upon us unconditionally by the Supreme Power!!! So when we look at the Life lived in the flesh by Jesus so far, we can only come to One Conclusion: Jesus is the Christ and is the Only Begotten Son of the Father, and Jesus is both “fully man” born of flesh and “fully God” for He is the earthly embodiment of God’s Holy Spirit!!! So the first “character” is “God’s Son” on a Mission from God, Jesus is a Gift from God because God “so loved the world” that God has given “His Only Begotten Son” for a single purpose, that by belief in Jesus being God’s Son that all those that “believe” will never “perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The second “character” is Simon Bar-Jonah whom Jesus named “Peter” when Jesus called Simon the fisherman to follow Him and be His disciple. Peter is the first one to declare that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” and it was Peter that got out of the boat during a great storm at sea and actually walked a couple of steps on the water Himself before sinking beneath the waves and crying “Jesus save me!”.  Our third character is a “tax collector” sent from the synagogue at Capernaum to collect the temple tax from Jesus and it was the tax collector that started the miracle by asking Peter if Jesus is going to “pay the temple tax?” — just another innocent “tax collector” doing their job of tracking down and collecting “taxes” from everyone they can find?? The fourth character is the most unusual of all when considering God, His followers, and tax collectors hunting down God and collecting taxes from Him, and that character is almost as slimy as the tax collector — enter character #4, the “fish”. The last character is not usually thought of as a “character per se” but everyone knows that all our personalities are affected by “money” and so we are going to give “a piece of money” the status of a “character” in this scene that denies human explanation anyway. Now that we have all the “characters” identified this would be a good time to exercise our individual intellects and without reading the scriptures further that we at this point stop and consider the circumstance and ask the cliche “W W J D ?” and just try to “imagine” why in this circumstance with these really odd characters that Jesus would first ask Peter JQ#21 — “What do you think, Simon?” (Matthew 17:25) Don’t cheat by reading ahead but just try to imagine a scenario using all these “characters” and put yourself in Peter’s shoes and use your own intellect and answer how you “think” Jesus is going to handle this tax collector?!?!? In other words, fill in the blank with your name as Jesus asks YOU, “What do you think, ____(YOUR NAME GOES HERE)_______________?” (Matthew 17:25)