Jesus was not the Messiah they were looking for

Today we read from Joel 1:1-3:21 in the One Year Bible. The very first sentence ties DIRECTLY into something God showed me today. What a coincidence, right?

So in verse two, we're asked "Has anything like this ever happened before?" And that question is one that we need to wrestle with. Let's think about Jesus.

Jesus came and walked among us. He was God Himself, incarnate. He was the One who created the universe. Before Abraham was, Jesus is ("I am.") Was this what Peter, James, John, and the other disciples were expecting? Absolutely not. They thought the Messiah was going to be a military leader who would, like the Maccabees, lead a revolt against Rome and free Israel to be its own country. 

What Jesus had planned was SO MUCH BIGGER than what they expected, they literally could not imagine it. Not a single follower of Jesus would have guessed that they would end up healing lepers and casting out demons and taking the Gospel of Jesus, raised from the dead, to the whole world, converting it to Christianity. They had no idea that they would all (except John) be martyred for their brand new faith. No one, not a single human being (besides Jesus) had any clue what Jesus was going to do to completely transform the world.

When the disciples started following Jesus, they had to give up their previous, MUCH SMALLER ideas about who Jesus was and what He came to do. And then they had to be completely open to what He told them, even though much of it (most of it?) made absolutely no sense to them. What they ended up doing didn't even have a name back then. They were creating the new church as they went. What they were doing was introducing a love so radical that it would literally remake the world into a new thing.

God comes to you, today. And He asks you to do the same thing. To lay down your ideas of what your day will look like. What your year will be like. What your life will be. And to allow Him to do something so much bigger that you can't even imagine it. He wants to love people through you in such a radical way that it literally changes the world.

What do you say?

God, thanks for showing us that when You start working in our lives, we can't even imagine what that will look like.

PS Jesus WAS the Messiah that had been prophesied. He just wasn't at ALL what anyone expected.