Hosanna Restoration Church

(Matthew 4:23 NLT)

What is the greatest teaching of Jesus? Now there is a question with a lot of different answers. Once when teaching on desiring the greatest gift of the Spirit, I was led to say that the greatest gift was the one that best fit the situation. If someone is sick they need healing, if they are bound they need deliverance and etc. Now God may well use a combination of the gifts to accomplish His purpose, but the fact remains that the greatest gift would be the one that best accomplishes the will of God at the time.

I believe that the same is true when it comes to the teachings of Jesus. Everyone has favorite portions of scripture, but there are times when one rises above another in our hearts as we read and as the Lord speaks to us. We can read Jesus’ teaching about taking His yoke upon us lots of times, but there comes a time when we understand that it is an easy yoke and we feel our burden slide away, that it becomes one of our most favorite teachings of all time. And it will remain a favorite, and we will find ourselves returning to it each time the we feel the load getting heavy. But we can not stop searching there.

It is important that we realize that everything Jesus taught was one more piece of the puzzle of the Kingdom of God, and one more revelation of who God is. After all, we must have faith in order to please God. To do this we must believe that “God is” the answer for everything! If there is any doubt about that in our minds or hearts, then we have a place where we need to let the teaching of Jesus fix our double-minded thinking.

Jesus was always teaching things that would blow away regular thinking. For instance when He told His disciples that if they loved their parents or even their own lives more than they loved Him, they would not be fit for the kingdom of heaven. Talk about having confidence in who He was. We must have that same confidence in His word, and in who He is in us. He is the same Jesus today that He was then, and He is very much wanting to complete the good work He has begun in us through His Word.

No matter which teaching is our favorite, there is another one yet to be learned and experienced. It is in taking the Word of God and the teachings of Jesus into our hearts and acting upon them, that we begin to see the kingdom of God take shape in and around us.

It only takes a prayer of believing in Jesus to graduate us into the Kingdom of God, but it will take an eternity in graduate school to learn all that God has to teach us. He is always ready to teach. Are we always wanting to learn?