Day 3: God felt hunger, what's your excuse?

Betrayal from someone close lands like an inside attack, and we feel it in our gut and our pride. We look at Judas in Matthew 26 and see how Jesus chooses forgiveness and peace even when He knows exactly what’s happening. 

• trust in uniformed life and why inside betrayal cuts deeper 
• Judas selling Jesus out for thirty pieces of silver 
• Jesus washing Judas’ feet and sharing the table anyway 
• how bitterness turns into a “safer” security blanket 
• Romans 12 and the limits of what we can control 
• a practical response that replaces retaliation with prayer 

So our action step today is this is think of someone who has frustrated you or talked down to you or flat out betrayed your trust recently. Instead of replaying the argument in your head for the hundredth time or figuring out how to get even with them, force yourself to pray specifically for their well being today. Ask God to bless them. 

Transcript

Welcome And Theme Of Betrayal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, it's Pastor Josh. Welcome back to this week's weekly devotional. If God Felt Hunger, what is our excuse? And today we are going to be looking at betrayal. See, when you're in a uniform, whether it's serving in the military or pulling a shift as a cop or even a firefighter to a lesser extent, L-O-L, just a joke if you were a firefighter, you quickly learn that your survival depends on the guy that is standing next to you. You have to know that without a shadow of a doubt, that the person covering your six is actually got your back. You can brace yourself from an attack from the outside, and you know what? You train for that. But attack from the inside, from someone in your inner circle, someone you've trusted with your life, that just completely hits in a different way. It knocks the wind out of you in a different way. It crushes your heart in a completely different way. And that's what we see in Matthew 26. Judas sells Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver. Jesus wasn't caught off guard by a sudden shift in his loyalty. He knew exactly what was happening. He knew that Judas had been doing behind closed doors. Yet, knowing all of that, Jesus still knelt down and washed his feet. He broke bread with him at the table. See, Jesus knows exactly what it feels like to have people talk behind his back, to have people betray him, to have people say one thing to his face and then do something completely different. He knows what it's like for his inner circle to fail him, for people to lie about him. Think about it, they called him a drunkard and a glutton, a friend of sinners. And he knows what it's like to face the deepest, most personal kind of betrayal. See, our challenge today is when we get burned by people we trust, our immediate fleshly reflex is to retaliate. We put up a wall, we cut them off, and we make sure that everyone knows what they did to us. Social media all of a sudden becomes our best friend, doesn't it? We carry that bitterness around with us like a heavy rucksack because honestly, holding a grudge feels a lot safer than doing the hard, vulnerable work of forgiveness. It becomes a security blanket that we never want to give up, but Jesus modeled a completely different way to operate under fire. He endured the ultimate betrayal and the ultimate character assassination, and he still chose to lay his life down. He still went, Father forgive them, they know not what they do. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12, as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Notice it doesn't say control the other person, because you can't control what they say or do. As far as it depends on you, are you living peacefully? Are you letting someone else's betrayal dictate your attitude and weigh you down? Are you being controlled by everyone else? So our action step today is this is think of someone who has frustrated you or talked down to you or flat out betrayed your trust recently. Instead of replaying the argument in your head for the hundredth time or figuring out how to get even with them, force yourself to pray specifically for their well being today. Ask God to bless them. It will feel completely unnatural to your flesh, but it is exactly what Jesus did for us.