After Jesus called his disciples and started his ministry, He performed many miracles for which the multitudes began to follow Him. They were looking for an earthly leader who could meet their physical needs, as He did when He fed and healed them. We need to look not for a Savior Who meets our physical needs and desires, but for One who meets our spiritual needs. The only thing that Jesus ever promised us about physical or material things was that we are to take up our cross daily, or die to physical desires, and that He would meet all our needs. Jesus never promised to give us everything that we saw and desired. Jesus spent time alone to pray to His heavenly Father, and so must we if we are to be able to be successful in following the will of God. Jesus taught us that we are not to worship simply for the praise of people. No matter how much we give, if we are doing it so that we receive the praise instead of God receiving the praise, it is spiritually worthless. Jesus had very little use for those who were supposed to be the religious leaders of the Jews, and they had no use for Him. We need to be careful that we do not begin to follow the teachings of religious leaders today instead of following the will of God. The disciples, who were the closest to Jesus physically still had ambitions based on physical results. They wanted to be closest to Jesus in His kingdom, which they still thought would be an earthly kingdom then, but when the time came to prove their devotion, they could not even pray with Him for an hour and they abandoned Him after His trial. Though Peter took up the sword to defend Jesus when He was being arrested, He did so for all the wrong reasons and denied even knowing Jesus after His arrest. Some people throughout the ages have made strong professions of faith and followed after Jesus as long as everything was going their way, only to abandon Him when real times of trouble come. We saw that given the choice between a bad sinner and Jesus that the world will often choose the bad sinner instead of Jesus. Though there are many other things that the book of Matthew teaches us, the final thing that I will mention is the most important. Jesus came to earth to live to show us how we are to live and He died to bring us salvation if we put our faith in Him as Savior and Lord. Death could not defeat Him and the grave could not hold Him, and the same is true of us if we follow Jesus as our Savior and Lord. We will next look at the book of Jeremiah.
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