“Whoa, he went way out on a limb with that proposal.” A businessman carrying a briefcase laughed as he left the boardroom.
His colleague shrugged, “Well, it must have been important to him, I guess. ”
To go out on a limb is to take a chance, isn’t it? One man in the Bible did that, literally. Zacchaeus climbed a tree to get a better look at Jesus as He walked towards town. Zacchaeus was too short to see over the crowds, so instead of putting about how unfair it was for God to make him that way, he found an innovative, and somewhat risky way, to make sure he got a better view. It was that important to see Jesus. (Luke 19)
Are you willing to take such a daring action of faith to seek your Lord? That as the question I heard in a recent sermon on this passage. Zaccheus crawled as far as he dared out onto a limb, the preacher suggested. Jesus noticed him for his faith.
Many of us believers become comfortable with Jesus after a while. We stay near the ground with our feet well planted in our daily lives. We enjoy the canopy of His grace, and seek protection there from the elements that may beat down on us – heat of controversy, storms of life, winds of change. We might even say God made us to be where we are, and since we are human, complain about that a bit too much.
What if we climbed up to get a better view of the way Jesus sees things? What if we risked standing out instead of blending into the crowd? If we stopped making excuses and turned them into opportunities?
What if we stretched ourselves, inch by inch out onto that limb, and even when it began to bend, held on because we knew that was where God would touch our lives in a new way?
The Good News is that Jesus meets us wherever we are. We don’t have to win His attention. But what if, out of faith, we stretched ourselves and scooted out of our norm ? We just might get a whole new perspective.
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