 Over the course of my Christian walk, there have been numerous Bible verses that have really confused me. Then there's others that I thought I knew the meaning to, but then after further examination or teaching from a pastor, I come to find out that I'm actually wrong. In today's video, I'm going to run through six Bible verses that people often misunderstand or just struggle with in general. Stay tuned for the last one because it's what I believe is the most misunderstood Bible verse in Christian culture. If you're new to the channel, welcome here. My name's Isaac David. This is The Daily Disciple where I help you follow Jesus daily. If you enjoyed this content, subscribe because I'm putting out new videos every single week. As always, let's dive in. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. In a world that is so consumed with this idea of self-love, the Scriptures are a stark contrast to it, which emphasize love for God first and foremost, and then love for neighbor. God is imminently aware of our innate love for self, and instead chooses to emphasize where our primary affections should be oriented. What I've seen is people use verses like this and others that refer to hating the flesh or hating your life, and they use it as justification for saying that self-hate is biblical. I think of the person who struggles with self-hate and self-condemnation constantly tearing themselves down for what they did in their past. Soaking in this space of shame, but meanwhile we're told in the Scripture that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So wait, we shouldn't hate ourselves? Here's what I believe is a biblical distinction here. We're called in the Bible to hate our flesh, to hate the old man, to hate our sin, but ultimately we're to rejoice in the new creation that God is growing within us. For the Christian, this means that we don't need to sit in self-condemnation or shame to continually beat ourselves up as some sort of attribution or as payment for our sins, because Jesus has taken those all on himself, because we can recognize that Jesus has forgiven us truly and fully, but we're still called to put to death our flesh, to hate our flesh, to hate our sin. I heard it put this way, that those sin no longer reigns, it still remains in some sense. So we still need to navigate it and battle against it and hate it. Okay, I'm going to play with two words here. This idea of acceptance and approval. The idea of radical and complete self-approval is baloney, and I think it's unbiblical. We should identify things in our life that are incongruent with God and his commands and seek to have those things transformed, to invite God into those areas and say, God, take reign, take dominion over these aspects of our life, transform me. You see, the world encourages this kind of radical and complete self-approval that you are perfect just the way you are, that you do not need to change in any way, and you shouldn't seek to change because you're just great and you should just love yourself, but I don't think that's biblical at all. What we should look towards is this idea of self-acceptance, that there is a level that we are created in the image of God, that he has given us his forgiveness and his love and his acceptance of us, not because we deserve it, not because we're that cool, not because we're that good, but because of his grace. And now seeing that, seeing that acceptance flow from God, we can actually have that same acceptance for ourselves. Not saying that we're perfect just the way that we are. No, but realizing, hey, man, I am walking on this path of following Jesus, and I don't need to constantly be in this mode of what I need to become, I can simply just be at the same time. But you're definitely seeing attention here. We receive God's love and forgiveness and acceptance, and we're called to rest in that, that our yoke would be easy and our burden would be light, and at the same time, we're called to pick up our cross and follow Christ to hate our sin, to put to death our sin, to be continually not conforming to the ways of this world, but the image of Christ. So in this case, acceptance of ourselves doesn't mean total approval, and it definitely doesn't mean apathy towards our own sin. What it does mean is we have the security in Christ grounded on what he has said of us, what he has done in us, and when we look, when he looks at us, he sees us as his child cloth in Jesus' perfect righteousness. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. What Jesus is proposing here is not to hate everybody in your life and bunker up somewhere and read your Bible, but rather he's using this stark language to shift our perspective in orientation to what we believe is most priority in our life. You see, in Jesus' day, maybe not so much now, but family was everything. You'd have multiple generations living under one roof, eating together, laughing together, working together. That family bond was so tangible and important. You can think even now the extent and lengths you would go to protect and care for your own family. But then Jesus enters the scene and he preaches this radical message of picking up your cross, denying yourself, and following him. And though some might look at the verse that I read and consider that it would be incongruent with Jesus' general teachings, ultimately it's an overflow of Jesus' call on each person to lay down their life in pursuit of him. To sever every tide that precludes you from following him, emotional, spiritual, physical. As he puts in verse 27, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Jesus is reorienting our loves, he's rearranging our lives, he's redefining our limits of how far we can go to pursue him. Jesus isn't new to calling out people's disordered priorities or loves. Think of the rich young ruler when he came to Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And he says, go sell everything that you own. And he went away sad. Jesus knew in that moment that that man, he loved his money. But this passage in Luke hits extra hard for us because we consider family to be something that is just pure and good in a lot of ways. It is, it's not like money. Oh, of course you can love money too much and you can be greedy and all that, but you can love your family too much, or you can have disoriented loves towards your family. And ultimately Jesus is saying, yes, if I'm not first, if God is not first in your life, then your loves to place your family as your first love is to do them a great disservice, because the truth is they cannot fulfill the responsibility of being your savior. The beauty of God is that when we take delight in him and glorify him, the overflow of that is to have secure, bold love towards our family. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And this is the confidence that we have towards him. That if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. Now I've heard many people use these verses as justification for manifestation. Sometimes people will even equate prayer with just manifesting and think those are kind of basically the same thing, but I wanna suggest there is a major distinction here. Now I would never equate prayer with manifestation because manifestation is built on this idea that you basically dream up something big and the universe is then obligated to fulfill that dream or that vision. That's definitely not the way prayer works and it's definitely not the way that God works. So what about these verses though? They seem to imply that I just need to ask something or believe something and God is obligated to make it happen. So I'm thinking Lambo or the car insurance on that thing's gonna be crazy. So maybe like a billion dollars to a mansion, a healthy family, a successful career. Okay God, make it happen. But we're missing a piece here. Remember the condition. If we ask anything according to God's will, he will hear us. So no, God will not just give you a mansion because you asked for it. Ultimately, we don't have the mind of God so we don't know perfectly what his will is. But in my personal life, when I encounter unanswered prayers, I can go back to God's promises recognizing that he's working all things out for my good and his glory and then even though I might be experiencing a trial that I wish I was out of that I might pray for God to remove from me, I can know that that's developing perseverance within me and drawing me closer to God as my primary affection. The other verse gives us another condition that if I delight myself in the Lord, God would give me the desires of my heart. But think about this. When I delight myself in the Lord, when I'm truly delighting myself in the Lord, my desires and my heart begins to get that much closer to the heart of God, my desires, my wants, everything, it begins to get that much closer to what God wants. So the more I delight in the Lord, the more I'm praying things that are according to God's will and the more that those things are kind of coming to fruition in some sense. And so ultimately, my goal is not to just, oh, I gotta think up things so then I can pray to God so then those will happen. But rather my primary purpose and calling is to delight myself in the Lord that way my heart and my desires will align that much more closely with the heart of God. And when I pray, it will just be so congruent with what God is already doing. Now, at the same time, it's hard because we can pray for things that we believe are really good and are good. Maybe it's a salvation of a family member or a healing for a friend or a success of a particular ministry and we can get to this place of like, okay, God, why aren't you doing this? This is good. You're forced into basically three conclusions. That number one, God is either emotionally absent that he knows what's going on. He's powerful, but he just doesn't care. Or he's not powerful enough. He does really, really care and want to bring all these things to fruition, but he just can't do it because he's just not powerful enough to make it happen. Or the third, which I think is the biblical reality that God is powerful and he does care, but ultimately he's got a greater sovereign purpose behind what he's doing, the prayers that he answers and the prayers that he doesn't, all in service to bringing himself the most glory. The scripture continually testifies to the fact that God's ways are higher than our ways and his plans are better than our plans. That's one of those moments in the midst of an unanswered prayer is where we need to really have faith that that is true. Okay, this next part came after Nicodemus asked Jesus an important question. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter for a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and of spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Well, there you have it. You gotta be baptized in order to go to heaven. Baptism saves you, yippee-di-doo-di-day. Okay, we figured it out, not so fast. There are a bunch of places in the New Testament that refer to water to be clean, to be cleansed. It's not just talking about baptism. He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. This analogy that's being used there is to be washed, to be cleaned, to be cleansed is the reality of God's regenerating work within us and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. That's not referencing baptism, but rather the internal reality of what's going on within us when we're saved by God, when we're born again by his spirit. The ruler asked him, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Wait a minute, did Jesus just admit that he's not God? Okay, let's just take a close look at it. Sometimes when you read a verse or a couple of verses and they don't make sense, you just read them again and sometimes you find more clarity in it. So the ruler asked him, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Okay, that's the first thing, good teacher. When this man was approaching Jesus, did he understand Jesus to be God? No, no, he saw Jesus as just a regular rabbi duty. He says, good teacher, what must I do to be saved? And that makes sense with the context because it wasn't widely understood at all that Jesus was God or he even claimed to be God. Yet when the ruler comes up to Jesus and calls him good, he has no belief or understanding that Jesus is God. Jesus knows that. So when he refers to him as good, he wants to hone in on that and correct his understanding of good. Not that Jesus isn't good or God, but that this man was quick to attribute goodness to just somebody he thought was a teacher. Jesus was by no means denying his own dignity, but rather wanted to correct this man's understanding of God's holiness and man's fallenness. Judge not, lest ye be judged. We've all heard this, even from non-Christians. People love to throw this around, especially when people try to make judgments against particular things or discernments against certain teachers or pastors. What immediately flows out is judge not. But what does Jesus really mean here? Well, to find out, it might be good to read the next verse too, just to make sure there's nothing. He didn't add anything to it. So judge not, lest ye be judged. Okay, good, okay, the next verse here. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged. And with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Okay, so this adds some clarity here. He's not saying to never judge, but he's saying that the same judgment that you use will be used to measure you. So the question we should be asking is, are we playing the hypocrite when we're making these kind of judgment calls? Or can we stand up to the same measure that we put against other people? Honestly, each time we make a judgment, it should be an opportunity to hold up the mirror to ourselves, to say, do we actually meet the standards of what we're holding to somebody else to? And if we are, okay, great, there's a time to speak truth, and that is part of loving. Like you wouldn't let somebody walk towards the side of a cliff and knowing it's there and just say, well, I don't wanna judge, I don't wanna make a discernment here because they're just doing their own thing. No, you know that will be harmful for them. So love is to speak out. We should never equate cowardice with compassion. Unfortunately, it is sometimes a challenging discernment process to know what to say, when to say it. Like you can have all these good truths in your mind to know, yeah, I should speak up and say something that is true because that's part of loving somebody. But it's also to know what to say and when to say it. And ultimately, I think that's where we need to go back into prayer and focusing on praying without ceasing, to being reliant on God, to give us words to speak, to give us the timing and that is the most appropriate and ultimately just rely on him that he's gonna guide us. And even when we make a mistake, even when we kinda step out of balance or maybe say something that wasn't as we wanted to say, we know that we can find forgiveness and that God is gonna continue to work in our life and help us judge righteously and love people well and that tension between those two, he's gonna help us navigate that. Thanks so much for watching this video, guys. It's brought to you by my patrons on Patreon. If you're interested in supporting my mission of equipping people to follow Jesus Daily, hit the link in my description and sign up today. It would be a huge blessing. See you later, guys. God bless. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, X-Rom, for the Equity of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians 1st and 2nd, Thessalonians 1st and 2nd, Matthew, Titus.