Journey of Life Church

08/20/2026

CAN I TRUST JESUS WHEN i DON'T UNDERSTAND HIM?
(read it on substack at https://johnrallison.substack.com/p/can-i-trust-jesus-when-i-dont-understand?r=18t8eo)

Sometimes Jesus says or does things that can be pretty difficult to understand.

For instance, there was a time when Jesus had just fed five thousand people. Jesus tries to get away but people follow him. First, he tells them straight out, you're only here because you want more bread. And then he says something strange: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53, ESV).

I want you to hear that the way the crowd heard it. Not like it’s in The Bible, but as something a teacher just said to you when he standing next to you, looking you in the eyes, face-to-face. The result of that assertion was perfectly reasonable: many of Jesus’ disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.

Seeing so many people leave, Jesus turns to the twelve and asks if they want to leave too. Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-69, ESV).

Notice what Peter doesn't say. He doesn't say, oh, of course, eating flesh and drinking blood, which makes perfect sense. He doesn't understand it any better than the ones who left. What he has is something else. He's seen too much. He's heard too much. He knows who Jesus is and what Jesus is like. And for Peter, that’s enough.

I think that's a principle we can actually use in our everyday lives. “Interpret the unclear through the clear.” When something in our Christian faith is hard to understand, whether it's a passage in Scripture or a season in your life, remember who Jesus is, and let that be enough for the moment.

An episode in the Gospel of Matthew provides an example on which to apply this principle. In Matthew 15, a Canaanite woman comes to Jesus begging him to heal her daughter. And Jesus doesn't answer her. Jesus ignores her completely. His disciples ask him to send her away because she won't stop crying out. And when Jesus finally does speak, he says it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. The “dogs”!

If you read that as just an incident, stripped of everything else you know, you'd have to ask yourself the hard question: was Jesus being a little bit prejudiced? It’s a reasonable question.

But it's not the whole story. This is a man who spoke openly with a Samaritan woman at a well, a woman with a reputation, at the time of day she chose specifically to avoid people. This is a man who healed the servant of a Roman centurion, an officer in the very army occupying his people. This is a man who stood up in his hometown synagogue and reminded everyone that Elijah was sent to a foreign widow and Elisha healed a foreign general, and they got so angry they tried to throw him off a cliff for saying it.

Whatever is going on with the Canaanite woman, it is not that Jesus drew a line with his own people on one side and everyone else on the other. His whole life argues against that reading.

So, what is going on? I'm not going to tell you I've got it fully worked out. Maybe he was testing his disciples, holding up a mirror to their own assumptions about outsiders. Maybe he was drawing out her faith. I don't know for certain and my point in this blog is that we don’t have to.

What is clear is who Jesus is, through the cross and through the resurrection. And whatever he was doing with that woman, we can be certain of this much: it was for love. Greater love has no one than this, that he would lay down his life for his friends. Jesus laid down his life for her too.

Paul runs into a version of this same wall in Romans 11. He's wrestling with what looks, on paper, like a contradiction: how can the Jewish people be, in one sense, enemies of the gospel, and in another sense, still beloved because of what God promised their ancestors? Paul doesn't land on a clean answer. He lands on this instead: “God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32, ESV). Nobody gets to stand ahead of anyone else in line. Everybody depends equally on mercy, which means nobody has to perform their way into it.

And then Paul does something I think is important for us human creatures. He doesn't keep arguing about his case. And he doesn’t get mad because he may not fully understand. He breaks into worship. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33, ESV). It's the same thing that happened to Job when God finally showed up. Job doesn't get his questions answered. He just says, “I spoke without understanding.” God’s presence turns out to be the source of peace and perspective, not a full understanding of his suffering.

Isaiah looked forward to a day when God's house would be, in his words, “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7, ESV). The invitation had always been open to anyone who wanted in. But Isaiah saw it widening further than anyone expected. And Jesus, risen from the dead, sends his disciples out to all nations, the same phrase, the same promise, now fully opened.

Back to today’s point. Jesus is the exact representation of God, the clearest picture we have of who God is and what God is like. So, when Scripture hands you something strange or difficult to understand — and it will, if you really engage it — you read it through Jesus. You read that passage or incident in the light of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

And when your own life hands you something you can't make sense of, you can do the same thing.

We all live just fine without understanding everything. Do you understand how DNA replicates? How does the screen on your phone work? How exactly does your body take digest food and turn it into energy that your body can use to power your eyes to read this blog? There's a lot we all live with quite comfortably without understanding it. And it doesn't ruin us.

So, when you run across hard passage of scripture or hard passages in your life, I encourage you to anchor your understanding and your peace in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Confession time for me. I was preaching away on this topic and, on the fly, I offered a simple statement of faith that I thought was recorded directly in the scriptures as an early Christian creed. It’s not, though it’s still an awesome phrase and encapsulates several early creedal statements into one short phrase:

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

This is what we know. Try saying this when you are confused and can’t make sense of a scripture or situation. Try saying this when you are suffering and aren’t sure how much more you can handle.

It covers everything. God’s love for you. Your sin, forgiven. God’s power over all, including death itself. Our bankable hope in Jesus. It’s a phrase worth keeping.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

I don't have to understand everything. I just have to trust who I know Jesus to be.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

STAY CONNECTED:

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• Watch sermons on YouTube:
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Pastor John Rallison
Redeemer Lutheran Church | Salem, Oregon
https://www.RedeemerSalem.org

08/20/2026

Can I trust Jesus when I don't understand him? New Podcast Episode

Jesus calls a woman a dog? He says I have to eat his flesh? What??
What do you do when Jesus says and does things that are hard to understand. We're going there in today's podcast.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lXHW2CxfyguGTtoK5sXkZ?si=NzPi9jbyQtecLtJiQ6PpAA

08/20/2026

Can I trust Jesus when I don't understand him?

A woman begs Jesus for help. He says nothing. Then he compares her ...

08/11/2026

https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/M5iEnsIGw5b

Most sermons on Peter walking on water turn it into

04/30/2026

https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/cB8QFbK9H2b

Most of us say we want clarity. What we really want is certainty about the future. And Jesus never promised that. What he promised was his own presence, every step of the way.In this final message of the series Jesus. Right Where You Are, Pastor John Rallison explores Psalm 23 and John 10, and what....

04/29/2026

WE DON'T GET A MAP. WE GET A SHEPHERD.

Most of us say we want clarity. What we actually want is certainty. We want to know how the story ends before we agree to live it. We want a map, full route, no surprises, destination guaranteed.

That is understandable. But it is something Jesus never promised.
He said, in the world you will have tribulation. He said, take heart, I have overcome the world. He promised presence. He promised ultimate victory. He did not promise a preview of how your particular situation resolves. And that distinction matters more than we usually acknowledge, because most of our anxiety about the future is really a demand for certainty dressed up as a request for clarity.

This is the third post in the series "Jesus. Right Where You Are," built on the conviction that the risen Christ meets people in the actual conditions of their lives. The first post explored how Jesus enters fearful places in our lives and speaks peace before we have solved anything. The second explored how he walks alongside disappointed people and re-anchors their hope in what he has truly promised. This one is about uncertainty, and the surprising gift Jesus offers in the middle of it.

The Shepherd Does Not Hand the Sheep a Map

In John 10, Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd. The sheep hear his voice. He calls them by name. He goes before them. The sheep follow not because they have been given a detailed itinerary but because they know the shepherd. Direction in the Christian life is relational before it is informational. You learn to recognize a voice. That takes time, exposure, and some quiet.

Psalm 23 makes the same point through its verbs. He leads. He restores. He guides. Not he showed me the route in advance. Not he explained what was coming. He leads. Present tense. One step at a time.

And John 15 adds the image that ties it together. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. The word is abide, not strategize. The fruit comes from staying connected, not from having figured out the road ahead.

The Rod and the Staff

Psalm 23:4 gets to the heart of this: even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

The reason David is not afraid in the valley is not that he knows what happens next. It comes down to a single truth: you are with me.

The rod was a short heavy club the shepherd carried in his belt. He used it to fight off predators, to examine each sheep by parting the wool in search of hidden wounds, and to redirect a wandering sheep with a startling throw near its path. Nothing could reach the flock without going through the shepherd first.

The staff was long, five or six feet, with a curved crook at the top. It could steer a sheep with gentle pressure on the flank, or lift one from a pit. A large part of why sheep are so vulnerable and need so much guidance has to do with the way they see the world.

Sheep have nearly 340 degrees of panoramic vision. But their binocular overlap, the zone where both eyes work together to judge depth and distance, is only about 25 degrees directly in front. Everywhere else the world is essentially flat. No depth, no spatial certainty. Which means in a rocky canyon at dusk, a sheep is not blind. It is overwhelmed. Every shadow looks like a hole. Every shift of light looks like a threat. Its own eyes are giving it unreliable information.

So the shepherd lays the staff against the sheep's side. Steady. Constant. The sheep cannot trust what its eyes are telling it. But it can feel the shepherd. That physical contact overrides the visual confusion. The staff says: I am here. The ground is real. Keep walking.

This is actually a more honest picture of how most of us experience uncertainty than the image of total darkness. Sometimes the overwhelm is fear or grief, where every shadow looks like a threat and we cannot trust what we are seeing. But at other times it is the sheer volume of information, options, and voices competing for our attention. Even good choices in abundance can paralyze us, causing us to freeze, decide poorly, or not decide at all. Our vision goes flat not only in the valley but in the noise of ordinary life. And in all of it, the shepherd does not fix our vision. He puts the staff against our side and stays there.

Christ Is the Concrete Thing

At some point, if you have been sitting with this long enough, a reasonable voice inside you says: that is all well and good, but I need something concrete. Something I can actually do.

That instinct is understandable. But here is the gentle pushback: Christ is not vague. He is not a feeling or a spiritual atmosphere. John says the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth. Grace and truth are not abstractions. They are always available. You may not know what the next year holds. You may have three options and no idea which one is right. But you can always ask what grace looks like here. You can always ask what truth looks like here. Speaking truthfully and lovingly is always the next faithful thing, even when nothing else is clear.

That is not nothing. That is actually everything.

The Presence Is the Clarity

People come to the question of direction wanting clarity because they believe clarity will bring them peace. If I just knew what to do, I could rest. But that gets it exactly backwards.

Peace does not come from knowing the road ahead. It comes from knowing who walks with you.

The disciples behind locked doors did not get an explanation of what would happen next. They got Jesus standing in the room, saying peace. The disciples on the road to Emmaus did not get a revised plan. They got Jesus walking beside them, opening the Scriptures, making himself known. In uncertainty, you do not get a map. You get a shepherd.

Sometimes there is a next step you can see, and you should take it. But sometimes the way forward stays dark, and that is not a failure of faith. That is the valley of the shadow of death, and the promise for that place is not illumination. It is presence.

Not because I can see. Because he is there.

The risen Christ is not waiting for you to figure out your life before he shows up. He is already present. He goes before you. His rod and his staff are with you in the valley.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." Proverbs 3:5–6

He is the direction you are looking for. Not a map. A shepherd. And he knows the way.

STAY CONNECTED:

• Receive weekly sermon summaries by email:
https://mailchi.mp/92230176913c/redeemer-email-signup-landing-page

• Read more reflections on Substack:
https://johnrallison.substack.com/

• Watch more sermons on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ozqxlON8mRFDt6Y0-nfb4qm5sjnQynm

• Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/40R6TAOIWGgjqOz8fVibMd?si=b9fba79c1eac491b

Pastor John Rallison
Redeemer Lutheran Church | Salem, Oregon
https://www.RedeemerSalem.org

04/28/2026

Most of us say we want clarity. But what Jesus offers is better than clarity. You don't need a map. You need a shepherd.

Better Than Clarity: Not a Map. A Shepherd. | 3/3 in the series "Jesus. Right Where You Are"

04/26/2026

Can't get to church this morning? Join us live on our YouTube channel (or catch the replay). The sermon is 3 of a 3-message series called "Jesus. Right where you are." How Jesus brings peace, hope, and clarity to your life.

(If you just want the sermon, the sermon gets posted as a separate video every week, usually on Tuesday mornings.)

Redeemer Lutheran Church, Salem, OR. Worship services and sermons for your spiritual growth.

04/24/2026

Positive thinking is powerful, but it cannot carry you through suffering and death. Christian hope is different — it is the way the soul sets itself toward the future in light of the risen Christ, and it holds whether or not things get better. Hear it on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7CUd9zr8tA8oTmKxsaGu21?si=D0lMe-IQSGeglhUAz--NZQ

04/23/2026

HOPE THAT ACTUALLY HOLDS
Positive thinking is powerful. But there is a hope that survives the worst.

There is a famous observation from Admiral James Stockdale, who spent years as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton. He noticed that the prisoners divided into three groups.

The first group lost hope entirely. That is not hard to understand.

The second group kept hope alive, but they tied it to a timeline. “We’ll be out by Christmas.” Christmas would come and go. “By Easter, then.” Easter would pass. “Surely by summer.” And when summer ended and nothing had changed, those people eventually broke. The hope that was supposed to sustain them became the thing that destroyed them.

The third group — the ones who survived psychologically intact — held on to hope without attaching it to a predicted outcome. They refused to believe they had been abandoned. They faced reality honestly. And they did not try to encourage themselves with promises nobody had ever actually made.

Stockdale called this a paradox. I call it a pretty good description of what the Bible means by hope.

There is a version of hope that is really just optimism dressed up in religious language. It says: trust God, and things will work out. Hang in there, because better days are just around the corner. That version of hope has a lot in common with positive thinking, and I want to be careful here, because positive thinking is not nothing. The way you approach your life does shape your life. Resilience matters. Attitude matters.

But positive thinking is a tool for navigating the local and the manageable. It helps you get through difficult seasons. It cannot carry you through suffering and death. It cannot hold you when the thing you feared most actually happens. And sooner or later, for all of us, it will.

I am not a motivational speaker. I am a pastor. And those are different jobs.

The hope we are talking about when we talk about Christian hope is not confidence that things will improve. It is something deeper and sturdier than that. It has to be, because in many parts of the world, following Jesus leads not to success but to suffering. There are Christians in Nigeria right now who are watching their churches burned and their communities destroyed. The sun-will-come-out-tomorrow version of hope has nothing to say to them. Christian hope has to hold in Nigeria or it does not hold at all.

There is a story in Luke 24 that puts all of this in focus.

On the evening of the first Easter, two disciples are walking home from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. They are in grief. They are confused. Someone joins them on the road whom they do not recognize. He asks what they are talking about. They stop walking. The text says they stood still, looking sad.

One of them, Cleopas, tells the story. “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.” (Luke 24:19-24, ESV)

The line that names everything is this: But we had hoped.

Past tense. Hope had been something they held, and now it was gone… or so they thought. Their hope had been real. It just had not been aimed correctly. They had hoped for a military and political deliverer. Jesus had come for something far larger. He came to defeat death itself. They were not wrong to hope. They had hoped for the wrong thing.

Jesus walks with them. He does not immediately reveal himself. Instead he opens the Scriptures, and something begins to happen inside them. Later they say, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?” That burning was not recognition of Jesus. They did not know yet who was walking with them. It was the Word doing what the Word does. It speaks to our hearts with the energy of the Holy Spirit.

Eventually, at the table, Jesus breaks bread. Their eyes are opened and they recognize him. And he vanishes.

They get up immediately and walk back to Jerusalem. Nothing about their situation has changed. The religious leaders are still hostile. The movement is still at risk. The world has not been repaired. But Jesus is alive, and that changes the frame of everything.

Christian hope is not about what you hope for. It is about in whom your hope rests.

That is a more important distinction than it might sound. We all have legitimate hopes — for health, for reconciliation, for provision, for the people we love to be okay. Those are real. But they are not the foundation. They cannot be, because they are not guaranteed. Jesus never promised that every hard situation resolves the way we want it to. He did promise that he would never leave us. He promised that nothing can separate us from the love of God. He promised that death does not get the final word.

Hope, in the Christian sense, is the way the soul sets itself toward the future in light of the risen Christ.

That kind of hope is not just something you think about. It changes how you live. It is what gets you out of bed on a day when everything feels unresolved. It is what gives you the courage to have the conversation you know needs to happen, even when you have no confidence it will go well. It is what lets you keep loving someone when the love is not being returned. It is what keeps you from saying something you will regret because you are afraid and want to force the situation. It is what lets you wait when every anxious impulse is pushing you to act — and act when fear is the only thing telling you to stay still. It is what lets you forgive when everything in you wants to hold on to it. It is what lets you endure when nothing seems to be changing.

Because the goal is not a particular outcome. The goal is faithfulness to Christ — walking with him into whatever is next.

Paul wrote near the end of his life: “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to him.” (2 Timothy 1:12, ESV)

Not what I hoped for. Whom I have trusted.

That is the question worth asking when you are facing something hard: Am I looking at this in light of the resurrection, or in light of my fear?

Hope is the way we walk in faith. Not a feeling to generate. Not a timeline to protect. A person to trust.

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STAY CONNECTED:

• Receive weekly sermon summaries by email:
https://mailchi.mp/92230176913c/redeemer-email-signup-landing-page

• Read more reflections on Substack:
https://johnrallison.substack.com/

• Watch more sermons on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ozqxlON8mRFDt6Y0-nfb4qm5sjnQynm

• Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/40R6TAOIWGgjqOz8fVibMd?si=b9fba79c1eac491b

Pastor John Rallison
Redeemer Lutheran Church | Salem, Oregon
https://www.RedeemerSalem.org