Cues are so hard to decipher. Especially the non-verbal cues that you’re somehow supposed to understand. But how could you understand them when nobody explained it to you? Have you ever been in a meeting and your team is giving you signs and you’re just staring at them, hoping they would say something, but you keep talking and they keep looking at you, and you just sit there having a staring contest because whatever needs to be said isn’t being said and after the meeting one of your team says to you, “isn’t it obvious? Why didn’t you understand?” So you sit there wondering whether you even knew what the signs were. If it hadn’t happened to you in an all important business meeting, it happened to you in your pursuit of a romantic relationship. Or it happened to you in your chase for a new job. It happened at some point where you needed to take the cues, understand the signs and you just didn’t get it because it wasn’t obvious. More than that, it wasn’t enough of a sign for you to go by. And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. – Matthew 16:3 This is what Jesus said to the religious people who wanted Jesus to perform some great miracles and heal some more people. The problem was Jesus was already performing miracles and healing people, the religious people just decided they were going to write those things off as flukes and serendipitous. It’s ironically funny because it is the religious people who should know the best and have the most belief, but it turns out that they were the most skeptical. They didn’t understand the obvious signs being performed in front of them because they chose not to believe it. Jesus storms off after making this statement by telling the Scribes and Pharisees, “no sign will be given to you except the sign of Jonah.” To us that statement is cryptic and something that needs to be deciphered in it’s own quiet time, but to the religious professionals of the first century, he was pressing upon the single greatest religious debate within the Jewish faith. This begs two questions this morning: do we choose, as modern day religious people (because if you go to church more than twice in a month, you’re considered religious), to not believe that there are real problems in the world that we should be responding towards? I mean, just think about this for a few minutes: we sit on our neatly ordered pews every single week, hoping for some type of divine revelation that the pastor is somehow supposed to bestow and we hear what the pastor says but we don’t use it for any type of change in our lives. It gets worse when we sit there and the morality that is supposed to be of God is relegated to relativism in our hearts because the signs of the times were written for God’s people who are other than us. Guess what, we just missed the obvious– we are God’s people and the signs are for us. These signs are not supernatural; rather, they are the remnants of an endemic plight of human depravity. Second, as religious people, are we not understanding the obvious cues written into our so called faith? Here’s what I mean by that: isn’t Jesus’ life, death and resurrection the obvious cues by which our course of action in our lives are vibrantly altered? By saying we believe this, shouldn’t that produce a reaction from us? Shouldn’t this be the calling on our lives to be more than what we dreamed of being? Jesus frees us to be truly who we were made to be and yet we choose to be who we are not, isn’t there a problem with that? It is pretty obvious, isn’t it? We have divine opportunity led to us by divine signs and we choose to ignore it. We’d rather demand more proof before we act. The problem is, we’ve been given the greatest proof and still we find it easier to not believe than to stare into the face of reality and believe. What signs and cues are obvious to you that are being neglected in your life? Find the strength and choose to correctly address the obvious.