Christmas Vacation

I have been writing this blog for almost one year. I get up early each morning and I enjoy simplifying the word of God so that even a bone head like me could understand it.

The problem that I have is that I do not see any fruit coming from this effort. I am now praying and asking God if this is something that He wants me to do or does He have something else for me to do?

I am going to take some time off and reflect and pray and I may resume after the first of the year.

May God bless and keep you.

Merry Christmas,

Ed

Make New Friends

In verse 12 of chapter 14, contains one of those messages that really makes following Jesus so challenging. He tells us that we should invite the poor, crippled, lame and the blind over for dinner instead of our friends and relatives. My human nature cries out! Can’t I just donate some money? Or pray for them? C’mon God, my house full of cripples? Along with forgiveness, this is the other edict that helps to create that narrow door to heaven.

To meet Jesus at this juncture of His word, I started reaching out and tried striking up a friendship with the less fortunate, invited them over for dinner and introduced them to friends. My wife and I help to support a young lady who is challenged and it has been very rewarding. In fact we were all set to provide her with a car until we found out that she didn’t have a license and was unlikely to ever get one in the future. We still laugh over that one.

We had a special offering for a missionary the other night at our Sunday service and as Susan and I were going up to leave our money in the basket, we recognized our challenged friend ahead of us with her offering in hand. It felt great to see God work in her and our life.

God finishes up with verse 14 saying that God will rewards us for giving to those who cannot repay us. I wonder if I should send this verse to my mortgage company? I don’t think they would get it or care.

"Where does it say that?"

In Luke 14:7, Jesus teaches a lesson in humility. I opened up my search engine and typed in, “lessons in humility”. I thought that maybe I would find a modern example of humility so that I could compare it to this chapter of the bible. To my surprise, there is no example, using those key words, that does not involve the name of Jesus or the bible as a whole, at least on the first several pages of links and web pages.

I don’t know about you, but that is scary and inspiring at the same time. We live in a world that has gone from humble to “hell, no!” in my lifetime. Conventional wisdom is, if you are humble in this world, you are a sucker that will be walked on. Parents used to teach their child to be humble and unselfish and now kids are taught to get theirs before someone else gets theirs. When I played organized sports as a child, it was always understood that the home run hitter ran humbly around the bases, the running back scored the winning touchdown with the attitude that he had done so before and would do it again in the future and the player who made the basket would have been run off the court if he made a throat slash sign or pumped his fist to signify his own greatness.

In this chapter, Jesus tells His followers (you and me) that we are to be humble and He uses the example of going to a wedding and choosing to sit at the head of the table without being assigned to sit there. He tells us that it would be embarrassing to be asked to move so that a more important person could have that seat of honor while you are relegated to a position further down the table. In this example, Christ tells us that it would be better to take the lower position at the table when we arrive and be invited by the host to sit in a more honored seat closer to the head of the table. Humility and self depreciation are not tools that this world admires but Jesus tells us in this example that the proud will be humbled and the humbled will be honored in the end.

With this in mind, there are going to be some surprised people on judgement day.

The Insincere Invitation

The other night I was at a street fair that takes place in the town that I live in. I overheard a conversation between a fellow who was part of a Christian ministry and another person who claimed to have no faith in God at all. The man, a self described atheist, insisted that the Christian read a best seller from a renown secular writer that claimed that God did not exist. The Christian insisted that the man needed to read the bible instead.

When the man who lives his life without God in it insisted that the Christian read the secular book first, he responded by saying, “why should I read a book about how life is just a black abys ending in an unconscious dirt nap?” He went on to explain that if he lives his life according to God’s word, statistically he will be happier, have a better relationship with his family and friends and lead a life of less stress in the face of constant duress and will open his eyes in heaven and live with God for eternity. If he is wrong and his fate is just the darkness of the grave with endless sleep, he will have lived a happier life on this earth and if the man of no faith is wrong, he will face an eternity separated from God.

We, as men, seem to always have a preference to want to hang our hat on the word or interpretation of another man. It is almost like we think that the word of God is too simple and needs to be more rigid or more slack. The man in the above story wants to shed the word of God completely and follow the writings of another man as if they were God’s words. To have faith that nothing exists requires a great deal of faith indeed and to believe another person’s creed requires more faith than I have.

In Luke 14:1, we run smack dab into another kind of faith, the modified word of God. This word is always used to put one person in judge of another. The modified law always has a Godly root source, in this case it is the commandment involving doing work on the Sabbath day.

Jesus was in the home of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on the Sabbath and just by coincidence, there was a man there in obvious need of healing. The reason that we know this is because Luke tells us that the man was swollen in the arms and legs. Luke also tells us that the people in the home were watching Jesus closely.

Let’s step back a bit and review this situation. Here are some points to think about:

1. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, He has been hounded by the religious leaders of the day and now He is invited into the home of one of the religious leaders.

2. There just happens to be a person in obvious need of healing, positioned in such a way that he and his condition can’t be missed, when Jesus walks in. This person was probably recruited because of his afflictions and it can be safely assumed that he knew that Jesus was capable of healing him.

3. Everyone in the house was to be a witness to the fact that Jesus was going to do something wrong.

This sounds like a set up to me and it took great courage on the part of Jesus to walk into what He surely knew was a trap.

He gets right to the point by asking the experts in religious law, “Is it lawful to heal this man on the Sabbath?” Luke tells us that they refused to answer Him and Jesus touched the man and he was healed. Jesus turned to his hosts and asked them, “If your son or one of your livestock were to fall into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you want to get them out?” Again the religious experts would not answer.

These religious men thought that they would trap Jesus with the word as they understood it. The fact is that they convicted themselves by their non action.

Ugly Bookends

Just after speaking these words to the crowd before Him, the Pharisees in the crowd jumped up and tried to get Jesus to leave by telling Him that Herod Antipas wanted to kill Him. Now, I’m confused. If the Pharisees were His enemy, why were they warning Him that people wanted to kill Him? Could it be that when Jesus was talking about the narrow door and how religious phonies were not going to heaven that the religious spies in the crowd panicked? If they openly attacked His words the crowd might have turned on them and recognized that they were being referenced by Jesus in His teachings.

Jesus responded by telling the Pharisees that they and Herod Antipas could pound salt in a rat hole! Imagine a fired up Jesus telling His adversaries that He wasn’t frightened by their threats. He went on to say that He wasn’t going to stop doing His job because of fear of the enemy. He was going to continue casting out demons and healing people and instead of running away, He was planning to go to the enemy in the city of Jerusalem.

False prophets acquire money, armies and subjects as long as they can. When the heat comes down, they run away and try to form a little kingdom somewhere all of the while hoping that their oppressors will forget about them. Jesus didn’t do any of that. He went to face the enemy and to establish His kingdom in Jerusalem. I live in a world that thirsts for a super hero and seems to be able to miss the intention and exploits of the greatest Hero that has ever lived.

Staying in the 14th chapter of Luke, verse 34 records the sorrow that Jesus felt towards His beloved city of Jerusalem and it’s people. This indifferent city and it’s inhabitants have a history of killing God’s prophets and messengers. Christ talks of how he wants to gather his children together but is rejected by them and He comments on how their house is empty and that they will never see Him again until they ask for His blessing.

We, in this country could very well qualify for the same fate as Jerusalem. We have steadily moved away from our founding Godly roots and foundations and have developed a society that murders its unborn citizens with the excuse that personal freedom trumps spiritual responsibility. A society that is systematically culling out the offspring of the poor and the uneducated using abortion as birth control and actually have the groups and races of people who are affected the deepest by these heinous acts, march and support their very existence.

On the other end of the spectrum we are allowing the old and infirmed to die “humane” deaths of starvation and dehydration because they, like the unborn, have no value in our society. With this type of bookend plan to eliminate those of us who are inconvenient aren’t you glad that your parents didn’t believe in abortion? And aren’t you a little afraid what is going to happen as society helps you “exit” when you are old and feeble?

I always say, be nice to everyone because you never know who will be the one that cares for you in the retirement home.

The Narrow Door

As we continue in Luke 14:22, the author tells us that Jesus was on a journey to meet His destiny in Jerusalem. If this took place in a modern movie, we would hear the ominous and stirring tone of the background music as the Lord traversed the countryside through the small towns and villages. We would see montages with only the sound of that music as Jesus interacts with everyday folks on His way to Calvary.

Those common people seem to understand that Jesus had great purpose in His mission and that is reflected in the question that everyone asks everyday in our daily lives. That question is, who and how many will be saved and going to heaven?

In the presidential election that just passed and in almost every other election that we have ever had, the candidates pander to their constituency. The answer that Jesus gave was anything but what would come out of a candidates mouth. He answered the question that came from one of the villagers who asked, “Lord will there only be a very few of us going to heaven? Jesus told this person that the door to heaven is narrow.

If Jesus was a false prophet He would have said that the door is wide and all you have to do is give me some money and I will give you my rules to follow so that you can go there. He went on to say that the door to heaven will be closed at some time in the future by the Father.

He further paints a picture of people standing outside of the locked door requesting that it be reopened and the people gathered will say things like, “you know us, we ate and drank with you and we watched you teach in our streets”. The bible says that the Father will tell these people to go away because they are people who do evil.

At that time, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth as those on the outside watch the children of God enter into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus goes on to tell us that we may be surprised by who actually makes it into heaven as those who are despised now will be honored then.

That reminds me of a joke. A woman dies and goes to heaven and is issued an old beat up VW to drive and a clean, modest apartment to live in. She sees her gardener go by one day, being driven in a Rolls Royce to a mansion on the hill. The woman went to complain and was told that her gardener spent his whole life serving God and based on that fact, greater things were given to them. As she drove her little car home her spirits were lifted when she saw her pastor pull up to his pup tent on a skate board.

There are many people who go through the motions of serving God and only serve themselves. We read of the Pharisees and the religious leaders in the time of Christ and judge them when all of the time our actions are worse.

If God chose to call all of His believers home on a Sunday during church services, would there be enough people gone to notice? Would those who were left behind know why?

Bread of Life

Another simple example explaining a complicated subject resides in Luke 13:20. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is like a woman baking bread. She uses a great deal of flour in her baking but a small amount of yeast permeates every part of the dough. In Matthew 16:6, the author helps to shed light on the intentions of the passage in Luke. According to the King James version, Luke reports that, Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

When Jesus spoke in these plain terms, the religious spies that followed Him and reported every word must of had a difficult time getting up fast enough so that they could go and tell their benefactors. Like all people of faith who cling to rules and regulations designed and imposed by men, the Pharisees and the Sadducees saw their beliefs as the flour and this interloper, Jesus, as the yeast.

Man has been introducing variations of God’s word since it’s inception and while I love what yeast does to my sourdough bread, I will follow my Lord’s example and delete it from the flour of my faith.