Transcendent Touched

Seek the Lord with all your heart, avoid sin and self-righteousness and be ready for the Day of the Lord (Luke 17-18)

We cannot go to the Lord based on our own righteousness, but we can go to Him because of the righteousness He has covered us with. He desires to attract those who are know they need Him: the children, the poor, the humble, those with a small faith, those who have a thankful heart. Such people may confidently and persistently go to Him, but He has warnings for the self-righteous or those who hinder others who go to Him. In either case, we should all take heed: There will be a day of judgement for those who have not repented, and those of us who have received blessings from Him need to guard our hearts, we need to keep in mind that in the end we are just unworthy servants.

For those who have eyes ready to see the spiritual truth, the power of the kingdom is at work within and around us (Luke 10,11)

Those whose hearts are not prepared and do not have the Holy Spirit within them, cannot perceive how God is at work in the world around them. Even though the evidence abounds around them, they are spiritually blind. Even if they ask for a sign of the evidence of God, the truth is that no evidence will be sufficient because they have not believed even the evidence of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

For those whose hearts are prepared, they can see the evidence of God’s power in many ways. Just within this passage we can see that the sick are healed, demons are cast out, people are demonstrating true love to God and their neighbors, people are responding to the teaching of Jesus and are eager to listen to Him, the disciple’s prayers begin with the relationship they have with the heavenly Father who desires to give them good things.

What do we see when we look around us?

Do we lean on the rule of the law or the spirit of the law (Luke 6:1-11)

Many people saw that Jesus taught as one having authority. His healing ministry was done in part to prove his authority. This was a challenge to the Pharisees who regarded the laws written in scripture along with the traditions developed by the Pharisees as the final authority. Although their initial intentions may have been good, the result for many of them is that the focus was more on the rules themselves than of the God they were trying to please by keeping them.

Healing on the Sabbath became a problem because of what their traditions specified as work – work was not supposed to be done on the Sabbath in order that the day could be focused on God. For those Pharisees, there was a two-fold problem: focusing on the definition of work rather than the meaning of the Sabbath and the challenge of authority. Is the law itself the final authority or is Jesus the final authority?

Those two problems are not just the problems for the Pharisees, but for us as we make decisions through the day. We live in a world with many rules – and there are usually good reasons for those rules. But we need to confront our attitudes sometimes. If our bent is to be rule followers, are we going to focus on keeping the rules for the rule’s sake or are we going to focus on the meanings and intentions of the rules? If our bent is to not be rule followers, what are we holding as  our final authority, ourselves or Jesus?

The law is good; in fact, Jesus came to fulfill the law which was given to Moses. But the intent of the law is to restore and maintain our relation with the God who gave us the law. In that regard, the law is not the end but the means.