Luke 4:24-30

Finished Luke, and jumped right into Acts. In chapter 4, there is a prayer said by Peter and John -- or possibly by one or more others among the believers.

"Sovereign Lord," they said, "you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
" 'Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26The kings of the earth take their stand
and the rulers gather together
against the Lord and against his Anointed One.'
27Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus."

Reading this prayer, several thoughts came to mind:

• I love that they prayed scripture back to God (v25 and 26). I expect to take a Saturday in the next couple of weeks and go to a park and really try to spend some quality time with God, and I must confess that I've wondered what the heck I'll talk about if I spend more than 20 or 30 minutes in prayer. I'll file this thought away for that day.
• Fascinating to think that (as in v28) its possible for us to do so terrible a thing as torture and kill Christ, only to find that God's power and will had decided this should happen. This certainly doesn't mean that any bad thing we do must have been God's will, but it could mean that some of the challenges we face were probably in the works for us, and just like Jesus, our role is to face these challenges as God leads us.
• Do you notice that the requests made of God come at the end, and even then the first request of God is that he would empower the believers to take action? I mean, my first thought on reading that part of the text was to pray the very last part, that God would stretch out his hand to heal and perform miraculous signs ... but they only asked for that after they asked for empowerment from God to speak his word themselves.
• And how would they know his word? From the teaching, from time spent reading his word, and from prayer. Which brings me back to the first bullet above. I need to step up in these areas.

Just thought I'd share today's study time with whoever might be listening.

B

Planting Trees

Read this from Luke 17:7-10 ...

7"Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? 8Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? 9Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "

This is an unusual passage, is it not? I mean, I'm so very accustomed to hearing about how God has called me 'friend' -- and He has certainly done that. So in reading this today I found myself thinking how opposite this is from much of what we hear today. It is as if this text were implying that we aren't God's friends after all, that we are mere servents, and we'll do what we're told.

But that's an oversimplification of this text, I think, and interpreting it this way does not seem to line up with other parts of scripture.

So I looked at it again, and looked at the context a little closer. Check out the previous two verses (Luke 17: 5-6):

5The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" 6He replied, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.

Jesus has just told His followers that they don't need much faith in order to do fairly amazing things. It is in the follow-up to this comment, then, that He points out that we shouldn't get a big head about using God's power. We have to be aware of the position we're in. Specifically, that God calls us to obey him, to serve him.

Of course, along the way He may call us to do some amazing things; to command a few trees to move, as it were. However, we shouldn't get confused into thinking we could ever serve him enough that He would somehow owe us a favor, or that He would let us use this amazing faith power to do things that serve ourselves, or that bring glory to ourselves.

See, God has called us friends, and He has blessed and served us in amazing ways, most notably through Jesus. But Jesus isn't speaking here of God's relationship to us. He's speaking of our relationship to God. No matter how good, how righteous we live our lives, we cannot be good enough to earn anything from God. In the end, we are unworthy servants. And if we've been obedient to God, it is because there is no other way to respond to what He has done for us.

Perhaps that's why we don't see even our most faithful brothers and sisters throwing out their gardening gloves, shovels, etc, relying instead on verbal commands to their garden plants as to where to be and grow. Jesus wasn't suggesting that God was going to give us a magic wand to serve ourselves. He was simply saying that it takes very little faith to do amazing things -- but the amazing things will be God's things, not ours, at His discretion, in His timing.

But I must confess, when I was planting a little tree in my back yard this past week, I'd sure like to have been able to just tell the tree to get in the ground.

Ready Freddie

Later the Master selected seventy and sent them ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he intended to go. He gave them this charge: “What a huge harvest! And how few the harvest hands. So on your knees; ask the God of the Harvest to send harvest hands.” -- Luke 10:1-2

Something struck me odd about these two verses.

Jesus had his pick of some number of people – for the sake of argument, let’s say he had 150 too choose from. But he only chose 70. And then he says to the 70, ‘I wish there were more of you!’

But … if he wanted more than 70, why not just choose more people? I mean, why not pick 120 people to send? Or just send all the people he had to ‘select’ from, instead of selecting some of them and leaving the rest out?

I think the reason is probably very simple. He chose all the ones who were ready.

Ready to take on the assignment. Ready to be obedient, whether we feel like it or not. By ‘ready’ I do not mean ‘perfect’ – no one is perfect except Christ. But while we won’t be perfect until we’re made perfect in heaven, I do believe there are stages to our development, and I believe that God will typically assign tasks to us based on our readiness and ability to complete the tasks.

Paul might have used a different word than ‘ready’; I think he might have said ‘worthy’. In 2 Thessalonians, Paul is writing to believers, and at one point (2 Thessalonians 1:11) Paul actually prays that the believers would be ‘worthy’ of God’s calling, and that they would accomplish every act that is prompted by their faith. I think Paul was praying that they would be ready – actively practicing obedience in order to be in the groove when they are prompted by their faith to particular actions.

You know. Ready.

So. Are you ready?