Consider the
invitation.
Who invited
you? What are you invited to? What are the expectations for your attendance?
What is the dress code? What time should you be there? What do you expect to
happen when you arrive?
All of these
questions and more flood our minds when we receive an invitation. The questions
usually have simple answers. (Generally speaking none of this is difficult to
figure out.)
Our response
is most often driven mostly by who the invitation
is from. Is it a person we regard as important – or someone we don’t care
much for?
Luke 14 is all about invitations. Jesus
is demonstrating and indicating how God views our responses to His invitations
to us…
Here we are
in synagogue service, and Jesus scans the room and invites a man with dropsy to
come forward. It is Sabbath. What will Jesus do? (Notice the man with dropsy
does not hesitate to respond to Jesus’ invitation.) We could ask, “Why not?” but the answer is obvious.
On the other
hand the lawyers and Pharisees don’t respond to Jesus’ invitation to be about
the business of healing broken people
on Sabbath. All the while they do
respond to the invitation of the needs of their animals without regard to the
day.
Jesus again uses
healing on the Sabbath to demonstrate how far askew their opinion of God’s Law
is. This is an invitation Jesus offers over and over again during the course of
His ministry because inviting people to be healed is such an important part of
God’s program – and God hates it when
His program is misrepresented by men invited by Satan to not do what God
desires.
The point Jesus
so vividly demonstrates is how we so often attempt to remain pious in
appearance while we are answering invitations from the devil and denying those
from God. “Is it lawful to heal on the
Sabbath?” That’s quite the invitation, isn’t it?
-Pastor Bill
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