Reflective Bible Study Gospel Adventure

Praise After Punishment: Luke 1:57-80

Published April 29, 2022 in Written Journal Entries

Focus Passage: Luke 1:57-80 (NIrV)

⁵⁷The time came for Elizabeth to have her baby. She gave birth to a son. ⁵⁸Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had been very kind to her. They shared her joy.

⁵⁹On the eighth day, they came to have the child circumcised. They were going to name him Zechariah, like his father. ⁶⁰But his mother spoke up. “No!” she said. “He must be called John.”

⁶¹They said to her, “No one among your relatives has that name.”

⁶²Then they motioned to his father. They wanted to find out what he would like to name the child. ⁶³He asked for something to write on. Then he wrote, “His name is John.” Everyone was amazed. ⁶⁴Right away Zechariah could speak again. Right away he praised God. ⁶⁵All his neighbors were filled with fear and wonder. Throughout Judea’s hill country, people were talking about all these things. ⁶⁶Everyone who heard this wondered about it. And because the Lord was with John, they asked, “What is this child going to be?”

⁶⁷John’s father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit. He prophesied,

⁶⁸“Give praise to the Lord, the God of Israel!
    He has come to his people and purchased their freedom.
⁶⁹He has acted with great power and has saved us.
    He did it for those who are from the family line of his servant David.
⁷⁰Long ago holy prophets said he would do it.
⁷¹He has saved us from our enemies.
    We are rescued from all who hate us.
⁷²He has been kind to our people of long ago.
    He has remembered his holy covenant.
⁷³    He made a promise to our father Abraham.
⁷⁴He promised to save us from our enemies.
    Then we could serve him without fear.
⁷⁵    He wants us to be holy and godly as long as we live.

⁷⁶“And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High God.
    You will go ahead of the Lord to prepare the way for him.
⁷⁷You will tell his people how they can be saved.
    You will tell them that their sins can be forgiven.
⁷⁸All of that will happen because our God is tender and caring.
    His kindness will bring the rising sun to us from heaven.
⁷⁹It will shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death.
It will guide our feet on the path of peace.”

⁸⁰The child grew up, and his spirit became strong. He lived in the desert until he appeared openly to Israel.

Read Luke 1:57-80 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!

Tucked within the birth story of John the Baptist is an amazing picture of redemption. While Luke begins his gospel by sharing about how Zechariah doubted the angel’s message promising the old couple a child, when John is born approximately 9 months later, we read a verse that brings things to a nice conclusion: “Right away Zechariah could speak again. Right away he praised God.” (v. 64)

While the last thing he said before being struck mute communicated doubt, the first thing he says when he can speak again is praise – and Zechariah praises God.

Not only that, several verses later, Zechariah shares an amazing blessing and prophecy regarding who his son John would become. He uses phrases such as “you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High God.” and “You will go ahead of the Lord to prepare the way for him.” (v. 76)

For nine months, Zechariah could have become bitter towards God. Zechariah could have dwelled on everything that God had done to harm him, with muteness being among the most recent things. But bitterness was not in his heart.

The entire prophecy Zechariah shares talks entirely about God’s goodness, His greatness, and on how He has kept His promises. Zechariah draws our attention onto the covenant that God had made with Abraham and the protection and guidance He had provided His people throughout their questionable past.

In Zechariah’s prophecy we find an amazing truth. John’s ministry would do the following:

“You will tell [God’s] people how they can be saved.
You will tell them that their sins can be forgiven.
All of that will happen because our God is tender and caring.” (v. 77-78a)

John praised God at the close of His “punishment”, and He draws our attention onto how God’s people are loved, saved, and forgiven because God is tender, caring, and loving towards those who follow Him.

This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!

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Our Food and Our Worship: Mark 7:1-23

Published April 28, 2022 in Audio Journal Entries

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As we’ve moved through this year focusing in on Mark’s gospel, we’ve sped through Jesus’ life and through many of the most significant events so far in Jesus’ ministry. In our passage for this event, Jesus is challenged again because of something His disciples don’t do, and in Jesus’ response, we get the picture He was perhaps a little irritated at these religious leaders, but also that Jesus had a higher opinion of God’s law than these religious leaders.

Let’s read this event and see what we can learn. Our passage is found in Mark’s gospel, chapter 7, and we will read it from the Contemporary English Version. Starting in verse 1, Mark tells us:

¹Some Pharisees and several teachers of the Law of Moses from Jerusalem came and gathered around Jesus. ²They noticed that some of his disciples ate without first washing their hands.

³The Pharisees and many other Jewish people obey the teachings of their ancestors. They always wash their hands in the proper way before eating. ⁴None of them will eat anything they buy in the market until it is washed. They also follow a lot of other teachings, such as washing cups, pitchers, and bowls.

⁵The Pharisees and teachers asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples obey what our ancestors taught us to do? Why do they eat without washing their hands?”

Before continuing to discover what Jesus says in response to this, I want to draw our attention onto this question being a spiritual question more than a health question. While the laws given through Moses encompass not only spirituality, but health, legalities, and more, at this point in the Jews history, everything was being given a disproportionate level of spiritual significance.

I will be among the first to say that there is likely spiritual significance in more parts of my life and habits that I even begin to realize. However, with that said, some instructions have less to do with spiritual health directly and more to do with physical health. I don’t know if these disciples did not ever wash their hands, or if these disciples didn’t wash their hands in whatever way was spiritually significant in the minds of these legalistic Jews.

However, Jesus’ answer draws our attention not only on His heart, but also onto a pretty significant spiritual truth as well. Continuing in verse 6:

⁶Jesus replied:

You are nothing but show-offs! The prophet Isaiah was right when he wrote that God had said,

“All of you praise me
    with your words,
but you never really
    think about me.
⁷It is useless for you
    to worship me,
when you teach rules
    made up by humans.”

⁸You disobey God’s commands in order to obey what humans have taught. ⁹You are good at rejecting God’s commands so that you can follow your own teachings! ¹⁰Didn’t Moses command you to respect your father and mother? Didn’t he tell you to put to death all who curse their parents? ¹¹But you let people get by without helping their parents when they should. You let them say that what they own has been offered to God. ¹²You won’t let those people help their parents. ¹³And you ignore God’s commands in order to follow your own teaching. You do a lot of other things that are just as bad.

¹⁴Jesus called the crowd together again and said, “Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. ^15-16The food that you put into your mouth doesn’t make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean.”

¹⁷After Jesus and his disciples had left the crowd and had gone into the house, they asked him what these sayings meant. ¹⁸He answered, “Don’t you know what I am talking about by now? You surely know that the food you put into your mouth cannot make you unclean. ¹⁹It doesn’t go into your heart, but into your stomach, and then out of your body.” By saying this, Jesus meant that all foods were fit to eat.

²⁰Then Jesus said:

What comes from your heart is what makes you unclean. ²¹Out of your heart come evil thoughts, vulgar deeds, stealing, murder, ²²unfaithfulness in marriage, greed, meanness, deceit, indecency, envy, insults, pride, and foolishness. ²³All of these come from your heart, and they are what make you unfit to worship God.

In this lengthy response to this challenge, Jesus calls out the Pharisees and other religious leaders for placing their own rules above God’s direct instructions. While I’m confident that the religious leaders believed both sets of rules were important, in any place where these rules conflicted, they minimized God’s law in place of their customs. While some of what God has said could be seen as unpopular and potentially illegal in our world today, God didn’t share His laws as optional from an eternal perspective.

However, the biggest portion of Jesus’ response comes in contrasting what makes you fit for worship from what is simply a smart thing to do for your health. However, one phrase in this passage stood out to me as we read it. This phrase is found at the end of verse 19: “By saying this, Jesus meant that all foods were fit to eat.”

Reading this translation makes me think that all foods are equal, but some of the other translations we regularly pull from frame this phrase better in my mind. Both the New American Standard Bible translation and the New International Version emphasize Jesus’ declaration here that all foods are clean. I can understand why these translators may have chosen to frame this idea as being fit to eat, but it might have been better to say that Jesus simply reframes all foods as spiritually clean.

However, Mark’s gospel is attributing a meaning to Jesus message that I don’t see. Perhaps the original language has a better connection, but Jesus is focused more on spiritual cleanness and fitness for worship and how our food doesn’t change our status or our fitness in God’s eyes. I don’t see Jesus telling us that all foods are now permissible to eat, because history, logic, and any reasonable dietician will tell you that different foods have different health benefits. Some foods are simply better than others, and some types of food should be avoided.

Jesus’ message is that our food doesn’t affect God’s response to our worship. Jesus does not hint or state that all things that go into our mouths are equal from a health perspective.

Instead, Jesus emphasizes that what comes out of our mouths comes from our hearts, and what comes out of our mouths makes us unclean. The things that come out of our mouths reveal our hearts. We could also say that the things we share on social media reveal our hearts as well. In today’s era, our “voice” extends to both what we say and what we write and share. What we choose to communicate to others reveals our heart.

God doesn’t view our online lives and our offline lives as different. God sees everything we do and Jesus tells us here that what we do is an extension of our hearts.

After leaving the crowd and entering the house with the disciples, Jesus reemphasizes the truth that our hearts affect how fit we are to worship God. This also strongly suggests that our worship to God might not be accepted based on the state of our heart.

While it is true that our food affects our health, and our health will ultimately affect our life, which includes our ability to worship, our food does not affect the spiritual state of our heart or God’s love for each of us when we come to Him in worship.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, continue intentionally seeking God first in your life. Don’t let this passage be a license to ignore what you put into your mouth, but let it be a challenge to be extra aware of what comes out of your mouth, and to be extra aware of what you communicate to others, whether this communication uses your vocal cords, your pen, or even your computer, tablet, or phone. What you say and share with others reveals the state of your heart, and the state of your heart reveals how fit you are to worship God.

Also, continue to pray and study the Bible for yourself. I don’t know of any better way to help clean and restore your heart than through heartfelt prayer, and studying God’s truth in the pages of the Bible. These spiritual habits have given men and women a solid spiritual foundation for centuries, these spiritual habits can strengthen our spiritual lives, and these spiritual habits have the power clean our hearts as well. Don’t simply assume the Bible says something because you heard it from a friend or read it on the internet. Choose to study it out for yourself because if for no other reason than your eternity depends on it!

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or abandon where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

Year in Mark – Episode 17: When challenged by some religious leaders about His disciples’ lack of an action, discover How Jesus viewed our food in relation to our spiritual cleanliness. Discover what our food can and cannot do, and what Jesus tells us is important when we come to God to worship.

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Freedom Through Forgiveness: Luke 17:1-10

Published April 27, 2022 in Written Journal Entries

Focus Passage: Luke 17:1-10 (NIV)

¹Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. ²It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. ³So watch yourselves.

“If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. ⁴Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”

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.

⁷“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? ⁸Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? ⁹Will 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.’”

Read Luke 17:1-10 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!

As this passage opens, we see Jesus sharing about forgiveness and stumbling blocks coming for His followers. The first part of Luke 17 talks about the importance of forgiveness, regardless of whether the person we are forgiving is worthy of receiving the forgiveness.

This broad sweep over forgiveness goes counter to everything we want to believe about our lives and the hurts we have faced in the past. Forgiveness without exception seems like we are letting the person or situation that hurt us off the hook – but in reality, forgiveness without exception is the only way we can really be free, and this is one of the biggest insights into God’s character than we might originally think.

Forgiveness is a characteristic of God, and He modeled it better for us than we could ever model it for each other. While we (humanity) were actively sinning, Jesus came and died on the cross to save us. This act demonstrates forgiveness because Jesus took the penalty for our sins and giving us the freedom to choose His righteousness. Jesus’ blanket forgave humanity’s sin, and He asks us to do the same for each other. (2 Corinthians 5:14-15)

Forgiveness releases us to move forward with our life. When we have not forgiven, we are holding the expectation that the person who hurt us must come back and apologize, which would turn the tables and give us the power we felt we were deprived of. But the flaw with the logic in our mind is that in most cases, either the person who hurt us doesn’t know they did or they don’t care that they hurt us. In either case, an apology is unlikely to happen, so holding out for traditional forgiveness will turn our hearts bitter.

Forgiveness does not mean reconciliation, because the other side of the coin is repentance. In this passage, Jesus tells us to always forgive when someone has come with a repentant heart – even if they have caused us hurt. Repentance is a much more challenging idea, because in it is taking the steps necessary to turn away from repeating the hurt. In Jesus’ challenge, we are to be forgiving when those we have forgiven mess up again . . . and again . . . and again.

However, forgiveness is what frees us to move forward, and it doesn’t require reconciliation or repentance from the other party. Forgiveness without exception, before the other person has even changed, helps place ourselves in a much more loving frame of mind if/when an actual apology comes.

Every situation is different, and there are some situations where reconciliation is unwise, but even if we never expect to reconcile, we still should forgive the person who hurt us so we can be truly free to move forward in life.

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Adoption Possible: Matthew 3:1-12

Published April 26, 2022 in Written Journal Entries

Focus Passage: Matthew 3:1-12 (NLT)

¹In those days John the Baptist came to the Judean wilderness and began preaching. His message was, ²“Repent of your sins and turn to God, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” ³The prophet Isaiah was speaking about John when he said,

“He is a voice shouting in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord’s coming!
Clear the road for him!’”

⁴John’s clothes were woven from coarse camel hair, and he wore a leather belt around his waist. For food he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁵People from Jerusalem and from all of Judea and all over the Jordan Valley went out to see and hear John. ⁶And when they confessed their sins, he baptized them in the Jordan River.

⁷But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming to watch him baptize, he denounced them. “You brood of snakes!” he exclaimed. “Who warned you to flee God’s coming wrath? ⁸Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. ⁹Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. ¹⁰Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire.

¹¹“I baptize with water those who repent of their sins and turn to God. But someone is coming soon who is greater than I am—so much greater that I’m not worthy even to be his slave and carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹²He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”

Read Matthew 3:1-12 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!

Before Jesus has stepped onto the scene of history, the prophet Isaiah prophesied that there would be someone who would come before Him to help prepare the way. The man to fulfill this prophecy was named John, and we call him John the Baptist to help distinguish him from other “John” characters in the Bible.

John the Baptist’s ministry was effective, and it attracted attention. However, John didn’t attract people with a heartwarming message of God’s love for everyone. John’s message was blunt, challenging, and even offensive at times. Matthew tells us in his gospel that when John sees some Pharisees and Sadducees coming to listen to him, “he denounced them. ‘You brood of snakes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who warned you to flee God’s coming wrath? Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. Don’t just say to each other, “We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.” That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire.’” (v. 7b-10)

In John the Baptist’s mind, sharing the truth was his most important mission – and speaking the truth in every situation, to every individual that came within earshot.

But here in this challenge to the Sadducees and Pharisees, John the Baptist draws our attention to a very important concept: While nationality is important, it cannot erase someone’s personal decisions.

The Pharisees and Sadducees had elevated their family tree as being the most important factor in their salvation. John cuts through their argument by challenging them directly. While it was true that God protected the Israelites through the majority of the plagues in Egypt, John’s message is essentially, “stop living in the past, thinking the decisions of your ancestors will protect you. Remember that it was your ancestors that got the entire nation exiled. Individual decisions matter more than race or ancestry.”

John even draws our attention to the truth that God can create children of Abraham from anything. This is important for you and me. If we are not direct descendants of Abraham, then in John’s challenge to these religious Jews, he opens the door for the message that God can adopt a non-descendant into His family.

Personal decisions are important. They can either move you closer towards God and adoption into His family, or they can lead away, and sever any past ties to God that you may have began your life with.

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