Lean in

Thursday, January 12, 2023

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Lean in

Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people.

This could be a touchy thing. Sometimes Jesus’ healing became well-known too quickly, and the crowds overwhelmed him.  Jesus was moved with pity, touched a leper, who was healed.

The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.

Jesus’ pre-dawn prayers to his Father must have expressed Jesus’ confusion.

When someone asks, I give, Father. You do that for me, and I do that for them. So many men and women and children are in pain, and demons depress them, defeat them, and eat them alive. But I have to stay out of town, because everyone tramples me.

Jesus remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

At least I’ve been getting enough sleep. When I stop moving and sit, my eyes close and instantly I’m asleep and enter your rest. When I awake in the morning, I breathe the air around me as if I’m breathing the same air you are breathing. You are so close to me then; your tenderness surrounds me. And I can come here, now, and talk out my heart to you.

Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart, so as to forsake the living God. Encourage yourselves daily while it is still “today,” so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.

Everywhere around me people are caught by sin. They indulge their egos and become trapped by false desires. Whether they are sick and poor, or healthy and wealthy, humanity trips over itself in their race to the wrong thing. When I ask you and seek you, everything I want and need pours into my lap. This is my reality, and you wait to make it theirs.

We have become partners of Christ if only we hold the beginning of the reality firm until the end.

On our journeys through the countryside between villages, some of my disciples talk a blue streak, and some of them are silent. I listen to their silence as well as their words. All of them want their chance to pray and heal, to speak to a sickness and watch it wither. They are afraid of demons, but not so much anymore, as they watch what so often happens, when the demons are turned away. They are learning to pray, to fast, and best of all, to trust you, Father. There is no fear in your love.

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We watch The Chosen, but we don’t walk on the same dusty paths as Jesus and his disciples. We mostly don’t heal lepers or speak to demons and watch them writhe miserably and disappear. But Jesus did tell us we would do what he did, and even more (John 14:12). Listening to him pray to our Father, and praying his prayers to our Father, praying our OWN prayers to our Father, nothin’s gonna stop us. Every day our life is just beginning. God has so so much in store.

 (Hebrews 3, Psalm 95, Matthew 4, Mark 1)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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