Luke 3-4

(May 18, 2015)

                Christ makes an intriguing point that we as members of the Lord’s Church should carefully consider.  Why was it that the leper that was healed was from outside of Israel, or the widow from outside Jerusalem?  What does that indicate for us?  I don’t think that it indicates that a particular curse exists for those who are part of the Lord’s Church, but rather that there is a defect that we must be cautious about when interacting with the Lord’s Church.

                In my opinion, I think I know what that is.  We who have the Church in our everyday lives begin to believe that this is an everyday Church.  It is easy to forget that this is a Church of miracles.  In my life, there have been perhaps a half-dozen true miracles (as the word is used today) – which, as I take stock of my life, seems to be a very high number (and I still don’t know why the Lord has blessed me with so many miracles of this type).  But even still, that averages out to one miracle every seven years or so.

                Now of course this doesn’t include the tender mercies that the Lord sees fit to give me on an ongoing basis, but I know that I struggle when I am in a difficult situation to expect the miracle when the miracle is needed.  I have been blessed by these miracles, but there have been other times when I haven’t seen the miracles when I thought they were necessary.  And when I have seen the miracles, they have been great distances in time apart.

                I worry in my own life that I can forget that we are a Church of miracles – even though I have seen so many in my life.  So, too, those of us who are in the Church can see the Church as a social group or a teaching group or anything other than the Kingdom of God on Earth.  And, by so doing, we have less faith than the outsider coming to the Lord fully expecting the miracle because that is the way God manifests Himself.