Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 21-22.

When Jesus was telling His disciples about the signs of the coming destruction of the temple and the coming of the kingdom of God, He said something I found interesting.

Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap.

We do not normally think of carousing and drunkenness as things we get weighed down by.  We tend to think of getting weighed down by work and family life so that we can no longer take part in drunkenness and carousing.  So, what are we supposed to be doing that we need to be careful not to get weighed down and thus fail to do?  Well, a sentence after the above quote Jesus tells us to be on watch and to pray.  So, perhaps if we come to view prayer as something which we will be too weighed down by other activities to take part in properly, we will pray more as we ought to.  We think of prayer as a solemn serious thing.  Well, it certainly is a serious thing, but perhaps we should sometimes make it less solemn.  Perhaps we should make our prayer time exciting and fun.  Certainly, our prayer time should be something to which we look forward.  And what about the other part of what Jesus tells us?  For what should we be on watch?  From the context, we should be on watch for the signs of the coming of the kingdom of God.  While the things which Jesus talked about earlier in this passage (earthquakes, famines, pestilences, fearful events, etc) are some of those signs, there is more to it than that.  Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus told us that the kingdom of God was within us.  So, we should be on watch for changes within us, for the ways in which we are being transformed to be more like Christ.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.