Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 14-16.

OK, I have some disconnected thoughts about today’s passage.  Perhaps I will manage to tie them together as I write.  Jesus tells us that we should never honor ourselves, nor assume that places of honor belong to us.  Instead of seeking the place of greatest desirability at a gathering or event, let us instead leave such places for others.  Instead wait for others to invite us to such a place, wait for others to hold us up for honor.  Instead of seeking honor for ourselves, let us seek to honor others.  Next I want to write about Jesus’ discussion about the excitement in heaven over finding the lost.  In His parables we normally think of God as being the one who found that which was lost.  While that is certainly the face value of what Jesus is saying, we should think a little deeper.  We should be the ones who energetically, and excitedly, seek out those who are lost and bring them back to God.  Which brings me to the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  We often think, speak, and write negatively about the elder son, because of the jealousy he felt over the feast his father gave his younger brother.  However, when we do that we are overlooking that his father offered him comfort, not condemnation.  The father pointed out that everything he had was the older brother’s and invited him to join the celebration of his brother’s return.  In the same way, God invites us to celebrate the return to Him of those who turned their backs on Him.  We get to decide by how we react whether the older son was ultimately a good brother or a bad brother, because we are the elder son in Jesus’ story.  We may have been, in fact, probably were, the younger son who turned his back on the Father, on God, but now we have been brought back and need to join God in celebrating the return of those who return after us.

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