Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 8.

So, I want to write about what Jesus says about lighting a lamp and what He says immediately following that.  The wording here is similar to what Matthew writes in the Sermon on the Mount.  As a result, we tend to view it as being about doing good deeds openly so as to bring glory to God.  However, here Luke records Jesus as saying it means that what is concealed will be brought out into the open.  So, the message here is different, but then it gets even stranger.  Having said that what is hidden will be revealed, Jesus tells us we should therefore be careful how we listen.  And, that whoever has will be given more and those who have little will have the little they have taken away.  The part of this which I do not quite understand is the part about being careful how we listen.  It seems to me that the part about what is hidden being revealed should tell us something about how we should listen, but I am not quite sure I see the connection.  Now that I have written that I have some thoughts on how these things tie together.  At least part of the point is that we should listen for what we are NOT being told when someone tells about an event, we should listen for the “gaps” which indicate that something is being left out.  We should listen for where people are being dishonest with us, but also for where the people who are telling us about it missed “the other side of the story”.  Those things will eventually come out, and if we may discover we have made bad decisions based on what we should have known was an incomplete account of what was going on.

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