Tag Archives: Daily Bible Study

Daily Bible Study

October 28, 2019 Bible Study — Unity Does Not Supersede Being Faithful

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 12-13

OK, I see several things here I want to write about and a common theme which runs through the entire passage.  Let’s see if I can make this work.  In the middle of the passage, Jesus tells us that He did not come to bring peace, rather He came to bring division.  Some will be for Him and some will be against Him.  Furthermore, the door to the Kingdom of Heaven is narrow and not everyone who desires to enter it will do so.  We must pay close attention to this teaching.   All are welcome to follow Jesus, but it is not enough to say that you want to do so.  You have to actually do so.  Earlier in Luke, Jesus talked about the need to be willing to give up your wants and desires in order to serve Him.  And in today’s passage, He talks about not worrying about what we will eat, or drink, or wear.  Instead, we should use our resources to aid those in greater need than ourselves.

Jesus speaks about hypocrisy in today’s passage and warns us that what we think we are doing in secret will be made public.  When we say something is wrong, but do it any way, we are hypocrites.  Worse is when we try to explain why it is wrong when someone else does it, but not when we do it ourselves.  Now I am going to try to tie this together with what Jesus has to say about lawsuits and going to court.  He tells us that when we are on the way to court with our accuser we should settle things before we get there (by the way, this is the basis for the legal idea of settlements for lawsuits).  However, just before He says that Jesus asks an important question, “Why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right?”  The question should not be “What is legal?”  The question we should ask ourselves, is, “What is right?”   And we should not be depending on what someone else says the answer is.  We should decide for ourselves, based on prayer, reading the Scripture, and the Holy Spirit, what is right.  This may involve asking other Believers what they think on the subject, but ultimately, we are responsible to decide what is right and then to do it.  When we know what is right we should do it immediately, so that we are prepared should Jesus return right after.

Daily Bible Study

October 27, 2019 Bible Study — Worshiping the Right Way and Still Getting It Wrong

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 10-11

When I got to Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan I realized something I do not remember anyone ever making note of: In yesterday’s passage we had an account of a Samaritan village which refused to welcome Jesus so strenuously that James and John wanted to call down fire from Heaven on them.  Which puts Jesus’ telling of this parable in a different context.  Despite having only a short time before having been rejected by a group of Samaritans, Jesus uses one of them as the person we should emulate in a story He told.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the three people who passed the man on the road.  First, we have a priest.  He would have been trained from childhood on up on the proper ways to worship God and it was his job to care for the spiritual welfare of the people.  However, he was also required to keep to a very high standard of ritual purity and if the beaten man were to die while the priest was touching him, he would be defiled and unable to fill his duties.  Well, then we have a Levite (the NLT translation says “Temple Assistant”, which for most understanding of this parable is good enough).  He would have had similar training to a priest, but would not have had quite as strict purity requirements.   However, neither of these men stopped to help the beaten man.  Finally a Samaritan, who did not even truly understand how to worship God, came along.  This Samaritan, who was despised by the Jews as someone who distorted God’s commands and who thought the same of the Jews, sacrificed his time and money to help the beaten man.  Jesus’ instructions to be like the Samaritan applies to more than just helping those in distress.  In this story, the priest and the Levite were more concerned with getting the ritual’s correct than with people.  The Samaritan’s only focus was on people.

Daily Bible Study

October 26, 2019 Bible Study — Are We Willing To Pay The Price To Follow Jesus?

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 9

The one problem I have with the current read-the-Bible-in-a-year plan I am using for this blog is that when I get to Luke it is the third time in a short period where I am reading a slight variation on the same story.  I really ran into that problem today.  However, Today’s passage does contain some insights on what it means to follow Jesus.

We have two sections of today’s passage which shed light on what following Jesus involves.  At the end of the passage, Luke tells us of three men who considered following Jesus.  We do not know whether they ultimately did follow Him or not, but Jesus’ interaction with them shows us that following Him involves being willing to give up our loyalties and commitments to anything else.  Earlier in the passage, when Jesus first told His disciples about His death, He told them that each day they would need to decide to be willing to face suffering and death for Him.  Each and every day we need to choose to do that which will please God, recognizing that doing so may lead us to lose that which we desire.  It does us no good to get everything we desire if we lose ourselves in the process.  Each day we must ask ourselves if we are willing to pay the price to follow Jesus, and each day we must commit ourselves to paying that price.

Daily Bible Study

October 25, 2019 Bible Study — People Will Get In Our Face and Demand That We Leave Them Alone

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 8

Luke mentions that Jesus began a teaching tour accompanied by the Twelve and some women He had cured.  I suspect that Luke named women were sources for parts of his account.  More importantly, Luke was telling his readers that these women, both those he named and the others who were there, were every bit as authoritative as to what it meant to be a follower of Christ as the Apostles.

I really want to explore the story about the homeless guy mentioned here.  We usually think of him as the demon-possessed man, and that is fine because that is what the passage tells us he was.  However it also tells us that he was homeless.  It helps me visualize him to think about the homeless men I have seen in various urban areas.  The locals had attempted to help him, but he reacted violently so they eventually gave up.  I wrote that because I do believe this passage should influence the way in which we deal with the homeless.  I am just not sure in what way.

Now that I started writing about this I want to point out one other lesson.  This guy approached Jesus and demanded to know why Jesus was interfering with him.  Jesus did not approach the demon possessed man.  We will run into such things with people around us.  They will come to us, then demand that we leave them alone. That does not mean that they are demon possessed.  I just want to point out that we will have to face situations like that.

Daily Bible Study

October 24, 2019 Bible Study — Blessed Are the Poor So Give To Anyone Who Asks

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 6-7

Having previously caught flack from Pharisees over their rigorous interpretation of the Law regarding the Sabbath, Jesus took the initiative when He saw a man with a deformed hand in a synagogue on the Sabbath.  Instead of allowing them to set the terms of the discussion, He did so Himself.  The Law said, “Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. .. On that day no one in your household may do any work.”  The Pharisees focused on the second part which I quoted there.  Jesus moved the focus from that to the first part about keeping it holy.  He focused everyone’s attention on the fact that you do not keep the Sabbath holy by making those in need wait for another day before you help them.

Today’s passage also contains Luke’s account of the teachings which Matthew presents in the Sermon on the Mount.  I suspect that Jesus touched on these themes many times throughout His ministry.  In fact, these two slightly different accounts of these teachings may actually represent two different occasions (or perhaps more than two).  As a general rule, I prefer the more nuanced account given in Matthew.  However, I also find an appeal in the much more blunt way in which Luke relates the same teachings.  God blesses the poor and the hungry, while sorrow awaits the rich and prosperous.  Which puts a whole new light when Jesus says a few verses later that we should love our enemies and do good for those who hate us.  We need to think about what Jesus means when He says “give to anyone who asks” when we realize this follows Him telling us that the poor are blessed.  Of course, Jesus also tells us elsewhere to be as wise as serpents.

Daily Bible Study

October 23, 2019 Bible Study — Just Because It Didn’t Work the First Time Does Not Mean That We Should Stop trying

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 4-5

Yesterday I wrote that Jesus’ mother was almost certainly Luke’s source for chapter 2.  Today’s passage was clearly based on the recollections of Jesus’ disciples, but not necessarily members of the Twelve (we know from Acts that there were others who followed Jesus from the beginning).  A careful reading shows us that while Luke did his best to put the stories he relates into the order they happened he was not entirely sure how stories he got from one set of sources matched up with those from other sources.  For example, it seems likely that Luke’s story about how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus, which appears at the beginning of chapter 5, preceded the end of chapter 4.

Speaking of Luke’s account of how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus (the fact that Andrew is not mentioned suggests that he is Luke’s source for this account) I want to point out something I never thought about before.  When Jesus was finished speaking from Peter’s boat, He told Peter to put back out and let down the nets.  Peter’s response was essentially, “We fished all night and did not catch anything.  There aren’t any fish out there, but I will humor you and put out the nets.”  The result was a catch so large that, even after he called James and John to bring their boat out to help, it almost sank the boat.  Then Jesus called them to follow Him and told them that from now on they would be fishing for people. The story makes the point that sometimes God will direct us to repeat something we did in the past that failed.  To put it another way, we should not give up trying to reach people for God just because they rejected our message in the past.

Daily Bible Study

October 22, 2019 Bible Study — God’s Ways Are Not Our Ways

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 2-3

To this day when I read Luke 2, I hear it in my father’s voice.  Every year on Christmas Eve we celebrated our family Christmas and that celebration started with my father reading Luke 2, all the way through the account of Anna. (We celebrated on Christmas Eve because we went to my uncle’s house on Christmas day for my Dad’s family Christmas dinner).  It seems clear to me that Luke’s source for this chapter is none other than Jesus’ mother, Mary.  All of the stories recorded in Luke 2 are the sort of thing that a mother remembers. 

I love the story of the angels announcing Jesus’ birth to the shepherds.  God did not send His angels to announce The Messiah’s birth to the Temple and the high priest, nor did He send them to the palace and the king.  God did not send His angels to announce Christ’s birth to the high and mighty.  He sent them to announce it to the nobodies in the field.  The shepherds weren’t the people with the “important” jobs.  They were doing a job about which most of their contemporaries would have said, “anybody can be a shepherd.”  That is who God thinks are important enough to announce the birth of Christ

Daily Bible Study

October 21, 2019 Bible Study — The Facts and Nothing But the Facts

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 1

I love Luke’s introduction and what it tells us about what he is going to do.  Luke focused on writing what he believed (and I believe) to be a factual account of Jesus’ life.  It was more important to him that what he wrote be an accurate account of what happened than that it supported a particular belief system.  This does not mean that Luke’s belief system did not influence what he chose to record.  But it does indicate that Luke attempted to base his beliefs on the facts as he observed them.  I also believe that Luke was telling Theophilus, “of course there are not accounts about Jesus from nonbelievers.  If you saw this stuff happening and realized that it was important, you would end up as a believer.”

I find it interesting to compare and contrast the ways in which Zechariah and Mary reacted to the message they each received from the angel.  Neither one quite believed that what the angel told them would happen.  Yet Zechariah received a reprimand for not believing while Mary received an explanation.  Of course, that goes right along with how they expressed their lack of belief.  Zechariah asked for evidence that what the angel was telling him would happen.  Mary asked for an explanation, after essentially saying, “I know how this works, and that doesn’t apply here.”  Since Zechariah asked for a sign, he received a sign, a somewhat punitive sign, but a sign nonetheless.  Mary asked for an explanation, so that was what she got.  I want to point out that I believe that Luke included Mary’s comment about being a virgin to indicate that she was not a naive young woman who did not know how pregnancy happened.

Daily Bible Study

October 20, 2019 Bible Study — The Desire To Pray and the Failure To Do So

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 14-16

I am sure I have written this in the past.  When I was younger, Jesus’ instructions to the two disciples He sent ahead to prepare for the Passover meal were related to me as an example of Jesus’ ability to see the future.  It was suggested that He prophetically knew the man would be where he would be and would be willing to allow them to use his room for their Passover meal.  However, as I read it now it seems clear to me that Jesus had made previous arrangements to eat the Passover meal in this man’s room with His disciples.  On the other hand, Jesus’ prediction that one of the Twelve would betray Him is indeed a prophetic pronouncement.  Every time I read that I wonder what went through Judas’ mind at that moment.  

When I read the various accounts of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane I have two separate reactions.  First is the desire and wish to pray as Jesus did when difficulty and struggling confront me: “Please take this suffering from me, but Your will be done, not mine.”  I want to ask God to take the suffering away from me, but I want to submit to that suffering if it is necessary to accomplish His will.  Second is an empathy with the disciples inability to stay awake.  All too often when I attempt to pray in the ways I think that I should I find myself falling asleep.  As with so many other passages on prayer, this passage reminds me that my prayer life comes nowhere close to where it should.

Daily Bible Study

October 19, 2019 Bible Study — Three Different Reasons Lead to Three Different Questions

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 12-13

Today’s passage contains accounts of three different approaches people take to those who proclaim the truth.  First the Pharisees attempted to trap Jesus in the conflict between government authority and popular opinion.  Then the Sadducees tried to trap Jesus in what they thought was a logic conflict in His belief system.  Finally an unnamed teacher of the law asked a probing question aimed at discovering the core of Jesus’ teachings.

The Pharisees thought that Jesus’ appeal to the masses came from telling them what they wanted to hear.  The premise of their question was that if Jesus gave the crowds the answer they wanted to hear, they could have the Romans arrest Him for inciting rebellion.  On the other hand, they thought that if Jesus gave an answer on taxation which did not support it the crowds would turn on Him.  The Pharisees did not ask this question in order to learn Jesus’ answer.  They thought they had come up with a question where they could use whatever answer Jesus gave against Him.   There are many nuances to Jesus’ answer.  However, Jesus makes the central point that only those involved in trade with the Romans were significantly impacted by the Roman taxes.  

The Sadduccess thought that resurrection from the dead was illogical.  Their question was intended to highlight the logical inconsistencies of what Jesus taught.  Again, they were not seeking to understand what Jesus’ taught.  They sought an answer they could use against Him.  Jesus showed that their question only seems like it presents a quandary because they lacked faith in God’s power over the Universe.

Finally, the unnamed teacher of the law asked a question which actually explored what Jesus taught.  This last question truly got at whether or not Jesus was a teacher to whom we should listen.  This man asked Jesus a question to which he genuinely wanted to know the answer.  Unlike the Pharisees who thought they would be able to use Jesus’ answer against Him, no matter how He answered and unlike the Sadduccess who thought their question had no answer.  This unnamed teacher genuinely wanted to know what Jesus thought.  He wanted to see if Jesus’ answer added up.  When people question us about our faith, they will fall into one of these categories.  Some people will be seeking an answer that they can use against us or our faith.  Others will be seeking to show that only foolish people would actually believe what we say we believe.  But a few people will ask questions because they genuinely seek to learn the truth.