For a description of the (Y2) reading plan, see the “About” page.
Luke 6
How do you discover the plank in your own eye? What do you think about Jesus’ counter-narrative? I have noticed that we humans have a tendency to see our own faults in others. Not exclusively, of course, but it happens a lot. I think it must be a subconscious reaction to the pricking from our own conscience. Our pride won’t let us admit that the guilt we feel is ours, so we pin it on someone else, sometimes whether they are guilty of it at all or not. That somehow scratches the itch. It’s sort of like having an itch under a cast and scratching the opposite limb to relieve it.
While I believe that we have a responsibility toward those we love to help them stay the course, I don’t think the behavior of others should be our primary concern. I think it’s important to first examine our own hearts. We can’t very well help others stay on the path if we ourselves are lost in the woods. Jesus essentially tells us that if our hearts are full of God’s Spirit, then Godly things will come out of us. So we need to make sure that we are filling our hearts with God’s word. That is how we will know His ways so that we can be a help both to ourselves and to those around us.
Jesus also goes on to tell us that it is not enough to simply know His ways. We also have to walk in them. We need to truly internalize His word – to plant it in our hearts and nourish it there so that it will produce its fruit in us. As Jesus later says, we have to abide in Him and Him in us. Which is exactly why I started these musings in the first place. It’s fine to read God’s word – that’s important. But in order to truly put it into action in our lives, we need to seek a more practical understanding. We need to allow it to transform our behavior. Let’s make sure we are digging deep and finding Christ as our foundation.
Gen. 11-12
Why did God destroy something that men thought was a good idea? Everything about the city that man was building, including their tower to the heavens, was about man’s own efforts. They used brick, which was formed by their own hands, instead of stone, which God had made. And their goal was, “that we may make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4). I don’t believe for a second that God was concerned with what man could accomplish. I believe it was more about what man would think he could accomplish. God knew that Man could not save himself. He needed to make that truth known to man.
I find two interesting ironies in God’s action. First, the people were building their great city and tower thinking that it would prevent them from being “scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4b). So what did God do? He scattered them all over the earth, of course! How better to make the statement that they could do nothing to save themselves than to cause what they feared to happen? The other thing is that this great city they were building was in Babylonia, the very place where God later exiled His people due to their continued faithlessness to Him. God turned them over to their own ways by sending them back to the very place that was built on man’s own efforts. Clever.