Daily Reading
Daily Thought
These middle chapters of Luke’s Gospel describe the middle of Jesus’s crusade, but it is in the middle where no one is permitted to place themself. This is a crusade of the King of kings heralding, “the kingdom of God has come near” (Luke 10:11). Jesus sent his followers, two by two, into the towns ahead of him to announce the coming of the King. If they accept you, they accept me, he tells them, “the one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). There is no place in the middle, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
It is in or out and it is all or nothing. A lawyer asks Jesus how to receive eternal life, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27). That is everything. Even his friend Martha is chastised for serving him as if he were merely an out-of-town guest, instead of worshipping him as the Lord of the heavens and the earth, as her sister does; “Mary has chosen the good” (Luke 10:42).
It is time to choose, and choose you must. Some chose and sneered, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Luke 11:15), and if they were not so terribly wrong, they would have been terribly right.
Jesus is the King of kings, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, or he is a devil pretending. There is no middle.
Daily Prayer
My Lord and God, Beginning and the End, Alpha and Omega, First and Last, You are the Creator of all things, and in You, all things will be fulfilled and brought to completion. You, therefore, demand and deserve my all. I want to give it to You. Help me do it. Remind me when I hold part of myself back, or when I use You for my own benefit. Like Martha, don’t let me get away with treating You as less than You are; don’t let me get so busy doing religion that I forget to worship my Savior.
I choose to follow You fully, letting go of anything else which could steal my heart.
Amen
Daily Question
Would you describe yourself as “all in” for Jesus Christ? Why or why not?