Browsing Category:

Luke

In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
May 22, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Outcast

There have many times in my life when I felt like an outcast. I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing. I wasn’t wearing what everyone else was wearing. I wasn’t watching what everyone else was watching. Sometimes, I’ve been glad for this. I’ve been happy to stand out and stand up for my principles and beliefs. Other times, I’ve resented this. I just wanted to fit in with my friends and peers, and I felt judged and excluded for being different. Whether I felt my outcast identity was good or bad in the moment, it pretty much always has left me feeling lonely. Life is hard, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it alone, without the help and encouragement of someone else who’s been in the same boat.

If we’re being honest, we’ve probably all felt like outcasts at some point or another, each of us experiencing varying degrees of loneliness, judgment, and exclusion. But in the book of John, Jesus comes upon a woman who was likely far more alone, far more judged, and far more excluded than we could ever imagine. And He met her in a city of Samaria.

Read more
By
/
In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
April 25, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Burdened

I do not watch horror movies. I know that some of you are probably flabbergasted that I haven’t and will never watch anything that falls in your favorite movie genre, but I just don’t enjoy horror films. I don’t like the jump scares. I don’t like to be kept up all night worrying that someone or something is going to kill me. And since most horror movies feature some demonic character, I don’t like focusing on these creatures that are very evil and very real.

I think a lot of people can forget that demons are real beings because we don’t typically see obvious examples or evidence of demon possession in today’s world. But they are real, and they have possessed many real people. During His ministry, Jesus encountered many people who were possessed by demons. One of them was a particularly burdened soul who dwelled in the Gentile region of the Gerasenes.

Read more
By
/
In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
February 28, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Grieving

“But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Quoted by Vision in the Disney+ series Wandavision, this question quickly resonated with viewers all over the country and all over the world when episode eight aired. We live in a broken world, and none of us are strangers to grief. We’ve all experienced the deaths of aging parents, close friends, and unborn children. We’ve all dealt with painful break-ups and awful falling-outs with people we loved dearly. We’ve all been betrayed or attacked by someone we once trusted and thought very highly of. And with everything that has happened in our world over the past two years, our levels of grief are higher than they’ve ever been before.

Grief causes us to feel a lot of things. Angry. Confused. Numb. Depressed. Anxious. Devastated. Guilty. Listless. Helpless. Alone. When we’re grieving the loss of someone or something, we may even feel like God is far away from us, ignoring our prayers and pleas. But the truth is that God draws near to us in our grief. And this is made evident to us when we see Jesus encounter a grieving widow in Luke 7.

Read more
By
/
In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
January 31, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Powerless

I cannot imagine what it must be like to never be able to walk or run. I cannot fathom what it must feel like to never be able to stand up and stretch and move around. As a person who likes to be in control of her life, I can’t conceive how frustrated I would be and how powerless I would feel that I couldn’t do normal, everyday tasks, like buying groceries, or putting on clothes, or going to the bathroom.

It can be easy for able-bodied people to take these things for granted, to forget how many things we need our legs for. I thank God that He has blessed me with legs that can run, walk, bend, stretch, skip, jump, crouch, and squat. But the unimaginable, the unfathomable, the inconceivable, the frustrating powerlessness is a reality for many people, including the paralyzed man in Luke 5.

Read more
By
/
In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
January 3, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Hurting

By some miracle, I’ve managed to never test positive for COVID-19 over the past two years. I say it’s a miracle because I’ve continued working throughout the entire pandemic, and I come into contact with a lot of different people at my job. I’m convinced that I have had it at some point and was just asymptomatic or had really mild symptoms and didn’t realize it was COVID.

I’m very grateful that I’ve never had COVID (or at least had no COVID symptoms) for many reasons. But one of the main reasons I’m thankful for never having COVID is that I never had to quarantine. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was hard enough to only go from home to work back to home again and never go anywhere else or see anyone else other than my immediate family and co-workers. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be isolated for days or even weeks on end and never see anyone or even go outside. I can’t imagine what it would’ve felt like for everyone to avoid me at all costs.

Sadly, many people, whether they’ve tested positive for COVID-19 or they’ve been diagnosed with something else, have been avoided, shunned, made to be outcasts because of their illness or disease, both in present times and in ancient times. And we can see this clearly in the story of Jesus cleansing a leper.

Read more
By
/