Day 25: The Real Rules (Luke 6:17-49)
Today’s Passage: Luke 6:17-49
It is a long section of Scripture. Certainly, you can break it up into smaller bits and study a specific subject. Today however, let’s think about it differently.
Jesus has just prayed and selected his apostles, the ones who will be sent with his message. He comes down and is face-to-face with a large crowd—a crowd that has either witnessed him heal on a Sabbath, or heard about him. No doubt people are wondering about this good guy who breaks the Law.
And so, Jesus gives them the Real Rules. He isn’t replacing the Bible (Luke in chapter 16 verses 16–17 will quote Jesus on the permanence of the Scriptures). No, he is taking them deeper.
Books have been written on little snippets of this chapter. And perhaps this chapter is where people begin to create this picture of “Jesus the nice guy.” Yet, when we read it as one long speech, I get a different picture.
What picture do you get?
I hear Jesus challenging me to love in a sacrificial way. I hear Jesus challenging me to make a hard self-assessment of myself. After each statement, I paused and asked, “Do I do this?”
In the company I used to be in, each year every person would do a self-assessment. We would all write down how we were doing living the company’s values, and also performing our specific goals. Our peers would similarly rate us, and then our supervisor. The goal was to agree on how we each saw ourselves, and then get the needed coaching to become even better. Imagine if we did that process with the above list, not to earn God’s love (he already loves us), but instead to seek to excel at following Jesus.