Thoughts for the Day

Luke 3: 1-2 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar – when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene – during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son…

Luke 4:3 The devil said to him [Jesus], “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” John said he wrote his gospel so that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  Gabriel had said Jesus would be called the Son of God.  Jesus knew he…

Luke 5: 23-25 “Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up and walk”? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.”  So he said to the paralysed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”…

Luke 3:21b-22a Jesus was baptised too.  And as he was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. A third clue to Jesus’s continuing confidence in his identity and mission may be found in his dependence on the Holy spirit.  Whatever Jesus’s relationship may have been…

Luke 5:16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. A second clue to the source of Jesus’s confidence in his identity and mission is the importance he placed on prayer.  A keyword search for “pray” on Biblegateway.com gives 26 results in Luke’s gospel compared with 33 for the other three gospels combined.  I…

Luke 9:22 And [Jesus] said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” Peter must have thought things were going well.  His own trial spell of preaching and…

Luke 7:40 Jesus answered him [a Pharisee who had invited him to dinner] “Simon, I have something to tell you.” Tell me, teacher,” he said. The word translated here as “teacher” is elsewhere translated “Master” or “Rabbi”.  It is a title recorded in all four gospels and given to Jesus by all manner of people:…

Matt 26:53 “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?  But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must be this way?” These words recorded by Matthew as he relates the details of Jesus’s arrest give…

John 5:19 “I tell you the truth, the son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees the Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” If yesterday we were considering aspects of the “big picture” of Jesus’s mission and purpose, today we consider more the issues of…

John 4:34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” We are still exploring this question of how Jesus grew from a helpless baby to a confident adult, aware of his unique identity as both man and God and filled with such certainty and…