A Broader Vision

Our text for this morning is Luke 4:38-44. “After leaving the synagogue Jesus entered Simon's house. Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her. Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she got up and began to serve them.

As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, "You are the Son of God!" But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah.

At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place. And the crowds were looking for him; and when they reached him, they wanted to prevent him from leaving them. But he said to them, "I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose." So he continued proclaiming the message in the synagogues of Judea.”

We’ll look at it in three steps as we go through the service in three different meditations.

Meditation One:

The Vision Comes in Solitude

Do you know the feeling of the pressure of so many good things that you could be doing, you feel that you ought to be doing, people want you to be doing, that it gets very hard to decide which things to do and which things to say ‘no” to? We all know that feeling. Do you ever have the feeling that all your time is going into good, legitimate things, but there just isn’t time left for the most important things? This morning we will be looking at a passage from Luke’s gospel in which he seems to have faced exactly the same thing.

Someone has said that “the good” is the greatest enemy of “the best.” Usually it is the good things that clutter up our lives, pulling us in many different directions all at once, so that we don’t have energy left for “the best things.” To live for “the best things” takes a clear vision of where you are going, what you are here on this earth to accomplish. Life can be like a gauntlet. There is a goal way down there in front of you. And to get there you have to run through a line of all sorts of things that push and pull and bang on you to keep you from getting there. “The best things” take commitment, consistency, and perseverance to accomplish.

And those “good things” are so tempting because you can just pick one here and one there and feel like you are doing good. But when they take over, they block us from “the best things.”

In this morning’s Bible passage, Jesus has a very good thing going. After worshipping in the synagogue in Capernaum, a friend, Simon Peter, invites him home. Peter’s mother-in-law is quite sick with a high fever. And Jesus heals her, suddenly, totally, dramatically. Word gets around town. And as things cool off later that evening, and the Sabbath comes to an end at sunset, so that it was allowed to carry someone needing healing, people start bringing their friends and relatives who are ill as well, surrounding the door to Peter’s house. And Jesus heals them all, one by one.

That must have felt good. Nobody is going to criticize you for healing the sick, especially if you wait until the Sabbath is over. They had just rejected him in his hometown of Nazareth, but here, in Capernaum, they loved him. That must have felt good.

But Jesus knew inside that this was not the very best. So he got up, very early in the morning, and went off somewhere to be alone and pray. And in that time of just focusing on listening to God, his Father, his direction, his next step, became clear for him.

As we work together to be disciples of Jesus, faithful followers, we often need to follow his example, to take time to just listen to God, to let him sort out for us what is merely good and what is the best, what can be sacrificed and what must be fitted in no matter what. We need to know the difference between what feels good today and what will really make a difference for the kingdom of God.

Let’s start our worship time together now, with a time for each of us to listen to God, to hear his still, small voice, to present ourselves to our God for service. May he open our eyes to see a vision of who we really are and what we can do in the power of God. To help us, Caren is going to come and sing for us, “Come and Find the Quiet Center,” a song of invitation to us to shut out all the noise of this world and listen to what God is saying to us.