Luke Chapter 7; Broken To Be Made Whole.

Broken to Be made Whole

Stand and lift up your bible and repeat after me.

This is my Bible.

I am what it says I am.

I can do what it says I can do.

I am going to learn how to be what it says I can be.

Today I will learn more of the word of God.

The indestructible, never ending, living word Of God.

I will never be the same.

I will never be the same.

In Jesus Name.

Please turn to Luke Chapter 7 and say, “Amen” when you are there.

Each of us have certain things in life that we just accept.

Some of them end up being wounds in our life that we just accept.

Hurts... both physical or mental.

There are certain things we just go along with, and we live our lives according to these things. We pass them onto our children, and we find that these things are reinforced by the people around us. We may be taught things growing up that just are not true.

I will give an example.

I was taught never to crack your knuckles in your hand because if you do it will damage them and you will not be able to use your hands when you get older.

Sound familiar?

Several doctors were paid to do a study on this and found that it does not change anything in your hand at all if you crack your knuckles.

Some of us may have spent our whole lives missing out on cracking our knuckles because of this. If want to right now, go ahead, crack your knuckles.

It’s Ok.

I was told that I would just have enjoy life without doing some things ever because of my fear of heights. That has turned out to be false as I have stood on the edge of a walkway in Peru at 11,000 feet elevation and I was OK. I also have gone hang gliding. I have been able to overcome the fear of flying having flown to many countries over the years because of my best friend and wife. And God.

But what if?

What if we’ve just accepted some things that have much more significant implications?

What if we have just gone along with some things in our lives? We’ve just believed some things because we’ve been told them, and it’s been reinforced by the culture around us…that have much more dire ramifications.

I was brought up not knowing anybody of a skin color darker than mine and not knowing people from other countries. And I accepted the fact.

But God changed that and I know that a person’s skin color does not make a person any different than me. We all bleed red when we are cut. Amen. Most of my good friends over the years have been from other countries and have had different colors of skin and been from different parts of the world that Our Lord created.

If you studied the ministry of Jesus, here’s what you’ll find: He spent a significant amount of His time teaching as a rabbi…

He spent a significant amount of His time overcoming the myths that the people had been taught about God and about faith. A lot of what He did was to say, “You’ve heard it said this, but I’m going to tell you something different. I know you’ve been taught to look at it this way; I’m going to give you a new way to look at it.”

He came on the scene, and He confronted some false beliefs about faith, about religion, about God that many people had just kind of accepted.

It is kind of like having and black and white TV and then getting a color one like what happened when I was a kid.

Many of the spiritual leaders of Jesus’ day made the focus the outside.

The outside appearance.

That’s what it meant to follow God. It was that you have your act together and that you keep up your appearances; and you follow all the right rules, and you keep the rituals. And Jesus came along, and He says, “Look, I know you’ve been taught that it’s what’s on the outside. That’s not what it’s about. It’s what’s on the inside, and then what’s on the inside comes out. It’s an inside-out way of following God.”

But for many of us, that’s not how we understood it. We learned to kind of keep track of how we were doing on the outside. We learned to keep up appearances, to make sure everybody knew we had a smile on our face and everything was good and we didn’t have any problems. And God says, “Look, man may look on the outside, but I look at the heart.”

But that was hard for the people to accept. Jesus came along; He turns some things upside-down, inside-out. And this may be hard for us to believe, but some of the people in that culture—they had actually created this environment in the temple, in the house of God, where certain people didn’t feel welcome.