11/18/2024 – Glory to God for Christ’s Perseverance
Luke 4: 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. 23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’” 24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy[g] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
The primary reason for confusion regarding the interpretation of God’s Word is that we try to understand a spiritual message with our mind focused on the material. Our Lord Jesus Christ appeared before the congregation in a synagogue in his village of Nazareth. But the people of Nazareth rejected him. They were looking at the appearance of Christ alone and thinking about their social position. Their expectations were limited to the physical and temporal while God works primarily in the spiritual and eternal.
The reaction of the congregation increased until it ended in a collective rejection. It was easy for the congregation of that synagogue to reach an agreement in full worship, and even a verdict of death sentence. That same day they tried to throw him off a cliff! What a sadness!
Glory to God that, despite the rejection of his people, the heart of Christ remained faithful. How good that Christ never considered abandoning his ministry because of the rejection of the people. The hallmark of the Holy Spirit’s presence in us is not our ability to meet the moral standards of our society, but the courage to remain faithful to God when the majority turns their backs on him and the sinful becomes acceptable.
Thank God that Christ did not give up on us. We must not give up either. Everyone who wants to follow Christ will have to swim against the tide. The most impressive thing the Bible tells us about Noah is that he was faithful to God when no one else was faithful amid his generation. Faithfulness becomes more valuable the more opposition you face.