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We think status, heritage, and credentials make us a somebody or a nobody, yet those are not what God values. In Matthew 8 a Gentile centurion—nobody by race—approaches Jesus with a suffering servant, forcing the question of what actually makes anyone able to approach God’s kingdom.
Selfishness is sneaky—it feels like commonsense in the moment. As the disciples sat right in front of Jesus, they struggled with the same self-centered question we all are challenged: “But what about me?”
There’s a blind man sitting by the road outside Jericho in Luke 18, and the crowd wants him to be quiet—he’s an embarrassment, a distraction from something more important. He cries out anyway: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Whatever it is that makes you feel like the person everyone else wants to go away, this passage is for you.
Even when we have the truth, we need to figure out how to convey it in love. Conveying truth in love involves caring about how the person we’re speaking to will hear it because of how we say it and when we say it.
Most of us have something we'd rather not put on the table before God—something we're holding just tightly enough that we hope He won't notice. In Luke 18, a ruler who has kept the commandments since his youth comes to Jesus asking what he still must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus names exactly the one thing he isn't ready to hear.
When we’re ready to accuse others of missing the mark of righteousness, are we prepared to explore the differences between ourselves and the righteous person too?
We're drawn to people who seem useful, impressive, ready to contribute—and in Luke 18, the disciples felt the same way when they turned away parents bringing infants to Jesus. But Jesus stopped them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
We constantly seek to strive for the better position in society, but what if we stopped trying to see ourselves as important and instead saw ourselves humbly?
Believing that God will ultimately triumph over the grave is one thing; knowing what to do with yourself in the meantime is another. Ruth 3 presses that question through people who have lost everything and choose to prepare rather than wait it out—and what their ordinary faithfulness looks like, in the daily grind before the story resolves, may be more unsettling and more freeing than expected.
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
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