347. He Wants To Change The Way We See, Think And Feel

Luke 14:5

So many of us have wasted a lot of time trying to please God by following all the rules. The thing is, following rules doesn’t have anything to do with pleasing God. Not only that, but trying to earn God’s approval by walking a perfectly straight line winds up making us worse. When we try to go by the rules, we end up blind, dense and insensitive. When we’re focussed on simply doing things the right way, we lose all traces of simple, basic, common sense. One time Jesus was at a dinner party with some Pharisees - the religious leadership of God’s people. In the midst of the guests was a man suffering from severe and painful swelling in his joints. Jesus had already gotten in trouble for healing people on the Sabbath day. They considered healing to be work and as a result, a violation of the command of that day to rest. Jesus looked at this hurting man and then asked the leaders if it was okay to heal even on the day of rest. They stayed silent. He then said that if they had a child or even an animal that was hurting on the Sabbath, they’d intervene and help out. What’s really interesting is the fact that this dinner party only takes up 14 verses in the whole book of Luke, but two of those verses were used to tell us the Pharisees were speechless. When we focus on the rules and doing everything the right way, we can’t see, think or feel properly. Trying to live right changes us, but it changes us for the worse. Jesus wants to set us free to simply let Him change us.