Throughout Scripture, we often get some very powerful imagery for us to understand the work of God. In our lives we have this idea that it is light, and this is really helpful imagery because you and I know the power of light. We understand this one at some point in our lives. I'm sure that when you were younger you were afraid of the dark. This is just a natural thing in us that light is powerful.

‌As I’ve mentioned many times, Luke takes the events of Jesus life and he is putting them together to tell us the story of salvation in Christ with a particular emphasis. One idea that continually comes through in “The Story Luke Tells” is the idea of the authority that Jesus has. We see this coming through in many ways in Luke’s gospel.

Do you have any Bible stories that stand out to you and come across as out of place in scripture? I can think of several of them and a lot of them we have journeyed through together while we were in the book of Genesis. We had the awkward story of the sons of Jacob slaughtering the people of Shechem after they had been circumcised. That whole story is rather different from top to bottom but yet we find there is a reason that Moses put it into holy scripture. There are others that we could bring up. Everything from Judah impregnating his daughter-in-law when he didn’t realize it was her and thought she was a prostitute to Sarah banishing Hagar and Ishmael from their community.

The idea of the Sabbath is something that we are familiar with. Right there in the very first chapter of our Bibles we find the created order and how God instituted our seven day week in the way that he created everything in six days and then rested on the seventh day. We not only find this in the creation account but it is one of the Ten Commandments and when we find this command of sabbath rest there we find that this fourth commandment is connected back to the creation story. The keeping of the Sabbath was an important part of the rituals of the Old Covenant and by the time of Jesus, many additions to the law had come into being and many of them revolved around the idea of keeping the Sabbath. As I’ve mentioned in talking about the Pharisees in the past, they were known for not only desiring to keep the law but also making laws to help you keep the law.

We often see people who make waves and from our perspective it seems as though their rise is quick and out of nowhere. As a baseball fan I usually think about the player who makes it to the major leagues and you’ve never heard their name before in your life and suddenly they are getting on base and knocking in runs at the most opportune time for your favorite team. Suddenly this person whose name you might not even have been able to pronounce three weeks ago is the talk of the team’s fandom. It seems as though its about luck or just pure God given talent from our perspective but the truth is this person’s rise to being famous had a lot to do with paying their dues and putting in the work. We don’t know much about their years in the minor leagues and how long it took for them to get promoted to the next level. We don’t know the hours they spent in the batting cages struggling to get that hitch out of their swing that was causing them to do nothing but pop balls up or drive them into the ground.

In the course of our lives there is rarely a bigger announcement that we get to make than the arrival of a child. Some of the best videos on the internet are of people telling their parents they are going to be grandparents. The best ones have the grandma to be not understanding the message and then when the light turns on joy overflows. Some of you may have had an experience similar to this. The announcement of a child is often held back because you don’t want people to know too early on. Often one of the parents to be is struggling with having to wait and they want to tell just one or two or seventeen people but they have to wait.