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Thursday, February 22, 2024 Stones Or Bread? Scripture: Matthew 4:1-4 (New Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV) – “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But he answered, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”’” Message: Asked about her day at nursery school recently our three year old granddaughter replied that it was OK, but one of her classmates had not been making good choices. Learning to make good choices is part of growing up, but can be heavily influenced by the culture we live in and the social forces at any given time. This would have been as true for Jesus through the early years of His life as it has been and continues to be for us in ours. Having had these human influences symbolically washed away at His baptism, Jesus is faced with a key question: “Whether to live and work according to God’s wisdom (as symbolized by the stones in the story), or to distort that wisdom by putting His own spin on it according to the prevailing human wisdom of His time (represented by the idea of turning stones into bread)?” Amidst the perplexities and dangers of this twenty-first Century, it is all too easy to be swept along on the strong tides of opinion generated by those whose agenda is the polar opposite of love of God and of the love of neighbor. This Lenten time, may the story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation be a reminder to us all to set the course of our lives founded on the solid rock of God’s wisdom and not our own, or on that of other people. Prayer:
Holy
One,
Mike
Evans |
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