WordLive - Year OneSample

Prepare: If we are to know God better, we need to be prepared for him to amaze and challenge us. Today, pray giving God permission to offend you, to blow your understanding of him wide open and show you something new. Confronting legalism Jesus’ radically new declaration of the kingdom of God was both profoundly good news and profoundly offensive. Those who encountered Jesus never went away unchallenged, but while some were healed and set free, others left plotting murder. Again Jesus confronts the deeply ingrained legalism of the Pharisees about the Sabbath. Yesterday’s verses showed Jesus and his disciples picking grain to feed themselves on the Sabbath. Today’s show how the Pharisees consider it better for a man to remain disabled than to be healed on the Sabbath. They really had got their priorities wrong. Revealing God Jesus confronts them directly (v 4): will they choose good or evil, saving or killing? They choose killing! Jesus himself is deeply disturbed by the response (v 5). How could they have misunderstood God so completely? God is a God of life, generosity, healing. Jesus’ mission in the world was to reveal the Father (John 14:9). In his way of life, his ministry and his death and resurrection he showed us the Father’s true nature of love and freedom. Respond: Do you sometimes behave as though God were more interested in rules than in people? As though God is concerned more with condemning than with liberating? Ask God to reveal your misconception of his character and praise him for his goodness today. http://www.wordlive.org/Session/Classic/2012-01-28