Urge Anyone You Find To Come

July 5, 2019

Urge Anyone You Find To Come

“So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full” (Luke 14:23).

Parable of the Great Feast - Luke 14: 15-24

A bit of context will be helpful as we prepare to consider the parable of the Great Feast. Jesus had been invited to dinner on the Sabbath and had encountered a man whose arms and legs were swollen. Jesus healed the man, and several people, as they were jockeying for positions of honor at the dinner table, objected to his healing the man on the Sabbath. These people took great pride in their knowledge of the religious law and their disciplined manner of keeping the law. You might think they would have taken great joy in the healing the man experienced, but they did not. If Jesus could heal on the Sabbath, then it brought into question whether all of their other rules and regulations were appropriate. If they were not, then all they had been doing to promote themselves as being better than others was for naught. Jesus seized the moment to confront the people with the inconsistency of their application of the law and then followed up with a teaching on humility. Jesus closed his teaching with the observation, “Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you,” whereupon one of the self-righteous men present responded, “What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!” (Luke 14:14-15). Jesus continued the teaching moment by telling those gathered the parable of The Great Feast.

This parable had particular meaning to Luke’s church. The Jewish Christians struggled with the notion that the Gentiles were as welcome at the table of their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as they were. It is very difficult for some people to fully embrace that each and every one of us stands in need of God’s grace. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can offer God that makes us any better than any other person. When we lose sight of this truth, we experience pride and arrogance creeping into our lives.

An inherent characteristic of our humanity is that we are tribal. We gravitate toward people who are just like us: people with the same color skin, similar backgrounds and tastes and similar financial standing. It is pretty easy to welcome people just like we are; it is more difficult to welcome people who are different. The man in Jesus’ parable was doing more than just welcoming all people to his table; he was going into the streets and alleys of the town and bringing in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.

My Takeaway; Welcoming all people is just one-half of what Jesus expects of me; inviting all people is the other half.

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Copyright © 2019 by Alex M. Knight

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.