Luke 11 and 12

Luke 11 starts with Jesus presenting the disciples with the Lord’s Prayer, the “prayer which meets all human needs” we are told on page 16 of Science and Health.  We sometimes neglect Luke’s version because Matthew’s places the prayer in the fuller version of The Sermon on the Mount.  We may also neglect the idea that Jesus needed to pray.  He really kept in close touch with his Father, divine Love, Principle. 
This chapter gives us strong reproofs, again seeming to be to persons, but as we have established, these reproofs are directed at impersonal error.  We have pitfalls pointed out along with the antidotes we are to use in rebuking them.

Chapter 12 opens with a scene somewhat reminiscent of an unruly soccer audience of spectators, with “an innumerable multitude” who “trode one upon another.” Maybe there is more to this simile than I had expected, for Dummelow says that the people were attracted by the dispute between our Lord and the Pharisees as depicted in the closing verses of Chapter 11. 

Did the people treat this as an entertainment like sports games attract people these times?

How valuable we feel when Jesus tells us that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered! (Verse 7)

And when we are called to explain Christian Science to a friend would we be wise to begin with a quiet moment where we can acknowledge what verses 11 and 12 advise: “And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.”

Listening!  Listening!  Watching!  Being ready!  Wow what a chapter!  Full of directions for living a Christian life.

 

I tipped my keyboard upside down and knocked the dust and dirt out of it.  Now the keys do not stick.  Hurray!

 

Joyce Voysey