Read Luke 6:17-26 – Part 2
“Aren’t I Special?”
I had some more thoughts on yesterday’s devotional from this passage. Jesus did a lot of miracles with his disciples present. It would have been easy for His disciples, to become arrogant and prideful, thanking, “Look, I get to be a part of something BIG with Jesus. He chose me! Aren’t I special?” Or “I’m better than the rest of you. ”
Maybe Jesus was on to something, because after all his miracles, it was then he looked at his disciples and said his “blessings” and “woes.” Perhaps he could see the temptation for his disciples to be prideful because of all the work God was doing.
Perhaps Jesus said all these things to the disciples because he wanted to make sure they were very careful not to lose focus on their relationship with the Lord while focusing more on being popular with the world.
When we read these blessings and woes, it could be easy to conclude that “God isn’t talking to me, I’m a Christian.” But be careful because pride can seep into the heart of anyone resulting in losing focus of God, and it would be a very slow process.
“Hey, I’m Blair Blakeslee! Do you want to hear all the great things I’m doing for the Lord?” If that’s your heart attitude, look out because you’re already losing focus of the Lord. You’ve taken credit for the blessings from God and you begin to look more and more for popular feedback to boost your ego. Once this happens, it is easy to put more focus on pleasing the world than to please God. Eventually, you start to compromise your faith so you can become more popular with even more people in the world.
“Aren’t I special?? Yes, I am special, not because of who I am but because of who Christ is in me. Apart from Christ I’m nothing (John 15:5-6). My Identity is not found in how people perceive and speak about me. My identity is found in my relationship with Jesus. Lord, help me to not lose focus of you!
