Living in the Spirit
July 3, 2016

Scripture Reading: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” –Luke 10:10-11

It is interesting how differently Christians can interpret the Bible. Most of those differences are dependent on the filters within our own minds installed through life experiences. We all have them. Actually we all need them to help our minds compartmentalize and streamline our functioning. Good filters are like traffic laws designed to keep transportation running smoothly and efficiently. Bad filters often result from entrenched coping measures that were instilled in negative situations. I was involved in a car accident a couple of months ago when a car T-boned the back left side of my car centered at the back wheel. No one was hurt and my car is repaired, but two months later, I find myself flinching, when a car seems to be getting two close to my left side. That is a copping filter. Now if it causes me to be a safer driver, it becomes a good filter and hopefully the flinching will subside. If it causes me to make erratic corrections, it could be a very bad filter. If it should have caused me to quit driving at all, it has become a life altering filter.

When I read our scripture for today, I thought of these filters. The scripture is one of the hard sayings of Jesus. While it does quote him as instructing disciples to wipe the dust off their feet as a protest against the people who reject them, I wonder if it is actually an instruction to not let rejection cloud their ministry as they move on to another place and population. He is advising us to keep our filters clean. I frankly believe that can only be done through the grace of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit because sometimes we cannot let rejection and hurts go without help.

Telling the rejecters that the kingdom of God has come near may be Jesus’ way of letting them know that the door to God’s love is never closed them.

Prayer: Lord, guide us in examining ourselves to identify filters that may be holding us back from serving you to our best. Once, identified guide us in letting the bad filters go and incorporating good filters into our lives. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized 
Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council 
of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights 
reserved.