Dave's Diary

Prayer

Briefly prepare your heart in silence, and ask the Holy Spirit to awaken your sense of anticipation that God is about to speak to you through His Word. Then, before you read, I invite you to pray this prayer based on Psalm 1:2-3:

Lord, my delight is in Your law
and I come now to meditate on it.
May Your Word make me fruitful,
and cause me to flourish and prosper
in righteousness and holiness. Amen.

Reading

Luke 13:1-9

Yesterday’s reading and devotion helped us to see the importance of focussing on fulfilling our own calling and responsibilities to the Lord, instead of comparing ourselves to others and their callings.

In today’s reading Jesus commands His disciples to stop wondering about the sins of others and to focus on their/our living in a constant condition of repentance for their/our own shortcomings, sins and transgressions, and making every effort to produce the “fruit of repentance” (see Luke 3:8).

The people in v.1 display our typical human tendency to look at the sufferings of others and assume that they have brought this upon themselves through their sin or rebellion against God. But Jesus rebukes that attitude. He emphasizes that neither the Galileans in question (v.1-2), nor others who died in a building collapse in Siloam at the time of His ministry (v.4) were any worse than anyone else.

So instead of spending time judging and blaming others, He calls them (and us) to look at ourselves and “repent” (v.3 & 5). I put “repent” in inverted commas because the verb in Greek is in the present continuous tense. That means that a direct translation of the Greek would be, “Unless you are repenting”. This is a call to a continuous attitude of repenting, i.e “constant turning away from our sins and towards God.”

It’s also critical to point out that to die from a collapsed tower or the violence of Pilate is something very different from “perishing”. Jesus is not warning them (nor us) that not repenting will lead to God killing us! Heaven forbid that we should think that way! He is, in fact, pointing out the deeper reality that to live merrily in sin and not turn back to God consistently and constantly leads us away from fellowship with God and into a growing state of spiritual perishing as we drift further and further from God and the life He gives us. our lives become like the fruitless fig tree in v.6-7.

What Jesus wants instead is for us to forget about the sins of others, focus on own sinfulness, respond to His ministry (v.8), repent of our sins and allow Him to lead us into a life of fruitfulness!

Will you?

Contemplation

Please take time to ponder what Jesus has commanded us. Turn these declarations over and over in your mind. Keep them in mind throughout the day and live in step with Your King, Jesus.

As a disciple of Jesus Christ:

• I will resist the temptation to judge others.
• I will test my own life and repent of all known sins.
• I will seek to respond wholeheartedly to Jesus’ ministry as He works to make me fruitful in my life.

Lord Jesus, I choose to turn away from my sin. I turn to You right now. Please forgive me for my past failures and work in me by the Holy Spirit to produce the good fruit of Your Kingdom. Amen.