"The Spirit of the Lord is on me because He has
anointed me to preach good news to the poor." Luke 4:18
Growing up in a city for thirty years and then leaving for a new job would mean saying goodbye to family members, friends, and neighbors who had been an important part of your life. Jesus had done just that when He left Nazareth to begin His ministry. It was many months later when He returned to Nazareth and you can imagine everyone's excitement to see the carpenter's son that people from all over had been talking about lately. News of the miracle at Cana, only four miles away, would certainly have reached their ears and His fame had spread far beyond his small hometown.
But the return home didn't go as expected; the people in Nazareth were satisfied to welcome Him home as a carpenter, even as someone now performing miracles as He traveled the country but the Messiah? For Jesus to announce Himself as the Messiah was totally outrageous, outside the bounds of what they expected or would accept. The good citizens of Nazareth saw Jesus in the light of the ordinary and the commonplace, blinded by familiarity-that wasn't who they were used to!
The sad thing is that we too often do the same. We allow our dead, dull familiarity with "religion" and with church to rob us of our sensitivity to the presence of the Lord and, in so doing, we miss the very one we are needing the most. Like the people of Nazareth, we want Jesus on our own terms, to fulfill our preconceived ideas and expectations of what He is like, and when He moves in a different way, we reject it. Think about it, Jesus was unacceptable to the very people He grew up with.
When the people rose up in anger, Jesus literally moved on. He set up shop in another city, Capernaum, and made that the base for His ministry. But what did the people of Nazareth miss as a result?
1. They missed seeing what Jesus could do in their lives.
2. They missed being a part of His plans and purposes.
3. They missed the opportunity of a relationship with their Savior.
And those are all the things we miss when we allow pre-conceived ideas and mindsets to dominate our thinking. Let's all commit to going to church this week planning on an encounter with God, expecting revival to break out, and with a willingness to change in any areas the Lord wants to put His finger on in our lives. Don't let familiarity with the things of God rob you of all the good things the Lord wants to do in your life.
God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church
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