Jaw-dropping Jewels about Jesus
Rarely does Jesus, God the Son, do exactly what we expect of Him. It seems odd that He so frequently surprises us, given that He never changes. Hebrews 13:8 makes this absolute statement: “Jesus the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Still, though He is blessedly consistent in His goodness, Jesus does unforeseen things. Even when He does what is expected, He does not always do it in the way that we anticipate. Let us join with Jesus on a jaw-dropping journey. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
Today, may we permit a blind man to teach us to see: “And they came to Jericho: and as He went out of Jericho with His disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway begging” (Mark 10:46). Do we give thanks regularly to our Savior God, including for such gifts as sight? This man had a life of no colors, no beauty, no grand views of a sunrise or a sunset, no faces of dear ones. Do we thank God that we can work? Bartimaeus and others like him were forced to beg for a living. He lived at a basic subsistence level, completely dependent upon the compassion of others. We all have hard times, no doubt, including financial difficulties. This blind man, though, had a day-by-day struggle for survival, a struggle that stretched into year-by-year drudgery. Do we take time to appreciate the everyday goodness of God? Years ago, I read of a man who grew up in church and did not appreciate the testimonies of the older women. He wrote, “I used to make fun of the way those women gave the same testimony again and again in church. They would say, ‘Thank Him! He woke me up this morning, and He started me on my way!’” Later in life, that man developed the same attitude of gratitude as he grew to understand how challenging life can be. “In everything give thanks” (I Thessalonians 5:18a); let us learn from a blind man to see what we have in Christ Jesus.