(Audio)
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
Jesus is calling to move beyond a kind of love where we are still mostly concerned with what we can get out of it. He is asking us to love more like he loves. We ourselves are loved by Jesus in spite of our inability to repay him. We are poor, crippled, lame and blind; still he invites us to his banquet.
Just as you once disobeyed God
but have now received mercy
because of their disobedience,
so they have now disobeyed in order that,
by virtue of the mercy shown to you,
they too may now receive mercy.
We see such disobedience in the world today. If we are honest we see it on ourselves as well. The great mystery of this is that God permits it precisely so "that he might have mercy upon all." In our failures God shows us mercy. This mercy is meant to give hope to the world that there is no one too broken to be healed or too lost to be saved. There are none who are abandoned. Failing to understand what mercy is all about, we think that we must repay him. But there is no one who can give God anything.
For who has known the mind of the Lord
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given him anything
that he may be repaid?
Yet though we can do nothing for him God does delight to share his mercy, his love, peace, and joy, his eternal happiness with us. He empowers us to live in a new way that depends on him utterly and entirely, a way to live for him completely, because living in that way is where we find fulfillment.
For from him and through him and for him are all things.
To God be glory forever. Amen.
Therefore we must not despair when we see a world full of broken and disobedient people. Instead, we should trust in the LORD's plan, not just in general, but in the particulars of the brokenness we encounter in our daily circumstances. He wants to "save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah." We can trust him to do it, no matter how things appear.
The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.
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