LIVING FOR JESUS --- Daily Devotional
APRIL 26 JQ#11 - What are your spiritual expectations?
365 Prayers to JESUS
Jesus, Lord, I come before You this morning with so much “thanksgiving” in my heart that I fear my words will once again fall short of glorifying You, for my words are from a finite intellect trying to glorify the Infinite Knowledge of Jesus, Lord indeed Your ways are higher than my ways and Your thoughts than my thoughts but Lord look again into my heart and may the Holy Spirit speak my thanksgiving in words of praise worthy of the Honor due You. Lord Jesus, I pray again these words first prayed 12 years ago: “Lord, strengthen my resolve to make every choice with the desire to glorify God!” Amen.
The Jesus Questions
JQ#11.5 — “What are your spiritual expectations of Jesus?” Matthew 11:7. This is a very significant question as is each of the Master’s questions. The fact that Jesus asked this question “to the multitudes” (Matthew 11:7a) just after declaring Himself to be the Messiah to the disciples of John the Baptist, alerts us to where our “focus” should be as we try to answer His teaching question. Jesus began His teaching of the multitudes with this question: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” (Matthew 11:7b). We know that it is a teaching question because Matthew states in verse 1 of Chapter 11 that Jesus had “finished commanding His twelve disciples” and that Jesus had “departed from there to teach and to preach in their cities” (Matthew 11:1) hence we can know that Jesus intends to “teach and to preach” and through our study of the previous Jesus Questions we know that many of His questions are rhetorical so we can come to an understanding that Jesus, being all-knowing, does not ask questions to gain knowledge but rather, Jesus asks questions to get us focused on a specific topic. With JQ#11 Jesus is asking us to stop and consider our “expectations” and specifically our “spiritual expectations of the Messiah”. We can easily paraphrase JQ#11 from “what did you go out…to see?” to “what are your expectations?” and since Jesus had just listed His list of accomplishments one should be able to make a direct correlation from how the prophets had described the Messiah,
plus John the Baptist declaring himself to be a “messenger” declaring that the Messiah is soon coming, and what Jesus Himself had accomplished in His ministry so far that had been witnessed by the multitudes for the Messiah and only the Messiah could accomplish what Jesus had been doing! There had never been anyone before Jesus that fulfilled the requirements of the Messiah and there has been no one after Jesus that has fulfilled those Divine Attributes belonging Uniquely to the Messiah! Jesus by His accomplishments proved He is the Messiah so why didn’t those that saw Him performing miracle after miracle including healing, casting out demons, and resurrecting the dead, and many, many, more signs believe that He was the Messiah without Him having to “lay it out” for them?? My pastor Steve McDonald uses the phrase: “lay the cookies on the bottom shelf so everyone can reach them” and Jesus had been performing divine acts so why couldn’t the multitudes who had seen, heard, and experienced Jesus in the flesh understand by their own observation that Jesus IS the Son of God, the Messiah? The same is true today as each generation has God revealed to them, and today we have the Holy Bible that lays the cookies on the bottom shelf for us, so why don’t we reach out and listen to Jesus and give Him a serious personal answer to this serious personal question Jesus asks each of us as individuals, “What are your spiritual expectations of Jesus?” Why don’t you take a bite of the cookie being offered and understand Psalm 34:8 “Taste and see that the Lord is good…”?
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