He wakens my ear
In an earlier post on this title I wrote:
‘I try to be often reading in the four Gospels. Luke is a favourite, to read about the loveliest life ever lived is always an inspiration. Who cannot be moved reading how Jesus graciously met with people, never turning any away who came in need?
He was always healing people, and everyone who met him with an open heart was never the same afterwards and changed for the better. No wonder his most attractive life drew the crowds, and it draws me
Someone once said Jesus’ whole body language said ‘welcome’ and it still does.
I want to know this Jesus better, for him to step out of the pages of the Bible history and walk with me and he does. A text for this search could be the words of a modern hymn: ‘to make of life’s brief journey a new Emmaus road’ (Luke 24). Those two disciples nearly missed a huge opportunity when Jesus acted as if he was going further. Happily though, they urged him to stay with them and it was at the meal that they realised this stranger was Jesus, risen from the grave.
Once invited, Jesus stays, forever. Wonderful reality! Moses turned aside to look and these men persuaded Jesus to stay. Two very wise responses!
A New Emmaus Road
In these overflow pages I want to continue to explore this theme. I’m after an ‘Emmaus Road’ type of experience. I want to know Christ ‘the stranger’ and walk with him, day by day.
We are part of a benumbed and ‘spiritually deaf’ modern culture and we need to be encouraged to yearn for something more. I want to be hearing the good news about Jesus as if for the first time. I sense a need to ‘unlearn’ much of my head-knowledge and to re-learn it using more of my heart this time. I am trying to think again about Jesus’ wonderful character and life as if I were hearing about it for the first time.
I want to be like this man from the early New Testament days. I can share in his excitement.
He was very excited about something he had experienced. He couldn’t keep quiet. The truth was bubbling out from him. It’s all the more striking that he was an old man now. The events about which he was so excited happened about 60 years before. Many years of hardship and difficulty had passed since then, yet it all seemed to him as if it were only yesterday. Now that past event had become to him a continuous present reality. In order to share his on-going excitement with others he wrote:
‘From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in—we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.
We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!’
The first letter of John, chapter 1 verses 1-2 in ‘The Message’ version
A Listening Heart 