Take a moment to refresh, refocus, and refine your faith.
Jesus, even when threatened by mobs and governments, even when arrested for execution, you chose grace and mercy over defensiveness. When faced with far lesser offences, Lord, my instinct is to put my guard up and shoot back with accusations. That is not the example you set. Holy Spirit, rise in me that I would rise to the occasion of reflecting Christ. Don’t let anger, selfishness, pride, or bitterness overcome me. Fill me with a humbling sense of your compassion and forgiveness so that I would respond to conflict with your peaceable nature. Amen.
Luke 4:24-30
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
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