Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 21-22.

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Today’s passage starts with a lesson on giving.  Jesus points out the widow who gave two small coins as giving more than that given by the very wealthy.  Sometimes we read this as being instructions about how we should give.  It struck me today that instead this provides guidance on how we should value both our own giving and the giving of others.  We should not feel that our gift is valuable until it comes at the expense of our comfort and pleasure.   I don’t often write on this because I know what I think about this passage, but I struggle to put it into words.

From there the passage goes on to Jesus predicting the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple.  At the end of His discourse on it Jesus tells His disciples that the destruction He described will come upon all who dwell upon the earth, which leads some to conclude that what He said before that (including where He says that this generation will not pass away before it has taken place) applies to the end of the earth.  Rather I think that having predicted the fall of Jerusalem, Jesus is saying that such disaster and destruction will happen again throughout history, and that it will come with little warning.

This leads me to what I wanted to focus on in that part of the passage.  Jesus tells His disciples to watch themselves and to stay awake.  I believe that by “stay awake” Jesus means to stay alert.  Jesus tells us that we should “stay awake and all times, praying…” We should be praying that we have the strength to escape these trials.  Later in the passage, when He led His disciples to the Mount of Olives, Jesus told them twice to “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”  There are two ways to read this command.  First, we can read it as saying that we should pray that we do not succumb to temptation.  Second, we can read it as saying that the act of praying will keep us from succumbing to temptation.  Considering what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing…”, I think we should take both meanings from this command.  Pray that you do not succumb to temptation and pray so that you do not succumb to temptation.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.