There is an expression that I think most people, parents in particular, know pretty well: to be “caught in a lie.” You know the scenario: someone is speaking and most often without even realizing it, does or says something that makes it clear that they have just lied. If you are a parent and this is your child, you meter out the punishment and hope to influence your child’s developing values.
People were taking the children to Jesus that he might bless them. In Jesus’ day it was apparently a common practice, but it is easy to miss the significance of this story. Hebrew fathers had been blessing their children throughout the whole Old Testament. Hebrew parents had been bringing their children to the synagogue way before Jesus’ time for a ritual of blessing. The Talmud contains one of these blessings: That they might be “
We think we are the most important
The disciples were arguing over who was the greatest. I think we can relate to that. We measure ourselves against each others. We compare and we compete. Mind you, Jesus had pretty much just changed the world order by suggesting that The Son of Man was destined to be betrayed and killed. Still the disciples were slow to turn that truth into something that really changed their way of being.
I think we often tend to think we know what God has in mind, only to be surprised that God’s plans are not the same as our own.
In 1831 William Miller, a Baptist preacher from Northeast New York, began to preach a message that Christ would return sometime between the spring of 1843 and the spring of 1844. He had come to that conclusion by reading the Bible and assembling a complicated calendar that led him to that conclusion.
Mark 10:13-16