What I'm Learning about Jesus

I don't have time to blog; I really don't. I have seven photo sessions to edit, and I'm off to take more photos in three hours.

I'm behind with my Bible study and struggling to keep up with homeschooling. I don't have time to blog,

and yet. I'm thinking of my friend from the restaurant: the one who advised me to slow my pace when I'm in the weeds. I'm thinking of his saying that, if I slow down, I'll remember everything I need to remember, and one thing I need to remember comes out of my Bible study.

This Bible study. There have been moments that I've felt as though God were speaking directly to me. And He was. He does that. His Word is so relevant to our daily lives. When I don't have time to read the Bible, when I don't want to read the Bible, I need to read it, most. I don't know why I have to learn this lesson over and over.

The Bible study is on Isaiah and took me, recently, into the fourth chapter of Luke. Jesus had entered His hometown of Nazereth after spending forty days in the wilderness. He had eaten nothing for those forty days and had resisted the aggressive temptation of the devil. Scripture says the devil departed from Jesus for a season. Jesus entered Galilee in the power of the Spirit. In Nazereth, He stood up to read in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He read this from the book of Isaiah (Chapter 61):

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).

Before Jesus closed the book, gave it to the minister, and sat down, He said: "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears" (Luke 4:21b).

Up until that moment in my Bible study, if someone had asked me what Jesus's purpose was, or is, I would've said He died to save us from our sins. Maybe, if pressed, I would've referred to Him as the Creator. And I wouldn't have been wrong, but I wouldn't have been entirely right, either, because I wouldn't have presented these verses. I wouldn't have offered that Jesus's purpose was, in part, to heal the brokenhearted. I wouldn't have suggested that His purpose was to give sight or release captives.

I knew He does those things, but it's different--isn't it?--to say someone does something and to say his or her purpose is to do something. It would be one thing, for example, for someone to say of me: she bakes a good cookie, another for her to say that I was put here on earth to bake cookies.

More than seven hundred years before Jesus was born, Isaiah prophesied that Jesus was coming to heal broken hearts, free captives, and so many other things, besides. Jesus didn't just do those things; He came to do those things. I'm having a hard time articulating why I find this distinction so meaningful for the same reasons I've found blogging so challenging, recently: there are things I can't write in this space.

But. My heart hurts. I am grieving. I have blind spots. I am in a prison (or two) of my own making. And it matters to me that not only can Jesus help me, but my life is in the hands of the One who was sent to address these specific concerns.