Contemplative Bible Reading

Luke 17:7-10 (New Living Translation)

⁷ “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? ⁸ Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? ⁹ Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? ¹⁰ So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

Jesus precedes this statement with, “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come.”

One of those “stumblers” is servants who think more highly of themselves than they ought. Jesus tells us that sometimes we are merely doing what is expected of us, and we need to remember that.

The phrase that keeps coming to me lately is, “but when is it my turn?” We say, or think, “I have given money in the plate every Sunday for decades – 10% and more. The church helps people with money and has a dinner to honor people and puts a plaque on the end of a pew with a person’s name but when is it my turn? When will I be honored and helped and blessed and…”

Uh, wait, “when will I be blessed?”

Am I kidding? When will I be blessed? Perhaps the question is, “when has God never blessed me?” (Please note the “n” in that question.) When was the time that God treated me as an unworthy servant? When did He not give me far more than I ever earned or deserved?

Thank God for humble duty and undeserved reward and a life of this Master saying, “Come along now and sit down to eat.”