Third Sunday in Lent: Gospel, Luke 3:1-9                    

Luke 3:1-9

God wants us to be good at discerning the times, our situations, our days. It comes down to choices we’re given to make and learning from our Lord the foresight to know that obedience is always best. In my own life, I need to remember more that God takes real delight in my obedience. Never slavish, nor under the crack of a whip. But rather under the hand and heart of a benevolent dictator. We say it often and sometimes glibly, but God IS good.

In the gospel reading above we have Jesus teaching about the way things go when we disregard His Word. Before that Word we all stand equal. Equal in our guilt, that is. And one of the delights the Lord takes in His children is when we acknowledge our guilt, our frailty, the disaster of our life without Him.

We don’t deserve his glance, let alone His gifts. But He stresses in this passage that there is a way to avert the doom that overtakes the sinner justly. “Unless you repent, you will likewise perish.” Martin Luther taught in the first of his famous ninety-five theses that the entirety of the Christian life is a life of repentance. Sounds so negative and ominous. But for those who know this truth and by God’s grace practice it, there is real freedom. Freedom from the immediate scourge of a guilty conscience. And freedom from eternal doom.

God be praised for His loving counsel, His tough truth.