Take a moment to read the entire chapter of Luke 19 before reading the devotional below.
Being a type-A, smart, overachieving conservative Christian child can be spiritually dangerous. Reading Luke 19 in such a state is practically guaranteed to make you overwork on your spiritual life. I heard various versions of “to whom much is given much is required” or “to those who use well what they are given, even more will be given. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away” (seen in this chapter, verse 26). Anyone else walk away from that with a gigantic amount of pressure to perform for God?
From everything else I know about God, I think I must be doing it wrong. Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light. We live under grace not the law. He fights our battles for us. Jesus set us free so we could live free lives. Surely carrying around an expectation of myself that I have to keep overachieving for God because I had a great head start in life seems like a misinterpretation. So what are these verses talking about?
Re-read verse 11. I notice a few things. First, Jesus was talking to a crowd of people, not an individual. Second, his purpose in telling his story was to correct their wrong ideas about how this coming kingdom thing was going to go down. He’s the nobleman in this scenario, and he’s about to head out of town. He’s leaving these people in charge of his stuff, and he wants to come back with more. Since Jesus told his disciples that they would become fishers of men, it seems like people are his currency. So he’s letting his crowd of followers know that when he leaves them, he wants them to go make the crowd bigger. Don’t sit on what you know about me, go multiply it by spreading the word.
Here’s your freedom for today: you are not the savior of the world. Jesus is. And you alone are not tasked with the job of evangelizing. We as the body of Christ are assigned this task. We’ve been given something great. And all we have to do is share. We’ve covered that theme before… All God wants us to do is share our most valuable thing with someone else. Deep breaths. I think I can do that.