Message Magazine’s Online Devotional for Sunday, April 26, 2015
Based Upon Luke 4:16-22
There are a great many of us, me included, who love to read a passage in the book of Luke, which demonstrates that it was the custom of Christ to go to synagogue on each Sabbath for worship. It is an almost too obvious fact that a Jewish person would do so. They wholeheartedly embraced the blessing of seventh-day Sabbath rest, which God established as a sign of His power to create and recreate us. And, for millennia, people all around the world have not ceased to keep the custom Jesus modeled during his more than 33 years living on earth, which was given to us at the time of creation.
Although this fact seems to be the focal point of Luke 4 in many discourses and pieces of literature and commentaries among Sabbath keepers, I would like us to also focus a bit on what He actually did that day in the Synagogue.
The Bible says, “And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, 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. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.” (Luke 4:17–20). It was at this moment during one of the may Sabbaths Jesus kept in fellowship with other believers, that Jesus announced His powerful ministry of redemption.
He firmly established His anointed prophetic mission to deliver helpless sinners from our bondage to sin, and give us the power to live for Him forever.
I love the fact that though He could have made this proclamation at any time at all, which would in no way have diminished its import, our loving Savior chose the sanctified day of rest, to share the blessing with us all. This blessing is now forever recorded for all the world to experience.
