I don’t know of another passage of Scripture that is more well-known or more beloved than this passage I just read for you. It’s one of the first verses of Scripture that most folk learn “by heart” because it conveys the core message of the Gospel and the means by which we secure eternal life.

A true disciple is a lifelong learner. That’s because there’s always something new to know about following Jesus or some spiritual discipline that we can become more proficient in pursuing. At no point does our need to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus become more evident than in the matter of giving.

This week in our pastoral staff meeting we were looking at the upcoming MBBC calendar when someone mentioned that Monday was “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Clearly, political correctness has even seeped down now to our Apple calendars so that we can’t even enjoy a good long weekend without being reminded of our inherited guilt as occupiers of a land that our ancestors discovered and then took over.

Most of the stories Jesus told lend themselves to easy application, do they not? Consider, for example, the story of the Prodigal Son or the story of the Good Samaritan. Everybody resonates with those two stories because everybody understands them and can relate to them. After all, who among us hasn’t felt the tug toward the far country and felt the need to come home once we had come to our senses? Or, who among us hasn’t wrestled with the responsibility of going out of our way to help another in need, especially when we at one point were on the receiving end of such aid? In almost every story Jesus tells, there is at least one character we can see ourselves in, or one character we can imagine ourselves working to become.