When my oldest grandson was just starting elementary school, my daughter and her family moved to a new city. Ryan was interested in street names and getting from one place to another in a new location. It didn’t take long for us to realize that he could navigate the city quite well. He would ask where we were going and then tell us the best way to get there. I still sometimes get lost when I visit.
I love the fact that we now have GPS systems in our cars. I am direction challenged so I depend on mine to get me anywhere I have not been before and sometimes places I have been before.
Familiar roads tend to leave us with a sense of comfort, but they also prevent us from seeing our surroundings. We assume things are there or not there based on what we have seen before. This thought brings to mind a passage in Luke that may be worth our consideration.
One of the things so familiar in studying about the life of Jesus is His taking time to go off alone to pray. We see this in the beginning of His ministry when He and the disciples were traveling throughout Galilee. He would teach, heal the sick, raise the dead, and then require some physical rest and time with the Father. I cannot imagine His exhaustion at the end of each day.
As Jesus neared the end of His journey on earth, He made that famous trip on the back of a donkey to the city of Jerusalem. There He was honored and worshiped by the people. Five days later, they nailed Him to a cross.
In that week between the triumphant entry and the crucifixion, several stories are recorded about the activities of Jesus, His disciples, and other friends of the Master. But there is something that I have overlooked that is probably the most important thing that happened during those five days. Look at this passage and mark it in your Bible, because it is significant to what happened to Jesus and what can help us in our daily lives.
In Luke 22, Jesus prophesies of persecutions to come for the Jewish people. He warns them about their hearts being challenged with the cares of life. Then He tells them to pray for strength to escape these temptations that will come to them. The next verse, verse 37, is the one that caught my attention. “And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet.” Remember where Jesus went on the night Judas betrayed Him? He went to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. So, Jesus walked the road to the temple from the garden and back every single day. Twice a day He walked this familiar path, and anyone that knew Jesus would have known where He would be. Jesus knew that His journey would end in that garden, but He walked it anyway. Judas knew it too. He knew where to find Jesus.
In our day-to-day lives, we often travel the same roads. We tend to pay little attention to changes—a new pot hole, a new building going up, a burned-out building, or new landscaping. We might take notice of those things, but they don’t make us take a different route unless the road is closed. The same is true with our spiritual lives. We are traveling the same roads. We are seeing the same things, encountering the same temptations, and responding in much the same way. Sometimes we encounter a new temptation, but mostly we continue to have the same challenges we had the day before. We take little notice of the way we handle our temptations.
Most of the time we know where we ought to be, the road we should take, and what we should be doing. For our spiritual life, we need to use a spiritual GPS, God’s Protection System. Verse 36 is our guide. “But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
Sandra Oliver