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Matthew 22:8-12 Gather all that you find - Day 22

 Good afternoon fellow hearers and doers of the Word

As I look back on what I wrote over a year ago, I think I may not have been consistently using Luther's 4 strand analogy.  The instruction/text book strand is to focus on what we learn about God, not trying to find ourselves in the passage..  Not sure where I picked up the "thoughts converge on God" but it gets this concept across.  

Second, we have heard how "pray moves the hand of God."  But my experience has been that by the time  a praise God for who He is and confess that I am not living the truth of who He is, my "daily need" petitions are not nearly so important as I thought they were.  In this passage, the servants don't get to ask the King why they are doing this, they just obey.

Maybe this explains why I was uncertain after I wrote this last year.

Blessings,

Jeff

Converge on God - if the invited guests were the Jews, then the guests who were invited in their place are we Gentiles. Indiscriminate gathering by God's servants.  Both bad and good are present. Like the wheat and the tares, the visible church is not made up of only believers. Of course, it should have been obvious to all who had a wedding garment and who doesn't. But only the king can make this distinction.  Activity in the Church is not the sign of spiritual rebirth. Transformed minds and lives are the wedding garments. 

We are instructed to invite indiscriminately. 

P.M. - so why do I spend so much time thinking about prayer and how it changes the one who prays?  What's the big deal?  Did the servants in this parable pray about what they were doing or did they just obey?  Did they learn something about the king's relationship with the Gentile invitees?  

I feel very uncertain about what this message is to accomplish.

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