The Bible, getting to grips with what the writers message means today ~ Luke

Reading the Bible is great, but reading it in everyday language, I believe, helps put it into perspective.
Even better is knowing the background of the writer and understanding why and to whom he was writing.
So these blogs, one for each of the New Testament Books hope to achieve just that by giving the background for each of the books of the New Testament as written in The Message.

LUKE

Most of us, most of the time, feel left out— misfits. We don't belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, "insiders" who know the ropes, old hands.

One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are "in" and the others “out”. The clubs range from informal to formal in gatherings that are variously political, social, cultural,and economic. But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out s that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a "membership." But with God there are no outsiders.

Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn't felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.

_{All Scripture quotations are taken from The Message, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.}