Luke 17

We need to be very careful.

When you read in the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 3, it talks about the Lord Jesus.

And it says that the Lord was growing in stature and wisdom before God and men.

The Lord Jesus was growing in stature and wisdom before God and men.

Wisdom is referring to the spirit in that physical body.

So the Lord was growing in stature physically and in wisdom spiritually.

Look how amazing the Holy Spirit is revealing it to our beloved Saint Luke.

He's put the physical before the spiritual.

He received.

So the book of Acts, Luke called the Old Testament church.

The book of Acts was written by Luke.

And Luke quoted the Old Testament church in the wilderness.

So God wanted to build a nation.

In 1948, Israel became a nation.

Look at 17.

Jump to 17.

We have done that which was our duty to do.

Luke 17, verse 10.

Thus the kingdom of heaven is not a reward for deeds, but a gift of grace from the master that is prepared for his faithful servants.

A slave does not demand freedom as a reward for his labor, but satisfies his master as a debtor and awaits freedom as a gift.

If you get this one, it's so important, because the Bible says this, look on your outline.

One day, the apostles are walking along, the disciples are walking with Jesus, and they say in Luke 17, verse five, they said, Lord, increase our faith.

That is a prayer God will always answer.

Lord, increase our faith.

slow to anger and abounding in mercy.

Now let's look at the New Testament and mercy as it connects to God's healing in Luke 17, verse 12.

Then as he entered a certain village, there met him ten men who were lepers." who stood afar off, and they lifted up their voices and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

They're crying out for mercy.

So when the heart of man is just on evil continually, when there's no end to wickedness, what happens? What happens to that civilization? What happens to that environment? well God says in the same chapter the earth also was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence and God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt and all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth and of course you know what God did he punished that civilization with an earth wide flood he destroyed that civilization before the flood And Jesus says the same thing is coming again.

That's in Luke 17.

It's about time that we start connecting the dots.

What is the cause of the violence, the unrest, the civil disobedience, the disorder? You've got France finally cracking down on these violent looters, burning cities down, burning parts of it, looting stores, torching cars.

It's going to cost you everything.

So I love that, like Luke 17, right? If you're not ready to hate your mom and dad, your very own life, your brother and sister, you're not ready to follow me.

So as it becomes trendy, part of the trend, I think, is that they want rules and they want dogma and they want all these, and the deeper that they go, it'll fix itself.

It's the, every time Jesus turned around and saw people following him for the wrong reasons, he always became skeptical of them, right? Huge crowds start to follow him.

You get the idea.

And going into the season of Thanksgiving, and I was also looking at a passage where Jesus, in Luke 17, Jesus had healed some lepers.

They left.

Only one of them came back to thank Jesus for the healing that he has received.