Prayer

Overview

Today’s sermon comes from a series on the life of Jesus described in the gospel of Luke. The passage comes from chapters 10 and 13 which help us answer the question, “What does it mean to be his disciple?” In verse 39 we learn that Mary sat at the Lord’s feet which is the technical way of saying that she was a disciple of a rabbi. Now historians will tell us it was extremely rare for a rabbi at that time to take a woman as a formal disciple, but Jesus does it. From a modern point of view, here’s a woman being told, “Send her back into the kitchen; she has no place at your feet as a disciple,” and Jesus says, “Yes, she does.”

Through Mary we learn something for all of us. Disciples are called into an extraordinarily personal relationship with Jesus. Let’s look more closely at these two questions: What is that extraordinary personal relationship, and secondly, how can we cultivate it?