Words of Authority

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE

WORDS OF AUTHORITY

Luke 4:31-32

31 Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath began to teach the people. 32 They were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority.

NIV

At first, we thought there was not much here for us to learn a lesson, or that we would apply to our daily lives, but then we got the message about authority. Of course, Jesus spoke with authority because He is God in the flesh, or perhaps we should say that He is the Son of God who came in the form of man, but God is three in one, the holy trinity, so Jesus is God and thus Jesus spoke with the authority of God. It was  God speaking. But the idea is that what we say, when we speak of the scriptures, and of God and specifically of the good news, and about Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, we speak with authority. When we quote the scriptures, we are speaking the very words of God and that is speaking with the authority God gave us. The Bible is the ultimate authority for and in our lives. Some people might want us to believe they are the authority on some topic, knowing all the stats of a sports star, or team, all the lives of some movie star, or even science or this so-called climate change, a plethora of other topics, all because they read about them in books. But all those books are written from the mind of man. True, there are many great minds in so many fields of endeavor. Man has learned so much about so many things, all of which God either made or established. Man has learned how to travel to the moon, build great buildings, and fix or repair parts of the human body. Man has accomplished many things, but we want to be clear, all this is by the authority of man’s thinking. In fact, some even think, such as environmentalists, that we can destroy the planet, which would mean man is greater than God. This is thinking by the authority of self. However, we know by whose authority everything in this world exists, and by whose authority we live and breathe. Nothing was made that was not made by Jesus. Through him all things were made. In him is life, and that life is our light. We live by the authority of Jesus, and so when we speak the words of God, we speak with the only true authority there is in the world. Let us speak the truth of God, and let us speak it with His authority which he gave to us.