Give Us This Day Devotionals, Volume 3: Luke

By Charles Erlandson

Give Us This Day is a unique daily devotional commentary for the entire New Testament based on the ancient method called lectio divina. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," is the method used by the early church and countless Christians through the centuries to read the Scriptures to form and transform the soul more than merely to inform the mind.

Give Us This Day deals in depth with entire passages and their contexts. Rather than selecting only certain portions of the New Testament to write about, Fr. Charles has written a devotional for each and every passage of the New Testament.

Fr. Charles writes for the whole person: he's not afraid to use his sense of humor, and he carefully relates the Bible not only to the individual's life but also to the life of the Church. At the end of each day's devotional, an appropriate Prayer is offered, as well as Points for Further Reflection on the day's lesson. Each devotional concludes with a suggested Resolution to put into effect what the Spirit has stirred up in the heart of the reader during the course of his reading, meditation, and prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725282537

Charles Erlandson

Charles Erlandson is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church and serves as the assistant rector at Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, where he resides with his wife and children. He is a professor of church history and the director of communications at Cranmer Theological House in Dallas. His previous works include Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Quest for Unity in a Diverse Religious Tradition; Love Me, Love My Wife: Ten Reasons Christians Must Join a Local Church; and Take This Cup: How God Transforms Suffering into Glory and Joy.

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to Give Us This Day, the daily Bible devotional I’ve written for every passage in the New Testament. I began to write Give Us This Day in the summer of 2006, in response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit for me to write a daily Bible devotional based on the ancient way of reading the Scriptures known as the lectio divina. Originally called Daily Bread for the first five years of its existence, my daily devotionals began as a daily e-mail I sent out to a growing readership. However, for some time it has been my goal to publish the entire series of devotionals so that there would be a daily Bible devotional for every passage of the New Testament. Some of you have been reading Give Us This Day from the beginning, and I thank all of you who have been its faithful readers over the years.

While I originally wrote Give Us This Day primarily for the Reformed Episcopal Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas at which I was serving as rector (St. Chrysostom’s then, but now called Christ Anglican), I became aware that many others might profit by these devotionals. When I first began writing, I surveyed the other daily devotionals that were out there and immediately noticed some differences between what I was writing and what others had written. I was concerned that most of the other devotionals only dealt with a verse of the Bible for each day, and I could find none that provided a devotional for every passage of the New Testament. I also noticed that what I had written was usually longer than the uniformly bite-sized devotionals that seemed to be the publishing norm. In addition, most other devotionals did not include suggestions for further meditations, and virtually none offered suggested resolutions to help put into effect what God had revealed through a given passage. At the end of each Give Us This Day meditation, I, therefore, offer not only a Prayer but also some Points for Further Reflection and a Daily Resolution.

This particular volume covers St. Luke’s Gospel and is the third of an eight-volume series that covers the entire New Testament. Give Us This Day will be made available as a printed book and an e-book and is also available as a daily devotional that is sent each day to those on my list.

Give us this day our daily bread is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.

As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The feedings of the four thousand and five thousand (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.

But He feeds us in other ways. In one of his sermons, St. Augustine expressed his belief that the feeding of the four thousand isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to Grant that we may in such wise hear them [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

However, Christians in the twenty-first century often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your real life. I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today, you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.

Scripture must, therefore, be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the spiritual blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?

The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:

1.lectio—reading/ listening

a.Cultivate the ability to listen deeply.

b.Your reading is slow, formative reading.

c.Your reading is based on previous reading and study.

2.meditation—meditation

a.Gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally.

b.Ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud.

c.Say the passage over and over, noticing different aspects—taste it!

d.Allow God’s Word to become His word for you at every level of your being and to interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas.

3.oratio—prayer

a.Pray—or dialogue with God—over the passage.

b.Interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you.

c.Allow God to transform your thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, and habits.

d.Re-affirm and repeat what God has just told you.

4.contemplation—contemplation

a.Rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you.

b.Rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God.

c.Leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you.

Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food we need to nourish and correct our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect, and our random forages into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.

A Few Words of Advice

1.Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.

2.Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Give Us This Day. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary to keep up with a different Resolution every day: you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure! Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Give Us This Day as it is most profitable for you.

3.If God stops you and tells you to do something different—for example, to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today—drop everything else and listen to Him!

4.Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day—don’t ever let go of it!

Ways to Profitably Eat Give Us This Day

1.Find and use some system for reading Scripture daily. I’ve organized Give Us This Day in the canonical order of the New Testament: from Matthew to Revelation. But many church traditions use a lectionary system of reading the New Testament. With your favorite lectionary in hand, you can read Give Us This Day with the daily New Testament assigned by that lectionary.

2.Give Us This Day was written with the conscious aim of encouraging the reader to think more actively about the act of interpretation. While the literal meaning of the text is always the beginning point, the Bible can legitimately be applied in other ways. I’ve especially tried to suggest that the Bible is best read with the interpretation of the entire Church in mind.

3.I’ve also written Give Us This Day so that it could serve as a reference point for Bible study: in other words, as a kind of commentary to be consulted and not only a daily devotional to be used only once.

4.The Resolutions found in each Give Us This Day are another resource that should not be neglected. It may be neither desirable nor possible to follow the prescribed Resolution for each day. But these Resolutions can be returned to for further reference and used even apart from the devotional for the day.

5.The Prayers of Give Us This Day, many of which have been taken from a variety of historical sources, are also a rich resource that bears repeated use. Together, the prayers form a kind of treasury of prayer that can be used in any of a variety of ways. They especially include several different ways to think about how to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

A Note on Interpretation

Most of us who believe the Bible is the Word of God naturally assume that God intends it all for me, but even if this is true, the question remains as to how it applies to me. This is the task of all interpretation, including teaching and preaching. Historically, the Church has read the Bible in four senses or kinds of interpretations: the literal, allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical. The allegorical meaning, of which so many Bible-believing Christians are afraid, is simply applying a given passage to Jesus Christ or the Church Militant (the Church still here on earth). We interpret the Bible allegorically all the time whenever we read the Old Testament and find Jesus Christ in it, for the literal meaning may be about the entrance into the Promised Land or about kings or about the delicate art of sacrificing animals. Yet we know that such passages also teach us about Christ. The moral sense is also one we use all the time, even if we claim we are only being literal. A moral interpretation of a passage involves applying it to yourself or other Christians. The anagogical interpretation means applying the passage to the heavenly realities and is thus (here goes another big word) eschatological in nature, applying the Word of God to the end things, or the world to come, on which we think too infrequently.

Give Us This Day is designed to be primarily moral in its interpretation because I want each of you to apply the Word of God to your life. But your life is not merely your own: it belongs to Christ, and so we seek Jesus Christ in His Church (allegorical interpretation). And all who are truly Christians are part of the Body of Christ and hopefully part of a local body, and therefore much of what the Bible says must be allegorical in this sense.

May God bless you through Give Us This Day, however you choose to use it, however you allow God to use it in your life. It is, in essence, but one way to make sure God’s people are meditating on His Word even as they pray. Feel free to share it with friends and pass along those parts that may be profitable to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Luke 1:1–25

I love the opening of St. Luke’s Gospel because I feel that St. Luke is talking to me. "You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?" we ask.

St. Luke’s answer (which is God’s) is, simply, Yes.

Why do I feel as if St. Luke is talking to me?

First, Luke is the only Gentile privileged to have been inspired to write a book of the Bible. In fact, he was privileged to write two: his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles (which I think of more as The Rest of the Words and Acts of Jesus Christ). In St. Luke, we see the coming of Christ to the Gentiles incarnated.

Second, Luke is the only one who has given us an account of how he came to write his book of the Bible. Knowing that we Gentiles needed a different kind of proof and understanding the Western mindset, he gives us a brief account of how he came to write his Gospel. Others had taken in hand to set in order a narrative of the things which had been fulfilled (presumably Matthew and Mark), but Luke wanted to write his own orderly account.

Being a companion of St. Paul, Luke had a perfect understanding of the things concerning Jesus Christ from the beginning, so he was able to write his own account. Though Luke himself was not an eyewitness of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, he received the facts of his account from such eyewitnesses. Luke was, therefore, privileged not only to have the eyewitness testimony of some of the original 12 apostles but also the revelations and insights of St. Paul.

The third reason that Luke seems to be talking to me is that I am Theophilus. We aren’t sure who the original Theophilus is, but I consider myself Theophilus, a lover of God. Luke’s account is written to and for all who are truly lovers of God and want to know and follow Jesus Christ. I’m also Theophilus because I am loved by God, and the name Theophilus means either lover of God or loved by God.

Finally, Luke speaks to me because he tells me why he has written his account: it’s for me (Theophilus)! It’s so that I may know the certainty of those things in which I have been instructed.

Having been so personally welcomed into the Gospel of St. Luke, I feel inclined to walk into the pages of his Gospel and make myself at home there. I feel as if I belong in these pages, and even as I’m writing, I feel like a kind of St. Luke. As I read and consider verses 5 and following, I feel like Zacharias and Elizabeth.

I feel barren sometimes. In all honestly, I feel a little like that this morning. I’m not feeling particularly perky or motivated. It’s difficult for me to get up in the mornings, and I’m not sure at what moment of any given day you might actually consider me awake. For that matter, I’m not sure sometimes that I ever fully wake up. And so, sometimes, my life feels barren. For other reasons, I’m sure some of your lives feel barren at times and may, in fact, actually be so.

But God loves barren lives. They are the kind of soil into which He loves to plant His garden (apparently, He loves a challenge and loves taking dead things and making them alive). He begins by planting His seed, which is His Word. And so we read the beginning of Luke’s Gospel this morning. As I read, unwilling though my body might be, and as I meditate on His Word, I know that something real has taken root inside me.

And then God comes and waters me by what Luke has written. God speaks to me this morning, and I begin to feel revived a little. Sometimes He also waters me by something so simple as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to which I’m now listening (more specifically, my favorite moment: the end of the third movement of the Summer concerto).

Suddenly, I am like Elizabeth. I, who woke up barren, have had the Word planted in me and have been doused by the Living Water, and I conceive. Life springs within me, a life that God has given me, and I can say with Elizabeth that this very day is the day when the Lord spoke to me and looked on me and took away the reproach of my barrenness. How fitting that today, musically speaking, it is Summer!

He looked at me! I still remember the barren years before God favored me with the presence of the Lady J (Jackie, my wife). I remember being in high school and college and feeling honored when a good-looking girl would look at me (more likely, she was looking over me or overlooking me). I even wrote a poem once based on such occasions:

Sue Ann was beautiful

very, very beautiful

and she looked at me once

or maybe even twice.

But this morning, I have a more heavenly poetry being recited to me by St. Luke, for he’s telling me, through the words and experience of Elizabeth, that God has looked at me. Not some girl that I never had the nerve to even talk to, but God Almighty Himself. And unlike the beautiful girls who may have overlooked me because I wasn’t attractive to them, God delights to look at me.

This is all the more amazing because spiritually, I have really greasy hair that hasn’t been washed in a month and zits and pimples erupting over the surface of my face like miniature Krakatoas and Vesuvii. I have eyes so weak that you can’t even see them but only my glasses, and my pants are so short they come up to my calves. My voice is as squeaky and irregular as a spastic chimp playing Vivaldi on a broken Stradivarius with one string, and I have a lot of annoying and gross habits that you really don’t want to hear me talk about (spiritually speaking, of course).

And yet, spiritual nerd and geek and wimp and loser that I am, God looks at me. I think, Lord, who am I that you would look at me? To which He says, It’s not who you are but who I AM.

Who am I? I am the one who the I AM has looked at. I am the one who is last but who God has made first. I am Theophilus, loved by God so that I may be a lover of God.

Prayer

Father, I thank You for inspiring St. Luke to write for me an account of the life of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank You for looking at me and giving me the sight to be able to look at and see You. By Your Word, by Your Son, and by Your Spirit, may You make the barren places of my life the place where You dwell. Amen.

Points for Meditation

1.Remember a time in your life when you experienced joy because of something wonderful that suddenly happened to you. Transfer that joy to the fact that God has looked at you today.

2.In what ways is your life barren? When God offers Himself to You, do you receive Him as you should, and do you believe the promises He has made to you?

Resolution

I resolve to listen today to God’s proclamation of His Good News in my life and to meditate on the fact that He has looked at me.

Luke 1:26–38

While Roman Catholics may exalt Mary to an inappropriate place and Protestants may ignore her altogether, Mary is to be an example of faith for us. There is no denying that she was, to quote the angel, full of grace. But Mary is also a prototype for us, and what was true for her is now true for us. And therefore, today, God says to you: Hail, Christian, full of grace!

The first thing to notice about Mary’s blessed relationship with God is that it is God who initiated a gracious, special relationship with Mary, and not Mary with God. God announced Himself to Mary through His Word, through His messengers. Why is Mary called highly favored? Because God has chosen to visit her. God chose to come and bless her—not on account of her merit but because of His sovereign grace.

There is no indication that Mary had done anything special to merit being the mother of her Lord, for if she had, then it would no longer be of grace but a reward. There is also no indication in Scripture, the oldest and most authoritative Tradition, that she was without sin. The idea of her sinlessness (related to the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception) doesn’t appear in the first several centuries, and teachers such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux opposed it. (It wasn’t dogmatized until 1854.)

The fact that Mary sinned like us is precisely the point: that God has come to dwell with sinners, not with those already righteous, because only God is righteous. If Mary were sinless, this point would be obscured. She would be less of a model for us because she would be unlike us, without sin and not in need of salvation herself. That God can and does inhabit sinful people is a greater testimony to the power of God in Mary’s life and ours than if she were sinless. This is the real miracle of Pentecost and God’s mighty salvation: that God has come to be with His people, even though they are sinful. This is why Mary is so meaningful to me: because, like me, she was a sinner to whom God miraculously gave His grace. Like sinful Mary, God has made me the Temple of His Holy Spirit.

Mary responds to this grace with faith. Though she was astonished by the astounding words of the angel, she believed. The things she felt are very instructive for how we should feel toward God and His grace in our lives. We find that Mary wondered at the things the angel had told her. Like Mary, we should wonder at the things God has promised to us and given us. Mary also believed. Though what God told her was outside of her experience, or anyone else’s, she believed. Did she understand it all? Obviously not. Did she believe? Obviously so.

Mary was also troubled by Gabriel’s saying, which is perhaps what most separates her from us. Mary was troubled that she could be found worthy to be the mother of her Lord. She was troubled that she would give birth before she knew Joseph. God has told us equally amazing things and done equally marvelous things for us, but we aren’t troubled by the presence of God. Somehow, God’s presence among us is too familiar and too tamed. God is not to be feared in any sense because He’s just a warm tingling inside and not a consuming fire.

But Mary was troubled, and we should be, too. Not troubled as in anxious or doubtful, but troubled in that if we understand God Almighty to be present among us and see Him for Who He Is, we appropriately tremble.

Equally important, Mary was humble. She knew that the miraculous things she heard were of God and not of herself. She knew that she was an unworthy servant, not someone who deserved and therefore expected what she received. Of all of the things that Mary felt and said and did, one of the most meaningful to me was her simple response to God in her life: Behold, the handmaid of the Lord. After graciously receiving the miraculous grace of God, her response was not to think too highly of herself but to stand, ready to serve in the way that He had called her.

In time, God blessed Mary by being with her through His Son and the work of the Holy Spirit. Gabriel tells Mary, The Lord is with you. First, the Father comes with His promise, and then the Holy Spirit overshadows her, and then the Son of God comes to her, and so the entire Trinity came and blessed Mary, just as God comes to us.

The point, again, is that having been blessed by God like Mary, we are to be like Mary in faith. As with Mary, God offers you His grace. You have been visited by the messengers (angels) of God—the other Christians in your life. You have heard His Word: it comes to you every time you hear or read the Holy Scriptures.

And you must respond with faith, humility, and obedience—just like Mary. If God could and did enter into Mary, He can do the same with you. If God can use Mary, imperfect but humble and faithful Mary, He can use you. If He can dwell in Mary by His Holy Spirit, then He can dwell in you by His Holy Spirit as well. You, too, are God’s chosen vessel and the locus of His special presence. You are called the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and so you have the Holy Spirit, as did Mary. The Holy Spirit didn’t turn Mary into God Himself any more than He turns us into God. Rather, God’s gracious presence through His Holy Spirit redeems us, the fallen ones.

As Mary bore Christ, so can you all be Christ-bearers, Christophers. This is the importance of the Incarnation to us, not just that Jesus became man but that Jesus became man so that man could now live with God and even become the Temple of the living God. As with Mary, Christ is to be born in us, and we are to bear Him every day. It’s not as if nine months later He goes outside of us: He has tabernacled with us permanently, through His Spirit. And this is the meaning of Pentecost.

What should our response be to such glad and joyful tidings? It should be the same as Mary’s. We should be troubled by the presence of God in our lives, but we should also believe. And we should show our belief by saying, Behold, the servant of the Lord, and then go out and serve not only as servants of Jesus Christ but as bearers of Jesus Christ.

Rejoice, highly favored one! The Lord is with you; blessed are you among men.

Prayer

My soul magnifies You, Lord, and my spirit rejoices in You, for You are my Savior. Come and glorify Yourself in me by coming to be with me. Fulfill Your promises to me through Your Son, and as You make me Your chosen vessel and servant, give me the Spirit of Jesus Christ that I may more faithfully serve. Amen.

Points for Meditation

1.What do you see in Mary’s faith that makes it worth emulating? Choose one of these and work on manifesting it more in your life today.

2.What changes in your life would you need to make to have faith like Mary’s?

Resolution

I resolve to see myself today as one to whom God has come to bless. I resolve to meditate further on Luke 1:28, hearing the Lord say to me, Rejoice, highly favored one, I am with you. Blessed are you among men.

Luke 1:39–56

Behold the maidservant of the Lord!

I find these words characteristic of St. Mary, and in them, I see the reason to emulate her. These words, Behold the maidservant of the Lord! are characteristic of the Lord’s faithful servants throughout the Scriptures. When God called Moses, revealing Himself to be the great I AM, Moses responded by saying, Here I am (Exod 3). God reveals Himself to us by saying I AM, and then He calls us. How we respond to His presence and call makes all the difference in the world.

God says, I AM.

Satan and God-deniers say, Are you?

The servants of the Lord respond to God saying I AM by saying, Here I am. But God-deniers say, "I am not (His servant)," as Peter did when He denied the Lord thrice.