The Question Jesus Asks The Most. It Will Surprise You.

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Matthew 12:1–4 NIV At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.” He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests.” CONSIDER Questions figure prominently in the Gospels. They are everywhere. If you took a count through the four Gospels you would find upward of three hundred questions Jesus asks others. There are something like 183 questions others ask Jesus. Interestingly, he only gives direct answers to three of them. You are going to start noticing them everywhere now.  In today's text, we come across Jesus's favorite question. It's the one he asks more than all the others. Did you catch it?  Haven't you read?  He will ask it twice in chapter 12 and another two times before we finish Matthew's Gospel.  Haven't you read?  Jesus reads the Scriptures. He loves the Word of God. In fact, he is himself the Word of God made flesh. Of course, in these texts Jesus references the Old Testament, as he was himself the emerging and now-unfolding, yet-unwritten New Testament. Jesus either directly quotes, references, or makes allusion to the Old Testament more than three hundred times in the four Gospels. From Moses to Jonah and from Noah to David, Jesus loves the Word of God. And he wants us to love it too. It's why he keeps asking: Haven't you read?  Note though, he doesn't so much want us to become Bible scholars as he wants us to become Bible lovers. He longs for us to love the Word of God. It's interesting. Most of the times he asks this question he's talking to people he knows have read the Scriptures—quite well but all wrong. In fact, back in chapter 4 we learned Satan reads Scripture—again quite well but all wrong. The minute you seek to become a master of the text is the minute you miss the point of the text. The goal is to be mastered by the text. And the only way to be mastered by the text is to read it (and practice it) with Jesus. And that's what Gospelling is all about.  Haven't you read? Remember, the goal here is not the oft-cited goal of biblical literacy. The mark is love for the Word of God.  And I'll share three Bible helps in the P.S. today you won't want to miss.  PRAY Father, thank you for your Word. Thank you that it is written down in a book. And thank you for your Son, the Word made flesh. Thank you that we can look at Jesus and see what every word that comes from the mouth of God looks like. Indeed, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord endures forever. I stake my life on the promise of your Word. Praying in Jesus's name, amen.