Lesson 15: Who Receives the Lord’s Favor?

Our modern American culture encourages us to think about ourselves as supremely valuable individuals entitled to certain rights and privileges. We should have a generous amount of esteem in the eyes of others, a certain and ever-increasing amount of money from our workplaces (or elsewhere), and a God who exists to make us happy. It turns out, however, that Jesus faced a similar attitude during His ministry among us millennia ago. Having been given the opportunity to open up the Scripture before those gathered at the synagogue, he went on to apply the text to Himself as the Messiah it spoke of. The people of His day then responded in the same way as so many do today; they could not see themselves as needy people whose only hope would be in a Savior instead of somehow in themselves. We learn from this message that 1) God richly bestows His favor upon the needy, and 2) that we are the needy, not the deserving.

Summary by Seth Kempf, Bethany Community Church Staff