Jesus And The Religious Leaders

'In the Word'
from Chuck Livermore
Week of January 11 - 18, 2009

Jesus and the Religious Leaders

The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things concerning Him, and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take Him. Then Jesus said to them, "I shall be with you a little while longer, and then I go to Him who sent Me. You will seek Me and not find Me, and where I am you cannot come."

Then the Jews said among themselves, "Where does He intend to go that we shall not find Him? Does He intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What is this thing that He said, 'You will seek Me and not find Me, and where I am you cannot come'?" John 7:32-36 NKJV

The Jewish leaders had secretly made plans to kill Jesus, but what they didn’t know was that Jesus had made plans long before they had to give His life for the sins of mankind. Sometimes we can not see how the plans we’ve made fit with God’s overall engineering of the events of the universe. Even when our plans are noble, we may not understand how God’s plans are running parallel or perpendicular to ours. We see persecution or resistance to our efforts as something wrong. And the people persecuting and resisting are intending it to be so, but God, who sees the end from the beginning, may use this resistance to slow you down until the timing is perfect. We may view a natural disaster as a setback, but God uses these things to build our dependence on Him.

We must always acknowledge the Master plan behind all of our plans. The writer of Proverbs tells us, “A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps,” Proverbs 16:9 NKJV. When our plans our frustrated, the Lord may be gently tweaking our will to match His. We may not understand what the Lord is saying and how our plans our affected, but we should always trust that a greater plan is being implemented than our own.

Author's Bio:Chuck Livermore's knowledge of the word is the result of a lifetime of study and reading. He is a servant leader at Calvary South Denver. He is a graduate of Wayland Baptist University and has participated in world evangelism through research of unreached peoples.
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