Listen

Description

We could spiritualize the things on the list Jesus references from Isaiah: spiritual blindness, captivity to sin, poverty of spirit. These are all real conditions we might consider in an honest moral self-inventory. I'll leave you to consider how that might apply to you.

But I want to suggest a different approach to how we hear and respond to Jesus' words here. There are people who are actually oppressed, poor, imprisoned, and blind. They need our prayers. They need Jesus' presence and deliverance. It all starts with the favor of God, and the Good News of his love and salvation through the life, death, resurrection, and final coming of Jesus. It might be that we pray for them to be delivered physically and spiritually from these ills. And as we do we might discover that we have been delivered from the blindness to others' needs, freed from the captivity of constant self-absorbed fretting, and enriched with the true treasures that are found in life in Christ.