Touched by an Angel

An angel of the Lord appeared to him.
—-Luke 1:11

All of us face impossible situations sometimes, don’t we? Our backs are up against the wall; there seems to be no way of escape. And even if we believe the miraculous stories of the Bible like the parting of the Red Sea, we tend to think, “Well, that was then, but this is now. God just doesn’t do the same things today as He did thousands of years ago.” But the Bible I read says God is “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Aren’t you glad of that? And the same God who was able to part the Red Sea, the same God who collapsed the walls of Jericho, the same God who miraculously fed Elijah in the wilderness–that same God is ready and able to work miraculously on your behalf.

In the story we are going to look at this week, we will see that God sometimes waits until the very last moment, when our backs are up against the wall, to intervene on our behalf. Because when He does, then there is no doubt who really performed the miracle.

In Luke 1 we discover a couple who were touched by an angel. We are studying the gospel of Luke in order to reignite our passion for Christ. Luke is the most detailed of all the accounts of Jesus’s life. Not only is Luke the most detailed of the New Testament gospels, but it was also written to Gentiles, people who were not Jews. The gospel of Luke is divided into three major parts, and the theme verse of Luke is Luke 19:10, in which Jesus said about Himself: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” That was Jesus’s reason for coming.

That theme verse is divided out over the gospel of Luke. The first section of Luke is about Jesus’s birth. He has come. The second portion is about Jesus’s ministry on earth. He has come to seek. And then the final portion of Luke deals with Jesus’s death and resurrection. He has come to save. So after the first four verses, which are the prologue of the gospel of Luke, we are ready to get into the story about Jesus in verse 5.

Luke 1:5 begins the story of a miraculous birth of a baby. It’s not the baby you are thinking about, though. Did you know there was another miraculous birth that preceded the birth of Jesus? It was the birth of a baby who would be pivotal in the life of Jesus Christ. And the God who intervened in that situation is the same God who is able to intervene in your life today.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Touched by an Angel” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2016.

Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.