Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power - Laugh With Me

Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power...

Happy Wednesday to you and thanks for stopping by for our Coffee Hour! It’s so good to share laughter with you! Grab your coffee and let’s go to some funny moments Jesus created as He taught and spoke to the multitudes.

Jesus used and continues to use humor to teach, heal, convert and ultimately transform all of us, just as He did when He walked the earth as a man for 33 years. His humor is said to be subtle, hard to detect at first, especially when you are looking for things you don’t want to miss in the lessons He uses to teach, and it was the same way when He walked with and taught His disciples.

Take the Sermon on the Mount, for example. It doesn’t begin with a joke to warm up and soften hearts. But He had a great wit, a good knowledge of language. He knew the perfect timing to speak with irony, and use word-plays and these are all great tools to soften the heart to receive the lesson, right?

Jesus knew that laughter could break down barriers between people; that laughter disarms and unites. It sets people at ease and leaves them receptive.

Let’s look at a couple of one-liner word images that truly were laced with a sense of humor and if you were to actually visualize, you would be rendered laughing. Let’s go first to Matthew 15:14 where Jesus is teaching about inner purity and He’s answering the disciples’ question about
the Pharisees being offended by something He said. He confirms
that if His Father didn’t plant them, they would be uprooted and then                 Destination? Joyful!
He goes on to say to just leave them alone because they are the
“blind leading the blind.” This is obviously a comical visual image and
 a pointed commentary on the religious leaders of the day. Granted He is
 speaking about spiritual blindness, but the visual is pretty funny!

Let’s look at Matthew 23:24. Again, Jesus is warning against the religious leaders who are micro-managing the law and ignore the greater principles, or the “weightier manners” as He called them. It was custom for the Pharisees to strain their water so they wouldn’t accidentally swallow a gnat, an unclean insect. This was according to the law which pertained to ceremonial cleanliness (external cleanliness) but had lost their perspective when it came to inner purity.

He calls the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites and tells them they ought to have included all things of the law and not left any of them undone. And in the next breadth, he says, “Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”

I don’t know about you, but despite the seriousness of the moral lesson, this visual He gives is funny! I mean, think about it: straining out a gnat and thereafter swallowing a camel! You know His disciples had to have been laughing at the analogy! Oh, that we would not forget to laugh despite the seriousness of the circumstances we may find ourselves in at this time!

Laughing,

Evinda