¹ The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.

² He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ ³ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. ⁴ A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Jesus then left them and went away.

Dear God, I don’t think the Pharisees and Sadducees thought through it this carefully, but it would have been interesting to ask them two questions:

• Why are you testing Jesus?
• What answer can He give that will satisfy you?

I think they could come up with an answer to the first one pretty easily. It would be something like, “We are trying to determine if he is, in fact, the Messiah.” That is what they would SAY. I think the real answer is that they just knew he was NOT the Messiah and they were looking for a way to prove it. They thought that there just had to be a way to discredit this guy.

Regarding my second question, I don’t think they had a clue. They didn’t know what they were looking for. They just knew they would know it when they heard it

There are times in my life when I am asking questions that I don’t really know what I am looking for. I’ll be trying to implement a rule or come up with a punishment for my children, but sometimes it is an arbitrary rule that maybe my parents came up with when I was a kid because their parents came up with it when they were kids. Or perhaps I will be at work and decide to do a fundraising event or enforce a policy because that is the way we have always done it instead of questioning why we are doing it and what the end will be.

A good example of this is collecting data for our diabetic patients and how they are doing. In the past we have felt this need to track how our diabetes patients, as a whole, are doing in managing their disease. Then when the numbers would come back we would always feel like failures because, being a charitable clinic that serves low-income uninsured people, we found that so many of them were not mentally or emotionally capable of managing their disease. So what good were the numbers doing us? We weren’t using them to apply for a government grant. No one was auditing us for them. We finally decided that we were wasting energy on calculating the data because there wasn’t much we could do about it aggregately anyway.

Father, help me to be discerning about the different decisions I make. Reveal to me when I am being foolish and help me to critically look at my expectations of myself, my wife, my children, and my business. Give me eyes to see and ears to hear. Give me a sense of your vision and goals for the different areas in my life so that I will spend my energy on the things that are above and not the things below.