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Last week I pointed how odd it was for John to begin his sermon by calling his audience a family of snakes. These people had come from all over the region of Judea, no doubt some had traveled a long distance a great personal expense. You would think that John would have begun by saying:

“Howdy folks, thanks for coming I know the journey must have been long and hard, I appreciate you coming”

But Luke tells the reason for this harsh rebuke,

· they had come to be baptized; however, they had no real repentance,

· they were trusting the fact that they were dependents of Abraham

Today, we talk about two aspects of John’s ministry, I want to note the miraculous nature of his ministry, and then I want to talk about his message.

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In this section of Luke, we come upon one of the most speculated about pierids in the life of Jesus. When you read the apocryphal gospels accounts of the childhood of Jesus what we find are wild stories that do not fit with how Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament. Stories like:

· Jesus turning Clay into birds in order to play with them

· Jesus cursing a kid

· In one of the stories, he kills a child for bumping into Him and when the child’s parents complain to Joseph and Mary about killing their child, He blinds them

Christian have rightly rejected these documents over the years because they clearly contradict the rest of the Bible and because they were seen as forgeries

There is a gap between what is reveled to us by the Holy Scriptures in the New Testament, and what our human curiosity wants to know. The writers of the fake gospels took advantage of this curiosity to put forward wild stories about the childhood of Jesus, which are all made up.

The reason I take the time to mention this is because it gives us a chance to talk about one of the most important lessons we can learn when studying the Bible. Which is, when the Bible is completely silent about a subject, we should use extrema caution.

Put another way, if God would have wanted us to know more about the childhood of Jesus, He would have told us more. Trying to read between the lines and fill in the gaps have done much damage to the Church throughout the years and has led many astray

So, what we find here in our text today is not as much as would satisfy our curiosity about the adolescent years of Jesus, however, we do find all we need to know in order to grow in faith

There were countless things that Anna was unable to do, she was a widow, she was elderly, however, none of that mattered because she did what she was called to do. Everyone  has a calling, there is something that God has for you, and what gets some of us in trouble is that we are too busy focusing on the things that we can’t do, and we forget about what God has called us to do.

Spurgeon said this about Psalm 131 “It is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn”. Psalm 131 is about humility, which is fitting because the pervious psalm is about forgiveness. The fact that God has forgiven us should make us humble. It should teach us not to judge others when we ourselves have been forgiven so much

Simeon first sings a song, then gives a prophecy. First, he praises God for the fact that the Israel’s consolation has come. He then prophecies what the ministry of Jesus will look like