We’ve been talking this week about looking at contexts to understand sentences in the Bible. I want to point you a just published illustration of using context: Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus. 

Rick Lawrence looked at a story Jesus told about a guy who, about to be fired, used the boss’s assets to make friends. He forgave large amounts of what people owed his boss. And then was praised by his boss for being so shrewd. Rick looks at Jesus’ words to the disciples as they head out on their first internship: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”

From these two anchors, Rick defines shrewdness as “understanding how things work, then leveraging that knowledge to apply the right force in the right place at the right time.” Then he runs all over the Bible, tracing  the idea of Jesus using leverage to move people.

Jesus often did the unexpected. He seems to have loved to disrupt expectations, not in a flashy way but in a way that invited reflection and then response. As Rick says, “it’s clear that if we studied the Jesus described in the Bible, we’d discover He is simultaneously the incarnation of God and the most confounding and difficult person who has ever lived.”

Rick offers a perfect example of looking at context to help us understand Jesus’ story and his statement about being shrewd.

(Disclosure. I got an early draft of this book as a PDF because Terry was excited. I read part of it and gave in and bought the Kindle edition. So I had a free review copy, but didn’t use it. But used a gift card. And the links to the book are to my Amazon store.)