March 2

      "Thus as He grew in wisdom and stature, Jesus increased in favour with God and man. He drew the sympathy of all hearts by showing Himself capable of sympathizing with all. The atmosphere of hope and courage that surrounded Him made Him a blessing in every home. And often in the synagogue on the Sabbath day He was called upon to read the lesson from the prophets, and the hearts of the hearers thrilled as a new light shone out from the familiar words of the sacred text."

         Desire of Ages, page 74 from the chapter, 'As a child'

Fellow lambs, we have to take a slight step back. Whenever you read something like, “Thus as ..” the author of the passage is using shorthand to say, “I need you to take notice of the passage you have just read.”

     Jesus grew in wisdom and stature because Jesus simply ministered to all the people around him. Remember, this is in the days before He took up His public ministry. He is still in Nazareth, that sink hole of all that was horrible. Yet in that environment Jesus ministered and gave prosperity and Himself grew in wisdom and stature.

     Yesterday morning at church I made a very conscious decision to look for the good things around us, and set out to share those good things with the church. We have a time of Bible study that we call Sabbath School. During our time together we briefly noted that it was hard to reach wealthy and powerful people with God’s message of love. Our class then spent much time looking at how many rich and powerful people Jesus and His disciples and apostles were able to reach and saw that 'hard' does not mean impossible.

     I love the way that our paragraph today lets us know that as Jesus read in the synagogue as a youth He was able to add new light to familiar words. That new light and those familiar words can do wonderful things today. Have a look at a short video from China.