How is Your Alignment?

When I first started to learn about World War II as a kid, I was impressed by countries like Sweden and Switzerland because they remained neutral through the war.  As I grew older, read more, and learned more, I realized that although neutrality was the officially-declared stance of those countries, there were many ways in which their decisions about issues such as Jewish immigration or trade and banking with Nazi Germany betrayed that outward declaration of neutrality.  As we consider the four sections recorded in Luke 11:14-54, we will see that Jesus makes it clear that there is no such thing as a “declaration of neutrality” when it comes to responding to Him:  we are either with Him or we are not… and if we are not with Him, we are indeed against Him.   While these four sections include a number of elements that may seem strange to our modern ears, the different scenes and statements Luke records all hinge on this important truth of how we view, listen to, and respond to Jesus with our inner decisions and outward declarations.