“Surely This Was A Righteous Man”

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man.” When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away.

Luke 23:44-48

As a child, we find great comfort in placing ourselves in God’s hands with those words before we fall asleep.

There is a similar prayer tucked away in the “prayer book” of the Bible, the Psalms. Some biblical scholars suggest that the phrase “Into your hands I commit my spirit” was a “bedtime” prayer taught to children in Jesus’s day.

You may recognize that prayer as Jesus final cry from the cross. But Jesus added one more word to it: Father. By praying that word in the moments before His death, Jesus demonstrated His intimate relationship with the Father and pointed believers toward their home with Him.

Jesus died on the cross so we could live in the wonder of a relationship with God as our heavenly Father. How comforting it is to know that because of Jesus’s sacrificial love for us, we can rest in God’s care as His children! We can close our eyes without fear because our Father watches over us and has promised to wake us up to life with Him.

A bright new morning awaits us in Jesus.

Our Daily Bread – August 21, 2018