GodReflection: Six Jesus Markers To Be More Like Him.
Jesus replies “The Scriptures also say, ‘You must not test the Lord your God” (Mathew 4:7). When he teaches in the Synagogue, He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. All eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently. Then he began to speak to them. “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!” (Luke 4:20-21). He cries in a final breath from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).
Scripture has great importance to God’s Son. It is estimated that Jesus shares eighty quotations from Scripture. And over one-tenth of Jesus’s recorded New Testament words were taken from the Old Testament. That is 180 of the 1,800 verses in the four Gospels show the high value Scripture has to Jesus.
Jesus wants us to hold Scripture in high regard just as he did. In the twenty-first century we follow his teaching that fills our New Testaments. 
How blessed we are to have access to Scripture that now contains both the Old and the New Covenant of Father, Son, Spirit.
It is from the record of our New Testament—the New Covenant—that we learn how to be like Jesus, how to walk as he walked and how to do as he did. In essence—how to be like him. Jesus gives us Scripture to serve as A Marker of Growth as we learn to be more like him. The dept of Scripture never ceases to amaze me.
His Sermon taught to a countless multitude in a mountain setting is a case at point. Each time I read it I find additional areas of my life that still need growth. There are always more growth nuggets to mine from Jesus’s Scripture.
I grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert, North America’s largest desert, home of my little town in the State of New Mexico. Our town’s economy depended on tourism from The Carlsbad Caverns National Park and mining by the Potash Industry that created fertilizer extracted from nearby underground mines.
Multiple mines provided employment to a sizable portion of our town including numerous church members. The mining vocabulary colored conversation. Decade after decade the deeper the miners went the more treasure-ore they discovered.
Scripture, like the mines of my childhood desert town, has new treasure the deeper we search. Its riches never run dry.
Paul writes to Timothy, his young disciple and to us: All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right (2 Timothy 3:16).
The apostle echoes King Jesus in a declaration that Scripture is A Marker of Growth we must mine Scripture for our own growth and to serve and teach fellow travelers we meet each day as all of us strive to become more like Jesus.
Stay tuned.
Gary J. Sorrells
A GodReflection: Scripture—A Marker of Growth.
God Reflection 