BUT ONE THING IS NEEDED

“But one thing is needed, and Mary has choose the good part, which will not be taken away from her” (Lk. 10:42 NKJV).  Mary appears three times in scripture in three     different episodes of her life, and on each occasion she is sitting at the feet of Jesus, bearing the brunt of someone’s harsh words for her single minded devotion to our Lord. (Lk. 10:39; Jn. 11:32; 12:3) Mary was a person of one thing... whole-hearted passion for Jesus. Her life was centered on Him in full submission to His Lordship, a symphony sung in one key... love, for her audience of One. The world listened in and could not understand, but Mary prized every second in her Lord’s presence. In a sense this passage paints a comparison of soul-life and Spirit-life... a picture of Romans 8:5:  “For those who live according to the flesh (soul) set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. Martha, representing soul-life, is “worried and troubled about many things”.  Our soul is never at rest and always distracted by the natural realm.  These distractions are not always “bad things” in and of themselves” as in   this case where “much serving” had distracted Martha from intimate fellowship with Jesus.  Remember, “good” is always the greatest enemy of “best”:  Martha wasn’t out hitting the local pub; she was serving food to Jesus and His disciples.  But she was “distracted” from the “one thing that was needed”, and missed out on the “good part”... her mind was set on the natural blinding her to the supernatural.  Mary, representing Spirit-life, is determined to abide in the presence of God with passionate, single-minded devotion... her mind is set on things above. This is the “one thing that is needed”, the “good part” - passionate, whole hearted, intimate devotion to our Savior.  But we must willfully choose to be a person of one thing, refusing to allow our soul to distract us from the wooing of the Holy Spirit... to draw us to lovers less wild.  In all her fussing about, Martha never realized that Jesus could have easily “created” dinner... He had twice proven His supernatural catering abilities, and the miraculous is never far behind passionate intimacy.

GOOD IS THE GREATEST ENEMY OF BEST