Luke 4:18 Meaning The Spirit of the Lord Is

Every state named here is a condition of the mind that has forgotten what it is. The poor are those who believe they lack, the captives are bound only by their own guilt, and the blind cannot see innocence because they are looking through fear. Healing does not add anything from outside; it lifts the veil so the mind can see what was always true of it.

To set the bruised at liberty is to release them from the belief that they have been truly harmed. A mind touched by love discovers it was never poor, never bound, and never blind, but only dreaming that it was.

The poor: the mind that believes it lacks and has forgotten the abundance already within it The brokenhearted: the mind wounded by its own guilt, aching to be told it is innocent The captives: minds that think they are imprisoned by sin when the only chain is a belief The blind: the mind that cannot see the innocence in itself and others because it looks through fear

Much of human suffering is captivity. A person is bound to a story about himself, to old wounds he rehearses, to the compulsive thinking that will not release him. He is the captive and also the prison. The heart carries its accumulated pain, a dense field of old hurt that stirs and takes him over when something presses on it.

What is announced here is a commission, so the freedom does not stay inside one man. Sight returns the moment awareness turns and sees the sufferer instead of being lost in the suffering. The brokenhearted are healed not by the erasing of their history, but by the arrival of a light that was never bound by it.

The Spirit resting upon a person is the assurance that he is now the one who works this power, and the poor, the captive and the blind are states within him, not people elsewhere. Poverty is a mind that feels it lacks; captivity is a self bound to conditions it thinks it cannot leave; blindness is the inability to see any state but the present fact. The good news carried to them is that a state assumed and felt as so becomes fact, and that changes each of them from the inside.

Deliverance comes by living in the wish fulfilled rather than in the report of the senses. The bruised are set at liberty when they stop rehearsing the injury and rest in the feeling of the thing already mended. Sight returns when a person learns to look at what he wants as done rather than at what stands before him. Every one healed here is a condition in you, freed the moment you assume its opposite and hold it.