Tag: love

1 Timothy 4:6-16 Life in the Local Church: What a Good Servant Looks Like

1 Timothy 4:6-16

Life in the Local Church

What a Good Servant Looks Like

Good morning. Please grab your Bibles and turn with me to 1 Timothy chapter 4.

The Apostle Paul wrote this letter to Timothy, after leaving and placing Timothy in Ephesus as the Pastor, the head elder. So, not wanting to get too far off track, a quick look at the timeline of the church of Ephesus. The church was founded by Paul, likely in the early 50’s AD. Timothy arrived to be their pastor in the early 60’s. Tradition holds that the Apostle John made the Ephesian church his home in the mid to late 60s. We also know that Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesians and that was likely right before Timothy arrived. So, the Ephesians had a pretty standout group of teachers and pastors and influences. And yet, by the mid 90’s, Jesus tells them, relayed through John, that while they did good works, while had the right actions, and even right doctrine, they no longer had a love for Christ, and they were told to repent in Revelation 2:1-7.

Paul wrote to Timothy in order to encourage Timothy, to build him up and to challenge him.

Timothy was placed in Ephesus in order to deal with the issues that the church was dealing with, most notably, but not limited to false teaching and the false teachers who teach them. One of the ways that Timothy should be counteracting these issues is by knowing and applying how to act in the local church.

Paul, already in this letter, has dealt with proper prayer, with worship, with church offices and the authority of those who hold leadership positions, and more. Now, Paul turns his attention to encouraging Timothy, teaching him, encouraging him and reminding him that his focus, and ours should be on building, training and growing ourselves, first, as a good servant of Christ.

Let’s go ahead and read this week’s text, 1 Timothy chapter 4, verses 6 through 16. Ill be reading out of the English Standard Version and I encourage you to follow along in your own preferred translation. Once again, 1 Timothy 4:6-16. Paul, under the inspiration of God, the Holy Spirit, bring forth the very inerrant, infallible, immutable Words of God, writes to Timothy:

If you put these things before the brothers,[a] you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. 7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and strive,[b] because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.

11 Command and teach these things. 12 Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. 13 Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. 14 Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. 15 Practice these things, immerse yourself in them,[c] so that all may see your progress. 16 Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

 

May God Bless the reading of his word.

Now, we know that the Bible is a unique book. Paul is very specifically writing here to Timothy. But we also know that Timothy is not the only person being written to and being instructed here. Like ripples emanating from a rock thrown in a pool, the ripples going out, there are many separate people groups being spoken to. First, of course, like we said, Timothy. Second, pastors, elders, church leaders are being taught through this letter how to lead Gods people. Third, as with all the Bible, all Gods people are being instructed, on “Life in the local church.”

Paul starts here, saying to put these things before the brothers. These things being the culmination of everything that we have looked at in the first 4 chapters. All the things that Paul has shared and taught Timothy up to this point. Bring all those things and put them before the brethren, the brothers and sisters, the body of Christ in the local church. Paul essentially telling Timothy, “Do the things that I am teaching you and you will serve the LORD well.”

Paul tells Timothy to be trained in the Words of the Faith. Paul gets more into what that means to Timothy specifically in his second letter to Timothy, but for here, we have one of the biggest points to take away from today; Read Yo Bible!

Be trained in what the Bible says. Above all else, above whoever else you are allowing to teach you, even above anyone else that is speaking into your life, Read Yo Bible. And then Read it again! And then again. Continue to read your Bible. Be trained by it and by the words of God in it. And then put it into action!

And we know that to put the Bible in to action correctly, we need to read it in the proper context (Ding!) Paul emphasizes this when he says that not only are we to be trained in the words of the faith, but in good Doctrine as well. Right understanding of the Word of God is so very vital and important. Context is everything! If our heart is truly Gods, then we should have a driving desire, a need to get it right!

None of the words of God are accidental or incidental. He gave us these words for very specific reasons. His words mean one thing and one thing only. And in order to know that one thing, we must study and be trained by it. In order to act on it, we must be trained by his words, fully and completely.

But we need to remember that, when you remove yourself from the Word and when you remove yourself from sound, good doctrine, you will struggle, and you will trip over the world’s and/or false teachers world views. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Bad company ruins good morals.”

What is and who are around us will influence us. What we watch, what we listen to, what we read, who we spend time with, all those things will affect us. The enemy and false teachers, they want to separate us and isolate us from God, his word and his people.

You know, I was also reading Psalm 1 and some amazing parallels jumped out at me. Psalm 1 is a short one, but a powerful one, let’s read it really quick. Psalm 1, the Psalmist writes:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 

 but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 

for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

 

In that, we see that those who are righteous, those who belong to the LORD, who know Jesus Christ, they are like trees planted next to streams. Of Course, we will see fruit that comes to bear on those trees. But what else we see is that the trees that are planted need a steady stream and they need to be planted in a single location.

If I plant a tree up by the house, then after a short time, I see no growth, and I dig it up, plant it somewhere else and continue this for a while, there will be no growth of that tree, it will wither. The same as if the water source dries up. We see that every summer here back where we were in California, and I would imagine here as well? No water, for an extended period of time and the tree will die.

We need the Word of God to teach us truth, good doctrine and right application. We need each other to help us to stay on track, to grow and to have right knowledge and right doctrine.

 

 

Paul reminds us, having mentioned this in the beginning of chapter 1 as well, that we are to have nothing to do with silly, irrelevant myths.  This includes getting into conversations about just ridiculous stuff. Supposed genealogies and the “ancestry” & “descendants” of Jesus. This is making parables out of the Gospel stories. This is putting any credence into the “lost” Gospels and into secret knowledge.

You ever have a conversation with someone, and they say something, and it’s so absurd, so out of the realm of possibility, and its everything you can do to not respond, to just let it go? That’s one of the things this is talking about. If you respond and get into this conversation, you will have wasted your time and nothing you say will have an affect on them. It is similar to casting your pearls before swine, though that is specifically talking about the Gospel.

Silly, irreverent myths are spiritually immature. They take the focus off of God the Father, His son, Jesus Christ and the Word of God itself. It places the focus on anything and everything else; trivia, minutia, unknowable speculation, the other person, and ourselves.

Paul says that instead, we should train ourselves in Godliness. The habits that we develop, the spiritual disciplines that we practice, these are the things that train us in Godliness. This is not easy. Distractions, laziness, other good but not God things, friends, family, sleep, phone calls, our favorite show, all these things will try to get in our way of practicing spiritual discipline. These and much more will attempt to stop us from practicing and training and spending the needed and necessary time in Gods Word.

Paul contrasts this with bodily training, with taking care of ourselves physically. He shows us that this is a good thing. Watching what we eat, keeping in good physical shape, taking care of the bodies that God has given us, these are good things. These are very good ideas, and they are incredibly important. They have some value. But they are not as important as spiritual training.

Spiritual training, which leads to Godliness, is everything. It is completely valuable. It is eternally valuable. It has promise and value in this life for sure. But more importantly, it has more promise and more value in the next life.

When Paul wants to really and truly emphasize a point, he says, as he does in verse 9 here, some variation of:  The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. And so, we need to pay extra attention to what Paul says here. V 10: For to this end we toil and strive,[b] because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.

          We work because of our hope and our faith. We work because of what God has done for us. We work because of the living God, Jesus Christ. We work because of the work that he did on the cross, accomplishing our salvation, rising from the dead and, once and for all, defeating death and sin.

The invitation to salvation, sent out to all, extended to all. As Paul writes elsewhere, there is no Jew, no Greek, no male or female when it comes to who is able to be saved or our standing before God. And it is those who believe that accept the invitation. It is solely by the grace of God, only through the faith that he has given us, in the only way to salvation, his Son Jesus Christ that we are saved.

It is because of this that we work. It is not that we work for this, but because of this. Sometimes those small, semantic differences can make all the difference. Scripture shows us this time and time again.

Verse 11, Paul tells Timothy, Command and teach these things. Teach these things that I just shared and reminded you. First and foremost, of course, the Gospel that he just shared. Teach and share spiritual disciplines. Teach and share the importance of Godliness. Teach the focus that needs to be on God and his Word above all else.

Paul starts this last section of our passage as an encouragement and a challenge. Timothy is a timid man, quiet, maybe shy. That’s the personality that God gave him. Timothy speaks to me in that way. I see a lot of myself in him. God gives us our personalities and he uses them for his purposes. We will get back to that in a moment.

Paul addresses one of the obstacles that Timothy is dealing with in Ephesus. Paul says, let no one look down upon you, reject you or not listen to you because of your age. Age isn’t, or shouldn’t, be an issue. What is an issue is your call, your qualifications, your godliness.

I look around and I realize that, in every church that I have served, I am the youngest adult in this church. I was the youngest adult in my previous church as well. Without getting into it, we see two different ways of looking at my situation. I have served, pastored and taught some who have been Christians for longer than I have been alive. But you know what? Many would never say that. They don’t use that as a reason to not listen to me or to reject what I am saying or teaching.  Others, unfortunately, would and did.

Timothy was encountering this. I’ve encountered this before. The truth is that God has called me. He has called me to be a Pastor, a shepherd, a teacher and as a protector of the flock. I have a lot to teach and a lot to share.  Age is not an issue with who God chooses to call to certain positions.

Now, I mentioned our personalities before, and I want to touch on those now as well. God has created each and everyone of us personally and with our unique traits and personalities. Some of us are louder, some quieter, some more outgoing, some quitter, some more cautious, some impulsive. Each given to us by God the Father himself. These are gifts and good things.

But each of these also has the potential to be a pitfall as well. The person who is quiet and timid might avoid confronting sin in others or avoid confronting false teachers and their false teachings. The person who is louder and outgoing, might offend, they might confront sin where there isn’t any, or put themselves and their thoughts, teachings above Gods.

The point that Paul was making was this, to Timothy, to me, to you, to all of us. Don’t use your personality as an excuse to sin. It’s way too easy, it takes an incredible amount of self-reflection, and it takes walking a very thin line sometimes. But do not use your personality as an excuse to sin!

We are called to deny ourselves. How often do you hear, as an excuse for sin, “I was born this way.” In a sense, that’s true. We all are born sinners.

But we are called to put that old self aside, and to repent of our sins. Paul tells us elsewhere that when we are in Christ, our old self has died, and we are now new creations. We have a new heart, we have new desires, we have a new nature when we are in Christ.   We are not to stay the way we were born, but instead, we are called to be born again.

And so, Paul says to set the believers an example. An example of Godly living. How we live and how we act. Our faithfulness to God. These are but some of the ways that we can show those around us and those who watch us the work that God has down for us all and what he expects in holiness and godliness.

In verse 13, we see again, in Paul’s exhortation to Timothy, the purpose of the local church. We see the reason that Paul (more specifically God) placed Timothy in Ephesus, and that is to combat false teaching. And we will see how. By the public reading of scripture, by exhortation and by teaching. Especially and specifically the teaching of that public reading of scripture.  This even goes back to Old Testament times. Nehemiah 8:8 says:

They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

In Verse 14, Paul points out that Timothy was given a spiritual gift from God. It is an unknown gift, though presumably teaching or preaching, something for sure along those lines of pastoring in Ephesus to combat false teachings.

And in verse 15 & 16, Paul emphasis self-inspection and spiritual growth. He says, practice your gifts. Do your duties, whether they are your gifts or not. Practice and grow your devotion to God and what he has called you to do.

As the fruit on your tree grows, as you develop your spiritual disciplines, as we grow in sanctification and maturity in Christ, People will see, and they will notice.

Verse 16, Paul tells Timothy to keep a close watch on himself and his teachings. Let me say it this way. It does no good for you to call out false teaching if you just replace it with other false teaching. The point is to replace it with the truth. Keeping a close watch on ourselves and our teachings is what will keep us from falling into false teaching or from becoming false teachers.

The single easiest way for one to start false teaching is to stop paying too close attention to what you are teaching or sharing. Often this will happen without noticing. Kind of mentally shifting into cruise control. This will have the thoughts of thinking we know it all, or that we have no need to study Gods Word or to get deeper into it.

By keeping a close watch on ourselves and our teaching, we will not only prevent ourselves from falling and failing, but because of the community we are called to, as the body of the local church, we will help others from falling into these false teachings as well, thereby saving them from, to use some language we used last week, walking out from under the umbrella of orthodoxy and into the rain of heresy.

I think that there really are three points I want you to walk away from this morning remembering. The first one, remember, was READ YO BIBLE! And make sure that you are desiring and focusing on the right and true word of God and right doctrine in how to apply it.

Second, your personality is a gift from God but don’t let it be an excuse to sin. Use your personality to share and show the Word of God, and Jesus Christ and his work on the Cross.

Lastly, keep a close watch on yourself and your teachings. Recognize and combat false teachings and make sure that you are keeping yourself in the truth and speaking the truth, no matter what else.

These things are the basis and foundation for us building up the local church and for us and the church to fulfill its purpose.

Let’s Pray on these things and remember the grace of God that we are saved despite all that is stacked against us because of sin.

Luke 22:24-38 Jesus is the Son of Man: The Future is not what You think

Luke 22:24-38

Jesus is the Son of Man

The Future is not what You think

 

          All right! Let’s turn in our Bibles to Luke chapter 22. As always, if you do not have a Bible, or are in need of a Bible, please see me after the service and I will work to get one into your hands.

So are in the last hours of Jesus’ last day before being crucified. Jesus and his disciples, the Twelve to be specific, are eating the Passover meal in an Upper Room of the home of one of Jesus followers. Hence, this section of teaching by Jesus is called the Upper Room discourse.

Luke doesn’t share as much about this discourse as some of the other Gospel writers, but there is a lot there, a lot here to unpack. Last week we saw Jesus institute the first communion and show that he was the final and ultimate fulfillment of the Passover.

Because of the importance of this section of teaching, Jesus made sure that they would not be interrupted during this time. Jesus knew that Judas was planning on betraying him and had in fact already made the plans with the chief priests. He was planning on turning Jesus over to the religious leaders when there were not crowds of people around to cause a stir and to do something to the religious leaders. The Passover meal would have been a perfect time, but Jesus made sure that this wouldn’t happen, as he Peter and John make the plans and preparations in secret. Jesus had much too important things to do, to teach, to say to be interrupted this evening.

With that, lets go ahead and read this morning’s passage, Luke chapter 22, verses 24 through 38. As always, Ill be reading out of the English Standard Version though I encourage you to grab your own, preferred translations and follow along as we read the Word of God.

Luke 22:24-38, inspired by the Holy Spirit, Luke records the following words of Jesus:

A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25 And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. 27 For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.

28 “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, 29 and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, 30 that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

31 “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you,[d] that he might sift you like wheat, 32 but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” 33 Peter[e] said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death.” 34 Jesus[f] said, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day, until you deny three times that you know me.”

35 And he said to them, “When I sent you out with no moneybag or knapsack or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “Nothing.” 36 He said to them, “But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. 37 For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.” 38 And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough.”

 

Thus says the Holy Word of God.

So, the last thing we saw Jesus say last week was that one of the twelve, one of the ones that were there with them, one of them would betray Him. The text says that the disciples began to question one another which it would be.

I believe that discussion, or questioning, or whatever, directly led and helped cause this first part of the text this morning. The disciples start arguing, at some point that evening, over who is the greatest. Again, I believe this stems directly from “Who’s going to betray Jesus? Certainly not I? probably Him…”

And you can just picture the ridiculousness of this.

“I did this so I’m greater!”

“I led more people to Christ so I’m greater!”

“I gave more money so I’m greater!”

“I baptized more people so I’m greater!”

“I led worship or served in this capacity so I’m greater!”

And so on and so on…

Its amazing how quickly we fall back on our base human nature. This is not a new argument between these guys. It has happened at least twice before that we have recorded in Luke’s Gospel, back in chapters 9 & 10. We do the same thing, going back time and time again to the same sins, the same temptations, the same weakness come back to haunt us.

If we have a conflict with someone, we can see that through our life, we often keep coming back to that same conflict. It may be years in between. Both you and the other person may genuinely believe that it is all behind you both, but then something strikes the match and it flairs right back up again.

That’s what we are seeing in the disciples with this argument right here. And of course, this is natural, human nature, sinful attitudes. Striving to be seen and known as the greatest. I am better than…
Jesus, of course, rebukes this attitude. He says this is how the world thinks. This is how the world acts. The unbelievers and the unregenerate. This is how the worldly Kings act and live. I’m better than everyone and so they must serve me. They sit on their throne and make everyone do everything for them. And then, get this! They act like they are doing it for the good of the people they are ruling over! Doesn’t sound modern or timeless at all…

And of course, we know, as Jesus has told, in a variety of ways, their reward is here and now. Don’t be like them. Don’t be wrong in the way that they are wrong. Don’t settle for earthly, temporary rewards. Don’t act spoiled, entitled, don’t act betta’ then.

Is Jesus acting that way? The Messiah, The son of God. The Christ, God in the Flesh. IS he acting this way? If he is not acting like this, why would we? If he is not acting this way, why would the disciples? Instead, act and lead and serve with humility, with true humbleness.

Jesus continues, and he says, don’t worry. I see you. I see your faith. I see your service. I see your loyalty. And though you may not see here and now your rewards and the benefits, I see you and I have rewards waiting for you in Heaven as you will serve in the Kingdom of God. You will be eating, drinking, sitting, serving at the wedding feast of the King and you will have responsibilities and authority then.

 

Then Jesus turns to Peter and says his name twice. Simon, Simon. This emphasizes the importance of what he is about to say. Jesus says that Satan has been asking, demanding to have you.

Two things here. First, this is a crystal-clear allusion as well to Job chapter 1, Satan wanted to have Job. And again, Satan has to ask or demand, he cannot just do or take. He has no power except what God allows or grants.

Second, the word Jesus uses here when he says you is the plural. Not to try and make light of it, but how we would understand it is that Jesus said Satan demanded to have y’all, or you all. He wasn’t talking individually to Simon Peter. He was talking to all the disciples.

But Jesus is talking to Simon Peter individually in verse 33. Jesus prayed for him, that his faith would not fail and that he would learn from his failings and use those to encourage and build up his brothers.

Jesus has a hold of Peter. Those he has a hold of, those who are in Christ and with him will never be taken away, will never be without him and will never lose him. WE will see over the course of this chapter that Peter will fail. He will sin, he will deny Jesus three times as Jesus will tell him in a moment.

But Jesus says, once you have turned again, once you have repented, once you have turned back away from sin, and turned back to follow Jesus, use that. Use it to strengthen and build up your fellow believers. Use it to teach and enrich each other’s faith and walk. Use it to encourage and edify your brothers.

Simon Peter was hearing what Jesus said and was probably still thinking about Jesus saying that one of them would betray them. HE responds to Jesus, “I will follow you to prison or to death, no matter where, no matter what, no matter the cost!”  He says, Ill follow, Ill I’m committed, I’m loyal. Don’t worry about me Jesus!

Jesus tells him, I know who you are. I know what you will do. I know that you will fail, you will sin, you will let me down. I know when, I know where and I know how.

Remember this, Jesus already knows. We should be worried about our sin. We should feel bad about it. We should feel convicted of it, and we should work to change it. Our sin is a big deal, and it is, as we focused on last week, what nailed Jesus to the cross. But we also remember what Romans 8:1 says, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Our sin does not take Jesus by surprise. IT does not change his mind. It is finished and already forgiven. That of course does not excuse our responsibility, but it is important to remember that Jesus already has it dealt with. He knew what we would do. He knew what our sin would be. When, how often, all of it. And he still chose to go to the cross for the forgiveness of that sin.

Jesus tells Peter, you will deny me three times before the sun rises, specifically before the rooster crows. Three times, you will deny that you are a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus returns to talking to the whole group of the disciples. He reminds them of some of the times that Jesus has sent them out to spread the word and to share about Jesus. One such example was back in Luke 10:1-12.

HE asks them, when I sent them out, did you lack anything? I hear their reply as them answering tentatively, No…

Jesus tells them, its not going to be that easy anymore. You are going to have to be prepared for what is to come. The individual items that he mentions are principals and examples, not the literal items themselves. And we will see this play later on in the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus is being arrested.

But these items Jesus lists are representative of the disciples being prepared, of them being aware of the obstacles and the dangers that will arrive. It is so that the disciples will look ahead and not be taken by surprise. Again, none of it will be a surprise to Jesus and he is trying to warn his friends. They are not only to be harmless as doves, but also, remember, as wise as serpents. The going is gonna get tough, no doubt, and that’s what Jesus is trying to communicate to them.

And Jesus tells them the reason for the change. He says I will, and I must fulfill what it says in Isaiah 53:12. He was numbered with the transgressors.

Jesus was incarnated, was God made flesh, in part so that he could identify with sinners. This would be the hardest thing he would have to do. When he hung on that cross, he was hung with two criminals, two transgressors and when he gave his spirit up, the father looked down and counted him as a sinner, poured his wrath out on Jesus. Jesus identified with us so that he could absorb that wrath that was justly meant for us.  Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

          Now, the disciples continue to be who they are and help us to not feels as bad as we could. They entirely miss the point in the moment of what Jesus was saying. They tell him, look, look, we not only have a sword, but we have two swords!

They are, of course, referencing the figurative statement Jesus made a few moments ago about selling their cloaks to buy swords. But, I believe, they are also saying to Jesus, we won’t let them “number you with the transgressors. We will stop them with force if needed.

Jesus “It is enough.”

Jesus is not saying that those two swords are enough, or even that their dedication or attitudes are enough. Instead, what he was saying is that this is enough of that sort of talk. Colloquially, “I give up.” That’s how much the disciples were missing his point.

Jesus didn’t want to spend this time arguing with his closest friends. He didn’t want to spend this special time trying to explain and convince them of something they wouldn’t understand.

Instead, Jesus was going to focus on going to pray, which is what we are going to see next week.

Now, I want to go back for a moment. Back to Jesus quoting Isaiah 53:12, saying that he would fulfill what it says, that he would be numbered with the transgressors. That statement is followed by two more statements in Isaiah as well. First, that he bore the sins of many. Second, that he makes intercession for transgressors.

That’s three things we see right there that Jesus came to do and did do. He came to identify with sinners, of whom I am the chief of all sinners. He atoned for the sins of all who believe. We looked at this last week, that his blood shed, his body broken, to deliver us form the bondage of sins and to purchase forgiveness for sin. And He would be our intercessor. He prayed for Pater He prayed for all the followers that The Father gave him. He bridges the gap between God and us. As Paul writes, there is one mediator between God and man, the LORD Jesus Christ.

We don’t need animal sacrifices. We don’t need priests to intercede on our behalf. Jesus already did it. Jesus paid it all. He reconciled our broken relationship between us and God.

And as we looked at last week, that’s what we remember when we celebrate communion. That’s what communion represents. Jesus, God become man. Came to this world, as a human baby, number with transgressors, willingly gave himself up to be crucified, shed his perfect and sinless blood. Broke sins grip on us. Died, was buried, was risen from the dead. Defeated death through that resurrection. The new covenant, that all who believe, by the grace of God alone, through faith alone in in Jesus Christ, the son of God, the Messiah, the way, the truth and the life, alone. TO those who believe he gave new hearts, he gave forgiveness, and he gave eternal life in the Kingdom of God, adopted as sons of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit, co heirs to the kingdom with Christ.

Communion is done in remembrance. IT is not salvific. It is not magic. IT does not impart righteousness, forgiveness or salvation. It is done, for believers, for Christians, to remember what Jesus did for us. TO remember what it cost God to restore that relationship with us. To remember how big of a deal or sin is.

In that vein, we do ask, that if you are not a believer, if you are not a Christian, because of the importance if this, please don’t partake. IF you want to believe, if you have questions, we would love to talk to you after the service and pray with you, but this act of remembrance is for those who have received the forgiveness that Christ purchased on the cross.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for[f] you. Do this in remembrance of me.”[g] 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

 

So, what we will do is have Mike and Frank come up and we will pass out these cups which contain both the wafers, representing Christs body and the juice which represents Christs blood. After they are passed out, one of them will pray over the wafer and we will take that together as a church family, as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Then the other will pray for the juice and we will do the same.

 

Let’s celebrate communion together.

 

         

         

 

 

Luke 22:1-13 Jesus is the Son of Man: Laying the Groundwork

Luke 22:1-13

Jesus is the Son of Man

Laying the Groundwork

All right! Please grab your Bibles with me and turn to Luke chapter 22. IF you do not have a Bible or ae in need of a Bible, please see me after the service.

 

Now, if this were a movie, this would be that brief calm interlude before the action and drama ramps back up for the climax.

Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, and they have been since Luke 19:28-40, where he made his triumphant entry. The previous 2 & ½ chapters take place over the course of, about a half a week.

The Passover, which this week’s passage will be setting up takes place Thursday night and A Lot will take place over the course of the next 24 or so hours.

Today’s passage lays the groundwork for it all. It is getting all the pieces and all the characters in place to play their part and to show that God knows what he is doing and that He has it all planned. None of the next 24 hours would come as a surprise or would be God reacting to what was happening.

So, lets go ahead and jump into this morning’s text, Luke chapter 22, verse 1 through 13. Ill be reading out of the English Standard Version and I encourage you to grab your preferred translation and follow along as we read the Word of God.

Luke 22:1-13, the Holy Spirit inspires Luke to record the following:

Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called the Passover. 2 And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death, for they feared the people.

3 Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. 4 He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. 5 And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. 6 So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd.

7 Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. 8 So Jesus[a] sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat it.” 9 They said to him, “Where will you have us prepare it?” 10 He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters 11 and tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 12 And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there.” 13 And they went and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

 

 

May God Bless the Reading of His Holy Word.

 

 

So, I figured we would start with a bit about why everyone is in Jerusalem to begin with. The custom of the day was for the Jewish people to go to Jerusalem for the festival of unleavened bread and the Passover, which took place of the first day of that feast.

They went and would go to the temple and have their Passover lambs sacrificed in the temple where sacrifices were supposed to take place. Some estimate that the population of Jerusalem would temporarily swell to over 2 million people during the Passover.

Passover, in terms of cultural importance and impact of the spiritual lives of the Jewish people was kind of like combining Christmas and Easter for us. This was the celebration of Gods saving providence.

God was unleashing the ten Plagues on Egypt and the last one was the death of all First-born males. In order to save his people, he told the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb without blemish and to wipe the blood over the doorway so that the angel of death would “pass over” that home.

Long story short, God spared the faithful Israelites and told them to celebrate and remember this every year thereafter. There was a specific meal involved, the sacrifice and eating of an unblemished lamb and teaching the children in order to remember.

That day was now upon them. And we see that the chief priests, the Jewish religious leaders who help some amount of political power, they were seething with hatred against Jesus, and they were looking for the right opportunity to take him out. They would, as one commentator puts it, “lead the final opposition against Jesus.”

Now, its obvious why the religious dint like Jesus and hadn’t for years. Why was it coming to a crux, to a pinnacle hear and know? Listen to what Philip Ryken writes:

Their hatred grew to its most furious intensity during the last week of Jesus’ life. By then it was not just the party of the Pharisees who wanted to get rid of him; it was the whole leadership of the temple in Jerusalem: the priests, the scribes and the elders. These men hated Jesus. They hated him for his condemnations of their hypocrisy and for claiming that he was God the Son. They hated seeing him teach in the temple. They hated how much influence he had on the people, especially during Passover, when so many people were there to influence. In their hatred they challenged his authority (Luke 20:2), tried to get their hands on him (Luke 20:19), and sent spies to trap him (Luke 20:20). In a word, they were seeking to destroy him (Luke 19:47). Maybe this explains why Jesus left the city every day before nightfall: it was too dangerous for him to be in Jerusalem after dark.

 

So, they wanted to get ahold of Jesus and have him killed. But they had to be smart about it. The people wouldn’t have stood for it, for sure. They dint know what the people would do, but it wouldn’t be good for the religious leaders. And so, the chief priests were looking for the right opportunity and the right plan to make it happen.

The next character is this drama that we see is Judas Iscariot. He was a close friend of Jesus. He was one of the twelve disciples. He was the treasurer of Jesus and the disciples. When Mary poured perfume on the feet of Jesus, Judas was the one who threw a fit, saying that the money that perfume sold for could have been used to help the poor, although John 12:6 tells us: He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.

And so, he was not some innocent bystander who was taken over by Satan and made to work against his will. He was already corrupted by sin and working against Jesus before this.

One commentator reminds us of Ananias and Saphira in Acts 5:3 to show that when the scripture says Satan entered into Judas, it is not referring to possession, but to a strong influence. Some may want to excuse Judas from the guilt of his actions, but scripture leaves no such opportunity.

So, Judas went out and he sought out the chief priests.

I picture one of those scenes where the chief priests are sitting around in a circle, brainstorming, looking like Winnie the Pooh, think… think… think…

“I know, we need someone on the inside, an inside man!”

“How are we going to get that? They are all loyal to him!”

 

*Knock, knock*

 

Judas: Hi guys! I’m an answer to your prayers!

 

That’s probably not how it happened, but…

 

Either way, Judas seeks out the chief priests and they figure out a plan. They also figure out what the price of that betrayal and that plan will be. Again, we see that the chief priests didn’t have to seek out or pressure or wear down or convince Judas to do any of this. He sought them out.

So, they agree on the price, and it is staggering how ordinary a temptation it was that allowed and caused Judas to betray Jesus. It was just a little bit of money. 30 pieces of silver. And it makes me see just how much of Judas there is in each and every one of us, every time we sin.

Often, its simple, plain, seemingly ordinary temptations that cause us to sin. It’s not usually that I all of a sudden get a temptation to murder someone. Its not that I suddenly get a temptation to go out and cheat on my wife. The end result, the sin itself is often bigger than the temptation that led us to it. Judas did not go out and get tempted to kill Jesus. But a chain of events and a chain of growing temptations, seemingly starting with the love of money, led him directly to that point.

And we also can’t tell by looking at someone one whether they are genuinely regenerated and saved or not. You can’t tell by their education in the bible. You can’t tell by their position in the church. You cannot tell what darkness lies in their hearts. People are good at playing roles and putting on facades. No one would have ever expected Judas to betray Jesus, especially for a relatively small amount of money, and yet, here in the Gospels, we see it written in black and white.

Now, again, why are we in Jerusalem right now? Oh yeah, the Passover. This passage from Luke 22, verses 7-13 feels a lot like as Jesus was getting ready to enter Jerusalem in Luke 19:29-34. Go do this and this and this is what you will see, right where I tell you and the person you meet will do exactly what I say he will.

Jesus tells Peter to take care of the preparations for the Passover meal. Go and find the guy with the water jug. This would have been unusual because for the most part, the woman had the water jugs, and the guys carry waterskins. Go find him and follow him and tell him I said so and he will let you use the upper room in his home.

Jesus didn’t just like ordering Peter around. He wasn’t just lazy and not doing it himself. There was a reason for all the cloak and dagger and the secrecy. Judas. None of the disciples except for Peter knew where the Passover dinner would take place. If Judas had known where it would be he could have set up the betrayal and Jesus’ arrest for during or before the diner.

Jesus was not going to let anything get in the way of his last meal his close friends, his family. He was not going to let anything get in the way of the Passover meal. And so, Jesus did what needed to be done to ensure privacy and security for this meal that we are going to be looking at over the next couple of weeks.

So, at this point, all the pieces are in place. The chief priests, Judas, Jesus and the Disciples, a Passover meal prepared and ready to go. The storm clouds are gathering. Bad things are going to take place over the next 24 hours or so of real time.

Satan and his work were coming to a pinnacle. He had been working since Adam and Eve to prevent the Son of Man from crushing him. He had down everything in his power to stop the line of Christ.

And that invisible war was coming to its climax. It would reach its climax with Jesus crucified on the cross. When it seemed that Satan had won and defeated the Son of God, when Jesus was dead, and the earth shook, and the sun went dark. And then on Saturday, Jesus buried in the tomb, it continued to look like Satan had won.

But these things did not just happen to God. They did not happen to Jesus. These things didn’t just happen. God and Jesus did not “react” to what was happening.

Acts 2:23 & 24 tell us that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. 24 God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it”

All that happened to Jesus was a part of the divine and predetermined plan that was orchestrated by the Trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, before the beginning of time.

God was orchestrating this all. Moving all the pieces into place. Showing his complete and total sovereignty, his complete and total control over all of creation.

RC Sproul writes: In Judas’ case, a heinous evil action was committed. But from a different perspective, the most glorious deed that ever was performed on our behalf was the betrayal of Jesus Christ, because through that work, God orchestrated by Gods sovereignty, our salvation came to pass. Judas was willing; he had his own intentions. His purpose was to strike Jesus. Gods purpose was to redeem us through this very same act.

 

In Genesis 50:20, Joseph, talking to his brothers who sold him into slavery, for the same amount that Judas took to betray Jesus, had this to say:  As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people[b] should be kept alive,

 

God is on control. Even when it doesn’t look like it. Even when bad things are happening. Even when things are at there darkest, God is in control. He is sovereign. And all things work together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose.

IF you are called according to his purpose, trust in him, look to him, have faith in him in and for all things. He will bring through all these things and the dawn is always brightest after the darkest of nights. Things are going to get dark, for Jesus as we will see, and for us in life. But Jesus rises on the other side and is control of it all and he has promised to never leave us or forsake us, and he has won the battle over Satan and the forces of darkness and sin. Amen.

 

Let’s Pray.

 

 

 

 

Luke 20:41-44 Jesus is LORD Jesus is the Son of Man

Luke 20:41-44

Jesus is LORD

Jesus is the Son of Man

 

All right! Please grab your Bibles and turn with me to Luke chapter 20. If you do not have a Bible or if you need a Bible, please see me after the service and we will work on getting one into your hands.

So, in Luke chapter 20, we see that religious leaders of all kinds, different denominations, different political parties, different viewpoints, they are all different in many ways, but they are united in one area. They are united against Jesus of Nazareth.

He and his teachings were a threat to their power, their religious power, their political power, their people, cultural power. And so, they combined to challenge him. They sought to undermine his power, his authority and his influence.

Jesus’ response to them was clear and firm. He kept bringing them back to scriptures. He kept focusing on the Word of God. Even when they wanted to use the Word of God against Him, he would use the word of God to correct their misunderstandings and show them what they and been missing in the Word.

Jesus continues that in this section this morning. We are going to read just a couple of verses here, Luke chapter 20, verses 41-44. I’ll be reading out of the English Standard Version, which will also be on the screen, though I encourage you to grab your own Bible, in your preferred translation and read along for yourself out of the word of God.

Luke 20:41-44, Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Luke records the Words of Jesus:

But he said to them, “How can they say that the Christ is David’s son? 42 For David himself says in the Book of Psalms,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
43     until I make your enemies your footstool.”’

44 David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?”

 

Thus says the Word of God

          Now, we saw at the end of the passage we looked at last week that Jesus answered their questions so well, so forcefully, with so much authority, that they didn’t dare ask him any more questions. They figured, this is the wrong tact to use, lets regroup and try something else, we can’t trick him with our questions.

And so here, Jesus flips the script and asks them a question instead. Again, he is looking to correct a simplistic, incomplete, misunderstanding about the Word of God, and therefore, about himself, that the scribes, and other religious leaders hold to.

Jesus cut at the expectations that the religious leaders had for who the Messiah was supposed to be and was going to be. The long awaited, long promised, longed for Messiah was prophesied to be a descendant of David. He was to be a Son of David and he was to sit on the throne of David.

In some ways, they were expecting the Messiah to be kind of a David part 2, a David Jr.

And so, the whole focus was on comparing him to the expectations that David’s reign as King had set. David, as King, unified the twelve tribes of Israel, united them back into a singular nation. He brought about a free and strong Israel. David provided, under his leadership, military and political power, and freedom and protection against their neighboring countries, historical enemies. He made Israel great!

As Jesus stood before the Jewish leaders, Israel was, again, a nation divided. Judah, Israel, even Samaria. Ever since they divided in the OT, stemming from a lack of leadership and godliness under the reign of Kings after David. They were also an occupied land and an occupied people.

And so, the Messiah had some very specific things to do, tasks to accomplish and prophecies to fulfill in the religious leaders’ eyes. He was to militarily and politically overthrow Rome and send them away from Israel. He would unite the three states of Israel and make them united and unified once again. He was going to sit upon David’s throne, a physical king, over a physical land, the country of Israel. He was going to Make Israel Great Again.

That was what was expected. They are what they were looking for. That is what they thought that God was sending them. The promised Messiah, the Son of David.

And yet…
You say that the Messiah will be the Son of David, and yet, in the Psalms, David says that He will be, He is David’s LORD. David holds him in higher regard than you guys do.

That last point is important, because in those days, in that academic and religious setting, those who came before were regarded as much more wise than present generations. This is why the leaders and teachers were so dependent on what previous rabbis said and taught. And so, again, using consistent, internal logic, they should have deferred to what David thought and believe and wrote.

Jesus is telling them; you have a very myopic view of who the Messiah will be. They were only looking at information, only looking for things that would confirm what they already believed, and they want to believe. The same way that we watch the news today, the same way we talk to people today, that same way our tendency is to read the Bible today.

They were looking at things through a very specific and particular lens. Kent Hughes cuts through it all and puts it very pointedly, writing:

 

The problem with these scribes is that they had a studied ignorance of God’s Word and a practiced inability to think beyond rabbinical traditions. They read the Word through a political lens that reduced the Messiah to a mere man on the analogy of David. We do the same with our lenses- an economic lens that turns every scripture into advice for financial wellbeing, a racial lens that not too long ago edited out the scriptural teaching on ethnic equality, a feminist lens that interprets and rejects the Scriptures as a tract for patriarchal dominance, a postmodern lens that subjectivizes Holy Scripture into “what it means to me.” We all have our lenses, and our lenses blind us to the glory of God’s Word. We must try to read Gods Word for what it is. And we must humbly seek the Holy Spirits help in bowing to what we read.

 

          Now, are there scriptures about how to rightly handle finances? Yes. Are there scriptures on Gods design for the family and head of the Households? Yes. Some lenses that we look at scripture through, there are parts of it that are valid. Some are not, but some are. And that makes them even more dangerous, because we look through those lenses and we focus only on what we see through that lens.

So, are there scriptures that say the Messiah will be the Son of David? That he will be a physical descendant of David? Yes, there are. But that’s not all of who He is.

We also see that He will be God. A part of who the Messiah will be is deity.   David, in Psalm 110, uses the English word Lord, twice, but that’s two different words in Hebrew. So, David is saying, “Yahweh said to my Adonai…”

Yahweh is the personal name of God. Adonai means my sovereign LORD. When every knee will bow and every tongue will confess, it won’t be at the name of Jesus, or Yeshua. It will be that Jesus is Adonai. David is saying that the Messiah will be sovereign overall. David will bow, submit to Him, call him LORD. He will be Son of God.

And we see him titled the Son of Man as well. Daniel especially uses this title and Luke does as well to harken back to Daniel and show that Jesus is who Daniel was looking forward to.  We see in the Gospels, specifically Matthew and Luke that Jesus was born a human baby. He lived a human life. He would die a human death.

And yes, in addition to Son of God and Son of Man, he would be a Son of David. He would be born in the lineage of David. This would be to help confirm whether those claiming to be the Messiah were or were not Legit. Luke is clear to confirm multiple times that Jesus is a descendant of David, (1:27,32,69, 2:4, 18:38)

 

As Son of David, the Messiah is not less than David. Just as, as Son of God, The Messiah is not less than God.  The Messiah is LORD. He is David’s son, but he is David’s LORD. He is Caesars LORD. He is your LORD, and he is my LORD.

We don’t have the right to have a myopic view of who the Messiah is. We don’t have the right to see him as only the Son of David, or only the Son of God, or the Son of Man, for he is all of these and more. The only box we can put the Messiah in, the only way for us to define who the Messiah is how he himself defines himself and the box he himself puts himself in. Namely, the Word of God.

We, as humans, have a lot to say about God, about Jesus. He is like this or like that. He would do this or would do that. He wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that. And most of the time, the things we say have no biblical basis. They are our wants, our desires and our human nature pouring out. IF there is any biblical Ness in it, it’s not contextually, comprehensively, biblically based.

Now, the question Jesus is asking the scribes, how can the Messiah be the Son of David if David calls him LORD? And what was Jesus’ answer?

One commentator writes:

What was the answer? There is no record in any of the synoptic Gospels that Jesus bothered to explain it to the scribes that day. The answer lies in the two stages of the Messiahs history. First, by birth, he became the “son” of David. Second, by his death, resurrection, ascension, and position at Gods right hand he reigns as David’s “LORD.”

Another commentator says that this riddle is solved only by Messiah being both God and Man.

And that man is none other than Jesus himself. There is no one else in history that can be the Messiah. There was never meant to be any one possible except Jesus.

He, and only He can define who He is. He and only He can show us who he is.

Son of Man, Son of God, Son of David

Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father.

Immanuel

Lamb of God

Alpha & Omega

Bread of Life

Redeemer

The Word Made Flesh

Beloved Son

Good Shepard

Master

Rabbi

Christ.

He is the King of Kings and the LORD of LORDs

 

All of this from the scriptures. All of this is who Jesus is. All of this is who the Messiah is. Not any one of these. All of these. And more.

He is our salvation. He is exclusive. He is the Way, the truth, and the Life. He came to be a ransom for many. And it is by the grace of God alone, through faith alone in Jesus alone that we receive salvation, that our sins are forgiven that we have our eyes open to who he is and what the Bible says, that we were blind and can now see, that we were dead but are now alive, that are able to be called children of God and that we are clothed in Christs righteousness.

 

Who Jesus is is the single most important question that we have to answer in this life. And He is the only one who has the authority to answer it. And he does answer it, right here in scriptures.

          Jesus and Jesus alone gets to who we say He is and who he is is worthy of all honor and glory and praises.

 

Let’s pray.

Luke 13:18-21 Jesus is the Son of Man Big God in a Little Package (X-Mas)

Luke 13:18-21

Jesus is the Son of Man

Big God in a Little Package

 

(Note: It has come to my attention that my sermon posts from Nov ’21 through the begining of Feb ’22 have been lost. So i will be reposting them here, meaning they wont necessarily be in the order they were preached and recorded. THank you for your understanding)

All right, please turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 13. As always, of you do not have a Bible or have a need of a Bible, please see me after the service and we can see if we can get one into your hands.

As I was praying and reading over the last few weeks and months, I was trying to figure out which passage of scripture to go over for Christmas. I looked at all the traditional Bible passages and some non-traditional ones as well. They were all good of course, but I was having trouble making a decision, feeling called to a certain passage.

Then I looked ahead and saw this passage in Luke, where we would be, what the next text in our series was and it was too good to be true. This morning is not going to be one of the traditional Christmas texts, but we can see the coming of and the importance of the birth of Christ here this morning.

To set the context of where we are in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has been focusing and prioritizing telling us where our focus should be and what our priorities should be. They need to be on Jesus, on God, on the Kingdom of God and having a right understanding of those things. And he shows us that having our priorities and our focus right will apply itself in our lives through belief, or faith and repentance, leading to eternal life in Christ.

 

And what easier time for us to focus on, our maybe renew our focus, or maybe focus rightly for the first time, focus on the object, the person, the God that The Bible points us to and tells us to focus on, Jesus Christ.

So, lets go ahead and read this morning’s short passage. Luke chapter 13, verses 18-21. Ill be reading, as always, out of the English Standard Version. Please grab your preferred translation and follow along as we read Gods Word.

Luke 13:18-21, Luke inspired by the Holy Spirit records the Words of Jesus:

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

20 And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? 21 It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.”

Thus says the Word of God.

 

So, a couple of “First-of-all,” s. First, we see that the word, therefore. And as we have seen, the word therefore is a connecting word. That means that this passage is directly connected to the preceding passage or passages. TO contrast, we look ahead and next weeks passage, where it says, “HE went on his way.” That is a transitional phrase. We take a break and move on from the previous passage. There still connected of course, as scripture, but not in a direct connection, inseparable.

And so, last week we saw Jesus miraculously heal a woman, correct a misunderstanding about the Sabbath and before that, the importance of our faith bearing fruit and before that the importance of repenting of our sins.

Now, therefore, he reaffirms the central message of his teachings. Bruce Larson writes:

As varied as his teachings are, the central message is always there. He keeps underscoring that He came to establish a kingdom, the kingdom of God. In that kingdom, there is a new way to live in relationship with God.

 

And here, Jesus gives two examples, two answers to the question, what is the Kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to?

 

First, He gives an example of the mustard seed. Proverbially the smallest of the seeds. IT was the smallest of the seeds that were sown in Israel. It is one of the smallest seeds out there, though some take issue with the phrasing, thinking that because there are seeds that are smaller, that Jesus was wrong, and the bible is untrustworthy. Jesus often speaks proverbially though. The key is to understand context. To Israel at that time, for all intents and purposes, there was no smaller seed than the mustard seed, certainly not one that mattered.

Jesus uses the mustard seed in another context as well. In Matthew 17, Jesus extols the power even that small amount of faith, faith the size of a mustard seed. He compares the kingdom of God, and he compares our faith to a mustard seed.

It starts small, tiny in fact. And it grows from so small to very large. The mustard seed grows from the seed up to a very large tree. Big enough to cover the ground and for the birds to nest in its branches. This is also an allusion to Old Testament language where God will encompass not only the nation of Israel, but also the gentiles. The Kingdom of God grows this way. As RC Sproul says it starts with small beginnings and it grows to yield great and vast fruit.

Our faith grows from a small initial, immature, beginning faith and it develops, over time, also yield fruit, into a mature, full grown faith in Christ.

And it all starts with Jesus. It all started in a manger all those 2000 years ago. The most important person, the truest religion, the most monumental started in the most humble and small way possible.

Philippians 2:5-8:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,[a] 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,[b] 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,[c] being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

 

He started as a baby, a human baby, God clothed in flesh. And his ministry grew to encompass everything. Started in Nazareth, well Bethlehem really. It spread to all of the region of Galilee. It spread out to all of Israel and over time it spread over the whole world. All over the known world within 3-400 years and it has been brought across the globe over the last hundreds of years. And the scriptures show us that it also spreads between this world and the next.

One commentator writes that “From a small and seemingly insignificant beginning, the kingdom of God grows- at times invisibly almost imperceptibly- until it reaches all nations with its transforming power.”

 

          Seeds like the Kingdom of God will grow. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes outwardly, like a seed to a tree. Sometimes inwardly like the yeast in the dough, as we are about to see. But always growing.

And like God, clothed in flesh, like the seed that is buried underground and starts to sprout, it all starts with an inward change. The change starts with the Holy Spirit changing your heart, it happens first on the inside, without being seen. But making us different from the inside out, instead of what we often try, which is to show the change in our outward behavior without actually changing us inside.

And Jesus gives another example showing the inner, unseen changing and comparing it to the Kingdom of God. He talks about a little leaven hidden in a large amount of flower. Basically, this is yeast being mixed through some dough.

To me this is a very interesting example that Jesus gives because, again, the leaven being spread throughout a batch of flour is used elsewhere in scripture. Only in other parts its used to show the corrupting power of sin. Paul talks in 1 Corinthians 5 how a little bit of sin corrupts much. The principle is that a little bit goes a long way.

It’s that principle that Jesus is using here. A little bit of Jesus goes a long way. It changes everything. It doesn’t take much. A little bit of Jesus transforms a whole person. OF course, it won’t continue to stay a little bit of Jesus. The amount of Jesus in your life should continue to grow and expand, but that’s more in line with the mustard seed.

The kingdom of God is the same way. It starts little, it starts with a small incursion, and then it spreads, and it will end up transforming the entire world. Transformation happens. The old passes by, and there will be a new creation. Our old selves are dead, and we are newly made alive in Christ.

Heaven comes down and invades this world and changes the culture. And we think that we need to fight this war on behalf of the kingdom of God. Yes and no. We are both winning and losing this war. We are destined to both win and lose this war.

We can’t succeed here on this earth. We will not “Christianize” the nation or the world. But we have seen what happens when the church decides that their main mission is to win the culture war. We end up moving to one extreme or the other. We move to the left, embracing friendship with the world over biblical fidelity and holiness. Or we move to the right, and we embrace power, especially political power over love and compassion.

But Jesus tells us that neither of these is right. He came, not to win a culture war, not to be the political leader like Israel was looking for at the time, or like we look for today. He came, not to allow and accept and embrace sin.

No, he came to ransom himself for the needs of the many. He came to acquire and offer salvation to sinners like you and me. He came to bring those who are dead and make them alive. He came to introduce the Kingdom of God to this world. And he succeeded.

RC Sproul writes: Within 40 years from the time Jesus spoke that parable, the kingdom of God had penetrated every locale in the Roman Empire. He started with a handful of people, and they leavened the whole lump. The little seed that was planted by Jesus has since grown into a tree that keeps us in its branches today, 2000 years after the life of Jesus.

          Small things can grow and will grow. The gates of Hell cannot prevail against it because it’s the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of men. With God, all things are possible. With Christ all things are possible. A woman bent in half can be made straight and a culture twisted and distorted can be turned right side up when the people of God act like the people of God.

         

 

          Jesus of Nazareth was born, come down from Heaven, God with us, born all those 2000 years ago. He came to introduce the Kingdom to us and this world. That’s what Christmas is. Celebrating and remembering Jesus’ first coming. We celebrate and remember his birth.

He came, he died on the cross. He rose from the dead three days later and then ascended into heaven. He calls us to respond to the offer of forgiveness and salvation by faith. He calls us to repent of our sins as we become new creations.

And he will be coming back. He introduced the kingdom, and he will return to consummate the kingdom. He will return to recreate the world. The New Heavens, the New Earth, all will be filled with us, His New Creations.

Christmas is the first advent, God come into the world to save sinners. Emmanuel, God with Us. He came to bring the Kingdom of Heaven. And it points us to the second advent, which we look forward to with, among over things, hope, faith, love and peace.

As we celebrate the first advent, the first coming, the introduction of the kingdom, we see the mustard seed sprouting and growing onto a large tree. We see the leaven being mixed into the flour and transforming it from the inside out. And then we will see the final and full manifestation of the kingdom, the transformation of the world completed when he comes again.

Joy to the World is one of the most famous Christmas songs although its not actually written about Christmas, Christs first coming. Instead, it was actually written about his second coming. Look at the lyrics with me as we finish up and then pray.

 

Joy to the World, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Joy to the World, the Lord is come!

 

Luke 12:49-53 Jesus is the Son of Man Peace or Division?

Luke 12:49-53

Jesus is the Son of Man

Peace or Division?

          All right! Let’s turn in our Bibles to Luke chapter 12.

 

I want to start us off by asking a question. Are we called to mimic Jesus in everything He did? Are we called to imitate Him in everything He is called to?

Before we look at our passage this morning and see why I am asking that question, we first look at the context of Luke chapter 12. Luke has been ensuring that we ate focusing on the things that He tells us to focus on. He is telling us to focus not on the earthly, the temporary. He tells us not to have a fear of man. He tells us that Eat, drink and be merry is the wrong worldview. Instead, focus on the eternal, on the heavenly. Have a fear of God. Be faithful to what God has called us to do.

And we see in scriptures that God tells us what he wants us to do.

Make Disciples

Teach them to obey all that Christ commanded.

Speak the Truth in Love

Pursue Righteousness.

Love God and Love your Neighbor.

 

What He doesn’t call us to do is to save people. That’s the Holy Spirits job. He doesn’t call us to heal the sick, though some had been given that gift. He doesn’t call us to die on the cross as a sacrifice for mankind’s sins. That was what Jesus was called to do.

 

And I will contend that we are not called to wield a metaphorical sword and act divisively. Paul writes in a few places that as much as it is possible, we are to live at peace with each other. One of the qualifications of elders in 1 Timothy 3 is that he must be well thought of by outsiders.

And so, with all that, the questions begs itself, what do we do with this passage this morning?

Let’s go ahead and read it and look deep at it. We will be reading Luke chapter 12, verses 49-53. I will, as always, be reading out of the English Standard Version and I encourage you to follow along in your preferred translation.

Luke 12:49-53, Luke records Jesus words:

 

“I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! 51 Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. 52 For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

 

May God Bless the Reading of His Word.

 

All right, so first of all, I want us to remember the context within which Jesus said this. WE just looked at a passage where Jesus said that faithful servants would be rewarded and that the unfaithful would be punished.

And so, we know immediately that sin will be punished. We also know that Jesus is the judge, the one who will judge sin. He is the one who will judge, who will determine whether we enter Heaven or Hell for eternity.

And so, Jesus says here that he is to cast fire on the earth, he is talking about divine judgment. The salvation He offers is the salvation from His wrath poured out over the sins we commit against Him. Hell, the Lake of Fire is not the devil’s domain. He doesn’t rule down there. God created it and rules over it. Jesus is King, not only of Heaven, but of Hell as well. He is sovereign over ALL of his creation.

He is saying, be prepared, be ready, eternal judgment is coming. And the fire will come through. He will cast fire on the earth. And Fire destroys the temporary. It destroys the exact thing we have been being warned by Jesus not to put our trust in, because it will all go away.

We see the correlation between Jesus’ baptism and the fire of judgment as well. John the Baptist, earlier in Luke, chapter 3, verses 16 & 17, he says:

“I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Baptism is also a symbol of death and rebirth. We are baptized, in part, to show our identity with Christ dying, going beneath the surface, and raising up from the dead, out of the water in our case. It is pointing to the crucifixion. It is a sign of death and resurrection. A sign of judgment and rebirth. In our cases, a symbol, a representation of us being spiritually born again.

And we get a glimpse here of Jesus’ heart. We see the desires of his heart. Jesus knows what he is going to go through. We see the night before his death, He is praying hard and asking God the Father that if there were any other way, to do that instead. He knows the pain and the wrath that He is going to feel.

But He also knows why. He knows what it will accomplish. He knows that our souls and our eternal destinies are at stake. He knows that the cross is how His people will be brought to Him. And he longs for it to have already happened.

You ever have one of those things that you want so much, all of your focus and energy and attention is on accomplishing that one thing. You are so looking forward to it that you want it to have already been done, already been accomplished. “I want this so much; I wish I already had it!” Not wishing to skip ahead and have it in your hands without all the work and preparation and all that that needs to go into it. But looking forward to that time when you come have it and look back on it.

Jesus longed for the redemption and salvation of his people to have already occurred. He wished for and longed for the Consummation of Gods Kingdom here on earth to have already occurred.

Kent Hughes says it this way:

Through his baptism, all who believed in him would be regenerated, born of the Spirit, made eternally alive as eternal sons and daughters of God (cf. John 1:12, 13; 3:3-6)- and he longed for that. They would be indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, the Spirit of truth- and He longed for that. They would no longer be alone (cf. John 14:16, 17)- and he longed for that. They would be sealed with the Holy Spirit as a down payment insuring their eternal inheritance. They would enjoy eternal life now (cf. Ephesians 1:13,14; 4:30)- and he longed for that. They would be sanctified, made holy by the Spirits fiery work of internal soul purification. He would melt their hearts, so to speak, and skim away the impure dross from their souls so they could mirror His holy image- and he longed for that. And ultimately their lives would be ignited, they would become incendiary. Pentecostal fire would flame from their lives, the Spirit of burning would rest above their willing heads, and the fire would spread- and he longed for that.

 

Jesus is saying that he longed for all that was going to happen to have already happened. And he was in great distress until it would.

 

And then he says something that goes against, or at least seems to go against, everything that the disciples and all Israel was expecting form its coming Messiah. They wanted and expected peace. They wanted peace within their borders, and a strong border and a strong king and leader ensuring peace with their neighbors. The coming Messiah was the Prince of Peace. The angels declared on the night Jesus was born, Peace and goodwill to all whom his favor rests upon.

And with all of this known and expected, Jesus says, I have not come to bring peace, but to bring division. So, again, I ask, what do we do with that? Once again, we look at the two hermeneutic rules of interpreting scripture. First, scripture always interprets scripture. Second, we let the clear passages of scripture interpret the unclear passages. So, we take what we know from scripture and use that to inform what we are not sure about.

First of all, Jesus was not talking here about interpersonal conflicts. He was not talking about one-on-one interactions. He tells the crowds during the sermon on the mount, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God.  Alastair Begg says at this point:

Clearly Jesus did not advocate conflict. He didn’t put together a group of individuals who were going to be insurrectionists.  In fact, he taught his disciples that at least in terms of their personal conduct, retaliation was not an option for them.

 

And he is not saying that we should be divisive. The Gospel is offensive in and of itself. Scripture attests to that. It is a stumbling block, and it convicts sin and people will get offended at that. But while the Gospel is offensive, we are never called to be offensive. We have to be careful that we don’t use this verse or others like it as an excuse to be a jerk or to offend others.

Instead, we are called to sow the seeds of the Gospel. We are to live at peace with those around us. We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We are to speak the truth in love and are given a ministry of reconciliation.

We are, in fact, called to be ambassadors for Christ. Think about what an ambassador does, what he is called to do. He does not lay down ultimatums. He does not wage or declare war. He does not decide who is a friendly and who is an enemy of the person they are speaking on behalf of. Their job is to present the message and stance of the one whom they represent. Their job is to speak on behalf of the one who makes those decisions. To diplomatically communicate what their boss, or king or president, or in our case, LORD has declared and wants communicated. And nothing more and nothing less.

Jesus will divide. The truth will divide. He has drawn a line in the sand and has told us all to choose a side. That line in the sand is what divides.

Jesus addresses our part in this in Matthew 13:24-30:

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds[c] among the wheat and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants[d] of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

 

          It is not our job to determine who is on which side of the dividing line. IT is not our job to determine who is in and who is out.

It is our job to communicate what that line is and what the consequences are for picking the wrong side of the line. We are also responsible for doing so firmly, but politely, respectfully and lovingly.

We stand against and we confront sin, but we don’t judge who is in and who is out, and we don’t divide. We don’t determine the outcome, or the results. We are especially called to peace with our fellow believers, fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. How many times does Jesus tell his disciples to “love one another?”

 

 

Jesus will punish sin. He will return and he will judge the living and the dead. He will divide the righteous and the unrighteous. He will decide who gets into heave and who goes to hell. And he will divide based solely on who is clothed in his blood. The dividing line in the sand is simply who is clothed in his righteousness or who is depending on their own righteousness.

SO, when he talks about bringing division, Alistair Begg says, “Now, what he means by that is clearly not that his ultimate objective was division but that the effect of his accomplishment of salvation would be division—

I will say this. We will be shockingly surprised at who we see in Heaven. And we will be shockingly surprised at who we do not see in Heaven as well.

Blood is thicker than water. We have all heard that, right? So, our own natural hopes, our beliefs are that we will be with family when we get to Heaven. That could be blood family. It could be our chosen family. It could be our church family.

 

 

Jesus says that our families will be divided. Not all are saved because of their family. We can’t trust that because our grandma used to take us to church, and we went to Sunday school or awana that we are good. Not all are saved because they go to church. We cannot trust in our attendance or our reputation for being a part of the church to save us.

 

Many who think they are saved, many who we think are saved will hear, “Well done good and faithful servant.” And many who think they are saved, many who we think are saved will hear, “Depart from me, I never knew you.”

 

This should install a sense of urgency to share the Gospel, to let friends, family and church members know that it is only though God’s grace and his blood and faith in His Son that we can be saved. That those who believe will be welcomed as children of God. And those who do not believe will be divided and sent to eternal judgment and wrath.

The results are in Gods hands. Obedience and faithfulness are in our hands.

I will leave you with a quote from JC Ryle, who says:

Let us never be moved by those who charge the Gospel with being the cause of strife and divisions upon the earth… It is not the Gospel which is to blame, but the corrupt heart of man…So long as some men and women will not repent and believe, and some will, there must needs be division. To be surprised at it is the height of folly. The very existence of division is one proof of Christs foresight and the truth of Christianity.”

 

Let’s Pray.

 

Luke 11:33-54 Jesus is the Son of Man: Whitewashed Tombs

Luke 11:33-54

Jesus is the Son of Man

Whitewashed Tombs

All right, let’s go ahead and turn in our Bibles to Luke chapter 11. As most of you know, if you do not have a Bible, if you need a Bible, please see me after the service and I will make sure we can get one into your hands.

 

So, Jesus is continuing in the same setting, continuing to speak to the same crowd, the same gathering that we have seen him in the last few weeks. And his main message has been, blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

Jesus is emphasizing a combination of head knowledge, inner trust and outward action. There is an inner change first, and then, flowing from that, there is the outer, behavioral change.

Its important to remember that our works and our behavior flow from our faith and salvation, not the other way around. All of that, the points Jesus makes and the things that he says, all continue to flow into the passage we are looking at this morning.

We are going to be reading Luke chapter 11, verses 33-54, a bit of a longer passage to read. I’m going to be reading out of the English Standard Version, my preferred translation, and I encourage you to follow along in your preferred translation.

Luke 11:33-54, the Holy spirit inspires Luke to write:

 

“No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. 35 Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.

37 While Jesus[e] was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table. 38 The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. 39 And the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. 40 You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? 41 But give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

42 “But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 43 Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. 44 Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it.”

45 One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, in saying these things you insult us also.” 46 And he said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. 47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. 48 So you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs. 49 Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ 50 so that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. 52 Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

53 As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, 54 lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say.

 

May God Bless the Reading of the Word

 

So, a lot to get into here. Starting with the first section here, Jesus is saying two different things in regard to light shining. First is, of course, that the light inside of us cannot and was never meant to be hidden. That inner change, that heart change is meant to be shown to those around us.

That light that shines from that heart change inside of us, what good is it if we hide it? Light is meant to shine, there is no point in being a lamp, if you are going to be covered up. When the light is lit inside of us, it will make itself known.

Secondly, Jesus’ work, the light of the Gospel, the signs and wonders he did, His death, burial and resurrection, they were down in plain sight, for all the world to see.

The scriptures, especially psalm 119 show us that the word of God is the light of the world. I especially like two verses from psalm 119, verse 130 says

The unfolding of your words gives light;
it imparts understanding to the simple.

 

          and verse 105:

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.

 

Then Jesus also uses the analogy of our eyes being the lamp of our body. The correlation regarding blindness and sight, between lightness and dark. When your eyes see, when they are working correctly, when God has taken the blindness away form you, you can see the light that already exists, The light of the Gospel, even better.

We talked the last few weeks about the desire for more signs, more wonders, more evidence of who Jesus was. In the words of RC Sproul, Jesus here is saying, “The people seeking a sign did not need more light, but better receptiveness to the light they already had. What God was doing in Jesus was plain enough.”

          The light and the darkness are used biblically to describe our spiritual condition and our sin nature. When we are in the darkness, we desire the darkness. We want to stay in the darkness because that’s where we are comfortable. We are comfortable in and with our sins. We think we are good because we avoid or protest against certain sins, but we have our own secret pet sins that we keep in the dark.

But the light drives out the darkness. The light of the Gospel inside of us exposes us to our sins, exposes our sins to us. We desire to stop and quit those sins because the darkness cannot exist in the light.

In verse 37, the scene starts to shift. One Pharisee invites Jesus to dinner. Now, many will tell you that this was a setup and that this pharisee was trying to trap Jesus from the beginning. That might be true, however, there is nothing in the text that indicates this.

Not all the individuals who were pharisees were Jesus enemies. Nicodemus was a pharisee. This unnamed pharisee invited Jesus to dinner and Luke does not tell us that there were ulterior motives.

Jesus knew what was going to happen. He knew how it was going to turn out and he still went. One commentator points out one principal from this is that we should always be looking for opportunities to build relationships, to build bridges and get to know people.

Jesus accepted the invitation and went to eat with the pharisee, seemingly at a big dinner party with lots of other pharisees and lawyers, or scribes.  And Jesus sat down with out ceremonially washing his hands before the meal.

THE SCANDAL!

The pharisees added so many man made traditions and rules and regulations to the law, to the rules that God gave down and this was one of them. The idea here was that our hands got dirty each and every day, some of it was ceremonially and ritually unclean. Since many of the meals in that day were eaten directly with the hands, this presented a problem to them.

The Mishna is major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions which is known as the Oral Torah. This is where all the man-made traditions of the pharisees and the rabbis throughout Jewish history to that point were written down. We have the records of what was a part of the pharisaical law of the time. In the Mishna it says that “tradition is the man-made fence around the law.”

          The noble idea being, the further away from the line we stay, the less likely chance we have at crossing it. We will return to that later.

 

          So, Jesus shocks His host and the pharisees by not ceremonially washing his hands. When they say something, Jesus comes back at them. He tells them outer physical cleanliness is not enough.

          In fact, outer cleanliness matters less than inner holiness, than inner righteousness. The condition of the heart is what God sees. It is not our outward behavior that makes us clean. Its why we sing and read in the Bible, “Create in me a clean heart.”

          Our outward behavior needs to flow from a clean heart that God gives us. This is the opposite of what our nature tries to do which is that we need to behave outwardly in order to cleanse ourselves.

          God tells the Israel through the prophets, throughout the Old Testament, in many different ways, I desire Mercy not sacrifice. This is, in essence, what Jesus is telling the group here. You misunderstand what it is that God desires from you.

          You are taking what is good, taking the law that God gave, taking what is right and you are taking it an extreme absurd. Your focus is more on your outward appearance and behavior than on the Heart of God.

          The pharisees were focused on confronting and avoiding sin, which is a good thing. They would have been protesting against same sex marriage and abortion and all sort of other sins. They would have been setting up boycotts of various companies and businesses because of their support of various things or their selling of stuff. Fighting sex trafficking and prostitution and pornography.

          The problem is not that they were fighting those causes or trying to eliminate those sins and that evil.  The problem was that they were more focused on all that instead of, or at the expense of loving God and loving neighbor and treating all people as image bearers of God.

          Jesus says, you are supposed to do both. You are supposed to fight against sin and evil as a way of loving God and loving your neighbor, not as a way to avoid loving God and loving your neighbor.

 

          But, like so many that we see in this world, and maybe like so many that we know, Jesus shows that they were more interested in people seeing them and their good works and their status’. They wanted to make sure people knew they were going to church, that they were pillars of the community, that they gave to the needy, that they volunteered, that they were a moral compass.

          Again, all of those are good things, except when that is the reason that you do them. Goods deeds done for the wrong reasons are not good. The right thing done for the wrong reasons are wrong.

          People see the outward signs and outer moral shell and they are tricked into not realizing that a person is spiritually dead on the inside.

          Jesus speaks of unmarked and hidden graves. Graves would make people ceremonially unclean. Hidden and unmarked graves would be a hidden source of spiritual impurity.

          The pharisees, because their outer behavior was not often accompanied with the inner heart change, they were hidden sources of spiritual impurity to those around them. They made people want to be like them, act as good as them, and that this was the key to earning favor with God.

         

          Jesus was not holding back any punches here. And the people in the room knew it. He was talking about them, and they were not happy. They were feeling convicted. One of the lawyers, one of the professional theologians, he says to Jesus, woah now, you are insulting us!

          The lawyer would have been at home here today. Jesus don’t say what your saying, even if its true, because we might be offended. And if we are offended then it must not be true, so there. As we know, there is no greater sin in today’s society than to offend somebody. It seems it wasn’t so dissimilar 2000 years ago.

          Now, it is very easy, when confronted with your sins, to respond by getting offended. The first thing we need to do, if someone says something that we get offended by, is to look deep in ourselves. We need to see if there is any truth or validity to what is being said. Often times getting offended is a defense mechanism for trying to avoid acknowledging the truth.

          That being said, we know that Jesus offends, that the Gospel offends, the light of the Gospel, as we mentioned earlier shines a lot on people’s sin and that makes people offended and defensive. However, nowhere in scripture does it allow for us to be offensive. As Paul says in Ephesians 4, we are to speak the truth in love.   Let Jesus and the Gospel do what they are going to do, we are to share it in love.

 

          This lawyer says Hey, you’re offending us. Jesus’ response, Woe to You!

 

          Woe to you putting extra burdens on the law. Jesus came to lift these burdens, burdens that God never designed us to be able to bear.

          Again, the original idea was to avoid getting close to sin, to avoid getting close to breaking Gods law. The pharisees had a great respect for the holiness of God and wanted to obey what they understood was the purpose of His laws.

          But what does this lead to? How far can I go without it being sin? How can I avoid breaking this law but still do whatever I want? This goes back to Eve in the Garden. God told Adam, don’t eat from the tree. When the serpent asked Eve, she said God said don’t even touch it. This extra level of fence around the law, as the Mishna out it, adds extra burden to us that is hard for us to bear.

          Even when the lawyers and pharisees were “honoring” the fallen prophets of the past, it was an outward honoring. They were still rejecting them. When the prophets were active, Israel, the kings, all the people, they refused to listen to the prophets, refused to hear the Word of God. They persecuted and killed them all.

          They were still refusing to listen to them. They were pretending to honor them but were really dishonoring them. If they wanted to honor the prophets of the past, they would live how the prophets described and to do what they said to do.

          This generation, the generation that Jesus was talking to, they were held even more responsible because they had Jesus right there in front of them, physically, literally right there, sitting with them and dining with them. And they rejected, persecuted and kill Him just as their fathers had done to the prophets, just as they and their children would do to the Apostles. There are clear allusions to verses 31 and 32 here as well, that Jesus is the greater prophet and the greater Apostle.

          In verse 52, Jesus rebukes the lawyers, saying, “you have taken away the key of knowledge.” The lawyers felt that their additions to the law should be even more held to than Gods laws because they were clearer and easier to understand. Jesus is telling them they are wrong. As one commentator points out that these traditions, these additions to the law, they made it impossible for the regular people to understand the meaning and purpose of the law.

 

          Instead, the lawyers used these additions and traditions to avoid the demands of the law itself. As I mentioned earlier, how can I technically keep the law but still do whatever I want?

          As Jesus leaves this scene, this crowd and especially the people who he was at dinner with, he leaves many of them mad and scheming. They would spend the rest of His life trying to get him to say something wrong, to answer questions, to teach something that would allow them to persecute and prosecute Him. Jesus, as of chapter 9 has set his eyes on his journey to Jerusalem. Here and know, the Pharisees and lawyers have set their eyes on Him. And not in the right way.

 

          Philip Ryken writes that the Christian faith is not a law to keep but is a Gospel to believe. Our morals, our values, our behavior they mean nothing in terms of us being saved.

          Now, of course, we will bear fruit once we are saved, but our works and our fruit are not what save us. Good works and fruit do not equal Christian. Being pro life does not equal Christian. Being anti sin does not equal Christian. Being pro Bible does not equal Christian. Believing that a God exists does not equal Christian. Reading and memorizing Scripture does not equal Christian. Voting for a particular party does not equal Christian. Church attendance does not equal Christian.

          Trust and faith in Jesus Christ and his work on the cross, his death, burial, resurrection. Trust and faith in his righteousness, not ours. Trust and faith in his sinlessness, not our sins. Trust and faith in his perfect obedience, not our attempts. Hearing the Word of God and keeping it. Complete and total dependence on Him and resting in his good work. That equals Christian.

 

Let’s Pray.  

            

Luke 11:1-13 Jesus is the Son of Man: Jesus Shows Us How to Pray

Luke 11:1-13

Jesus is the Son of Man

Jesus Shows Us How to Pray

 

All right, lets go ahead and turn in our Bibles to Luke chapter 11. If you do not have a Bible, or are in need of a Bible, please see me after the service and we can help with that.

So, last week we saw Jesus staying with two sisters, Mary and Martha. As he was staying there, he not only helps a teaching session with some group of people that including Mary, who sat at Jesus feet to listen to his teachings. Jesus also held a private teaching session with Martha, loving her and comforting her in her anxiety and frustration.

Jesus and his disciples continued their travelling from town to town and from village to village. Jesus was making his was way slowly but surely towards Jerusalem, where he was to fulfill his purpose. Along the way, they were preaching the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven being here in the here and now. We have seen many signs and wonders by Jesus to confirm his deity and the truth of his claims.

As he and the disciples are travelling, Jesus is teaching the, mentoring them, preparing them for ministry after he leaves his earthly ministry. The wonderful thing for us, is that these teachings that Jesus shared with his disciples, many of them are recorded in the Gospels contain in the Bible, so we have access to them whenever we want. And this morning we see some very important and practical teachings from Jesus.

So, let’s go ahead and read this morning’s text before we dive in to the teaching. Luke chapter 11, verses 1-13. As always, Ill be reading out of the English Standard Version, but please follow along in your preferred translation. Luke 11:1-13, Luke, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit records the following:

 

Now Jesus[a] was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say:

“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread,[b]
4 and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.”

5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence[c] he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for[d] a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

 

May God Bless the Reading of his Word.

 

Its always interesting to me when God and when the Gospel writers include or omit certain details. In this case, Jesus was in a certain place. Where that place was, was not important. What was important was that Jesus was praying. We have seen him does this often and it emphasizes to the disciples and to us, if Jesus needs to spend time in prayer, how much more do we?

So, Jesus is praying, and as was common for teachers and disciples of the time, Jesus followers wanted their teacher to teach them how to pray. Every teacher had their own style and method and pattern of prayer. The disciples mention John the Baptist and though we don’t see his prayers recorded in scripture, the disciples had heard of them and wanted to hear Jesus’ versions of prayer.

The disciples looked at Jesus as a number of things but included in that would have been seeing Jesus as their spiritual mentor. They wanted to model their spiritual life off of his. They wanted to be just like him. They wanted to learn from him. He had a robust spiritual prayer life, and they wanted the same.

They were saying to Him, “Lord, you were praying, you have such a good prayer life, your so good at praying, we want to have that same prayer life.”

 

And Jesus was a great example of a good mentor. When Jesus does show the disciples how to pray, he doesn’t give them a list of rigid instructions. He doesn’t say, “First, do this…Second, say this…” Instead, he gives example. He teaches the principles. He explains the whys and such.

 

And in verses 2-4, Jesus gives them a model of prayer. We see here a truncated version of the Lord’s prayer that we see in Jesus teach in Matthew 6:9-13, the version we all know and have memorized.

I think that’s the first think for us to take away form Jesus’ teachings this morning. The length of the prayer does not affect how well or how much God the Father hears our prayers. He does not hear longer prayers any more than shorter prayers. For sure, pray as long as is needed in that specific situation, but there is no need to make it longer and to fill it with fluff words to try to make it more holy.

Now, there are a number of different acronyms and lists and different descriptions out there about what is included in making a good and complete prayer. You may have heard the acronym, ACTS. An ACTS prayer would include Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication (or asking). A-C-T-S.

RC Sproul listed some attributes of this and other prayers in scripture as Adoration, petition, confession and intercession. For this passage here this morning, the most common descriptions I read over and over were vertical and horizontal.

This means first, you pray vertically, upwards, towards God. Prayers are directed at someone, and who they are directed at matters. We don’t send our prayers and thoughts out to the universe. We don’t send prayers to people. We don’t pray to a God we don’t believe in or to any God that might hear it. We are praying to the Creator God of the Universe. We are praying to God the Father. We are praying to the one True God. And we need to make sure that we recognize that.

Now of course, this is not to legislate that every prayer we say has to include an out loud, personalized greeting to God. When something happens, sometimes, we just throw prayers out there. God still hears those and responds to those as well. They are no less valid prayers than the more formal prayers we are addressing here this morning.

After praying vertically, we then pray horizontally. We pray for the things, situations and people around us. First, we look up to Heaven, to God, then we look around us. Love God, love your neighbor. Pray to God, pray for your neighbor.

 

Jesus starts the prayer addressing God as Abba Father. Personal, individual Father. We who have been saved by the grace of God through our faith in Christ, we have been adopted into the family of God. God also tells us that we are to approach boldly the throne of grace. God is our Father, if we are children in the faith. And he wants to make sure that we know he is approachable. He wants us to know that we can go to him. Anytime, anywhere, about anything. Jesus will talk more about God as Father coming up.

Hallowed be God’s name. God’s name should always be spoken of with reverence, with awe. He is Holy Holy Holy as Isaiah declares. And so, we are to approach God boldly, as our children approach us as parents, but also humbly.

AS we approach God, as we approach our Father, we then ask for provisions. We ask for what he has already promised us. Now God will often overdeliver on those promises. What amazing that we don’t have only manna to eat each and every day, but we have a plethora of amazing foods, flavors, spices, and so much more. These are things that God knew about and put into our world and into our lives so that we could enjoy them. His promises are for our sustenance, to get us through the days. His delivery is often so much more, for our enjoyment, for our pleasure.

Jesus shows us in this model prayer that next we thank God for what he has done for us and what he is continuing to do for us. We also thank him for those very provisions and gifts that he has and will give us.

He also reminds us that what God has done for us, specifically forgiving us our sins, we are to make sure that we do to those around us. Forgiveness, like prayer, is a tricky thing to talk about sometimes.

God, of course, models forgiveness for us. Forgive us our trespasses as we then forgive those who trespass against us. Gods’ forgiveness of us is a once and for all deal. We come to faith in Christ and all our sins, past, present and future are instantly forgiven. And that’s good because we are in constant need of forgiveness.

The forgiveness we give out (and ask from others around us) is an ongoing and continual event. We need to have a continual spirit of forgiveness, always in the present tense. Our forgiveness of others and the forgiveness we ask of others is not a once and for all thing.  It reminds me of the Martin Luther quote that a believer’s entire life is one of repentance.

Jesus gives us a parable in verses 5-8 that shows a couple of things. First, persistence works. We are imperfect friends, sinners. There are times when even if our friends are asking for something that we are expected to give them, we don’t always want to do it. It can take them asking over and over. Eventually we will get up and do it.

Persistence often works. We will see this is the parable of the persistent widow and the point is don’t stop praying. Gods’ answers don’t always come quickly.  I don’t need a show of hands, but how many of us have been praying for years if not decades for certain or specific family members, friends, whoever, for them to come to know Christ. Some of you have seen results from those prayers. But it wasn’t quick or immediate.

Now, where we have to be careful with this story from Jesus is to take the parable too far. God is not annoyed with us for asking too often, or from praying too long (unless its full of hypocritical holy sounding fluff words and the like, but that’s for a different time) The parable is not that God is the friend that needs to be pestered. Instead, the point is that in opposition to how we fail to act and give as we are supposed to, God is happy and delighted to give us good gifts and to answer our prayers.

Now, persistence does not mean repeating the exact words of the prayer over and over. It does not mean ritual. It does not mean wrote repetition. It does not mean mindless repeating of a prayer we have memorized. Jesus warns against this very clearly.

Instead, we are to not give up. We are to stay faithful and steadfast. We are to trust God that he knows what he is doing and will answer our prayers. We trust in God’s definition of good and right and remember that his answer will fit into that category.

 

 

Verses 9 & 10, Jesus says, And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

 

First thing is let’s remember the context of this passage. The context is believers praying to God their father. These often get misapplied to unbelievers.

When Jesus says Seek and you shall find, this is not referring to those outside the church who are “seeking God.” Scripture makes it clear that we don’t seek God on our own.  Romans 3:10&11, Paul writes:

“None is righteous, no, not one;
11     no one understands;
no one seeks for God.

 

I came across a great quote while reading RC Sproul’s commentary and he relayed a comment by Thomas Aquinas. Sproul wrote:

Now, it may appear to us that he’s seeking after God. Thomas Aquinas answered the question this way: “The reason we think people are seeking after God when they’re not is that they are desperately and earnestly seeking for those things that only God can give them—happiness, meaning, freedom from guilt, peace—all of these benefits that accrue to those who put their faith in Christ.”

Sproul continues: From our perspective as Christians, we say, “They’re seeking the benefits that only God can give, therefore they must be seeking after God.” Aquinas said: “No, they’re not seeking after God. They want the benefits of God without God.” That’s the dilemma.

 

People who don’t yet know God, do not seek after God. God draws us to him. Once we believe, then we pursue God and to know him as much and as closely as we can. Jonathon Edwards said that seeking after God is the central pursuit of the Christian life. Jesus tells those listening during the sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:33:  But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

We also see Jesus say, knock and it will be opened to you. This of course holds allusions to Revelation 3:20, where Paul tells the church at Laodicea, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him, and he with me

 

These verses are often used in reference to evangelism, “Jesus is knocking in your heart, so let him in and be saved.” That’s absolutely NOT what these verses are talking about. In both these cases, Jesus is talking to people who already love him and are believers.

 

But here is what I think is important to know about these verses. The way they are written is literally Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. So, I see the purpose of these verses as two-fold. First, of course is that God will deliver and respond to our prayers, not always how we expect of course, but our prayers will be answered.

Second, the Christian life is on of action. Our salvation and forgiveness are not by our doing anything., They are solely by the grace of God. But our life after that is one that we are continually called to, maybe that’s not the right word, but we are compelled to action. Prayer, Loving God and Loving our neighbors. Learning from the Word of God. Serving in whatever capacity God has called us to and created us for.

We finish up with verses 11-14. We are imperfect sinners, even as parents. We want to give our kids good gifts, especially if they ask. But we fail and we fail often. Hebrews has a similar passage regarding our earthly fathers and how no matter how they are, God as our Father is so much better. No matter what kind of gifts we give as a father, God gives better and greater gifts. Paul writes in Romans 8:32:  He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

And we see specifically one gift. The Holy Spirit is the greatest gift. God the Father desires to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him in Faith. How great the fathers love for us!

He has already given us these great gifts. Love, forgiveness, redemption, grace, eternal life and the like. He wants us to come to him. He wants us to talk to him, that’s what prayer is, talking to God. He wants us to get to know him. He wants us to trust him. He wants us to act like his children and to treat him like our father.

 

God, our Father is Holy, yet approachable. He is loving, yet just. He gives out perfect wrath, yet perfect mercy. He is our perfect Father. And the Son promises that the Father will give us the Holy Spirit.

Ill finish with Ezekiel 36:26&27:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.[a

Luke 10: 25-37 Jesus is the Son of Man Good Samaritan

Luke 10: 25-37

Jesus is the Son of Man

Good Samaritan

(Note: Because of the length of this weeks sermon, the audio will be broken up into two posts, though text will all appear on this post. Sorry for any inconvenience.) 

 

All right! Let’s go ahead and turn to Luke chapter 10. As always, if you do not have a Bible, or if you need a Bible, please see me after the service so we can get the Word of God into your hands.

If you look at and read through Luke’s Gospel, we have actually been building to this passage for a little while. In Luke 9, we saw a Samaritan village reject the Apostles as they went to prepare the way for Jesus on his travelling teaching journeys. Last week, Jesus prayed in verse 21, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.

          We are going to see this morning an example on one of the wise and understanding, a lawyer, a man who knew the scriptures inside and out, we are going to see how he gets the law wrong, how he gets to love of and the will of God wrong. And how we often get the law and the gospel and the will of God wrong.

The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well know stories in the Bible. Unfortunately, as with most of the well-known Bible stories, it is all one of the least understood or most misunderstood stories. When we are too familiar with certain stories, our tendency is to skim by it or to overlook it and not spend enough time reflecting on it and mining the Biblical truths that God has for us in these stories.

Let’s go ahead and read our passage this morning, which includes the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke chapter 10, verses 25 through 37. Ill be reading, as always, out of the English Standard Version. I do encourage you to follow along as we read, from your preferred translation.

The Holy Spirit inspires Luke to record the following Words of Jesus Christ:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 And the next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

So, in 2008, ABC News did an experiment. Much of what I am sharing with you about this experiment comes directly from the news article.

They placed ads in a newspaper and on Craigslist. The ad said we were looking for people to participate in an “on-camera tryout” for ABC News. Those who responded were interviewed on the phone, and those selected were asked to come to appointments over the course of two days.

When they arrived for those appointments, the volunteers met with an ABC producer who talked to them in general about the audition but did not go into specifics about what they were to do. She explained that each person needed to have a topic to discuss before the cameras, and that she was going to help them select that subject. She then showed each of them a sampling of cards and asked them to pick one.

What appeared to be random was in fact not a choice at all. The topic listed on all those cards was the same: The Good Samaritan story that we are going to look at this morning.

They were given the Sunday school version of the story. A man who is beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. Two religious men come by and ignore the victim. But a third man, an outcast from society, a Samaritan, comes along next and not only stops to help the man and care for his wounds, but he also takes him to an inn and pays for him to stay in a room there and have meals. Jesus instructs his followers to follow the lead of the Good Samaritan.

After our producer read the story to each person, they were told they were to give a short speech about it for their “audition.” Thinking that the cameras were set up at a nearby studio, they walked the short distance. They set off with the Good Samaritan story fresh in their minds. Following the directions took the volunteers through a small park. They had no idea what would be awaiting them there: actors hired by ABC News.

Two men took turns playing a person in distress. They were seated on the grass directly alongside the path the volunteers were instructed to use. The actors were told to play men clearly in need of help, and both cried, moaned and rocked back and forth. They seemed to clearly need help. Who better to come to their aid than our volunteers, who approached with the Biblical story of helping one’s fellow man echoing in their ears?

The question: Would these participants stop to help? Carrie Keating, professor of psychology at Colgate University, expected they would. She predicted they would be suspicious of the situation, and likely to do anything to make themselves look good.

But Keating was in for a surprise: many of the 22 volunteers did not stop. They rushed right by the actors, proceeded to the studio, and gave the speech on the Good Samaritan. Their words were the complete opposite of their actions from just minutes before.

They completely missed the point, much like the lawyer in our story, many, many years before this experiment.

Jesus would often teach in parables. Parables are simple, memorable stories that use common examples or imagery from the culture and use them to teach greater truth. Sometimes the greater truth was painfully obvious and sometimes the truth was hidden. Jesus would, at times explain the meaning of some of the parables, not to the public, but to his disciples.

After teaching a parable early on in his ministry, the disciples asked Jesus what it meant. In Mark 4:11 & 12, Jesus tells them,

        “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that

 

“they may indeed see but not perceive,

                and may indeed hear but not understand,

        lest they should turn and be forgiven.

The parables were used to teach because some people, who were listening to Jesus, were not ready to hear. Sometimes the truth was hidden in these stories. However, sometimes the truth comes through to everyone and, as happens here, is very pointed at the Pharisees, or the religious leaders of the day.

Now, sometimes I think the Pharisees get a bad rap. I don’t mean that they were right when we think they were wrong. But I mean that all the things that we pile on and pick on the pharisees for, we are often guilty of ourselves. I think this parable here is a perfect example of that, whether we want to think of it that way or not.

First, again, as I said at the beginning, we remember the context of this passage. Jesus was rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, praying to God the Father. Things were going well. And part of Jesus prayer was thanking the Father that he had hid from the wise and understanding what the Truth is and exactly who the Father and the Son are. And then this lawyer, this guy full of knowledge, this pharisee stands up and proves Jesus’ point.

We see here that the expert in the law asks a very deep and profound question. Now, he just thought he was trying ask a difficult question to try to trip up Jesus or get Jesus to contradict himself. But he asked a question that people everywhere and, in every time, have been asking and we have here a very clear answer. The lawyer asks in v. 25, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He is asking what do I need to do to be saved?

Now this is a common and understandable question, but there are actually two issues with it. First is the lawyer’s motivation. As just mentioned, he wasn’t asking with a pure heart, but asking the question to put Jesus to the test, to trip him up. Secondly, the man asks, “What shall I do?” His focus was on himself, and what he needed to do, instead of what God and his grace and his mercy.

There was an old rabbinical saying, common and famous at the time, that said, “Great is Torah, for it gives to them that practice it, life in this world and in the world to come.”

And in that, we see the focus on obeying the rules, on earning salvation, on being good enough. But the scriptures make it clear that it is not our goodness that grants salvation and life in the world to come, but God and his richness and mercy and love that bestow it upon us.

Jesus, as is the norm for him, answers this question with a question himself. He asks the man, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” Good teachers will do this. If you ask a question that you already know the answer to, they will redirect you in a way that has you say the answer and think through it instead of just telling you the answer.

And the man did give the correct answer. He replied to Jesus, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus affirmed this answer as correct.

So, there you go. The lawyer knows what he had to do. Love God and Love your neighbor. This is the summation of the law. And what he will sometimes forget, is that the law does, sort of, offer salvation. If we were able to keep the law, all of it, 100%, outwardly and inwardly, then we would be able to be saved by keeping the law. But as the entire Bible, points out, pretty much the second biggest theme of the Bible, behind pointing to Jesus himself, is that we can’t keep the law.

Jesus is clear in the Sermon on the Mount that, even if we keep it outwardly, we still often and continually sin in our hearts and our minds. Paul points out a couple times that if anyone could make a claim to keeping the law, he would be able to make that claim, and yet, he calls himself the chief of all sinners.

And so, Jesus gives the layer a legal answer. You know what to do. DO it, do it perfectly, do it completely and you will live.

Now, all of us will come to the point where we have a choice to make. If God has changed our heart, opened our eyes, if He has chosen to reveal himself and the truth to us, then we will recognize who we are as sinners, undeserving of eternal life. We will look for God’s mercy and his grace and we throw ourselves at the feet of Jesus.

However, often, before we get to that point, we will refuse to see the truth. WE will entrench our selves in our preconceptions. We will reject grace when it’s offered to us and we will insist on living life ourselves, do it on our own, the American idea of rugged individualism and pulling our selves up by our bootstraps. WE dig in that if we just work harder, try more, get better and shove ahead with brute force and will power, that we can do it. It’s a lie from the devil.

We will do everything we can to justify our views, our opinions, our actions, our beliefs and everything else about us. Just as the lawyer does in verse 29.

The lawyer’s heart was all wrong. The scriptures show us that the lawyer was trying to justify himself when he asked, “who is my neighbor?” Instead of genuinely asking and looking for who his neighbor was and how he could help them, he was looking for loopholes, looking for reasons to not help. He was looking for the least that he could do. The least he could do to not help those around him…To not help those different than him…To not help those he did not like…. To not help those he did not know…

By teaching him this parable, Jesus is showing the lawyer, and us, that the question is not Who is my neighbor? But instead, Am I loving my neighbor?

The lawyer is asking, Who is my neighbor that I have to love? AND underneath, by extension, Who is my non neighbor that I don’t have to love? This is what we often do. I don’t want to love that person, or, as also applicable to this parable, I don’t want to love that group of people…

Jesus twists it, so the question is not Who is my neighbor, but instead, Whose neighbor am I?

 

Now, Jesus is really going to twist things up as he goes ahead and tells those listening and the lawyer the parable. The details that Jesus uses in this parable are not incidental or accidental. The man was walking from Jerusalem down to Jericho. This was a 15-mile journey and the road here was very treacherous. It was steep, rocky and had a lot of twists and blind turns. It was notorious for  having many bandits  being a very dangerous journey. This was well known for having these dangers and people knew the risks involved in this journey. Often times people would wait at one end of the journey for a group of them to gather so that they would at least have a little it of safety in numbers.

So, this man got mugged and beaten and was left lying on the side of the road, half dead. Now, even though this was an infamous, dangerous walk, many people did take this journey alone as well. It took 8 hours for the journey, and sometimes, time was of the essence. It was the only way to get between these two cities.

Now, Jesus brings along a Priest. If anyone would see a man in need and stop and help him, to show him mercy and kindness it would be a priest, right? He sees the man, crosses to the other side of the road and just walks on by. He had a job to do, he was ceremonially clean, and he didn’t have time to deal with this situation and then get ceremonially clean again.

The law at the time was looked at as the ‘Be-all, end-all” and it didn’t matter what had to be sacrificed, or what the motivation behind it was. In this case, there would have been no reason, no excuse in the priests’ mind to becoming ceremonially unclean, not even a different Law of God.  If the priest had stopped, the best-case scenario for him was that he would be unclean until the next sundown. That’s assuming he had time to get home and go through the cleansing process. If the body was a dead body and the priest came in contact, he would be unclean for a minimum of 1 week. During these times of being unclean, he would not be able to enter the temple or take part in any of the ceremonies.

However, some also speculate that he knew he was making the wrong decision and that’s one of the reasons why he crossed over to the other side of the road, so that the man would not recognize him if he survived, and this story later got out. Either way, the priest was not willing to take time out of his busy schedule doing God’s work, to be a neighbor to this beaten broken man.

After he passes by, Jesus brings along a Levite down the road. Instead of crossing to the other side of the road, the Levite actually looked at the situation before deciding to continue on his way. Levites were of the same family, in the line of Aaron that the priests were. In modern terms, if the priests were the pastors, the Levites were the elders, the deacons, the worship leaders, or other people in the church that work behind the scenes to keep the church running.

Just like the priest, the Levite knew the Law and had it memorized since he was a young man. He knew the laws about loving your neighbor, which are all throughout the Old Testament. But, for whatever reason, he did not want to take the time and effort to stop and help this man. He looked at the situation and it was very likely that he could see the gravity of the situation, that he could see that the man would surely die if he did not get any help, but also that the man could be saved. The Levite saw what was happening and then crossed over to the other side and passed on by. These men thought they had the duty to not stop and help a dying and beaten man.

James 4:17 tells us, whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

 

          Now, the people listening likely thought they knew where this story was going. They probably expected the next one to come along and help the beaten man was going to be a common, everyman Israelite. They thought it was going to be a critique of the religious establishment. Instead, Jesus throws everybody through a loop and has the next guy walking along the path be a Samaritan.

A Samaritan! What is he going to do? Finish the man off? See if the robbers and muggers missed anything? At best, he will just do what the other two did and just pass on by. I mean, he is just a Samaritan.

This was the mindset of the Jews at the time regarding the Samaritans, and vice versa. There is no putting it mildly, they disdained each other.

The Samaritans were partial Jews who had been living in the Northern Kingdom of Israel prior to the Exile in Old Testament times. When the Northern Kingdom was conquered and captured, they intermarried with the culture around them and were often guilty of worshiping false gods and idols.

The Jews looked down on them, mocked them, made jokes at their expense, and this hatred was returned back at the Jews by the Samaritans. When traveling to certain areas of Israel during this time, the quickest, most direct route would be through Samaria, for example from Jerusalem to Nazareth, where Jesus was from, or the Sea of Galilee. Instead of going through Samaria, most Jews went far out of their way, going around the area, adding much time and distance to their journey.

The Jews would say that Samaritans “should be pushed into a ditch and not pulled out.”

So, when a Samaritan comes walking down the path and sees a Jew, beaten and bloody, there is no inclination that he would stop and help.

And yet, he does. He stopped his journey. He bandaged the wounds of this man. Luke, who was a physician, noted that the Samaritan poured oil and wine on the man’s wounds. But he didn’t stop there. He lifted the man up and put him on his own personal donkey and took him to the nearest inn. It was here that he essentially put a down payment and opened up a tab at the inn for whatever the beaten man needed.

The two denarii that the Samaritan gave to the innkeeper would pay for a few weeks of care for the beaten man. Now, we do notice that the Samaritan still had to go about his life. He still had to deal with his own business and take care of his own stuff. But he did that while taken care of and loving this beaten man.

Jesus asks the lawyer in v. 36, “Which of these three, do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

And you can almost hear the contempt and defeat coming out of the lawyer’s mouth when he says in v 37 “The one who had mercy on him.” He couldn’t even refer to him directly, just, “That one…”

 

It hurts, doesn’t it? Those times when unbelievers, atheists, pagans, when they outperform us? When they out compassion us? When they out love us? When they outlive us biblically? That hurts. We don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to see it. We see an unbeliever doing biblical things and we will find a way to deny that it is biblical. We will cover our eyes and see things through the wrong point of view.

We see that throughout the parable that Jesus told. See, each group in this story saw the man who was beaten very differently. The lawyer saw the man as a subject to discuss. The robbers saw the man as someone to use and exploit. To the priest and Levite, the man was someone to avoid at all costs. The innkeeper sees the man as a customer. To the Samaritan, the man was a human being, a man worth caring for and helping, a neighbor.

  The lawyer in this story was full of head knowledge. But he would not see or admit the truth. He knew what the commandments said about loving God and loving neighbors. He knew who his neighbors were. The priest and the Levite in the story, They Knew! They knew that they were supposed to stop and help the man. And yet, they didn’t. Knowledge without application.

James is quite clear in his letter that faith without works is dead.  This if course is not saying that works are necessary for our salvation, but that true faith will produce works. And those good works are a sign of a changed and repentant heart.

Back to the experiment I talked about earlier. They had divided the volunteers into two groups at the start. Everyone heard the Good Samaritan story but only half of the volunteers got something more: time pressure. That group was now facing a dilemma. In order to get their chance at something they really wanted — a chance to be on TV — they would have to hurry. And researchers discovered, that made a big difference in their behavior.

Only about 35 percent of our volunteers in a hurry stopped to help our actors. But almost 80 percent of those who were not rushed stopped to help.

Since the volunteers thought they were rushing in order to do something they thought would be beneficial to them, perhaps it is not surprising that time pressure would influence them. The researchers found that being rushed changed people’s actions. Time pressure was the only significant factor the researchers found that they concluded would determine if a particular volunteer would stop to help a stranger.

Keating says that other research since then has shown that it is possible to make anyone disregard the needs of others if enough pressure is introduced. She concluded that in this experiment, not stopping to help was not an indication at all of whether any particular participant is a good or moral person. She said any of us might act in the same way.

And we do, every day. But we shouldn’t.  Every subject in this experiment knew that the right thing to do was stop. But many of them didn’t. Would we? Do we? I said earlier that the lawyer asked the wrong question. Again, to reiterate, the question was not Who is my neighbor? But should have been, Am I loving my neighbor?

Now, I have had church people who have told that my neighbor is the person sitting next to me in the pew at my church. The only conclusion to draw from this is that the person is doing the same thing as the lawyer in this story, justifying themselves as to who they do and do not have to love.

And yet, the definition according to Jesus, of who is my neighbor, is any other man irrespective of nation or religion with whom we live or whom we chance to meet.

 

We need to remember this, “any other person whom we chance to meet.” It doesn’t matter who it is. God put them into our life, into our Day for a reason.  It doesn’t matter if it is someone we know and don’t get along with. It doesn’t matter if it is someone of a different religion, Muslim, Wiccan, Hindu… It doesn’t matter even if they live by different moral codes than the one that God gives to us. It doesn’t matter if they have different political views than us. In other words, it doesn’t matter if they are Republican, Democrat, capitalist, Communist, socialist, fascist.  We are to love them. It’s not a choice available to us to not love them.

But in our minds, we are justifying ourselves, asking, “Do you know how long that would take?” or “But I am on my way to go do this or go do that” “But its inconvenient,” “How much will it cost me?”  I know I do this all the time. But when Jesus said, at the end of v.37, “Go and Do Likewise,” he was not just talking to the lawyer, or to the Pharisees, or to the Jews. He was also talking to us. And the commands he gives to us, they are rarely easy.

One of the aspects that the lawyer missed, is that the law the lawyer referenced earlier was to Love your neighbors as yourself. That doubly shows that the question of “Who is my neighbor?” was an invalid question. If we were beaten, robbed and mugged, how would we want to be treated? Which of these three figures would we want to be the ones to come along? Whatever our answer is, and most of us, if not all, would want someone to act like the Samaritan, stopping to help us, that is how we treat the people we come across in our lives.

I mentioned earlier that each character in the story saw the man who was beaten in a different way. One that I did not yet mention was Jesus. To him each and every character in the story, from the lawyer, to the pharisees, to the priest and the Levite, the innkeeper, the Samaritan and the man who was beaten and robbed, he sees them all the same way, as a sinner in need of a savior, as someone in need of forgiveness and someone who by all objective standards is not worth the time to die for and take care of. It doesn’t cost God anything to not save us. It did cost Jesus his human life to die for us. But, as God, being in complete control, he knew the outcome. He knew that, though we were not worth dying for, the act of dying for us was worth it. There was nothing reckless about Jesus’ love for us. God knows the end of the story and all the outcomes because he wrote the end of the story.

Like the Samaritan, he sees us beaten up by sin, by grace through faith, picks us up and put down a down payment on the price of our sins and has an open tab for us, not matter what it costs to win us, for those that are his, he did it. No one else has been able to do that because no one else was God and man. No one else was able to atone for our sins and offer forgiveness. Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, any other religious figure that people follow, they are the lawyer, the priest and the Levite, unable to help us in our sin. Only one can offer forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Jesus said that He is THE way, THE truth, and THE Life. Paul wrote that God showed us what love was, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Love him, trust him, repent and believe, as Jesus says, and let him show us how to love others.

 

 

 

 

 

Luke 9:27-36 Jesus is the Son of Man: The Transfiguration

Luke 9:27-36

Jesus is the Son of Man

The Transfiguration

 

All right! Please turn in your Bibles with me to Luke chapter 9. As always, if you do not own a Bible or have need of one, please let me know and we will get one into your hands as our gift to you.

. Many of the events or stories that are recorded in the Gospels here are somewhat famous. Many people know, at least in general terms, of some of the healings, or the feeding of the 5000. Many know of the calming of the storm and the walking on water. These, even if they are incredibly hard to believe, as they would be for those whose eyes God has not opened to the Truth, they are easy to picture.

They are easy to know, again, in general terms, what happened in those instances, even if the meanings and importance are not always understood. However, of the miracles, works and stories that are easily recognized, there is one especially that it seems as if nobody really knows what to do with. Some people can tell what the big picture meaning behind it is, or why it happened, but to really know and describe what happened, the transfiguration is one of the hardest to picture and communicate.

But it is arguably, one of the most important events in Jesus’ life and ministry to take place, one of the most important events in Jesus’ life and ministry for the disciples to witness.

How many of your Bibles have those little subheadings that give you an idea about what a section is about, or at least the different chapters? I will bet if you have this, many of your bibles will include verse 27 with the passage we look at last week. And the way Luke is going to phrase it, you can see why. But it fits really well the subject matter we are looking at today, with verses 28 through 36.

And so, I read it last week in that passage, but I didn’t expound on it. And I’m including it this week as we will expound on it, including it in the context of the rest of todays passage.

So, lets go ahead and read this morning’s passage, Luke chapter 9, verses 27 through 36. I will be reading out of the English Standard Version, though I encourage you to read along in whichever is your preferred translation.

Luke, inspired by the Holy Spirit, writes:

 

But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.28 Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. 29 And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white. 30 And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, 31 who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure,[b] which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. 32 Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, but when they became fully awake they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. 33 And as the men were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah”—not knowing what he said. 34 As he was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen One;[c] listen to him!” 36 And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.

 

          May God Bless the Reading of his Word.

 

So, Jesus finished of last week by saying, But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

There are a few opinions among theologians and bible scholars about what Jesus means here. What is it that will be seen as the kingdom of God coming with Power? Many, based on where this statement is, right before the transfiguration, believe that that is the event Jesus is talking about here.  Others say that the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the event, and still others say the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was given from Heaven unto all believers. There are good arguments to be made for each of those. And it might be one of those, but after doing research for this message, this passage, my view is that Jesus is talking about the temple being destroyed almost exactly 40 years after his death, after the time of him telling the disciples that some of them will see this.

RC Sproul explains the reasoning for this view: When these terrible events occurred in AD 70, the Christian Church was finally understood as an entity distinct from Judaism. It was no longer considered a subset or a sect within Judaism. The triumph of the Messiah’s church was made visible and manifest in power with the judgment of God on the Jews. And some of those present when Jesus prophesied the manifestation of the power of the kingdom, did in fact die between his announcement and the coming of the kingdom in power in 70 AD.

 

Sproul will continue on to say that he does know for sure that this is the correct answer, and I do not presume to know which one is correct, but I looked at a tiny bit of the evidence and decided I think this is the most likely. I encourage you to do the same, look up some of the evidence for the different views and see which one you think makes the most sense.

          8 days after telling the disciples that the Son of Man must suffer and die, and 8 days after he promised that the Son of Man will come in glory, Jesus leads Peter, John and James up onto a mountain alone. Peter and the brothers, the Sons of Zebedee, James and John are Jesus’ best friends, they are his inner core among the disciples, among the Apostles. They are his confidants. Often, scriptures shows that if it is not the whole group of Apostles with him, it is these three.

They go up on this mountain alone and Jesus is transfigured. It is interesting to me that Luke does not give any physical description of what happened to Jesus, not in a way that we can picture. His clothes turned dazzling white. His face was altered, but He doesn’t describe how his face was altered. Mathew tells us in his Gospel that his face shone like the sun. Pure light shone from him, not as a reflection like we see with the moon reflecting the sun, or with Moses’ face reflecting God’s glory in Exodus 34. This is one more piece of evidence to show that Jesus was who he said he was. But Luke doesn’t describe it specifically at all. I don’t think we were meant to know. This is, I think, one of the reasons that we have such a hard time with this story sometimes. We aren’t able to picture what happened very easily. As I mentioned at the beginning, those other stories, they are easy to picture, even if we don’t believe them. This, not so much. I think it would take too much focus away from the other things we are to take from this story if we had a clearer picture.

Now, one of the important things to notice is what words are used here. Mark says that Jesus was transfigured. The word in the Greek is metamorpho. Its where we get the word metamorphosis. It means to change into another form, to transform, to transfigure. Now what makes this interesting is there is only one place this word occurs in the New Testament where it is not referring to Jesus’ transfiguration. In Romans 12, verse 2, Paul writes:

 Do not be conformed to this world,[c] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.[d]

 

Jesus was physically, visibly transformed up on that mountain, all those 2000 years ago. For a brief moment, his human body could no longer keep his glory hidden, but transformed into a preview of what we will see when he comes back in all his glory. Something happens to us, when we become disciples of Jesus Christ. We have a similar transformation inside of us.

Who we are before, who we are in the world is sin, is darkness? We live how we want to live. We do what we want to do and nobody else has any right to tell us anything differently. When we make the decision to follow Christ, to turn our life over to him, something has to change. We cannot expect to follow Jesus and have our lives stay the same. Something will change.

The Holy Spirit comes down brings with him a piece of the power of God. We cannot change ourselves. We cannot make ourselves better. We cannot, in the words of Pastor Alistair Begg, change our cosmic, spiritual grade from an F to an A. And we cannot change darkness into light. But God can. And Jesus can. To be sure, that’s what we see here, pure light coming off of Jesus.

We cannot change to darkness inside of us in light. Jesus does that for us, if we are willing to be used by him, to allow him. When he changes that, he expects things to change. He tells us to change things. Now, I say this often and I will continue to say it so that I will not be misunderstood. We cannot earn our way into heaven. Nothing we do can make us look better in Gods eyes than the darkness and sin he sees in us every time he looks at us.

But he changes us. He turns that light into darkness. And God no longer sees our unrighteousness. We are still just as unrighteous. Nothing about us has changed, nothing except that Jesus has covered us with his blood and the Holy Spirit has come and found a home inside of us.  Nothing we do from here on out makes us righteous. Nothing we do from here on out can maintain our right standing with God. We didn’t earn it and we can’t keep it.

But there is now a light inside of us, generated by the Holy Spirit. And Jesus says that this light is supposed to be reflected off of him and the Holy Spirit and be reflected in us to be shown to the world and the people around us. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5, in his Sermon on The Mount, verses 14-16:

 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that[b] they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

 

 

That light he is talking about is him. It is the hope of the world. It is the hope that even though we are undeserving sinners, who can nothing to change our selves, nothing good in and of ourselves, that there is a hope. That we can be transformed. Not that we will now be righteous, but that God will now see us as righteous.

          We have a question to ask ourselves right now. Are we reflecting the light of Jesus to those around us? I don’t mean are we talking about sin. I don’t mean are we reading our bibles. I don’t mean are we going to church every Sunday? I mean are we being a light, a beacon of hope for the people around us. Are we shining the true light of Jesus? Or are we hoarding it for ourselves?

Jesus was transfigured up on that mountain and who else do the disciples see with him? The Law and the Prophet. Moses and Elijah. They came as the two most revered men in the Old Testament. They came as symbols of the law that God gave to Israel and the prophets who told Israel about the coming Mighty Warrior King. They came to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of all this. The law was given to Israel to show the need for a savior, to show they could uphold the law all on their own. The prophecies were given to show that God had a plan all along and that none of it was an accident.

Jesus was the fulfillment of all of that. He was better than and above them. That’s why Peter wanting to build all three of them tents to stay in was a bad idea. Peter was putting Moses and Elijah on the same level as Jesus. He was putting the law and the prophets on the same level as grace and mercy.

Peter is once again like us today. Peter had an amazing spiritual experience. He got to see this moment, Jesus transfigured, Moses and Elijah. And he didn’t want it to end. He wanted to make camp up on the mount and have a permanent Bible Study with these three. He wanted to chase the feeling of the experience.

We often do that today. We don’t want to put in the work of studying the scriptures, praying without ceasing, dealing with the rough times, but still knowing that God is right there with us. We don’t always feel him, we don’t always see his hand at work, but we are told, and promised that he is with us til the end of the ages. We won’t have all our moments be mountain tops. We will have valleys. But our natural inclination is to avoid those valleys, avoid reality and seek out emotional highs, manufactured emotions that don’t last.

But God was quick to correct Peter. As the Glory of God as radiating from Jesus, heaven opened up and the Father said “This is my beloved Son;[c] listen to him.” God the Father was saying that Jesus was above Moses and above Elijah, he was God the Son. And we have the command to listen to him. What he says we are supposed to do. How he says we are supposed to live. And how we are to try to be like him as we spread the hope of Jesus to those around us.

Jesus gives us hope because he did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. He paid the penalty for our sins. It cost him his broken body and his blood on the cross.

And today, being the first Sunday of the month, we are going to come to the LORDs table, we are going to celebrate communion, which is the remembrance of his sacrifice, his act of pure true love for us. We are going to this with partaking of bread and juice symbolizing his body and blood and with reflection.

Now, I ask that if you are not a Christian, if you are not a follower of Jesus Christ, please just pass the elements along. There is nothing magical about it. There is nothing special about it for those who do not believe that Jesus Christ gave his broken body and his blood for the forgiveness of our sins. There will be no pressure and no judgment.

stemming from that, Communion does not save us, it does not cleanse us, it does not do anything along those lines. It has no power to keep us clean or to restore our relationship with God, only Jesus can do that. This was given to us by Jesus for the purpose of remembering. Remembering who Jesus was. Remembering what Jesus did for us. Remembering how much he loved us and remembering just how big of a deal our sin really is. It is meant to be sobering and somber, but at the same time it is meant to be a celebration.

Thirdly, we are told that we need to come and participate with the right heart. As I said, we do this in remembrance of what he gave up for us, the sacrifice he made. We do this because we remember how big of a deal our sin is, that he died on the cross for it. We need to make sure that our hearts and minds have their hearts set on what’s important and that we seek God’s forgiveness and make our relationships are right with him. In addition to a tradition becoming too important and placed above the word of God, tradition can become bad is by it losing its meaning and becoming simply a ritual. Please take some of this time to reflect on what this tradition means and to make sure that you are prepared to receive. There will never be any judgment if you choose not to participate, and just pass the plate.

Paul recounts to the church in Corinth what I now tell you as well, in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26:

 

23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for[e] you. Do this in remembrance of me.”[f] 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

 

          We have individual cups that contains both the wafers, which symbolize Jesus’ broken body on the cross. His Death that pays the penalty for our sins. It also contains the juice, symbolizing the shed blood of Christ, which purchases our eternal life in Christ, through faith.

First, we will take the wafer together. Afterwards, we will take the juice together and we will be united together under the cross and blood of Jesus Christ. I will pray and we will come to the LORDs table.