Communicate The Truth Series

Text: Luke 1:1-4

Theme: communicate the truth

Introduction: the Lord is good and his love endures forever.

The great theme of this gospel of Luke is Jesus Christ is the divine saviour. This is the supreme fact focused on. According to Luke, Jesus means “the Lord saves”(Luke 1:31). The good tidings of great joy has come to shepherds as the saviour is born in the city of David, his name is ‘Christ the Lord’ ( Luke 2:10). Jesus is the divine saviour of the Old Testament appeared on the earth according to the plan of God (Luke 4:17-21).

Today, I would like to leave with you all the following three notes: Communicate the truth with confirmation, confidence and personal conviction.

1. Communicate the truth without corruption

Many at Work refers to the professional writing, literary writing and writing from government perspective. History is twisted, added imaginary stories and given glories to the authorities and to baby Jesus. There were 46 books of apocryphal which were not considered as books of the Bible. Twenty are of the Old Testament and twenty six are of the New Testament. They were not inspired books, they are religious books, historical books, religious novels and uninspired writings.

There were hundreds of gospels written, they were merely heresies created by Jews and heathens to spoil the church believers. These gospels has numerous stories of boy Jesus performing miracles, cursing children who dashed against him while playing on the streets, changing humans into animals and vice versa. Holding water on the cloak. But these are against John 2:11. Because Jesus performed his first miracle in the wedding hall of Cana. So, they were rejected by the church council.

He was not happy the way the gospels were written, the history of Jesus was spoken on those days. They couldn’t prove the salvation history with proper presentation. Therefore he wrote this history of Jesus and the church with true meaning. He write to counter the heretics more than that to bring the purpose of god for the salvation of humanity in Christ. He calls the readers to respond to this Kerygma.

The introduction to Luke has protasis and apodosis. Luke’s introduction is of the traditional historian’s pattern of writing, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, and Josephus. He expresses that “I too” want to give an account of, or writing the truth, or do the research. Luke is the only gospel writer prefaced the gospel with a prologue, according to the literary custom of the time, in which he mentioned his sources, and predecessors and the basic reason for his writing. He took the pain to give full, accurate information from the beginning of this event related to Jesus to the present stage of the persecution of the church. Theophilus is the representative of a readers community .

Luke has done the homework of investigation of the story of Jesus and it’s sequel events. Luke wrote with very conventional vocabulary with conversation method. His orderly works was not a cut nod paste of the other writers and researchers but very systematic building of the conviction he had on Jesus as Lord and saviour. Luke has his reference to most of his writings from Mark. Luke has 7036 words of Mark out of 8485.

Luke never intended to write a mere human history of human Jesus but he brought the clarity to the fulfilment of the prophecy by God on human salvation. He brings the chronological, logical and spatial understanding of the human salvation through Christ. Luke’s ideas were to present the gospel in good order, according to the sequence. Luke presents the history of Jesus with more emphatically than mark and Matthew. Luke expresses that Jesus has shown his love for the despised both by his behaviour and by his message, such as to sinners, to women, to Samaritans.

Luke presents history of Jesus with a clear link of the personalities of his time, and his era. He mentioned three important references such as:

* connection between the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and the census decree of Caesar Augustus under Quirinius and the appearance of John the Baptist based on the dates from Roman and Jewish history. So the history of Jesus belongs to the world history.

* Luke places the history of Jesus as the beginning of the ongoing church history, yet never Jesus became the person of the past history. He continues as presenting in church history. The history of Jesus has reached finally Rome through Paul.

* Luke proves the political innocence of Jesus in the eyes of the Romans, especially the Pilate. Luke proves that Jesus was not. Political restrictionist. A political apologetic made Romans to feel guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus.

2. Communicate the truth with confidence

The relationship between ideas, salvation-history and eschatology are mixed up to communicate the truth through the history. The first phase of the salvation history begins with Genesis and runs with the law and the prophets up to John the Baptist he was the last and greatest of the prophets, which was the period of history of Isreal (Luke 7:26-28). The second phase of the salvation history embraced with Ministry of Jesus on the earth. The third phase is the church under stress.