God Is For Us

Sermon Brief

Date Written: November 26, 2013

Date Preached: December 01, 2013

Where Preached: OPBC (AM)

Sermon Details:

Series Title: God is Revealed

Sermon Title: God is FOR Us

Sermon Text: Luke 4:18-19 [HCSB]

Essence of the Text: Jesus stresses here that He had been sent by God and anointed for His mission to preach the Good News…

Essence of the Sermon: Jesus’ words reveal God’s desire for us to hear the Good News from Jesus, through His word!

Objective of the Sermon: We need to know and recognize that because of the witness of Jesus, we can know that God is FOR us…

Introduction:

This morning we embark upon the Christmas season… or should I say the ‘Christmas Season’ according to Wall Street got started on Thursday night with some PRE-Black Friday sales and continued throughout this weekend. In fact, more money is spent just THIS WEEKEND than just about all the weekends of the year leading up to it!

The Friday after Thanksgiving has traditionally been set up as the official starting point for the Christmas season, as retailers gear up for what they deem as the BEGINNING of the Christmas season!

BUT… Christmas should not be seasonal for the believer… Christmas should be an attitude of the heart that believers carry with them throughout the entire year!

We may not display a tree or Christmas lights all year BUT we should display the character and attitude of Christ in all we do and say throughout the year…

We just completed a study on how God has laid a thanksgiving upon which we should always give thanks… a foundation that God is God, Jesus is Savior and the Holy Spirit is leading and directing our steps!

We also learned last week that in Christ we have a perfect (completed) relationship… a perfect (completed) progress in knowing Him and finally a perfect completion awaiting us in Heaven…

So we learned that we should be thankful… this week begins a series that reveals God FOR who He is… the Savior who has come! This is the time of year we celebrate the birth of Jesus… the time of year we celebrate the wonderful gift from God to bring redemption and salvation to the world!

God is REVEALED in His word, and today we are going to see how NOT only is God revealed to us, but God is FOR us! Let’s open our bibles OR we can look at the screen for the reading of God’s word! Turn to Luke 4:18-19 (HCSB)

18The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Now when we look at this particular scripture we don’t see it as a traditional Christmas passage… usually when we are looking at the Gospel of Luke in conjunction with Christmas we are in ch2 where Luke writes of Jesus’ birth!

Now that is a wonderful Scripture, but I ask you to hang in there with me this morning as I unfold this passage to reveal that it is ENTIRELY appropriate to use it in this season… The first thing we can presume in our passage today is…

This morning I want us to look at a FACT, a QUESTION and A RESULT...

God Came…

When we look at this passage we can see that it is a story about Jesus teaching in a synagogue, but this was NOT just any synagogue… it was the synagogue from His home town of Nazareth! Jesus had stood to read the Scriptures for the service and He chose the scroll of Isaiah…

The words used here in these verses are directly taken from the prophet Isaiah’s writings… When we look at this story from Luke 4 we find the people asking themselves, “Who is this man? Isn’t this the son of Joseph, the carpenter?”

The people had a vision or concept of who Messiah would look like… or who God would look like… but they NEVER believed God would show Himself in the form of the son of a lowly carpenter in their small town…

So the basic question we can ask about this passage is, “What is God like?” and I believe that the Christmas season also answers this question, but not like we may expect!

Many of us see the coming of God in our lives something similar to the coming of a parent when we have our hands in the cookie jar… we don’t see it as GOOD NEWS!

Many of us see God as a cosmic cop that sits on his throne and picks us off one by one as we make mistakes… This thought process can lead us to feeling very uncomfortable knowing that God is all knowing and all seeing… we sit and wait for God’s foot to slam down on our lives…