Introduction

Welcome church! So, our teaching for the day has me wondering something: Who here loves fast food? Now, we don’t need to raise our hands and make it publicly known, but maybe just nod to yourself… You love a good ol fashioned Big Mac with a side of fries.

In fact, when I simply said, “Big Mac with a side of fries” you started to feel your mouth watering and you began thinking about how you could sneak off after service to the nearest McD’s to satisfy your craving.

That’s kind of the beauty of fast food isn’t it? You can have what you want, when you want it. You can have it your way, right away… You don’t even need to get out of the car and wait in line if you don’t want to!

And fast food is just the beginning, the proverbial tip of the iceberg if you will. We can get our groceries delivered to our homes, our taxes done online, and don’t even get me started on Amazon Prime… Everything we want and need is at the tip of our fingers. Instant gratification has never been more attainable to the masses as it is now. But the instant-microwave-never have to wait culture we live in isn’t teaching us much about patience, resilience, and humility is it?

We need someone else to help us learn those skills. Just like the Jews wandering in the desert wilderness or the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, many of us have lost our way, and we need the gentle instruction of our chief shepherd to get us back on track.

We need someone else to help us learn those skills.

Main Teaching

Our passage for the day, Luke 14:1; 7-14 finds Jesus back at a dinner party. Now there won’t be any Big Macs or Happy Meals in our story, but there will be several very important lessons to learn. Jesus will take, as He often does, an everyday occurance and turn it into an opportunity to reveal the heart of God for His people. In today’s passage there are three specific areas I want to highlight; humiliation, humility, and honor. So let’s get started;

Before we get too deep it’s important that we recognize the occasion on which this dinner feast is happening. It’s the Sabbath, and the Pharisees have presumably invited Jesus over to share a meal with Him. It would seem from the passage that they were keeping a close eye on Him as “They continued to watch Jesus for the purpose of finding something He said or did by which to condemn Him, both to the Jewish population and to the Romans.”

The Pharisees and other religious leaders of the day were threatened by Jesus and they were looking for any plausible reason to get rid of Him. In Luke 14:2-6 we read that Jesus offered up a couple of different questions that were met with silence. The leaders in attendance weren’t saying anything, which honestly, was probably better for them in the long run as Jesus would only humiliate them further with His divine understanding and application of the Law.

And so, in verse 7, Jesus opens His mouth with a parable for those in attendance… ... View this full sermon with PRO Premium

We must learn to trade humiliation for humility, “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

“For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”