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…
Many of us may see God as the overprotective parent who simply won’t let us do anything to have fun… He puts EVERYTHING off limits and we think of him as a Cosmic Killjoy.
Others see God as Big Brother… always looking, always snooping, with no respect or compassion for us, and his focus is that he only wants to control our every movement and thought…
You see many in this world do NOT see the coming of God as a good thing… they do NOT see God’s presence in this world as ‘good news’ at all, but they see it as disturbing and troublesome!
Many of us think this way because this is how we saw our parents as young children… We associate God with our parents and how they treated us!
With our parents we felt that their love for us and their favor toward us was based on our ‘goodness’ and what we did or did NOT do as children.
As long as we are living a ‘good’ life we feel safe from God’s wrath, but when we stumble and fall we expect the full wrath of God to come crashing down upon us… so we tend to see God from a judgment and punishment perspective only!
We have read in the Bible where Isaiah says, “…we all went astray like sheep…” (Isaiah 53:6-HCSB) and that “…we all have turned to our own way…” And because we know Scripture says this and how we may feel about God as some sort of Cosmic Cop, then we feel guilty when we fail and stumble…
We feel that God is against us and all He wants to do is PUNISH us… so we ‘see’ God as a proud and arrogant judge who enforces His rule over everyone!
The fact of the matter IS that we ARE guilty before God! Believers we need to understand that although God has promised us a future home in heaven… we still sin here in this world!
But the fact of the matter is that this is NOT about what we expect, but it is about the truth! We have the tendency to see things from a different perspective…We see God as JUDGMENTAL b/c we desire our own way...
Now God knows how our minds work and He knows what we think based on our broken and sinful nature… SO, when God decided to come to this earth, he did so to show His love and NOT His wrath... so He came as an innocent child!
And so when we read our passage this morning we do not see Jesus proclaiming His moral and authoritative rule over His creation… NOT AT ALL… Jesus came in weakness and humility…to show His love, NOT His might... to show His mercy NOT His judgement!
Jesus came born of a VIRGIN! He was God wrapped in flesh, in the body of an innocent and vulnerable baby boy! How he came is important, but it is NOT the most important thing...
The main thing we need to see here is that God came… God entered INTO His creation thru an innocent baby boy... His son Jesus… so the 1st point we must absorb is THAT God came!
NOW WE DON’T EXPECT THAT FROM GOD! God is powerful and strong and righteous and holy… but He chose to come to this world, humbly, in weakness and exposed to opposing forces with his vulnerability of being a baby!
But our natural follow up to what God has done is the question of WHY! We may understand THAT God has come, but the question that we want answered is why He came…
Why God Came…
Now we ALL have done wrong and we ALL have all felt guilty about doing something wrong…and it is natural to fear the punishment for that wrongdoing!
And the truth to this situation is that eternal punishment IS what we deserve… but Jesus came so that WE could escape the eternal punishment that we deserve!
Jesus did NOT come as a judge, jury and executioner, but Jesus came to this world as a redeemer, an advocate and a friend! Jesus did not come to oppose us, but came to reconcile us to the Father!
In Luke 4… Luke shares Jesus’ FIRST sermon as He was beginning His ministry and mission for God here in this world! Jesus was approximately 30yrs old and when Jesus stood before this hometown crowd in that small synagogue in Nazareth…
Jesus laid out to them the WHY… Jesus revealed His purpose to these people! He told them what kind of ‘minister/teacher’ He was going to be!
Here in these verses we can see what kind of Savior Jesus would be… how Jesus was going to reveal God to the world around Him… God as He is NOT God as they thought Him to be…
When we look at these verses the very FIRST thing that jumps off the page at the reader is when Jesus says, “…to preach the good news to the poor…”
The ‘poor’ here are those who were socially put down and held down… the disenfranchised… the oppressed… the downtrodden! Jesus was proclaiming that the spiritually poor…those who perceived themselves to be UNWORTHY and lacking… and those who were TREATED as such…
Jesus was here to preach ‘good news’ to these people… What was that ‘good news’? The “Good News” was the message Jesus brought to the world… that God can and will make you ‘whole’ in Him and restore your relationship to the Father! Where they will be seen as equals and whole and have dignity as God’s creation.
And when we look at this it applies to our 21st century crowd… many of us feel inadequate and beat down… many of us feel as if we cannot measure up and we are on the edge of giving up for good!
But this news… this ‘word’ from Jesus is ‘good news’… Instead of feeling worthless, inferior and guilt-laden… the ‘good news’ Jesus brought is God’s proclamation that we can KNOW Him… that we can RELATE to Him… that we can EXPERIENCE Him and become His children! Now THAT is good news!
Jesus is called to bring good news to the spiritually and socially poor in spirit… but we can also see that Jesus was called to, “…recovery of sight for the blind…”
When we look at Luke’s writing we can see that it is both figurative and literal (as Jesus healed several physically blind people as well as deliver MANY spiritually blind people)
Many of us feel inadequate before God and we expect Him to treat us as an INFERIOR to Him… and YES while it is TRUE we are vastly inferior to God… He would NEVER treat us as such! Jesus was sent by God to bring good news to the poor and heal/give sight to the blind (whether that blindness is spiritual or physical)
The mission of Jesus was to open the ‘eyes’ of a world that was spiritually blind and allow them to ‘see’ God for who He is…and NOT what they perceived Him to be!
Jesus wanted open the eyes of those who believed that God was only pleased by focusing on doing good things to please Him… (the Pharisee type) Jesus wanted them to see God as a merciful and compassionate God who had come to save them and NOT condemn them!
Jesus also wanted to open the eyes of those who believed they were TOO far gone for God to even look at… (the publican type) Jesus wanted them to know that no matter what they had done or how bad they thought they were… he was willing AND able to save them and redeem them and restore them back into a right relationship with God!
Jesus’ purpose was to reveal God’s love, grace and mercy… Jesus’ purpose was to reveal God to a world that had the wrong view of WHO He is!
But what does this mean for humanity? What is the result of God coming and why He came... In our Scripture this morning we find that Jesus proclaimed the result as his purpose was that He was, “…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”
What God’s Coming means for us today…
What this means is that Jesus came to reveal the work of God to the world thru His life and works! All that Jesus proclaimed during His ministry here in this world was based on God's love for His creation... in other words... the Lord’s favor!
Thru the life of Jesus, those in this world who were looked at as having less significance were given standing before God thru the life and works of Jesus…
Thru the life of Jesus , those who were blind (spiritually/physically) had eyes opened by Jesus 2 see God for who He is…
And here Jesus is revealing that He is doing this all because this was the favor of God… Jesus is revealing that God is FOR us! He is on our side… this IS the Good News!
Well preacher that makes for a good story, but what does it have to do with ME today? I want to share with you that what Jesus brought 2000 yr ago is still the same ‘good news’ today!
That GOOD NEWS is that God CAME to us… He came to us wrapped in flesh in the person of Jesus… He came so that He could die for our sins on the cross… so that we could know God's mercy, grace and forgiveness AND Salvation for eternity!
God came because humanity was guilty…YES we are ALL guilty of sin against God and the penalty is eternal death BUT God came to us in Jesus… God came to take away that eternal penalty and free us from the bondage of sin that convicts us and enslaves us!
We are ALL guilty of sin b/c like the prophet Isaiah said, “…we have ALL like sheep gone astray!” Because of our sin, there is a gulf between us and God that we cannot cross...
BUT b/c God came…
Because of what Jesus did on the Cross...
Because of what Jesus did thru His resurrection…
that gulf has been bridged and a way for us to cross over to God’s heaven and be saved has been provided!
Our need for God to come was and still IS real… and our need actually made God’s coming to us necessary! However, we can also see it like this… it is IN His coming that He reveals our need for His salvation! So 1st His Coming reveals our need for Him!
BUT the 2nd thing we can see about God’s coming is that it leads reveals to us that on our own, we cannot reach God! God knew this and so God initiated His plan… God reached out to us through His son Jesus Christ!
He did not wait on us… to reach out to Him but HE came and HE made Himself available FOR humanity’s redemption! This leads to my next sub-point- God’s actions reveals His great LOVE for us!
Do you know that WE were and still are the rebellious & stubborn creation of God! However, when we see God for who He is, our hearts melt under the convicting light of His love… it is at that time when we either surrender to His plan and purpose… OR we reject Him and turn away! His love offers a chance for salvation!
Finally we can see that the words of this passage also reveal that humanity will one day BE with God in heaven… we are scheduled to “RETURN” to God in body one day… now that body will be a ‘new’ body!
God did not wrap Himself in flesh for thrills or kicks… OR even to masquerade or play a game… His purpose was to redeem and see people come to know the Lord.
Believers... Oak Park mbrs...THIS is OUR duty today as His witnesses! In Acts 1 Jesus instructed His disciples that they would BE His witnesses in this world… that is what we are called to be!
We are not called to judge, but to reveal God’s love, mercy and grace…we are called to reveal to the salvation that Christ brings… It doers not matter how good we try to be, we will always fall short of God's perfection! But also it does not matter how bad we HAVE lived or what we have done…God is able and willing to save and redeem us thru His Son, Jesus Christ!
Jesus came, wrapped in flesh to reveal God the father to the world and to reveal His love, mercy and grace to the world, it is our job as believers to share that with the world around us!
So during this season... when you hear the question, “What is God like?”… you CAN know and relate the answer... God came, God came to save us... God still comes today and God still saves today!
Christmas is about knowing WHO God is and also about WHY He came…
Give invitation here…
