The Journey Of The Christian Life

Today we’re just about at the end of the Christmas season and we’re going to move on from our Christmas themes. We’re starting a new series in the gospel of Luke and we’ll mostly continue in Luke until Easter.

But before we start to look at our passage I want to explain why it’s so important that we read the Bible in general and why the gospels are especially important. There are probably all sorts of reasons people would give, but I would pick out three.

REASON 1: BY READING THE BIBLE WE MAKE ‘JESUS IS LORD’ A REALITY. Imagine you’re the director of a company. One day a customer calls you. He really needs to have an order delivered by the end of the week. You promise him that he’ll have it. You send a memo marked ‘urgent’ to the despatch manager to tell him to prioritize the order. The despatch manager reads it and fulfils the order. By reading your instruction and following it, he's treating you as boss. But If he ignores it, he isn’t. It’s the same with God and the Bible. In the Bible, God gives us instructions. It’s his main way of communicating with us. If we read the Bible and follow it then God is boss. If we ignore it, God isn’t boss.

REASON 2: BY READING THE BIBLE WE ENTER INTO GOD’S THOUGHTS. Imagine you want to become a doctor. You got three very good ‘A’ levels and now have a place to study medicine. At the start of your course, you don’t know much about medicine. But you go to lectures. You discuss cases with experienced doctors. You read textbooks. You’re exposed to medical thinking. You engage with it. You take it on. You start to think like a doctor. You do this for about five years. Finally, you become a doctor! Most of what has happened has been inside your head.

It’s similar for a Christian. A Christian is a follower of Jesus. He or she wants to be like Jesus. The Christian engages with godly thinking and takes it on. Like the medical student, the transformation for the Christian is mainly inside his or her head. Paul tells us that we are transformed by the renewal of our minds. Where does the Christian find this godly thinking to engage with? The main place is the Bible, of course!

REASON 3: IN THE GOSPELS ESPECIALLY WE SEE JESUS. I said a moment ago that a Christian is a follower of Jesus and that he or she wants to be like Jesus. But is that true? Do we want to become like Jesus? Is that one of our goals? There are at least two reasons it should be. First, God created humankind in his image. That was God’s original intention and there’s no reason to think it isn’t still God’s intention. Second, Paul wrote that GOD PREDESTINED US TO BE CONFORMED TO THE IMAGE OF HIS SON. If we had any doubt that God intends us to be like Jesus, this verse makes it totally clear that he does.

God created us in his image and he wants us to be like Jesus. If this is God’s goal it must surely be our goal too. We should want to be like Jesus. How will that happen?

I once watched a documentary about Chinese artists who are brilliant at making copies of European artists. They weren’t trying to make fakes; they wanted to copy their art as a training exercise. In the documentary they travelled to Europe, sat next to the originals and painted.

If our goal is to be like Jesus then we need to be like those Chinese artists. They looked closely at the orginal; we need to look closely at Jesus. The gospels give us that opportunity. In the gospels, we can look directly at Jesus, the perfect person whose image God wishes to shine through in us.

That is why I think it’s so important that we spend some solid time each year in the gospels. Last year, we went through the whole of Mark. This year I thought we’d turn to Luke. Mark is the shortest gospel; Luke is the longest. I thought it would be too much to cover all of it so we’re going to look at about two-thirds of it, with a short break in the middle.

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I’m going to start at Luke 9 verse 51. That may seem like a strange place to start! Most people start a book at page 1. If you do start in the middle of a book you’d probably start at the beginning of a chapter. But it’s actually a logical place to start. Although chapter 9 verse 51 isn’t the start of a chapter, this verse marks a turning point in his gospel. It’s the point at which Jesus set off for Jerusalem. Over the following ten chapters Luke frequently refers to Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. For example, he writes that Jesus ‘went on his way … teaching and journeying towards Jerusalem’; that Jesus was ‘on the way to Jerusalem’; that Jesus says, ‘we are going up to Jerusalem,’ and so on. Bible scholars recognize that this is a distinct and significant part of Luke’s gospel. They call it ‘the travel narrative.’