What Jesus Said

Turn in your Bibles with me this morning to Luke 4.16 where we will begin reading. Jesus, according to Luke has recently returned from the wilderness and the temptation, after having been baptized by John the Baptist and He is beginning to preach and teach. And it says news spread about Him across the whole countryside and He was teaching and everyone praised Him. And we come to verse 16ff which reads, “16 He (Jesus) went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f] 20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now, I want to ask you a question this morning. When Jesus picked this particular passage to read, from the book of Isaiah, this prophetic passage of promise about the Messiah and what He would accomplish, do you think Jesus was talking in a spiritual sense, or a literal sense? When He spoke to the crowd and told them that what He had just read was fulfilled in their hearing, was He saying that it had been fulfilled spiritually or literally?

Now, I know our first tendency, our first reaction to a question like that is to answer, well of course, Jesus meant it spiritually. I mean, that’s the reason Jesus came. His teaching was good. His healing was incredible. His miracles were unbelievable. But the real reason Jesus came and entered our world was to bring salvation to the world. The reason Jesus came was to die on the cross so that all of humanity could be made spiritually right with God. John 3.17 says, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” The ultimate reason Christ came into the world was not simply to live as one of us, but to die for us. It was necessary that Christ die as a perfect sacrifice so that we might be restored in our relationship to the Father. Paul expressed this in his letter to Rome in Romans 5.18-19, a18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

Christ’s reason to come was to satisfy the requirement of His life for ours. And this is a spiritual truth. So it must be that when Jesus quoted from the book of Isaiah and said “this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”, he must have been speaking spiritually. But how many of us would say that when we accepted Christ, the only difference He made in our lives was spiritual? Raise your hands? Anyone want to suggest that when Christ became our Savior that He didn’t also change us physically? Or maybe we would say that what happened to us on the inside also changed the way we acted on the outside. And not only the way we acted, but our understanding of the world, our perspectives were changed.

For instance, we might recognize that before Christ came into our heart and changed us, if we got ahead because someone else got cheated, or if we cheated someone else in order to get ahead, it was okay. We could easily dismiss it. We could justify our behavior and our actions. But after Christ changed us, we realized that to be His follower, we could no longer cheat to get the advantage. We could no longer take advantage of situations that we had before. We learned that Christ not only changed our spiritual life, but He changed how we thought about things, He changed our perspective.

And with this changed perspective, we no longer saw people as items to be used to get ahead or to benefit us, but we began to see them with compassion and with kindness, with generosity and with grace. We saw them as people in need of a Savior. But we didn’t see this because we suddenly had the ability to look into their hearts. We saw this because of their external actions. When we watch someone get angry over what appears to be a minor event, we pray for them. When we see someone who takes advantage of a situation for themselves, we pray for them.