What We Put In The Way Of Setting People Free Series

“THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE”: Jesus came to set people free from Satanic oppression.

- Luke 13:10-13; John 8:32.

- There was more to Jesus’ mission than this, but one of the biggest things that He did was to set people free from Satanic oppression.

- This is true both in terms of exorcisms, like we see in this passage, and a more general spiritual release from Satan’s influence.

- In this case, we see a woman who has been physically struggling for nearly two decades and Jesus sets her free (vv. 11-13). This is obviously a moment of great power from God and great joy for the woman.

- This is a good moment for us to pause and consider John 8:32. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

- That is often used simply as an inspiration saying, but it’s much more than that. It is a principle of spiritual truth.

When you know the truth, that very truth will set you free. What does that mean? Living in falsehood and accommodating sin will create innumerable problems in our lives. Falsehood builds a life that cannot be relied on not to fall apart. Truth, on the other hand, is consistently reliable. Sin will ruin us. Getting rid of it will heal us.

- All of this flows from the reality that Jesus wants to transform our lives. He wants to grow us into practical Christlikeness. The truth sets us free from the bondage and oppression that sin holds us in. We find ourselves freed from anger. We find ourselves freed from envy. We find ourselves freed from worry. We find ourselves freed from greed. We are freed to enjoy the goodness of God in our lives.

- What Jesus says to this woman (“. . . you are set free . . .” in v. 12) is what He wants to do in each of our lives. Sin is shackles. Sin is bondage. And Jesus wants to set us free.

“THAT VIOLATES THE RULES”: Too often people let their man-made rules get in the way of people being set free.

- Luke 13:14.

- Matthew 7:24-27; Romans 3:23; 1 Timothy 2:9-10; 1 Peter 3:3-5a.

- There was joy in this freedom from the woman (v. 13) and from the crowd (v. 17) but the synagogue ruler was having nothing of it. Why? Because this could not be from God because Jesus had violated the ruler’s Sabbath rule. That's where his focus was: on the rules.

- That's because his whole approach to religion was essentially rules-based. “Here are all our rules and as we follow those, God loves us.” The Pharisees in particular were renowned for adding more and more rules to try to “help” people know exactly where the lines were and how they should act to obey God.

- Because their focus was the rules, it led to a simple calculus for them. If the person violated the rules, then that could not be from God. It didn’t matter how amazing (v. 13) what happened was, it simply couldn’t be from God. That led to the religious leaders lamely arguing that Jesus must be doing miracles by the power of Satan (Luke 11:14-28). As we discussed earlier in this sermon series, that made absolutely no sense, but it was their only choice to explain an indisputable miracle that they believed could not have been from the power of God.

- Does this mean that the Sabbath was not something that should be observed? Not at all. The Sabbath was a gift given for our benefit. But the Pharisees piled on rule after rule to try to nail down where the specific lines were for proper obedience and disobedience to that command. It became a heavy burden that no one could carry - keeping up with the myriad of man-made rules that needed to be observed to keep God happy.

- An important question for us to consider is whether we do the same thing today. Specifically, do we let the rules we’ve made up get in the way of Jesus setting people free.

- We do.

- I want to share three examples of this. Not all of these are as prominent in every congregation but these are all things that have been a part of American church life in recent decades.

a. Dress up to come to church.

- This has slackened somewhat in recent years but for many years if you came to church you were expected to dress up. We even had a term for it: “your Sunday best.”

- This created a situation where people didn’t feel they could come to church unless they had nice clothes. There were numerous occasions down through the years where someone was thinking about coming to church for the first time and asked about the “dress code.”