Doubts, Deeds, and Divine Identity

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Somebody sent me a video this week of a. . .

It was a sad video of a man who. . .

And I would say there was a mixture of sadness and anger in what he shared. But he was talking about 60 years of praying, 60 years of talking to Jesus. And he said, not one of my prayers was answered.

And of course, people in the comments were saying, no, your prayers were answered. You just didn’t like the answers. That’s true.

may be not helpful to tell him in that moment as he was talking about a cancer diagnosis and about losing his house and you could understand why he would feel frustrated. But the circumstances this man was facing had led him to a point where he doubted Jesus. He doubted Jesus’s existence and if Jesus did exist, he doubted that Jesus was good, that Jesus cared.

He doubted any of the things that Jesus said about himself or that the Bible says about him. And it just so happens that that’s what the next passage in Luke talks about. As we’re going through our study of the book of Luke and we get toward the end of chapter 7, it begins to talk about John the Baptist in a moment where he began to question who Jesus is.

He began to question Jesus’s claims about himself. I’m not sure I would go all the way to say that John the Baptist doubted, but I think there were some, or I wouldn’t say that he disbelieved, but he was starting to have some questions. And sometimes this rises, sometimes these questions arise as we look at the wrong kind of evidence about who Jesus is.

So we’re going to look at this story about John the Baptist this morning and the way he approached Jesus and Jesus’s response, because Jesus showed John and by extension shows us how it we really know that we can trust Jesus. What evidence has he given us that we can trust him? So we’re going to be in Luke chapter 7, and we’re going to start in verse 18 this morning, if you’d turn there with me.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s word. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 7, it’ll be on the screen for you. But follow along with me as we read.

Luke chapter 7, starting in verse 18. It says, the disciples of John reported to him about all these things. Now, when it says all these things, it’s referring to the healings that he had been performing all throughout Capernaum, all throughout Nazareth, that area, especially earlier in chapter 7, healing the centurion’s servant that we talked about two weeks ago, and then what we talked about last Sunday morning with Jesus raising the young boy from the dead, the widow’s son.

So the disciples of John reported to him about all these things. Summoning two of his disciples, John sent them to the Lord saying, Are you the expected one, or do we look for someone else? When the men came to him, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, Are you the expected one, or do we look for someone else?

At that very time, he cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits, and he gave sight to many who were blind. And he answered and said to them, Go and report to John what you have seen and heard. the blind receive sight the lame walk the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear the dead are raised up the poor have the gospel preached to them blessed is he who does not take offense at me when the messengers of john had left he began to speak to the crowds about john what did you go out into the wilderness to see a reed shaken by the wind but what did you go out to see a man dressed in soft clothing those who are splendidly clothed and live in luxury are found in royal palaces but what did you go out to see?

A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and one who is more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.

I say to you, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John, yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. When all the people and the tax collectors heard this, they acknowledged God’s justice, having been baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by John.

And in verse 31, Jesus continues, To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children who sit in a marketplace, who sit in the marketplace and call to one another, and they say, We played the flute for you, and you did not dance. We sang a dirge, and you did not weep.

For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say he has a demon. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.

And you may be seated. We see here from John’s example at the beginning of the passage, verses 18 through 21, that people begin to doubt Jesus when he doesn’t meet our expectations. And I think that’s the tragic part of the story of the man that I shared with you at the beginning.

He was not looking at Jesus and evaluating him based on what he said about himself. He was evaluating Jesus based on what he expected and what he wanted. And you and I easily fall into the same trap where we say, well, I wanted this and I prayed for this and Jesus should have given it to me, but because he didn’t or because this happened to me, then clearly Jesus isn’t who he says he is.

We begin to doubt Jesus when he doesn’t meet our expectations. John stayed, even though he was in prison at this point, John stayed up to date with the stories of what was going on about Jesus. He was aware of the healings.

He was aware of the miracles. He probably had heard already that people were being raised from the dead. But he was still, when we get to verse 19, he was still prompted to send his followers to Jesus questioning his identity.

When the men came to him, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, are you the expected one or do we look for someone else? That was his question. It’s a question he sent in verse 19, the question they asked in verse 20.

Are you the expected one or do we look for someone else? When he says the expected one, he’s talking about the Messiah. Are you the one that God has promised?

Are you the one that we’ve been looking for? Or have I just been confused all this time and we’re really supposed to be looking for someone else? And that’s an odd question.

If you’ve studied the Gospels, if you know anything about John the Baptist at all, that’s going to strike you as a strange question. Because John the Baptist is the one who came and announced Jesus as the Messiah. And this is just my opinion, but John the Baptist doesn’t strike me as somebody who’s going to go flatter somebody and just try to butter them up.

If he said that Jesus is the Messiah, it’s because he believed Jesus is the Messiah. We go back to Luke chapter 3, and he told his followers, one is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of his sandals, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. Here’s this messenger from God saying, there’s one coming who’s even greater than I am.

I am not good enough even to touch his shoes. And he is going to baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire. Clearly talking about somebody who comes from God.

In John chapter 1, he said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. When he sees Jesus coming, he tells his followers, look, here comes the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He says, this is he on behalf of whom I was sent.

He said, this man is the whole reason that God sent me here. After me comes a man who has a higher rank than I, for he existed before me. He said, he outranks me because he existed before me.

John the Baptist was about six months older than Jesus. So when he says Jesus existed before him, he’s not confused about their birth timeline. They were cousins.

They knew each other. He’s not confused about who was older. That’s one of those things that as kids, you always try to lord it over the other siblings or the other cousins.

I’m older. They knew who was older. When he says he existed before me, he’s talking about from eternity past. And then just a few verses down, he says, I myself have seen and have testified that this is the son of God.

That’s a question I’ve asked when it comes to Jesus’s brothers, but it’s a question worth asking with John too. Most of you in this room have cousins somewhere along the line. What would it take to convince you that one of those cousins you grew up with was God?

There’s probably no set of boxes they can check, right? For John the Baptist to have grown up with this man and said, I’m telling you, I have seen it myself. He’s the son of God.

That is quite an endorsement. And so it’s crazy to us to be familiar with that John the Baptist and then come to Luke chapter 7 and he’s saying, is it you or do we need to keep looking? And it makes you wonder what happened.

Somehow, somewhere, John’s expectations of Jesus were not met. And Bible scholars go back and forth over what those expectations were. I saw this week where somebody had written that because the Messiah was going to come and set the captives free, and John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Messiah, sits here in prison, he probably thought, if he was the Messiah, he would have set me free already.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer. I lean more toward everybody. Everybody in that society was looking for the Messiah who was going to come and drive the Romans out, and restore the kingdom of David.

They were looking for a military leader. They were looking for a political leader. They were looking for somebody who was going to restore a golden age to Israel.

And John is looking at what seemed like missed opportunity after missed opportunity when Jesus could have done that. And instead of building a following to drive out the Romans, he’s running around with tax collectors and lepers. And I don’t know that for sure either, but to me that makes more sense as the reason why John’s saying, are you him?

Somewhere along the line, Jesus did not meet John’s expectations of what the Messiah was going to be. And when he didn’t do what John expected, John began to doubt or to have questions. That’s where I say you and I may sometimes begin to doubt when Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations.

If we’re looking at the wrong kind of evidence to try to decide whether Jesus is everything he says he is or not. But Jesus’ answer tells us a lot here. Jesus points to the stuff he’s done.

And that shows us that Jesus’ deeds demonstrate his claims. When I say Jesus’ claims, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus claimed to be God.

And I know it’s become very popular on TikTok and places like the YouTube comments section to say that Jesus never claimed to be God. All you have to do is open the book of John and he very clearly claimed to be God. So the answer is, well, that’s something John made up later because John was the last of the Gospels written.

I certainly don’t have any problem with saying John was the last of the Gospels written. I don’t think it’s as far from the others as some people seem to think. But we spent an entire Wednesday night going over no less than 19 places just in the synoptic Gospels.

That means the ones that aren’t John, the ones that people say, oh, those are the ones that portray him not as God. No less than 19 places in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus made claims that only God could make. Jesus claimed to be God.

He claimed to be God the Son. He claimed to be sent as the Messiah by the Father. And he points us in verses 22 and 23 to the works, the deeds that he had done that verify that, that demonstrate that.

He didn’t just claim to be the Messiah. He backed it up and he let his work speak for himself. If you go to verse 22, he answered and said to them, go and report to John what you have seen and heard.

They weren’t going back to John and having to report rumors. He said, you have seen the things I’ve done. They’ve been done out in the open.

You know what I’ve done. You know what I’ve been about. Go back and report those things to John.

And he gives us a list here. And if you’re reading in the New American Standard Version, you may see that some of these are in all caps or small caps. That means that’s where it’s a direct quote from the Old Testament.

But each one of these things, whether it’s a direct quote from the Old Testament or not, are things that are shown in the Old Testament as something that the Messiah was going to do or something that only God himself could do. And he lists a few of them here. He says, one of the things you’ve seen, the blind received sight in verse 22.

That was promised in Isaiah 29, 18 and Isaiah 35, 5, that the Messiah would do that. And then it was fulfilled in Matthew 9. Now it was fulfilled in other places, but up to this point, it was already fulfilled in Matthew chapter 9, when Jesus had healed a blind man.

And some people have suggested there’s an escalation of the miracles. You start with the blind. That’s a pretty impressive miracle.

But from the outside, if you don’t know the guy, you can’t prove he was blind. You can’t prove he can see now. Until you get to the point where we’re talking visible miracles.

You can’t look at somebody necessarily and tell they’re blind. You can look at somebody and say, that man can’t walk. His leg is all twisted up.

And then you can see, now he can walk. You can see that man was dead, as we talked about last week. He was carried out in the open on this stretcher thing wrapped in linen.

And Jesus said, get up. And in full view of everybody, he sits up and starts talking. That’s a miracle you can see.

So we start from these that are maybe harder to verify. I still believe they happen, but they’re a little harder to verify. You can’t deny this if you saw it.

The blind receive sight. The lame walk, promised again in Isaiah 35, 6, and fulfilled in John 5. The lepers are cleansed.

Now, this is one that’s not specifically taught that the Messiah would do it, but all throughout the Old Testament, we see that only God can cleanse the lepers. That’s why they had to go back to the priest to have it verified that they’d been cleansed. We see in Exodus chapter 4, for example, Moses is told, stick your hand in your cloak and pull it out and you’re going to have leprosy.

Stick it back in and pull it out and it’s going to be gone. And God was using that as a sign. That’s one of many places in the Old Testament where we’re shown only God has the power over leprosy.

And yet we get to Luke chapter 5. We’ve already studied it. Jesus healed a leper.

The deaf hearer. That was promised of the Messiah in Isaiah 29, 18 and Isaiah 35, 5. I looked, when you line the Gospels up chronologically, I looked, what before this?

Is there a specific story of Jesus healing a deaf person? There’s not a place before this where it specifically says Jesus healed a deaf person. There are stories that are told later in the Gospels of Jesus healing a deaf person.

But he could not have used that and said, go back and tell John the deaf are healed, and that’s evidence. If John was going to say, wait, that never happened, kind of undermines his credibility. Jesus had healed deaf people.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given that as evidence to John. Why don’t we have a record of it? There are a lot of the healings we don’t have records of.

There are several places, just as we’ve been through Luke, where it says, and he went around Capernaum healing people. And it doesn’t detail. But Jesus, at times, had to leave the city because the line of people wanting to be healed was so long.

There were deaf people healed in those crowds. And as to why we don’t have the story recorded up to this point, that’s one of those places that God tells us what we need to know, not what we want to know. But he had healed the deaf.

And again, with John the Baptist being a skeptic, he’s not going to throw that to him as evidence if it hadn’t happened. He says the dead are raised up. This was promised in Isaiah 26, 19, shown as something that is the exclusive work of God.

We know other people cannot raise people from the dead by their own power. or many of us would have tried to do it already. If somebody’s raised from the dead, God has to be in it.

It’s promised that way and it was fulfilled just before this, like the moment before. And I forget how it came up last Sunday night, but we were talking about the timing and how strange it was that Jesus would go to this little, not even wide spot in the road. It’s just a little village on the edge of a mountain that isn’t really on the way to anywhere.

Why would Jesus have been heading there? Well, obviously he knew he was going to go heal this man, the widow’s son. He knew he was going to go heal him.

Why now? Why at this point? And Sharon pointed out the next story with John the Baptist. He healed somebody.

He raised somebody from the dead so that when this question comes up, there’s the evidence. Are you the expected one? Go back and tell him I’ve raised the dead.

Go back and tell him that. His deeds demonstrate his claims. And the poor have the gospel preached to them. That was promised in Isaiah 61.

1, and it was fulfilled throughout Jesus’ ministry. And he encouraged John not to doubt him and abandon him. When he said, blessed are those who do not take offense at me, that word offense means to be embarrassed by him and abandon him, as it becomes so easy to do.

But he’s encouraging John, even in the midst of his doubts. And notice here, he doesn’t critique John for having those questions. But he points him to the evidence and says, If you’re having trouble with who I am based on your expectations, look at the things I’ve done and understand God blesses those who are not embarrassed to the point where they abandoned me.

And sometimes that embarrassment can even just be, I didn’t get my prayers answered. I feel foolish for believing this. He says, look back at what I’ve done.

And that’s helpful advice for us today. There are times that you’re not going to get your. .

. I won’t say you won’t get your prayers answered. You won’t get them answered the way you want them answered.

That has happened to every one of us in here. There may be times in life where you question because that prayer wasn’t answered or that didn’t happen or that didn’t come through. Is he real?

Is he everything he claimed to be? Always go back to what he did. The thing that settled this for me was the realization, and I’ve used this phrase with you many times, 2,000 years ago, Jesus either walked out of the tomb or he did not.

And that really settles the question of who he is, regardless of anything that happens today. But not only that, Jesus goes on to say that John’s ministry itself corroborates his claim. The very fact that John came as this forerunner points to Jesus being the Messiah.

John made enormous sacrifices in order to bring a message from God and to stand firm in that message. When we get to verse 24, that’s what he’s talking about. John went out to the wilderness, and he says he was not a reed shaken by the wind.

When he went out ministering, when he went out preaching the word of God, when he went out proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah, he stood firm in that, even though it cost him. He was not like a reed shaken in the wind. He didn’t, as verse 25 says, dress in soft clothing.

He didn’t live in a luxury of the royal palace. He lived in the wilderness, and he made people angry. And so Jesus calls him a prophet, and more than a prophet, he says, this is the one about whom it is written, behold, I send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way before you.

Jesus said he was fulfilling the prophecy in Malachi 3. 1 of sending a forerunner to announce the coming of the Messiah and prepare people for that. And just John’s call to step into that role in and of itself was one more thing that pointed to Jesus being who he claimed to be.

And because John’s message was true and Jesus was the Messiah, we hold a more privileged position today even than John did. Jesus said there’s no one born of woman greater than John the Baptist, he says, and yet even those who are least in the kingdom are greater than John. That means where John came under the Old Testament law, you and I have access to God the Father, we have a relationship with the Father, we have a place in the kingdom that folks under the old covenant could only dream of.

And he’s pointing again to even this man who is doubting at this moment, his ministry demonstrates demonstrates that all of this is true. And then we come to verse 29 again, and there’s the response of the people. Some of the people listened to this and said, oh, he makes good sense.

The Pharisees and the religious leaders, they look at him and say, that’s crazy. And it all depended on whether they even responded to John’s message to begin with or not. And Jesus began to teach and said that Israel at that moment, they were like those who sit in the marketplace and play a song, and they’re upset because nobody danced to their tune.

And what he means by that is he explains in in the next sentence that John the Baptist came and lived in the wilderness, didn’t eat anything, didn’t drink anything, at least among the people. He wasn’t feasting and going to the banquets and such. And they said, oh, he must have a demon because that’s where that’s not a leap at all.

Right. So I’ve got some children who I never see eat anything. I’ve never once thought, oh, they must have a demon.

But we’ll have to look into that. But that was where the religious leaders went, oh, John the Baptist doesn’t eat anything, he must have a demon. And then Jesus came and he actually went to the banquets and he ate with the tax collectors and the sinners and they said, oh, what a glutton, what a drunkard, which Jesus did not get drunk and Jesus was not a glutton.

But they accused him of those things and, oh, he hangs out with those people. And Jesus’s point here is, Israel was determined not to believe. They just made the decision not to believe and they were looking for any evidence that would stick to support that disbelief.

They didn’t want it to believe. They didn’t want to believe. And so if John came and did one thing, they were going to criticize him for that.

And if Jesus came and did the opposite, they were going to criticize him for that. They were never going to be happy because there was no circumstance under which they were willing to believe. There was nothing that was going to convince them because they had already decided they did not want to believe.

But their disbelief didn’t make him not the Messiah. It As a matter of fact, God’s word told us that was what was going to happen. One example, one of many examples of this is the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament is in Psalm 118. 22, where it says, The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. Speaking of the Messiah, that he would be rejected.

Isaiah 53 gives a graphic account of the Messiah being rejected by his own people. So they looked at it and said, well, we don’t believe it, so it’s not true. And Jesus is pointing out here, your unbelief is more proof that it is true, because this is what the prophet said was going to happen.

And we come to this last verse here, come to this last verse, verse 35, but it says, yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children. He’s telling us that the evidence is going to show what’s true. What’s true and what’s false is going to show up.

He’s talking about the wisdom of God revealed here in the prophets. And when he says wisdom’s children, He’s referring to her works. What’s true is going to show up.

Eventually, you’re going to be able to see what’s true. And that’s why He always pointed back to His works. Like in John 14, 11, He said, believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

Otherwise, believe because of the works themselves. Jesus told His followers, if you don’t believe me just because I said so, that’s fine. Believe me because of what I’ve done.

And these things bring us back to a very important principle that we have got to remember that Jesus doesn’t prove his claims by doing what we want, but by doing what he promises. He does not prove who he is by doing what we want, but by doing what he promises. Oh, he didn’t answer my prayer about that illness.

That doesn’t mean he’s not God. He didn’t grant that request about my kids. That doesn’t mean he’s not God.

The question is not, did he do what I wanted him to do? The question is, has he done what he promised he would do? And if he’s done what he’s promised he would do than he is who he says he was.

And I still, I keep thinking about this video of this man. I feel tremendous sympathy for him because I cannot imagine what he’s going through with this diagnosis. At the same time, he talks about, I have followed Jesus for 60 years and it was a mistake.

And I can’t help but think of all the people who have followed Jesus until they didn’t get what they wanted and then walked away. And we see this with the crowds that we’re encountering in the book of Luke. In these crowds, there were people who followed Jesus.

And some of these men, you know, they stumbled, they tripped, they got back up and they followed Jesus to their deaths. There were other people who didn’t follow Jesus so much as they followed Jesus around. They went with him.

They wanted to see what he was going to do. They were into the spectacle until it cost them something or they didn’t get what they wanted or they didn’t get what they expected. There is a big difference between following Jesus and following Jesus around.

Following Jesus around what happens when we say, I’m with you, Lord, as long as I get what I want or what I expect. But as soon as you don’t live up to my expectations, I’m out. In that case, we’re not really following Jesus because he’s not Lord.

He’s not master. He’s just an ATM. It is dangerous just to follow Jesus around because he has proven to us who he is.

I promise you, there will be moments when you’re disappointed by the answers you get from God. I know that because I’ve been disappointed. I know that because I’m already aware of some of the times you’ve been disappointed by the answers you’ve gotten from God as you’ve come and talked to me about them.

There will be times that you’re going to be disappointed by the answers you get. But him being God, him being Lord, him being our master does not depend on him living up to our expectations. It depends on him living up to his promises.

And so as you go through struggles of life, as you deal with heartaches and disappointments, don’t evaluate him based on what you think he ought to do. Evaluate him on what he has done and what he said he would do. The most important thing that he’s ever done for us, the most important promise that he’s ever kept was the promise to deal with our problem of sin.

You and I were separated from a holy God because of our sin. Sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God, and we are all guilty. And because God is holy and God is just, that sin separates us from him.

You and I could never do enough good to erase the wrong that we’ve done. But God promised, God planned from eternity past, and God promised beginning in the garden that he would deal with that sin. And he followed through on that promise every step of the way.

As Jesus came to earth, born of a virgin, to live a perfect sinless life, to go to the cross and take responsibility for my sin and for yours, to be nailed to that cross and to shed his blood and to die, promising to pay for that sin and rise again dead. And three days later, just as he said, he rose again. And he has promised us eternal life.

If we will repent of that sin and turn to him in faith. This morning, your relationship with him begins with a promise, a promise that he’s already kept to pay for your sin and make a way for you to be right, make the only way for you to be right with the father. And right now where you are, you can trust Jesus as your one and only savior.

And you can ask for that forgiveness and you can have it because He keeps His promises.