Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 4:31-44, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 5
- Date: Sunday, February 9, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Recognizing Real Authority
I think that if you give it enough time, every human society will eventually develop some kind of authority structure. Years ago, some filmmakers made a documentary about the civil unrest in Europe—the riots, protests, and other events that formed the backdrop to World War II. I remember watching it as they interviewed one of the women, who was well into her nineties by that time.
She was talking about being part of the riots and unrest, and she suddenly became very proud and said, “I was the leader of the anarchists in my city.” I thought, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to an anarchist meeting.” I’ve never been to one.
But I don’t think that’s how it works. Anarchists aren’t supposed to have leaders. That’s kind of the point of being an anarchist. That’s like saying I’m the circle with the most corners.
But even these people who had decided to reject the idea of authority, they had leaders that they looked to. You see that even with children as they play. Eventually, one tends to dominate, and I won’t name names, but we see that even with our younger children. You see that among middle schoolers as they’re interacting.
There’s somebody that they kind of look to who has just a little more influence than the others. And a lot of times, this idea of authority will come from some kind of office and it’ll have symbols to let people know that you’re in authority. When I was in elementary school, they would choose children each week to serve as something like hall monitors, except we did not have halls. It was one of those school buildings where everything opens to the outside and it’s different buildings.
They would give us orange safety vests so the other children would know we were the monitors. Everybody wanted one because it made us feel important and in charge. You know, even today we’ll give badges to law enforcement officers as a symbol of authority. Judges or Speaker of the House, people like that, will have a gavel as a symbol of authority. I was trying to think if we had something that the President has, kind of like the King of England has a crown and a scepter.
There are different symbols of authority in every society. I don’t know that we’ve got anything like that, but Air Force One is kind of impressive, kind of lets you know that the guy in charge is there. A lot of times authority does come with an office, and it does come with symbols, but people can have authority even without it. I think it was John Maxwell in one of his books about leadership talks about when he was a pastor, when he was a brand new pastor at this particular church, he walked in thinking he was in charge because of the title he had, And then he realized there was one of the men that every time that man spoke, that’s who everybody listened to.
And he realized that that guy was the authority in the church. He could either fight it or he could work with it. And he talks about them teaming up. So a lot of times we think of authority as somebody that has a title.
We think of authority as somebody with symbols of their power. But a lot of times it can be a lot quieter. It can be a lot more subtle. It can come without those things.
When Jesus arrived in a town for the first time—or returned to one—it was often a shocking experience for the people who thought they were in authority, because they had the titles, and they had the offices, and they had all the symbolism and the tradition behind them, and then Jesus would come into a place, and he would just begin to work, and he would begin to teach, and he would begin to do miracles, and the people began to listen to Him. And Jesus was able, without any kind of office, without holding any kind of office, without any crown, badge, or orange safety vest, He was able to step in and exercise authority simply because it was in His nature. That is who He was.
Jesus Displays His Authority
As we continue our study of the book of Luke this morning, we’re going to look at how Jesus displayed His authority without holding an office, carrying a title, or possessing any of these symbols of power. Simply by the force of His nature and what He was able to do, He put His authority on full display.
We’re going to pick up where we left off from last week in Luke chapter 4, and we’re going to start at verse 31. Luke chapter 4 verse 31, it says, and he came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and he was teaching them on the Sabbath. And they were amazed at his teaching, for his message was with authority.
In the synagogue, there was a man possessed by the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, let us alone. What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us. I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
But Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be quiet and come out of him. And when the demon had thrown him down in the midst of the people, he came out of him without doing him any harm. And amazement came upon all of them, and they began talking with one another, saying, What is this message? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out of him.
And the report about him was spreading into every locality in the surrounding district. Then he got up and left the synagogue and entered Simon’s home. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him to help her. And standing over her, he rebuked the fever, and it left her.
And she immediately got up and waited on them. While the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him. And laying his hands on each one of them, he was healing them. Demons also were coming out of many, shouting, you are the son of God.
But rebuking them, he would not allow them to speak because they knew him to be the Christ. When day came, Jesus left and went to a secluded place and the crowds were searching for him and came to him and tried to keep him from going away from them. But he said to them, I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose. So he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea.
Rejected at Nazareth
Think back to what we looked at last week.
That Jesus was in the synagogue in Nazareth, in His hometown. And He came and He was invited to give the sermon on one of the books of the prophets. He was handed the Isaiah scroll. And He opened it to the portion He wanted, what we know of as Isaiah 61.
He began to read prophecies that they knew dealt with the coming of the Messiah. Then He sat down to teach and told the people, “These things that I have just read are fulfilled right here in front of you.” And it says the people were amazed. They were impressed with his speaking ability.
They were impressed with His presentation. But their response showed that they did not really believe Him: “As good as He sounds, isn’t that just Joseph’s son?” Really? That guy, we’re supposed to believe that guy’s the Messiah, and Jesus calls them out for their unbelief, and they ran him out of town.
See, the people at Nazareth did not acknowledge Jesus’s authority. They didn’t recognize it. Better said, they didn’t want to recognize it, because it played against their preconceived ideas of who Jesus is and what he was supposed to be. They were just a little too familiar with him.
It was not that He had done anything wrong to cause them to think that way. They had watched Him grow up from the time He was a small child, and He came from their town—their insignificant town. They thought their town was nothing. If you read the way people from here talk online and run down our city, it drives me crazy. But people thought the same way about Nazareth: really somebody that somebody good like that’s going to come from here that was the idea they had and so for many reasons they just rejected him and rejected his authority they didn’t want him to be who he claimed to be. And we almost have this idea that if I don’t recognize Jesus in that way, then he’s not that. If I don’t acknowledge that God is in charge, then he’s not in charge. Listen, God is in charge whether we acknowledge it or not.
Jesus has given numerous kinds of evidence that he is who he says he is, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Just like every four years we have people say, oh, he’s not my president. it doesn’t matter which party it is somebody’s always he’s not my president I think he’s the one with the finger on the button whether whether you know whether you voted for him or not whether you like him or not that’s just there’s all sorts of people in office that I’m not crazy about but they’re still they’re there and me acknowledging that or not acknowledging it doesn’t make a difference It is the same way with Jesus. He is who He claimed to be whether we acknowledge it or not. I think the people of Nazareth believed that by refusing to acknowledge Jesus, they could simply brush Him aside.
Authority on Display in Capernaum
But then he goes to Capernaum, and he begins to work in the way that we just read about.
And what we see there is that Jesus’ authority was not diminished by other people’s unbelief. Jesus did not perform many miracles in Nazareth on either occasion when He was there. And it’s not that he couldn’t. Jesus is not Peter Pan—or whoever it is—
Or they say, oh, if you believe, Clap your hands. You can tell I’m not up on my Disney. with the idea that if people believe, then He will have the power. He is not Santa Claus or an elf who depends on everyone believing so that the sleigh can fly.
It’s not that Jesus was not able to do miracles because the people didn’t believe. He just chose not to. Because they’d heard about the miracles, they’d heard eyewitness testimony of the miracles, and still chose not to believe. But the fact that there’s this group of people in his hometown who did not believe in Jesus, it did not rob him of his authority.
It did not diminish his authority. Even though they dismissed him just as Joseph’s son, and they tried to kill him when he challenged their unbelief, we know that they weren’t convinced that he was the Messiah, but their bias had no bearing on what happened at Capernaum. Because when he came to Capernaum, verses 31 and 32 tell us that the people were amazed by him. Everything that he did, everything that he said, they hung on his every word and his every action.
They wanted to see what he was going to say and do next. It tells us that they sought him out. They came out looking for him in verse 40. Even the demons were on high alert whenever Jesus was present, whether He was in the synagogue or walking through the town. They recognized that Jesus was in their midst and recoiled in terror.
We see that in verses 34 and 41. There was a huge difference between what Jesus did at Nazareth and what He did at Capernaum. It wasn’t because he was unable to do those things at Nazareth. And it’s not because Jesus cared more about the people at Capernaum.
But Jesus chose not to, as he says in Matthew 7, cast his pearls before swine to people who were just determined not to believe. And we’ll come back to that in just a moment. Nazareth had the same opportunity Capernaum did to witness the miracles and power of Jesus, but they were simply determined not to believe.
And it’s obvious that they were just determined not to because Jesus’ authority was on display for anyone who was paying attention. If you look at what Jesus did in Capernaum, the things that we’ve just read this morning, it would be hard, and I’m sure these are just the highlights. You can tell Luke is just summarizing in some places. Yeah, he healed a lot of people.
I mean, if we were to sit down and hear all the stories of all the people Jesus healed and all the stories of all the demons that Jesus cast out and all the things that Jesus taught, I think we’d be in awe. But Luke, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gives us only a summary here. Even from that summary, though, it’s supposed to be evident to us that Jesus was working with authority that was more than what any mere human should have.
Teaching with Authority
We see that he taught with authority.
We can explore this more during our question-and-answer time tonight. But the way this is structured, we see Luke repeating things for emphasis, repeating topics. But we see that Jesus taught with authority. We see that toward the beginning and toward the end.
The passage begins and ends with Jesus preaching to the crowds. And all of those who heard him recognized that he taught with authority. Later in the Gospels, as He goes into Judea, the Pharisees and Sadducees are especially determined to oppose Him. They hear him and the crowds say he teaches with such authority, unlike these guys, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes.
He teaches with authority. They don’t dispute that he teaches with authority. They just try to explain it away. They try to say he gets this power from Satan.
He gets this power from somewhere else. But even they could not dispute that he taught with authority, that when he spoke, there was power in his words. There was power in what he taught that was unlike anything that anybody else was teaching. He was not like the other religious leaders of his day.
And what an incredible thing it would have been to hear this. And even what we hear because it’s recorded for us is amazing. Jesus speaks with an authority unlike anybody else’s. I don’t speak with any authority of my own.
If I ever try, you need to have a serious conversation with me. but any authority I have depends on what this book says. What I say to you is authoritative only insofar as it remains faithful to what this Book says. But Jesus, where the other religious leaders would say, you know, it’s as so-and-so said to so-and-so, and they’re basing it on the tradition and all these people going back, Jesus would just cut through all of that and say, you’ve heard all of these people say, but I’m telling you this, Jesus taught with authority.
Authority Over Demons
Not only that, he cleansed with authority.
A man in the synagogue was found to be possessed by a demon. It’s interesting that he could be so religious and still so far from God. I think there’s a warning in there for us as well that religion by itself does not make us close to God. This man was among the worshipers in the synagogue, yet he was possessed by a demon. Jesus commanded it to come out, and the demon could not refuse Him.
The demon seems to throw a temper tantrum on the way out, throwing the man down as if to say, “Fine.” Have you ever seen a child get angry after being told no and throw a toy down? It says the demon threw the man down. That’s kind of the impression I get.
But he wasn’t even able to harm the man other than just throwing him down because Jesus said, get out of there. The demon couldn’t argue. The demon had to do what Jesus said. This is not something that ordinary humans can do on their own.
I know we have stories in the New Testament of people casting out demons, but it’s in the name of Jesus and in the power of Jesus because the stories where people just try it on their own, I think even trying it in the name of Jesus when they’re not connected to Jesus, they don’t belong to Jesus, those demons tear them apart. But Jesus said, get out, and the demon had no choice but to obey.
Authority to Heal
As He made His way through town,
He commanded demons to come out of people, and they obeyed. There’s not even a hint that they fight back. As soon as Jesus shows up, they recognize his authority. You know, there are just some people that walk in the room and everybody notices because they’re so charismatic.
I’m not one of those people, but I know some people like that. That’s how this was with Jesus and these spirits. Only more so. Jesus walks in and all the spirits knew that their time was up just because he was present.
So he cleansed with authority. And then he healed with authority. I chuckle a little when it says that He rebuked the fever. He didn’t even talk to the woman.
He just rebuked the fever. I know a lot of parents who have wanted to try that over the last week or so. But he encounters Peter’s mother-in-law. She was sick with a fever.
He just tells the fever, get out. He rebukes it, tells it to move on in verses 38 and 39. And the fever does it. Sometimes we struggle to control those things even with medication, with modern medical treatment.
He just says, get out. Then verse 40 says that others came to Him with various ailments. He laid His hands on them, and they were all healed. It’d be impressive enough if some of them were healed. But it doesn’t say that some of them were healed.
It doesn’t say that most of them were healed. All of them were healed. Everybody who came to Jesus, he healed them. There was not an ailment that he couldn’t solve.
This is not merely about Jesus being a healer. It’s not just about Jesus doing miracles. Again, in light of what we just saw at Nazareth, this is highlighting the authority of Jesus. That’s why the people keep bringing it up.
He speaks with such authority. He acts with such authority. Because Luke wants us to understand on the heels of what just happened in Nazareth, Jesus walked into Capernaum with undiminished authority. He showed Himself to be the solution to the people’s deepest needs, whatever they were.
There were people there who had serious physical ailments. He can solve that. There were people there who had serious spiritual ailments. He can take care of that.
There were people who just needed to know the truth, and he certainly can take care of that. Luke wants us to understand that Jesus is the answer to all of these things. He has the ability and the authority to fix them if Nazareth had just recognized it. But so many people missed it.
That’s why at the end of his ministry as he’s coming into Jerusalem, Jesus talks about how they did not know the time of their visitation. There were people who just didn’t understand. Probably many of them because they didn’t want to understand, but there were people who just didn’t understand the magnitude of who God had sent into their midst. A moment ago, I told you there was a significant difference between Nazareth and Capernaum.
And it had nothing to do with God loving one more than the other. I’m convinced Jesus visited Nazareth again at the end of his ministry, even after this. And it’s a very similar circumstance. But I don’t think Jesus would have done that if he did not care about the people there at Nazareth.
He wouldn’t have given them a second chance, especially after they tried to throw him off a cliff. He went back because he cared about the people at Nazareth. So the difference is not he just likes the people at Capernaum more. The difference was not that somehow his powers were limited when he walked into Nazareth.
Jesus Works Where People Are Receptive
The difference between Nazareth and Capernaum was that Jesus worked where people were receptive.
And that tends to be how Jesus works. Now, I don’t want to limit God. Not that I could. Even in my own thinking, I do not want to limit God by saying that He cannot do something unless we are willing.
God is God. God can do what He wants. But throughout Scripture, God tends to work where people are receptive to His work. Was that not the point of the story that He told them at Nazareth when He said to Nazareth in their unbelief, you know, there were a lot of widows in Elijah’s day in Israel, but He went to the woman out by Sidon.
He went to the Gentile woman It’s because Israel was rejecting what God was doing. So God sent Elijah and God worked where the people were receptive. Same thing with Elisha. He said there were a lot of lepers in Israel.
That’s what he told Nazareth. There were a lot of lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha. Who got healed? It was Naaman the Syrian because Israel was not listening to what God wanted to do.
So God sent his prophet and he worked among those who were receptive. And that’s exactly what Jesus did here. Nazareth was not receptive. It’s not that Jesus couldn’t have gone ahead and done miracles in their midst.
It’s not that Jesus couldn’t have continued to teach anyway. It’s not that Jesus couldn’t have done something to shake up Nazareth. But Jesus went where the people were receptive. The people in Capernaum recognized that there was something different about Jesus.
They were amazed by him. They recognized the authority of his teaching. They recognized the power that he had to cast out unclean spirits. And they even began to spread the news.
Verse 37 tells us that they recognized someone in their midst unlike anyone else. They had enough trust in him that all those people in verse 40 came to him for their diseases to be healed. The crowd was just hungry for more. It says Jesus had to try to get away for a minute, and the crowd was running all over the place searching for him.
It was something like when my wife tries to step away to take a phone call or simply breathe, and the children form search parties throughout the house. It’s what these people were doing with Jesus. We want to see him some more. We want to hear what he’s going to say.
We want to see what he’s going to do. They were hungry for more. Maybe some of them were only interested in the spectacle, but the point is that they did not reject Him. They were receptive to what he was going to do.
There is a message here for us as well. Again, I do not want to put God in a box and say that He works only where people are receptive, but God tends to work where people are receptive.
The Greater Purpose of His Ministry
And when he eventually moved on to Judea, it was so he could fulfill the Father’s plans.
So he ministered in Capernaum because the people were receptive, but eventually he did leave because he had to fulfill the Father’s plans. Those plans culminated with him giving his life for us. Now, I think at this point, we’re still early enough in Jesus’ ministry. That’s not the final trip to Judea.
But Jesus was always going back and forth, following where the Father led him to work. Part of His ministry in Judea laid the groundwork for Him eventually to go there for the final time and be crucified. He was crucified not as an accident of history and not because He had carelessly provoked the Romans. He was crucified because it was the Father’s plan, in which He willingly participated from beginning to end. He would be the perfect, sinless sacrifice. He would take responsibility for my sin and yours. He would be nailed to the cross, where He would shed His blood and die as the one and only all-sufficient payment for our sins, and He would rise again to prove it.
The miracles, the teachings, all the things that led up to that pointed to the fact that he was who he claimed to be and that he had the authority to do those things, that he had the authority to pay for our sins.
Responding to His Authority
Now that He has paid for our sins, risen again to prove it, and offered forgiveness, we need to understand that He still works where people are receptive. Perhaps you think, “I’ve wandered too far from God. I’ve done too many things. God could never forgive me.” Jesus paid for all of that on the cross. Whatever is holding you back from God, Jesus paid for it. That does not mean God is simply indifferent to it. Jesus had to die for it because it was sin, and sin separates us from God.
But Jesus paid for it so that we could be forgiven, so our slate could be wiped clean and we could have peace with God. Even as a believer, you may think, “He could never use me. He could never use me in that way.” Throughout the Gospels, we see the same lesson taught here at the end of chapter 4: God works where people are receptive.
If you are receptive to what He wants to do, receptive to His authority in your life, and willing to follow Him as a believer, there is no limit to what God can do.
