Wait for Help

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There is a learning curve involved in every new job, and I’m living that out right now. Let me give you an inside peek into what my week has largely sounded like. Stella will knock on the door of my office and say, did you want me to make a phone call about?

And I’ll say, oh, I’m on that. Would you like me to send this letter? I’m already on that.

Would you like me to order this? I just did. And she has looked at me more than once.

Some of you have been in the office and heard these conversations because they’ve happened just about every day. She’s looked at me more than once and said, you know you have an assistant for that. You know you have people to help with that.

And I’ve told her, yes, I know there are people to help with that, but old habits are hard to break. And I told her, I’ve told some of you that have been in there, I am used to pastoring smaller churches. And somebody said, well, this is a smaller church.

I said, well, my first church was a six-to-zero boat. to vote me in. So this is a little bit bigger.

I’m used to out of necessity, if it needs to be done, doing it. Because there’s not always been someone else there to help at various churches. You know, I’ve replaced the leaky toilet if it needed to be replaced.

I’ve mowed the yard. I’ve printed all the prayer lists. And I’m breaking the first rule that an older preacher told me when I started out.

He said, don’t let them know you can do things. So just ignore that part. Just ignore that part.

And I’m not saying there’s never been any help, but I’ve just been used to, okay, if it needs to be done, I’m going to go do it because there may or may not be somebody around in the office. And I told Stella, I said, I really appreciate that there are people here that can help. There’s her and Candy in the office.

Rick has been up here every day helping. Christy, Bob has been here. Several of you have been up here and can help and do things, and it’s not that I’m trying to do it all myself.

I just said, habits are hard to break. I said, it’s going to take a little while to let me be able to let go. And I realized in this job, I cannot do all of this by myself, and I’m going to wear myself out trying to.

Or I should say, trying to do my job and Stella’s. I’m going to wear myself out. And Stella has more energy than I do, if you know her.

I need help. And that’s why there are people to help. And it’s that way in most things we do in life that are worth doing.

We need help. Parenting is wonderful, but I need help. Thank God, Charla is Charla.

Because I couldn’t do all of this on my own. I need help. We all need help in the things that are worth doing because there are some things that we just are incapable of doing on our own, at least doing them as well as they need to be done.

We need somebody to help us. And Jesus addressed this reality. Jesus addressed this reality when he was talking to his followers between the time of his resurrection and his ascension, between the time that he rose again from the dead and when he was raised to be in heaven with the Father.

And I’ve told you that we’re going to spend a few weeks talking about some of those final words that Jesus gave, some of those final instructions, his final words that became our first commitments. And we’re going to look at one of those today where Jesus deals with this subject where we need help. It’s not just that I need to accept help in the office or I need to accept help at home or Charlie needs to accept help at home.

It’s more me helping her, I think, than her helping me. But in our spiritual life, we need help, right? Anybody in here saying I can do it on my own?

Probably don’t raise your hand on that. We need help. And Jesus set up for us to have help.

He warned his disciples that there was a time coming with challenges that they were not going to be able to handle on their own. That if they stood there and said, no, I’ve got this, they really did not have this. And it was going to, it was going to lead to colossal failure on their part.

They needed help. Jesus told them they needed help. And we’re going to look at that today in Luke chapter 24.

If you’ll turn there with me, It looks like it’s on the screen, so you may have already turned there. If you haven’t, go ahead and turn with me to Luke 24, starting in verse 44. And if you would stand with me as we read this morning.

It says, Then he said to them, These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms concerning me. And he opened their understanding that they might comprehend the scriptures. Then he said to them, Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem.

And you are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send the promise of my father upon you, but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high. You may be seated.

So to set the scene here, there were a couple of Jesus’ followers who were traveling on the way to Emmaus. After the resurrection, they were traveling out there. And Jesus showed up when they were along the road.

They didn’t recognize him at first, but he began to teach them. And they realized that it was Jesus. They understood who he was.

And so these two returned to Jerusalem to find the 11 remaining disciples and tell them their news. that they had just seen Jesus who had been raised from the dead. And when they got there, Peter and the rest of the 11 said, we saw that too.

We heard he’s appeared to us as well. And they began to talk, all of them, about the resurrection. They began to all of them discuss what they had seen, what they’d been eyewitnesses to.

And as they were standing there in this room talking, Jesus showed up again. I read this and I would love to have been there and seen what that looked like during this time. Jesus just shows up in random locked rooms. He just comes through the wall.

He’s not a spirit. He has a body, and yet he can just, I guess when you’re God, you can do things like that, right? But he just shows up in these closed-up rooms. It’s not even he knocks on the door, they go answer it, and it’s Jesus.

Jesus is just there in the midst of them. And he began to teach them. Well, first of all, they were afraid, thinking they were seeing a ghost. And so Jesus does the most Baptist thing we see in Scripture and says, do you have anything to eat?

I can think of about five ways jesus could have demonstrated to them that he was not a ghost but the way he picked was to ask for some food you know why because ghosts don’t eat as far as I know so he asked them for something to eat they they give him some food and then after they eat together and I imagine them sitting there looking at this figure about to eat and saying does he really eat the food or does it just is he a ghost or is he not and once he eats they’re satisfied that it’s Jesus, and he begins to teach them some more. And that’s where we picked up in verse 44 that he’s teaching them out of the scriptures. And mind you, at that time, they’re about to be writing the New Testament.

These are the events that happened in the New Testament. So he’s teaching them from the Old Testament scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. And he’s teaching them about his death and resurrection and how it was all part of God’s plan.

He reminded them, too, that during his ministry, he had already warned them that it was coming. And they missed so many of these warnings. They didn’t understand it.

And we like to look down on them for that. But I think if we were there during their day, we would not have, we have the benefit of hindsight. We wouldn’t have understood in their situation either.

But he says, if you think back, I warned you all these times. And then he took them through the scriptures and showed them how his sacrifice was foretold in God’s word all the way back to the earliest days. And his most important job was to fulfill the father’s plans and promises for their salvation.

He said in verse 44, all things must be fulfilled. He said, this was my job. This had to happen.

You all looked at it like it was some tragic mistake, but it had to happen. It was God’s plan. And he talks about the law and the prophets and the Psalms. Now he’s not just picking out a few random words here.

There were three collections of books that made up the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, the Ketuvim, and the Nevi’im. They call it the Tanakh for the Old Testament. That’s the law, the writings, the wisdom books, and the prophets.

And so when somebody would refer to the law, the writings, and the prophets, what they were saying was it’s the whole thing. It’s like saying A to Z of the scriptures. It’s not just found somewhere in the scripture, it’s in the whole thing.

So as Jesus began to show them his role in the law and the psalms and the prophets, what that means is he’s taking them through the Old Testament and showing them how he’s all over it. You can’t shake a stick in the Old Testament without finding something that points to Jesus. And so when he says that these three collections of books, he describes them as concerning me in verse 45, he was telling them that he was the point to all the scriptures.

He was the focus of all the scriptures. That this wasn’t just an accident of history, his death and resurrection This was God’s plan. It was the very center, the very heart of God’s plan was for Jesus to die and rise again.

And he opened the scriptures in verse 45. He opened their understanding so that they would comprehend the scriptures. He gave them the power finally to understand these promises that God had made because so many people missed it.

They didn’t understand. The Pharisees didn’t understand. So many people missed what God was actually doing because they came with their human understanding and it wasn’t enough to really figure out what exactly God was doing.

It was only when he opened their understanding. And on the basis of what he showed them in the scriptures, he explained that his death and resurrection had to happen in the way that they did. I want you to understand that.

I met a very nice lady a while back who thought, well, Jesus got himself crucified by accident, but the father thought, hey, I can use this. No. I mean, she believed Jesus died and paid for our sins, but it It was kind of an afterthought for God.

Well, there’s no such thing as an afterthought for God. This was his plan all along. This was the whole reason Jesus came.

He said it had to happen this way. For Jesus to suffer crucifixion and rise from the dead was the only way to pay for our sins so that God could offer us forgiveness. It wasn’t God’s plan B.

God didn’t wake up on crucifixion morning and say, gee, I didn’t see that coming. It’s more like God looked at the world on crucifixion day and said, I told you. Now Jesus said some other things.

He said all these things had to happen, but now he said some other things had to happen. He said now that the resulting message of repentance, now that Jesus had done the work to purchase forgiveness, the message of repentance had to be proclaimed. He said now somebody has to go and tell people to repent and seek God’s forgiveness.

He said it would begin in Jerusalem, but it had to be spread to the whole world. This isn’t news that you just hold dear to yourself. This is news, kind of like I spoke about in that first message I brought you, that this is good news worth sharing.

This is news that you go take to anybody who’s willing to listen. And he said it had to be spread by those who had been eyewitnesses to what Jesus did. He spells those things out in verses 47 and 48.

The people who know have to be the ones who go and tell. Now those who were eyewitnesses to the fact that Jesus rose again had to go and tell people that Jesus rose again. God could, God could, if he wanted to, arrange things in such a way that he could just make people get saved.

I don’t know, he could show a big video in the sky if he wanted to and tell everybody that way. But God set it up where it had to be, those who were eyewitnesses go out and share the story. And I know you and I are not eyewitnesses to the resurrection, but we’re eyewitnesses to what he’s done in our lives as a result of the resurrection.

And it becomes our responsibility to go out and share. You don’t have to tell anybody anything about Jesus Christ that you don’t know. Go and tell them what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced.

So their job was to go and tell the world how Jesus died, how he rose, and how he was now offering salvation to everybody who believed as a result of what he’d done on the cross. And given such an important job to go and tell the world, they needed the power of God to accomplish it. This is where we get into needing help.

It’s a pretty big job to go and tell the world about Jesus. It’s a pretty big job to go and convince the world about Jesus. And so they needed the power of God.

And we see where Jesus spells it out here. He says, behold, I send the promise of my father upon you, but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power on high. So the father, again, this was part of God’s plan too.

The Holy Spirit was not an afterthought. Sometimes we as Baptists, I don’t know if we’re afraid of the Holy Spirit or if he’s just an afterthought. Folks, he’s the third person of the Trinity.

He’s as wrapped up in this deal as the Father and Son are, and we can’t neglect the Holy Spirit. This was part of God’s plan. The Father promised the power.

Jesus said in verse 49, he was sending the power, and the Spirit was the one bringing the supernatural power. They needed the power that the Holy Spirit brought with them in order to go and do the job that God had given them. It was part of God’s eternal plan to empower them and send them out as witnesses.

But the power of God was so vitally necessary to the task that they were told to stay put until they had the power. Notice what he said in verse 49. Jesus didn’t say, go out and practice.

Go out and try a dry run. Go out and sharpen your skills. Jesus said, you tarry.

That’s old English fancy talk for you. Wait. You stay put until the power comes on you.

Until you have the power from on high, you stay put. They were warned not even to try doing this on their own without being in due with the power from on high, without that power coming and living inside of them. Now you think, what’s the big deal?

They’re just going and telling people about Jesus. You might be thinking that. You might be thinking, oh, good, an excuse not to have to go step out of my comfort zone.

Now that was for them. We now have the Holy Spirit, so we don’t have that excuse. But think about why they needed the Holy Spirit.

Think about the task that they were about to undertake. They were carrying a message to the world that was unlike anything anybody had ever heard. Now, you may hear from people today that, oh, the story of Jesus, it’s just an adaptation of pagan myths, and they’ll talk about Mithras, and they’ll talk about, no, it’s nothing like pagan mythology.

In pagan mythology, there are plenty of stories about people dying and being reborn. There are not stories of someone rising from the dead as the same person in the same body. The story of Jesus Christ was completely unique.

It’s why we really don’t have anybody else that we talk about as a rival story of somebody being raised from the dead. You talk about the resurrection, people think Jesus, because it’s a completely unique moment in history. And so they were taking a story to people that nobody had ever heard anything like this in their lives.

And by the way, that’s why it turned the pagan world upside down. It describes that in the book of Acts. Those who have turned the world upside down have come here also.

If it was just like every other story they’d heard, it wouldn’t have turned their world upside down. So they were going out and trying to tell people this story that was just so far outside of any frame of reference they had. And they were going to carry this story facing persecution from the government.

They were facing opposition and hostility from angry mobs. They were facing subversion by false teachers, people who would want to come in and take the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. just tweak it a little bit.

Problem with that is when you tweak the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, you change it into something completely different. They faced hesitation from listeners. Have you ever heard something the first time and you thought, I don’t know about that.

I have kids, so I hear stories from time to time that I think, I don’t know. And we know from the scriptures, there were a lot of people who the very first time said, gee, I don’t know. That’s a good story, but I’m going to have to think about it.

I want to hear more. And they were moving forward. at great personal cost. This wasn’t just going and talking to people about the weather.

This wasn’t shooting the breeze with somebody in line at the bank. Not that we can do that anymore. Line up at the bank.

They were going and carrying a message that was going to cost them. It was going to be hard. This job was bigger than what they could handle on their own.

So as Jesus told them to go, and He did tell them to go, He told His followers to go into all the world. Actually, as you’re going into all the world, It was just assumed that we were going to go. As we go about our daily lives, make disciples.

As he told them to go, one of his final instructions to them was to rely on the power of God as they went. Don’t try to go on your own. It’s like Stella keeps telling me, you’ve got people to help with this.

And my wife keeps telling me, when I come home exhausted at the end of the day, well, you’ve got people to help with this. Getting it from both sides. Don’t try to do it on your own.

You’ve got people to help with this or that. Jesus told his followers, don’t try to do this on your own. You’ve got help and you can’t do it without that help.

We tend to overestimate our ability to manage things, don’t we? Does anybody else do this? I’m real bad at it.

I’ll make plans. So I’m going to get up early on a Saturday morning and I’ve got all kinds of projects I want to do outside. I’m going to mow and I’m going to weed eat and I’m going to clean out the flower beds and I’m going to clean out the shed and I’m going to build some shelves for charlotte.

and the list suddenly gets really long. And I believe, I’m not just making stuff up. I tell her this is my plan.

I really believe I’m capable of doing all these things. And we get to lunchtime and I’ve barely got half the yard, though. We overestimate our ability to manage things all the time.

We tell ourselves, I’ve got this. I’ve got this under control. I can do this.

We think we’re self-sufficient. We think we’ve got this. And we’re telling others about Jesus, we may think we’ve got this.

Times have changed. You know, we don’t face the same kind of opposition or the same kind of challenges that they did. Or do we?

Even in 2020 in America, I’m not saying we’re facing persecution, but as I’ve heard someone say, we as Christians have definitely lost the home field advantage in the culture. It’s not an easy thing, even in 2020 America, to go out and share the gospel, to go out and point people to Jesus, to go out and make disciples. It’s not easy.

The challenges may look different from what they faced. Let me tell you, the fallen condition of the world we’re engaging has not changed. In 2,000 years, it has not changed.

The darkness is every bit as dark as it was 2,000 years ago. We may not be imprisoned. We may not be thrown to the lions.

Let me tell you, it still requires a great deal of wisdom and discernment and strength to go out and try to represent Christ in this world day in and day out if we’re going to do it the way we’re supposed to do it. It’s not something we can do on our own, in our own power. You may think, I’ve got this.

And you may be able to do it for a little bit. But to do it as consistently and as long-term and as well as we’re supposed to do it, it is beyond our capability. We are still fallen, sinful human beings.

We are spiritually weak apart from God. I mean, think about the world that we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with a world of people around us who are hurting because of things like depression, addictions, domestic violence, suicide, the breakdown of the family, racial strife.

All you’ve got to do is turn on the news, which I don’t recommend. Wait until tomorrow. Spend a refreshing day with the Lord.

The news will still be there. The world will still be crazy tomorrow. But all you have to do is turn on the news to see that we face incredible challenges.

The world is broken. And these are not things that we can fix ourselves. And we have the task of representing Christ to a world that is seething with turmoil.

Do you feel equipped to take full responsibility for figuring out how that works? Do you need help? I know I need help.

We simply cannot be what we’re supposed to be in this world without relying on his power. So that’s why Jesus told his disciples to stay put until they had the power. And they did.

They stayed in Jerusalem. And we know from Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit showed up. And boy, did the Holy Spirit show up.

the Holy Spirit showed up and empowered them. They went out preaching in languages they didn’t know, real languages that other people understood that they had not studied. And it was just, they came bursting out of the upper room so full of the Holy Spirit that the people thought they were drunk.

And I’ve never met somebody drunk who can all of a sudden speak Spanish without ever having studied it. But that’s what happened. It was the Holy Spirit.

And people’s hearts were changed. Guess what? That wasn’t the eloquence of Peter.

That was the Holy Spirit. empowering the message, and affecting the heart of the listener. We are so reliant on the Holy Spirit to do any of this, to do any of what He’s given us to do.

We need the Holy Spirit. We need to be led by Him. And you don’t have to wait for some Acts 2 Day of Pentecost experience because the Bible teaches that once we are in Christ, now that that initial coming of the Holy Spirit has passed, once we are in Christ, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, comes and takes up residence in each and every believer.

You have the Holy Spirit if you belong to Jesus Christ. We need to be led by the Holy Spirit. We need to be praying regularly for His guidance. We need to be listening to His direction because we can get guidance and not follow it, right?

I do this all the time with my GPS. We need to ask for the guidance and we need to follow it. When the Holy Spirit points us in the right direction, we need to follow His leadership.

Without the power of God, we are powerless in this world.

and so for us to look at this story and learn from it and say what are we supposed to do as a result I would tell you what we’re supposed to do is to give up the illusion that we can do any of this on our own and rely on the Holy Spirit start recognizing how reliant we are on the Holy Spirit and asking him to lead us so I don’t have any success talking to people about Christ are you asking the Holy Spirit are you getting him involved are you praying and praying and asking for God to give you the right words before you open your mouth are you asking him to show you who needs to hear of course we know everybody needs to hear but who has he appointed you to talk to what does he want you to do deal with the holy spirit we’ve got to realize we cannot be the witnesses we need to be on our own without it without relying on the holy spirit and there’s one other area where we have to realize that we’re powerless to do anything on our own and that was the whole point that jesus was describing when he took them back through the scriptures see mankind was powerless to save ourselves we’ve all sinned we’ve all disobeyed god we’ve all turned our backs on him and because of our sin we were separated from god and there’s nothing we could do to fix it I mean we could try to do good things but it doesn’t erase the wrong that we’ve done and god saw how powerless we were how hopeless we were and god had a decision to make god could either let us stay separated from him and end up in hell and he had every right to do that or he could deal with the problem of sin and he could save us and that was the whole purpose behind sending Jesus.

That’s why it was His plan from before the foundation of the world to send Jesus to come to earth to live a perfect sinless life so that He could be a perfect sacrifice so He could take our punishment instead of taking punishment that He deserved, but take our punishment instead and be crucified in our place and shed His blood and die for us so that we could be forgiven. And then He proved it when He rose again from the dead.