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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 11:5-13, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 38
• Date: Sunday morning, November 9, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ I read a story this week about a man during the California Gold Rush. Most of you probably learned a little bit about that in school. You all are probably about to when you finish up the Jacksonian era. But you probably learned a little bit about the California Gold Rush.

There were a few people that made quite a bit of money in the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s. There were a lot more people who lost money as a result of it. But there was one story in particular that stuck out to me from this time. It was a man who went to California to prospect for gold, and he felt certain the area that he claimed had gold on the property.

This was about 1853 at Sutter’s Creek, so it was not too far from where the original strike was. He had every reason to believe there was gold on this property, and so he dug, I don’t know what the technical term was, but he excavated. He hunted for the gold, and he hunted and he hunted and he bought more equipment because he was just sure that it was there, and he kept looking and he kept looking and he kept looking, and finally he got frustrated and decided there is no gold here. And so he went and he sold his claim to another man there in town and sold all of his equipment to the same man, and he sold all of this stuff for pennies on the dollar, a fraction of what he’d paid for it. And the man said, I’m going to go out and I’m going to check this out myself.

And so he goes out and says, you know, I can see where he’s dug here. I can see where he’s dug here. I’m going to try one more spot. And he tries one more spot on this claim and he digs down and he strikes gold.

He finds it less than a yard from the last place the man was digging when he gave up. And that is, as far as I can tell, that is a true story. There are some legendary stories, but as far as I can tell, that one’s a true one they have record of, of somebody that just gave up right before their breakthrough was about to happen. And that came to mind, as I’m looking at Luke chapter 11, at where we are in our study of the book of Luke, it came to mind because that’s how we deal with prayer a lot of times. We will pray and we will pray and we will pray and then we will give up just before something happens.

We give up too soon. Sometimes we will treat God like a vending machine and we’ll treat prayer like a transaction. Have you ever stuck money in a vending machine and didn’t get anything out of it? What’d you do then?

You kicked it, okay. Not the answer I was thinking of, but did you continue to put money in it? Who said yes? Okay, you and me.

We’re slow learners. I don’t know if I thought as a kid it was like a slot machine. If I keep putting money, eventually it’ll pay something out. Not that I’ve played slot machines as a kid either, but no, I’d keep putting money in and it wouldn’t give. So eventually you’d stop.

But we treat prayer the same way, like God is a vending machine. And if we pray for something, and you know, I prayed two whole times for that, and I didn’t get it, or God didn’t do anything about it, so I’m done here. And a lot of times we will walk away and we will stop praying when God is not done working. And we give up on God too soon.

That’s what we’re going to look at in Luke chapter 11 this morning. If you haven’t turned there with me, please go ahead and do so. And once you find it, if you’ll stand as we read together from God’s Word, Luke chapter 11, and we’re going to start in, it says verse 5 on the screen, but I want to go back and read the whole prayer that we started last week. So, the first part won’t be on your screen, but we’re going to start back at verse 1, and then read through verse 13, just for context. Luke says, it happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught His disciples.

And He said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins. For we also, ourselves, forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.

That’s what we looked at last week. Verse 5 says, Then he said to them, Suppose one of you has a friend and goes to him at midnight and says to him, Friend, lend me three loaves. For a friend of mine has come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him. And from the inside he answers and says, Do not bother me. The door has already been shut, and my children and I are in bed.

I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs. So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find.

Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives and he who seeks finds and to him who knocks it will be opened. Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish. Will he not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he?

Or he will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he? Or if he has asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? And you may be seated. What Jesus is teaching His disciples there?

Because don’t forget they have asked him, Lord, teach us to pray. They’re watching him in his prayer life, and they’re wanting to learn to do the same thing, so they’re asking, Lord, teach us to pray. And he gives them this model prayer, which, like I told you last week, is not something that we have to memorize and recite the exact same words. It’s more of a pattern, teaching us what our priorities ought to be in prayer, that we start, even if our prayer doesn’t start out with a verbal recognition of the Father’s greatness, that’s the posture that we bring to prayer.

That model prayer demonstrates what our priorities ought to be in prayer. But then he goes, and if you want to learn to pray like Jesus, the most important thing they needed to learn and that we need to learn is to keep going. because as I mentioned last week, that was a common theme throughout Jesus’s life and ministry. He was constantly spending time in prayer. He was constantly going to the Father, especially, and we would see this anytime He’s about to make a big announcement or they’re about to enter a new chapter of ministry, He’s about to appoint somebody, He’s about to do anything big, He would get away alone for prolonged periods of time in prayer.

And so if we want to learn to pray like Jesus, the first thing we have to learn is to keep going. And we see this at the very beginning of this passage that Jesus calls us to pray persistently. He calls us not to give up just because we don’t get the answer that we want the very first time. I won’t name any names just because I haven’t asked, but I have a friend who talks about praying for their family for nearly a decade that they would come back to the Lord and have continued in that prayer. And now, after almost a decade, are beginning to see some small moves in that direction.

Some small glimmers of interest in what the Lord is doing. Asking questions. And my friend has told me, this is the answer to years and years and years of prayer. And I just think about how important that is, and what a pity it would have been if my had given up after five years?

If my friend had given up after once or twice praying for it? What if my friend had stopped at seven years? And it’s not that God can’t, it’s not as though God’s hands are tied and God can’t do anything until we pray X number of times. And once you do that, suddenly God is magically unlocked and He can do what you grant. As I mentioned to you last week in this, prayer is not about bringing God’s will into alignment with ours, it’s about bringing our wills into alignment with His.

And God many times can be working on the prayer request where we see nothing is happening, and it looks like God is just not paying attention to us, and yet God is working in the background in ways that we can’t see, and it’s all going to come together at last minute. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a project that right up until the last minute, it just looks like a mess of pieces, and then it all starts to come together. Some of the stuff we do here can look that way. You walk in on Fall Fest, and you see stuff on every table, and you see stuff sitting everywhere, and it looks like a mess, but Christy has a plan.

And at the last minute, it all comes together, and it looks spectacular. God works very much that way. And so while we think he’s taking eight, nine, ten years to answer this prayer request, really he’s working all the time, and sometimes the last part of it is for our wills to be fully in line with his, and then he shows us what the whole thing has been all along. So he calls us to pray persistently. He talks about this story of a man who goes to his friend to try to get some loaves of bread.

And the reason he’s in such dire need for bread at midnight, I have never been so desperate for bread at midnight that I’ve gone and tried to wake up my neighbor’s. Children’s Tylenol, maybe, but never a loaf of bread. The reason why he is in such dire need of this bread at midnight is because a friend of his has come on this long journey, and hospitality is hugely important in Middle Eastern culture, especially at that time. If you have somebody who has come in, and they’ve come from a long journey, and especially if you know them, but even if you don’t know them, and they come to your house, you are expected to put out a spread to show your hospitality and your generosity, and if you fail to do that, it is a major social faux pas. I heard somebody use the word social catastrophe recently, talking about one of these situations in the Gospels.

It would have been a complete disgrace if he said, hey, I’m glad you made it in for your journey. Don’t really have anything for you right now, but I’ll see you in the morning. No, he needed to put out something for his friend right then, to be able to refresh himself before he went to bed. And so facing this kind of disgrace, he goes next door to his neighbor.

Verse 5 says he goes to beg his friend. He’s pounding on the door. And verse 7, his friend says, don’t bother me. Leave me alone. I’m in bed.

The kids are in bed. The dogs are in bed. You know, everybody’s locked up. It does not say the dogs are in bed.

But in our culture, everything’s locked down for the night. Sorry, you’re not getting in here. And we might think, what’s the big deal? Especially if you know him.

I’m not talking about one of those ring doorbell camera videos on the internet that some strange person shows up on your door at 3 a. m. This is somebody you know. What’s the big deal? In our day, he might call first.

Give him some bread. In their day and age, this was a major imposition. Many times, they slept in one-room houses. And everybody slept in one bed together.

One bed area. They might take all the mats and push them together. And so if you’re getting up and lighting the lights so you can see what you’re doing, and you’re getting out of bed, it’s going to disturb the kids. It’s going to disturb the servants. It’s going to disturb whoever is.

The whole house is going to be awake. On top of which, it took a lot of effort. I couldn’t find what they looked like, but I read descriptions where these locks were apparently pretty complicated to try to keep people out at night. Because in that day, they would just leave the door open all day.

But when it came nighttime, you bolt that door, and you go through this complicated procedure to make sure it’s secure, and nobody gets in or out. So for him to ask, for us, it just seems like, why not just give him some bread? This was a major imposition. this is somebody showing up at your house in the middle of the night and asking for a large loan and you have they need the cash right then you may have it you may not but you also need that you know this is you know it’s hard to fault the friend who says no he’s not just being selfish so he refuses to help but Jesus points out in verse 8 the man could still get what he wanted or what he needed by continuing to ask all the friend had to do was make it more inconvenient to not answer the door than to answer the door so you keep pounding you keep yelling louder everybody in the house is going to be awake anyway and so the man would keep asking this this word, some translations have it as persistence, some have it as shamelessness, some have it as insistence. It’s a word that we don’t have one perfect translation for.

All of those are correct. But what it describes in Greek, this word that you may see as persistence or shamelessness or whatever else, in verse 8 that he tells him that because of this he’ll get what he wants, is basically a lack of sensitivity to what’s proper, to what’s expected. He’s not minding his manners. Some of the definitions given to it are insolence, audacity, impudence, shamelessness. He’s not saying be obnoxious.

But if you’ve ever been in such a dire need that you’ve been willing to make a nuisance of yourself, you understand. Maybe you had a child that was very, very sick, and you’re rushing all over town trying to find the pharmacy that has the right medication that is going to take care of that illness, and you’re begging everybody. Can you just check in the back? That kind of shamelessness where you’re willing to beg because the need is so great. You’re willing to make a nuisance of yourself if necessary.

Jesus said because of that kind of attitude, the neighbor would get out of bed and give him whatever he needed. now he is encouraging us to be persistent in prayer he’s encouraging us to continue asking but this is not a comparison between god and the neighbor okay this is a contrast between god and the neighbor because the point is that if persistent asking would pay off with the neighbor who’s really put out by having to do this then jesus’s point is how much more will our persistence pay off in asking a God who desires to give us what we need. Again, we’re talking about what we need. But for God, it’s not an imposition to give us what we need. It’s what He wants to do. And so Jesus’s point is, if this guy who is so put out and annoyed that he finally opens the door, if persistence pays off with him, how much better will it work with the God who loves you?

Just keep asking is the point that he gives us. Unlike the friend, unlike the neighbor here, God is delighted to take care of us. And sometimes that means working in us before granting the request. Sometimes the matter is I need to change you a little bit before giving you the thing that you’re asking for.

Because prayer more often than not deals with us as much as it deals with our circumstances. God wants to give us what we need God makes no promise to give us everything we want but God wants to give us what we need God wants to take care of us God wants to do what’s best for us and sometimes we give up too quickly in asking because maybe the way he’s taking care of us is shaping us and changing us in order to be in a place where we can receive the thing we need. So Jesus calls us to pray persistently. Jesus also calls us to pray expectantly in verses 9 and 10. So building on that story, Jesus moves on to say in verse 9, So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you.

Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds. And to him who knocks, it will be opened. each of these things where he says, ask and seek and knock, the way the Greek verb tenses are there, it’s not a one-time thing. He’s saying, keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking.

But we’re doing this with the expectation that when we ask, we’re going to receive. When we seek, we’re going to find. When we knock, the door is going to be opened. Now, one thing I want to caution you about here, as He gives us these three things, repeating them, because sometimes God has to tell us the same thing over and over, doesn’t He?

Especially for me, who would keep putting the money back in the machine. Slow learner. He has to tell me multiple times. So, He’s given us these three ways of saying this, ask and seek and knock, and it’s kind of an escalation, but it’s three things written there to remind us to keep going and to expect.

But one thing we’ve got to caution ourselves about there is to understand what it is that we’re to ask and seek and knock about. We could very easily take one passage of Scripture, verses 9 and 10, out of context, and just say, God will give us whatever we ask for. Jesus could have easily walked up to some random stranger on the streets of Jerusalem and said, ask and seek and knock and you’ll receive and you’ll find and it’ll be open to you. And we would take that as a blank check from God. While the scripture says what it says, it doesn’t say what it says in isolation from other parts of scripture.

And we have to remember that Jesus is saying this to people who have just come and said, would you teach us how to pray like you do? And people that he has spent months and in some cases years pouring into them and teaching them about the kingdom and just training them as we saw all through chapters 9 and 10 to be on mission for God and to be kingdom focused. Knowing they have that foundation, telling them ask and you’ll receive is a very different situation. About once a week my wife and I try to go have lunch together because all of our kids are in school. And so we can actually talk.

And usually we’ll say, one of us will say to the other Thursday, I think it was, I said, we can go wherever you want to go. And I can say that to my wife because we have common goals and values. And one of those goals and values is to not be in crippling debt. Okay.

I do not tell my children, we can go eat wherever you want, because they will want to go to all the places and order all the things. But I know there’s that baseline foundation that we understand in the background when I say, I’ll take you wherever you want. It’s the same way with Jesus telling this to his disciples. It’s not just to random people off the street, it’s to people who have been trained all this time to be kingdom-focused and mission-minded. And when our focus is on God and His kingdom and His glory and our part in that and doing what is right and what He’s called us to do, what He’s designed us to do, when that’s our focus in life, He can come to us and say, ask and you’ll receive.

Seek and you’ll find. Knock and it’ll be open to he’s able to give us this blanket promise because our prayers are going to be different. What we’re asking for is going to be different. And so he tells us to pray with this expectation that God is going to do what we ask.

And sometimes this is where persistence in prayer changes us and shapes us and pays off. Have you ever had an idea that you thought was phenomenal until you told it to somebody out loud? Happens to me all the time. I’ll tell Charla or Christy or Katie something, and you know that sounded a lot smarter in my head. Have you ever been praying and trying to tell God what you need, and once you start explaining what you think you need and why you think you need it, suddenly you have a hard time justifying it to God.

Same. Lord, that sounded a lot better when I just thought about it. Probably because the reasons we convince ourselves we need that, as we’re praying it to God, we know that He knows that’s not true. So sometimes just spending an extended period of time getting real honest with God is going to change the things that we ask for.

And as we persist in time, sometimes we’re praying for things we think we need, and God refines our perspective to where we understand that’s not what I needed. And so we find ourselves, instead of asking for what we want and thought we needed, we just convinced ourselves it was a need, God is refining us and shaping us to ask and seek and knock for what we really do need and for what He wants to do in us. But God has called us to pray with the expectation that something is actually going to happen. To pray with the expectation that He is actually going to work in that circumstance. That I can pray God take care of this need. and he’s either going to take care of that need or he’s going to show me that it’s really not a need and lead me to pray for something else that he’s going to take care of he’s going to do something but we cannot come to God and pray with the expectation that he’s not going to hear me anyway okay, then why would we do it? If we don’t think God hears us, if we don’t think God pays attention, if we don’t think God can be bothered to be concerned about little old me, why would we pray anyway?

The only reason why we would ever pray is because we believe God hears us. He’s told us he would. As a matter of fact, his word says to come boldly before the throne of grace. that doesn’t mean that we walk in like we own the place but we come in like we’re going to see our father i’ve used this illustration before but i don’t know why but so many people in this room act weirded out about coming to my office like i’m scary but i’ve been told well it’s because it’s the pastor’s office i know but i’m i’m the pastor so it shouldn’t be scary. But some of you, a few of you still act like, oh, I’m sorry to bother you.

Not Abigail. She just marches in. This is my daddy’s office. Sometimes when I’m in the middle of a meeting, it’s not just Abigail, they’ll all do it. But this is my daddy’s office.

And I try to keep them in line where they know they don’t own the place, pick up after yourselves, that sort of thing. But that’s kind of the way we’re supposed to approach the Lord. he’s told us because we’re his we come boldly before the throne of grace not terrified that he’s going to zap us if we knock but my dad is in there my father’s in there so i’m going to go ask him for what i need so we we come to him with the expectation that he’s going to do something that he’s going to hear us and that it’s in some way he is going to work out the situation or work through us for our good and for His glory. And then finally this morning, Jesus calls us to pray confidently. This is a little bit different from praying expectantly, but He goes to this story, this illustration He uses about a son asking a father. And in some translations, it’ll say, if he asked him for bread, will he give him a stone?

That would go over real well at my house. Here’s your rock. Some of my kids I can’t tease with. But if your son asks you for a fish, I’m hungry, can I have a fish to eat?

Got to be able to trust that your father’s not going to hand you a serpent. You know that that’s not going to happen because I’m not going to have a snake in my hand. All right? They know.

But he says, what kind of father would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or if you come and ask for an egg, because we have those all over the place. If you come and ask for an egg, gives you a scorpion instead. We also have those, but I also don’t carry them around. Jesus’ point is, what kind of father does that?

And really, unless somebody is seriously mentally ill, a father does not do those kinds of things. I read where one commentator was talking about some terrible people in history who have been fathers but have still not done things like this with their own kids. Well, and the example was used of Hitler, who was not a father, as incredibly evil as that man was. There are videos of him handing gifts to little children whose parents brought them to his house in the mountains, whatever.

There are videos of him being kind to children, as awful, as evil as he was. The point is, who does that? Nobody in their right mind does that. We cannot approach the Father with the mindset that He’s that kind of Father, that He’s going to do those kinds of things. When even those of us who are evil, and that’s on a spectrum there, because we’re evil compared to God, but it’s not saying we’re all as evil as Hitler or as evil as somebody who would do these things.

But God is the best Father there is. Why would we approach Him thinking, oh, He’s going to give me a scorpion instead of an egg? no we pray confidently not because of the circumstances not because we know how it’s all going to work out but because we trust him even an earthly father in his right mind would not treat his children this way and it’s kind of like the the contrast with the friend the neighbor who gives the bread finally it’s not saying God is like that it’s saying God is even better than that so if we could trust that an earthly father is going to even if he’s a bad man he’s going to give good gifts to his children if he’s in his right mind, how much more can we trust that God as the ultimate Father is going to give good gifts to his children when they come to him? God is even better than that. So we can pray confidently.

And by the way, he doesn’t just say every gift. He’s going to give the Holy Spirit. This is literally an expression of God being with us at every moment. it’s not just that God doesn’t okay a lot of people have the idea that God doesn’t care about them individually it’s not just that that is untrue but that is so untrue that God has given the Holy Spirit the third person of the Trinity to live inside you and go everywhere with you at every moment so that you are never out of communication with God so that you never lose that contact. And that kind of God who would go to those kinds of lengths to care for us and to protect us and to guide us is a God we can pray to confidently, not because we know how every circumstance is going to play out when we pray for it, but because we know who God is.

We know what kind of father he is. And it makes me think of one of my favorite quotes from Adrian Rogers years ago, faith is not merely believing that God can. And we come to our prayer sometimes with that attitude. I know God can do whatever I’m about to ask, but faith is not merely believing that God can, it’s trusting that God will do what He has said. And when God says He wants to give good gifts to His children, when God says He wants to care for us, when God says He will never leave us or forsake us, we can pray with confidence because we know who God is.

I don’t know exactly how He’s going to answer the prayer, but I know that if he doesn’t do exactly what I’m asking, I know that what he gives me is going to be better in the long run. We trust God and we can pray confidently. We have this confidence that God will fulfill his promises. God has never not fulfilled his promises.

Case in point, God spent thousands of years telling the Jewish people that he would send a Savior. And when the time came, he sent his only begotten son. He didn’t send a lamb, he didn’t send a bull, he didn’t send a goat. He sent his only begotten son, who came willingly to the cross and took responsibility for my sin and for yours. So that he could take all of our punishment.

He could make all the payment that was necessary so that you and I could be forgiven, our slate could be wiped clean. God goes to extraordinary lengths to keep his promises. Now, if you’re a believer, I hope that you will take what Jesus says to heart and pray persistently and expectantly and confidently.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 11:1-4, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 37
• Date: Sunday morning, November 2, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ Well, I’ve been known periodically to hold a training conference where I teach the same material over and over, and we usually host it at my house, in the kitchen, my older two kids and me. Y’all thought I was going to talk about some theological training, didn’t you? Part of being a parent is always teaching. I host these training seminars on how to clean a pan.

Now, there’s more than one right way to clean a pan, but there are a whole lot more wrong ways to clean a pan. And I’ve taken over doing that because I get even more frustrated than my wife does about pulling pans out of the cabinet, and they are dirty. So, I’m explaining, you know, you can’t just use the brush because you’re not getting all the grime off of there. You’ve got to use the sponge.

You’ve got to wipe it down. But you do need that brush. You’ve got to get around the rivets. Really, you’ve got to do all of this. And then you run your hand over it to make sure there’s nothing stuck to it that you can feel.

And how do you clean Dad’s cast iron? You don’t. That’s the right answer. You don’t.

Not until you’re 25. I might trust you with it then. It’s important, not only for our health now, but for their life in the future, that they know how to do things like clean a pan. When there’s something important that needs to be done, we need to be taught.

Sometimes you recognize that something is important, and there’s the potential here for failure. So, you actually say to somebody else, I want you to teach me this, or I want you to walk me through it. I learned much of what I know how to do with cars, building things, and working outside from my grandfather. And either him saying, Let me show you how to do this, or me saying, Would you show me how to do this? Even just Thursday, I was looking at the possibility of needing to paint a vehicle, and I know nothing about painting a vehicle.

I called Huey and said, Tell me about this. I need you to, I’m not, first of all, when I call, I’m not asking you to do it, so you can relax. sometimes when you get that call hey tell me about that people are wanting you to do something now I just need you to tell me what the pitfalls are here what I should do what I shouldn’t do because there’s a potential I could mess something up here teach me because it’s important we do that with God’s word we recognize the need to be taught that’s part of the reason for being here is to come and be taught I need to be taught as well that’s why I sit on sit in on Sunday school classes. That’s why I listen to preaching podcasts. We all need to be taught, and the more important the subject is, the more important the subject is, the more important it is that we seek out that teaching. And I suspect that’s what was on the disciples’ minds when they came to Jesus and asked Him, Teach us to pray.

We’ve been studying piece by piece through the book of Luke for the better part of this year, and we’re now up to chapter 11. And that’s what we’re going to look at today, the beginning of this conversation, where the disciples come to Jesus and say, Teach us to pray. Teach us to pray. So, if you haven’t already, please turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 11.

And we’re going to see this conversation, the beginning part of this conversation, which we’ll follow up with, Lord willing, next week, on Jesus teaching them about prayer in response to their request. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 11, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you where you can follow along. And before I start reading it, I will point out that you may notice based on, depending on what translation you’re looking at, the wording may be a little bit different. It may be different from what I read and what’s on the screen, especially if you come on Sunday nights.

I normally make a handout that shows the comparisons of those things and shares where the Gospels line up together. I’ve prepared those for this morning since we don’t have tonight. You don’t have to be part of our Sunday night class to pick one of those up, but they are out there if you want one, and it’ll walk you through. Oh, this manuscript says this, and this one has this. That’s why different translations say different things, so don’t just think, I forgot how to read and left out parts of what I’m looking at.

Luke chapter 11, starting in verse 1, it says, It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples. And he said to them, When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.

And you may be seated. As you read that, you may think, well, that sounds different from how I remember it. I memorized it too as a child, the Lord’s Prayer or our Father, depending on what church context you grew up in. And that comes from Matthew. It’s already a little bit different because they were two different situations.

Some variation of this model prayer was taught a couple of different times by Jesus. In the Matthew version, he is standing there as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and he’s teaching his followers about a variety of topics, about what it means to live and represent God’s kingdom, and he begins to teach them this model prayer. And it is just a model. It is not something that all our prayers have to be recitation of this.

It’s a model for us. It’s an example. It’s a pattern. And Jesus gives them this pattern.

What we’re looking at in Luke is a completely separate incident. Quite a bit later in Jesus’ ministry, where the disciples have actually come to him. In Matthew, when Jesus does this, he’s just teaching, and he’s setting the agenda. In Luke, in this later incident, Jesus is just sitting there praying. And the disciples see this, and they say, Lord, teach us to pray.

And so, Jesus gives them a variation on this model prayer. Now, even though the lines are a little bit different from what it says in Matthew, and it’s not a contradiction. Again, it’s two different events. If you tell a story, and then I ask you the next day to repeat the story, some of the details are going to be different; you’re going to include some details the second time that you didn’t include the first time, and vice versa, but the gist of the story is going to be the same.

That’s what’s going on here. Jesus gives them this prayer in response to them, because even though he’s taught on prayer, and they’ve seen him model prayer for them, sometimes we just need a reminder. Do you usually only have to be told things one time? I know I usually have to be told more than once. I know growing up, our parents said, How many times should I have to tell you?

Just once. But we get old and our memories fail us. And as a matter of fact, we had a situation yesterday where Charla said, Did you tell one of the kids they could do such and such? And I said, I don’t remember even discussing that.

Like an hour before, apparently, I had. I have no recollection of this conversation, but we have cameras in our house. Apparently, I can remember the combination to my locker from high school. But I can’t remember a conversation an hour ago.

I’m afraid I might need to see a doctor about that. But we have to be reminded. Very rarely did Jesus tell his followers something once, and they went, Ah, we got it. To the point that Jesus would also say, yeah, you got it.

No, they had to be told multiple times. And so even though he’s taught on prayer, they still need that refresher course. And so, they come to him and say, Would you teach us how to pray? Because they’re watching him do it. Lord, teach us how to pray.

And he goes through this model prayer. And he goes on, starting in verse 5, to teach more on prayer after this model. Like I said, we’ll get into that hopefully next week. But I want us just to focus in on this model prayer this morning and some things that we can learn from it in order to help our prayer life.

And a strong prayer life, a faithful prayer life, is so vitally important in the life of a believer. I heard one evangelist say that prayer was not the preparation for his work. Prayer was the work. That he was out trying to win thousands of people to Christ.

And you’d think, oh, you pray in preparation for going and doing that. No, the real work is you being there on your knees before God, praying, and then you walk out and just see what God does. And for each of us, that’s true. Whatever God has called you as his child, as a believer in him through Jesus Christ, whatever he’s called you to do, our prayer is not preparation for that. Our prayer is the actual work and then standing back to see what God does through us.

We cannot have a healthy walk with him without prayer. We cannot represent him well without prayer. Prayer is, I am scared to death, I will tell you. I’m scared to death to preach this message because prayer is so vitally important to our Christian life that the last two times I have preached a series of messages on prayer, my entire life has fallen apart because Satan doesn’t like it.

And so, I’m scared to death to be talking to you about prayer today, but I know God is bigger than Satan. What did we learn from VeggieTales? God is bigger than the boogeyman. So, I’m going to trust God and I’m going to pray about it. But we need to learn some things that we can apply to our prayer life in order to be as strong in our walk with the Lord as we ought to be.

The first thing that we see in this passage is that the first thing that’s important here about prayer is that prayer helps us to become more like Jesus. The goal of our Christian life is to be more like Jesus. I don’t care how many people you have influenced. I don’t care what you’ve done and what you’ve built.

If you’re not becoming like Jesus, you’re not doing the Christian life right. That is His goal for us. That is what He has destined us to. Romans 8 says, whom He did foreknow, He did also predestine to be conformed to the image of His Son.

His plan for us is to be more like Jesus, and that’s what the Holy Spirit is doing in us. And part of being like Jesus is going to the Father in prayer. These people who are asking Jesus, Would you teach us to pray? They’re the ones that are following Him around. He is their rabbi, and they are patterning their lives after Him.

They’re trying to learn from Him, trying to serve Him, learning at His feet, as we talked about last week with Mary, and prayer had to be a central part of that, because they see Him in the midst of this work, verse 1 tells us He’s just there praying. He’s not putting on a show. He’s not putting on a prayer lecture at this point. We’re not having a big conference on prayer.

He’s just there praying. He’s just there spending time with the Father, conversing with the Father, and they see this. They see Him in a certain place, and they recognize that if they’re going to follow him, that’s something they’ve got to do as well. You and I cannot be like Jesus if we refuse to do what he did. Let me say that again, because when I realized that, that kind of hit me hard.

We cannot be like Jesus if we refuse to do what he did. Now, to the extent that we’re able, we have a different nature from Jesus. He’s God in human flesh. We can’t walk on water unless He enables it and He tells us to, and then don’t take your eyes off of Him.

We can’t die on the cross for anybody’s sins. I can’t pay the penalty for anybody’s sins. But to the extent that we are actually capable of doing it, we cannot be like Jesus if we refuse to do what He did. And one of those things was prayer.

Prayer was one of the most common themes of His life. As a matter of fact, it was a regular occurrence. It was a daily occurrence, but especially as he was about to take another big step, there would be prolonged periods of prayer that the disciples would find Jesus in. Sometimes he would go away to spend an extended time in prayer. And something that always strikes me when we look at passages like this is if Jesus needed to pray. what would give me the idea that I don’t we get so busy that we just think oh I don’t have time we talked about that some last week I think with the idea of slowing down following Mary’s example instead of Martha’s that if we make our time with the Lord something that oh I’ll do it when I get a chance then we’ll chase that chance all day and we’ll fill in the day with other things.

Prayer has to be the priority, or it just won’t happen. And if Jesus, who is actually the infinite eternal God of this entire universe, who created everything out of nothing by just the words of His mouth, if He’s God the Son, if He needs to spend time in prayer to have that constant connection with God the Father, in order to go and do the things that he was supposed to do. It boggles the mind that you and I think that we can go through one day of serving him and not need that same thing. If we’re going to follow his example, there needs to be that prayer. And they recognize that, and so that’s why they see him praying, and they want to do that just the same way that he does.

Following his example and submitting to his authority, it says, after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples. It was a pretty common thing, evidently, back in that day that, you know, each rabbi would have his followers, his students, the people who would come and follow him and want to be like him and learn from him. And it was a common occurrence that these rabbis would write their own prayers that they would use and that they would teach to their followers. It’s not a bad thing to have a written prayer. It depends on what the content of it is.

And as long as you pray it with sincerity, I mean, we can even pray the Lord’s Prayer and not mean it, just go through the words. That does nothing. It’s okay to recite a prayer if you, first of all, if it’s in line with Scripture, and if you mean it sincerely. But these rabbis, they would write their prayers, they would teach them to their disciples, and their disciples would pattern their prayer life after the rabbi. when they come to Jesus they’re saying and say teach us to pray like you do they are submitting to his authority and saying we want to be like you down to the way we pray because they figured out a long time ago that Jesus had something they didn’t have and they were willing to yield themselves to it wasn’t oh we’ve seen you pray we want to do that too so we’re going to go and figure it out on our own no we want to learn to pray exactly how you do and so when we look at Jesus as the example of how to pray, we’re submitting to His authority, praying like Jesus.

Praying like Jesus is one of the ways we identify Him and acknowledge Him as our master, and then we get to His answer, and there are a couple of very important things that this pattern teaches us. Again, I mentioned at the outset of this, this is not the only thing we’re supposed to pray. Every prayer doesn’t have to be our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It’s not wrong to pray that if you mean it. But every prayer is not limited to that.

This is a pattern. This tells us some of the things that we ought to pray. This tells us some of the priorities that we ought to pray. And I love that when Jesus prays, he teaches us to start out by addressing God.

It’s not a, because prayer, prayer is not just to get what we want. The ultimate goal of prayer, more than anything, is to bring our heart in line with God’s heart and bring our will in line with His. And so, we ought to approach it from a, not a standpoint of, God, I’m going to come to you with a list of things, and if you could fill that list for me, I’d sure appreciate it. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.

Instead, when we pray, and it’s fine to ask God for the things that we want and need. He already knows we might as well admit it to Him. There’s nothing wrong with asking God for things. But that’s not the ultimate goal of prayer. And if we do it right, we may come to God with that list of things that we want.

But as we’re praying, or things that we need, but as we’re praying, we begin to notice a shift taking place in our hearts. that we recognize that maybe that’s not exactly what I need after all. Or maybe the thing I want is not what I need. And maybe God begins to impress on our hearts something different, and so we begin to pray a different way. Has that ever happened to anybody else in here?

Constantly go to God thinking, this is what I want, this is what I need. And as I’m praying, God, would you just fix this? And what I find is sometimes he’ll fix this, but more often than not, what he does is fixes my heart about this. Because as I begin to pray, I recognize there’s an attitude here that’s not in line with his will. And prayer is there to bring our wills into line with his.

And so, our prayer begins by recognizing the greatness of God. Even if we don’t start out with something like this, oh God, you’re so great. that is the attitude that we come to the very place of prayer with. Our prayer starts with that attitude of recognizing the greatness of God. Now, you may be in a situation of just, all you have time to pray is, Lord, help me.

That’s fine. You don’t have to start out with the flowery, our Father who art in heaven, please help me. He knows who you’re talking to. But it’s the attitude that we come with, this is first thing, this is first priority, recognizing the greatness of God. And if our hearts aren’t already there when we come to the place of prayer, then that’s where we need to start, is reminding ourselves how great He is.

And it can be something as simple As before we get into the list of what’s on my mind, what’s on my heart, Lord, I just come to you this morning recognizing how awesome you are and how much you’ve blessed me that I don’t deserve, I haven’t earned the right to come before you at all. But just out of your own goodness, you even made it possible, and you tell me to come to your throne anyway. if we start our prayers with a recognition of God’s greatness whether it’s from our lips or already there in our hearts it’s going to set the stage for everything that happens next that’s why he says father hallowed be your name the greatness of God one of the things that we see just in that phrase right there hallowed means to be treated as holy. God, His greatness, His holiness is so incomparable that even His name is holy. Even His name is to be treated as a holy thing. That’s the heart of our prayer life.

But there’s something else unusual about the way that Jesus prayed. At that time, The Jews talked to the Father. He was referred to as the Father. But Jesus addressed him as my Father, or our Father, or just Father.

Jesus addressed him in personal terms. Just calling him father like this was not something they did. And it speaks to the closeness of the relationship that God has invited us into. That God is not a, even though he could be in his greatness, he could be distant, and he could be unapproachable.

He is not a distant, cold, unapproachable father. He is a father who loves us. who doesn’t owe us his time and his interest, but he loves us enough that he’s chosen to give it to us. And so, when we come to God in prayer, recognizing his greatness, we’re recognizing that he’s great not only in who he is, but he’s great in what he’s done for us. And then he says, your kingdom come. Our prayers are supposed to be kingdom focused It’s very easy for them to become me focused What I want, what I need And again, there’s nothing wrong with those things That’s part of the discussion about the daily bread that we’ll get to God wants us to come to Him for those things but our priority is seeing God’s will to be done and for his rule to be realized everywhere.

God’s already the king. He’s already the ruler. He’s already the sovereign Lord of this entire universe. He can’t get any more sovereign than he already is, but we’re praying for His greatness to be recognized by everyone.

We want to see that kingdom expand in the hearts of men. And so, we recognize His greatness, and we pray for Him to be glorified. And so, everything about prayer starts from this posture of bringing our wills into line with the Father. But then we come to the second part of this where our prayer acknowledges our dependence on God. We depend on Him for our daily provision.

Give us this day our daily bread. We’re dependent on Him. There’s a lot of debate about what this phrase daily bread means. When Charla and I were in Santa Fe on our anniversary trip, she said, you know, I never just get to sit and read. so while we’re on our trip I’d love to sit in a coffee shop and read a book do my bible study for I think it’s Janie’s bible study from Tuesdays I’d love to sit there and work on that and I said that’s fine we can take an afternoon and do that so we’re sitting in a coffee shop and she looks over at me and she says now when Jesus says give us this day our daily with Irenaeus that he’s talking about our daily provision, or he’s talking about, or Cyprian said the word of God, or do you think like Augustine meant the Lord’s Supper, and I’m going, Charla, I already married you.

You don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to woo me. Say more things. I just fell in love with her all over again, okay? Kind of nerd out on these things.

There’s this debate. What does he mean? I will say, I don’t think he meant the Lord’s Supper, because the disciples had no idea what that was going to be yet. But as far, oh, are we talking about the spiritual things? Are we talking about the daily things?

And some people say, oh, he can’t be talking about the daily, the stuff we need, the actual bread for that day because that’s not important enough to be included in this prayer. Excuse me, he tells us to come to him for our daily bread. He uses that example for a reason. So when he says, give us this day our daily bread, people argue unnecessarily.

Is it what we need spiritually or is it what we need physically? Yes. Whatever we need. I don’t see why we have to make things so complicated sometimes.

Have to argue back and forth, well, is it this need or is it that need? It’s our needs. Whatever we need. If you’re trying to figure out where your next meal is going to come from, you can go to Him about that. If you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to pay the mortgage, you can go to Him about that.

The mundane things of life, the things that don’t seem mundane to us, but it’s our everyday stuff about how we’re going to get by. He cares because He cares about you. The spiritual stuff as well. The emotional stuff.

The stuff we can’t get over, the stuff we can’t get past. the stuff that’s dragging us down we can go to him whatever our daily bread is whatever need you have you can go to him he told us to cast all of our cares upon him because he cares for us we depend on him for daily provision the food we eat he provided it yes you may have worked and earned the money but who gave you the legs and the hands and the back and made them work to go out and do that? And at any moment, he could say, no, that’s the last breath, but he hasn’t. And that’s his provision. We depend on him daily. We depend on him for spiritual restoration as well.

Verse 4, forgive us our sins for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. I will tell you that the Bible is too clear in too many places that our salvation is the forgiveness of our sins it is by the grace of God through faith alone not anything that we earn or deserve so he is not here when he’s talking about forgiveness of sins he’s not talking about how we somehow earn our way into heaven by being forgiving or that if we fail to forgive or fail to forgive quickly enough, didn’t realize that was going to be a tongue twister, that somehow we’re going to forfeit our salvation. But we know that even if the relationship with God does not go away, that sometimes the fellowship with God can be broken. Have you ever gotten into a fight with your spouse? I can’t remember the last one we had before this, but we kind of got mad at each other at Bucky’s.

Because I was getting overwhelmed by the amount of people, and she mistook my being overwhelmed for judging how much she was spending. We were not happy with each other by the time we got out to the truck, or whatever we drove. Were we still married? Come on, I told you there are no trick questions here.

Were we still married? Okay, yes. Check my ring. Yes, we’re still married.

Did we need to have a talk when we got out there and get all that sorted out? Otherwise, it’s going to be an awkward ride home. That can happen in our relationship with God. We’ve sinned, we’ve messed up, even as a child, and we need forgiveness.

We’re still His child, but there’s a problem in the relationship that needs to be dealt with. That fellowship is not what it ought to be. And so we’re talking about asking that kind of forgiveness, not that we’ve stopped being His child and need that forgiveness salvation-wise, but we need that fellowship to be restored with Him. And that fellowship with God is not going to be right Until we’re willing to extend that same kind of forgiveness to others. That’s why he says, forgive us, for we ourselves forgive those who have trespassed against us.

But we depend on him for spiritual restoration. When there’s a problem in our relationship with God, when that fellowship is broken, it’s never his fault. Because he’s never the one that moved away from it. like I used to see my grandparents sit next to each other in the seat of the truck one of those old trucks that didn’t have the individual seat what are they called bench seating and she would always sit next to him and I heard somebody tell a story one time about a couple like that that the wife said we don’t we don’t even act like we like each other we don’t even sit next to each other in the truck anymore and he said I’m not the one who moved when there’s something wrong in the relationship with God he’s the same as he’s ever been if the relationship is not what it ought to be we’re the ones who moved and we’re the ones who need the forgiveness and we rely on him for that spiritual restoration and so every day we’re coming back to him saying Lord if I’ve messed up, or sometimes we know how we’ve messed up, forgive me of this. We always want a clean slate with the Lord. And then verse 4 says, lead us not into temptation.

We depend on Him for wisdom and protection. This is not the idea that God is tempting us. But you think about it like Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. He’s leading us, and sometimes we will walk through that valley of temptation with Him.

He is not the one tempting us, but He’s the one protecting us from the temptation, and we’re asking that He will help us and preserve us so that we don’t fall into the temptation when it presents itself. We depend on Him for wisdom and for protection. We depend on Him for every single thing that we need. This is what Jesus taught us in prayer.

So, we never come to God in an arrogant way, saying, this is what I need done and I need you to do it. We come to Him recognizing that He’s the one in control, that every good thing we have comes from Him, that we are utterly dependent on Him, and every good thing we have is just a gift of His grace because He’s that good and because He’s that kind. We’re recognizing who God is, and if we will pray that way, it will change. It does not always immediately change our circumstances, but it will almost always change our attitude toward our circumstances. It will humble us, and it will help us see situations for what they are, it’ll help us see God for who He is.

A God who loved us enough to deal with us at all. A God who loved us enough to save us when we didn’t deserve it. A God who looked at us in our sin and our inability to change our sin, saw us, and instead of writing us off, said, I will provide the sacrifice. And Jesus Christ came and took responsibility for my sins and yours. And He paid the penalty.

He took the punishment for our sins so that we could be forgiven. And not only that, but God took His righteousness and put it on us so that when we come to Christ, the Father no longer sees sinners, but He sees us as forgiven and clean and clothed in the righteousness of Christ. He didn’t owe us any of that, and we didn’t do anything to deserve any of that. It was solely because He was good and kind.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 10:38-42, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 36
• Date: Sunday morning, October 26, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ Charla and I are trying to hire some tree work done at our house. We’ve got some of you been out there and seen the massive elm trees that are out in our pasture. And some of them have gotten old and they’re just kind of, I feel like they’re dangerous to walk underneath because they look like they could come down at any time. And so we called somebody, we had an appointment for them to come out Friday and look at them and give us an estimate.

And after they talked with us, I’m not sure if I’ve ever spent that much money on a car. So I was not inclined to go with their estimate. And I told Charlie, I said, you know, I could get a longer chainsaw, a whole lot cheaper than that. She said, when are you going to have time to take down those trees and cut them apart and dispose of them?

I said, well, I’m not paying that. So I can go next week and buy a chainsaw if you would like to call the company we’ve used in the past. I thought I’d save some money and call the company that we’ve used here at the church, but they were crazy expensive at my house. I said, if you want to call the company we’ve used in the past, go ahead. You have a few days before I go and invest the money in a chainsaw.

So we’re going to try to have them come out and do the work because those elm trees are, The wood is hard. The trees are about this big around. They’re about three stories tall. And some of the guys from here at church and me managed to cut one down, and then it took me two years.

I still couldn’t make a dent in trying to disassemble it once it was on the ground. But these guys had it carted off, it and took another one down. They had it carted off in, Well, by lunchtime, the day they started. And I was asking the owner of the company, how do you do that? I said, I’m assuming you have better chainsaws than mine.

He said, well, that’s part of it. He said, but we set aside time and make sure we keep our chains sharp. He said, if there’s not a job going on right then, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to sharpen our chains. If it’s raining outside and we can’t go out and cut trees and do whatever, he said, we sit down and sharpen our chains.

And see, that was part of my problem. When I started all of that, I was new to living on land, more than a little postage stamp size in town. And so I didn’t know that you had to sharpen your chainsaw. I thought it was a chainsaw.

It’s just sharp. I mean, if I put it up to my leg, it’s going to cut, right? So I just assumed it was sharp. And here I was spending weeks hacking away at this tree and putting in the work and trying to brute force the thing and never taking time to just sit down and sharpen the chain. And as we study through Luke, Luke chapter 10, the story we’re going to look at reminds me of that story where somebody was trying to forge ahead and do the work but never take the time to sit and sharpen the chain.

We’re going to be in Luke chapter 10 this morning, and I’m going to share some things with you this morning that feel crazy for me to say. The reason I say they feel crazy for me to say is I have never been in a church where there were enough volunteers and enough workers. Rodney, have you ever pastored a church where there were enough volunteers and workers? Okay.

And we have more people volunteering here than I’ve ever seen at any church. We have more workers. We have more stuff going on. But what I’m going to tell you this morning is not that we shouldn’t work and that we shouldn’t serve and that we shouldn’t volunteer, but it is that in order to do those things well, we can’t do those things all the time. That’s why I’ve given you the title this morning, Before You Serve, Sit.

I thought about it this morning, I could have called it, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There. Most of you will be familiar with this story, but if you’re not, you’ll see what I’m talking about here in just a moment. Luke chapter 10. Hopefully you’ve turned there with me.

If you haven’t, go ahead and turn there with me now. We’re picking up where we left off with the Good Samaritan last week, and we go starting in verse 38 to the next story as they’re traveling along. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. And if you don’t have a Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 10, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you as well.

Short story here that Luke tells, starting in verse 38. It says, Now as they were traveling along, he entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister called Mary who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to his word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations, and she came up to him and said, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? then tell her to help me.

But the Lord answered and said to her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things, but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her. And you may be seated. Usually, in church, we are focused on the fact that we really need more people to work and serve. But sometimes, we need to stop and consider that before we work and serve, it’s more important that we worship. Now, I don’t want you to hear things this morning that I’m not telling you.

I am not telling you that the work we do for the Lord is not important. I’m not telling you that we shouldn’t serve. I’m not telling you if you’re serving, stop. What I am telling you is that there’s a matter of priority here.

And I don’t want to get too ahead of my own notes. But I want to tell you, we can go too far one direction or the other, sometimes. We can get so deep into our work, and don’t get me wrong in this either. I feel like this will come up tonight in our Q&A time.

You can worship through your work. The way you serve God is part of your worship. But it can’t be all of your worship. And we can go so deep into the work that we’re focused on what we’re doing for Him that we forget about Him. At the same time, we can get comfortable with the idea of sitting and worshiping to the point that we don’t care about doing any of the work.

And both of those are issues, but I tend to think that if we are truly worshiping Him, if we’re truly focused on His goodness and His greatness, I think that it will drive us to work out of that. So if we’re going to focus on one over the other, I think this passage teaches us that it needs to be the worship. that we focus on. And if we do that right, if we come to him in the right perspective from that direction, then the work will take care of itself. But we see Mary doing something unusual here.

She’s sitting at the feet of Jesus. And this for us is the highest privilege that we have. The highest privilege that we have is to sit at the feet of Jesus. If you think about how the Bible describes us, that we are sinners, that we are estranged from God, that we are undeserving of His kindness, the very fact that He would love us, that He would forgive us, that He would save us is incredible enough, but Jesus invites us in to sit at His feet and learn from Him and be close with Him. That’s not something that you or I earn or deserve.

That’s a privilege that He grants us just because He is good, and it’s because it’s what He wants. What He desires is that closeness with us. So it’s a privilege that we shouldn’t take for granted. Jesus came to this house, and He was welcomed here as an honored guest.

And it wasn’t unusual for somebody to come and sit at the feet of a rabbi, of a religious teacher, and come and sit at their feet and learn from them. What was unusual in this circumstance is that Mary was a woman. I guess it’s not unusual for Mary to be a woman. It’s unusual that Mary as a woman would sit at the feet of Jesus. A rabbi would not allow that to happen because they were looked at as inferior.

They were looked at then as not worth the rabbi’s time because she can’t understand the things a man can understand. Same reason why they didn’t want to mess with children. They can’t understand the things that an adult can understand. No self-respecting rabbi was going to allow this to happen.

No self-respecting woman was going to put herself in this position. But Jesus was different, and Jesus’ love for his people, for those who followed him was so great that he did what no other rabbi would do. And Mary’s devotion to the master was so great that she didn’t care whether it was the proper thing to do or not. She didn’t care whether she was going to be embarrassed, whether she was going to be talked about. She didn’t care whether her sister was going to be mad.

She just sat at the feet of Jesus. It’s the greatest privilege we have. She sat there, verse 39 says, at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. And not only did Jesus allow this, Jesus actually encouraged it.

That’s why he says in verse 42, she did the good part, or she had chosen the good part. She had chosen the right thing, the best thing. I do want us to understand through the course of this message, as we look at this story, both the work and the worship are good. There’s nothing wrong with either one.

But the worship is better. and the worship will drive the work. But he said she had chosen the good part. By sitting at Jesus’ feet, she was showing her devotion to her master, to her teacher. She was putting herself in a place of subjection to him. And that word sounds so harsh the way we talk.

She’s saying, he’s above me. I’m beneath him. I have so much to learn from him. My job is to follow him.

She wasn’t approaching him as an equal. And you and I don’t approach him as equals either. But we have this incredible privilege of even being able to sit at his feet and to spend time with him and to learn from him and to be changed by him. Now, you and I don’t have the opportunity to sit at his feet physically. the way she did.

Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing? That would be an incredible experience, but I feel like in that moment I would probably be Martha, jumping up, making sure everything’s just right. Did we remember to start lunch? Did we tell people he’s here?

Did I adjust the thermostat? Is he comfortable? You know, we would start to think about all the things that we have to do. We don’t have the opportunity to sit at his feet physically the way she did, so what does this mean for us? How does this apply to us?

By sitting there, she was showing her devotion to Jesus, and she was learning from him. And you and I have the opportunity to do that as well. We can’t sit at his feet physically at the moment, But the way we consider it metaphorically is to show our devotion to him through worship and prayer and by learning his word. That’s what she was doing.

She was communing with him, and the way we commune with him is worship and prayer, and she was learning his word. And this is a reminder to us that we need to take time, not just take time, we need to make time to sit at his feet. We need to make time to slow down and spend time with him. Not just worrying about what we’re going to do, not even worried about what we’re going to do for him, but to spend time just abiding in his presence. That can be a hard thing to do.

I’m not sure there has ever been a time in history when we were busier which is crazy when you think about it if you compare the life that we live to the lives that people lived 300 years ago and you see all of the things they had to do just to survive that we don’t have to do because of technology, because of supply chains, because just the world is not in a moral sense, but the world in a material sense is a much better place than it’s ever been. We have far more leisure time compared to our ancestors, far more leisure time than any generations ever had, and we just fill it up with stuff that may or may not matter. and then sometimes we throw things on top of that that we’re doing for the lord that he didn’t ask us to do and i’m guilty of that and we stay so busy that we get to the point we don’t have time to slow down and sit at the master’s feet. And then we wonder why we’re burned out. We wonder why we don’t want to serve him.

We wonder why it becomes a drudgery to think about doing that thing that he’s called us to do. A few weeks ago, we talked about how Jesus went over the things that we have to rejoice about as we’re out on our mission. Serving the Lord is hard work, but he never intended it to be a drudgery. he never intended it to be a day in the minds because even as we’re working hard we find the joy and the rest that comes from just being with him and in his presence and Martha is the poster child of that now I don’t want to be too harsh on Martha Marcia sure Jan I don’t want to be too harsh with her because I don’t want to be confronted in heaven about throwing shade at her. I think she is viewed as a uniquely schedule-driven, task-driven individual that, oh, we should never be like that.

She’s just representative of so many of us. She was not uniquely uncaring. She was doing what so many of us do on a daily basis. But do you ever get burned out just on the stuff you’re supposed to do?

The day-to-day tasks of life and the stuff that God’s called you to do in ministry? It happens for me. And I’ll sit there and wonder, why do I have such a bad attitude about this? or why do I dread doing this or why is it so hard to get motivated to get started with this and I’m a little slower on figuring this out than I would like to be but usually I come to my senses and realize that’s a red flag that’s saying I’m not abiding in him the way I’m supposed to be and I’ll have to ask myself did you rush through your time with him today were you so consumed by the things you had to do and the things you had to fix and the things you had to take care of that you just made a perfunctory effort to spend time with him or did you really spend time sitting at his feet because i will tell you that without exception when i find myself at that moment of burnout and thank the lord it is only moments of burnout it’s not it’s not the pattern of life but when i find myself in those moments where i cannot go on any further in the work, without exception, I find that I have not been sitting at his feet the way I’m supposed to. Go back and deal with that, and everything else falls into place. Sitting at his feet is our highest privilege.

We can’t allow busyness to distract us from sitting at his feet, and it’s so easy to do. I’ve already kind of hit on this. I shouldn’t have to spend too much time explaining this to you. You know how busy you are.

I know how busy I am. We’re busy and it distracts us. When sitting at his feet should be the most important part of our day, the thing that we build everything else around. I’m not saying you have to do it first thing in the morning.

I’ve heard preachers emphatically say you should get up and first thing in the morning should be your quiet time with the Lord. If the Lord wants me awake for quiet time, that’s not going to happen. I get here to the office about 7. 50 every morning We open at 8. 30 but I’ve got kids that go to school here So I get here earlier And I may get started working But about 9 o’clock I’m fully alert It’s much better for me to take some time right before lunch Or right after lunch not so late after lunch that you know you’re slipping into a coma again but there ought it ought to be the priority of our day to spend some time sitting at his feet not i’ll fit it in when i’ve got time because we will chase that time all throughout the day and it won’t happen but that ought to be the thing we build our day around that ought to be the thing we build our life around. You’ve probably seen the illustration of the jar and you’ve got the sand and you’ve got the pebbles and you’ve got the big rocks and trying to fit all of it in there. And if you try to put the sand in first, everything doesn’t fit. The big rock, spoiler alert, if you’re ever called on to do this, the big rock goes at the bottom, then you fill it in with the pebbles, and then you fill the sand in around that.

Sitting at Jesus’ feet needs to be the big rock that is the focus of our lives every day, and then we fill in the other stuff around it. It’s so easy to get distracted, and for Martha, this problem quickly grew beyond just being distracted. It actually changed her view of what was going on. It poisoned her view of what was going on.

It poisoned her view of Jesus, and we see some ways that her focus, her wrong focus caused her to act wrongly and think wrongly. She was so focused on her own preparation that it made her self-centered and unconcerned about Mary’s spiritual growth. So we can get so focused on being busy that it makes us self-centered. and that is such a convicting statement for me because I have to have the reminder I have to have the talk with the Lord all the time a lot of times the things that we consider interruptions in ministry are the actual ministry and I hesitate even to say that because now you’ll be afraid to call on the phone or stop by the office don’t. That’s why I’m here.

And it’s not every time somebody calls, but I’m in the middle of this project. There are certain projects that for me, it’s like an itch in my brain, and I can’t focus on anything else until that itch is scratched. And that’s when the phone rings. Now, the phone rings at other times, that’s fine.

You know what? Figuring out what this Greek word means is not the ministry. The interruption is the ministry. But she had gotten to the point of self-centeredness, to the point she didn’t care that Mary was learning from Jesus. She just barges in in verse 40 and says, my sister has left me to do all the serving alone.

And I want you to think about what that means because it sounds like a reasonable statement. I need help. Until you think about what was going on in that room. Mary was sitting at the feet of the creator of the universe who walked away from the splendor of heaven to take on human flesh and come down here and be around us and to be among us and to die for us, taking responsibility for our sins.

That creator was sitting there in her living room and her sister was taking advantage of this amazing opportunity to sit at his feet and abide in his presence. And Martha said, I don’t care that you’re getting to do that. I need help getting the salad out. When you think about it that way, it’s not as reasonable a request.

But we can start to see people as interruptions. We can start to see people as obstacles if we get focused on our busyness. Her focus on her busyness made her bitter, made her convinced that Jesus didn’t care. That’s why she says in verse 40, Lord, do you not care? I’m going to give you one of the answers on the test Does Jesus care?

Yes The answer is always yes Every time he was asked by somebody in the gospels Do you not care? The answer is yes, he cares He’s aware of what’s going on here And he cares more than you do Just his priorities are in the right order But sometimes we can get so focused on our busyness that something happens and something comes along and something doesn’t work or somebody gets in the way and we get mad, we get mad at them, we get mad at the Lord. Well, why’d you put me here to do this anyway? If you’re not going to let me finish it or if it’s not going to work, we get mad because we’re focused on the task instead of being with Him. And then her focus on her own busyness made her arrogant to the point that she was willing to order Jesus around.

If we get to the point where we’re willing to give instructions to God, something has gone deeply wrong in our minds. And it’s probably because something’s gone deeply wrong in our hearts. She said, Lord, or she said, tell her to help me. And we could see this as a plea for help.

But the Greek phrasing there is a command. Tell her to help me. Would you please tell her to help me? Oh, that would have been so much nicer.

We know the difference. If somebody says, even forcefully, would you please do this? That doesn’t hit us quite as wrong as do this. Somebody asks me to do something, I will bend over backwards. If somebody tells me to do something, it is a fight with the flesh, not to just refuse out of spite.

Now, Jesus doesn’t have that battle with the flesh there. But she tells him, imagine the thought process that gets you to the point of saying, God, here’s what you need to do. my agenda is on the line my plans are on the line what i’m trying to do is on the line you need to do this again if we get to the point where we are commanding or presuming to command the god of the universe something has gone deeply wrong and it all started just from a little bit of distraction a little bit of I am so and again I don’t want to be too harsh with her I think her motives were probably right the master is here we want to make everything perfect for him you know what the master can say a word and the banquet appears you have the opportunity to sit at his feet she was trying to do a good thing but she got so focused on the task she forgot about the Lord himself and ultimately I think the point of this passage is that what we do with Jesus takes priority over what we do for Jesus and that seems so backwards that seems so crazy to say because we are always trying to get people to volunteer and do more and think of all the things that that could be done if everybody would just do all the things God called them to do we want people to serve We want people to work. There’s nothing wrong with it. And your work can be part of your worship. I don’t know if you realize this, but what I’m doing right now, this moment, part of my job.

But the preparation for it, the delivery of it, I try to stay prayed up so that it’s not just a task, but I’m worshiping the Lord through what I’m studying and taking in and what I’m putting out. You can worship the Lord through your work. It just can’t be all of your work. I mean, it can’t be all of your worship.

But what we do with Him takes priority over what we do for Him. Because if we just push, oh, you have to do this for Him. Step out and do this for Him. And it’s always the stuff you do for Him.

Then we end up, we end up with a church full of people who are burned out, who don’t want to serve anymore, are tired of all of it, because they’re not abiding in the presence of the Lord. They’re not finding the joy in serving Him. And it’s a tragedy because Jesus came that we would have life and have it more abundant. It’s not wrong to work. As a matter of fact, all through chapters 9 and 10, as we’ve studied through Luke, have been about preparation for the work. the problem is just a matter of the priority.

When we get to verse 41, he tells her, Martha, Martha. And by the way, repeating her name like that is something they would do in that culture as a display of love, of tenderness, to repeat her name. It shows he cared about her. But he tells her, you are worried and bothered about so many things.

And as I researched those words and how they were used, one tends to be used about mental anxiety, and one tends to be used about emotional distress. The woman was a wreck. That sounds harsh. Our poor sister was a wreck.

Was a meal needed? Yeah, these people have been traveling. They were going to be hungry. But again, the master could snap his fingers and the banquet would appear. He had done it before.

You know what? He had done it before. He had made the food appear so he didn’t have to stop teaching. Did Jesus need the elaborate spread?

Did he need everything she was working on? He didn’t need that. The only thing that really mattered, according to verse 42, is what Jesus came there to do in the first place, and that was to teach his people and be with his people. And both of these sisters, when Jesus came into their house, they had a choice to make, whether to work or to worship in that moment, and Mary, not Martha, chose correctly.

Now, Martha’s the one being critical, saying, she’s not even helping me at all. Mary’s the one doing what she’s supposed to do. and this convicts me because it’s hard for me to sit still now you may see me sitting still sometimes I guarantee my mind is still working on three different projects and I’m a perfectionist about some things now you look at my truck you will not see there goes a perfectionist you look at my office you will not see there goes a perfectionist but there’s a reason why I asked Marilyn to take over the bulletin because something we’re putting out in print I will spend 11 hours working on that to make sure it is exactly everything’s laid out exactly right there are no typos now when I fill in I may forget what date it is and that ate at me for days but there are things I’m a perfectionist about that don’t matter that much we have an opportunity to focus on things that kind of matter versus the things that ultimately matter. We should choose to focus on the things that ultimately matter. That’s what Mary had done. We are supposed to work for the Lord, but our priorities make the difference.

If you’re worshiping Him, you’re spending time in His presence every day, you will just naturally work for Him. You won’t even have to make yourself do it. You’ll be so closely connected to him that you’ll know where he’s leading you to go. And you’ll do it.

And you’ll love doing it. Doesn’t mean every moment of it will be easy. But you’ll love doing it. If you prioritize the work, you’ll say, well, I’m going to spend time with him.

But you’ll get drawn deeper and deeper into the work until there’s never time to sit at his feet. the difference is the priority we can work for the lord without giving the relationship a second thought we can do that but if we’re focused on our relationship and worshiping him with everything we have then naturally the work will result so when we look at this and we see mary versus martha it’s not oh just slow down take time to smell the roses the lesson here is to make Jesus the priority and the work will follow if you find yourself burnt out go back and make Jesus the priority then you’ll find you probably won’t be as worried about the things that you thought you couldn’t live without make Jesus the priority some of you may be sitting there this morning saying, but how can I have that kind of relationship with him? How can I sit at his feet? I don’t even know him. It’s very simple.

Jesus came for us to know him. Jesus came because we were separated from God by our sin, and there’s nothing you or I could do to fix it. And so Jesus came and took responsibility for that sin because God is a just judge, and that sin had to be punished. Jesus took responsibility for our sin and he was punished in our place. That’s the whole reason he went to the cross and shed his blood and died, so he could pay for our sin.

So that that slate could be wiped clean. And God could take the righteousness of Christ and put it in our account so that when he looks at us, instead of seeing sinners who are under his condemnation, he sees children who he loves who are dressed in the righteousness of Christ. And today, you can have that. you can have your sins forgiven.

You can be somebody that God looks at as his righteous child, not because of any good you do, but because Jesus paid for your sin. And all that you have to do is believe that he did that and ask God for that forgiveness. And he’s promised you’ll have it.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 10:25-37, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 35
• Date: Sunday morning, October 19, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ We’re going to be in Luke chapter 10 this morning. The passage that we’re going to look at today, every time I read, you may think this is strange, but stick with me. Every time I read this passage about the Good Samaritan, I think about nature documentaries. I’ve probably mentioned in the past, my kids and I especially love nature documentaries.

And if you’ve ever watched many of those, you find yourself rooting for one of the animals over the other, don’t you? When there’s a predator and prey scene. Okay, so if there’s a wild dog and it’s chasing a, you know, chasing a, what are those things called? Meerkat.

Chasing the meerkat, I am pulling for that meerkat. I want that meerkat to get away. Cute little meerkats. If you’re not familiar with meerkats, they kind of remind me of Africa’s prairie dogs.

But I want that meerkat to get away. If that wild dog is being chased by a cheetah though, then I’m cheering for the wild dog to get away. I don’t want that cheetah to win until that cheetah’s in a fight with a crocodile. Then I don’t like that crocodile. I don’t trust that crocodile.

But suddenly I become team crocodile when there’s a python involved. You know, it just depends on which animal I feel more connected to at that moment. And I guess I’m very fickle because it just shifts depending on who they’re up against. The reason the story of the Good Samaritan always makes me think of those nature documentaries is because we look at something like one of those nature documentaries and we are picking and choosing who we care about based on how attached we feel to them at the time.

But the story of the Good Samaritan teaches us that we don’t get to pick and choose who we care about. We don’t get to pick and choose who we love. That was the whole point the lawyer was trying to make, as we’re going to see in just a moment. Hopefully you’ve turned with me to Luke chapter 10. If you haven’t, go ahead and turn there with me this morning.

We’re continuing our study through the book of Luke. And we’ve finally arrived at chapter 10, this familiar story to you, to many of you. Luke chapter 10, and once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 10, it’ll be on the screen for you to be able to see what we’re reading. But we’re going to start in verse 25 this morning.

It says, and a lawyer stood up and put him to the test, put Jesus to the test. This expert in the Old Testament law, or at least their interpretations of the Old Testament law, decided he was going to put Jesus to the test and try to entrap him. And he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And he said to him, what is written in the law? How do you read it, or how does it read to you?

And he answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And there he’s stringing together two quotations, one from Leviticus and one from Deuteronomy. And he said to him, Jesus answered the man, said, you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.

Sounds like a recipe for eternal life, right? But the point Jesus makes is we can’t do it perfectly, as we’ll look at a little later on. But wishing to justify himself. So he’s wishing here to prove that I am good enough to meet that law. I’m good enough.

I have what it takes. Wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor? He’s looking for a loophole. Verse 30, And he said, go and do the same.

And you may be seated. So as we’ve studied our way through the book of Luke, and we’ve been in chapters 9 and 10, they’ve really been focused on Jesus preparing His disciples to go out on a mission. And it’s talked about the dedication and the sacrifice that are required to the mission as we go out and represent Him and help people to know Him and come to that saving knowledge of Him. It’s talked about the duty and the sacrifice, the dedication.

When I was here two weeks ago, we looked at the cause for rejoicing that we have as we carry out this mission, that it’s not, even though it is obligation and it is duty, it’s not just those things. It’s not a drudgery. There are things that we can and should rejoice in. Then we come to this passage that almost seems like he’s shifting gears here. He’s focusing on something other than the mission.

This still fits into the mission, though, because we cannot accomplish our mission for Christ without love, without demonstrating love, even for those that it’s difficult to demonstrate love for. You say, well, shouldn’t think anybody is difficult to love. We’re all human. We’re all human.

It’s like the nature documentary. There’s some people we care more about than others. It’s natural. But we don’t get to not love anyone.

It’s part of the argument Jesus is making here. And they start out with this question of the law. I think this man probably was listening and was offended at what Jesus said when he’s telling the disciples, the 70-plus disciples, that they should feel blessed because there were people who died waiting to see what they got to see. In other words, there were prophets among the Jewish people. There were leaders among the Jewish people who had died longing to see the Messiah and didn’t get to.

And then along comes Jesus. And I think this man probably felt a little sense of jealousy for those who had been in his shoes in generations past and wants to push back on this idea that Jesus is the Messiah, wants to challenge him a little bit. This was a fairly common question that they debated. What do I have to do to earn eternal life?

And it’s something they debated. I don’t think that’s something God wants us to have to debate. That’s why, especially in the New Testament, it makes it very clear that it’s by grace through faith in Christ and nothing else. But even understanding that, you go back to the Old Testament law, and it’s sprinkled through there as well. Because the law sets a standard so high, we can’t keep it.

We cannot possibly keep the law perfectly. And even those in Jesus’ day who thought they could keep the law, when they understood the law in the right way, they had to realize, I can’t keep this. Oh, I’ve never broken one of the commandments. Well, maybe not outwardly, but Jesus talked about the condition of the heart, and suddenly we’re all guilty.

And we come to this. We come to this. He says, what does the law say? It says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. By the way, the order of those is very important as we try to understand love.

If we get those out of order, we have a distorted view of what love is. If we get those out of order and we put love, I hear people say from time to time that the most important thing that Christianity teaches is love your neighbor. In reality, that’s the second most important thing. Because Jesus said the first and greatest commandment is the one that came first here, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And the second is like to it, love your neighbor as yourself. When we love God first and love God most, it changes our perspective on what love is. We have tried to cultivate in our kids an understanding that sometimes they see things they’re not allowed to do, and they feel like we’re just mean parents. Maybe sometimes we are mean parents, but not most of the time. But they see things they’re not allowed to do, and we’ve tried to explain to them that, you know, when you see this, that’s not necessarily loving from a parent.

Oh, we let you stay up till 3 a. m. and eat nothing but junk food every day. That’s not love. That’s neglect. Love sometimes means saying no. Love means knowing where to draw the boundaries for somebody else’s good.

That’s what love is. It’s not just a warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s part of it. But it’s seeking the good of the other person.

And when we put those two loves in the right order of priority, when we put God first, it helps us better understand how to love our neighbor. And quite honestly, it makes us more capable of loving our neighbor. You and I are not wired naturally to love our neighbor as ourself. Our human nature is selfish.

We’re not wired that way. But when we love God with everything we have, God gives us a capacity to love other people in a way we couldn’t otherwise. So it’s important that we get those things in the right order. But he comes and says, you know, the law teaches me, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says you’ve got the right answer.

Do that and you’ll live. And again, it sounds like a recipe for eternal life until you realize we can’t do that, at least not perfectly. Are there moments that we love God with everything we have as believers? Are there moments we love God with everything we have?

I think probably there are. But do we do it consistently, perfectly? I don’t. My guess is you don’t either.

Are there moments when we love our neighbor as ourselves? I think there are. Do we do it consistently and perfectly? No, because we’re fallen sinful individuals. So this is not so much a recipe for eternal life as a standard.

It’s like those things you see at a theme park. You must be this tall to ride. Didn’t you hate those when you were a kid? You must be this holy to inherit eternal life. and we can’t ever be that tall.

We can’t ever reach that point. But this man is trying, he’s looking for a loophole. He’s smart, I’ll give him that. He’s looking for a loophole.

Maybe if I can equivocate on the word neighbor, maybe if I can redefine neighbor to where it doesn’t apply to everybody, because again, there are some people we are better at loving than others. Oh, that sounds so harsh and so un-Christian. I am better at loving my children than I am strangers at Walmart. And I probably should be better at loving my children than strangers at Walmart, but it doesn’t mean I get to not love the strangers at Walmart. We all have people that it’s easier to love than others, but we don’t get to not love them.

So he’s wanting to redefine this and says, who is my neighbor? And Jesus uses this story of the Samaritan to point out, you don’t get to pick and choose who your neighbor is. Your neighbor is whoever is around you that has the need. Now again, this is an ordered, prioritized love.

We’re loving God first, and that means we’re seeking the good of the person. Love doesn’t mean always saying yes. So if somebody shows up at the south door tomorrow, and they’re asking for $50 so they can buy some meth. We’ve never had anybody come out and ask that, by the way.

But if they came and they said, could I have $50 so I can buy some drugs? The loving thing to do is to tell them no, right? Right? Are we, we’re all together on that? Okay.

All right. Making sure you’re awake. I hope we’re all together on that. The loving thing is to say no to that.

But sometimes the loving thing is the hard thing to do. and in this story presenting the Samaritan to this Jewish lawyer Jesus gives us a picture of what it looks for us looks like for us to love others when we’re on mission for him and I want to point out just a few things this morning in the time that we have left together that we see in this passage that love begins with noticing and having compassion. Look back at the beginning of this story. Jesus tells the story of a man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. And by chance the priest saw him, he went down, he saw him and he passed by on the other side. He went around him.

The Levite, who was kind of one of the assistants in the temple, He came to that same place. He saw him. He passed by to the other side. The difference, there’s this repeated structure through the beginning of the story.

Come down the road, see him cross over. Come down the road, see him cross over. Come down the road, see him, and that’s where the story changes. The Samaritan didn’t cross over.

He felt compassion. Love begins with noticing and having compassion. That’s half the battle right there. that’s honestly the part I struggle with the most is just noticing I don’t mean to be that way but I go through life oblivious my wife cut off half her hair and wanted to see how many days it would take me to notice how many was it? A couple hours at least.

Okay. Yeah. I have a saying I use with the ladies in the office all the time. You’d be amazed what I don’t notice. How do you not notice that?

Christy, is it true? Katie, is it true? Yeah. Oblivious.

Maybe some of that’s just being a man. But for us to, I didn’t say it was an excuse, it’s an explanation. This is going to turn into a debate if I don’t move off this topic real fast. But love begins with noticing and having compassion.

And I think we all have the ability to do this. We get so busy with what we’re doing, we put our blinders on, we focus on the project, and we completely miss the person, we completely miss the need. And I’m probably the guiltiest person in this room. The priest, you know, I can’t even give the priest that.

It says he saw him. There was noticing, but there wasn’t compassion. The Levite saw him, he noticed there wasn’t compassion. It wasn’t until this Samaritan came that somebody stopped to help. And the difference, as I said, is where the Scriptures mention compassion.

The other men noticed enough to cross the road. The Samaritan noticed and had compassion. He saw the need, and he was affected by it. He was moved to care and to do something.

That’s what compassion is. When you notice the need, and you’re affected by it to the point that you feel compelled to do something about it. He saw this need. He felt compelled.

And this is a big part of what we’re called to do as believers, is to notice, to pay attention, and to care, but in a way that compels us to do something about it. It’s one thing to notice and care and, man, I sure feel sorry for you. It’s another thing entirely to do something about it. And one of the things that this calls us to do is that as we are focused on being on mission for Jesus, we’re called to take this message of salvation to people around us, we can get so focused on, I need to present this point, I need to make this argument, I need to have this conversation that we miss needs all around us. And again, I’m not telling you this to get on to you, I’m telling you this because it’s what the Word teaches and I’m probably the worst one here. but part of being on mission for Jesus is not to view people as a distraction from the work but to view people as the work to view people as the ministry then we see from this story as we move on to verse 34 that love leads us to serve in spite of all the reasons not to it says that this man came to him and he bandaged up his wounds poured oil on them and he put him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him before he did all that i can’t imagine that there was not an internal conversation within this man as there would be with any of us about whether he should stop and help or not because sometimes we have compassion but we have that internal discussion should i do something should i intervene and this man had plenty of reasons not to help.

You know, we always paint the priest and the Levite as villains in this story. They didn’t do the right thing, but I don’t know that they’re necessarily evil in this story. It says that he was set on by robbers, and he was beaten. And historical records tell us that this stretch of road between Jericho and Jerusalem was one of the most dangerous places in the whole country when it came to bandits. This Samaritan had no clue, just as the priest and the Levite had no clue, is this a trap?

Is this man in on it? That happens even today sometimes. People will fake an accident or a roadside emergency to get people to stop. I remember there was a case, I don’t know if I was a small boy or not born yet, but I remember my grandparents talking about a family that was murdered on I-35 in Oklahoma in one of those situations.

You just don’t know. And so I want to let the priest and the Levite off the hook just a little bit that maybe they weren’t evil, they were just cowardly, if that’s any better. But there was a danger involved. Could this man be in on it? Or could the people who did this to him, maybe he is innocent, but could the people that did this to him, could they still be nearby waiting to do this to me?

That was a very real reason for this Samaritan not to stop. also the cost involved if I stop and help this man what is it going to cost me in addition to the time and the effort that he has to expend he takes him to the end and he pays for pays for his stuff there was going to be a real cost involved schedule he this this man he was he was headed out to attend a business he had things to take care of and was on a schedule. And I think the most telling of all is just the hostility that would naturally have existed between these two men. This man who lay beaten on the side of the road was Jewish. The man who happened upon him was a Samaritan. Those two groups of people did not get along.

And there was some animosity back and forth, But a lot of it was started by the Jewish people who looked at them as less than them, maybe even to the point of being subhuman, because they were the descendants of those Jews who had intermarried with their pagan neighbors, and so they looked at the Samaritans as they are not as good as us, they’re not as godly as us, they’re not worth as much as us. And so here, even if you’re the nicest Samaritan in the world, you’re really going to help this guy who probably hates your guts. If I go over and try to help him, you know, is he going to spit at me? What is he going to do? There was hostility.

There were all these reasons not to help, but he helped anyway. He bandaged the wounds. He treated the man with oil and wine. That’s kind of a foreign concept to us.

But wine was used for its antiseptic properties. It would clean out a wound. Oil would soothe wounds. I’ve read that travelers in that day would carry small vials of each, kind of like a first aid kit.

But he treated him with the oil and the wine. He bandaged his wounds. He gave up his own transport animal. It’s a pretty treacherous road to walk.

It’s a long and winding road to walk. Much easier if you’ve got an animal to ride, but he took his own animal, put the Jewish man on the back of it, and took him to an inn. There were all kinds of reasons not to help. And when God calls us to do something to serve somebody else, we’re pretty good at coming up with reasons not to do it. I’m pretty good at coming up with reasons not to do it.

There’s always a reason. But sometimes love calls us to act anyway. And then we go to verse 35. On the next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper.

Each denarii was a day’s wages for an unskilled laborer. so you take you just take the idea of two days pay he handed over two days pay to this innkeeper and he dropped him off at the inn and he said you take care of him you feed him you lodge him you know more oil and wine for the wounds more bandaging whatever you have to do and whatever is left I’ll pay it when he comes back what he did was he essentially gave this man a blank check for the care of the man he was dropping off. How many of you want to do that? You want to take somebody down to Comanche County Memorial and drop them off and say, whatever it costs, I’ll be responsible when I come back. I don’t want to sign up for that. That’s basically what he did.

I will be responsible. This man made a huge sacrifice. And he made a sacrifice for that man because this man is no longer responsible for the cost of the care he receives. That man said, let me take it.

And sometimes love will call us to sacrifice to meet a need. And Jesus gave them this story and said of the three, which one is a neighbor? Which one acted as the neighbor to the man who was beaten. And they said, well, obviously it was the Samaritan.

It was the one who stopped and helped. And he said, go and do the same. To the lawyer, to those standing nearby, to his disciples who were no doubt part of this conversation, go and do the same. You and I are called and challenged to have this kind of compassion, to make these kinds of sacrifices as we represent Christ in a world who needs to hear about Him. Now, the understanding underlying all of this is that we’ll never do it perfectly.

So, if you’re thinking, I can’t do that, you’re right, you cannot. These things I’ve just told you we’re supposed to do, I can’t do them perfectly either. But our job is to desire to do these things, and as the Holy Spirit works through us as believers and guides us and shapes our hearts over time, that these things will become more and more natural to us as He makes us more and more like Christ. Because what we see here is a story about a Samaritan, but it’s also a reflection of the love that Jesus has for us.

See, this man took compassion on somebody who may or may not have deserved it. He had plenty of reasons not to serve, and he sacrificed out of love anyway. Can you think of anybody else in Scripture who did all those things? You’re whispering it.

Jesus, all right, good. I told you all before, I don’t ask trick questions. I’m not trying to trip you up. Jesus, this kind of love was most clearly exemplified by Jesus himself. Now as I tell you this, I believe the story of the Good Samaritan really happened.

I think it was something that Jesus knew about and used that story to make a point. I also think it reflects his character well as he’s telling us to do these things. The whole meaning of the exchange between Jesus and this lawyer was that none of us can love God perfectly. None of us can love our neighbor perfectly.

Even if we have moments like the Samaritan where, you know, we just knock it out of the park in those moments. You and I can’t do this consistently perfectly. This man had come with that question to try to trap Jesus. He was familiar with God’s standard and the law, but he was so self-righteous he thought he could keep it. And stories like this, when we look at them and when we’re honest with ourselves, they reveal that there’s something in our hearts that is lacking that does not reflect Jesus.

And when we see this story, and if you think like I do, that’s really hard. Oh, I’m not sure I could do that. It reveals where we fall short of God’s standard. But the good news for us is that we don’t have to try to be like the lawyer and nuance or weasel our way out of obedience to God.

Jesus recognized that we can’t do this perfectly, but he can. And that’s why he looked on us with compassion in spite of our sin. Everything that we recognize about ourselves and our own hearts that doesn’t belong there, every bit of that, Jesus already knows. Even when we discover something new that’s there that’s not supposed to be there.

Jesus already knew. And Jesus looked on each person in this room with compassion. In spite of our sin, in spite of the ways that we would fall short of his standard, he looked on us with compassion. He saw us. And then Philippians 2 talks about him emptying himself.

That means that while he was seated in the glory of heaven, He was worshiped. He was served. He was adored by the angels. He had everything the way He deserved it.

He looked at us with compassion, and He willingly walked away from all of that, the glory, the joy, the presence of the Father, all of it that He deserved. He voluntarily walked away from that and came to earth and became a man because He loved us. And He became a man so that He could go to the cross for us, which was an enormous sacrifice. But folks, just the fact that He would come here at all and be around us was a sacrifice as well.

We’re a handful sometimes. And there are some very beautiful spots in this world, but it does not compare to the splendor of heaven. He left that and came to this. He left the presence of the Father to come deal with us, knowing that He was going to go to the cross for us. He came here with compassion for us in spite of our sins.

He came here to serve and offer His life a ransom for many, the Word says, in spite of all the reasons not to. Can you think of some reasons why you wouldn’t want to go to the cross? The beatings, the humiliation, the pain, the separation from the Father. There were so many reasons not to come to the cross, and yet Jesus did it willingly.

And then he made the ultimate sacrifice to meet a need because you and I couldn’t do it. With the sin that’s in our hearts, with all the ways we fall short of God’s standard, there was not a thing you or I could do to make ourselves right with God again. There was a need there, and Jesus came and made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could be forgiven. he went to the cross and he took responsibility for my sins and for yours and he shed his blood and he laid down his life to pay for our sins to take the wrath of god that we deserved so that we could go free so that we could be forgiven and as challenging as it is for us to love this way. When God’s Word calls us to do it, all we are being asked to do is be a pale reflection of the kind of love that Jesus showed for us.

If you struggle with parts of this like I do as a believer, ask the Holy Spirit to work in you and help you to love, not like the Samaritan, but like Jesus. and if you’re here this morning and have never trusted Jesus as your savior you’ve never experienced the forgiveness that you can have because of this sacrifice that he came and made because of his compassion for you if you need to know how to be right with God it is as simple as understanding that Jesus paid for your sins because you couldn’t be right with God paid for him in full on the cross and rose again three days later to prove it. And all you have to do is believe that he did what he said he could do and ask for that forgiveness and you’ll have it.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 10:17-24, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 34
• Date: Sunday morning, October 5, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ After any kind of big event, it’s not unusual for those who participate in it to have some kind of a debrief, or sometimes I’ve heard it referred to as a post-mortem, where they’ll go over what just happened and how did it work, why did it work, why didn’t it work, kind of dig into some of those details. Some of the most famous examples I can think of come from NASA when the Challenger disaster happened, when that space shuttle exploded. They went back and did a thorough investigation of what happened, step by step, what happened through that process that caused this to happen. And they did this so they could try to figure out how never for it to happen again.

And through that investigation, they discovered that it was one small rubber O-ring that had failed on the shuttle, causing that explosion and causing that loss of life. Military strategists will do this after a battle. They’ll get together and figure out what worked, why it worked, why it didn’t work, what could we have done better. On a smaller scale, we do this with the academic team here at the school after we’ve had a match. okay what what went really well and why did we win or why did we get slaughtered yeah what should we have done differently my wife and i do it we’ll we’ll take the kids out to a restaurant and afterwards we’ll sit down and say what what was different this time that made us think that it wasn’t going to be chaos like every other time you know we sit down and have that that debrief and go over what just happened it’s a normal thing that we do sometimes we even just do it ourselves as we go as we think back over our day as we get into our text today in Luke chapter 10 that’s what Jesus is doing with his disciples with these 70 or 72 depending on the the translation that he sent out that we studied about last week he they’re they’re coming back together there’s sort of a break between verse 16 and verse 17 verse 16 ends with Jesus sending these disciples out to represent Him, to share the good news about His coming kingdom throughout Samaria, in particular some of the Gentile areas as He’s preparing to go through those areas. And in verse 17, they come back to Him, and they are eager to talk about what has just happened, in particular the things that worked. And they were very excited about these things.

And in this passage, Jesus gives them some instructions that we’re going to look at today. but I think the takeaway we are supposed to have from this passage is just the way or is especially the way Jesus responded as we read this passage as you’ll see in just a moment there’s a word that’s used a couple of times here and it’s rejoice there’s a theme throughout this this section of the text that we haven’t necessarily come across a great deal up to now in in as we’ve studied through Luke chapters 9 and 10 the focus of it has been on the mission and preparation for the mission the hard work that’s going to come the sacrifice that is going to be involved and when we talk about things like that when we focus on the mission and that’s not a bad thing to do that’s why Jesus put their focus on the mission to go and prepare people for the kingdom to prepare people for the king that’s not a bad thing but all the talk about the mission and the duty and the preparation and the sacrifice all the things that we’ve studied up till now if we’re not careful we can take that and we can misinterpret all of that as though serving the Lord is a drudgery it’s an obligation that it’s supposed to be hard all the time don’t get me wrong serving the Lord is challenging to us. Serving the Lord is challenging at times. He never promised us that it was going to always be easy. At the same time though, it should not be a joyless experience. Have you ever known somebody who was serving the Lord but they were not happy about it?

Ever met that person? I’ve known some people throughout my ministry, there’s some faces that pop up especially early on that they were serving the Lord, they were faithful in church, they were sharing the gospel, they were serving, they were doing what they were supposed to do, but just sour and negative. I’m not saying that means you’re not saved, I’m just saying that means you’re not doing it right. Because serving the Lord should be a joyous experience.

That’s why when they come back and they’re all excited, He is talking about the things that they should be rejoicing in. And so I want us to take this time as we go into chapters 9 and 10, I’m sorry, into this culmination of the work that he’s prepared them for in chapters 9 and 10, and we come to this time of this debrief, I want us to understand from Jesus’ response that while the mission is important and we have a duty to fulfill the mission and it’s going to involve sacrifice, it should not be a joyless experience. We should be, if we’re doing it correctly, if we’re doing it in the right frame of mind, we should be able to serve the Lord gladly, even in the midst of the sacrifices. So turn with me, if you haven’t already, to Luke chapter 10. Luke chapter 10, we’re going to start in verse 17 and take a look at this debrief that goes through verse 24.

And once you find it, if you’d stand with me, as we read together from God’s Word. If you don’t have your Bibles or can’t find Luke chapter 10, it’ll be on the screen for you where you can follow along. But here’s what he says starting in verse 17. The 70 returned with joy saying, Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name. I feel like there should be an exclamation point there.

That’s not just something you walk at, Lord, the demons were a little bit subject to us. No, Lord, the demons, even the demons are subject to us in your name. And he said to them, I was watching Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy and nothing will injure you.

Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven. At that very time, he rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit and said, I praise you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in your sight. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. Turning to the disciples, he said privately, Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see.

For I say to you that many prophets and kings wish to see the things which you see and did not see them, and to hear the things which you hear and did not hear them. And you may be seated. There are at least four things in this passage, four things that I see that Jesus points out that we ought to rejoice over. And we’re going to look at each of those this morning. But because he sort of starts out with the biggest, or probably the one that makes the most eternal impact on us, I’m going to start from the end and work our way backwards, work smallest to biggest.

So I want you to focus with me on verses 23 and 24, at what he says that we can rejoice for. He doesn’t specifically use the word rejoice, but this is in a prayer of thanksgiving, or it’s after a prayer of thanksgiving. He tells them, blessed are you. Sometimes that word is translated happy because we don’t always use the word blessed in a way that the world understands what we mean by that.

Have you ever had a cashier tell you, have a blessed day? I think that’s great. I’m not against that. I’m not telling you it’s wrong.

But if we were to ask that cashier, what do you mean by that? If I told somebody, have a blessed day, and they said, what do you mean by that? I would probably struggle for a definition. It’s not a word we use outside of church context very often. And so sometimes people will translate that word as happy.

But it doesn’t mean happy in the sense of, oh, everything is wonderful and everything is going my way. It’s a deeper contentment. It’s a fulfillment that comes from our walk with the Lord. It’s more akin to joy than happiness.

Blessed is a perfectly fine word. I’m not against it. I just want you to understand the connection he’s making here. When he says, blessed are you, this is something that they have caused to be joyful about.

What he tells them in verses 23 and 24. Turning to the disciples, he said privately, blessed are the eyes which see the things you see. Take joy in what God has given you the privilege of seeing. He’s talking to these 70 who not only saw the things that they had just witnessed, they had obviously seen some miracles. If they’re coming back saying, even the demons are subject to us in your name.

There had been some spiritual warfare going on. There had been some things that took place that were surprising to them. They were getting to see these miracles take place in their own lives. But more importantly than that, they were seeing the greater work that Jesus was doing that was the reason for it.

These are people who, even though their names are lost to us as far as the Bible, these 70 had walked with Jesus. Maybe not as closely as the 12, but they’d walked with Jesus, they’d seen what He got to do. And so Jesus says, blessed are your eyes, the eyes that see the things you see. What was it that their eyes saw?

It was the work of Jesus. So things that He was doing right in front of them. And he makes the point, this was not something that everybody got to see. When I read about people in the Old Testament, I feel a little sorry for them. Moses and Abraham and Elijah, they got to see incredible things that God did.

But they longed, and they and others like them longed to see the Messiah. and while they know who He is now, they died before they got to see Him. These people got to see the Messiah. They got to see the fulfillment of the promises of God. You and I get to look back on the Messiah and see how it all worked out, see who He was.

He’s not here in front of our eyes in the same way that He was in front of them, but through the pages of this book, through what His apostles recorded for us, we have an understanding of the Messiah that a lot of people throughout history have not been privileged to have. Not only that, but you and I get to have a relationship with this Messiah. Generations of Israelites went to the grave longing, wanting nothing more than to see this Messiah come. And you and I get to have a relationship with Him. That is incredible that God has allowed us to see the work of Jesus.

Every day we get to see Him at work in us, and we get to see him at work through us. It’s an incredible thing. How could we go through a life of serving God and working for him and be miserable about it if we’re mindful of that privilege that we have that so many would have died for? To know the Messiah, to know who he is, to know what he’s come to do, to know him experientially and relationally. and to see the work that He does.

Every time we see somebody come to faith in Jesus and we see them transformed, we’re seeing the work that He’s doing. Every time as we walk with Him and He sands those rough edges off of us, we’re seeing Him at work through His Holy Spirit. If you’re serving the Lord and it’s become a drudgery, stop thinking about just the tasks that you’ve been given and pause for a moment to think about the privilege you have been given that you get to see the Messiah at work. That’s cause number one for rejoicing. Second of all, God allows us to come to Him through Jesus.

Verse 22, He says, things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. So when He says at the beginning of that verse that all things have been handed over to me by my Father, Jesus is pointing out, as He did several times throughout the Gospels, that He was sent here with full authority from the Father. Again, keep in mind that a lot of the people who were watching thought that he was merely a prophet. If he was merely a prophet like Elijah or Moses or Isaiah, Jeremiah, any of these guys that they thought might come back, he would have been able to do some mighty works, but he wouldn’t have the authority of God. And Jesus made the claim that he was God in human flesh, who came with full authority from his Father.

And he says, no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son. Now that can be confusing to us until we think about what people knew before Jesus came. As we look back on it now, we can see in hindsight that in the Old Testament, there are clues there of the Trinity. There are clues there of the inner working of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But for them, until Jesus came, it was not abundantly clear to them that there was a son, let alone for them to know him.

And when he showed up, they did not understand who he was until he had to reveal it, and he had to make it clear. And still, no one knows the Father the way the Son does. we can know a lot about God because he’s chosen to reveal it in his word and in the person of Jesus Christ the father has shown us who he is and what he’s like we can know a lot about God but we don’t know the father the same way the son does nobody in here would claim to understand God as well as Jesus no one in here would claim to understand the Father as well as Jesus. And so no one knows Him, no one knows the Son except the Father. It’s not saying we don’t know them at all, but we don’t know them the way they know each other.

But here’s the thing, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. With us being sinners, God would have been completely justified to leave us in the darkness and leave us groping around not knowing Him, having some idea through creation and through conscience that there’s a God out there, but not really knowing Him or knowing His will for us. But God chose instead to speak to us through His Word. And the introduction to the book of Hebrews talks about how God spoke through the prophets throughout history, but now at the last time, He came and gave us the ultimate view of Himself through His Son. That is a very loose paraphrase.

I encourage you to go back and look at the first three verses of Hebrews, but it’s right there. He’s saying, God has chosen to tell us some things about Himself through His Word that He did not owe us that information. And then He chose to send the spitting image of Himself to us in Jesus Christ so that we could know Him fully. And even at that, there was still confusion until Jesus began to open their eyes. The only way we can know the Father experientially is through Jesus.

The only way we can know Jesus is because Jesus chose to make it so. In our sin, He didn’t owe us that. In our sin, He did not owe us the light. He did not owe us a relationship with Him.

But He chose to do it anyway. God allows us to come to Him through Jesus Christ. And the only way that we can know him is through Jesus Christ. That’s why Jesus said in John chapter 14, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through me. If we get bogged down in the day-to-day of the mission and just doing our duty and going through our obligations and we find it to be a joyless experience, We need to stop and we need to pause for a moment and think about the very fact that God has allowed us to come to Him through Jesus Christ at all.

We can get so focused on the mission and the work that we forget about that very simple fact that God did not owe us a relationship with Him. God did not owe us to know Him. Everything that we know and understand about God, everything that we know intellectually, everything that we know experientially, everything that we know relationally of God, is a testament to His grace. And so we should pause and find joy in the fact that we can know Him and come to Him.

And look with me at verse 21. I love this it’s at once it’s at once very reassuring and affirming but it’s also a little insulting Jesus looks at these who have just been sent out and he gave thanks to the Father for the way that he had worked through these disciples but he says I praise you O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent. How would you like to be the audience to that prayer? Father, I thank you for the things that they’ve seen and experienced. I thank you that you hid them from wise and intelligent people.

I think I would have some questions. But the reality is, there were people in that society who held themselves out to be the wise and intelligent when it came to the things of God. There was a whole class of priests and scribes and royal court officials who thought that they had a monopoly on what it meant to know God and to serve God. But in reality, these people, when Jesus showed up, they were blinded. Some of them honestly deceived, and some of them just intentionally blinded.

They knew who Jesus was, but they didn’t want it to be true, so they put the blinders on. These things were hidden from them. As far as Jesus’ identity, as far as what He was doing, it was like it wasn’t even going on in front of them. So when Jesus says, thank you for sharing these things, not with the wise and intelligent, he’s not really insulting his followers.

This is just a little bit sarcastic toward those who would consider themselves to be the wise and the intelligent, but they were completely ignorant of the things that God was doing. Because they were too impressed with themselves. They were too impressed with how they were serving, how they were working. They were too impressed with what they knew. They were too impressed with their lineage.

They were too impressed by themselves to focus on what Jesus was doing. And so God, there were these priests and religious leaders, and they, on paper, they should have been the people that God worked through, but God went around them, went around the wise and the intelligent, as He does so often, and it says, and you’ve revealed them to infants. Now, these were not literal infants. But these ordinary people, that’s how they would have been looked at by these religious leaders.

You don’t know God the way I know God. You don’t have the right lineage. You don’t have the right upbringing. You didn’t go to the right schools.

Just a little common peasant. You can’t know what I know. exactly why God went around them to go to the ordinary people. You’ve revealed them to infants. It was the uneducated and unsophisticated in the ways of the world. Those are the ones who were given the insight.

Those are the ones who had the eyes to see and the ears to hear what God was doing and the ability to understand. And those are the ones that God was able to use in his work. who is God going to choose to use those who are so impressed with themselves that they’re not going to listen to what he says or those who come to him and say I can’t do this I’m not worthy of this I’m not skilled enough I’m not smart enough I’m not educated enough but I’ll do what you tell me to do God is going to use that second group of people every time and he says in verse 21 yes father for this way was well pleasing in your sight God is pleased to use ordinary people and hopefully this is not insulting to anybody in here but I think we would fall under the category of ordinary people none of us are billionaires that i know of if you are come talk to me afterwards none of us are billionaires none of us are major celebrities major tv personalities none of us are the are the the preacher that has the thousands of people following them and watching them on tv we’re we’re ordinary people but God works through ordinary people and sometimes again we get so bogged down in the day-to-day of the ministry that God’s given us of the mission that we’re fulfilling that it becomes a burden in our minds we need to remember that it’s a privilege that God chooses to work through us even though we’re ordinary. He doesn’t have to do that. There are lots of people who on paper would be so much better at the things He’s called us to do than we are. There are people who on paper would be so much better at this than what I’m doing right here.

But God calls us and He equips us and He puts us in place and He chooses to use ordinary people. And maybe if we are burdened down by the mission, it’s because we’re trying to do it on our own terms, by our own efforts. Or maybe we’re just, we’ve gotten to a place where we’re so impressed with ourselves that we cease to realize that this is just God working through us. I’m ordinary. this is all God so maybe we need to come to that place and pause and get our perspective right and then verse 20 verse 20 where he starts out the whole conversation starts out they’ve come in and they’ve said even the demons are subject to us by the way these 70 they had to have been super excited about this because not too long ago we studied a story in Luke chapter 9 where even after Jesus told the twelve that they had authority over demons they had not been able to cast out a demon.

And the guy had to bring his son to Jesus. And so these seventy are out and they’re able to do something now that even the twelve weren’t able to do just a short time ago. and Jesus says to them nevertheless yes that’s all good I’ve given you that authority I’ve worked through you this is not surprising he’s talking about how he saw Satan fall from heaven this is not surprising to him this is exactly what I told you was going to happen and yes it’s amazing yes it’s wonderful nevertheless do not rejoice in this that the spirits are subject to you and I don’t think he’s saying here that it’s wrong to celebrate that. I think he’s talking about it in terms of priorities. Don’t rejoice in the fact that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.

If you want something to celebrate, celebrate the fact that God has written your name down in heaven. If you’re a believer, if you’ve trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, that’s what you ought to celebrate. And you know what the good news about that is? It’s going to be true, not only today, but tomorrow and the next day. When you’re having a great day, when you’re having the worst day ever, it’s still going to be true.

When amazing things are happening in your service for the Lord, when you’re seeing the miraculous or the near miraculous, that’s still going to be true. When things feel dry and barren, that’s still going to be true. That is a cause for rejoicing that never goes away. This word recorded, that verb is given to us in the Greek in the present, I’m sorry, in the perfect tense, meaning it’s something that’s ongoing.

The names are not just recorded in heaven now, they are recorded now and for all time. And it refers to a kind of a written record that a lot of commentators connect with the idea of being a list of citizens with full rights and privileges in a kingdom. and so for Jesus to point this out in verse 20 tells us that our greatest source of joy is not what happened today it’s not what’s going to happen tomorrow it’s not how well we do it’s not the successes we have our greatest source of joy should be our guaranteed place in the kingdom and the full privileges we have as children of God, which we have because of Christ alone. If serving the Lord ever becomes a burden, and you need a way to recover that joy, pause and go back to that spot right there. But it doesn’t matter, ultimately, any of these other things, any of our performance, how our circumstances are, It goes back to the fact that our greatest cause of rejoicing is that if we come to Him through Jesus Christ, God has written our names in heaven, not just now, but for forever. I think this is what David talked about when he said, Restore unto me the joy of my salvation, and renew a right spirit within me.

David was one of those who died without seeing the Messiah. Although he knew from the Father some things about the Messiah. and gave some prophecies about the Messiah. I think David still understood what it meant for that relationship to feel like it’s not what it ought to be.

And I’ve let it become dry and ordinary. I’ve let it become a burden, and I need the joy of that salvation restored. There may be times in our lives when serving God feels like a drudgery. if it does go back to the very fact of where it started the very fact that your name is written down in heaven because jesus christ suffered blood and died to pay for your sins in full that none of this is based on your performance none of this is based on your circumstances it’s based on that moment in time where jesus took responsibility for your sins and for my sins and he was nailed to the cross and he shed his blood and he died so that you and i could be forgiven and then there was that moment in our lifetimes there was that moment in your lifetime where you trusted him as your one and only savior where you accepted that payment that was made on your behalf and you put your faith entirely in him and your name at that moment was written down in heaven for all eternity and if you have nothing else to rejoice over that happens today you have that and that’s reason enough to wake up every day rejoicing in the Lord

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 10:1-16, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 33
• Date: Sunday morning, September 28, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ So we did take them on a field trip to the wildlife refuge with the school, and I wanted them to tell you about some of the things that we had to do in preparation for that. Because we had to pack water, of course. You don’t go hiking without water. We had to pack a lunch.

We had to come prepared in that way so that we could go out and see everything that we were going to see. And with the little ones, they took up on this nature hike. They called the Animal Olympics. And they had to act, do jumping and push-ups and things that were like different animals.

And they got to see lizards and bison. We got to see a lot of ragweed, which is why I feel like I’m dying today. A lot of ragweed everywhere. But we had to prepare.

And even just going out, before we went out, the rangers were preparing them for how this was supposed to go. don’t stick your hands anywhere you can’t see thank you okay yeah you were there you you remember i should have interviewed you we’d still be up here though don’t put your hands anywhere you can’t see stay on the trail don’t touch anything you can’t identify these kinds of things they they were giving us instructions giving the kids instructions in preparation to go out and do this this mission this animal olympics hike that they were going on For any time we go out on any kind of important mission, we have to be prepared. And we’ve spent all of Luke chapter 9 with Jesus talking about the mission, talking about the mission that the disciples were about to go on, that 12 of them already had embarked on a little bit. And we come to chapter 10, and now it’s time for him to send them out again, to send them out better prepared, to send out more of them. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning, is this preparation that Jesus gave them to go on mission and what it teaches us about being on mission for him every day. Now, his preparation, his instructions were a little bit different from the instructions we were given.

As a matter of fact, he tells them, don’t pack a lunch, opposite of us going out to the refuge. But we’re going to learn from the instructions Jesus gave them in preparation for their mission. So hopefully you’ve already turned with me to Luke chapter 10. And would you stand with me as we read together from God’s Word?

And if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 10, it’ll be on the screen for you. But here’s what it says. Now after this, the Lord appointed 70 others and sent them in pairs ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come. And he was saying to them, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

Go, behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes, and greet no one on the way. Whatever house you enter, first say, peace be to this house. If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him.

But if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you. For the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house.

Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you. And heal those in it who are sick and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near to you. But whatever city you enter and they do not receive you, go out into its streets and say, even the dust of your city which clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet be sure of this, that the kingdom of God has come near. I say to you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.

Woe to you, Chorazin. Woe to you, Bethsaida. For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you.

And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will be brought down to Hades. The one who listens to you listens to me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects the one who sent me. And you may be seated. so he’s preparing them for this mission that he’s sending them on again chapter 9 is all about preparation for the mission it just does not let up and the mission they were given which is the same mission we have today is the mission to tell other people about our king and to prepare them for his kingdom that was the mission they were given that’s the mission we were given as the church that’s the mission that still is our responsibility to carry out.

Now, as I mentioned before, when he sent just the 12 out, we have the benefit that we understand more of the message about the king. They were coming, telling people that the king is coming. We get to go and tell people that the king has come and is coming again. We have the understanding that he died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

We have the understanding that He rose again three days later to prove it. We have the understanding and the promise that He is returning. So we have a fuller understanding of what it is we’re supposed to be sharing with the world than they did. But the mission ultimately is the same. We are telling people about our King and preparing them for His kingdom.

So He’s given them this mission. He’s given us this mission. And we see some things that we can learn from in His preparation for sending them out. There’s a gap here between verse 16 and verse 17.

In verse 16, it closes with the end of His instructions, and verse 17 says, they came back. So in between 16 and 17, they went out and did what He sent them to do. But as He sent them out, He sent them on a difficult task, a challenging mission. And we see right from the beginning there in verse 2 that the mission is challenging, and so we need help. As he’s preparing us for our mission, we have to understand that it’s going to be challenging.

If we think that it’s always going to be easy, that everything is always going to go according to plan, we are going to be disappointed very quickly. Does life ever go according to plan? No. That’s even truer in ministry. You can make all these plans, and you’ll be lucky if 1% of them work out the way you had intended.

But he says in verse 2 that there is a plentiful harvest. When he’s talking about the harvest, he’s talking about the souls of those who are going to hear the message about the king and who are going to respond by receiving Jesus as their king. Those are the harvest. And Jesus elsewhere talks about looking out and seeing the fields white for harvest.

When the crops are ready, when the crops are ready, they can’t just sit around and wait for weeks on end. Usually in farming, you bring on extra help. It’s all hands on deck to get the harvest brought in. Because the harvest is there and it’s ready now. And Jesus said in terms of this harvest of souls, he says, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

So there are so many people who need to hear about Jesus, and there are so many people who would respond if only they had this opportunity to hear, and there just aren’t enough workers to go out and harvest all that there is to be harvested. And so as He’s sending them out, He’s already preparing them that the mission is going to be a challenge in the sense that it’s going to be bigger than what you can accomplish on your own. Now, we need to understand a little bit of nuance here. That you, each person, each believer who hears this, you are absolutely vital in the work of the kingdom.

You are absolutely needed. And you are absolutely equipped to whatever task God has put in front of you. If He’s called you to it, He has qualified you and He has equipped you to do it. At the same time, you will never be able to do it all on your own. That’s why God puts us together.

That’s why He sent these men out two by two. It’s why Paul took somebody with him on his missionary journeys. It’s why God left us together as the church. So we do these things together.

He says, pray to the God of the harvest. That may be the other place in Luke where he talks about that. Therefore, beseech the Lord of the harvest. I’m sorry, I’m using a new Bible and Jesus’ words are not in red, so they don’t jump out quite as much as they did last week.

He does say the Lord of the harvest. Let’s each beg the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. He’s saying even the 70 of you are not going to be enough. As you go throughout all of the villages of Samaria, there is such a need. There is such an opportunity here that even sending out 35 teams of missionaries out into these villages is not going to be enough.

So pray and beg the Lord of the harvest that he’ll send more people out. And so for us, we understand from that that we’re not going to be able to finish the job all on our own. We need others. However, God has called you to accomplish the mission because it may look different for you than it does for me.

I heard a story this morning about somebody leading somebody to faith in Christ on a golf course. I don’t think I could lead somebody to faith in Christ on a golf course because everybody would be laughing too hard. at my golf game. It just doesn’t appeal to me. God has called and equipped each of us to go into different places and to reach different people. But it’s by working together, it’s by working together that we accomplish the task He’s given us in its fullness.

You and I will never reach everybody. But the more believers enlist in what God’s called us to do and actually get off the sidelines and do it, and the more we reach people for Christ and we disciple them to come and be in the harvest as well, that’s how the work gets done. So the work is challenging, but we have to know that that just means we need help. It doesn’t mean we can’t do it.

It means we need help. And additional workers aren’t the only help we need because the end of that verse says, beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out the laborers. Ultimately, it’s His help that we need. He’s going to supply us with everything that we need for the mission that He’s given us. So as we think about what it means to be on mission for the Lord, He prepares us ahead of time to know that it’s going to be challenging.

It’s going to be hard work. and so we’re going to need help and there’s no shame in asking for that help he encourages us to cry out to him for his help and for him to send others when we get to verse three he tells them go and then it says behold i send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves Doesn’t that make you want to go? Are lambs threatening? I’m careful to ask that. I asked that one day in a middle school Bible class and had one boy say, I was attacked by a lamb when I was little.

Okay, they don’t normally do that. So other than that one case, are lambs threatening? No. That’s kind of the point here. They are not threatening animals.

Are wolves threatening? if you bring a lamb to a wolf fight who’s going to win the wolf it’s not a trick question i promise it’s a wolf and jesus says to his followers go and by the way i’m sending you out as lambs among the wolves that is not very reassuring but it should be. He says, go behold, I send you out as lambs among the wolves. He’s comparing us to helpless animals, and from what I’m told, not particularly smart animals either. And his reason for comparing us to that is something that they would have immediately understood as meaning that we are at risk.

There is always a risk to us that there’s going to be a cost that there’s going to be a danger involved in following Him. But when you look at how non-threatening sheep are, lambs, and how vulnerable they are, there is one reason that lambs survive. There is one thing that provides for the lambs and protects the lambs so that they can survive. What is that? A shepherd.

The only reason the lambs survive is because of the shepherd. Now, he could have used any number of helpless animals. I think at that nature hike thing, they were talking about frogs. Everything loves to eat frogs because they’re non-threatening, they can’t fight back.

He could have said, I’m sending you out as frogs among the wolves, but he didn’t because frogs don’t have a shepherd. He’s not only telling us that we’re vulnerable on our own, he’s pointing to the fact that we need him. We need him for provision. We need him for protection.

This animal only survives because it is faithfully shepherded. And so it’s a reminder for us that we are faithfully shepherded. And the only reason that you and I will survive the mission that he sends us on, the only reason that we will be successful in the mission that he sends us on, is because of Him. And this is also a reminder that we represent Him. Because He’s also identified in Scripture as a lamb, not in the sense of being helpless, but in the sense that He didn’t fight back when they came for Him, in the sense that He was offered as a sacrifice.

Now, you think about some of these men who were about to go on his behalf. You think about some of the people like we just talked about last week, who said, I will follow you, because he was going to Jerusalem, and they thought he was going to Jerusalem to set up the kingdom. And so they were ready to take the sword and the spear and the slingshot and whatever else they needed, and they were ready to go to Jerusalem and whoop up on some Romans. They were ready to go and start an uprising.

They were ready to go and fight and fight and conquer like an army. If his followers thought of him as a conquering king, they thought of themselves as an advancing army. But here they’re being compared to lambs. I’m not sending you out like soldiers. I’m sending you out like lambs.

Lambs don’t conquer anything. At least not by force. If they were going out as lambs and being sent out to conquer these villages in Samaria, it wasn’t going to be through traditional weapons, through human warfare. They were going and representing a different kind of king.

And it just showed them again that he was a different kind of king. His kingdom was not of this world, and that what they expected Him to be was not who He was. But throughout this mission, we have to rely on Him. If we go out and try to reach people for Christ without Him leading, we’re going to frustrate ourselves.

We’re going to talk to people who aren’t listening. We’re going to stumble all over our words. It’s much better to be led by Him. I’ve told you before, I was way older than I want to admit before I realized the Holy Spirit has a role in evangelism. It’s the Holy Spirit who convicts.

It’s the Holy Spirit who draws. I don’t understand how all that works. But the Bible teaches it, so I know it’s true. We go out not as a conquering army, but we go out as lambs to the slaughter and let Him lead us, let the shepherd guide us. then we come to verse 4 and he tells them about all the things that they don’t need to worry about all the things that on paper we should do like when we were preparing for our preparing for a hiking trip you’re going to make certain provisions so that you don’t get out there and dehydrate to death or if you’re going on a transcontinental flight you’re going to prepare certain ways There are certain things that are just wise to do in preparation for any kind of trip or mission or journey.

I don’t care what it is. And he tells us not to worry about those things because the mission is urgent. And so he wants us to keep our priorities straight. Look with me again at verses 4 through 9.

He says, don’t carry any money belt. Meaning don’t worry about how much money you’re going to take for the trip. Don’t carry a bag, meaning I don’t want you carrying a whole lot of stuff around with you in preparation for the trip. No shoes. Now, he’s not saying go barefoot.

He told him not to carry any shoes, meaning don’t take an extra. Don’t take 57 pairs of shoes for the trip. Just take what you’ve got on and go. And greet no one along the way.

Now, that sounds hateful, but we’ll talk in just a minute about what that means. and he gives them instructions of what they’re supposed to do when they come to each house and they’re not supposed to worry about where they stay and what they eat what is he talking about here he’s talking about keeping our priorities in the proper order don’t burden yourself with a lot of provisions that’s why he says don’t don’t worry about the money belt or the bag or the extra shoes don’t don’t carry a bunch of stuff that you’re going to have to worry about that you’re going to have to transport you travel light so you can move quickly when the lord leads you’re able to respond quickly and go where He goes, or go where He sends you. And don’t waste time on things that don’t advance the mission. That’s what He’s talking about here when He says don’t greet anybody along the way. This is not telling us that somebody says hi to you, you just ignore them and walk on by, because He said don’t greet them. Now, in the ancient world, in this culture, they would go through these elaborate greetings where they’d meet along the side of the road, and they would, who are you?

Who are your people? Who’s the leader of your people? Let me hear the history of your people. Who are your enemies?

What news do you have from where you came from? They would try to work out business deals. It became this elaborate thing anytime you met somebody along the road. And he’s saying, don’t do that.

You’ve got places to be. Now, I think if the Holy Spirit led somebody to, led one of these men to stop and share the gospel with along the side of the road. Yeah, obviously, you’re not just there to ignore people. But he’s talking about not being focused, as we tend to do, on things that may not be bad things, but they don’t contribute to the mission. And that is a convicting point.

That’s something I have to come back and ask myself all the time. There are things that are good that we can get focused on that do not contribute to the mission. And if they don’t contribute to the mission, they’re not something we ought to spend a lot of time or energy on. And then don’t get caught up in earthly pursuits and comforts.

This is as we move into verse 5, whatever house you enter first, say, peace be to this house. If a man of peace is there, meaning somebody who’s open to receiving you, your peace will rest on him, but if not, it will return to you. He’s saying here, if it does, stay in that house eating and drinking what they give you, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. And he says, whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you and heal those who are sick and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near you. He talks about not moving from house to house within the same town.

I think you could offend people doing it that way, but you can also get focused on, oh, these people have a nicer house. I started out in ministry as pulpit supply, and sometimes you’d end up going to some random little town, and I use the word town generously, somewhere in Oklahoma that nobody’s ever heard of. Rodney knows what I’m talking about. And sometimes people would invite you to stay the night, and sometimes some of them had really nice houses.

Other times, not so much. But if you accept an offer from somebody to stay in their house, and then you find out Brother So-and-so’s got a really nice house, you say, you know what, I’m going to go stay over there. You’ve just offended some of the people that you’ve come to minister to. Not only that, the eating, I use this story all the time with my kids. There was a little, again, not even a town, just like three houses and a church up on a hilltop over in eastern Oklahoma that I went and preached at.

And they were probably 30 or 40 minutes from the nearest town that had a restaurant. So after church on Sunday, they were insistent, we’re going to take you back home and we’re going to feed you. Okay, I’m used to feeding myself, but that, okay, is the way it was said, we’re going to feed you. So I went, and you may recall from previous messages that there are two things that I will not eat. Raw onion and American cheese.

And I sit down at this lovely farmhouse table, and the lady has obviously gone to a lot of trouble and made a casserole that just has American cheese baked over the top in a layer about that thick. And once it came out of the oven, sprinkled raw white onion all over the top. And I use this as a story with my children. They’re picky, and some of them, some of them are picky.

I can’t eat that. I’ll die. You ate it yesterday. You’re just not in the mood for it today.

You will not die. And I tell them about going to that couple’s house after I had preached at their church, and they served that casserole. And you know what I did? I learned how to swallow without chewing. and I ate the casserole and I asked for seconds of the casserole because that’s what you do.

Now some of y’all are going to bring me American cheese and onions just at the next potluck. If you do it just for spite I might not eat the casserole. But that’s the kind of thing they’re talking about here. That’s the kind of thing Jesus is talking about. You put you aside, you put your comfort aside.

Now, have I always done that perfectly? No. But you put you and your comfort and your preferences, you put those things aside for the good of the people you minister to. Don’t get caught up in earthly pursuits and comforts. Like, I’m going to stay here because it’s nicer.

Oh, they have better food over there. He says just pick a place, stay there, and minister to the people in the village. For most of you, that won’t be an issue of having to stay with people as you’re going around doing ministry. But the lesson here is that we don’t focus just on our earthly pursuits and comforts. And he tells us in verse 9, we do things that the world thinks are just a little bit weird because the mission comes first.

But you have the opportunity to go to the nicer house. You have the opportunity to minister over here where the fringe benefits are better. You have the opportunity to do this, but you’re not going to do it because you’re focused on the kingdom. That’s exactly what he tells us to do in verse 9.

He tells them just heal the people who are sick and say to them the kingdom of God has come near to you. This whole thing about our priorities means prioritizing ourselves lower in our list than we think we ought to go. And then we come to verses 10 through 16, and I’m going to try to wrap this up quickly. But he talks about what happens if they don’t receive the message.

Now, again, most of you will not necessarily end up going village to village and town to town. So how does this apply to you? It applies to you because every day in our daily lives, we have the opportunity to share Christ with people, and some of them will receive him and some of them will reject him. When you get excited about evangelism and you go out and share Christ, and you think everybody’s going to respond to the gospel, and that first time somebody rejects it, it’s discouraging. Because we think, well, everybody should want what I’ve found.

Jesus prepared them for the reality so that they wouldn’t get discouraged, so that they wouldn’t give up. As a matter of fact, he spent a relatively long time in this, preparing them for opposition and rejection. And the reason is because they were going to experience both. If you’ve never had anybody reject the gospel as you’ve shared it, it’s probably because you hadn’t shared the gospel or certainly hadn’t shared it very many times. He tells them in verses 10 and 11 that some people, some villages, were going to reject their message outright.

They didn’t want to hear it. What do you think are the chances of running into somebody today that you share the gospel with who they’re not going to want to hear it? are people out there who don’t want to hear it yes there may be people who don’t want to hear it today but maybe the next time the holy spirit’s working on them so we don’t just write them off either but they were reminded these disciples were reminded that god was going to deal with this because we immediately think what is it that i did wrong maybe if i’d said it this way or maybe if i’d approached it that way and the reality is there’s probably nothing you did wrong Now, if you gave them a false gospel Or if you were deliberately offensive That’s a different story But you could present the gospel faithfully And persuasively You could present it lovingly And still there are people who are going to reject it Even if you did nothing wrong in your presentation Don’t worry about that God will deal with that. That’s what the whole thing about wiping the dust off of their feet was. I told you before the last time Jesus said this in Luke, that when the Jews would walk through a pagan area before they would cross back in to Israel, they would wipe the dust off of their feet as a symbol of I’m not carrying that pagan dirt into Israel as a sign of God’s judgment against that pagan nation. And so when they’re wiping the dust off of their feet when leaving a village, it’s a sign the judgment of God is here.

You didn’t want God’s mercy. You’re still under judgment. God is going to fix that. We look at verse 10.

We also look at verses 12 and 15, where he talks about these cities in the day of judgment who had the opportunity, they heard the message, and they wanted nothing to do with it, that God was going to deal with it. And some of the cities, some of the cities had seen enough miracles and heard enough about what Jesus had done that other wicked cities like Sidon and Tyre and Sodom even would have repented if they’d seen the things these cities had. And still, with seeing Jesus Himself, it wasn’t enough to convince them. If Jesus appearing Himself and doing miracles among the people wasn’t enough to convince some people, you and I need to understand it’s not us. People were going to reject Him. but the mission is necessary so we persevere there are still people who need to hear there are still people who may well respond to the gospel if they hear it one more time so we persevere we keep sharing the message in spite of the closed doors in spite of the rejection in spite of the opposition in spite of the hostility we continue on this mission.

Why would we do that? Why should they continue? Why would we? And it’s because it’s not about us. It’s about Jesus.

It’s about finding someone in that crowd who listens to our message, but hears His voice. It’s about finding someone in that crowd who comes to the Father through him. That’s what verse 16 says. The one who listens to you, they’re not listening to you.

If they’re listening to you, they’re listening to me. And if they receive you, they receive me. If they receive your message, they receive me. And if they receive me, they receive the one who sent me.

If they reject you, they didn’t reject you, they rejected me. And they rejected the one who sent me. It’s all about glory to the Father and glory to the Son.

And so we press on with the message of our King who has come and who has taken the penalty of our sins and paid for it in full on the cross, where He shed His blood and He died. And we continue to take the message that that Savior rose again three days later to prove it, and that He promises to come back, and that we’ll be with Him forever. We persevere in that mission because it’s about Jesus.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:57-62, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 32
• Date: Sunday morning, September 21, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ I know that none of you have ever had to deal with anybody who’s entitled, right? There’s none of that in your world. I heard a really deeper than expected laugh over there. Now, we all deal with people who are entitled from time to time.

If you work in any kind of retail setting or any kind of food service setting, you probably deal with that more than most of us do. I used to run into a lot more entitled people when I was younger and used to work at the grocery store. And when I worked at Homeland some 20, 25 years ago, we used to have sales on Blue Bell ice cream. They probably still do that, but we just order groceries from Walmart and don’t think about it.

But they would have sales on Blue Bell ice cream. The sale paper would come out. And if I would see that on sale, I would begin wondering if it was too late to call in sick or change careers or that sort of thing. Because they would never order enough. These people would come out of the woodwork and they would come in to stock up.

My grandmother was one of them. Sometimes I would forget that there was a sale until I would see her at the store and think, oh, this is going to be a rough weekend. Not because of her, but just because I knew it was on sale. They would never order enough for the demand.

And so people would get there expecting their bluebell two for six or whatever it was. I don’t think you get those days back. Whatever this really cheap price was, and we wouldn’t have enough, and they would start throwing a fit. Now, we were able, if they requested it, we were able to write them a rain check so they could bring it back in and still get the sale price.

But there was one lady in particular that was not good enough. We were supposed to make it right. Like, I had personally wronged her. because we had run out of bluebell. And I don’t know what she wanted exactly because everything I suggested, everything the manager suggested, it was not good enough.

I think she wanted us to go out into the parking lot and milk the secret herd of cattle that we had and make her some more bluebell on the spot. But what makes somebody entitled and what makes it so difficult to deal with them is that there is a big gap between what they deserve and what they think they deserve. And when we see that gap in the wrong direction, where somebody thinks they deserve way more than they actually do, she did deserve to come in and be able to buy her bluebell. She deserved to be treated with respect, and she was.

But she demanded things that were not reasonable. When somebody expects more than they actually deserve, it becomes frustrating for everybody around them. And so you have to look at somebody that has high demands and say, what do they actually deserve? Is this reasonable? When we look at Jesus, His demands on us as His children, as His followers, His demands on us are incredibly high.

But there’s no gap here between what He demands and what He deserves. This morning, I want us to look at what it is Jesus deserves out of His followers. What kind of disciples does Jesus deserve? And there’s no gap here.

We’re going to see these high demands, but they’re not unreasonable. Nobody looks at this and thinks, well, Jesus is acting entitled, because we understand that He’s worth whatever He can expect of us and so much more. Even if we fulfilled everything that He expected, He would still be worthy of more. So we’re going to look at three would-be disciples this morning and where they fell short of what Jesus deserved, of what Jesus expected, and what this shows us about the kinds of followers He deserves for us to be. And we need to understand going into this that you and I will never be able to do any or all of these three things perfectly, but these are the things that And so this is what we aim for.

We don’t ever treat it like he’s expecting too much out of us. So we’re going to be in Luke chapter 9 this morning. Some of you may have already turned there. If you haven’t, please turn there with me so we can read together.

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 9, it’ll be here on the screen for you where you can follow along. But starting in verse 57, here’s what Luke records for us. It says, as they were going along the road, someone said to him, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, the foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. And he said to another, follow me.

But he said, Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father. but he said to him, allow the dead to bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God. Another also said, I will follow you, Lord, but first permit me to say goodbye to those at home. But Jesus said to him, no one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. And you may be seated. This morning, we’re going to look at these three men and exactly where they went wrong, because most of what they’re most of what they are proposing to Jesus does not sound unreasonable at least the way we understand it but when we look at it through the lens of their culture and their society and and what these things would have meant to them we understand that what they are asking is actually unreasonable in light of what Jesus deserves I don’t think these were evil men I don’t think they were wicked.

I think they were just run-of-the-mill people going about their daily life and trying to try to work Jesus into their life as kind of an accessory. You know how there are some things that we just kind of squeeze into our lives as we have time? That’s kind of what they’re trying to do with Jesus. That doesn’t make them evil, but it doesn’t make them disciples either. And so Jesus uses these three men and these events as teachable moments for those around them, those around him, and for us as well.

So we look at this first man who comes to Jesus seemingly unprompted and says, I’ll follow you wherever you go. Now, Matthew tells us that this man was a scribe. For him to follow Jesus was going to be a sacrifice. I think he probably knew there would be some sacrifice involved, but I don’t think he understood the depth of the sacrifice that Jesus was actually calling on him to make.

And so as we go through this first man story, we’re going to see that Jesus deserves any sacrifice we can endure. Anything that he puts in front of us that he says, this is the cost of following me. any price it costs us, he’s worthy of. For this man, there was going to be a sacrifice, and Jesus was worthy of him enduring that sacrifice. So what was this sacrifice? Again, Matthew tells us that this man was a scribe.

He was one of the religious leaders, and he came to Jesus here and said, I will follow you. This is a little bit unusual for one of these religious leaders to come to Jesus and say, I want to follow you. I want to go with you. Now, follow him where?

If you look back just a few verses before this, back at Luke 9 51, it says, when the days were approaching for his ascension, he was determined to go to Jerusalem. He had made it very clear to everybody who was listening and paying attention that he was heading to Jerusalem. There were going to be a few stops on the way, but his ultimate destination was Jerusalem. And when you take that, the fact that they all knew he was headed toward Jerusalem, and you pair that with the rampant misunderstandings that everybody has, that everybody has been dealing with in Luke chapter 9 about what it actually meant that Jesus was their king, that Jesus was the Messiah. You pair the going to Jerusalem with what they thought the Messiah was going to do.

They’re thinking he’s going to Jerusalem because it’s time to set up the kingdom. And so this scribe believes in Jesus enough to say, I think he’s the real deal, but like his disciples, who also believed in him, they still didn’t understand what that meant. And they thought he was going to Jerusalem to be an earthly king. And this man says, I believe in him enough that I want to go and be part of that.

He’s willing to make a little bit of a sacrifice to follow Jesus, to go with him, to set up his kingdom. And if you think about it from their perspective, that was probably an exciting prospect. The Messiah has finally come. He’s going to usher in this golden age to Israel. Everything’s going to be wonderful, and I get to be there and see it happen.

I get to be in on the ground floor. I get to be involved. Maybe there will be some place for me in the Messiah’s kingdom, sort of like when the disciples ask, can we be on your right hand and left hand? Everybody wants to be part of this.

It’s a movement, and they’re willing to pay a little bit of a price to be part of this, but we know this man misunderstood something because Jesus’ response only makes sense if he misunderstood. This man basically professes loyalty to Jesus, and Jesus says, hold up here, there’s sacrifice involved. There’s going to be a cost here. That tells us that the man did not fully understand. what it was going to cost him to follow Jesus in the way that he was talking about.

He says in verse 58, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Now, if you’re like me, you’ve probably read this before and thought, okay, he’s just making the point that it’s going to be tough. If you want to follow me, you’re going to be deprived of some things. It’s not always going to be easy.

And that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true as far as it goes. But I find myself, as I read the biblical text, a lot of times asking why. Why did he say that?

Seriously, of all the examples he could have used, why in the world did he talk about foxes and birds? Is this a common expression? It doesn’t seem to be a common idiom that they would have used that I could have found, that I could find. And so I start digging into, where does the Bible mention these creatures otherwise? Trying to understand why, as he’s talking to that group of people, why he would use these animals as examples.

And the first thing we notice is that foxes are unclean animals under Jewish law. Under the Old Testament law, you could not eat foxes. First of all, Madeline, good news, right? Her favorite animal.

You could not eat foxes. Really weren’t supposed to handle foxes. You didn’t want foxes around for a number of reasons. Not only are they unclean, they’re kind of scavengers, but they’re also predators.

They’ll attack your chickens. They might attack people. They’re just not an animal that they were excited about having around. They were unclean.

They were also considered to be just a little bit wily, a little bit devious. And the term fox was used as an insult. I think Jesus even called King Herod a fox. That was not a compliment the way some people would use it today. It meant you’re sneaky and you’re up to something.

So you’ve got something that was unclean, something that was despised, something that was not trusted. And then when you look at what Jesus says about birds elsewhere, he talks in multiple of the Gospels about birds not having much economic value. Later on in Luke 12, he talks about how you could buy five birds for a coin. and he uses them as an example saying these birds are basically worthless but they don’t drop out of the sky without your father noticing so how much more does he care about you these birds are a symbol of something that’s worthless and when you look at those two things together what a fox would have meant to them what a bird would have meant to them I can’t help but see parallels between that and other people in the society that Jesus inhabited who were treated in the same way. The Gentiles were looked at like foxes.

They were unclean. They weren’t trusted. The religious leader certainly didn’t want them around. Then you’ve got other people that even though they’re Jewish, they’re kind of outcast.

They’re poor. they’re socially unacceptable, they’re crippled, and they just didn’t have very much value in the eyes of the elites. And so I think on one hand, yes, Jesus is making a very clear surface point that there’s going to be a sacrifice here, because if you follow me, you’re not even going to have the basic expectation that you have a home of your own, because you’re going to wander from place to place like I do preaching the kingdom. But I think it goes further than that, because he compares himself to the foxes and the birds. And he says, even the unclean animal has their nest. Even the worthless animal has its roosting place, but the Son of Man has nothing.

And I think this is something that they would have understood as saying, you’re coming in as a scribe. You’re coming in as one of the elite people. You’re coming in as somebody who’s respected and powerful and you’re part of the in crowd in this society. But you’re wanting to follow me and I’m going to be as rejected in those circles as the Gentiles, as the poor, as the vulnerable. I think this is pointing out that he’s not going to Jerusalem to set up this earthly kingdom they’re anticipating.

He is going to Jerusalem to be rejected by the very people that this scribe represents. And so not only are we talking here about sacrificing the comforts of home, we’re talking about sacrificing reputation. We’re talking about sacrificing social standing, maybe our dignity, if that’s what is required to follow Jesus. This scribe was a prominent man, but following him wherever he went was going to require humility and sacrifice.

Salvation is absolutely free to us. Jesus has paid the cost. But there is absolutely a cost to us in following Him. Now, when He tells this man, you know, you want to follow me, but I don’t have a home that even the foxes and the birds have. It’s not telling us that to follow Jesus we can’t have homes.

Most of us in this room are in trouble. What it means is if we’re wanting to follow Him, if we desire to follow Him, especially if we desire to follow Him in the way that He deserves, we have to be willing to suffer. We have to be willing to be deprived. We have to be willing to be rejected.

But he is worth the sacrifice. And then we come to the second man. And we see from his account that Jesus deserves to be our first priority. With this second man, Jesus actually approached him.

He’s the only one of the three that Jesus approached about following him. The other two came to Jesus and just volunteered. This man, Jesus goes to him, and in verse 59 says, come follow me. So in response, this man asks him in verse 59, Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father. Okay, that does not sound like an unreasonable request, does it?

I think we would all say, yeah, go, go, do that, go take care of that. Jesus doesn’t say, go take care of that. Jesus says, let the dead bury their own dead. And for you and me, again, if we don’t look at it through the lens of what they would have understood and what that meant to them, it sounds like a very harsh response.

But there’s a few things for us to consider. If the man’s father was already dead, it makes it sound like you can’t go to your father’s funeral. If the man was already dead, if the father was already dead, that’s exactly where he would be, is already burying his father. Unless there were some extraordinary, extenuating circumstances.

When somebody died in that culture, they were buried before sundown. You just didn’t dawdle and drag it out, and sometimes it’s a week later that you bury somebody here. Maybe longer. They buried them that day before sundown. If they died during the night, it was before the next sundown, unless it was the Sabbath.

But they were supposed to be right on it. So if the man’s father was already dead and he’s saying, I want to go to the funeral, he would already be at the funeral. So for him to say, let me first go bury my father, he is either looking ahead and realizing my father’s old and he can’t live forever. Eventually he’s going to die.

I want to be here for that. I want to be here with him. And so he’s saying, eventually I’ll come follow you. Let me put it off until it’s convenient. Or he’s talking about something that happened a year after somebody died, when they would gather up the bones that were left, and they would reinter them in this ossuary, this bone box, and they would go and put it away, and that’s when the inheritance was distributed.

So he’s either saying, let me wait until my father dies, whenever that’ll be, but whenever it’s convenient, I’ll come follow you. Or let me wait until we’ve reburied the bones and I’ve got all my money and I’ve tied up all my loose ends. What he is asking is not a simple, hey, can I go to my father’s funeral and I’ll be back in a few hours and then I’ll follow you. And Jesus is completely unreasonable and says, no, you come now or not at all.

This man is saying, can I come and follow you when it’s convenient? Can I come follow you when it’s convenient? So he’s attempting to delay discipleship until some future moment when it’s actually convenient. But I know this from experience, and you probably do too. If we come to Jesus with a mindset that says, I will follow you when it’s convenient, if we have some reason why we’re going to delay obedience to him, if we have some reason why we’re going to delay our devotion to him, there will always be another reason.

It’s sort of like me and Weight Watchers, all right? I’ll do really well for a month, maybe two, and then I’ll fall off the wagon. We’ll have something delicious here at church, and I’ll fall off the wagon. I’ll start back tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes, and it’s busy. I’ll start back Tuesday. Oh, wait, somebody’s having a birthday. Somebody is always having a birthday at my house. or oh the the grandparents are going to be in town this weekend they’re going to want to go eat well i can’t not have solaces okay there is always a reason to put it off till tomorrow getting back on if you’re waiting for it to be convenient to follow jesus there will always be something that you say oh it can wait till just a little bit longer let me take care of this first but then as soon as we take care of this, there’s something else on the horizon.

Oh, just a few more days, just a little while longer. That’s what this man was doing. But the excuses aren’t worth it because Jesus deserves to be our priority. That’s why he told the man, let the dead bury their dead.

What he meant by that is the spiritually dead, those who did not know him, let them go deal with these earthly concerns. All of the things that you think you’ve got to work out, all the loose ends that you’ve got to tie up, all the ducks you’ve got to get in a row, all the cliches and idioms that we use to excuse putting off obeying Jesus. He says, let the people who don’t follow me deal with those earthly concerns. You just follow me. The time for us to follow him is always today.

And I say that recognizing that that is a very easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to do consistently. But that is the goal we shoot for as believers. To not consistently say, oh, whatever he’s called me to do here that I’m putting off, I’ll do it tomorrow. Or I’ll do it when I take care of this or that.

If he’s calling you to do it today, step out and do it today. He deserves to be our top priority. And then we see with this third man that Jesus deserves our full devotion. The third man came to Jesus offering to follow him. But again, only if he could go home and say goodbye to his family.

In verse 61. Now again, that sounds reasonable. But what he’s talking about here is really going home and setting his affairs in order. Again, not something evil. something pretty responsible, actually.

Let me go home, let my family know what’s going on, let us make plans for the contingency, what they’re supposed to do in my absence, let’s figure this out, and then I’ll come follow you. But Jesus’ response, and all of that still sounds reasonable, until you look at Jesus’ response and see from Jesus’ response that he saw something in the man that we don’t see. And what he saw in the man based on his response was that this man was committed with half of his heart to serve Jesus and was committed with half of his heart to being back at home. Because Jesus’ response, Jesus’ response in verse 62 is, no one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. I don’t think that’s talking about salvation, because they’re talking about following him.

They’re talking about service in the kingdom. but nobody putting their hand to the plow and looking back is fit for service in that kingdom. If you want to serve God, your focus needs to be on Him. Again, that does not mean that we should be irresponsible. Balance your checkbook, pay your bills, do the things we’re supposed to do.

It’s talking about where our hearts are and where our focus is. For somebody to look back from the plow. Now, this is a biblical metaphor that’s actually really easy to understand, because I’ve gardened enough to know. I’ve even used an old plow.

Apparently, you’re supposed to hook it up to horses. It makes it easier, but you can try to push it, too, if you want. Don’t recommend it. But whether you’ve got a plow or a tiller or whatever you’re trying to do, if you’re trying to get those rows ready for cultivation, you want to look forward straight into the distance because then you’re always headed toward that mark and you’re going to plow a straight line. If you’re plowing or tilling, whatever it is, and you’re looking all over the place, pretty soon you’re going to be twisting and turning and all over the place.

And you make a mess and you don’t do it right. And the same thing is true. If we’re trying to serve the Lord, but our hearts are everywhere else, we’re not going to be able to plow straight rows. We’re going to make a mess. When we literally look back from the plow, we lose focus, we make a mess, this kind of looking back is the spiritual equivalent, and it shows that there’s a half-hearted devotion to Jesus.

He deserves our full devotion. Jesus deserves more than half of our heart. there’s no part of our lives that Jesus does not deserve to be Lord of. And again, that is extraordinarily easy to say and very difficult to live out. But the question that I have to ask myself when I find myself struggling with this, and maybe it’ll help you as well, is to mentally make a list of all the parts of my life that Jesus doesn’t deserve.

And when I think about it in those terms, I cannot bring myself to say out loud that he does not deserve to be Lord of this or that, and I realize how foolish I’ve been. This man, his problem was not that he wanted to set affairs in order and be responsible. His problem was what Jesus saw beyond that, that his heart was halfway in it. When Jesus deserves our whole heart. So we look at these three men.

We see what they had in mind about being as disciples. They had some desire to follow Jesus. but there was something that was lacking in each of them. And we look at these men and this really happened. God’s word teaches it like it really happened.

But I think we can also look and see ourselves in one or more of these men. Maybe all three, maybe different ones at varying times. And so the question that you and I need to ask ourselves and that we need to answer is, are we living as the kind of disciple that Jesus deserves? And some days the answer might be yes for you.

Some days the answer might be no. And we don’t ask that just so we can answer no and then feel bad about it and continue to feel bad about it. We ask this question of ourselves. We compare ourselves. We hold up the mirror of Scripture to our lives to see where we fall short so that it can be fixed. And if we come to a point where we say, Lord, I’m trying to hold back from you in this and not give you my full devotion in this area, will you help me turn it over to you?

He’ll do it. Father, I find that I’m not willing to count the cost and pay the cost to follow Jesus. Will you help me become willing? He’ll help us.

Father, I’ve been putting my priorities in the wrong order. Will you help me? And he’ll help us.

Folks, those are prayers that God delights to answer. Those prayers that make us more like Jesus and help us to follow him more effectively. So this morning with these three very simple stories, I just want us to look at these men and learn from where they fell short. and learn to identify these things in ourselves so that we can be the kinds of disciples that Jesus deserves to have. of.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:46-56, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 31
• Date: Sunday morning, September 14, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ As we are working our way through Luke chapter 9, we’ve seen a kind of transition take place where the disciples have gone from just training for the ministry that Jesus is going to give them to now they’re entering a phase where they’re actually being sent out for short periods of time on mission. They’re preparing for what that mission is going to look like and how they’re going to carry it out, and they’re having to care about things like mission and strategy, some of these things that are going to be very important to their ministry later on. And I love things like strategy. I can’t say that I’m always good at it. I can’t play chess to save my life, but there is a game I love called Mancala, where the objective is to move these rocks around on a board and get, you know, you line them up certain ways and you can get extra turns and the objective is to get all of the rocks or as many of the rocks in your cup as you can.

And I’ve loved this game since I was a kid and I’ve loved it so much so that I have a multi-decade strategy of parenting and raising opponents that could play me. And so I started them very young playing this game and showed them no mercy. Never once have I let them win. And now, at least my older two can play this game and sometimes beat me, and it makes it a great challenge.

But there’s some strategy involved in this, and part of my problem is Benjamin knows my strategy. He’s figured it out. See, if you can line up these rocks in certain numbers, in certain patterns, in one turn, you can clear the board. And so he will try to do this to me, and I’ll try to do it to him. We will try to line things up where we can go around and mess up the other one’s strategy.

But even easier than sabotaging your opponent is sabotaging yourself. It’s always easier to sabotage yourself. I don’t care what it is. It’s always easier to sabotage yourself than to sabotage somebody else.

If I’m not paying attention or if I’m overly confident, I can miscount. I can line them up in the wrong pattern, and my whole strategy is gone. It’s always easier to sabotage yourself. When we think of the word sabotage, if you’re like me, your mind goes to something like in a war, where somebody will sneak behind enemy lines, and they’ll try to disrupt the railroads, or they’ll try to blow up bridges, things like that. We think of that as sabotage.

But sabotage can be things that we do on a daily basis that interfere with the mission we are trying to complete. And this morning, as we’re talking about the mission that the disciples are being sent on, we come across a section of Luke chapter 9, where Luke points out three stories about how the disciples, as they are preparing to be sent out on this mission, begin to do things and begin to act in ways that are going to sabotage the mission that Jesus is sending them out on. They are doing things that go against the strategy that they should be working. And so we’re going to look at these things this morning and hopefully learn from their example of how to sabotage our mission. These are things not to do as we seek to serve Jesus Christ and fulfill the mission that he’s given us.

So if you haven’t already, turn with me, please, to Luke chapter 9. Luke chapter 9. By the way, we could look at the opposite of doing these things as part of our strategy. But Luke chapter 9, and once you find the passage, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to start in Luke 9, verse 46, and we’re going to read through 56 this morning.

And here’s what Luke says. An argument started among them, that’s the disciples, as to which of them might be the greatest. But Jesus, knowing what they were thinking in their heart, took a child and stood him by his side and said to him, John answered and said, Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow along with us. But Jesus said, When the days were approaching for his ascension, he was determined to go into Jerusalem. And he sent messengers on ahead of him, and they went and entered a village.

Pardon me, I turned too many pages here. A village of the Samaritans to make arrangements for him. But they did not receive him because he was traveling toward Jerusalem. When his disciples, James and John, saw this, they said, Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them. But he turned and rebuked them and said, you do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.

And they went on to another village. And you may be seated. So here we’re going to see three things that they did that were setting them up to sabotage the mission that Jesus was sending them out on. And like I said, we could look at doing the opposite of what they did as a pretty good strategy for our mission.

Now, to be very clear, these are not the only three things that we could do to sabotage the mission He’s given us, but these are the three that are pointed out here. These are three things that just from the outset are going to doom our mission, or at least our participation in the mission, to failure. Excuse me. But before we get into what these steps are, it’s important for us to make sure we understand what their mission is, and by extension, what our mission is. And to do this, we can go back to the beginning of chapter 9.

It’s been a few weeks since we looked at this. But in Luke 9, 1 and 2, as he prepared to send the 12 out for the very first time, it says, and he called the 12 together and gave them power and authority over all the demons and to heal diseases. And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and perform healing. So prior to these incidents that he’s talking about here in this, in the section we read this morning, before those things, he sent these disciples out and he said, you’re going to go out and you’re going to heal.

You’re going to go out and you’re going to cast out demons. You’re going to go out and you’re going to preach. You’re to draw people’s attention to Jesus. This is what they were sent out to do, and that’s before the crucifixion. After the crucifixion, one of the very final things that Jesus did on this earth was to commission his followers to go out and do the same thing.

The only difference is now we have more information about what that good news is that we’re supposed to proclaim. The believer’s mission is to tell other people about our king and to prepare them for his kingdom. He gave these same marching orders in Luke 24 when he said, It is written that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. He tells them that it is necessary that the message goes out from Jerusalem, that the Messiah has died, has suffered for sins, and that He has risen again.

It needs to be proclaimed that forgiveness of sins is available in His name because of what He’s done. It needs to go out from Jerusalem to every corner of the world, and he says, and you are witnesses. It began with them. It was their job.

And folks, that was not just given to the people who were physically present the day Jesus gave it. Jesus gave those marching orders to his church, and that is our mission still today. To carry the good news about our king and his coming kingdom to the ends of the world. to every nation, tribe, and tongue, to those who are across the street from us, to those who are overseas from us. That’s our mission.

That was their mission. That’s our mission. And they were about to embark on some things that would sabotage them from being able to do that. As we looked at last week, one of the worst things we could do is not understand this mission. not understand what he’s left us here to do. We get easily distracted.

We get easily caught up in our own agendas, in our own mission, in things that look like good ideas but aren’t the best idea. We get caught up in those. But he gave us this mission. He gave us one thing to do that we’re supposed to have a sense of urgency about.

I think over the last week, some of us have felt that sense of urgency. I know that even before this week There have been people in our church Who have been talking about a sense of urgency I know of a couple of ladies in particular Talking about the time is short I hope this doesn’t embarrass you for me to share But I love it Miss Daniela chased somebody down the street the other day Because the Lord said Go make sure that he knows about Jesus because the time is short. Now, am I saying Jesus is coming back in our lifetime? I’m not saying that. I wouldn’t dare speculate when he’s coming back.

But he could come back any moment. He could come back for any one of us at any moment. We don’t know how much time we have to be on this mission. So it’s not something we put off till tomorrow.

It’s not something we think about tomorrow. It’s something we get in the fight and we engage on today because it’s the one thing he gave us to do. and we don’t allow ourselves to get focused on anything else. If it doesn’t further that mission, we shouldn’t have a lot of time to spend on it. So three things that the disciples did that were going to sabotage this mission from the get-go.

We sabotage this mission when we make it about us. Look with me again at verses 46 through 48. they started arguing, it says, about who was the greatest. If you remember back to last week, they still misunderstand what the kingdom was for and what the king was about because they thought he was going to set up an earthly kingdom. They thought he was going to throw the Romans out.

They thought this was going to be a new golden age of Israel. It would be like the second coming of David. It’s going to be great. And they’re all thinking, we want to be on the right and left hand of the king.

We want to be in positions of power and authority. And so they were debating among them which of them is the greatest. This is like kid stuff when you hear them arguing, oh, I’m better than you are. No, I’m better than you are. No, you’re not.

Yes, I’m telling mom, this is the kind of stuff they’re doing. Are they going to be able to focus on the mission he’s given when they’re making the mission all about them? No, they’re too focused on what they’ve done, on why they would be the greatest. They’re seeking honor.

They’re seeking praise. They’re seeking position. And they’re seeking it based on all the things they had done. On how often they had done it.

How long they had done it. How well they had done it. How pleased everybody was. And this debate naturally caused friction within the group and kept them from being able to focus on the work.

Say, well, how do you know it caused friction in the group? Because they’re arguing about it. He uses that word. They were arguing. They were debating.

They were not focused on what Jesus had come to do. They were focused on how it made them look. Now, there’s nothing, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to do a good job in the things that we do for the Lord. When we do something for the Lord, we ought to do it to the best of our ability.

Now, is what I do for the Lord going to look as good as what you do for the Lord? Not necessarily. But the main thing is we do our best in what we do for the Lord. But the moment we start to promote ourselves, we stop promoting Jesus.

The moment we start making the mission about ourselves, we stop making the mission about Jesus. And then it’s not promoting the king and preparing for the kingdom anymore. And so to get them to understand this, Jesus brings this child over, verse 47. And we look at that in our culture and we think, oh, how nice. You know, we have children up here and they come for the devotional and we see them, they’re sweet and innocent and we all care about the children and that’s wonderful.

They saw this in a different way because children are weak and dependent compared to adults. Up to a certain age, they weren’t even supposed to be taught the Torah, the Old Testament. They weren’t supposed to be instructed in the law. up to a certain age. And so for a teacher, a rabbi like Jesus, there was no point in even engaging with these children.

It would be beneath him. Jesus knew what was in these disciples’ hearts. He knew the pride and the self-centeredness that lurked there. So he brings this child, somebody that should have been beneath him, beneath him as a teacher to spend any time with, he brings this child to him in all his weakness, in all his tendency, and he says in verse 48 that whoever receives this child in my name receives me. The disciples were worried about being the best and being better than each other and being better than anybody else, and Jesus brought up this child and said, it’s about those who are weakest.

It’s not about your glory and your prestige. You go to those who least deserve it and can least do anything for you about it. And he who receives or welcomes this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. If they were to ignore their mission to the most vulnerable, they were ignoring that they were serving Jesus, and they were ignoring the will of the Father. And so he ties their treatment of the least of these, those who were beneath them, to their treatment of Jesus and their reception of the Father.

It is hard to make the service about ourselves when we stoop in humility to reach out and serve somebody who’s beneath us in the world’s eyes. I heard another preacher say it, that it’s hard to be prideful when you’re washing feet. To be great in the kingdom, we have to serve the Father in humility. To do that, we have to serve the Son in humility.

We have to come through the Son in humility. I mentioned this the last week. I can’t remember what service it was in. But about how my pastor used to say growing up that the church and the Hell’s Angels were the only two organizations that you had to admit to being bad before you could get in.

If we’re going to come to Jesus, we have to come in humility. He doesn’t want all our self-righteous boasting, look at all I’ve done. Jesus wants us to come to him in the words of the song we sang this morning. Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling. We don’t come boasting of what we’ve done.

We come admitting that we are sinful, that we are wicked, that we are in need of his forgiveness and cannot do anything to earn it or deserve it. We have to come to the Son in humility, and we have to serve the most humble in humility. To fulfill our mission, we serve in humility, and we keep the focus and glory on Him where it belongs. So we sabotage the mission when we make it about us.

Then we look at the next couple of verses here, verses 49 and 50. John comes, and he’s so proud of himself, and I read this in a child’s voice, because I can hear a tattling child in John’s voice. Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he wasn’t one of us. Almost tattling on this other man. We sabotage the mission when we act like gatekeepers.

Now, gatekeeper is a word that I’ve learned in the last few years, but it just sums it up. A gatekeeper is what it sounds like. The gatekeeper is somebody that opens the gate and closes the gate to let you in or let you out. And it’s used as a euphemism, like the White House chief of staff is the gatekeeper to the president.

If you can’t get through the chief of staff, you can’t see the president. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the cabinet, doesn’t matter who you are. If you can’t get through the chief of staff, he doesn’t take your call. We can, if we’re not careful, act like gatekeepers to Jesus, deciding who gets in and who gets out.

Even when it comes to the ministry. Now, I don’t think we would ever do that in terms of somebody getting saved. Although I did recently hear a story about a pastor whose church got mad at him because of who he led to Christ and baptized him, and they didn’t want him in that church. what I’m talking about is when it comes to ministry they were upset because someone outside the group was found casting out demons in Jesus name and they even tried to stop him because he wasn’t part of their group and I wondered why do they object to this man casting out demons and there are a couple of reasons he didn’t have the right connections or the right credentials. And sometimes, unfortunately, this is the way the world operates anyway. I remember sitting in a while back on a meeting with a committee that was hiring somebody for a ministry position and looking at a candidate and his resume and somebody said, oh, he went to that school? Oh, I can’t remember the exact words, but basically it was a hard pass.

And I thought, oh, I’m kind of glad I’m on this side of the table and not the other side of the table. But somebody can have all the wrong credentials on paper and still be called by God to do ministry. Somebody cannot have gone to the right schools. Somebody cannot have had the right training.

Somebody cannot have had the right family background and still be incredibly used by God in his service. And so for this man who was not part of their group to come and be casting out demons, they were upset he didn’t have the right connections, he didn’t have the right credentials, And so he was a threat to their own power and prestige in the kingdom. Oh, if this man starts casting out demons, then anybody can cast out demons. And if anybody can cast out demons, then we’re not special.

Then we’re not special. And then who’s going to be impressed by us in the kingdom? What if he likes that guy better? What if that guy gets to sit on the right hand when Jesus comes into his kingdom? So they were bothered by that.

But again, one of those things that we learn by taking Luke as it was written, piece by piece, it was embarrassing to them because this man did what they could not. Remember back in chapter 9, verses 1 and 2, I read to you a minute ago, preached over several weeks ago. Jesus sent them out with authority to cast out demons. Last week we saw how in verse 40, the man came to Jesus and said, Can you cast the demon out of my son?

I went to your disciples and they couldn’t do it. The disciples lacked the faith that they needed to do what Jesus told them they could do. And now here’s somebody else who’s not even part of our group. And he’s showing us up. Sometimes we want to gatekeep because somebody else might serve Jesus more effectively, we think, than we can.

Now, do I think anybody in this room is doing this? No, I don’t. I share it with you because it’s in the Word and because it’s one of those things we need to guard against. But they didn’t want anybody infringing on their position.

And so Jesus told them in verse 50, do not interfere. Here, this guy is on the same side as us. He is not actively working against the kingdom, then he’s on the same team. One of the other gospels, Jesus tells them, Jesus adds there in the middle of this statement, nobody can cast out demons in my name and turn right around and speak evil against me.

He said, if he can do this, it means we’re on the same team. To fulfill our mission, sometimes we’re going to have to serve alongside other faithful servants that God has put in situations and places that we don’t think they ought to be. Well, God, I wouldn’t have called that person to do that. That’s fine, He did. They’re the Lord’s servants, not ours.

And then finally this morning, we sabotage the mission when we fail to show grace. And this may be the hardest one of all. So in verses 51 through 56, they approach a Samaritan village on their way to Jerusalem. Now Luke presents these stories one right after another.

He doesn’t say they happened at the same time. But we know this third event took place a little while later. but Luke puts them together so that we see the comparison among the three stories. They go to this Samaritan village on their way to Jerusalem. It required, going from Galilee to Jerusalem, required them to travel through Samaria among these people who were half-breeds, as they would have thought. They were descendants of those Jews who intermarried with the pagans.

So they didn’t like the Samaritans. The Samaritans didn’t like them. It was a very touchy situation, and he sent the disciples ahead to prepare for his visit. Verse 53, though, says they did not receive him, meaning they did not welcome him because he was traveling toward Jerusalem.

The people in Samaria, in this village, got upset not because he was Jesus, not because he was Jewish, but because he was going to Jerusalem. He was heading there to observe the Jewish feasts at the Jewish temple instead of lingering there to worship as they did. There was this long-standing conflict between the Jews and Samaritans about the right place to worship. And they were not interested in supporting the ministry of someone who wasn’t going to agree with them. They wanted Jesus to compromise on the truth.

Now, since they didn’t receive Jesus as quickly and readily as the disciples thought they should, there was this really bizarre reaction. the disciples ask are you Lord how about we just call down fire from heaven on them right now let’s just burn up the whole village and I tell you what I have struggled with this for years because this is such a bizarre reaction to me who does that and then I felt it this week I felt it this week with what happened in the news this week everybody’s made it out to be about politics and I only think that’s because we have taken biblical issues and allowed them to be reframed as political what people don’t realize if they haven’t watched Charlie Kirk’s videos is that he was motivated by the gospel. Oh, I don’t like his politics. Okay, fair. You probably wouldn’t like mine either. I don’t like what mine were 10 years ago.

You know, that’s part of human existence. But his motivation was to go and speak on issues, not just to point out where people were wrong, but to call people to Jesus Christ. And he did that frequently on campus. As a matter of fact, I found out that Frank Turek, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because I quote him all the time.

Frank Turek was there at that event because they were there to do ministry together. That young man, a few moments before he was shot, was talking about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and inviting people to trust him as their Savior. And that young man at 31 years old had done more to advance the gospel in the dark abyss of this nation’s college campuses than anybody. And he was shot and killed. And I found myself strangely devastated over somebody I’d never met.

And then by the time I left church Wednesday night, I saw people celebrating. and then I got angry and I got it. Because if I’d had the opportunity I would have called down some fire right then too. And that’s understandable that we would feel that way, that we would react that way in the flesh. But when Jesus was outright rejected by the Samaritans he rebuked the disciples for that response.

Not because they were necessarily wrong to feel that way, but because that’s not what we’re here to do. The mission is grace. Even when Jesus was rejected, he was beaten, he was despised at the cross, he said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter how it affects us personally, how angry we may be over any given circumstance, how wounded we may be, how disrespected we may be. Jesus set an example for us at the cross of extending grace to those who do it. Grace does not mean surrender. Jesus didn’t compromise and say, it’s fine, I’ll go worship on Mount Gerizim then. Jesus didn’t compromise at the cross and say, you know what, I’ll back off some of these claims about being God.

Jesus stood for truth, but he did so in a way that was gracious, and that’s what we’re called to do as well. And nothing will sabotage our ministry faster. Nothing will sabotage our mission, personally or corporately, faster than failing to show grace. Again, that doesn’t mean giving it.

You notice the way Jesus showed grace was to walk away. And there is a place and there is a time for judgment. That’s what they wanted. And God’s judgment is just.

Their idea was just, hey, let’s call down His judgment right now. And when God’s judgment falls, it will be just, it will be deserved, it will be well executed. but it wasn’t the time for that. God will decide when that is. Until then, it’s our job as we carry out His mission to show grace so that people will understand the grace of a king who could have come to be served but came instead to let himself be betrayed and let himself be taken into custody and let himself be despised and rejected and mistreated in every conceivable way. Would let himself be nailed to that cross and be mocked and be scourged and shed his blood and die.

A king who did not have to do any of that but a king who willingly did all of that so that those of us who least deserved His grace would receive it freely. Even me. When we fail to show grace, when we fail to respond to things in the way Jesus would, when we’re just a little too excited about the reality of judgment, we will sabotage the mission. Jesus told us he did not come into this world to condemn the world the world is condemned already instead he said God sent his son into the world that through him the world might be saved and that’s our responsibility to take the message about that king and his kingdom to a dark and depraved world that needs to hear it and I want to start this morning by saying not start the message but start that by saying, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, that’s where all of it begins. The realization that we have, each and every one of us, sinned against a holy God.

The realization that none of us deserve that fellowship with Him. None of us deserve to be right with Him. And yet, in spite of our sin, He loved us enough that Jesus Christ came to earth to pay for our sin. God couldn’t just ignore our sin or let it go or compromise with it it had to be punished but Jesus Christ came to take that punishment in full so that you and I could go free he rose again three days later so that we would have the hope of eternal life and now he promises that to all those who believe so this morning if you believe that you’ve sinned and and you know that your sin has left you far separated from God. But you believe Jesus died to pay for your sins in full, and you believe he rose again, you can ask for that forgiveness, and he’ll give it to you.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:37-45, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 30
• Date: Sunday morning, September 7, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ One of the reasons why I love history so much is that you can learn from other people’s examples, good and bad. You can learn from other people’s mistakes, and there are a lot of really big mistakes to learn from. One of the biggest, as I was thinking about the topic of this morning’s message from Luke, One of the biggest mistakes, I think, in history happened about 800 years ago. Right after a sultan in Egypt had just taken over Jerusalem, taken it out of the hands of Europeans, Christians, they identified themselves as Christians.

We might take issue with some of their theology, but they claimed the name of Christ. So the Pope decided it’s time for us to have another crusade because we have to retake Jerusalem. This was the beginning of the fourth crusade. Now their mission, we need to remember this because it becomes important later.

Their mission was to retake Jerusalem. So when I ask you, if I remember to ask you in a minute, what was their mission? To retake Jerusalem. I promise there are no trick questions this morning. Their mission is to retake Jerusalem.

So the Pope says, we need to have a crusade because we need to retake Jerusalem. So a group of knights in Western Europe answered the call and said, we’re going to go and we’re going to retake Jerusalem. And they marched south to the Mediterranean coast, and they realized, we’ve got to find a way to get to Jerusalem. See, this was not very well planned out.

We’ve got to find a way to get to Jerusalem. How are we going to get there? They happened to encounter some merchants from Venice, and merchants from Venice always had ships. And they said, no problem, we’ve got you.

We can get you to Jerusalem, or at least to the Holy Land. Jerusalem’s not there on the coast, but we can at least get you within marching distance of Jerusalem for a fee. And these crusading knights said, but we don’t have any money. And the merchants in Venice said, no problem. See, there’s this city not far down the coast from us that we don’t really like so much called Zara.

If you’ll just go and attack their city, we’ll pay you and we’ll cover the cost of getting you to the Holy Land. And the Crusaders said, all right, this is our mission. We need to go and attack Zara. What was their mission?

To retake Jerusalem. But now their goal is we have to go and attack this city that the Venetians don’t like. So they took the city. They attacked it.

They took it over, handed it over to the Venetians. Everybody was really happy. There was someone nearby that the crusading knights encountered who said, you know what? I’m the rightful heir to the throne of the Byzantine Empire. But somebody else is sitting on my throne over in Constantinople. if you’ll help me, since you’ve got all these armies right here not far away anyway, if you’ll help me retake Constantinople, I will pay you an enormous sum of money.

And the crusaders, the crusading knights, or at least their leaders thought, well, we’d be foolish not to take that deal because who doesn’t like money, right? And so they say, we’ve got to go take Constantinople. Why? Because we need to make money. but what was their mission?

To retake Jerusalem. So they go and they end up using all of their forces to go and attack this Christian city, fellow Christians, different denominations, so there was a little bit of animosity there, but they go and attack this fellow Christian city that had enormous walls because it was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and they expend all of their energy taking this city and they got bogged down and they spent months there and they stayed there until they could try to capture Jerusalem try to capture Constantinople and what was their mission retake Jerusalem but after the debacle at Constantinople they just kind of turned around and went home and they never made it to Jerusalem see we can start out with a plan we can start out with marching orders in this case the mission that was given to them by the pope we can start out with those things and get distracted by our own plans along the way and it may sound like a good deal at the time but like those crusaders who never reached jerusalem and now we can debate and people do debate whether it was right for them to go retake Jerusalem or not. That’s not the issue here this morning. That was their mission. We can allow other things to distract us from the mission we’ve been given. That’s what Jesus deals with his apostles about in Luke chapter 9.

If you’ve already turned there with me, great. If you haven’t, please turn with me to Luke chapter 9. As we look at the next stage of Jesus’ training of His disciples in preparation to hand the ministry over to them. Once you turn there, once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together.

If you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible, it’ll be on the screen so you can follow along there. We’re going to start this morning in verse 37. This is just after the transfiguration that we talked about last week. And it says, On the next day, when they came down from the mountain, a large crowd met Him, And a man from the crowd shouted, saying, Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only boy. And a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly screams, and it throws him into a convulsion with foaming at the mouth.

And only with difficulty does it leave him, mauling him as it leaves. I begged your disciples to cast it out, and they could not. And Jesus answered and said, You unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you and put up with you? Bring your son here.

While he was still approaching, the demon slammed him to the ground and threw him into a convulsion. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy and gave him back to his father. And they were all amazed at the greatness of God. But while everyone was marveling at all that he was doing, he said to his disciples, Let these words sink into your ears, for the Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. But they did not understand this statement, and it was concealed from them so that they would not perceive it.

And they were afraid to ask him about this statement. And you may be seated. I struggled. I struggled this week in preparing this message because the perspective I was looking at just wasn’t working.

And I finally realized I was looking at this from the wrong angle. When you read this, just on the surface, it looks like it’s a story about him healing the boy who is demon-possessed. But there were so many instances of Jesus healing people and doing miracles that John even says that if they were to write them down, write them all down, then the world itself could not contain all the books that would need to be written. So with understanding the limitations of space, there’s always a reason why the gospel writers include the stories that they do. And you look at it and you think there’s got to be more to it, more reason to this than just the healing of the demon-possessed boy.

Because Luke has already illustrated that Jesus can do that. So why put another one of these stories in here? And then you read it again, and you read it again, and you read it again, and you realize that even Jesus draws his disciples’ attention away from the possession. And you see that the focus here is not the possession. It’s whatever’s going on with the disciples that they just can’t get their heads around what Jesus is doing.

And when Jesus healed this demon-possessed boy, Luke includes that story because it’s pretext for us to understand that the disciples were struggling here. It happened, the healing happened, it was important, but it’s really for us to understand what’s going on in the relationship between Jesus and the disciples. This man brings his child to Jesus, or catches Jesus’ attention, and says, I’m begging you, my son is possessed with a demon. And it does terrible things to him.

It causes this violent physical reaction. My son is in peril. And I brought him to your disciples thinking they were going to be able to help. I begged them, and they couldn’t do anything.

So I’m bringing him, and I’m begging you, please, would you do something with my son? And Jesus has this reaction that kind of strikes our ears as unusual, but I think we can make sense of it in just a minute. And he says, how long am I going to have to deal with you people, basically? Bring your son here. And just to give you a little sneak peek of where we’re going with this, when he says, how long am I going to have to deal with you people, he’s not talking to the dad.

When you compare this with the other gospels, you realize he’s talking to the disciples. they’re the problem how long do i have to deal with you people bring me your son and so the man brings his son to jesus jesus sees what this demon does to the boy and jesus rebukes the demon casts him out the boy is healed instantly and everybody sees this incredible miracle and they’re all marvel marveling this is the show that they have come to expect This is what they have come to see, and while they’re marveling at what Jesus has just done, Jesus turns to his disciples and begins to teach them, because the focus here is not on the healing, as important as it is, and especially as important as it is to the man and his son. But Luke’s focus in recording this is that this story of the healing shows us there was something that the disciples were struggling with. And what they were struggling with was serving Jesus, following Jesus, obeying Jesus when they were so distracted. And what we’re supposed to learn from this story, one of the things that we’re supposed to learn from this story, is that we struggle to serve Jesus when distracted by our own agenda. And that’s where the problem lay with these disciples.

They were so wedded in their minds to who they thought Jesus was supposed to be and what they thought Jesus was supposed to do that they could not see the plain truth that was in front of them even when Jesus spelled it out for them. And you and I are, it is so easy for us to get distracted by things that matter less to the point that we ignore things that matter more. I had the opportunity yesterday to take a group of young men to a conference for middle schoolers and high schoolers who are pursuing the call to ministry. And one of them went with me to a class called Removing Distractions. And we told Benjamin he couldn’t go with us to that class because he was too distracting.

But it was on Removing Distractions. I’m sorry, you know I love you. Okay. It was on removing distractions.

And part of that class that we sat in on was just explaining to these kids that even good things can be a problem if we allow them to distract us from God. Even pursuits and things that are not sinful in and of themselves, they can be a problem. They can become an idol. if we allow them to take our focus off of God. Even good things can distract us from better things.

There was a day a couple of weeks ago when, you know, my kids, especially the little ones, they just chatter. They just chatter. And Abigail came and asked me a question, and I said, oh, that’s nice. I was sitting there working on the checkbook.

It is a good thing to balance your checkbook periodically. Sometimes I can go overboard and balance it every day. I try not to do that, but it’s a good thing. But Charla said, did you hear what Abigail asked you? Oh, not really.

She had brought me a book, my favorite children’s book, and asked me to read it to her. Like, I love that book, and I love Abigail. Okay, we’re going to read this book, but I had allowed something that was good to distract me from something better. We do the same thing with God.

I talked a little bit recently on maybe a Sunday night or a Wednesday night about how I did this with the call to ministry and let things that would be good distract me from what God’s agenda. I let my agenda distract me from God’s agenda for my life. That I knew God was calling me to ministry from the time I was in high school, and I fought it. I didn’t want to say yes to that junior high, I knew, and fought it. I started high school and finally said, okay, God, if you want me to do this, I’ll do it, but I still had in mind, I can preach part-time.

My goal, and this was in the days before social media got so prevalent and so awful, my goal was a career in politics. I was going to run for the state house of representatives. I knew which seat. I knew when the guy was term limited, and I was going to go for it and serve 12 years and then run for governor.

I don’t know what in the world I was thinking, but I thought, I could still preach on Sundays and fill in at churches. I mean, it sounded crazy at the time, but James Lankford does it now. It’s not unheard of. I could have done that, and here I was trying to do pulpit supply and said, God, yes, I’ll do that.

I’ll it just wasn’t working. And finally I realized God was calling me to do something full-time and I was trying, I was so distracted by my agenda that I was just trying to shoehorn his plans into my agenda and that’s why it didn’t work. We will always struggle to serve Jesus when we’re distracted by our own agenda. And that’s what these men experienced. When the man came to see Jesus, he was desperate.

He begged Jesus in verse 38 to heal his son, just like he had begged the disciples, he said in verse 40. And these disciples, think about this, they should have been able to do what the man asked. They should have been able to do this. How do we know they should have been able to do this?

You don’t even have to turn back that far if you look at verse 1 of this chapter. It says, and he called the 12 together and gave them power and authority over the demons, over all the demons, and to heal diseases. He had sent them out with this authority. But when the time came for them actually to step out and do what he had called them to do, do what he had empowered and equipped them to do, do what he had commanded them to do, they couldn’t do it. The man told Jesus in verse 40, I begged your disciples to cast it out, and they could not.

Jesus said they could, but they couldn’t. and their problem, the problem that kept them from being able to do it was a lack of faith, specifically a lack of belief that what Jesus said about their authority was true. And that’s easy to miss from just the passage in Luke. As I read through a passage, I’ll jot down questions. I’ll interrogate the passage.

Why is this here? Why does this say this? Why does he say it that way? One of the questions I had was, why does Jesus get so frustrated in verse 41? Because it sounds, the way we read it in Luke, it sounds like he’s mad at the man.

But if you compare it with Matthew and Mark, you realize that he’s talking to the disciples. Because in Matthew 17, they asked the question, why could we not drive out the demon? And Jesus said, because of the littleness of your faith. Because your faith was tiny.

He said, for truly I say to you, if you have the faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible to you. Now, he’s not talking about them being able to manifest riches. Hey, just speak it with enough faith and you’ll have a Mercedes. That’s not what he’s saying. But the things that he’s called them to do, the things that he’s equipped them to do, the things that he’s promised they could do, if you have even the size of faith of a mustard seed, you’ll be able to say to a mountain, move, and it’ll be moved, if that’s what God told you to do.

But when he tells you, you have to believe. And so this explains Jesus’s initial reaction there in verse 41. He’s not getting mad at the man and saying, Oh, you people, how long am I going to have to heal people and do these miracles for you? When He says, you unbelieving and perverted generation, He’s talking to the disciples.

And it’s because they are refusing to believe the things that He’s told them, and they’re refusing to act like they believe the things that He’s told them. It’s about the disciples. and just to be clear on what he’s saying here because these are difficult words to translate unbelieving means they had no faith I mean that’s pretty simple they did not fully believe what Jesus told them back in verse 1 it could have even been a sense of I mean he did tell us but how do we know they’re questioning what he told them and it’s okay to ask the Lord questions but not from a place of unbelief and when he says they were perverted and that word has some really awful connotations in the way we talk when he says they were perverted he means they had deviated from the path that he had put them on it means they’ve wandered away it doesn’t mean that they were involved in anything scandalous. But because of their lack of faith, they had deviated from the path that God set out for them. And what this boils down to, as we look at the passages before it and the passages after it in Luke, what they’re struggling with, they are acting like he’s going to stay there forever. In their mind, all that stuff about, oh, I’m going to die, I’m going to be handed over, I’m going to rise again, they’re thinking that’s years off.

They have seen him at the transfiguration. They’ve seen this glimpse of him in his glory. And they’re thinking that’s what’s going to be on display for the whole world in the very near future. They’re thinking about Peter’s confession that he’s the Messiah, the son of the living God.

And they’re still thinking in terms of an earthly Messiah. No matter how many times Jesus tells them, I am going to Jerusalem to be killed, they are still in their denial, putting that way down the road because they want him to be the political and military leader who’s going to come and kick out Rome and set up his kingdom and restore a golden age to Israel. That’s what their agenda is. And we know this because in the next passage, they’re asking, can I be on your right and left hand when you come into his kingdom? Now, we have the benefit of looking back and realizing you don’t want to be on the right and left hand when he comes into his kingdom.

There are two thieves that are going to be on his right and left hand. That’s not a question they should have asked if they understood. It’s in direct contradiction to what he’s already told them about himself. He’s going to be leaving.

He’s going to be betrayed. He just said that to them in verse 22. And he’s sending them out. He told them that in verses 1 through 5 earlier on in chapter 9. He’s calling them to serve.

When we looked at the feeding of the 5,000. He handed them food to go and hand out to the people. There is a passing of the torch here where Jesus is saying, I want you to be involved in this ministry. I have an agenda for you.

I have a plan for you. It’s your turn to go out and serve in my name. He’s calling them to do these things, and he’s calling them to lay down their lives, as he said in verse 23. But their agenda is something different.

It’s that earthly kingdom. That’s still what they expect, an earthly kingdom with the glory that they glimpsed at the transfiguration. An earthly kingdom where he’ll be there and he’ll do all the work. And listen, as believers who serve him, we do rely on him for everything we do. We rely on him to empower, we rely on him to guide us, but he still expects us to go out and be his hands and feet.

We still have to do something. Because that’s, not because he needs us, but because that’s the way he wants it. and they were just sitting back he’s always going to be here he’s always going to be the one doing the things and we get to just watch and they’re expecting their agenda to play out and as i’ve already pointed out we’re prone to doing the same thing you and i have a tendency to do that in life we have a tendency to let good things distract us from the best things sometimes we have a tendency to let bad things distract us from the best things we do it with the Lord as well we will let even good things distract us from his agenda so how do we avoid that there are two mistakes that the disciples made in this passage that if we can learn from we can avoid and they’re very simple hopefully hopefully when we’re done here you say oh that was so simple I’m not sure why he even had to tell us well the reason I have to tell us is because it’s in the Word, but also because we need the reminder. Notice I didn’t say you need the reminder. I said we need the reminder because I’m right here in the same boat. First way we avoid this is very simple.

When Jesus calls you to do something, obey Him. Easy enough? I mean, simple enough to understand, not always easy to do, but simple enough to understand this is a basic Sunday school lesson. When Jesus calls you to do something, obey him.

There was some form of hesitation on their part. When Jesus had said, you’re going to go out and you’re going to be able to cast out demons in my name, you’ve been given all authority over it. When it came time for them to do that, there was some kind of hesitation when it came time to cast out the demon. We don’t know what specifically motivated it.

It might have been fear. It might have been disbelief, like this is not going to work. It might have been complacency Jesus will deal with that. It could have been any number of things. We don’t know specifically what it was, but whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.

Because the bottom line is whatever the excuse was, they were disobeying him. And we, as a species, are very good at coming up with excuses. I am very good at coming up with excuses when Jesus says to do something, to put it off. Or say, Lord, I’ll do part of it.

Or I’ll do it later. Or I’ll do it this way. But as believers, we’re called on, if He’s Lord, we need to act like He’s Lord. And when He tells us to do something, go do it.

But it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to us, but His brain is bigger than ours. It doesn’t make sense to us, but His ways are higher than ours. The more we trust him, the more we’ll obey him. And sometimes we just have to step out on faith and do the obedient thing, even when it doesn’t make sense, and even when it goes against our agenda.

Because if we’re not deliberate about obeying Jesus’ agenda for us, if we’re not deliberate about obeying the things that he told us to do, we’re going to go back to our own agenda by default. It’s just the way we’re wired. If we’re not deliberate about looking at what is it Jesus told us to do, and that’s what I’m going to do, we will end up filling up the calendar and the to-do list ourselves. So that’s the first thing.

How do we avoid their mistakes? How do we avoid getting sidetracked with our agenda? When Jesus tells us to do something, obey him. The second one is, when Jesus tells you who he is, believe him.

This was really at the root of their problem. I think whether it was fear, whether it was complacency, whatever it was, At the root of it, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus is and what he’d come to do. They’re thinking, we can’t do it even though he told us. Well, you’re doubting that he has the authority that he said he gave you, or he’s going to do it himself. You’re doubting the fact that he said he’s going to leave and he’s giving you this ministry.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of who he is and what he’s come to do, but he had claimed already and already His authority. They knew who He was. Peter made that clear. He’s the Messiah, the Son of the living God, and nobody argued with that.

Jesus confirmed it, and He had demonstrated it over and over. That’s what so many of these miracles were about, was demonstrating this authority, that He is God the Son, that He is Israel’s Savior. He’s the Savior of mankind. He was demonstrating the power that he had. He had shown his glory, and a group of these apostles had seen that glory on display like nothing that anybody has ever seen.

He had warned them, going back to verse 22, about his departure, now three times, once after Peter’s confession, once during the transfiguration in verse 31, and now here in verse 44, he tells them again he’s going to be leaving. In spite of all the things he showed them. Here’s who I am and here’s the proof. Here’s what I came to do.

And I’m going to tell you over and over so you get it. Despite all of that, their ideas about him and his kingdom, their own ideas veiled their eyes from the truth. One of the questions I brought to this text was why does verse 45 say that God concealed these things from their eyes? Jesus is trying to tell them these things.

Why has God concealed it from them? And then I realized I’m just reading that into the text. It never says God concealed it. It says it was concealed. When you look at the Greek, it just means there’s like a veil over their eyes.

And sometimes we do that to our own selves with our own ideas and our own opinions and own presuppositions. Their ideas about his kingdom and what that was going to look like had blinded them. When he told them about himself, he said, let these words sink in. That’s what he says in verse 45.

Let these words, I’m sorry, verse 44, let these words sink into your ears. That means listen carefully and don’t forget. And then what does he say? He reminds them.

I’m about to be delivered up. Luke gives us a short snippet of it. Matthew and Mark tell us that he goes through the whole thing about what’s about to happen to him. He’s going to be delivered and betrayed.

He’s going to suffer. He’s going to die. He’s going to rise. He goes through this reminder of who he is, and they’re still not getting it. And the only real explanation is they just don’t want to get it at this point.

Because they’re more concerned about what they want. When Jesus tells you who he is, believe him. If we’re not listening to what Jesus says about himself, we’ll fall for the world’s opinions about him. Are the world’s opinions about Jesus right?

There’s a lot of wrong opinions out there about who Jesus is that directly contradict what he said about himself. And if we don’t listen to what he says, we’ll listen to what the world says. And we’ll end up in the same boat as the disciples, wandering off the path that he set for us. In order for us to trust him, in order for us to obey him, in order for us to walk with him and serve him, we need to pay attention to what he says about who he is and why he came. He didn’t come just as a good moral teacher.

He didn’t come just to give us a comfortable, pretty life. He didn’t come just to set an example. He came to take responsibility for our sins and be delivered up for our sins, to be nailed to the cross, to be punished in our place, and to die so that we could be made right with God. And then he came to rise again to prove it.

And he came to reign over us as our good and righteous king. Not an addition to our lives that we sometimes look to for guidance, but the one who sets the agenda. The one that every day we get up and say, Lord, what do you want me to do today?

And that’s what we do. But we’re not going to be in that place if we don’t take seriously what He says to us about who He is.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:28-36, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 29
• Date: Sunday morning, August 31, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ Now, most of the time when you go to a wedding and the bride comes and walks in, you probably do what almost everyone does and turn and look at the bride, right? I mean, usually the preacher will even say something along those lines, turn and look at the bride. I usually find myself, whether I’m officiating a wedding or just attending a wedding, I find myself looking at the groom because I like to see his reaction. And it’s, well, in my experience, it’s always been a happy reaction.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my experience, it’s always been a happy reaction. And I remember my own, my own wedding to Charla. I remember when I looked and saw her for the first time at our wedding, I thought, wow, she’s actually going through with it. at our wedding, I left the stage and went and got her. And people asked later on, why did y’all do it that way? I said, I got tired of waiting.

But it wasn’t that we planned it that way, because in so many of Jesus’ parables, he talks about the groom coming to get the bride, and we wanted to weave biblical themes throughout the entire ceremony. And so I went and got her to walk her down the aisle, and I went and opened that side door to the auditorium, and I did think, wow. I had never seen her up to that time look so beautiful, and it wasn’t that she didn’t look beautiful before, but there was something different, and it wasn’t the dress, it wasn’t the hair, it wasn’t the makeup, it was the look on her face, and I thought, she is about to be my wife. She is crazy enough to go through with this, and she is about to be my wife, and it’s like she just looked different, looked like I’d never seen her before. And I think probably a lot of men experience that, of seeing their about to be wife in a different light.

There’s just something different about the way she looks at that wedding ceremony. And it is a pale comparison even at that, but it gives us some glimpse into what the disciples experienced on the Mount of Transfiguration when they saw Jesus, the word the Bible uses is transfigured right in front of them, that they saw Jesus in a completely different light than they had ever seen him before. That’s what we’re going to look at this morning in Luke chapter 9. If you’re new with us, we are working our way piece by piece through the book of Luke, and we’ve arrived at Luke chapter 9, this Mount of Transfiguration experience. If you’d go and then turn there with me this morning.

We’ll be in Luke chapter 9 starting in verse 28. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible with you, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen so that you can follow along. But let’s look together at what Luke says about this experience that some of the disciples had with Jesus. Starting in verse 28, it says, some eight days after these sayings, He took Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.

And while he was praying, the appearance of his face became different, and his clothing became white and gleaming. And behold, two men were talking with him, and they were Moses and Elijah, who appearing in glory were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions had been overcome with sleep. The Greek says they were heavy, they were burdened with sleep. But when they were fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him.

And as these were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three tabernacles, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah, not realizing what he was saying. While he was saying this, a cloud formed and began to overshadow them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. Then a voice came out of the cloud saying, this is my son, my chosen one, listen to him. And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone, and they kept silent and reported to no one in those days any of the things which they had seen.

And you may be seated. This is one of those stories that I just didn’t think about much for many years, even reading the Bible, studying the Bible, even preaching the Bible, I just didn’t think about this story very much. And if you ever wonder why do we preach through books of the Bible, that’s not the only way I preach. Sometimes we will do a series on topics, but why do I spend so much time preaching through a book? It’s because until I started doing that, I was missing things, not just stories that didn’t necessarily appeal to me on first glance, but also just connections that you build as you go through week after week.

The only time I’ve ever preached on the transfiguration was before this is when we did our study of the book of Mark a few years ago. I’m not sure I’ve heard any sermons on the transfiguration just in my years of sitting in church. But once you start to dig into this story, I thought, what does this even mean? Jesus looked different.

Big whoop. Now, I would never say that because it’s the Bible. It’s in there for a reason. But I’d rather go on to the resurrection story. But this story is so connected to so many things in Scripture that it’s kind of like when you fly.

How many of you have ever flown out of Lawton from the Lawton Airport? Okay. Where’d you go straight from there? Dallas.

Can you go anyplace else? Not unless you’ve got your own plane. And I do not. I watched a documentary on megachurch pastors.

I do not have my own plane. I flew American Airlines or whatever their cheap brand, American Eagle, I guess, to Dallas. You can’t go anywhere from Lawton but Dallas, but when you go to Dallas, Dallas is connected to everywhere. This story is like the Dallas Fort Worth of biblical texts. It connects to the Old Testament.

It connects to Exodus. It connects to the prophets. It connects to 1 and 2 Peter. We won’t even cover this morning all the ways that it connects.

But it tells us a story of who Jesus is. And that’s where I want us to begin this morning. The transfiguration was a turning point for all those who witnessed it. For these three men who had the privilege of being there with Jesus that night, this event that seems so mysterious to us was a turning point for them understanding of who Jesus is. And there are multiple points to this morning’s message, but point one probably is where we’ll camp out most of the time, just because in order to understand the other points, we need to understand this one, and what exactly happened on that mount of transfiguration?

What exactly happened? So they’re there, and they’re praying, and true to form, Jesus is praying, and the disciples are sleeping. Jesus, a few times that are recorded in the Gospels, took this group of disciples especially with him away from the others, and he went off to pray to renew his strength. Even though he’s God in human flesh, he’s in human flesh. And so he would get weary, and he would go and he would pray to commune with the Father and renew his strength.

And they’re out there on this mountain, presumably in the middle of the night, the other disciples, James, John, Peter, they are exhausted, and they’ve fallen asleep. And somewhere in the midst of this, they wake up because of what’s going on, and they see that Jesus’ appearance is completely different. Now, Matthew and Mark say that he was transformed, and they use a word that we get metamorphosis from. Luke doesn’t use this word. He kind of understates it, I think, because he was writing to Gentiles, and the Gentiles would use that same word to describe things that happened with their pagan gods, and I think Luke didn’t want to confuse people.

So, Luke kind of downplays it and just says he looked different. But the point is still there. His appearance was completely changed. For the other two, they say it was a radical transformation.

He says Jesus’ face changed. Matthew tells us that it became bright like the sun. They all give a slightly different explanation of what happened. Not that they differed at all, but Matthew comments that his face was bright like the sun. Luke just says it was bright, but Matthew says it was like the sun.

Even his clothes became different. Luke tells us that, but Mark tells us it’s whiter than any launderer on earth could ever make them. I tried to bleach some things this weekend, and I was very disappointed. My wife buys the good bleach that I won’t spend the money on, so I used the good bleach, and I thought it would make things radiant white, but there are some things even bleach can’t get out of stuff, which is really disappointing because I just, you know, if I was trying not to bleach something, the bleach would make it white. But he says these clothes that Jesus was wearing were brighter and more radiant than any launderer on earth could ever make them.

There’s a change in his appearance in verse 29. What they saw was not the Jesus that they were used to. And so already when they wake up and see that just in his appearance, he looks completely different. They know something unusual is happening here.

They look up and verse 30 tells us that they see him meeting with two men. He’s meeting with Moses and Elijah. And I know the question has arisen before. How did they know it was Moses and Elijah?

If God wanted us to know how they knew, he would have told us. I want to know, but it’s not something we need to know. I don’t know if they were wearing name tags. Hello, my name is Moses. I don’t know if maybe the disciples overheard them talking and understood from the context who they were.

I don’t know if maybe they asked Jesus a little later on, who are these guys? Maybe they interrupted. Sometimes the disciples act like kids. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to think that they interrupted Jesus and these other two men.

Hey, Lord, who are you talking to? But somehow or another, they knew that he was talking to Moses and Elijah. which is incredible in and of itself. We just kind of gloss over that. At the transfiguration, he talked to Moses and he talked to Elijah. Moses had been dead for 1,400 years by this time.

And Elijah had been dead for 800 or 900, if memory serves. I mean, these men were long gone. And they show up on the Mount of Transfiguration and they’re talking to Jesus. This is not something that happens every day.

And so they’re having this conversation, and the question that arises for us is, why were those two guys there? First of all, why was anybody back from the dead talking to Jesus, or even their spirits just appearing there talking to Jesus? We don’t know what form exactly they were in. But why were these men talking to Jesus, and why was it these two men specifically? And kind of the traditional understanding that people have had and that I’ve taught is they represent the Old Testament scriptures.

And this would be fitting symbolism because Jesus talked about how he’s the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament tells us. He’s the fulfillment of the law. He’s the fulfillment of the message of the prophets. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who represented those things better than Moses and Elijah did.

Moses is the one that God used in order to give the law to his people, and Elijah was one of the most famous of the prophets. He’s the one that everybody expected to come back. And so if you want a visual representation of the fact that the Scriptures testify to Jesus, here you’ve got Moses and Elijah. They’re talking to Jesus. And I think that’s true.

I think there’s something to be said for that. But studying this passage again and just that nagging question, why these two guys? I mean, it’s recorded in three of the Gospels that those two men were there. Why is it so important?

Why was it those two men? And why is it so important that it was those two men? And so I did some digging. And what did earlier generations of believers understand about this passage? And I came across a man named Cyril of Jerusalem, one of the church fathers, who wrote about 200 years after this, if memory serves.

And he pointed out the fact in his writing on this passage that these two men showed up as two witnesses. Deuteronomy 17 and 19, I believe, talk about how in order to prove something happened under Old Testament law, you had to have two witnesses. They didn’t have DNA and forensic files, so you had to have two witnesses to verify that something happened. And so these men showed up.

They would be two witnesses. And the reason why it’s important that it’s them is he points out these were two men who had met with God personally in the Old Testament. And once I read that he pointed that out, I thought, man, why did I not see that before? These two men met with God personally. Doesn’t mean they saw God in all of his glory.

As a matter of fact, in both circumstances, I believe, they were told if they saw God in the fullness of his glory, they would die. But there’s the instance with Moses when he’s atop Mount Horeb in Exodus chapter 33, where God puts him in the cleft of the rock and covers him with his hand, and he sees sort of God pass by. He catches a glimpse of God passing by after they’ve been talking. And then there’s a very similar situation with Elijah also at Mount Horeb in 1 Kings chapter 19. The famous story where he looks for God in the earthquake.

He looks for God in the whirlwind, and he hears God in the still small voice while he’s standing there in that cave. Both of these men had a personal experience meeting with God and speaking with God. And when you understand that, it becomes so much clearer why it’s these two men and why it needed to be these two men on the Mount of Transfiguration in order to make the point that God wanted to. These men were two witnesses who had met with God in the Old Testament, and they’re meeting with God again.

They’re bearing witness that this is the same God they knew. That Jesus didn’t just appear on the scene in Bethlehem some 30 years before this. This is somebody that they’ve met with before, somebody that they knew from experience. Why did Moses and Elijah appear? They’re bearing witness that Jesus Christ is God just as He claimed to be.

And as they come, verse 31 tells us that they were discussing His departure. Appearing in glory, they were speaking of His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. They’re not talking about Him leaving Jerusalem in the sense that He finishes up and goes on back to Galilee. They’re talking about His death. they’re discussing the death that he was about to die and Jesus death was not a surprise as we go through the gospels we see that it’s woven throughout there Jesus over and over and over is is leaving a trail of clues for his disciples about his purpose here on earth and that his purpose was to go to Jerusalem and be crucified for us and to rise again three days later.

As a matter of fact, when they’re still not getting it, he goes beyond leaving these clues to out and out telling them, I’m going to go there and I’m going to be killed. He’s just done that in the previous passage. The Son of Man must go to Jerusalem. He must be rejected.

He must be abused. He must be killed and he must rise the third day. He’s told them this with the intent that by the time they get there, it wouldn’t be a surprise when it happens. and I asked the question on a Sunday night just a few weeks ago why do you think that after all the times he told them why do you think they were still so surprised when it happened that he was crucified and I forget who it was but somebody somebody in here I think it was one of the ladies pointed out that when you love somebody you just can’t believe that that’s really going to happen you’re kind of in a state of denial maybe believing what you want to believe oh yeah he’ll someday, maybe at the end of his reign, they were still, I think, believing that he was going to come into Jerusalem and be crowned king. And maybe he’ll die a few years down the road, but they couldn’t believe that this trip they’re about to make to Jerusalem is where he’s going to be killed. And as they’re standing here having the discussion about his departure, verse 32 tells us that they saw his glory. They had been overcome with sleep, but when they were fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him.

Have you ever been asleep and you wake up and you don’t quite know what’s going on? That’s me most mornings. What decade is it? Okay, they were asleep and it took them a minute to wake up and really fully appreciate what was going on, but once they did, they saw Jesus in all of his glory. They saw a side of Jesus that they’d never seen before, that they’d maybe gotten a tiny glimpse of when they’d see him calm the storm, when they’d see him raise the dead, when they’d see him do something, but now they get to see the glory all over him.

And they respond in worship. I’ve always been puzzled by this idea that Peter wants to build three tabernacles, or some translations say build three shelters, or three dwellings, or three tents. Why is he wanting to camp out on the mountain? it’s because at this time of year they were about to celebrate the feast of tabernacles which was one of the old testament feasts but there was an understanding they had that they believed when the messiah came and set up his kingdom that they would build that they would put up their little temporary tabernacles around him and so when peter is offering to build three dwellings there on the mountain, it’s an acknowledgement that he’s recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. So we read that, and to our Western mind, it looks like, oh, he’s so silly.

Why does he want to camp out there? Doesn’t he know Jesus has got an appointment? He’s convinced Jesus is the Messiah, and he’s well-intentioned. He just doesn’t understand what being the Messiah means at that moment. And so they’re standing there.

He’s wanting to build a tent or build tense, and verse 33 tells us, as they were leaving him, and it’s kind of like Peter starts saying silly things and the cool kids leave. Moses and Elijah are out of here. Jesus continues talking to the disciples, and it says, a cloud overshadows them. This is the same terminology when the Jews translated the Old Testament into Greek. for what they used at this time, because it was more common at that time to be able to speak Greek than Hebrew. So in their Greek Old Testament called the Septuagint, when they translated Exodus chapter 40, it’s the same terminology used here as was used there in the story where Moses cannot enter into the tabernacle because a cloud of the glory of the Lord overshadows it.

So this is not a cloud in the sense that we think, oh, storm rolls in. This is talking about of God coming and resting on the mountain the same way it did on the tabernacle in the Old Testament. When you begin to see the connections between this story and the Old Testament, the Father is putting on full display in every way possible just exactly who Jesus is for them to see and understand. The glory of God comes down upon them and it says that they are afraid as they entered the cloud, as they should be, as any one of us would be. And then the Father’s voice was heard in verse 35, saying, this is my Son, my chosen one.

Listen to Him. And we’ve heard these words before as we’ve studied through the book of Luke, Luke chapter 3, at His baptism. The Father affirms, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him. and that’s where this story ends with them hearing the voice of the father and after the father spoke it says Jesus was found alone now this means this doesn’t mean this is not a contradiction with it saying the disciples were there the disciples then found Jesus alone meaning Moses and Elijah were gone the cloud has departed it’s just the four of them again and they go on and they are too scared in this moment to tell anybody what they’ve seen but they do tell people later.

This was a turning point for them in their understanding of who Jesus is. After Peter has confessed Jesus as the Messiah, as they’ve spent some time just the week before talking about what that means, now they get a visual demonstration of Jesus as the Messiah. And Peter, once again, true to form, is all in, ready to build those tabernacles and declare Jesus the Messiah are right then and there. And the reason this was such a turning point is, for one, it was a preview of Jesus’s glory. Throughout most of his earthly ministry, even though we know looking back on it, that Jesus is not just like you and me.

He came as God in human flesh to live among us and be like us, and the Scripture tells us there was nothing physically to distinguish him from other people. It’s not like he was somebody that the world would have looked at and physically said, oh, he stands out. There was nothing that they would have seen that just to look at him would have suggested, oh, this man’s a king. And part of the reason for that is it would have short-circuited the plan that the Father put in place. The plan was not to sweep Jesus into power.

The plan was to send Jesus to the cross. And so He came to walk among us, to live among us, to be somebody who could teach and draw a following of people who would not just hear his words, but would listen to him and would obey him and would give their lives to him, but also somebody that the culture widely would reject so that he could and would go to the cross. But in this moment, they got to see something different. They got to see a glimpse of who we’ll see when Jesus comes again. They got to see that Jesus is not just there as a performer.

He’s not just there working miracles for the crowd’s amusement and enjoyment. He’s not just there calming storms when they want it. He’s not just there feeding the crowds. Now, He did all of those things, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with those things, and those things worked into His ministry. But it would get very easy to think that, oh, Jesus is just here to grant all of our wishes.

He’s just a nice teacher who came to grant all of our wishes. He’s the Jesus of bumper stickers and T-shirts and wall art from Hobby Lobby. Nothing wrong with any of those things, but He’s so much more than that. He’s not a Jesus who decorates our lives.

He is the Jesus who is the reason for our lives. He’s not a Jesus who just comes along and does what we wish. He is a Jesus who says, take up your cross daily and follow after me. He’s not just a teacher. He is a teacher, but he’s not just a teacher.

He is the King of kings and Lord of lords, and they got to see that. And it changed their lives. This transfiguration was also a confirmation of Jesus’ identity. he had been telling them who he was not just in John where even the skeptics say oh yeah that John John says that Jesus was God John was written later and they say oh Matthew Mark and Luke they were written earlier and they don’t say these things about Jesus no even in Matthew Mark and Luke it’s clear that Jesus claimed to be God and it’s clear that the people who wrote it believe that Jesus was God. Well, here, to everyone who got to see it, it was confirmation. The Father said, this is my Son.

The glory of the Lord that descended on the tabernacle in the Old Testament descended on Jesus. Why? Because He’s the tabernacle. I’m not saying He’s a tent.

He’s a physical building. I’m saying the tabernacle was the representation of God among His people in the Old Testament. And Jesus is literally God among His people in the New Testament. And so the glory of the Lord came and landed on them with Jesus just the way it did in the tabernacle in the Old Testament.

You’ve got the people who met with God. I can’t really say face-to-face because if they’d seen God face-to-face, they would have died. But the people who met God as personally as anybody could have in the Old Testament now stand face-to-face with Jesus on this mountain. and confirm that he is exactly who he claimed to be. These three men walked away more convinced than they ever had been of who they were following. The transfiguration was a fulfillment of Jesus’ promise.

In the text we looked at last week, in verse 27, there’s that statement Jesus makes as he’s explaining the cost of following him. He says, but I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God. And then about a week later, about a week later, three of those men get to see Jesus on that mountain and get to see a glimpse of what it’s going to look like the king at his coming. They got to see the kingdom of God. up close. They got to see Jesus for who he really is.

See, Jesus always keeps his promises. And then this transfiguration, all of this is important for us to know because it’s confirmation of who Jesus is, although I think most of you sitting out here in this room are probably not in doubt about who Jesus claimed to be. That’s why you’re here. But just in case you are in doubt, these are the eyewitnesses saying, we saw these things and we became convinced that this man we were following was exactly who he claimed to be before and after. For our purposes, the transfiguration was a call to believe Jesus.

There is one command in this passage. When we look at the Bible text and we say, what am I supposed to do with this? It’s great to learn what things mean, but we also want to take something away that we can apply and use. We look for the commands in order to do that.

There’s one command in this passage. And it’s found at the end of verse 35. When the Father says, this is my Son, my chosen one, listen to Him. And He’s not telling them just to hear His words. He’s telling them to listen and obey.

That’s implied in that word listen. Not just hear it, but hear it and do something about it. That was the call to these three men who heard, who saw everything that they saw, and they wrote it down so that we would know, and so we would be convinced that this is God’s Son, listen to Him. That we’re called to listen and take to heart what He says about Himself.

That we’re called to listen and obey the things that He tells us to do. And that’s why Peter writes about this in 2 Peter chapter 1, which is one of those passages that can be confusing in and of itself until you realize how it connects to this story. He says, for when he received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. And we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts. Peter there is writing to early believers and saying there are reasons why we should believe Jesus and obey Him.

And he says, in the context of that passage, he says, we know because we saw with our own eyes and we heard with our own ears who Jesus is. We saw the glory. We heard the voice of the Father. And so we were convinced to believe and we were convinced to follow him.

But in that broader passage, Peter is making the point that even that experience was not as sure as the word of prophecy. He says, if you weren’t there on that mountain to see who Jesus was, you weren’t there to hear the voice of the Father and you want to know who Jesus is, he says, you look at the more sure word of prophecy. You look at everything the Old Testament says about who the Messiah would be. You look at everything the Old Testament says about what he would do. You look at everything the Old Testament says about what our response should be to him.

And you’ll see that that’s fulfilled in Jesus Christ. He says that even our experience pales in comparison to what the sure word of God tells us. And we have the two-part benefit of this story being recorded for us in the word of God so that it becomes part of our understanding. But Peter’s point in retelling that story, Luke’s point, Matthew’s point, Mark’s point in recounting that story is that this story calls us to believe Jesus and act accordingly. For us as believers, it’s a reminder that He’s not just a decoration of our lives.

He’s not just an aspect of our lives. He is our King. He’s shown glimpses of it before, and we’ll see it fully revealed that is coming. but He is our King and we’re supposed to act like it. We’re supposed to listen to Him. And if you’re not already a believer, if you’re not already somebody who’s trusted Christ as your Savior, it’s a call to hear what He says about Himself and respond in faith, to believe Him and to act on it.

When He said He was coming to die, to die for us and to rise again so that we could be forgiven, God’s word tells us to believe that, to listen to that. And for you this morning, it is as simple as recognizing that we’ve all sinned against a holy God. That’s why Jesus had to come. And Jesus took responsibility for my sin and for yours when he was nailed to that cross and he shed his blood and he died. And then three days later, he rose from the dead to prove it after telling us that’s what he was going to do.

And he offers us forgiveness if we’ll simply put our faith in him. If we will believe that he and his sacrifice are the only answer to our sin problem, that we can’t be good enough to earn it or deserve it, we can’t get to the Father on our own, we have to come through him. If you’ll believe that and you’ll ask for that forgiveness, he will forgive you, he will cleanse you, he will change you, and he will give you new life with the Father.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:21-27, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 28
• Date: Sunday morning, August 24, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ I was thinking this morning about some of the trips that my kids and I have taken with my dad, or better said, he’s taken with us over the last few years. About how he took a week off of work this summer. About how he took a week off of work this summer to go with the kids and me to Dallas for the SBC meeting. And some of you have been to those meetings, and you can attest, it’s nobody’s idea of a great time, a vacation.

But he took a week off work to go with us so that he could spend that time with me and with the kids. But there was a cost involved in it because, okay, let’s be honest, you’re traveling in a vehicle with my children. Your ears are going to get talked off. Plus, it’s long, and at the end of it, you know, you get there and there’s meetings that you sit through, and he can’t even vote.

He’s just sitting there in the meetings and getting dragged all over. You know, there’s a lot of walking involved, and you’re rewarded for the trip with exotic locales like Dallas and Indianapolis. Next year’s Orlando, and I’m not sure I’m going to go. That’s One time he flew to Phoenix. He didn’t have enough time to take off to go with me the whole time, but he flew to Phoenix to meet me out there and rode back with me, and we had a great time with my alternator going out in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

I bet he was glad he took off work, but he’ll do things like that to spend the time with us, and it got me thinking about my relationship with my kids and really how anything that is worth doing in life comes at a cost. Anything that is worth investing in in this life comes at a cost. There’s a sacrifice. Our relationships with our spouses, our relationships with our kids, our relationships with one another, to put in the work that it requires to make those things good, There’s a cost involved. There’s a sacrifice involved.

Even our walk with the Lord, especially our walk with the Lord, there’s a cost and a sacrifice involved in order for that to be everything that it ought to be. Now, that sacrifice, I’m not talking about sacrificing so that we can have a relationship with Him. Jesus already took care of that. But in order for our walk with the Lord to be everything it ought to be, there’s a cost that Jesus points out that we have to choose to pay.

This morning, we’re going to be in Luke chapter 9, where Jesus talks to His disciples about this cost that’s involved for this very worthwhile pursuit of being His disciple, of walking with Him, of having this close fellowship with Him. There’s a cost involved, and he lays that out for them, for them to understand. So we’re going to be in Luke chapter 9, where we left off last Sunday. If you’ll turn there with me, we’ll read together. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me in honor of God’s Word.

If you don’t have your Bible this morning or you can’t find Luke chapter 9, it will be on the screen for you up here so that you can follow along as we read. But Luke chapter 9, starting in verse 21, And I have backed up a little bit to the end of the passage that we read last week because it helps inform what he’s talking about this week. Verse 21 says, but he warned them and instructed them not to tell this to anyone. That’s the idea that he’s the Messiah.

He says, let’s keep that quiet for right now. Verse 22, saying, the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day. And he was saying to them all, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?

For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God. You may be seated. He’s laying out here that there is a cost involved in following him. He’s not talking about salvation.

There is a cost involved in salvation, but he paid that. Now, at the time that he’s speaking to them he had not yet paid it. But for us looking back 2,000 years ago, he’s already paid that. What he’s talking about is the cost of following him, the cost of walking with him, the cost of doing what they’ve been called to do, and what really they’ve been spending these previous months being trained to do.

In order to do it, he says it’s not going to just be easy. I think they, well, I know they had the idea that it was going to be easy, that it was going to be fun, prestigious even. We get further down the road and some of the disciples are still asking, hey, can we sit on your right and left hand when you come into your kingdom? They’re wanting to sit on the throne.

They think this is going to be a thing of ease that they’re walking with the Messiah. And he begins to burst their bubble here that there’s a cost involved. And the cost was going to be taking some of the things that they loved and putting those things on the altar. It’s not a guarantee that we lose everything we love, but there has to be a willingness to take the things that we love and hold them loosely and surrender them to him that we’re willing to give them up if necessary. And what he’s pointing out here to these men is that it’s dangerous to love other things more than Jesus.

It was going to be dangerous for them to love other things more than him. He was calling them to a life of surrender. And oftentimes that entailed dangerous or difficult tasks, things that were not going to be easy. And under those circumstances, when you look at the cost of what it, what it, the cost involved in following Jesus, when you look at that, some of them were likely tempted to pull back away from it. Some of them probably thought that, you know, we could save ourselves all that trouble just by stepping away from this.

Maybe we don’t have to be so committed. I mean, we can love Jesus. We can walk with Jesus. We’ll just be quiet about it.

And we won’t go and do all the things that he told us to do. And maybe we can save ourselves because there was going to be a cost. Some of them probably thought that by breaking ties with Jesus, we’re not going any further. They might have an easier life or a better life.

They might be able to hold on to things that they loved, like wealth, things like ease, prestige, even life itself. Because Jesus is very clear here, there’s a cost involved in following him. There are still people that pay this cost. some of the most underreported stories of the last few months in the media have been the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, which has been a Christian country in the past, or a largely Christian country. But people have been pretty quiet about that, as well as the slaughter of Christians in Armenia by the Azeris, just because of their faith. Now, there’s some nationalistic things tied into that as well, but part of the difference between the Armenians and the Azeris is one group is Christian and one is not.

There are still people who are losing their lives because they identify with Jesus Christ. There are countries in this world that the mere suggestion that you belong to Jesus Christ is an instant death sentence. And maybe that feels too far removed because we’re not in that situation. But there are people this morning that some of us in this room know who have stepped away from everything. They’ve stepped away from their lives here in Lawton, Oklahoma, put friendships on hold, put jobs on hold, put everything on hold, and have gone to the mission field in closed countries.

Maybe not countries where they’re in danger of losing their lives, but where some of the people they work with are, and they constantly risk deportation if they’re found out. There are people who are doing dangerous things because when they were called to serve Jesus, they said, whatever the cost. If that’s what it cost me to follow you, then I’ll do it. And there’s a temptation even today to say, oh, maybe if I don’t embrace it that wholeheartedly, maybe I can just kind of thread the needle here, and maybe it won’t cost me that much. Some of these people thought that they could save the things that they loved more.

And let’s be honest, that’s what it really is. Anytime we say, no, Lord, or we say, yes, Lord, but, it’s because there’s something there we want to hold on to. And we might not say, oh, I love this thing more than Jesus, but that’s what our actions indicate. And these people thought they could save something, they could hold on to something that they loved more than at least their obedience to Jesus, but he warned them about the dangers of going down that road.

In verse 24, he says, whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. Some of these men might try to preserve their lives by saying, okay, this disciple thing, I didn’t realize how much was involved. I’m out. Jesus, I love you. I’ll support you from afar, but I’m out.

But he said, whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. Because if we reject Jesus, if we reject Jesus, what we lose is far more valuable than what we would have given up. And again, we don’t earn our salvation by following him. He paid for it.

We believe for it. But if these people were so unconvinced of who he was that they weren’t willing to follow him, it’s a good bet they weren’t really convinced about his power to save. Because when we come face to face with this saving power that Jesus has, and we really understand who he is, it transforms our lives. And so for them to be able to step back and say, I’m out on this one, indicates that there’s really not sufficient faith here in Jesus. And so we’re going to draw back and we’re going to distance ourselves from Jesus, maybe even reject Jesus to try to save our own lives.

He said, you’re going to lose your life in the end. The Bible says it’s appointed unto man once to die. And after that, the judgment. It’s appointed unto each of us to die.

We’re going to die one way or another. The question, the only question, is how the judgment works out on the other side. were we with him or were we not some of these people might say you know the it’s just too difficult the creature comforts i don’t know i’ll die for you but i don’t know that i could live 40 40 years for you in poverty by trying to preserve their wealth they would lose their souls though he says in verse 25 what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself. Verse 26 says, whoever is ashamed of me in my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory. Some of them would try to preserve their reputations. Now, nobody likes to be ashamed, but in their culture, shame is one of the worst emotions you could feel and one of the worst things you could heap on somebody.

And so he was asking them when he said not to be ashamed of him. There were going to be people who were going to treat them shamefully. And he’s asking them to endure this hardship, probably the greatest non-physical hardship that they could experience in their culture, this sense of shame. And he was asking them to take that on themselves for his sake. Because he says, if you’re ashamed of me, if you walk away to try to preserve your reputation, to try to save face, you don’t want to be identified with Jesus, you don’t want people to think you’re one of those crazy followers of Jesus, you’re going to walk away from me.

He says, what’s to stop me from being ashamed of you when you stand before me? In fact, he says, whoever is ashamed of me in my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory. we’re all familiar with this pull of I’m not saying you’re you’re on the fence and and you’re going to walk away from Jesus but sometimes I think we draw back from total commitment because we think about what it’s going to cost and we think well maybe if I just don’t go all the way to total commitment maybe I can preserve some of these things that I love and I hold on to. But Jesus was giving his followers a warning that whatever you try to hold on to at the expense of your walk with Jesus, you’re going to lose that and more anyway. What we’re talking about here is idolatry. And if you read back through the Old Testament, the history, idolatry never ever works out well.

We can look at our own lives and see that idolatry never works out well. I remember when God was calling me to pastor my first church, and I knew He was calling me to that specific church, and I didn’t want to go, and I had good reasons not to want to go because it was not a good experience. But one of the things I said was, Lord, I’ve got this full-time job working for the county, and we’re trying to buy this house, and I started hating my job at the county and came home shortly after I had this conversation with God, and my whole house is flooded because I can see the water from this broken pipe running down the driveway. That’s never a good sign when you get home from work and see water running down your driveway from inside the house. It’s like, okay, I was making an idol of that job in that house, and that did not work out well.

Okay, Lord, whatever you want me to do. Whenever we try to step into idolatry, it’s dangerous for us. It never works out well. But, lest we just look at this as a completely negative passage, it’s not that, because behind every warning, there’s also a promise.

That’s really what this passage is about, the promises that he’s giving his disciples. See, we could misread each of these things as saying, oh, you have to, by your performance and your commitment, you have to earn each of these things. But really, he’s saying the way is clear for you to walk in these things because of the promise of what waits on the other side. We’ll talk about that a little bit. Behind each of these warnings, there’s a promise.

So we go back to verse 24, and he’s promised life to them. He says, whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. Now, when we talk about saving their lives, he’s not saying you are, understand he’s the Savior. He’s the one that does the saving.

But he says the one who gives up his life for Jesus’ sake will actually find his life saved. Because what Jesus does, even as we lay down our lives for him, which doesn’t just mean dying, but even as we lay down our lives for him, what he gives us in exchange for that is abundant life. We take the old selfish life where we live for ourselves and our purposes, and we lay that down at His feet. We hand it over to Him, and He gives us an abundant life in exchange for that. And even if that life is cut short by martyrdom, there’s still the promise of eternal life to come.

Whatever life we lay down for Jesus, whatever that looks like, and like I said, there are some believers today who are laying down their lives literally in the sense that they are dying. They are at risk of death, and some of them are actually dying because they are Christians. They can do so confidently because they know that the life that He has set aside for them afterwards is better than anything on this earth. And you and I, even now, that’s not just a promise of future stuff. If we lay down our lives in the sense that daily we get up and we surrender our lives to Jesus, and we say, whatever it is you want for me to do today is what I’ll do.

Not my will, but thy will be done. We say that to Him, and He gives us abundant life that eclipses anything. that we put aside to follow him. We will never give him more than he gives us in return. And so when he warns about life lost because they’ve held it too tightly and made an idol of it, there’s also the promise behind this warning that we can walk with him boldly and with confidence.

We can trust Him because no matter what happens here, we know that He gives us abundant life here. He gives us joy. There is joy in serving Him even in difficult times. But there’s the incredible joy to come of eternal life. And so He’s not saying, again, He’s not saying that we earn our eternal life through our commitment to Him.

He’s saying we can be committed because there is this promise of eternal life waiting for us. There’s also the promise of salvation. He asks, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, in verse 25, and loses or forfeits himself? Pursuing the world and the things in the world while rejecting Christ will cost us our souls.

And so the opposite is also true. That we can walk with Him and we can serve Him confidently knowing that there is salvation waiting for us. That we’ve already begun to experience. our salvation is a done deal in the sense that you and I are as saved as we will ever be at the moment we trust Christ as our Savior. But there’s a day coming when we get to experience all the full benefits of that salvation. We are already saved in the sense that God has looked at us and declared us righteous, and we have a relationship with Him, and the slate is wiped clean.

We are being saved in the sense that He is conforming us to the image of His Son, and we will be saved when we get to be with Him for eternity in His presence and in His glory, in our new glorified bodies where the knees don’t hurt and the next don’t pop. And there’s none of that. There is salvation. There’s hope.

And some of these overlap. Life, salvation, hope. These are, it’s really hard to draw a bold line between them because they all fit together. But verse 26, he talks about those who are ashamed of him, he will be ashamed of them.

But look at what he says, when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. Jesus points out there is a day when he is returning and those who have received him will find joy in that day. and those who have rejected him will walk away sad. He’ll be ashamed by those, but he won’t be ashamed of those who have received him, who’ve been willing to endure the shame here on earth. So you and I have hope that no matter how dark things get here on earth, there is a day coming when Jesus will return in all of his power and all of his glory and we’ll behold him as he is. And we’ll either come with him or we’ll meet him in the air.

We’ll be raised. And we have that hope. Do you ever feel like the world is a little bit hopeless? There are times that we feel that way.

And then we remind ourselves of the hope we have in Jesus. And we get through another day. But it’s true. He promises that there’s a day that He’s coming, and we can walk with Him boldly, knowing that when that day comes, we’ll experience the joy and the hope, and we won’t be ashamed in Him at all. And then there’s this final promise in verse 27, where He says, But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

And this is one of those things that theologians debate over what it means. Is it talking about when he comes with the resurrection? Is it talking about the crucifixion? That doesn’t seem like a joyous promise to make to them.

More likely to be the resurrection. Probably not the second coming, because these men are all dead, and Jesus doesn’t make mistakes. I think the most likely thing that he’s talking about is the transfiguration that we’ll look at, that he talks about right after this, in the next passage. when Jesus goes up to a mountaintop and talks with Moses and Elijah, and they, Peter and the others with him, see a glimpse of Jesus for who he really is. They know.

Peter knows. He just confessed last week as we read it, probably the same day. But for our purposes, it was last week. We read it that he knows that Jesus is the Messiah.

He acknowledged it, but they get a glimpse of what that really means. And I think in context, that’s what he’s talking about when he says that they will not die before they see the kingdom of God. And what that is a promise to them for is that they would have the opportunity to witness his plans unfold. And folks, if we walk with Jesus, no matter what the cost is, one of the great joys that we will experience is that we get to be a part of his plans and we get to watch those things unfold. Have you ever been through a circumstance where you’ve said, I don’t understand why this is happening.

Maybe you’ve been unhappy about it. And then you look at it on the other side and go, wait, that’s what God was doing. That’s why he did that. Some of the most difficult circumstances of my life fall into that category.

When you’re going through it, you think, this is awful. Why would God let this happen to me? Maybe sometimes you think, why would God do this to me? And then you get a little further down the road, and you see how He uses it, and you see what He does in you, and you see what He does in other people, and you recognize what He was doing all along, maybe part of what He was doing all along.

And it’s a blessing to get to see God’s plans unfold and to get to be a part of it. And so there’s this promise that as we walk with him, we’ll get to see his plans unfold. Now, these statements that he makes in verses 24 through 27, they don’t mean that we earn these things through our commitment. Jesus paid for each of these things. Jesus paid for you to have hope of eternal life.

Jesus paid for you to be saved and to be saved right now. Jesus paid for you to have spiritual life. You can’t do that on your own. He sent the Holy Spirit to give it to you.

He did all of this. Instead, what these are, are promises that are meant to reassure the disciples. As he’s speaking to those 12 men and saying, the things that are about to come are going to be very hard. They’re going to be very difficult.

You’re going to want to give up. You’re going to want to throw in the towel. Goodness. You’re going to want to walk away. but keep going because here’s what’s waiting for you on the other side.

And those things are true for us as well. Those things are true for us as well. These are promises to his people that when we, in a life of serving him, come to those points where we think this is too much. I can’t do this again. I can’t deal with this one more day.

I can’t pay that cost, it’s too high. I’m ready to walk away. I’m ready to give up. He tells us keep going because of these promises that are awaiting us.

We know that we can endure anything. We can endure any cost because what he restores to us is far more than the cost that we pay. And I want to leave you with this because I think this is the most important part of this passage. We look at a passage like this, and we think of how much it’s going to cost us to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

We think about how much we’re going to have to go through. We think of the problems that it causes for us, but it is nothing in comparison to the sacrifice He made. It’s nothing in comparison to the cost that He paid for us. It’s nothing in comparison to what he has endured for us. And so ultimately the call to discipleship is a call for us to be like Jesus.

It is very important that we understand he is not asking us to do anything that he hasn’t done. Actually what he’s asking us to do is less than what he’s done. Our kids have chores at home and sometimes they think why do I have to do this and sometimes I’ll step in and help. Not because I have to, but because I want them to see, I’m not asking you to do anything that I won’t do.

Jesus is not asking us to do anything that He hasn’t done. Jesus is asking us as His people to come and be like Him. Look at verse 22. He tells them, Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day. He’s saying, this is my whole plan.

This is what I came to do, was to be rejected and to be despised and to suffer and to be crucified, to be killed and buried and to rise again. And so by the time we get to 23, verse 23, when he tells them, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me. Suddenly, that cost doesn’t seem so high because He’s just asking us to exhibit the kind of sacrifice that He made for us on a smaller scale. When we’re asked to take up our cross, for most of us, that’s not literally to go and be crucified.

But it is daily putting the flesh to death and saying, it’s not about me and what I want, it’s about what He calls me to. So I take up that cross. I deny myself. When my flesh wants something different than what He’s called me to, I say, no, deny Himself daily and follow me. When we’re called to be disciples, when we’re paid to make the sacrifice, when we’re called to pay the cost.

Jesus is not asking us to do anything more than what he’s already done. He’s actually asking us for a whole lot less. But every time, every time we endure some hardship for him, every time we deal with some cost or some inconvenience for him, we’re just learning to be more like him.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:18-22, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 27
• Date: Sunday morning, August 17, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ Well, one of the first widespread conspiracy theories came about over a hundred years ago after the last emperor of Russia and his entire family were executed one night by the communists who had captured them. And a story, a rumor, almost immediately started that one of his four daughters had escaped, had escaped the firing squad and gone into hiding in Europe. And it was about two years later, in the early 1920s, that a woman showed up in a mental hospital in Berlin and claimed that she was the Tsar’s youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. And evidently she was convincing enough that some of the doctors, some of the nurses believed her, to the point that they contacted some of the relatives who had fled from the revolution and were living in France or Germany at the time. And people, some of the emperor’s relatives, some of the former servants would come and meet with this woman, and some of them came away convinced that she was an imposter, but some of them came away convinced that she was exactly who she claimed to be, that she was the czar’s daughter, that she was now the, I don’t know if she would be the rightful heir to the throne if they were to restore it, but she was certainly entitled to all of the money that was left behind and the title and everything else. And it became a long-running debate in Europe, and it even spread to America.

She moved at some point and ended up in Virginia, and it became a point of debate over here as well. Who is this woman? Is she really the czar’s long-lost daughter? And there were people who devoted a substantial part of their lives to determining the question, who is this woman? And like I said, she had supporters and opponents, even among the family.

It just was an open question. She ended up dying in the mid-80s with the question still not settled to the point that there wasn’t a debate anymore. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union fell in the early 90s that they were able to find and recover the bodies of the family and do DNA testing on her and find out that this woman who eventually went by the name Anna Anderson was not the czar’s daughter. She was a Polish factory worker who just decided being the czar’s daughter, I guess, sounded like a better life than what she had and made that claim. But this, probably because of the title and because of the money involved, this was one of the big questions of the 20th century for a lot of people.

Who is this woman? that people would devote their lives to figuring out who she is. Now, it’s an important question, like I said, because of all of the money involved. But for you and me, the question of was she or was she not the czar’s daughter isn’t of any real lasting significance. Really, for most of the people who didn’t stand to inherit the money, it wasn’t of any lasting significance. But there is a question that we’re going to look at today, a question about Jesus, the same question, as a matter of fact, who is he?

That is far more important for each of us than that question ever was for anybody else related to Anna Anderson. Who is he? Who do we believe him to be? Who does he tell us He is?

And do we believe that? So this morning, as we continue our study through the book of Luke, we’ve come to Luke chapter 9. We’ve recently finished up the feeding of the 5,000, and now we’re going to talk about some of the aftermath in Luke chapter 9. Once you’ve turned there with me, if you’ll stand with me as we prepare to read from God’s Word together, and this morning, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 9, it’ll be on the for you so you can follow along as well. But we’re going to read about this question that was posed that I think is the most substantial question any of us can ever be asked or can ever answer.

So starting in verse 18, it says, and it happened that while he was praying alone, the disciples were with him. So that’s not a contradiction. Luke didn’t forget mid-sentence what he was talking about when he says Jesus was alone and the disciples were with him. All through this section of Luke, what is Jesus trying to do? Trying to get away from the crowd for just a minute.

Just give me five minutes. So when it says he was alone, it means he was away from the crowd. The disciples were with him. And he questioned them, saying, Who do the people say that I am?

And they answered and said, John the Baptist. And others say Elijah. But others, that one of the prophets of old has risen again. And he said to them, But who do you say that I am? and Peter answered and said the Christ of God but he warned them and instructed them not to tell this to anyone saying the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day and you may be seated so they’re walking along, or they’ve been walking along, Jesus is praying, and he asked them, who does everybody in town say that I am?

And they were quick to answer. They just had all kinds of answers. And then he says, okay, that’s great. Who do you say that I am? And the Bible doesn’t say this, But when we get a flurry of answers to the first question, and only Peter, who has a habit of being the boldest and most outspoken of the group, Peter’s the only one recorded to answer, I kind of imagine that there were crickets at this second question before Peter finally is the only one with the boldness to speak up.

It was easier for them to answer the first question than the second. And then Peter says, you’re the Christ of God. He’s saying, you’re the Messiah. You’re the one God sent.

And Jesus immediately says, don’t tell anybody that. Now, for reasons that we’ll get into in a little bit, that does not mean that Jesus was denying it. Like, don’t tell people that. It was, okay, don’t tell anybody. And we know from Matthew’s account that Jesus actually admitted it and said, you are blessed because the Father has revealed that to you.

Now don’t tell anybody because it wasn’t time yet. We’ll get into that in just a moment. But these questions that Jesus asked are kind of a turning point in the Gospels. Because up till now, there’s been this ongoing question of who is Jesus that’s bubbled up just under the surface, where we see people watching His miracles and responding saying, is He a prophet?

Can He be a prophet? And Jesus does all these things that the great prophets would have done, does these miraculous things that even up to the point of raising the dead that we see happen in the ministries of Elijah and Elisha. And then right after that, on the heels of that, we come to the storm on the Sea of Galilee, where the disciples see him command nature. And they say, whoa, what kind of man is this? Who is this?

Because they’re starting to realize he’s more than a prophet. and we go back through the gospels and we can see Jesus is gradually revealing for these men who he is because if he walked up to them the very first day and said hey I’m God in human flesh how are they going to react to that somebody walks up to you today on the street as you’re going to get in your car and says hey I’m I’m I’m God I’ve come here as a person you’re going to think they’re not playing with a full deck, right? That person’s not all there. No, Jesus is gradually revealing this so that they can come to understand. And now they’re to the point where they’ve seen enough that they ought to know.

They ought to have some understanding of who he is, that he’s not just a man. He’s not even just a prophet. He’s so much more than that. And through this conversation, Jesus is bringing them to the point of understanding who He is, that He’s Lord, and what that means, what He’s come for. And so we’re going to look at a few things this morning that we can take out of this question and understand when it comes to our relationship with Jesus and our understanding of who He is and how we’re supposed to respond to Him.

But we see starting out right in these first couple of verses, verses 18 and 19, that Jesus’ lordship does not depend on popular opinion. His first question to them that day was about who other people thought he was. And as I pointed out, they were very quick to answer him. They’re sort of machine-gunning him with answers. Oh, some people think you’re Elijah.

Some people think you’re John the Baptist. Some people think you’re one of the other prophets. I think Matthew records that they said some people think you’re Jeremiah. They were quick to provide the answers to that.

And they were quick to answer because it’s always easier to account for other people. It’s always easier to critique other people than to take responsibility for your own self. So when it came time to get to their own convictions, oh, we’re a little more hesitant to put ourselves on the line and say this is what we believe. But we’ll go ahead and say, You know, it’s easy to answer for everybody else. And they were right.

There were many among the people who thought he was a prophet back from the dead. And we’ve seen glimpses of this through the other stories that we’ve read thus far through Luke. Even when he sent the twelve out, just a couple of passages ago, he sent the twelve out and Herod’s court is in an uproar about who is this man. In Herod’s court, it was a common belief that he was John the Baptist returned to life.

And in Matthew, Herod himself even wonders, could this be John the Baptist? I beheaded him, but here he is. He’s back. Could it be him?

Then they say, Elijah. And it’s important that we understand where they’re coming from because this is such a strange idea to us. As we read about Jesus, that they think he’s all these other people. my answer to him being john the baptist is they’ve seen him and they’ve seen those two in the same place at the same time you know they’re not the same person because they’ve interacted but when it comes to elijah returning malachi 4 5 talks about elijah returning to turn the hearts of the children back to their fathers. It’s a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, but Jesus and the apostles taught that this referred to John the Baptist coming in the spirit and power of Elijah. But it was a common belief that Elijah is just going to be resurrected and walk in our midst. So when you understand that, it wasn’t completely crazy that they thought, oh, this man is Elijah.

After all, he’s doing a lot of the same things Elijah did, Just he’s doing them on a grander scale. And he’s actually claiming the power and authority to do it on his own. And then according to the way some of the rabbis interpreted Deuteronomy 18, they had begun to insist that Jeremiah was going to return from the dead. When Moses talked about a prophet who is greater than I, they had decided, oh, that must mean Jeremiah. And so some of them, there was this popular view that Jeremiah was going to come back. so when we when we read that when we understand that it’s not as crazy as it first sounds that they all say oh it’s one of these guys it was based on the way they were interpreting scripture they just missed it which is easy for us to say in hindsight none of these outlandish none of these were outlandish for them to look at Jesus and say I bet he’s that guy because that’s who they expected were any one of those three and so they had these opinions about who Jesus is and they even had some justification for their opinions notice I didn’t say they were right I just said they had some justification they had some reason for thinking these things.

They weren’t completely crazy. But they had these opinions, and they were very sure in their opinions about Jesus. But see, that’s the thing. People today have opinions about Jesus that they’re very sure of. There are people you can get, I don’t recommend this unless you’ve taken some headache medicine, but you can get on YouTube today and watch all sorts of theories about Jesus that people are very, very sure about and very, very wrong about.

And it even gets crazier in the comment sections of videos. Again, I don’t recommend that unless you’ve prayed for patience because God will use that to provide it to you. But today there are opinions. Some people will say, oh, Jesus wasn’t even real. We have evidence even outside the Bible that He existed. they’ll say oh he was a he was a good moral teacher and I defer to C. S.

Lewis who pointed out that he claimed to be God and if he claimed to be God he’s either God or he’s not if he’s not God he’s either a lunatic who thought he was God or he’s a liar who knew he wasn’t God and said it anyway in either case he’s not a good moral teacher and so Lewis’s trilemma was that he’s a liar a lunatic or Lord, but he can’t be just a good moral teacher because it goes against what he himself claimed. People have all sorts of opinions about Jesus, but if our opinions about Jesus, no matter how certain we feel about them, if our opinions about Jesus are not rooted in what he and his closest associates said about him, then we’re very wrong. We’re as wrong as we are sure in our wrongness. And so his lordship doesn’t depend on popular opinion. The fact that all these, everybody had an opinion.

Everybody thought, oh, he’s got to be Elijah. That didn’t make him Elijah. Oh, he’s got to be John the Baptist. That didn’t make him John the Baptist.

All the claims that all the people made that were contrary to his claims didn’t change who he was. Then we skip ahead just a little bit to verse 21. We’re not skipping verse 20. We’re going to come back to it. Because what we see at the beginning of this passage is people being confused about who He is.

It ends with people being confused about who He is. And in the middle, there’s a clear statement of truth that’s being emphasized. Starting in verse 21, we see that Jesus’ lordship does not depend on our understanding. So when Peter made the confession of who Jesus is, he had taken a major step.

This is the first time Jesus is being openly identified by his followers as who he is. But when he claimed to be the Christ, that’s not just his name. That means Messiah. Christ comes from Christos, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew word Messiah. He’s making a claim about what He is, not just who He is.

Not just His name, but what He is. And if Jesus is the Messiah, there were certain expectations that the people had for the Messiah. They were looking for somebody who was going to come in and sweep the Romans out. They did not like the Romans being in charge of them.

We would not like it if some other country came in and just started telling us what to do. Even if they were nice about it, we wouldn’t like that. So they were looking for somebody who was going to sweep the Romans out. They looked for somebody who was going to overthrow the Herodians, Herod and his dynasty, because they were corrupt and they were way too close to the Romans. So we’re going to get rid of them too, even though at least on the surface, they’re a Jewish ruling dynasty.

We want to get rid of them. And they were looking for somebody who was going to come in and reestablish the kingdom that David had set up and usher in this golden age for Israel. They were looking for somebody who was going to come in as a political and military leader, who was going to right all the wrongs and fix everything and make everything in Israel wonderful. And that’s why he told the disciples, don’t tell anybody. When Peter said, you’re the Messiah, Jesus said, don’t tell anybody, not because he was saying, that’s wrong.

Hey, you got it wrong. Don’t tell anybody that he’s the Messiah because he had not come yet in the way that they were expecting. Now, there will come a time where he overthrows all the wicked rulers, where he sets up a perfect kingdom, where He rules on the throne of David forever, that day will come, but that day is still in the future for us. This time He had come for a very different reason that He outlines in verse 22 with what He says, the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day. What He had come to do was very different from their expectation of this man who was going to whoop up on the Romans and set up a golden age.

He had come to suffer at the hands of the Romans. And if the people got wind that he is the Messiah, it was totally going to cause an uproar and cause them to be trying to push him in a direction that he was not sent to go. He had come to suffer at the hands of the Romans. He had come to be rejected by his own people, these people who would have tried to usher him in and put him on the throne. God’s plan required that he be rejected by those people, especially by the religious leaders who should have been the first to recognize him for who he was, but didn’t.

He had come to be killed, which was, in their minds, it was unthinkable that the Messiah would be killed, would be executed, especially that the Messiah would be crucified. It was considered the most humiliating way that somebody could be put to death. But he had also come to rise, to rise from the dead, he says in verse 22. And he says specifically on the third day, and this also is something that they didn’t really have a category for in their minds. The Jewish people at that time had a concept of a general resurrection at the end of time, but as far as somebody coming and coming back to life at this point in time when we’re not talking about the end of days, that wasn’t something they were expecting, and so everything about who he was and what he’d come to do was out of step with what they expected if they heard that term Messiah.

And that’s why he tells them, don’t tell them yet. It’s because they wouldn’t understand. If they found out he was the Messiah, they would have tried to make him a conquering king instead of the suffering servant that he’d come to be. The bottom line is he was not the kind of Messiah that they expected. But he doesn’t have to wait for us to understand everything in order for him to be what he claims.

I think even his followers looked at him, even up to the time of the crucifixion, saying, this is not supposed to be this way. When he talked about laying down his life and being raised up the third day, Peter was telling him, no, we’ll never let it happen. Even his closest followers didn’t understand what it meant for him to be the Messiah. Did that stop him from being the Messiah? No. So, his lordship does not depend on our understanding.

For him to be lord of my life does not require that I understand everything that he is doing. Have you ever been confused by what his plans were for your life? Yeah. Some of you, I think, are afraid to shake your head.

Are you afraid I’m going to ask you publicly what it was? See, I already know the answer. If you’ve walked with Jesus for any length of time, you’ve been confused by his plans for your life. And maybe, just maybe you get to the other side of it and you get some idea of, oh, that’s what that was for.

Sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes we never figure out why we went through this. But if he’s Lord of my life, I don’t get to say, no, I’m not going to do things your way because I don’t really understand that. Or you can’t be who you claim to be because this didn’t work out this way. This is the way we sometimes deal with Jesus or deal with God the Father.

Well, I’m not going to worship him because this happened in my life. Years ago, I spent a lot of time talking with a man who had completely walked away from the Lord because his sister died of cancer. there are a lot of reasons that could that we could look at in our lives and say i don’t understand why that happened i don’t understand why i went through that so i i don’t believe in you anymore okay jesus either is and if you’re going through a time of difficulty please understand i’m not trying to minimize that. Everybody in this room has been through something traumatic in life. But Jesus either is who he says he is or he is not.

And it has nothing to do with what you or I went through or are going through. The bottom line for all of this is Jesus either walked out of that grave 2,000 years ago or he didn’t. And all the miscarriages or stillbirths that I’ve ever experienced for one of my children. They don’t change that. Any of the traumatic life situations, he is who he is regardless of whether I understand what’s happening around me or not.

And the disciples were about to go through some traumatic things. Losing this man that they loved so dearly that they had walked with for years, seeing him go to the cross, they weren’t going to understand it, but their lack of understanding didn’t change the fact that he’s Lord. And so this passage begins and it ends with accounts of people being confused about who Jesus is. Even the people he’s talking to, they still don’t understand the Messiah came to suffer this time, not to rule. But in the middle, in the middle of all this confusion, oh, we think he’s John the Baptist.

Oh, we think he’s come to set up his kingdom. In the middle of that, there’s this moment of remarkable clarity that is the focus of this passage. And that’s that Jesus is Lord. He is the Messiah, and His Lordship demands a personal response.

As I’ve already pointed out, the disciples were quick to answer for everybody else in verse 19, but that wasn’t enough. And when we get to verse 20, Jesus called them to account personally for who they thought he was. Who do you say that I am? That word there, we see it translated as but. It’s a Greek word that points out a contrast, telling us that we can put aside everything that came before.

Take what everybody else says about Jesus. Take what everybody else thinks about Jesus. take all of their opinions, take them, roll them up in a ball, and set them aside. They go over here. They’re irrelevant.

They’re over there, but we’re not even looking at that anymore. Now, who do you say that I am? The only thing that matters in that moment was their answer to that question. The only thing that matters for us is our answer to that question.

Each of us has to answer this question for ourselves Who do we think Jesus is? Jesus is one of the few figures in all of history That everybody who’s heard of him has some opinion on him And if you think that’s a tall claim, I wrote a whole book about it That every religion in the world has some answer to this question, who is Jesus? Now, I think they’re all wrong except one, otherwise I wouldn’t be up here doing this and telling you these things, but they all have an answer because it is such a central question. Who do you say that I am? Each of us has to answer that question.

It’s a factual question describing his identity. Is he the Messiah? Did he come as God in human flesh as he claimed and as his closest associates, his disciples eventually became convinced. It’s a factual question about that. Do I believe the claims that he made?

That he would come and that he would die and then three days later he would rise again. Do I believe the claims that he made that through his shed blood we can have forgiveness of sins? Do I believe that he actually did those things? but it’s also a personal question about acknowledging the role that He plays in our lives. Who do you say that I am?

I believe that He is everything He claimed to be. I believe that He’s God in human flesh. I believe that He was born of a virgin. I believe that He lived a sinless life of complete obedience to the Father. I believe that He died on the cross taking responsibility for my sin and for yours.

I believe he shed his blood and died. There is the full payment for that sin. I believe that three days later, he rose again from the dead in the same body that he was crucified in. And I believe that one day he is coming back to rule and to reign and to judge and to set all things to right.

I believe that. But I can believe all of that and still not submit to it. I can believe all of that. I can intellectually believe all of that and still not receive him as the Lord of my life.

So it’s more than just a factual question, who is he? It’s also a personal question of who is he to you. What does who he is mean in your life? What role does he play? Is he your Savior?

Is he your Lord? nothing matters more than the way we answer these questions and if you’re not sure about your answer or how to make your answer what it ought to be it’s not just enough to believe that he is those things but he calls us to put our faith in him that means trusting him as our one and only savior submitting to him as our lord and if you’ve never done that before, it’s very simple. It’s not very easy because our pride gets in the way, but it’s very simple. We have to acknowledge that we’ve sinned and that our sin separates us from a holy God. And that’s difficult because we want to believe that we’re better than we are. I grew up in a Christian family.

I grew up as a kid who was too scared of my parents to really do anything too wrong. And yet I had to acknowledge that I’d sinned against God. And even if we’re good in our behavior, our attitudes and our hearts are sinful before the Lord. So we have to acknowledge that there’s a problem.

And we have to recognize that that’s the reason Jesus came, was to die on the cross, to pay for our sins because you and I could never do enough good to undo the wrong that we’ve done. And then we believe that He died not just to pay for sin in the abstract, but He died to pay for my sin. And then He rose again three days later to prove it. And if we believe that, we believe all of that, that we’ve sinned, there’s a problem, Jesus is the only answer. He paid for the sin in full.

He rose again the third day. Then all that’s necessary is for us to say, I believe he did that for me. And I trust in the payment he made, that he’s the only way I can get to heaven, that he’s the only way I can be forgiven.

He’s the only way I can be right with the Father. See, we take what he did and we put our trust in that. And this morning, wherever you’re seated, if you’ve never received that forgiveness, if you believe that he is who he said he was, if you believe that he paid for your sin like he said he would, then right where you are, you can ask him for that forgiveness and you’ll have it.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:11-17, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 26
• Date: Sunday morning, August 10, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ A recent study found that over 60% of people who were surveyed believe that our society as a whole is becoming less compassionate. And that concern, I don’t know that the other 40 think, oh, no, we’re on the right track. But you’re always going to find a certain number of people in any survey that say, I don’t know what I think. Is the sky orange? I don’t know.

But over 60% said our country, our society as a whole is getting less compassionate. And I think that’s cause for, whether it’s true or whether we just perceive it that way, I think it’s cause for concern. Because we do see stories in the news constantly about cruelty, about people just lacking compassion. Depending on what media sources you follow, you may see stories about somebody attacking somebody on a New York subway and other people sitting around just doing nothing about it. I can’t remember how long ago it was, but there was a story that filtered even down to me here in Lawton, Oklahoma, about a woman being killed on the subway. And other people just stood by and did nothing.

And we’re concerned about those stories, but for each of those stories that we run across, there are other stories of people showing compassion. We’ve been inundated with the stories of people who have dropped everything and gone to Texas to help with recovery in the aftermath of the floods. I know that every single time my hometown was hit by a tornado growing up, people would show up from across the country to help. And so it’s hard to know if we’re becoming less compassionate or not as a society. But I think all of us agree that we want to be more compassionate as a society. We agree that we want to see more compassion.

And part of the reason why we all recognize that, unless there’s just something seriously wrong with us, we all recognize the need for compassion because God has put that in us. Because it reflects the nature of who God is. Now, we know that God is compassionate, but we may not always feel that way. We may not always describe him that way. Sometimes the circumstances of life can feel like he’s not compassionate, but our feelings lie to us. Sometimes people will even look at stories in the Bible and say, that’s not compassionate at all.

But even in judgment, God is compassionate. There’s a video, it’s from 2014, but I’ve seen it several times this week. These things just kind of make the rounds on the internet and they get prominent again. Back in 2014, R. C. Sproul, who’s now gone on to be with the Lord, was doing a question and answer service, kind of like we do on Sunday nights.

And somebody asked the question, since God is compassionate, When Adam and Eve chose to sin in the garden, why was his response so harsh? And you may have seen this clip and maybe weren’t aware of where it came from, but Sproul turns to the people and says, what is wrong with you people? That’s an answer you will never get from me during one of our Sunday night question and answers. But he began to explain how you have us as these creatures that God created from the dirt and gave us everything that we needed, everything that we could ever want, and He created us for perfect fellowship with Him. And nevertheless, we decided to rebel against Him. He had told us, God had told us, that the day we ate of that fruit, we would die.

And while spiritual death did take place in that moment, our lives did not cease. Adam and Eve were not struck dead. God, there were consequences, but God was far more gracious to them than they deserved. And so Sproul looked at this and said, given the circumstances and given who God is and who we are, it’s amazing that God’s response wasn’t harsher. We say the same thing with Noah’s ark. How could God, if he’s so compassionate, how could he wipe out all of life on earth?

That’s the wrong question. Because with as sinful as mankind was at that time, it was worse than today. The way Genesis describes it. Every thought of everyone’s heart was only evil all the time. The question is not, why did God only spare eight? The question is, why did God spare anybody at all?

Or the question, if God’s so compassionate and understanding, why did He only make one way to heaven? The question is, with our sin, why did God make any way at all? God is compassionate. And this morning, as we continue our study through the book of Luke, we’re going to see the compassion of God on display. This is not the ultimate display, But this is one of those places that you look at and you think all the ways Jesus could have done something differently if he was like us. All the ways that this story would have been different if Jesus was like us, but he’s not.

He’s far more compassionate than we are because God is compassionate. We’re going to be in Luke chapter 9, starting in verse 11 today. So if you’d turn there with me, if you haven’t already. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. We’re going to start in verse 11. We finished up with verse 11 last week, but this verse is kind of a bridge between the two stories.

Last week we were looking at him sending out the twelve to go throughout Galilee, and today we’re looking at the feeding of the 5,000 that came shortly after. Verse 11 says, but the crowds were aware of this and followed him, and welcoming them, he began speaking to them about the kingdom of God and curing those who had need of healing. Right there, right there, I’m just going to pause right there and say that right there is already a mark of compassion. Jesus has gone to where he has gone to get away from the crowds because Jesus is tired. I think one of the gospels says at this point he and the disciples hadn’t even had time to stop and eat. He gets there and the people flock to him again.

And if you or I are in that situation, we’re going to say, I’m sorry, I’m on a break. I need you to leave me alone for a few minutes. He doesn’t do that. It says he welcomes them and began healing them and curing those who needed healing. Verse 12 says, now the day was ending, and the twelve came and said to him, send the crowd away that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside and find lodging and get something to eat. For here we are in a desolate place.

But he said to them, you give them something to eat. And they, think about that. They’re saying we don’t have any food, and he says, give them something to eat. It’s got to be confusing to the disciples. And they said, we have no more than five loaves and two fish. These are little biscuit type things and two probably salted fish preserved.

Unless perhaps we go and buy food for all these people. For there were about 5,000 men. And he said to his disciples, have them sit down to eat in groups of about 50 each. They did so and had them all sit down, and he took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he blessed them and broke them and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the people, and they all ate and were satisfied, and the broken pieces which they had left over were picked up, twelve baskets full. And you may be seated. So a few things to understand here as we start out.

It says there in a desolate place. Some translations say desert. It’s not desert in the sense that it’s just rocks and sand. This is not Arizona, New Mexico, northern Mexico kind of desert. This is just a place where there’s not a lot of stuff. It’s a remote area.

It’s like if my kids and I go hunting in southeast Oklahoma. Lush places, trees, fields, the whole nine yards, but you can’t necessarily go find anything to eat real easily. Okay, that’s the kind of place that they’re in. They’re out there, they’ve got all these people, and it says 5,000 men. Others of the Gospels talk about their wives and children being with them. This is a crowd that could be as large as 25,000 people.

That would be a challenge today, even when we can run to Sam’s. We would probably empty out Sam’s, trying to provide for 25,000. I know we would empty out Sam’s. We’d probably have to go to the next one. We’d have to send somebody to the city for Costco. We’d have to empty out everything to feed 25,000 people.

And they’re getting to the point that this is a major concern for them. Now, it says in some of our translations, the day was ending. This doesn’t mean they’ve just come to sundown and they’re suddenly aware of the problem. This is really any time after noon, they realize Jesus has not stopped teaching. And if we’re going to send these people away in time for them to find provisions, we got to do something now. We’ve got to make a decision now because there’s going to come a time when these people need to eat dinner.

And you don’t want an angry crowd that is hungry. Any of you ever get hangry? I may or may not have some people in my house that get hangry. You don’t want that crowd to be there and there’s no food and then no place for them to lodge. For the disciples, this is a huge logistical problem that they’re starting to get worried about. And so they come to Jesus.

And they come to Jesus with this problem. And I want to share with you four ways that we see the compassion of Jesus on display in this very short passage. The first of these is that when they come to Jesus, they come saying things and having attitudes that they should have known better than. And Jesus addressed them very patiently. The Lord addresses our weaknesses patiently. That may not fit the picture that some of us have in our minds of who God is, but in reality, he addresses our weaknesses patiently.

So these men, think back as we’ve studied through Luke piece by piece, we’ve seen the stories here of the miracles that they have just seen with their eyes. Imagine seeing him raise people from the dead. Imagine seeing him calm storms. Imagine seeing him heal lepers. Imagine all the things that they have just seen, and to realize there’s nothing that’s outside of his control. And that includes healings that have just taken place that day.

That’s why verse 11 is so important. He gets over there. He begins healing people again. It’s not like it’s been three months since his last miracle, and what have you done for me lately? That day, he’s been healing people. And despite everything that they have seen, their faith was not as strong as it should have been.

They are actually worried about how Jesus is going to take care of this many people. Actually, they’re worried about how they’re going to take care of this many people. And that betrays this sort of lack of trust that Jesus is going to do anything about it at all. I have one child in particular, a little six-year-old redhead, who always has to remind us to feed her as though we have ever forgotten. Last night, Charla was, well, a couple nights this week, Charla’s been out working on a project for the school, and I’ve been responsible. I’ll be in there standing there making dinner.

And she comes in all frantic, worried that I’m not going to feed her. I’ve clearly got it under control. But that little girl has zero confidence in my abilities to feed her. She does the same thing to her mama, too. It’s just her. That’s kind of how the disciples are acting.

They’ve seen Jesus, they know he can handle this, but they don’t seem to have any concept that he’s going to actually handle this. And they’re worried, what are we going to do? They’ve come up with a plan. And so they came to Jesus, they thought these people are going to have to leave to find what they needed. And what’s interesting about the way they do this is they are so consumed by their worry that they actually interrupt Jesus while he’s teaching and start telling him what he needs to do. I’m just going to step out on a limb here and say, knowing who Jesus is, if you’re going to interrupt him and start bossing him around, you’re not thinking clearly.

Really, at any point, if you start bossing Jesus around or trying to boss Jesus around, You’re just, you’re not thinking clearly. So they come in and do that, and Jesus answers this by instructing them back. They’re all worried about, we’ve got to send these people away to find food, and he just says, give them something to eat. Like, this is not a hard problem. Just give them something to eat, in verse 13. And here again, we see Jesus letting them know what’s going to happen.

Just give the people some food. We’ve got plenty. They’ve seen this before. When they panicked in he had already told them, we are going to the other side. And they miss these things when Jesus says, this is how it’s going to be, and they’re so consumed by their worry. Now, we don’t want to sit here 2,000 years later and feel like we’re so superior.

I would be doing the same thing. I don’t know that I would be trying to tell Jesus what to do, but I would certainly be worried about it and encouraging Peter to go tell Jesus what to do. So we would be in the same boat. But even though Jesus told them what was going to happen, they’re unconvinced that he’s going to do anything about it because they didn’t have the means to supply the crowd. It’s great that Jesus said, just give them something to eat. Their answer is, we don’t have enough.

Guys, you’re talking to Jesus. But what we see here is this group of disciples, they’ve been trained to serve the kingdom, and they’ve just been out to serve the kingdom, and they’ve seen God do incredible things through them, let alone the incredible things that Jesus has done, and yet they come back and they’ve allowed themselves to get sidetracked from their service to the kingdom by these earthly concerns. They can’t see what he intends to do because they’re so focused on earthly things, and we do the same thing. But here Jesus doesn’t answer them as harshly as he could. spot that Jesus deals with the disciples when they come in with this lack of faith, and really it’s not so much a belief that Jesus can’t do this, it’s just they get so consumed by their worry. And you might think, oh, I know there’s nothing Jesus can’t do. My faith is strong, but sometimes our worry chokes out our ability to see that clearly.

Jesus could have answered them harshly. Jesus could have said, how dare you? Can’t you see I’m Who are you to come in and tell me how we’re going to do these things? He doesn’t do any of that. Jesus answers them gently. And he addresses them patiently, and he does so in ways that are going to teach them so that their faith is stronger the next time.

That’s one way we see his compassion on display, just the way he patiently addresses our weaknesses. You and I have those weaknesses. You and I have those moments where our faith is not as strong as it ought to be, where our knowledge is not where it ought to be, where our ability to persevere and do what he’s called us to do are not as strong as they ought to be. I’m not saying that he’s just fine with sin, but I’m saying in our weaknesses, he’s patient. Then we come to verse 14, and we see that the Lord shows his compassion in the way that he provides what we lack. The most notable part of this story is the miracle in the middle of it.

It’s the display of compassion that we just can’t miss. It’s so obvious, in fact, that Luke doesn’t go into a lot of detail about it. We can glean some more details from some of the other gospels, but Luke just presents it here without a lot of explanation, just hear it happen, because it’s so obvious, this part of the story, that there was they didn’t have. There was something they needed. It wasn’t something they wanted. You know, he’s not providing the trip to France that Reuben talked about that I would love to have, but I don’t really need.

He’s not providing that, but something they needed like their daily bread, he’s going to take care of it. The reality here is that, like I said, there were probably 20 to 25,000 people who are in this remote place. They didn’t have ready access to food. They didn’t have ready access to lodging. Even the disciples’ plan of sending them out, if they went out into all these little villages, there’s a good chance there’s not enough of those things to go around for everybody there. Once everybody dispersed, or even if everybody dispersed, it would have been difficult to supply everybody on this short notice.

They were in a difficult situation. But Jesus was able to meet the need. And so he has everybody, when we get to verse 14, sit down in these manageable groups, these groups of about 50, and he began to distribute the little bit of food that was available. Like I said, they had five loaves and two fishes. That’s probably two little dried fish that they would have had. This was a little boy’s lunch that he’d brought with him.

And we’re not talking five loaves of sandwich bread like we’d buy at the store, probably something closer to a a biscuit or a tortilla, something smaller. Had five of those. And Jesus just begins to take those apart, hand it out to the disciples. And I would love to have seen how that worked. As he’s just pulling it away, it just never seems to end. And I know for the more skeptical among us, that may be a kind of a challenge to understand.

How’s he pulling some away and there’s still more. I mean, you’re defying the laws of physics. It is a challenge to understand until you remind yourself that if He spoke the universe into existence, if He spoke to nothing and commanded it to be something, this is not a hard thing for Him. And so He begins to take it and tear it and distribute it, and as He does, it just keeps multiplying. And He multiplied this food. By the way, He gave thanks for it and blessed it and began to multiply it.

And He multiplied the food everyone was full. That word satisfied says they were bursting. Some commentators say here that the Greek word is tied to the idea of an animal gorging itself on what you put out before it. One of those nights she was so worried I wasn’t going to feed her, I made Jojo hot dogs with sauerkraut, and she said, this is so good, I’m going to keep eating until I get sick. I was like, Please don’t do that. But finally, she just could not take one more bite, and she was full.

I’ve never seen it in six years that she was full, but she was finally full. That was them. They ate until they couldn’t eat anymore. And they were satisfied. And when John MacArthur was preaching on this passage, he pointed out that Jesus was creating the food right in front of them, that that was probably the best loaves and fishes any of them ever tasted. Probably the reason why they sat there and kept eating.

You ever had something that’s so good that you know you should stop eating, you’re going to be sick, but you keep eating because it’s so good? That was probably what they experienced. But these people had a real need. Now, to us, it seems like a mundane need. They were hungry, but it was a real need. They didn’t know where they were going to get the food from.

Jesus didn’t have to feed them. Jesus could have sent them away to fend for themselves. But he had compassion on them. And he met their need. He provides what we lack. Verse 17, I love this.

I got so excited about this, I had to go out and see who was in the office because I had to tell somebody. And poor Christy just got an earful because she was the only one there. But the Lord plans for our future. If we look at the end of verse 17 here, we can’t overlook the 12 baskets. These were not scraps. When it says fragments, it’s talking about the pieces that he pulled off and distributed.

There were 12 baskets of those left. And I think when I was a kid, I thought it was just the scraps that people left on the ground. No, this was food that Jesus distributed, that they just had more than they needed, and there were 12 baskets full. Enough exactly left over to fill 12 baskets, one for each disciple. And this is one of those things that I’ve heard so many people say stuff about over the years that I’m just, I think it sounds good, but I need more information. I’ve heard one preacher say that by handing each of them a basket, the 12 of them, it’s symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel, and he’s founding a new Israel that was the church.

Like, that sounds good, but I feel like there should be something in Scripture to back that up, and I don’t see that. So I was digging in this week, saying, what are the 12 baskets about? They’re recorded because it happened, but Jesus didn’t do things by accident. And what I found is that these are baskets that are called kofinoi in the text, and these are small baskets that you could put something in. I don’t think we’re talking big laundry hamper baskets, which is what I was led to believe as a child. These are little carrying baskets.

And as I got to research the history a little bit more, those kofinoi were used specifically for Jewish travelers to carry food in, clean food, for provisions as they were traveling through Gentile lands like Samaria. This feeding of the 5,000 is one of the final big events of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee before He starts working His way south. And as they work their way south, they were about to head into Gentile lands, and they were about to head into Samaria. And I thought, that cannot be a coincidence. That cannot be a coincidence. once I saw that Jesus is preparing them for what they’re about to do. There was enough for each individual disciple, and I think part of the purpose of that was so each of them, oh, here, you didn’t think there was enough food? Here’s a basket for you.

You didn’t think here’s a basket for you. They’ve each got their own individual basket, so they can be reminded of His power and His provision. but also Jesus showing compassion by planning for their future. He has a plan for each of them. He’s going to send them on his behalf, and he’s going to go with them part of the time, but he’s going to send them on his behalf through these Gentile lands, and they’ve just been provided for. Folks, it’s not just true of the disciples.

Each and every believer has a calling that God has planned and placed on our lives. God has a plan for you. That doesn’t mean it’s always a fun plan to our flesh, but it means God has a design for how He intends to use you for His glory and how your life can be lived for the fullest or to the fullest for His kingdom. And whatever that plan is, he already has the provision in mind. And I believe that’s what the 12 baskets were about, preparing them for what they were about to do. And sometimes the compassion of Jesus just shows up for us in the way that he’s already prepared the road ahead for what he’s called us to do. and then the fourth way his compassion shows up we have to go back to verse 11 and there’s the very fact that jesus engaged with these people when he was trying to rest he was giving them one more opportunity these folks in galilee like I said he’s about to leave galilee not too long after this and he’s giving them one more opportunity.

He could have just said, I’m not doing this today, but there’s a crowd here wanting to hear about the kingdom, and he’s going to make sure they’re taught. We’re getting close to the end of the day, and the disciples say we’ve got to send them away. Jesus does what he can or what he needs to in order to keep that crowd there so he can continue to teach them, because for some of these people, this may be their last opportunity. and while he has the opportunity Jesus is teaching them about the kingdom calling them to repent calling them to the Lord sort of like when you have a loved one that you know is about to leave on a long trip and you’re not going to see them for a long time you try to make the time last but Charles’ brother just left to go back to Hawaii and my lovely wife I can’t even tell you how much we owe the turnpike authority for the money spent going to the city to see him every opportunity. And I understand that. Completely understand that. Just want one more opportunity to see my family. Jesus was giving them one more opportunity.

I have a chance here to teach them. I’m going to take it. Part of the way his compassion shows up is that he persists in calling us to repent. He will give us one more opportunity. He’ll give us one more opportunity. When our patients would have run out with somebody, he’s going to give them one more opportunity.

Peter talks about this. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise. Why has God not brought all this to an end? Why has God not punished the guilty? Why has God not done any of this yet? It’s not because God is unjust.

It’s not because God doesn’t care about justice. It’s because he’s given one more opportunity to repent. The question Frank Turek asks is, if God were to destroy all evil at midnight, would I be there at 1201? He gives us room to repent. And I believe the very fact that he engaged with these people and that he kept them around as long as he could, he’s giving them one more opportunity to hear the word before he leaves Galilee. and if you’re hearing these words today and you’ve never trusted him as your savior he’s giving you today an opportunity to repent none of us are promised a certain number of opportunities but god is merciful and god is compassionate not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. His ultimate display of compassion came substantially later than this on the cross.

Nobody took Jesus’ life from him. He made it clear he had the power to lay it down and he had the power to take it up again. He died voluntarily as a sacrifice to pay for my sin and for yours. That was the ultimate demonstration of his compassion. That’s why Paul said, God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. If we ever question whether God cares, whether God loves us, whether God has compassion, we have to look no further than the cross.

Jesus paid for your sin, and he paid for it in full so that you could be right with God, so you could have a relationship with the God who loved you and created you and created you to walk with him. and he shows his compassion every day by giving one more opportunity, one more day to repent. If you’ve never trusted him as your savior, it’s very simple. We have to understand that our sin has separated us from God. Our sin is offensive to God, and because God is just, our sin has to be punished. But because God is compassionate, He made a way where that punishment didn’t have to destroy us. And so Jesus came and willingly took responsibility for my sin and for yours.

And He was punished in our place. He died in our place so that we could be forgiven. And He rose again three days later to prove it. And if we understand that, that our sin separated us from God, but we believe Jesus paid for it in full and rose again, the only thing that we have to do is to turn to him and ask for that forgiveness, believing that he provided everything that was necessary, and we’ll have it.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 9:1-11, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 25
• Date: Sunday morning, August 3, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ Well, it is not unusual for us to be sent on errands for other people. I got sent yesterday. Charla called me after I’d got into town and said, can you go pick up Abigail’s birthday cupcakes? And I said, okay, where from? She said, Walmart.

And if you ever doubt my love for you, I went to Walmart on a Saturday. All right. But we, you know, I’ll send her to pick up curbside orders at Atwoods. We do those things for each other. I’ll send the kids, you know, if we’re sitting at a restaurant, hey, would you go get me a refill? My knees are older than yours.

We send other people on errands. We’re sent on errands. In the ancient world, it wasn’t unusual for kings to send people on errands. I read about Charlemagne, the famous Frankish leader in the Middle Ages, used to send him out two by two, a bureaucrat and a clergyman, together to the different parts of his empire. And they would be kind of his eyes and ears and his hands and feet throughout his empire and make sure everything was running the way it was supposed to be. I read another story this week about Genghis Khan, the Mongol ruler, and about his interaction with the Khwarezmian Empire that he was friends with.

Now, how many of you have ever heard of the Khwarezmian Empire or Khwarezm? Okay, a couple. Of course, you two have. There’s a reason why the Khwarezmian Empire is not famous. And I’ve heard of it, but I know very little about it other than this story. There’s a reason the Khwarezmian Empire is not really famous, and that’s because they were friends with Genghis Khan, and he would send his emissaries out as a king would, and in that day, they were supposed to be respected the way the king would be.

And the way you treated their emissary, the way you treated their ambassadors, the way you treated the king. And so they were used to trading with each other, and they were on friendly terms. He was one of the few people that Genghis Khan was on friendly terms with, until one day he sent these emissaries to the sultan of Corazam, who was disrespectful to one of his emissaries, and so Genghis Khan invaded and just obliterated the entire empire, just gone, took it over, burned their cities, salted their fields, there’s no more Corazam. That’s why we don’t hear about it, because somebody disrespected the king’s emissary, or the Khan’s emissary. It was expected that somebody was going to go out and they were going to serve on behalf of the ruler, and they were going to do what he called them to do, and they came with his authority, and so they were supposed to be treated likewise. As we continue our study in the book of Luke, and if you’re a guest with us today, we’re glad you’re here.

We’ve been studying piece by piece through the book of Luke, and we’re in Luke chapter 9 this morning, where Jesus acts like the king that he is and sends out emissaries on his behalf, and we’re going to look at the way He sent them out, what He sent them out to do, and what it means for us as well. So Luke chapter 9, if you haven’t already turned there, please turn there with me. And once you find it, if you’ll stand as we read together from God’s Word, if you can’t find it or you don’t have your Bible, that’s all right, it’ll be on the screen for you as well. But however you get eyes on the text, get eyes on the text and we’ll read along together. Luke chapter 9 verse 1 says, and he called the 12 together and gave them power and authority over all the demons and to heal diseases. And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to perform healing.

And he said to them, take nothing for your journey, neither a staff nor a bag, nor bread, nor money, and do not even have two tunics a piece. Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that city. And as for those who do not receive you, as you go out from that city, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them. Departing, they began going throughout the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere. Now Herod the Tetrarch heard of all that was happening, and he was greatly perplexed because it was said by some that John had risen from the dead, and by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the prophets of old had risen again. And the other gospels tell us that Herod himself even thought for a moment, maybe this is John the Baptist that I beheaded, and he’s come back from the dead, and now he’s mad.

But Herod ends up concluding verse 9. Herod said, I myself had John beheaded, but who is this man about whom I hear such things? And he kept trying to see him. When the apostles returned, they gave an account to him of all that they had done, taking them with him. And he withdrew by himself to a city called Bethsaida. But the crowds were aware of this and followed him and welcoming them.

He began speaking to them about the kingdom of God and curing those who had need of healing. And you may be seated. Luke wants to make it very clear, as do the other gospel writers, that Jesus calls his followers to be on mission for him. That is the purpose of this text, that he took these 12 who had been walking with him and began to send them out. It says in verse 2, he sent them out. He called them to go and represent him throughout Galilee.

This was in preparation for Jesus to move on. Because the stories we’ve been looking at lately have been taking place in Galilee, up in northern Israel. This is sort of Jesus’ home turf. And this is where the people tend to be a little friendlier to Him than they are down south in Judea. Now, that doesn’t mean everybody there is excited about Jesus, but just in general, the crowds are friendlier to Jesus in Galilee. But before too long, he’s going to leave and he’s going to begin to make his way elsewhere.

He’s going to visit some Gentile areas. He’s going to go through Samaria. He’s going to end up going into Judea where the people are still Jewish, but they’re much less friendly. But before he leaves, he wants to make sure that the villages, the people in the far-flung villages get a better idea of who he is so they can be prepared for what he is bringing them as far as the gospel. And these 12 that we’re looking at, these are 12 disciples that he has called and set apart as apostles. At that time, there were a lot of people, we’ve talked about this before, there were a lot of people who were following Jesus around.

And we’ve talked about the difference between following Jesus and following Jesus around. These crowds followed Jesus around because they wanted to see what miracles he was going to perform. They were there for the show. But within that, there were these 12 who had grown closer to Jesus, he had called them into a deeper commitment, and they had become his disciples in the sense that they were committed to him, and he’s been preparing them to be apostles. Now, the 12 disciples were also the 12 apostles, but those words don’t mean the same thing. A disciple is somebody who follows, and an apostle is somebody who is sent out like an ambassador.

So, he’s been preparing them for this, and now they’re finally ready, and so by sending them out, he’s ensuring that all the villages throughout Galilee are able to hear the news about him and his ministry. He’s also preparing at least 11 of these men for what they’re going to do after he has risen from the dead and ascended back to the Father. But this is, Jesus does this all throughout the Gospels. He takes some time in the beginning to prepare them for what’s going to come, but from here on out, he is sending them repeatedly. That becomes their job, is to be sent and to be on mission. When we get to the next chapter, Luke chapter 10, he sends even more disciples.

Now that’s not more apostles, that’s more disciples, but he sends them out to represent him as well. He sends 70 or 72, depending on the text we’re looking at. He sends them out to prepare people for his arrival all throughout Galilee, and we’ll see that in the next chapter. In John 20, 21, on the day of his resurrection, later that Sunday, when they’re all locked in the upper room, and everybody’s there but Judas who’s dead and Thomas who we don’t know where he is but he’s full of questions wherever he is. In that room Jesus tells his disciples that he’s giving them the Holy Spirit and he says he is sending them out just as the Father has sent him. So again we’re told you’re going to be sent you’re going to be given a mission and you’re going to go on that mission.

Then right before he ascends into heaven in Matthew 28 he commissions all of his followers to carry the gospel throughout the entire world. And that’s the mission for us today as his followers, that great commission, that he has called us to be on mission for him, telling people about who he is, telling people about what he has done, telling people about what he can do for them, and speaking with his authority. Not that we say, well, you have to listen to me because I’m better than you, but we have authority because we’re speaking the truth. We take his words and we share what his word is, and his word is the authority. But he’s given us that opportunity to represent him. That calling applies to us today.

So as we look at this and we recognize that obviously these 12 people were called to be on mission for him, we need to recognize that even though their calling was a little bit different, they were in different circumstances, they had a different title than we do. I’m not an apostle, neither are you, in the sense of holding that office. but we are sent, which is connected to that word apostle. We have a different circumstance. We have a different title. We have all these different things, but we serve the same master, and he has called us to be on mission for him.

So as we look at their story, even though the instructions he gives them are for them, we can also learn some things that we apply to the calling that he’s given us as believers under the New Testament to go and make him known. And we can also do this with confidence. If you’re thinking, I’m supposed to go out on a mission, that sounds terrifying, I’m not prepared, he’s got you covered. Some of you are planners, and I won’t ask for shows of hands, but there are two different kinds of people, planners and non-planners, and they usually marry each other. Charla is the planner. We cannot leave the house without days worth of provisions.

I am not that way. But some of you, especially if you’re a planner, you’re thinking, I’m not prepared. I don’t know all the answers. I don’t know this. I don’t know that. Jesus has got you.

He sends us out with everything that we need. If he’s going to send you on a mission, he’s going to supply you with everything that you need. Jesus does not just say, here, go do this and figure it out. You’re on your own. He doesn’t do that to us. He didn’t do that to them.

Verses two through six here are all about what he was going to supply to them. And again, he supplies these things to us. So what are the things that we need as we go out. First of all, we need his message. If our mission is to represent him, we need to know what that entails and what it is we’re supposed to tell people. His message, it says in verse 2, he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to perform healing.

So they were sent out to spread a message, and that’s what they did. Verse 6 tells us they began going throughout the villages, preaching the gospel, and healing everywhere. Now, this is not the gospel in all of its detail that we would be familiar with today, which is not to say that it’s a false gospel. Jesus would not send them out to teach a false gospel either. But the gospel, as we understand it on this side of things, looking back, the gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the offer of salvation that we have through him. That’s the gospel.

What has not happened yet at this point? The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They don’t know that. And even as Jesus has begun to give them hints about it, and sometimes he just flat out says, I’m going to die and then three days later I’ll be back. They still don’t get it because they are all in a panic when he’s crucified.

They’re all in a panic when they start seeing him raised from the dead. And fair enough, we would be the same way. But they didn’t understand all of that, and yet they’re taking this good news to Jesus. They don’t understand yet the death, burial, and resurrection. So this is not all the details of the gospel. But what they’re doing is they’re preaching the coming of the Messiah and his kingdom.

They’re taking what they do know about Jesus, and they’re proclaiming it, that the Messiah has come. That’s kind of the basis of the gospel. Jesus was not just some guy. He was the Messiah. He was God the Son who was sent by the Father to die and to be buried and to rise again. So they took this good news that the Messiah has come.

God’s answer to our problem of sin has come. The King is here, and we are called to repent and believe in him. And again, they’re missing some details that they would have later on, but this is sort of laying the groundwork for those who would hear. The people in the villages of Galilee, this would prepare them for later on when they hear the message that Jesus died and rose again. That’s the proof to them that this is true, that he’s the Messiah and that he’s come. It’s also preparing the disciples because they have this foundation of now they’re used to going out and telling people about who Jesus is and why he’s come.

And so when they get the full picture later on, they just take that and run with it. This is preparing everybody with the message. And these healings that are mentioned over and over, they’re not incidental. They confirm the message and they showed what Jesus was about. So when these apostles came through and they’re preaching about Jesus and they’re healing people, that’s something that would have gotten people’s attention where they would say, this is real because these miracles don’t just happen. This is real.

And like I said, it also showed who Jesus is. It shows when they come on behalf of the king and they’re preaching his message and they’re calling people to respond and to repent, but they’re also healing the sick, it shows that he’s a compassionate king. He’s a king who came with our best interest at heart. And so the Lord sends us out with everything we need. That includes his message.

That includes his authority. Verse 1 says he gave them authority over all the demons. And that word authority is just what it sounds like. It means it’s the right to speak or to govern on somebody else’s behalf. Now, I don’t believe that you or I have any special authority over the demons beyond the name of Jesus and what the Word of God says. If we’re to cast out demons, it’s not because you or I have the power, it’s because Jesus has the power.

But you and I, when we speak what His Word says, we speak with His authority. Hey, this is what God wants. This is what God doesn’t want. Well, who are you to say, oh, I’m nobody, but he said it, I’m just repeating it. Because that’s the world’s answer to the preaching of the gospel. Well, who are you to say, it’s not about me.

I have no authority. I’m nobody. I’m just telling you what the king said. So we have authority to speak what he commanded us. When we step out and speak, it’s not based on our authority. It’s not based on how powerful or compelling we are at sharing the message.

The authority is in what the king said, and he gave us, he gives us his power. These two things are intertwined in verse one. He gave them not only the authority over all demons, but he gave them the power to heal diseases. So what he sent them out to do, they had the power to do. Power and authority sound like the same thing, but they’re not. You can have power and no authority.

I could probably walk into somebody’s house and say, I live here now. This is mine. I have that power, depending on how well-armed they are, right? I have the power that I could walk in and say, this is my house now. Do I have that authority? Absolutely not.

At the same time, I may send one of my kids to tell on my behalf, one of the other kids something to do. They’ve been given the authority to tell that child what to do. Can they physically make them do it? Not without a whole host of other problems, right? Most of the conflict in our house comes from somebody trying to parent somebody else when they’re not a parent. Power and authority are not the same thing.

Authority is the right to do something, power is the ability to do something. And when it comes to representing him, the good news is he’s given us both. And he promises his provision as well. Verse 3 explains that they weren’t supposed to pack extra supplies, which would be terrifying again for some of you who are planners. Even me who is not a planner, there are certain things I don’t leave the house without. And he’s saying, no, no, no, your trust is not in those things you bring with you.

You’re traveling light. You’re not being burdened down by all these things. You go, you do what I’ve told you to do, and the Lord is going to provide for you. He says, I’ll provide. When we get to verse three, he tells them, don’t take anything for your journey. Don’t take a staff.

One of the other gospels says to take a staff. I think what he’s telling them here is don’t collect staffs. He may have said two different things at two different times. Don’t take a bag. Don’t take bread. Don’t shoes.

In other words, don’t think I’ve got to provide everything I need in order to do the Lord’s work, because then you start trusting in yourself and your provision, and you get worried when I don’t have enough, well now I can’t step out and do it. He says, go do what I’ve told you to do, and I’m going to provide what you need in order for you to do it. And he does that. When we’re obedient to him, he provides everything we need. He does not necessarily provide everything we want, And that’s an important distinction. But he does provide everything we need.

And I’m not just talking about financially. He’s talking about the provision for their daily lives. He’ll provide that for us too. If we’re walking in obedience to him, he’ll take care of our actual needs. But this extends also to the things that we need in order to fulfill his work. There may be things God has called you to do as he calls you to be on mission for him that you say, I can’t do that.

Listen, if he’s called you to do it, absolutely you can. I’ve told you before, I am an extreme introvert who grew up with a speech impediment. I am the last person on paper that I would have picked to be a pastor and preaching the word every Sunday. Some of y’all are aware of this. You’ll sit and talk to me in the office. I get tongue-tied just trying to talk to people one-on-one.

And yet God provides. God provides the ability to stand up and share his word. I don’t know how it works, but he takes care of it. Whatever it is God is calling you to do, whatever the mission is he gives you, he’s going to to equip you with everything that you need to fulfill that. And this is so important. Verses four and five, he gives you his guidance.

Sometimes we step out in faith and we say, okay, I’m going to trust your provision. I’m going to do what you told me to do. I’m going to serve you. How? Something comes up, some scenario that we didn’t expect. How do I navigate this?

He gave them some instructions starting out that we’re going to be specific to their situation. But I think this teaches that he gives us his guidance regardless. He told them, you’re going to go and you’re going to find houses where the people are glad to have you there. And Matthew and Mark give more detail on this presentation. But he says, as you travel, you’re going to find people who are excited to have you. You stay with them, and I’m going to provide for you through them.

But you’re going to stay there, and you’re going to do my work for as long as I have you there. And then you’re going to move on. You’re not going to have to figure out night by night, where am I staying, where am I going? you just go find a spot and minister around there. And then when it’s time to move on to the next place, you’ll do the same thing. And what happens if we come to some place where they’re not ready to receive us? Have you ever wondered about that as God sends you out on mission? What happens if somebody is not ready to receive?

What if they don’t want to hear it? What if I’m rejected? Well, he has advice for that too. As for those who do not receive you, go out from that city, shake the dust off of your feet as a testimony against them. He says, if they don’t want to hear, then you go on. If they’re not interested in what I have to say.

He tells us elsewhere it’s not you they rejected it’s me. But he said if they’re not interested in what I’ve sent you to share then you just move on. And the whole shaking the dust off the feet I wondered about that because it just kind of feels like an aggressive move. Oh you don’t want to hear what I have to say? Well you know shake the dust off. Apparently it was a tradition for them that when they traveled outside of Israel they traveled through pagan countries as they prepared to cross back into Israel they were supposed to shake the dust off of their feet in a reminder that this was the promised land God had gave them it had been consecrated to the Lord and when you’re in Israel you’re supposed to save the Lord or serve the Lord we’re not bringing anything pagan in with us and so you would before you exited that pagan country to go into Israel you would shake the dust off of your feet so you didn’t bring anything unclean in with you.

And so when he says, shake the dust off, he’s talking about there were people in Israel who were going to reject the Messiah and they were going to be treated like the pagans. This was a mark of God’s judgment. And so the idea that somebody is going to reject what we have to share, it’s between them and the Lord. It’s not between them and us. It’s not something for us to take personally. And I say that even as somebody who really struggles with the idea of not taking it personally.

And it’s something the Lord has to work on me in, work in me about. But when they were wondering, well, what do we do if people don’t want to hear? He says, you move on and you leave it between them and the Lord. And so he gives us his guidance. How am I supposed to step out and do what he called me to do? He’s going to give you everything you need, his message, his authority, his power, his provision, his guidance.

And then we come to the responses. And I’m just going to summarize quickly here in these responses we’ve already read. They had gone out preaching, again, not the full message of the gospel that they later would preach, but the gospel as far as they understood it at this point, which is the idea that the Messiah, the king, was here. This is good news. God has sent the Messiah. He is in the process of fulfilling his promises to Israel, and we need to be prepared to repent.

We need to be prepared to seek the Lord’s salvation. Their message was about the coming of the king, just as ours is. We just have the benefit of seeing what happened after this. So we can say the king has already come, and the king has already conquered. The king already died and rose again, and he conquered death, and he conquered sin, and he conquered everything that holds us back away from God. And right now, you can have a relationship with God just the way he intended for it to be if you come to him through faith, and you repent, and you trust in him for your salvation.

We have the ability to say this is what happened, but our message to the world is not about how to have a good life. Our message is not how to get what you want. Our message is about a king who has come. And the fact that that message was about the king and is still about the king shows up in their responses. Herod is not at all bothered by the fact that these 12 men have gone out performing miracles. He’s bothered by the stories about the man they’re all talking about.

He’s bothered by who is Jesus. That’s the question that they have to come to terms with. Who is Jesus? in verses 7 through 9. And in verses 10 through 11, these apostles had gone out and done phenomenal miracles in the villages, and the people began to flock, not to see the apostles, but to see Jesus. See, Jesus was the focus of their mission, and Jesus is the focus of our mission. Our job, as we’re sent out on mission for Him, is to make Him known, to help people who are estranged from God, to help people who are alienated from God, know Jesus Christ and the salvation that he’s provided.

That’s our job as a church. That’s what we do when we gather on Sundays, is to lift him up so that if there’s anybody in our midst who doesn’t know him, they’re introduced to him, but also prepare us to go out and live out that mission so people understand who Jesus is. That’s being the church out in Lawton, Oklahoma, that is our job, to make Jesus the focus of our mission, to go and tell people about this King that we have who’s come. In just a moment, when we observe the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is the focus of what we do. Our message is not about how wonderful we are, and there’s some pretty wonderful people sitting in this room, but that’s not our message. I love this church, but our message is not about how wonderful Central Baptist Church is.

Our message is that we serve a king who has conquered. We serve a king who died for us and then conquered death so that we could be forgiven. And if you’ve never met that king before today, it is as simple as understanding that we’ve sinned against God. Sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. And we’re all guilty. And our sin separates us from God. and there’s not a thing in this world that we can do that will erase the sin we’ve committed. No amount of good works erases that.

That sin had to be paid for and it had to be punished. And Jesus Christ, our King, came voluntarily. Nobody took his life from him. He laid it down himself. Our King came and took responsibility for our sins and took all of the punishment in our place and made all the payment on our behalf and then rose again conquering death, conquering sin, conquering hell so that you and I could be forgiven. This morning, all that’s necessary for you to do is to believe that your sin separates you from God, believe that Jesus Christ died to pay for it and rose again to prove it, and ask for that forgiveness, and you’ll have it.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 8:40-56, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 24
• Date: Sunday morning, July 20, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ We spent last week focused on the anniversary of the church, and rightfully so. My wife is big on anniversaries. She likes looking at her Facebook memories and telling me what we did seven years ago today. We ate at such and such place. But over the last month, we’ve looked a lot at photos from OU Children’s Hospital.

It was four years ago this month that we’d been here less than a year and suddenly found out Jojo had to have open heart surgery. And you all were so gracious to walk with us through that time and support us through that time. but it was such an eye-opening experience to spend that month or so. Well, the first time she was in there was about a month, and then about two or three weeks when she had the surgery. It was an eye-opening experience because you, especially in the area where she was, it was a lot of kids that were heart patients, and you got exposed to a lot of people with a lot of different stories. You got exposed to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds.

There were situations like ours where it just came completely out of the blue. We didn’t know until she was born that there was a heart issue. And I remember Charla kind of beating herself up. Is there something I did? Is there something I didn’t do? Is there something I should have done differently?

We became acquainted with kids and families who were in there, and sometimes there had been substance abuse during pregnancy that may have contributed to some of those conditions. We met families who were there from all over the country. Because there are only so many people, I’ve mentioned this to you before, there are only so many people who can do these very detailed cardiac procedures on babies. And one of them happens to be in Oklahoma City. But if you’re in some part of the country where there’s not a doctor, or something happens and your child needs surgery while the doctor’s on vacation, they will fly you. Like if this one man had been on vacation when Jojo needed surgery, we would have ended up in St. Louis or Pittsburgh or who knows where.

But we met people who were there from all over the country where we had the benefit of our parents just lived 10 minutes away. We had this huge support system and places to stay. People up there who were able to eat only because the hospital provided them a tray. And we were blessed to not be in that circumstance. We met people from all different circumstances and in different situations, but we were all there for the same reason that our children were suffering some malformation of the heart that needed to be fixed. And we were there because that was one of the only places in this country where we could go to get it fixed.

And we all sat there hoping that it would be fixed. The day she had her surgery was the longest day of our lives because you have to hand your child off to somebody, and there’s not a thing you can do. It’s completely in somebody else’s hands. And we talk a lot about faith. There’s a lot of faith involved in handing your child over to somebody and saying, I hope this gets fixed. If you’ve ever been in a situation like that, or in a situation in general where you’ve had to trust somebody with such an enormous need, it gives us some glimpse of what the people were dealing with in the passage that we’re going to look at this morning in Luke chapter 8.

We’re going to look at a couple of stories that they get a little confusing sometimes, the way the different gospels treat them, and the fact that it’s two stories entwined in one. But we’re going to look at the circumstances of two different people who were very different, had very different needs, ultimately the same underlying need, and all found exactly what they needed when they came to trust Jesus. And so we’re going to be in Luke chapter 8 this morning, and we’re going to start in verse 40. I’ll give you just a second to 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 the Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 8, it’ll be on the screen for you. But we’re going to read about these two people and the needs they had and how they came to Jesus with that hope that He was the only person that they could come to who could fix these problems.

Luke chapter 8, starting in verse 40, it says, and as Jesus returned, the people welcomed Him, for they had all been waiting for him. This is right after two weeks ago, we studied how he had been on the other side of the sea, casting demons out of a Gentile, and the people had panicked and said, please leave, please leave. So he comes back to his own side of the lake, and the people are delighted to see him because they’re excited about the miracles that he could perform. And there came a man named Jairus, and he was an official of the synagogue, and he fell at Jesus’ feet and began to implore him to come to his house. For he had an only daughter, about 12 years old, and she was dying. But as he went, the crowds were pressing against him.

And a woman who had a hemorrhage for 12 years and could not be healed by anyone, came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. And Jesus said, Who is the one who touched me? And while they were all denying it, Peter said, Master, the people are crowding and pressing you. But Jesus said, Someone did touch me, for I was aware that power had gone out of me. When the woman saw that she had not escaped notice, she came trembling and fell down before him and declared in the presence of all the people the reason why she had touched him and how she had been immediately healed. And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

Go in peace. And while he was still speaking, someone came from the house of the synagogue official saying, Your daughter has died, do not trouble the teacher anymore. But when Jesus heard this, he answered him, do not be afraid any longer, only believe and she will be made well. And when he came to the house, he did not allow anyone to enter with him except Peter and John and James and the girl’s father and mother. Now they were all weeping and lamenting for her, but he said, stop weeping for she has not died, but is asleep. And they began laughing at him, knowing that she had died.

He, however, took her by the hand and called saying, child, arise. And her spirit returned and she got up immediately and he gave orders for something to be given to her to eat. Her parents were amazed, but he instructed them to tell no one what had happened. And you may be seated. A couple of things that I want to go over in this passage that I would have done as we went through verse by verse, but I didn’t want to keep you standing that whole time while we went through them. You’re welcome.

There’s a few things that happened here. First of all, this idea of a hemorrhage, we don’t know exactly what happened to her, but this woman had been bleeding for 12 years. She had been unable to stop it. Not only are there tremendous medical problems that that can cause, but there was also the cultural problem that she was considered ceremonially unclean. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. But she comes up and touches Jesus, and he says, who touched me?

As I pointed out to you before, We believe that Jesus, being fully God, would have known who touched him. Frequently, when Jesus is asking these questions, it’s not because Jesus wants to know, he already knows. It’s because Jesus either wants somebody to admit it so they can have a conversation about it, or it’s for the benefit of the people who are listening, so he can begin to engage in front of the audience. not audience in the sense that Jesus is putting on a performance, but he’s teaching people about who he is and what he can do. And sometimes for them to understand what’s going on, he needs to draw a little bit of information out of the other person, have kind of a public admission of what’s going on here so that then they can talk about it. But it doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t know. Sometimes there’s also this misconception about verse 46, I was aware that power had gone out of This doesn’t mean that Jesus lost any of his power, but it means that his power was used.

He was aware that however that works, I don’t fully understand it. I’m not God. Amen. But however it works, Jesus understood. He could feel it. And let’s be honest, Jesus knew it was going to happen when he headed there that day.

But Jesus was aware that this healing power had gone out from him to heal this woman. And so he calls her to acknowledge what she had done. One other thing that may raise questions, and tonight we can get more into these issues if you come back as we compare also what Matthew and Mark say about this event and look at it piece by piece. But when you start to compare the other Gospels, you see there are people already in the house when Jesus gets back to Jairus’ house. Because just reading through Luke, I read that he wouldn’t let anybody but this small group of apostles and the parents come into the house with him. And then he says, she’s not dead, she’s just asleep, and it says they began to laugh.

And I thought, this is really uncharacteristic for these apostles, and it’s really uncharacteristic for the grieving parents that suddenly we’re going to laugh about, oh, look at the crazy guy who just said our daughter’s not really dead. If anything, they might be a little shocked, but I don’t see them laughing, but there were already mourners, as Matthew and Mark tell us, there were already mourners in the house. Jesus didn’t let the crowd follow him in from outside, but there were already mourners in the house. So these are just a couple of things that we need to be aware of to make, number one, to make the story make sense, but also to demonstrate there’s not a contradiction here in some of these details that people like to pick out. But as we read these two stories, and understand too, when I say stories, I don’t mean like fairy tale stories. I mean stories of things that really happened.

I can tell you a story about something that really happened during my day. But in these two stories, these people come to Jesus with very different circumstances and deeply in need, and we see Jesus just step up and handle each of these like, to him, it’s as easy as breathing. And these stories are here to teach us that Jesus is the Lord over every circumstance of life. It does not matter what circumstance you or I face today. Jesus Christ is Lord of it. Jesus can handle it.

And you may say, oh, great, that means he’s just going to magically pay that bill. Or he’s going to give me this. Again, we’re asking for what we need, not necessarily what we want, as the kids learned about earlier. Jesus being Lord means he has an understanding of our circumstances that transcends our own understanding. And the way he will deal with our circumstances for our good and for his glory may not line up with what we expect or want. But it doesn’t mean that he can’t do it.

I’m sure that Jairus didn’t want to go through the ordeal of his daughter dying before they got there. I’m sure the woman didn’t want everybody to know that she had come. I’m convinced she didn’t want everybody to know that she had come up and touched Jesus’ garment. And yet he worked through both of those circumstances. He’s Lord over every circumstance in life. It just doesn’t mean that his lordship is going to take care of those circumstances in exactly the way we want them to.

But there were two people, and the two sets of circumstances, they were all very different. Some commentators will suggest that Jairus was rich. That’s probably accurate, being one of the rulers of the synagogue, and they’ll suggest that the bleeding woman was poor. That’s probably accurate as well. We don’t know if she started out poor, but one of the other gospels tells us she spent her entire livelihood on doctors who had not been able to do anything for her. And I read about some of the things they might have prescribed based on the medical knowledge of that day, and there’s no way any of it would have helped.

So when they say she was poor, we don’t know if she started out poor or not, but she was poor now. So these two were in very different circumstances. He was the ruler of the synagogue, as verse 41 said, he was the one in charge. He was the one who led worship and arranged things, and he was considered an elder among the people, somebody who was highly respected. But her issue of blood that’s described there in verse 43, if we go back to Leviticus chapter 15, we see that somebody with a medical issue like that was considered ceremonially unclean, which to us doesn’t mean a whole lot, but imagine you had something wrong with you physically that people also looked at and said, oh, you must have done something wrong to end up in that circumstance, and now you’re not fit to come to worship. You cannot be in the Lord’s house.

Imagine the shame that would be involved in something like that. And people would look at ceremonial uncleanness, and sometimes there was a sin component involved in that. Sometimes you just go through the rhythms of life and end up ceremonially unclean. I’m having real trouble saying the word ceremonially today. But you would end up ceremonially unclean, even without any kind of conscious sin on your part. But that idea of uncleanness there in the Old Testament is there to showcase the holiness of God and to remind us of the fact that we fall short.

In her case, this was not something morally that she had done wrong. It was something that happened to her, and yet she still would have been kept at arm’s length from the people, not able to come to worship, not able to participate fully in the life of God’s covenant people. And so she was kept estranged. In that regard, they could not have been more different. You had the ruler of the synagogue and you had an outcast from the synagogue. You had Jairus.

That’s how I heard it growing up. I think it’s Jairus. Sometimes the oaky just comes out. But Jairus’ daughter had presumably 12 years of health. We don’t have any description that there had been anything wrong with her up to this time. And after 12 years, she’s suddenly on death’s door.

After 12 years of life, this woman had been walking around for 12 years with illness. I don’t know what the significance of that is, but both of them, the number 12, the 12-year thing, features prominently in their story. She had 12 years of persistent sickness, different circumstances. So for one, this seems to have been a sudden onset thing, something that nobody expected. And for the woman, this was just the way her life had been for years and years. Dairus’ family was surrounded by those who cared.

You see in verses 51 and 52, there are people in the house. The other gospels tell us this. There are mourners there. There’s a band there. I don’t fully understand that culturally. But there were people around them, and this woman slipped almost unnoticed through the crowd.

Jesus is the only one aware that she’s even there. As a matter of fact, and I meant to bring this up too as I was going through some of the points at the beginning, the disciples seem to think it’s a crazy question. I wouldn’t say Peter is making fun of Jesus, but he is kind of making light of the question a little bit. When Jesus said, who touched me? And everybody’s been there waiting on the shore for Jesus to get back. Peter’s answer is kind of, Lord, who’s not touching you?

Everyone is touching you. The crowds are pressed in. I don’t know how he did this for three years, or for the better part of three years. We go to, well, we don’t go to sports games or concerts for that reason. But if you go to something like that, or we go to the convention and there’s 20,000 people and they’re pressed in, I need to lay down afterwards. I can’t deal with that kind of crowd.

And Jesus just had it constantly on him. And the disciples were saying, Lord, everybody’s touching you. Jesus said, no, no, there was something different about this one. Jesus, because of the massive nature of the crowd, Jesus is the only one who notices this woman. Everybody’s there for Jairus. Nobody notices her.

Jairus approached Jesus openly in verse 41 while the woman tried to come by stealth. She thought her best shot was to get in and get out and nobody noticed her. There’s a certain amount of shame there. There’s a certain amount of maybe fear that Jesus would rebuke her. Jairus faced a sudden urgent calamity with his daughter while this woman had been struggling for years. He was comfortable making a request of Jesus while this woman could only hope to touch the hem of his garment.

These were very different people, very different circumstances. But despite their differences, they had the same need. They needed hope and they needed healing. And fortunately for them that day, Jesus was able to provide both. He was able to provide both regardless of the circumstances they came from. He was able to provide both regardless of the circumstances they faced at the moment.

Just because one had a 12-year ailment that nobody else had been able to handle didn’t make it harder for Jesus to handle. Just because one came with this sudden onset that nobody could have seen coming, it didn’t mean that Jesus didn’t see it coming. Jesus was able to handle their deepest problems and meet their deepest needs. Again, that doesn’t mean that God’s provision always comes in the form we want it to. Sometimes we will pray and pray and pray for years and years and years for God to resolve a situation, and then when He does, we say, no, Lord, not like that. But then usually on the other side of that, maybe years down the road, we can look back and see the wisdom in His approach.

But whether it comes in a form that we like, whether it comes in a form that we would have willed for ourselves, whether it does that or not, whether it comes in a situation that, in a means of provision that we would not have picked out. Jesus Christ is still the Lord of every circumstance in our lives. Whatever you’re facing today, he can handle. Whatever you’re about to face, he can handle. And when we get to the way he handles these circumstances, this passage teaches us that our hope is not in the how, but in the who. Now, I realized after I wrote that, there’s a band from, I think, the 60s called The Who.

That’s obviously not what I’m talking about. Predates me by a couple decades. Our hope is not in the how, but in the who. Our hope is in Jesus. He is the who. The circumstances surrounding these two people were not the only ways the two encounters differed.

How the healings played out was also different. The woman experienced Jesus’s power immediately. I mean, the Gospels go to great lengths to point out it happened immediately. They seem to be shocked by how quickly she was healed. Twelve years of bleeding, and it’s just gone like that. They all say immediately, immediately.

I think Mark says it a couple times if memory serves. She was healed immediately. And she was healed when she merely came and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. Now, was there something magical about the hem of the garment? No. Jesus tells her, and we’ll talk about it in just a moment, what it was. Jesus tells her what it was. But she was healed immediately.

She was healed when she reached out and touched the hem of his garment. But for Jairus, the circumstances continued to grow worse before they got better. Have you ever been in a situation where you prayed for God to deal with it, and you felt like it only got worse before it got better? Oh my goodness, I could write a book about my life called, and then things got worse. Eventually got better, but that seems to happen sometimes. We pray and pray.

See, the goal there is don’t give up when things start to get worse, because you think, oh, they’re just going to stay worse. You keep praying, you keep trusting, You keep walking by faith because sometimes things do get worse, like in Jairus’ case. They do get worse before they get better, but it doesn’t mean he’s not going to handle it in the end. His daughter, when you say, what do you mean they got worse? His daughter died before Jesus got there. As a matter of fact, some commentators have speculated that maybe the reason why he didn’t make it in time to save her before she died was the fact that he spent so much time investigating what was going on with the woman who was bleeding.

And maybe that was frustrating to Jairus. We know that others said, Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. But for Jesus, raising her from the dead was no more complicated than waking her up from sleep. That’s why he says in verse 52, she’s not dead, she’s only sleeping. Jesus is not lying, but we’re also not dealing with a case where she’s actually just asleep. She’s actually dead, but Jesus is making a point.

He’s using language that would shock them and get their attention to make the point that for him, This is no more difficult than just waking her up. And so he says, she’s not dead, she’s only sleeping, because to God she is. And so Jesus came to Jairus’ house, and he privately commanded the girl to get up. Verse 51 tells us he didn’t let the crowd in. This was kind of a private deal.

And in verse 54, he commanded her to get up. So the woman got an immediate miracle. She got it by touching the hem of his garment. It took place in public, despite her trying to keep it private. For Jairus, it was not immediate. It was probably frustratingly slow.

It happened because Jesus came to the house and it happened privately. Everything about these miracles was different. The only common denominator in these two stories is Jesus. It’s not the how, it’s the who. Jesus frequently, we see this throughout the Gospels, He frequently varied the means of His miracles, how He accomplished the miracles, just like the Father did in the Old Testament. He varied the ways He worked.

And there’s a reason why he did this. As we study through the Gospels, we see some of these miracles, and the stories are a little weird, and we say, why would he do that? I think part of it is that he changed it up so that we did not begin to trust in the how, but kept our trust in the who. Now, I am not a Calvinist. I’m not the son of a Calvinist.

But one thing I agree with John Calvin on is when he said the human heart is a factory of idols. We will come up with things to worship and trust other than God. Our hearts would start to trust the garment. If he kept healing people by touching his garment, we would start to trust the garment. Maybe not us specifically in this room, although we’re susceptible to it as anybody else. But as humanity, we would start to trust the garment.

If he always did it by saying, get up and walk, we would start to trust those particular words. Those are the magic words that you say, and that’s how God works. We would trust the water pots. Like in John 2, where at Cana, he said, go fill up a bunch of pots with water, and he turned them into wine. We would say, that’s how he works. He uses those water pots.

Mark chapter 8, when he spits in the dirt and makes mud and puts it on the blind man’s eyes, we would start to trust the spit if he did that all the time. We would trust the loaves and fishes. The reason Jesus changes the way he does some of his miracles, there may be other reasons, but I’m convinced one of the big ones is that we need to be taught not to trust the how. Our faith doesn’t belong in a method. It doesn’t belong in a means. It doesn’t belong in a timeline.

Our faith belongs in Jesus alone. And I think that’s what we can learn from the comparison of these two stories. And when we trust Him fully. So, before I move on from that, we can start to do that in our own lives. If every time I have a need, God provides financially for me to be able to pay the way out of that situation, what am I going to start to trust? It’s not a trick question.

I’m going to start to trust that bank account. If every time God sends some other person, say every time I’m in a jam, God sends Brother Jeff to help me out of it every single time, who am I going to start to trust? Jeff. That’s why God’s provision comes from different places at different times, so that we learn to trust Jesus alone. And when we trust him fully, something beautiful happens here. Just like in this story, Jesus responds to genuine faith with redeeming grace.

Both of these people came to Jesus, Jairus and the woman, in verses 41 and 44. For them to approach Jesus the way they did shows some level of confidence that he could address their situation. Now, maybe it was the confidence of saying we’ve tried everything else, he’s our last hope, but they came to him at least expecting that maybe there’s something he could do. There was at least that level of confidence in Jesus. Both of them fell before him at his feet. This is a worshipful thing.

When Jairus in verse 41 and the woman in verse 47 fell down at his feet, this acknowledges his power. Have you gone to see the doctor looking for help and fell at his feet? No. Because we understand, with all his or her medical training, still a person like you and I are. But to come to Jesus and fall at his feet acknowledges that he is someone or something more powerful than we are. It’s an acknowledgment of his power. And both believed, Jairus and the woman. Folks, this is faith, the willingness to come to him, believing that he can do something, acknowledging who he is, at least as far as you understand it, acknowledging who he is, believing that what he says, he means, and what he means he’ll do.

That’s faith. So the only other common denominator between these two stories, other than Jesus, is their faith. And when they exhibit this genuine faith, Jesus is gracious to them. Both of them received healing. Jairus’s daughter was raised from the dead, and the woman was healed from her 12-year ordeal.

But it’s not just the physical healing involved here. Jairus’s daughter received new life. She’s one of the few people ever raised from the dead. She’s one of the signs that jesus gave validating his ministry that he’s able to raise people from the dead And this woman was told that her faith Saved her some translations Maybe maybe one you’re looking at this morning say made you whole or healed you and that is true But understand that the greek word there sozo that’s used is the same word for salvation I don’t think it’s by mistake that that word was used something spiritual happened in these people because of their faith in Jesus. And he does the same thing for us. No matter what circumstances we’ve come from, no matter what circumstances we face, Jesus and Jesus alone is able to meet our deepest needs, no matter what they are.

And before you think, but you don’t know what I’ve come from, you don’t know what I’ve done, I don’t, but he does. And you tell me the sin that’s so big that Jesus couldn’t pay for it on the cross. Tell me how your sin is bigger than his ability to atone. You won’t be able to name one. Jesus and Jesus alone is able to meet your deepest needs, and He does it when you respond to Him in faith. When there’s that genuine faith, that falling, even metaphorically, falling on your knees at His feet, acknowledging who He is, and believing that He can do for you what He says He’ll do.

That’s faith, and Jesus responds to that in grace. And while we’re talking about physical healing here, this is a picture of the gospel. This is what He he comes to people who have that same need sinners some down and out some up and out and he comes as the only one who can who can make things right and he did that for us at the cross when he shed his blood he took responsibility for my sins and for yours and he was nailed to that cross where he shed his blood and he died as the only all-sufficient payment for all of our sin to pay for it in full so our slate could be wiped clean and not only that but that the father would look at us and see his righteousness instead of our unrighteousness. He came to pay for our sins and cover us in his righteousness. And then three days after he died, he rose again from the dead. And now to those who believe, if you’ll respond to him in faith, if you’ll believe that he is able to do that, and you’ll ask for that forgiveness, you’ll have it.

And that’s where the new life starts. That’s where we’re made whole. That’s what salvation is. That’s what the gospel is. Jesus extending his grace to sinners, not on the basis of anything we can do or earn, but solely because of faith, and faith specifically in what He has done.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 8:26-39, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 23
• Date: Sunday morning, July 6, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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⟦Transcript⟧ Well, if you’re of a certain age, meaning those of us who were born, as my kids say, or who were alive, as my kids say, back in the 1900s, if you were alive back in the 1900s, you probably remember who Chuck Norris is. Any of you remember Chuck Norris? Okay, for those of you who weren’t old enough to remember Chuck Norris, he was kind of the action hero of the 90s. I’m not sure exactly what he was famous for other than roundhouse kicking people in the face, but he had a whole TV show about it. My mother still watches it.

But a few years ago, I don’t think it’s a big deal anymore, but a few years ago, it was real big on the internet, this group of jokes called Chuck Norris facts. There were these made up, exaggerated facts about how tough Chuck Norris was, and I always loved them. They always made me laugh. And this week, I was looking at some that I could share this morning, and keep in mind, they’re supposed to be exaggerated about his abilities, but one of the Chuck Norris facts from the internet was Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked a coal mine and turned it into a diamond mine. Chuck, I like this one. We have at least three science teachers in the room.

Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table because he only recognizes the element of surprise. Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird. I like that one. When Chuck Norris has surgery, the anesthesia is applied to the doctors. There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live, okay? And when the boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

And I mean, there are hundreds, if not thousands of them online. And they make me laugh. They always have because they’re, you know, we know they’re exaggerated. nobody is that tough, nobody is that capable, nobody is that fierce a warrior, that scary to their adversaries. But it also speaks to something in us that we look for heroes like that. We want to believe there is somebody that can just roundhouse kick evil in the face and fix everything. If you watch the show, you want to believe there’s somebody who can fix everything in 60 minutes minus commercial breaks. The reality is, and Chuck Norris, I assume, would tell you this himself because I read somewhere he is a believer in Christ.

He is not the all-powerful being that the Chuck Norris facts have presented him to be, but there is somebody who is. And we’re going to look this morning at, Chuck Norris may not make the boogeyman tremble, but we’re going to look at a story about Jesus making Satan tremble this morning, and how even Satan, even all the powers of darkness on the face of this planet still have to bow in acknowledgement to Jesus Christ. If you’re new with us this morning, we’ve been studying through the book of Luke for quite some time, going piece by piece through the book of Luke, and we’re in the latter part of chapter 8 this morning. Not the very end of chapter 8, but the latter part, and we’re going to start in verse 26. So if you haven’t already, please turn with me to Luke chapter 8, verse 26.

And we’re going to read about Jesus and what He did to bring evil into submission. And so we’re going to read together from verses 26 through 39. Once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read from God’s Word. It says, Then they sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite of Galilee. And when a man came out onto the land, he was met by a man from the city who was possessed with demons and who had not put on any clothing for a long time and was not living in a house but in the tombs. Seeing Jesus, he cried out and fell before him and said in a loud voice, What business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

I beg you, do not torment me. For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. for it had seized him many times and he was bound with chains and shackles and kept under guard and yet he would break his bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert and Jesus asked him what is your name and he said legion for many demons had entered him they were imploring him not to command them to go away into the abyss now there was a herd of many swine feeding there on the mountain and the demons implored him to permit them to enter the swine and he gave them permission And the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they ran away and reported it in the city and out in the country. The people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man with whom the demons had gone out, or from whom the demons had gone out, sitting down at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they became frightened. Those who had seen it reported to them how the man who was demon-possessed had been made well.

And all the people of the country of the Gerasenes and the surrounding district asked him to leave them, for they were gripped with great fear. And he got into a boat and returned. But the man from whom the demons had gone out was begging him that he might accompany him. But he sent him away, saying, Return to your house and describe what great things God has done for you. So he went away proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him. And you may be seated.

There’s something that I would not have picked up on necessarily if it were not for our conversation last Sunday night about Jesus calming the storm. And we were talking about why the men that, you know, we studied that last Sunday morning, and last Sunday night we were talking about why the disciples were so surprised. If they went and asked Jesus to calm the storm or to do something about the predicament they were in, why were they so surprised? And Jonathan made a great observation that I wish I had made because it was that insightful. But he was pointing out how in previous chapters we’ve looked at there’s this thought among the people that Jesus is a prophet. And he’s doing all these things that prophets do.

Because my question was, if they had seen him heal people, and they had seen him raise somebody from the dead, why would they be so shocked? If he can raise the dead, why would they be shocked that he could calm a storm? And what he pointed out was, up to this point, they think he’s a prophet, because the prophets have healed people. The prophets have spoken with authority. The prophets, some of them have even raised the dead, Elijah and Elisha both. But when he stepped out and calmed that storm, He’s doing something no prophet had ever done.

And I thought, that’s why they’re afraid. And that’s why that section of the text ends with the question, what kind of man is this? Who is this really? Because they realize they’re following somebody who’s been sent by God, but up to this point, a lot of them probably think still that he’s just a prophet. Well, now they’re seeing him do things that no prophet has ever done. And like I said, they ended that text with, who really is this?

They get in the boat and they go back across. I’m sorry, they continue the journey across the lake and they see who this really is. When all the powers, all the forces of darkness have to yield to his will and to his word. And I think the disciples are getting, just as we go on, a clearer and clearer glimpse. This man is not just a teacher. He’s not even just a prophet. it. He’s the Son of God.

The demons recognized that. The demons had a deeper understanding of who Jesus was than his disciples did at this point. But we start out by looking at the text and what was going on with this man, and we can’t help but notice that Satan is far more powerful than we are. You look at this man who was completely under Satan’s power, and he’s helpless. I don’t think, even if he was messing around with spirits and things like that, I don’t think this man wanted to be the guy that lived out in the tombs and ran around the desert and cut himself with stones. I don’t think anybody signs up to be that guy.

I think I’ve told you before that I love the Travel Channel and I used to fall asleep watching the Travel Channel and they’d go from, hey, we’re eating weird things in Biloxi to you wake up and they’re in some haunted house. Okay, I don’t want to watch that. I don’t want, but I woke up one night and these guys were going through what they considered a haunted place, and they’re almost daring the spirits to come out and show themselves. And I watched it for just a few minutes, and by the end of it, these guys are terrified, and not just TV terrified. I think they were legitimately terrified, had scratches on them. Like, you don’t mess with Satan.

You don’t mess with darkness and think, well, I’m just going to go a little bit. I can control it. I can let it into my life this much. Satan gets in. He takes everything. And this man, we don’t know his story.

We don’t know exactly how he started. But at some point, the door was opened for Satan, and he took complete control of the man’s life. And we’ll do that with sin. We’ll say, well, I can take just a little bit of it. I know this is not what God wants me to do, but I can take just a little bit of it and let it into my life and accommodate it a little bit. And next thing we know, the power of it grows and grows and grows, and suddenly we’re someplace we didn’t intend to be.

This man at some point, the door in his life had become open for this, and it devastated his life. We see that from the description. Verse 27 tells us that he was possessed by demons. That word there, possessed, it means to be owned and controlled by. They weren’t just living inside him. They were in the driver’s seat, these demonic spirits.

It says in verse 27, he had not put on any clothing for a long time. Okay, this would have been a shameful way to live in that era. That’s why it’s noted here, that he had not put on any clothes. He was living like an animal. Verse 27 also tells us he was not living in a home, but in the tombs.

And I’ve always pictured that, you know, he was out roaming around cemeteries, like we think of. That’s not, then I forget, that’s not how they buried the dead in that place and in that time. They had tombs that were hewn out of the rock, basically caves. And so he’s wandering around the caves, spending all of his time with the bodies of the dead, and it was a, I think it was a picture of his spiritual condition. This man was spiritually dead, as much as anybody in those tombs was physically dead. And it says in verse 29, when we go ahead a little bit, that the spirits, this force that lived inside of him, it had seized him many times.

These demons caused a violent physical reaction within this man whenever they asserted control. It wasn’t just a switch was flipped and suddenly the demons are in control. It was a violent seizure that he experienced. And he was bound with chains and shackles and kept under guard, and yet he would break his bonds. This doesn’t mean he was free. They recognized, I think one of the other gospels tells us that he was so violent, nobody could pass down the road near him.

And so they would try to restrain him with shackles, with bonds. He was able to break free of them. And we might look at that and say, well, yeah, he was free. No, he was still enslaved to this force that enabled him to break the bonds, but also drove him out into the desert. When it says desert, it means a wilderness place, a place where there’s no food, there’s no water, there’s no habitation, there’s no community. He’s just on his own with these dark forces where nobody would try to interfere.

And this is what Satan does. Jesus talks about the enemy coming to steal and kill and to destroy. And you and I are powerless to stop him. Now, if you’re a Christian, that probably sounds strange to you, if you’re already a believer in Christ, because we know that greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world. But I’m not talking about He who is in us. I’m not talking about Jesus at the moment.

I’m saying if it’s just you or just me versus Satan, there is no question about who is more powerful. And people all the times, all the time, dabble in darkness and think, well, I can dabble, I can control it, I can set and I’ll go no further. But Satan’s track record is undefeated. If given an inch, he will take a mile. He’s far more powerful than we are. And this is what he does.

He did not come to make our lives fun. He did not come to set us free from God’s rules. He came to enslave and to destroy us. But the good news is that Jesus is far more powerful than Satan. When we get around verse 28, we start to see Jesus’ presence, and it’s enough that these demons take notice, and they come to meet him when he gets off the boat, or they lead the man to come and meet him when he gets off the boat. And in Jesus’ presence, these demons could only fall in fear and submission.

They had to recognize his authority. Verse 28, seeing Jesus, he cried out. Now, it’s the man’s voice at this point, but he’s being controlled by something else, and fell before him and said in a loud voice, what business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? This phrase that’s translated, what business do we have with each other? If we translated it literally word for word from the Greek, it means what of you and me, which doesn’t mean a whole lot to us, but it was an expression that they would use, meaning what kind of business do we have together. When it’s asked in a context like this, it could be seen as a request.

Please leave me alone. Please go away. It’s not time for this. You start comparing the other gospels and their accounts. The demons are saying, we know that there’s a time you’re coming to torment us, but I didn’t think it was supposed to be yet. And so there is this strong reaction from these evil forces that Jesus shows up and they began to panic.

Please leave us alone. What business do we have with each other. This is not, I think sometimes the world imagines it’s God versus Satan, and they’re kind of equally matched, and who’s going to win? We don’t know. It’s nothing like that. Jesus shows up, and all the demons of hell recoil in panic, and they had to recognize his authority.

They called him the Son of God. They recognized him with an authority that even his disciples didn’t fully comprehend yet. So he shows up, and they were powerless to resist him. You know, don’t, please don’t send us out into the abyss. Please do not torment us. There’s this begging.

And Jesus tells them to come out, and there’s no argument that they have to come out, because he said it. So they don’t resist him. They don’t try to disobey him. They can’t. The best they can do at this point is try to negotiate their exit, because he’s already said, come out of the man. They had no choice, So they’re going to try to negotiate their exit.

They asked in verses 28 and 29 to be allowed to go into. . . I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. They asked in verses 32 and 33 to be allowed to go into the pigs. We know we have to come out because you said so. But don’t send us into the abyss.

That means don’t send us yet into the lake of fire where we know we’re going anyway. Please send us into the pigs. There’s a few things that go on here. Jesus commands them to identify themselves, not for his benefit, but for the listeners. Before he just tells these demons or this voice coming out of the man, get out of him and nobody knows what’s going on. He asks, who are you?

And they have to tell him, we are legion. That means there were thousands of them in there. They have to identify themselves to Jesus because they’re under his sovereignty. They knew at any moment he could condemn them to the lake of fire, and yet he granted their request to go into the herd of pigs. This is a really confusing thing, because if you’re like me, you look at this and think, Jesus just grants requests for demons, but he’s going to do them a favor? That doesn’t fit any box I have in my mind for how Jesus works.

Why did he grant their request? I think it was a sign to everybody. It wasn’t a favor to the demons. Jesus knew exactly what was going to happen. And if Jesus just said to the man, or said to the demons within the man, get out of him, go into the lake of fire, there’s probably a violent reaction with the man physically as the demons come out, and that’s the only sign they have. But when everyone is standing around watching and Jesus says, yeah, go into the pigs, and the man begins to convulse as this comes out of him.

And then suddenly what Jesus just said to happen, go into the pigs, they go into the pigs and the pigs react violently and they stampede down the side of the mountain, down the side of the cliff into the Sea of Galilee to drown themselves. That’s a sign that is unmistakable to everybody around there. That’s why the herdsmen were so terrified. Jesus granted their request as a sign to those who were watching that he really is dealing with demonic forces. It was showing that the man really was possessed and Jesus really did order them out. When you watch that, when you’re one of those people standing around watching that, you can’t argue with either of those facts now because everything you’ve just seen lines up with Jesus and this display of power.

Jesus showed up that day and he showed himself to be far more powerful than Satan. Satan had complete control of this man’s life. This man was completely powerless. And yet, as much as Satan’s power overshadowed the man, Jesus’ power overshadowed Satan. And because Jesus is more powerful than Satan, Jesus can overcome anything that holds us captive. Just like this man by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus can overcome anything that holds us captive.

All we have to do to see his power is look at the results for this man. Look at what happened in his life. We see this in verses 34 and 35. It says, they saw what had happened. They ran away. They reported it in the city and out in the country.

The people who went out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man whom the demons had gone out, sitting down at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they became frightened. I think sometimes the Holy Spirit was intentionally funny in the way he inspired the writers to write things down. I don’t know if this was one of those times that’s intentionally funny, but it makes me chuckle a little bit. They’ve seen this man breaking free of shackles. They’ve seen him running around scaring people. They can’t even walk down the roads because they might be attacked by this guy.

He lives among the dead. He cuts himself. He’s running around naked. Everything about this man is terrifying, but I guess they have gotten so used to living in a place of darkness that that’s just normal to them, and here’s what’s funny to me. They walk in and see him sitting there clothed and in his right mind, acting civilized, and that’s what terrifies them. They’ve been so enveloped by the darkness that things have become normal to them that should never have become normal.

I really think it has more to do, though, with kind of like the disciples in the storm. What kind of person has that kind of power to create that kind of change in that man? Well, somebody who can set us free from anything that holds us captive. This transformation was so noteworthy that the people who saw it ran to go tell everybody, and people came pouring out of the town to see this. They flocked to see this. They saw that he was sitting there.

He was sitting calmly. He was sitting at the feet of Jesus. What does that mean? What was he doing? You scared to answer? It’s not a trick question.

Learning. He’s sitting there now being taught by Jesus. You would sit under the teaching of a teacher. They would be your master and you would sit at their feet. This man is under new management, sitting at the feet of Jesus. He was clothed and he was in his right mind. and this was a remarkable transformation that took place only because Jesus had set the man free.

And folks, that’s what he does for us. He sets us free from the bonds of sin. I visited Bonnie’s Sunday school class this morning. Don’t worry, like you said, what happens in there stays in there. But the statement was made that at some point everybody says when presented with the gospel or just about everybody says or thinks, but you don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know what sin there is in my life.

You don’t know what there is that holds me captive. and that’s true we we do think that a lot no you don’t know tell me what in your life that holds you captive is stronger than what captivated this man if jesus can set this man free he can set any of us free and when we trust him as our savior he he breaks those bonds of sin that hold us captive it doesn’t mean we never sin again but it means we’ve been set free from the eternal consequences of that sin there may be still consequences here on earth but it sets us free from the eternal consequence. We’re no longer under the judgment and condemnation of God for our sin because Jesus has set us free from that. He’s also set us free from the power of that sin where before we just sinned because that’s who we are. We’re sinners. It’s in our job description.

That’s all we know to do. He has broken that and he’s given us his spirit to come and dwell within us and change us and shape us and guide us so now that we have another option. And there are still times that we sin. There are still times we absolutely mess up and blow it, but we can come back to him at any time, and we can have that forgiveness, we can have that restoration, and we can ask him to help us deal with that sin. And he will, over time, continue to break those shackles until they can no longer hold us. He sets us free from anything that holds us captive.

And these people were so used to seeing the man under demonic power that seeing him any other way terrified them. And it terrified them because they couldn’t help but think of the power of Jesus. I’m not saying our testimony should terrify people. It’d be a little strange if it did. But the change that Jesus makes in us as believers ought to cause people to take notice. Even though we’ve not become perfect on this side of heaven, who we are in Christ ought to look vastly different from who we were before Christ.

Or as we discussed this morning, those who trusted Christ early as kids, maybe you didn’t do that much that could be considered wrong in the world’s eyes. Who you are in Christ ought to look incredibly different from who you would have been apart from Christ. Because when he shows up, when we submit to him as our master, the transformation is remarkable. And if you’re worried about anything in your past or anything in your present that currently holds you back from Jesus, you make a list of what you think that’s so powerful Jesus can’t deal with it. Make that list and then cross off every item because Jesus is powerful enough to deal with it.

And we see here in the last verses of this passage that Jesus’ authority, the authority, the power that he demonstrates throughout this passage, it confronts us and it calls for a response. When we encounter the power and the authority of Jesus, it can be shocking. I mean, they were shocked when they saw this man ordered demons out of a man and completely transformed his life. When they saw that, they were shocked. Jesus demands our attention, and some of us have testimonies. Maybe they’re not as dramatic as the Damascus Road experience that Paul experienced, but some of us have testimonies where we can point out ways that God got our attention, that God got our attention in pretty drastic ways, that God has shown up and shown His power to us in drastic ways so that we would recognize what He was calling us to do.

When His power and His authority show up, it demands our attention, it calls for a response. And we see the two responses that we have available to us here in this passage. There are the townspeople who saw his authority and they recoiled in fear. They said, we want nothing to do with this. They’re telling him in verse 37, get back on the boat. We want you gone.

You scare us. We’re scared of what you might do next. And that’s not an unreasonable fear. We may be afraid of what the Lord might do in us or with us next if we say yes to him. Yet we have to get over that fear and trust him. But they were scared to death.

They were coiled in fear. That’s one thing we can do. We can look at his power and his authority in our lives and say, no, I don’t want any part of that. Be like the townspeople who came out and saw and said, we want nothing to do with that. Get back on the boat, please. Or we look at the life of the man who had just been demon possessed in verses 38 and 39.

The man from whom the demons had gone out was begging him that he might accompany him. This man who only moments before had been under the power of Satan now is begging Jesus, I want to come with you. He saw what Jesus had done in his life and he wanted nothing more than to go and continue to walk with him. He was begging him, but he sent him away. Jesus sent the man away. This was not a cold or a harsh response.

Jesus sending him away, he said, return to your house and describe what great things God has done for you. One of the other gospels also adds how he has had mercy on you. So he went away proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him. So this man wanted to come with Jesus. That’s part of his response was to embrace Jesus. But embracing Jesus didn’t look exactly like he expected, exactly like he wanted.

He wanted to come with him. Jesus said, I have a job for you to do. And even though it wasn’t what the man wanted, the man was still metaphorically at the feet of the master saying, I’m going to do what you’ve called me to do. And when Jesus said, I want you to go and be a witness of what I’ve done and how my power has worked in your life, the man went and did it. See, when we’re presented with Jesus’ authority, and I tell you what, every time we open the pages of this book, we are confronted with the authority of Jesus in our lives.

Every time we are confronted with that authority, we have a choice to make, whether we recoil from what he’s called us to do or whether we embrace it and submit to Him as Lord. We don’t always think of it in those terms, but I hope next time God calls you to do something, God tells you in His Word to do something, and you’re faced with the choice, do I do this or do I not? Think about the two responses of these people, and who actually walked away knowing Jesus, and who actually walked away obedient to Him.

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Message Info:

• Text: Luke 8:22-25, NASB
• Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 22
• Date: Sunday morning, June 29, 2025
• Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
• Audio File: Open/Download

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Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ How would you feel if I told you you were going to have to take a big test today? You might have some questions about what kind of test, right? Did any of you like tests in school? That’s because you’re normal. Okay, most of us don’t like tests.

I didn’t mind them so much, but I didn’t celebrate. Whoopi, there’s a test today. In school, there was that one kid, that one overachiever that was excited about tests, and I don’t know why, but that wasn’t me or most of the people I know or I guess anybody in this room. Tests are helpful, though, because they tell us what we know, what we don’t know, what we’re qualified for. They tell us where maybe some shortcomings or some deficiencies are that we need to work on. I will tell you the hardest test I ever took in my entire life was not my Greek final in seminary.

It was not the ACT. It was not the SAT. It was not the state insurance exam. The hardest, I shouldn’t even say test I took because it was so hard I ended up not taking it. But the hardest test I ever encountered in my life was the test to be a school bus driver. Christy says yes.

Years ago, I was helping with a church that was starting. We had moved to this community. We were looking for ways to get involved in the community. And somebody said, you want to get involved with the school district. I said, well, that sounds like a good idea. I didn’t want to go for a teaching job at that time because I would have been too tied down as far as responsibilities with the church.

But I thought if I drove a school bus, I’d work early in the morning, I’d work in the afternoon, I’d have time in between. And so I went down and talked to them about a job driving the school bus. And they were excited because they always need school bus drivers and did so in that town. Here’s the problem. I don’t know how much of what I was given was the test for the CDL and how much was just the test for the district. But they handed me this big stack of stuff that I had to learn and had to memorize.

And I got through chapter one. I got through chapter two. I got through chapter three. Okay, it’s making some sense. I got into chapter four and they wanted me to understand all of the every aspect of the suspension and braking systems for all of their fleet of buses. Is that CDL or is that just district?

Oh my goodness. Okay, I’m never trying that again. Because you have to have a CDL to drive a vehicle more than 15. The church better not ever drive a bus or buy a bus. I won’t be able to drive it. But they wanted you to know all these different springs that the bus might sit on and all the, and I just looked at it and it’s like I’m trying to read hieroglyphics and they’ve got pictures and I don’t know if I’m holding the book the right way.

And I finally just said, okay, God, you got to show me something else. I am not smart enough to be a school bus driver. I failed that test before I even took it. But you know what? I learned something. I learned that was not what God was calling me to do at that point, was be a school bus driver.

And better, I found out early on. So we all face tests in life, and tests, as much as they’re unpleasant, as much as they’re things we don’t like, they have a great way of clarifying where we are and maybe what some of the things are that are holding us back from being where we want to be. This morning, we’re going to look at a test, one of the first major tests that the disciples faced in their walk with Jesus in a familiar story to most of you about a time that they were on the Sea of Galilee with Jesus and a storm came. So we’re going to be in Luke chapter 8 this morning, if you turn there with me. Luke chapter 8, and we’re going to start in verse 22. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s Word.

We’re going to look at just a few verses this morning about this test that they faced and did not do great. I’ll just go ahead and spoil the story for you if it’s not familiar. They didn’t do great on the test, but it taught them some things they needed to know going forward. So starting in verse 22, it says, Now one of those days Jesus and his disciples got into a boat, and he said to them, Let us go over to the other side of the lake. So they launched out. But were sailing along, he fell asleep, and a fierce gale of wind descended on the lake, and they began to be swamped and to be in danger.

They came to Jesus and woke him up, saying, Master, Master, we are. . . I should read that with a little more intensity. Master, Master, we are perishing. And he got up and rebuked the wind and the surging waves, and they stopped, and it became calm. And saying to one another, who then is this that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?

And you may be seated. And reading that again for probably the hundredth time in my life, it just strikes me as funny. The way they say, who then is this? Like who have we been walking around with all these months? And they just are starting to recognize there’s something different about this man. This storm for them was unexpected.

This storm for them was something that was scary, that caught them off guard. But God knew this was going to happen. God the Father knew it was going to happen. God the Son, who was there sleeping on the boat, knew it was going to happen. This was a test. They didn’t realize that this was going to be an opportunity for their faith to be tested.

And that’s the case in a lot of circumstances like this. Life’s most difficult moments test the soundness of our faith. Sometimes we will go through moments. Sometimes we will go through seasons. We’ll go through events, and we’ll wonder, what is the purpose of this? And God may have a purpose in mind for the difficult moments we face that we may never understand on this side of eternity.

But one thing that a lot of those moments have in common is that they’re tests. They’re tests of our faith. They’re tests of how strong is our faith. They’re tests of, is our faith in the right person or in the right place? Now, this story clearly displays Jesus’s power and his authority. And that’s kind of the main point of the story, is Jesus showcasing this power and authority by his ability to perform a miracle and command the natural world.

Nature bent to his command. That’s not something that you or I can do. I heard a story about somebody that with their kids, when their kids were little, this was not me, although it might be fun to try, that when their kids were little, they’d be driving and every time they’d see an overpass. I always get confused which one’s an overpass, which one’s an underpass. I guess it depends on which side you’re on. But when they’re about to go under another road on the highway and it was raining, they would tell their kids, I’m about to make it stop raining in three, two, one, and then it would stop for a second.

But I can only do it for a second because it makes me tired. Okay. That’s about the extent of our ability to control the weather. We live in Oklahoma. We know We don’t have a lot of say or really any at all over what the weather does. And yet Jesus just said, shh, pipe down.

That’s not a direct quote. But nature bent to his command. This was an incredible moment, but we can’t pretend like this just came out of nowhere for them either. Now, I don’t want to be too harsh on the disciples today because you and I, no pun intended, would be in the same boat if we walked with them. we would have the same crises of faith that they had. So I don’t want to pretend like we’re better than they are. But you look at this, you can’t pretend that this just came out of nowhere, his ability to control storms.

Maybe we’ve stepped it up a notch from what they’ve seen before, but they’ve been watching him do miracles over and over. Luke, just Luke by itself records numerous miraculous stories leading up to this point of things that Jesus had done, Jesus’s power, Jesus commanding sick people to be healed, Jesus commanding withered limbs to grow back, Jesus commanding dead people to stop being dead. They’ve seen all of these things. It boggles the mind looking back that this would be such a surprise to this. But what makes this story stand out from those other stories about Jesus’ power and authority is the test that’s involved here. that this is really, as far as I can tell, one of the first places where we see the disciples presented with the opportunity to respond either in faith or in unbelief to what Jesus is able to do after what they’ve all seen.

In previous sections, Jesus has encouraged them to believe Him and obey just in chapter 8 alone that we’ve studied the last few weeks. If you go back to the parable of the sower. He talks about the good seed and the good soil being those who have heard the word in an honest and good heart and hold it fast. Basically, those who have taken his word to heart, they’ve believed it. And when he says in verse 18, it’s what we talked about last week, take care how you listen.

Are you paying attention to God’s word and taking it to heart and believing it? And now they have the opportunity to do just that. They have the opportunity in a real and a tangible way in a life-altering situation potentially to put their faith in Jesus. And so they face a moment that’s going to require them to make that decision either to trust Jesus or not. And they had enough faith to get into the boat with Jesus. The Sea of Galilee is not a place where these kinds of storms are uncommon.

It’s been years since I’ve done any kind of in-depth study into the geology and geography of that area, but I do remember you have winds coming from the east, and they come down off the cliffs, and they drop several hundred feet, and there’s turbulence, and it stirs up the waters as it goes into this deep depression, and storms are not uncommon, and crazy wind coming from different directions is not uncommon. They had enough faith to get into the boat with Jesus, but the real test was not when we’re sailing along and everything’s okay. The real test is when the storm starts. And that’s true for other kinds of storms as well. That’s true in our lives as well. It’s one thing to have faith in Jesus.

It’s one thing to trust Him when everything’s going well, when the boat is steady and we’re just going along the sea. It’s easy to trust Jesus when we’re walking along and we’re seeing Him do miracles and the crowds are cheering. It’s another thing altogether to trust Jesus when you get into those moments of storm where you’re not sure what’s happening or what’s about to happen to you. And I’ll tell you, I’m not going to stand up here and say I’m super spiritual and, oh, these are just wonderful tests of our faith. When we go through storms in life, I hate it. And many is the time I’ve had a pity party with the Lord and whined to him about the circumstances.

But God doesn’t put us through those moments to be cruel. As I said at the outset of this, he has a purpose that we may or may not understand on this side of eternity. But one thing that’s common to many of these storms in life is that it’s an opportunity to test the soundness of our faith. And so we keep that in mind as we look at the story, the test that they went through, and we see in the midst of this test, in the midst of this storm, that life will gladly hand us reasons not to trust Jesus. When we are in that moment of storm, or maybe even a season of storm, and we are about to be faced with the decision to trust Jesus or not, and I do believe it’s a decision for us as believers. You say, oh, well, you know, it was just in the moment.

In the moment, we can remind ourselves of who Jesus is and kind of bring ourselves back from the brink, bring ourselves back to reality and say, I’m going to trust Jesus in this circumstance, whether I feel it or not. I’m going to trust him. We can make that commitment, but life will, when we come to those moments of decision, whether we’re going to trust Jesus with the storm we’re about to sail through or not. Life will gladly hand us reasons not to trust Jesus. And this passage outlines some of the reasons why they might have not trusted Jesus, some of the reasons why we might not trust Jesus, some of the examples from the disciples’ experience that caused them to doubt, that would cause us to doubt. Our storms are big.

They were not just afraid of thunder off in the distance. I know sometimes kids are scared of thunderstorms. I don’t think any of mine have ever acted scared of probably because they’ve lived their whole lives in Oklahoma. It’s just normal. And now living in Lawton, we can’t tell.

Actually, Charla and I will sit downstairs in the living room at night and play a game called artillery, thunder, or someone out of bed, because we can’t tell what we’re hearing overhead. But this wasn’t just the sound of thunder in the distance kind of getting them a little nervous. They were in the middle of an actual storm. They were in the middle of lightning and thunder and wind and waves that were tossing their boat around like it was a toy. The storm was big. The storm was real.

It says a fierce gale of wind descended on the lake. And when that happened, a boat of any size was in danger. Folks, it may be a literal storm that tests our faith. Lord, why did this happen to us? Why did this happen to our house? But in many cases, it’s a less literal storm that you and I face, but it’s no less real and it’s no less big.

Sometimes the storm can come in the form of a diagnosis. Sometimes the storm can come in the form of a broken relationship. Sometimes it can come in the form of a prodigal child. Sometimes it can come in the form of a financial hardship. Any number of things. I would imagine for each of you this morning, something different has come to mind.

Either a storm you’re going through right now or a storm you’ve been through. The storms we face are big. And even if somebody else is facing a bigger storm, the storm can still be big to you. Part of the problem we face, though, is when we’re in the middle of the storm, we look around and all we see is the storm. And so it looks like the whole world is a storm. Our storms are big to us, and that can persuade us not to trust Jesus because we’re more focused on the size of the storm than we are on God.

We look around and see the gravity of the problems we face. We see the enormity. We see the complexity. We see how unimaginable a solution would be in the storm. And if we look at that, we look at all of those things that we think this can’t possibly be fixed, and that’s where our focus is, it pulls our focus off of God and makes it more likely that we’re not going to trust Him and that our faith will waver. Our storms can be real, and our storms can be big, and that feels like a reason not to trust Him, but it’s not.

Second thing we see here is that our danger is real. They were not overreacting when they said, we’re in real danger here. They began to be swamped and to be in danger. That’s not just a direct quote from them. That’s commentary from the Holy Spirit through Luke.

They were swamped and in danger. Their boat was sinking. And it’s bad enough if your boat sinks, but to be out in the middle of that storm with the winds and the waves, some of these people, if not all of them, were going to be lost. Sometimes our problems present a real danger to life, to property, maybe just to life as we know it. And when we are in a situation like that where we’re genuinely at risk, it’s easier to doubt God than when the cost of faith is minimal.

It’s easy to trust God. It’s easy to walk in faith when everything’s wonderful. But in a moment where there’s a real cost, our faith is put to the test. Do we really believe this or not? I think of brothers and sisters all over this world this morning who are in real risk of life and limb for worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ.

And in a way that you and I don’t understand, they have a real choice every day. Do I trust him and walk the road he’s called me to, or do I focus on the danger? Now, we face lesser dangers, but sometimes just the reality of the danger, hands us a reason, maybe an excuse is a better word to say, to not trust him. Our fears are overwhelming. Part of their problem is that they weren’t thinking clearly because they were afraid. But you know what?

That’s my problem too. Do that all the time. When I went through the volunteer training at the pregnancy center several years back, one of the most valuable things they taught us about counseling somebody when they come in for help is that everybody that through that door with an unplanned or unexpected pregnancy, they are overwhelmed and overcome by fear. And fear is in the driver’s seat of making decisions. Fear is in the driver’s seat of reactions. And so your number one job is to try to calm down the fear so that you can think clearly.

I have found that more helpful than almost any training I’ve ever been to on anything in ministry in my life. And sometimes I have to have that conversation with myself. No, no, you are reacting out of fear. You need to stop and just slow down. But sometimes our fears will convince us. They will overwhelm us and they will convince us God can’t handle this situation.

Oh, I know he promised something, but he wasn’t talking about this. God couldn’t have foreseen. When your fears start telling you God can’t or God hasn’t, they’re lying to you. But in their fears in verse 24, they were saying, Master, Master, we are perishing. No, you’re not, because Jesus is still in the boat with you, but that fear infests your brain where you can’t think clearly. And I think a lot of it comes down to our knowledge of Jesus hasn’t become trust yet.

I was listening to an interview with a professor talking about this idea of faith in the scriptures the other day. And he was talking about how we treat the biblical concept of faith as just belief that. You know, I believe that Jesus can. I believe that Jesus did. It’s a whole different thing. The biblical idea of faith, that’s part of it, but it’s so much more.

And he likened it to getting married. And getting married with the perspective we’re supposed to have that when you say, I do, I’m all in, I’m fully committed, I trust this person. Like the story from centuries ago about the conquistador, I can’t remember which one, but landed in Mexico and told his men to burn the ships because we’re not going back. We’re here. That’s faith. It’s not just belief that something is true.

It’s trust in that fact. And I’ve been thinking about what that man was talking about. And as it applies to this, our relationship with Jesus is intimately connected to our trust in Him. Because trust isn’t just part of a relationship. Trust is the relationship. Any meaningful relationship we have is based on trust.

And There’s a spectrum of this, but the depth of the relationship is tied to the trust you have in the other person. When I walk into Chick-fil-A, I trust they’re not putting anything weird in my sandwich. I don’t know those people, most of them, but I have at least the amount of trust that they didn’t do something to my food. On the far other end of the spectrum, I trust my wife implicitly. I trust my wife more than anybody else on this planet. She’s the one person I know I can tell what’s ever on my mind, and she’s not going to judge me or hold it against me.

All of our relationships require trust. It requires trust to be church family. And I look around and I see people I trust. I see Christy that I can talk to about ministry things and work through those things. And sometimes we have disagreements, but we figure it out.

And I trust her, and I know she’s got my back. I look at Aaliyah, who I’ve trusted to be in my home watching my children. That’s a lot of trust. I look at Bob and Polly that I’ve trusted to be in my home with my children. I look at Rick.

Well, I would look at him, but he’s out there. I look at Rick. I’ve traveled across the country with Rick. So what kind of trust does that require? Go down to Stripes, find a random person, and just take a road trip with them. No, we don’t do that.

But I look at people that I know and we trust each other. I won’t name names in this, but so many of you have come to me in my office or in the fellowship hall or in here or over a cup of coffee or something and have talked about struggles that you have in life or questions that you have about God’s Word, and you have trusted me enough to bring those to me. And in many cases, I’ve entrusted stories back to you. Even the relationships we have together are built on trust. The relationship we have with Jesus is not just built on belief that He is. That’s the foundation of it.

But we have a trust in Him because we believe that He is. Our relationships have to be based on trust. And sometimes when we find it hard to walk by faith, it’s because that knowledge, that knowledge of who He is, that knowledge of what He said, that knowledge of what He did, it has not yet translated in our brains, in our hearts, into trust. And I think that’s where they were, because they came and woke Him up. They came and woke Him up, and one of the other Gospels tells us, I think it’s Matthew, they actually asked Him, save us, Lord.

They’re calling out to Him. Save us, Lord, we’re perishing. But they had enough belief in him to ask him for help. But the fact that they were so afraid, they were so surprised when he actually did something and it worked. And the way Jesus handled the situation tells us that there wasn’t a real trust.

It’s more like they were calling out to him as the last resort rather than trusting in him. It was more of a head knowledge that he could than something that had translated into actual trust. And I think sometimes that’s where we are in our walk with the Lord. We read the book. We know what he said. We know what he did.

We know what he’s capable of, but we haven’t yet become convinced that he can and he will. On the other hand, Jesus has given us plenty of reasons why we should trust him. First of all, his past performance. I don’t know why the phrase has stuck in my head, but when you would see, I watched a lot of history channel back before they got into aliens and swamp things, and I don’t know. But they used to have back in the 90s these commercials for stock brokerage firms, and they would always say, past performance does not guarantee future results. Okay, they have to put that on there so they don’t get sued, but past performance is probably the best indicator of future results in anything, in anything in life.

And you can look at the past performance of Jesus and know who He is and know what He’s capable of. Why should I believe that He can handle my situation, because look at all the things that He’s handled before. And if we go to verse 22, it says, now one of those days, Jesus and His disciples got onto a boat. That may not mean much to you, but that tells me this started out as just another day walking with Jesus and witnessing all the miracles they had. This was nothing out of the ordinary. These men had for months been walking with Jesus and seeing the things He had done, seeing the healings, seeing the raising from the dead, hearing him teach with authority, and just being awestruck by everything that he had done.

And if you look at that, if you’re less focused on the storm, and instead you’re looking at everything Jesus has done up to this point, that will bolster your faith like nothing else. I will tell you, moments of fear when I start thinking God can’t handle, and I would never say it like that, but this situation’s too big. This is not going to work out. This is not going to get fixed. This is going to be a catastrophe. Part of that calming down and slowing down is to start thinking about the ways that God has come through before.

This is something that Israelites did all throughout the Old Testament over and over. Every time they were called to step out on faith, right before that, somebody stepped up and began recounting the stories of how God had been faithful to their nation. That’s why they built monuments. That’s why they would build altars at places God had done a miracle because they wanted to remember. We can go through God’s Word, and we can see the things that Jesus has handled before. And our faith can be strengthened through that.

But you can also look at your own life and the things that He’s done for you up until now. You look at His past performance, like the disciples who should have looked at everything that had happened up to this just one day we got on the boat and seen the past performance. And that’s why our faith is not just a leap in the dark. It’s based on evidence. It’s rooted in who He is and what He’s always done. But his past performance gives us reason to trust him.

Also his promises. And you might say, well, where did he make a promise? Because I missed it too, several times reading this through. But look at verse 22. He said to them, let us go over to the other side of the lake. If they believe that he meant what he said, and if they believe that he had the power to do all the things he’d done up until now, he already told them where they’re going.

He didn’t just say, let’s go on a boat ride and see where it goes. They already had the promise that they were going to the other side of the lake. He emphasized in the last things that happened in in Luke chapter 8 he emphasized trusting his word and now his word said they were going to the other side. So sometimes when we’re walking through a storm and we find it difficult to trust him we don’t stop at looking back at how he’s come through before in scripture and in our own lives. We also take a look back at the scriptures and say what has he promised? Now he’s never promised that every situation is going to be fixed exactly the way we want it.

I wish, but he doesn’t work for me. I work for him. But he has made promises to us in his word. He’s told us that he’s working things out for our good and for his glory. Now his definition of good may look different from ours. I’ll let you in on a little secret.

I believe in Romans when he says he’s working all things together for good, for those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. When he says good, I think the context there points to he’s using circumstances to make us look, to make us more like Jesus, which puts a little different spin on it than, oh, everything’s just going to be peachy. But see, we have certain promises that he’s given in his word that we can fall back on because he’s always kept his promises. And then the final reason I see in this text of reasons he’s given us why we can trust him is his presence. If they just paid attention to the fact that he’s here with us on the boat. They were sailing and he fell asleep.

Jesus wasn’t worried about this. Jesus wasn’t worried about the storm. And rather than notice that, they get mad. I mean, rather than take comfort in that, they almost seem annoyed. You don’t care that we’re perishing, they ask in another one of the Gospels. But He was still with them.

His presence remains with us. Now, not in the same way as them, but for one thing, He’s given us His Holy Spirit. The Bible calls that a seal and an earnest, a down payment. How do we know He hasn’t abandoned us? How do we know He hasn’t left us and forgotten about us? Because He’s given us the Holy Spirit.

His presence is still with us. And so I want to leave off with this this morning. I think there are two vital questions that are asked in this passage that you and I need to consider when we go through storms. And maybe even when the skies are fair, we ask ourselves these in preparation for the storms. The question Jesus asks in verse 25, where is your faith?

Is our faith rooted in Jesus? Is it a biblical faith that comes from a place of trusting Him have walked with Him long enough to know that we can trust Him? Has it gone from being a belief that to being a trust in? And then the question they asked in verse 25, who then is this? Who is this man that He commands even the winds and the water and they obey Him? Because that question, if we ask ourselves that question and we answer that question, that’s going to help take care of the where is your faith question.

The most important question Jesus ever asked His followers is, who do you say that I am? And if we stop and ask ourselves, who is he? Who do I believe him to be? Who do I know him to be? That’s going to go a long way towards strengthening our faith to come through the storms.

That’s also the question that starts our very relationship with him. Who is he? Is he a good moral teacher? Is he just a historical figure? Is he a man with some good ideas? Or is he who he claimed to be?

When he claimed to be God in the flesh, when he came to, when he claimed to be the one to come to die for our sins in full, when he claimed to rise again under the Father’s power, when he claimed to be the one that forgave our sins, do you believe in that Jesus? Even the relationship begins with not just a belief that, but a trust in. Trusting that when Jesus claimed to be our one and only Savior, that he really is that person. To recognize that you and I have sinned against a holy God, that that sin incurs a penalty, and the only way that penalty could be paid and our debt could be cleared was for Jesus to be the sacrifice. And so he went to the cross, he shed his blood, he died paying for your sins and mine in full, and rose again, so that you and I could be forgiven if we would put our trust in him.

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