Luke 13:10-17
Turn in your copy of the scriptures
to Luke’s gospel. Our reading today is chapter
13 verses 6 through 9. Actually, it’s verses 10 through
17. I must have really flubbed up on what I sent in for the
bulletin this week. Verses 10 through 17. Luke chapter 13, verses 10 through
17. This is the passage where Jesus
recounts an interaction with a woman of a disabling spirit,
but also the leader of the local synagogue where he is preaching.
There is a dispute. And so this is an interesting
story in the gospel of Luke. Let’s give our attention now
to God’s word. Luke chapter 13, beginning at
verse 10. Now Jesus was teaching in one
of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and there was a woman who had
a disabling spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and could not
fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called
her over and said to her, Woman, you are freed from your disability. And he laid his hands on her
and immediately she was made straight. and she glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue,
indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people,
there are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those
days and be healed and not on the Sabbath day. Then the Lord
answered and said to him, you hypocrites, does not each of
you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger
and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter
of Abraham, whom Satan bound for 18 years, be loosed from
this bond on the Sabbath day? As he said these things, all
his adversaries were put to shame and all the people rejoiced at
all the glorious things that were done by him.” This is the
word of the living God. Let’s look to him in prayer.
Pray with me. Lord, may we have eyes that see. May we have ears
that hear and may we have hearts that are not hardened as this
man in the scriptures were so hardened, but may our hearts
be tender to hear the voice of Jesus and see the mighty, powerful
works of his kingdom and rejoice in them also. Help us and we
make our prayer in Jesus’ name, amen. A church ought to be a
place of comfort, A church ought to be a place of truth. A church
ought to be a place of peace. And a church ought to be a place
of worship. A church ought to be a place
of a lot of other things, but we’ll stop short with that list
there. But often a church is a place full of strain and strife. It’s often a place full of confusion.
And it’s often a place instead of worship, a place of self-centeredness. And you might be thinking to
yourself, well, that’s just because we’re Americans. That’s something
in the last 100, 150 years. Well, I want to tell you it’s
nothing new. It’s nothing new, and I don’t
say that based on the passage of Luke’s gospel we read today,
where there was a dispute right in the middle of worship. I say
so because it’s as old as Satan’s fall from glory. Somewhere in
eternity past, we’re not told exactly when, It’s alluded to
in Isaiah and other places. We see it unfold in Genesis chapter
three, and we also see it unfold in the prologue to Job. But somewhere
in the past, Satan decided he could do it better than God.
And Satan, when he decided to do it better than God, did so
because of pride. And we call this the fall of
Satan. And so disputes in the kingdom
of God, disputes in the church, disputes in the synagogue, disputes
among Christians is nothing new. It’s as old as Satan’s fall. We see it first manifested really
in the Garden of Eden, where Satan comes to Eve and says,
did God really say? Did God really say not to eat
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Some of you
have the Children’s Jesus Storybook Bible, and I love the way that
it unfolds in that retelling of Genesis 3. Basically, Satan
says to Adam and Eve, God doesn’t want you to have any fun. He
wants you to be miserable. And so if you want to be miserable,
do things God’s way. But if you want to have lots
of fun, do it your own way. Play by your own rules. Well,
as you look at the church or any other institution in this
world, you will understand that various institutions will pick
on the church here since we’re Christians. And this is about
that today. Churches go through formation.
They decide what they want to be and how they want to do what
they do. Hopefully they do it by the word
of the living God. And as time goes by, formation
leads to deformation. Things begin to fall apart. You
get factions in the church. You get people that want things
this way, others that want it that way. And you get church
splits. And that’s why we have so many churches on every corner. That’s why we have so many denominations. But over time, what was formed
and ideal gets deformed. And then we have the wonderful
word, a word we love in our Protestant tradition, the word Reformation.
We reform what has been deformed back to the way it was originally
designed or first formed. And so we think of the Reformation
as associate reform Presbyterians or reformed Christians or Protestants. We think of the Reformation as.
Well, the 1500s, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to
the door of the chapel at Wittenberg, stating his points of debate
with the Roman Catholic Church. We think of that as the Reformation.
And friends, that was a great one. We’re children of that Reformation. But I want us to see a different
sort of Reformation today. It’s one that began in Jesus’
day. And it’s a reformation when the
king of the kingdom came to Israel. And he came to Israel when what
he had formed in centuries past had become deformed by them doing
it their own ways and forming their own rules and forming their
own laws. And it became deformed to such
a degree it was not a ministry to people. It was not a place
of comfort and truth and peace and worship, but it was a place
of burden and hardship. And so Jesus, the king of the
kingdom, is showing what reformation in his kingdom is like in this
particular synagogue as he teaches and heals on this particular
day. I want us to see four things
from this passage, four things about the kingdom. The first
thing in verse 10 is the preaching of the kingdom. In chapter 13,
verse 10, we read Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the
Sabbath day. Probably about a dozen years
or so ago or more, I was an associate pastor at a church in Charlotte
area. And one of the things I like to do and ask my elders for permission
to do was to get around and help other churches that needed a
guest minister. And so about six or eight times
a year, I would disappear from my local congregation and would
go to a church and serve them for the day. Well, I went to
one particular church where their pastor of about 25 years had
stepped away. He had retired and the new pastor had been there
about a year and a half. And the church was in great disorder.
The church was under a lot of turmoil and it was unknown to
me the situation. Well, actually I had a sinking
feeling that they didn’t like the preacher. So what did I do?
I did what every guest preacher shouldn’t have done. I meddled.
I preached from first Timothy chapter four about what a preacher
should be and what a preacher should do. I thought it was a
wonderful biblical sermon. Well, I get back home and on
Monday morning I get a phone call from the minister and he
says, what did you preach yesterday in my congregation? And I told
him and he said, Oh, no wonder. He says, they don’t like me.
They don’t like me because I’m not like the guy that was there
25 years. And I said, well, according to
first Timothy chapter four, if that guy who was there for 25
years, was the type of person the scriptures call for and did
the type of work the scriptures called for. Y’all should be just
alike. And he said, well, that’s the
problem. He did what he wanted and he did what they wanted.
Now I come and do what God wants and they don’t like it. And I
said, oh, I see. But it caused a stir because
they held the new pastor, not to biblical standards, but to
standards which they had created and decided they would mark him
by. And dear friends, that’s often
the way it is. It’s the way it is in this synagogue with the
Judaizers. I know it’s run through this
church. I’ve been here five years. I know it’s run through the other
churches I’ve served. And I talked to so many pastors who are dealing
with, do they measure up to the people standards? Or do they
measure up to God’s standards? And let me tell you, the people’s
standards are always held in higher esteem than our God’s. And it brings such difficulty
to the church and to the pastor. Often the church has its own
standards and not God’s. Well, Jesus walks into the synagogue.
And you understand a synagogue was a outpost of Jerusalem. All worship and all sacrifices
were to be done at Jerusalem on the holy mountain in the temple
of God. No sacrifices were to be made
elsewhere. And so, as you heard from Exodus
chapter 34, at least three times a year, every male should attend
temple. Every male should go and make
sacrifices if the family can go fine, but if not, he is their
representative. But these synagogues formed throughout
the country of Israel, throughout the tribes of Israel, and they
were meant to be a place where the word of God was read and
explained. No sacrifices, no other rituals,
but they were places of teaching. You might say that if big church
was Jerusalem, Sunday school were these synagogues. And it
took 10 men to form a synagogue. And so you can imagine that throughout
the countryside of Israel, there were synagogues all over the
place. And if a town was big enough and there were enough
people in that town that didn’t like each other, guess what?
They had two synagogues. Or take Jerusalem, for example,
they had nearly 500 synagogues. And so our little American church
dream isn’t new to us, right? Where we have a church on every
corner and You know, this church split from that church because
they couldn’t agree on which air conditioning company to use
for service. And so they decided they would
have the Presbyterian church that used this company. That’s
a real thing. I used to preach in a church
and seminary. That was a real fight. But you get the picture.
There was a lot of different synagogues with a lot of different
beliefs. Well, Jesus enters this particular
synagogue when Judaism at its height has all these rules. All these rules about how to
live and serve the living God, mind you, they weren’t the ones
God put in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These
were additional rules added to it. And in fact, on the Sabbath
day itself, there were so many rules that it took a rabbi or
a young man wanting to learn the laws of the land It took
him over a decade to read through and be taught the Sabbath rules. Let that sink in for a minute.
When you walked into a synagogue, you didn’t know which way to
step and what to do because you didn’t know what the rules are
or were or would be. And so Jesus enters this synagogue.
It has its own rules, its own customs. And it has the typical
Judaism standard of self-righteousness, not righteousness in Christ Jesus
or in the God of Israel. And what does Jesus preach as
he preaches the kingdom? He doesn’t preach, be good. He doesn’t preach, do the laws.
He doesn’t preach, keep the Sabbath and all these other rules that
go with it. He doesn’t preach all their little extraneous laws.
He preaches repentance. He preaches faith and he preaches
the power of the coming kingdom. Well, how do we know this? I
didn’t see that in verse 10, did you? Well, we can look at
all the gospels and see Jesus general message. And we’re pretty
sure he didn’t deviate from it on this case, but he preaches. with the preaching of the kingdom,
repentance, belief and resting in the Messiah alone for salvation. Now, you can imagine like when
I was a guest preacher at the church in the Charlotte area,
Jesus met some opposition. Oh, he upset the apple cart.
He did what ought not to have been done in that synagogue. And so we’ll see that opposition
in a few moments. But there is the preaching of
the kingdom. Well, the second thing I want us to see is the
salvation of the kingdom. We find the salvation of the
kingdom in verses 11 to 13, but also verse 16. Beginning at verse
11, it says there was a woman who had a disabling spirit for
18 years. She was bent over and could not
fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called
her over and he said to her, woman, you are freed from your
disability. He laid his hands on her and
immediately she was made straight and she glorified God. Skip down
to verse 16. Ought not this woman, a daughter
of Abraham, whom Satan bound for 18 years, be loosed from
this bond on the Sabbath day. So not only did Jesus come into
this synagogue to preach the kingdom, he came to show the
salvation of the kingdom. Some of y’all will ask me tomorrow,
Did you notice this happened in church and that happened?
My kids will tell me some stories. I’ll hear about this and that.
Did you see what so-and-so did? Did you hear us snickering at
the joke? And I usually respond, I don’t see a whole lot. I’m
kind of busy up here. I don’t see too well anyway,
and my perception isn’t all that great. So I see about the first
10 feet in front of me, and that’s about it. But what goes on around
here, I don’t see a whole lot of it. Now, there’s some things
I do see. There are some things that are
just, oh, they’re just they’re just out there and you see it,
you know it. And we tell stories about it
for years into the future. Well, what happens in this synagogue
in Luke chapter 13 is something you would see. Wouldn’t you notice
if there came a woman into the congregation and she began to
walk in late and walk forward and her body was so bent over
that she was almost face over the ground? We would notice it. We would see her her gait as
she struggled to walk. We would likely hear it as the
synagogue would have had a stone floor. And on and on, we could
think and let our imaginations run. This woman drew attention
as she shuffled into that synagogue. It was for sure a disruption.
Now, what does Jesus do? Is he the one that says, dear
woman, there are six other days to be healed? The Sabbath is
not one. Come back on another day. No,
he is the one who calls her. He meets her in the aisle way
as it were. He speaks to her. He touches
her. He frees her from this being
bound for 18 years by Satan and heals her. And what does the
Bible say? She was made straight. Now we’re not into the, the Benny
Hinn stuff. You know, we don’t call people
up and, knock them on the head. Now we do in the back corner
there in the little bridal room, we have, I think, two wheelchairs,
one walker, and one of those little knee scooters. You guys
like to borrow them from time to time, so when one of y’all
gets hurt and doesn’t need your crutches anymore, it ends up
back there. And I joke that it looks like the back room of a
Benny Hinn crusade. It looks like people got healed
and we just stored their unneeded accouterments back there. But at least here in the synagogue,
As part of the message of the coming of the king of kings and
the manifestation that his kingdom is powerful, Jesus, yes, he preaches,
but he also heals. And this woman who has been over
for all these years. And maybe she had been a weekly
participant in the synagogue, who knows? She might have been
a regular in town who people saw. She was made straight. And don’t you imagine? She was
stunned, but the people were as well. And so as Jesus preaches
the kingdom, as he shows the salvation of the kingdom in the
life of this woman, we see a third thing very quickly opposition
to the kingdom. You see it in verses 14 and 15,
then also verse 16, verse 14 tells us. The ruler of the synagogue, indignant
because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people,
There are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those
days and be healed, but not on the Sabbath day. The Lord answered
him, You hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie
his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water
it? Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound
for 18 years, be loosed from this bond? on the Sabbath day
as opposition to the kingdom. I think in every church I have
served, and I think of one in particular, not this one. You’re
not supposed to tell things about the church you’re in when you’re
preaching. You can tell about it when you go to the next church. But
in the first church I served, we had a Wednesday night family
night. And we went there as a young couple, Mandy and I, this was
a good 20 years ago. We were students in seminary. We were
looking for a church where we could participate and serve in.
So we went to Wednesday family night. In a Wednesday family
night, somebody always cooked a meal. Somebody always provided
good food, good dessert. There was always a message for
the adults. There was something for the little ones and there
was something for the youth. Well, somebody in the church
decided maybe since just beyond the back door of the church,
there’s a rough neighborhood. Maybe we ought to try to reach
it. And you know what happens, don’t you? When they bring in
the rough kids to church, all of a sudden the kingdom of God
closes up. And the kingdom of God is for
us who are neat and who are clean and who are not messy in our
lives. And you would have thought everybody
would have said, what a wonderful thing. These kids who are coming
from broken homes, they have difficult socioeconomic circumstances. They’re coming to church. Oh,
no. We can’t have it. They’re dirtying
up the bathrooms or you make the list. And remember what I
said earlier, a church goes through formation. We love the living
God. We want to worship him and we want everybody to know who
Jesus is until it comes to the rough kids, until it comes to
the poor kids, until it comes to the kids who come and they
dirty up the bathrooms or they haven’t got manners or whatever
it is. And so there’s opposition to the kingdom in every setting,
isn’t there? There’s opposition here. I’ve
served the church 17 years now as an ordained minister, and
I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve served. Anger at Jesus. Anger at Jesus’ word. Anger at
Jesus, especially as he heals. Now, let’s be fair here, the
ruler of the synagogue had an important job. Remember, I said
that a synagogue was formed by at least 10 men who in that local
area wanted a place where the word of God could be read and
explained. And so the ruler of the synagogue’s job was to maintain
order. It was his job to find an itinerant
rabbi who would read the Bible and explain it that day. Well,
he made a big one, didn’t he? When he asked Jesus to be the
speaker that day. But this ruler in charge, whose
dignity is at stake, his reputation in the community is on the line,
becomes angry. And I bet his anger started when
Jesus was preaching a message of repentance and belief and
resting in the Messiah and not in rule keeping and rule making
and following the rabbis. But you can see as this woman
was healed, it says he became indignant. And he makes a public
announcement. I love passive aggressive behavior,
don’t you? He stands up instead of saying
to Jesus, you shouldn’t have healed this woman on the Sabbath.
What does he say? There’s six other days for healings,
not on the Sabbath. And so implicitly he’s saying,
Jesus, you’ve done wrong. But he calls out this poor woman
who suffered so long, but who is now made well. So this opposition
to the kingdom is thick, it is obvious. And what does Jesus
say? He says, you hypocrites. And
in a sense, he’s going to take their mask off. That’s what hypocrisy
is, isn’t it? It’s hiding behind a mask. He
takes their mask off and he says, you on the Sabbath day, you’ll
untie your donkey and you’ll take it from the manger to water.
That’s work. Now, they had a rule that if
It wasn’t burdened. It didn’t have a load of hay
on its back or wasn’t being used in its normal way. It wasn’t
breaking the Sabbath. But he said, even you, even you
have mercy for an animal on the Sabbath. It needs food, it needs
water. How much more does a daughter
of Abraham need to be loosed from the bonds of Satan, which
she has endured these 17 years? And as Jesus spoke, the passage
tells us, shame on those who were against the kingdom. against
its preaching and against its salvation. Shame on those who
would look down on the preaching and the healing of King Jesus. You know what legalism is, don’t
you? Legalism is an attempt to make up rules that make us righteous. Now, we live in the South. And
what do we say about the South? It’s the Bible belt and different
towns like to claim that they’re the buckle of the belt of the
Bible belt. And I think Greenville, South
Carolina always wins out. But in the South, we have this
legalism and what is salvation to us as Christians in the South?
I’m generalizing here, but this is what it amounts to. We don’t
drink. We don’t cuss, we don’t smoke, and we don’t chew, and
we don’t go out with girls that do. That’s legalism in a sense. Now those are things, probably
good things to avoid, but you get the sense, don’t you? And
you can look at various forms of legalism. You know, how long
is your skirt? How long is your hair? You can
look at things like, do you do this? Do you not do that? How
do you raise your children? Are they in government school,
public school, homeschool, Christian school? And on and on it goes.
There are all these badges of what makes us right before God.
Dear friends, what makes us right before God? Only the righteousness
of Jesus, only the one who lived perfectly, obeyed perfectly and
died a death that was satisfying to God Almighty. Yes, there are
times when we make rules to make no provision for the flesh. I
understand that. We all understand that. I do
believe. But when it leads to legalism and it’s so weighs down
the people of God that they cannot measure up in your eyes. What
do they then believe? I can’t measure up in God’s eyes. And dear friends, it is crushing
to live under legalism. It is crushing to live under
a disability, a disabling spirit for 18 years that has you bent
over and looking at the ground and not looking up at your savior.
You begin to see the themes in this passage, don’t you? The
legalism of the Judaizers. the theme of this woman bent
over for these years and oppressed by Satan, but the freedom and
the rest that is given to us so richly and freely in Christ
Jesus. And that leads us to the final
thing this passage shows us. We’ve seen Jesus preaching the
kingdom. We’ve seen the salvation of the kingdom as he healed this
woman. We’ve definitely seen the opposition to the kingdom,
haven’t we? But what about rejoicing in the kingdom? That’s what we
see in verse 13 at its end and also verse 17. At the very end
of verse 13, when it says Jesus laid hands on her, immediately
she was made straight. And what did she do? She glorified
God. And then skip down to verse 17.
As Jesus said these things to the hypocrites, they were being
put to shame. The people. rejoiced at all the
glorious things that were done by him. A couple of verses ago,
we ran across a passage where the people asked Jesus, when
we see somebody suffering, and we see them suffering really
badly, gave the example of the Galileans who were slaughtered
by Pilate, and then those who the Tower of Siloam fell on inside
the city of Jerusalem. There were sinners, that was
the premise, right? Bad things happen to you means
you’re a really bad sinner. So guess what was probably going
on in their minds with this woman, bent over, oppressed 18 years,
really bad woman. And so we come to this end of
this glorious passage and we see a woman who in their economy
was a great sinner. And it’s a good reminder for
us to think this way. We’re all sinners, aren’t we?
It’s not them who do worse or them who don’t measure up to
our little standards we create. And we all create them, don’t
we? But under God’s great standard, all have sinned. All have fallen
short of his glory, not your glory, not a legalistic church’s
glory, but God’s glory. And there’s good news. There’s
wonderful good news. Jesus, as far as we know, never
preaches in another synagogue. Don’t you imagine the word got
out? Don’t invite Jesus. When I got here as the pastor,
y’all had been through about a year of interim time. And the first
thing I said is, well, when I go to the beach, who do y’all want
me to get? And you know, what was first on the list, here’s
who not to get. And Jesus was on there, who not
to get list. We don’t want him back. But Jesus didn’t need to
preach in another synagogue, for he was headed for more important
work. He was headed to Jerusalem, where these people who could
not shut him up, they could not shut him up in his hometown of
Nazareth when they tried to run him off the cliff. They could
not shut him up in the Galilean cities. They could not shut him
up in all the places where he preached. But they’re going to
get him, aren’t they? They’re going to catch him, betrayed
by Jesus or by Judas, handed over to the rulers and authorities.
And on a Friday afternoon on a cross outside the camp, the
sins of the people would be laid on him. And he would free his
people, free them from running around trying to keep up rules
and laws and statutes. And he would free them to rest
in him alone for salvation. And so, dear friends, as you
look around yourself on a Sunday, as you look around the church,
do you see people that are saved by grace through faith in Jesus
and healed of their loosed from their bonds to Satan? Or do you
say, well, they get the church dirty? Do you say they don’t
keep up the rules? Do you say things that are opposition
to the kingdom? Or do you rejoice in the kingdom
and see a saved people touched by Jesus and now free to rest
in him? There is a difference. Let’s
pray together. Our Lord and God, we thank you
that our Lord and Savior did the tough work of coming to reform
a people. who had lost their way, who had
been formed and founded from all the other nations of the
earth to be a special people. Yet they forgot your redemption.
They forgot your statutes. They forgot your laws, your covenants. But thanks be to God, you and
your mercy sent Christ the Messiah to save a people, to love you
and serve you. We bless you that we are numbered
among your elect. We are numbered among those who
have called on your name by your grace. So help us to have eyes
of the kingdom, your kingdom, and not eyes for our own kingdom,
which we are so prone to build. Hear us and help us, amen. We
want to respond to God’s goodness by singing various verses, which
are listed in your bulletin of hymn number 401, Holy Spirit
of Messiah. We’ll stand to sing.