Luke 4:14-30
Please turn in your copies of
the scriptures to the gospel of Luke to the fourth chapter.
Our reading from Luke’s gospel today is chapter four, verses
14 through 30. And as we have made our way through
Luke so far, verse by verse, we have seen that Jesus, the
eternal son of God, has become man through the promise of God,
through the work of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin
Mary. He was conceived. He was born.
He has grown in wisdom and stature. We’ve seen him in the temple
with great understanding of the law of God. We’ve seen him baptized
and approved by Almighty God, by the voice of God coming from
heaven, the Holy Spirit also descending on him by a dove. enter his public ministry. Jesus,
having been baptized and tempted by the devil, now begins a public
ministry. And in verses 14 and 15, we get
a little bit of a summary of what Jesus is doing and how he’s
been received. And then in verses 16 through
30, we get a specific account of one of the events of Jesus
ministry. You’ll notice Jesus makes reference
to he’s probably already done something like turning water
into wine, and that is recorded in other gospels. but Jesus makes
reference to it here. Let us hear God’s word together.
This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus from the pen of Luke, beginning
at verse 14 of chapter four. It says this, and Jesus returned
in the power of the spirit to Galilee and a report about him
went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their
synagogues being glorified by all. And he came to Nazareth
where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went
to the synagogue on the Sabbath day and he stood up to read.
And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He enrolled
the scroll and found the place where it was written. The spirit
of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim
good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty
to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set
at liberty those who are oppressed. to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor. And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant,
and he sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue
were fixed on him. And he began to say to them,
today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And
all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were
coming from his mouth. And they said, is not this Joseph’s
son? And he said to them, doubtless,
you will quote to me this proverb, physician, heal yourself. What
we have heard you did at Capernaum do here in your hometown as well.
And he said, truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable
in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there
were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens
were shut up for three years and six months and a great famine
came over all the land. And Elijah was sent to none of
them. but only to Zarephath in the land of Sidon, to a woman
who was a widow. And there were many lepers in
Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was
cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian. When they heard these
things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they
rose up and they drove him out of the town, and they brought
him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built. so
that they could throw him down from the cliff. But passing through
their midst, he went away. Pray with me. Our Lord and God,
we recognize that in our hearing, in our very ears and before our
very eyes, the gospel of salvation through Jesus has been read to
us. And we ask, Lord, that your spirit
would give us eyes that see and ears that hear and hearts that
understand and hands and feet and wills that will leave this
place and go and do what is required of us in your glorious gospel. We cannot do this without your
help and without your strength and without your mercy. And so
we ask for it and we pray for it in the name of Jesus. And
it’s in his name we ask it. Amen. Do you ever wonder why
we do what we do in worship? Some of you have been in the
church a long time and you come every week and you notice that
we do certain things and maybe you start to scratch your head
and say, why do we do that? And not only why do we do that,
why do we do that the way we do that? Well, there’s a pattern,
a system of belief that we understand. It comes out of Reformation thinking
that in worship, we do what God commands. If it says in the scripture
that God is to be worshiped, that a certain thing is to be
done in worship, that is something that we must do. We are people
under authority, and so we must do what God commands, especially
in the area of worship. But we also understand that in
the area of worship, there are things that we do that may not
be explicitly or expressly put down on the pages of scripture,
but we can, by good sanctified wisdom and common sense, figure
out those things for ourselves. And so an example, an example
of scripture commanding us to do something that we do in worship,
think of Paul to Timothy. Paul wrote two letters to Timothy.
They are called the pastoral letters. And in those letters,
the apostle Paul tells Timothy to labor in preaching and in
teaching. And then at one of his letters,
he says, until I come until I visit you, devote yourself to the public
reading of scripture and to exhortation and teaching. So we see from
there and in other places that reading the word and preaching
the word and teaching the word and exhorting the word or something
that ought to be done in the life of the church. How is it
to be done? Well, we can look back through
scriptures and see patterns. We can see that God’s people
throughout the history of Israel, throughout the history of the
church, they gathered to hear the law read. We read from Nehemiah
chapter 8 where a special raised platform was built. And all the
people, it says in Nehemiah 8, gathered as one man. They gathered
corporately. They gathered as the people of
God to hear the word of God. And from that platform, the book
of the law was opened. It was read. And then a sense
of the meaning of the passage was given. Did you notice also
that in chapter 8 of Nehemiah, it says the people gave attention
not only to the reading of the word, but to the explanation
of the word. And then there was a response.
They mourned. They mourned because they realized
that their lives did not conform, did not match up to the law of
God. And then the priest and the Levite
said to them, do not mourn for the joy of the Lord is your strength.
Go, go and live, go and serve, go and be Christian people, godly
people. and live a life of obedience
as you have heard from the word of God. And so we hear God’s
word read and preached and explained and we respond to it, sometimes
with mourning, sometimes with repentance, sometimes with great
joy and loud song. And sometime it’s what we do
during the week as an act of obedience. Now, one of the things
you probably haven’t noticed in our reading from Nehemiah,
and it’s really not clear in our reading from Luke’s gospel,
is that when the word of God was read, the people stood. Maybe
some of you have been in traditions where at least people stood for
the reading of the gospel. said something like this, we’re
going to hear from the gospel of Luke. Let’s all stand in honor
of the reading of God’s gospel. And so people stand other places.
We do it here. We sit, we do a lot of sitting
and standing. And so, uh, we don’t sit out of irreverence
for God’s word. We sit out of. Maybe necessity. And so in some places you may
see that. But one of the things you don’t
catch is that when the people stood and heard the word of God
read after the word of God was read, the teacher would sit.
but the people would remain standing. So count yourselves lucky. Count
yourselves blessed. I don’t sit during preaching.
You sit. My legs are tired when I go home
on Sundays. So we’ve got it all backwards. We’re going to have
to make a change around here, right? Reformed and always reforming.
You guys will be standing. I’ll be sitting. Now, that’s
what’s taking place in this story that we read in the life of Jesus
and his ministry. Jesus, who is full of the Holy
Spirit, who’s been approved by God, the Heavenly Father, who’s
been baptized, who’s been tempted by the devil, who’s been tried
in his past. He’s sent the devil packing.
He’s come to his hometown of Nazareth after he has made his
way around Galilee in some way, shape or form. We don’t know
how long his ministry has been at this time, but he makes his
way to his hometown. And in Nazareth on the Sabbath
day, he goes into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he reads
and explains the word of God. Now, you’ve got to understand
something about Jesus’ hometown. You know, this was Nazareth.
Yes, this is where the carpenter shop was. This is where Jesus
rode his tricycle and skinned his knee and probably broke a
window with a baseball, all the good childhood things. You notice
in the passage they say, isn’t this Joseph’s son? Isn’t this
the carpenter’s boy? But Jesus comes to his hometown
to a synagogue. And there’s a lot of background
about this synagogue you have to understand. You remember,
the northern tribes were the first to apostate. After the
split of Israel, after Solomon’s reign, and because of his sin,
one son took the northern tribes, 11 of them, and another son took
over the kingship of the southern tribes, Judah. Judah, if you’re
reading through your Old Testament, was generally faithful. You’ll
hear about a king who heard the book of the law, who repented
of Israel’s sin and kept the book of the law. But often when
we read about the northern tribes, we read about wicked kings, wicked
kings and their wives who did what was evil in the sight of
God. They did as they pleased and God was unhappy with them.
And so first, the northern tribes were exiled by Assyria. So Jesus
is, in a sense, coming to his hometown. Yes, where he grew
up. But there has been decades, there have been centuries of
indifference towards Yahweh. And we understand it because
we know who Jesus is, that in the synagogue at Nazareth that
day stands Yahweh himself. Jesus is standing in the presence
of the people of Israel, the northern tribes. And he’s entered
into a dead church. He’s entered into a church that
is full of Pharisees. It’s full of teachers of the
law. It’s full of scribes. It is full of cold hearted people
who’ve been sitting in their pew for decades. And he’s come
to read and preach the word of God. And guess what? They are
not going to like it. But Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit,
in the midst of his new ministry, he enters this synagogue. And the word of God is read in
that church sequentially. And maybe you’ve bumped into
churches, you’ve seen churches that we might call liberal or
dead churches where the word of God is still read. And friends,
we have to understand that wherever the word of God is read, there
is light. It may be poorly explained. It
may be preached. It may be pushed away as something
other than the word of God. But when the word of God is heard,
it is glorious. It is heavenly. Yet Jesus here
enters the church, the synagogue, as was his habit. It was his
custom to read, preach the word of God. We have something in
our shorter catechism. You can find it on page 974 in
your hymnal. It’s from the Shorter Catechism,
Question 89. It says, How is the Word made effectual to salvation? It says, The Spirit of God makes
the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual
or effective, it works, means of convincing and converting
sinners and of building them up in holiness and comfort through
faith unto salvation. We believe much about the reading
and preaching of the Word. And then it says in question
90, how is the word to be read and heard that it may become
effectual or that it may work to salvation? That the word of
God may be effectual to salvation, we must attend to it with diligence,
with preparation, with prayer. We must receive it with faith
and love, lay it up in our hearts and put it into practice in our
lives. So, dear friends, Jesus here
is showing us that not only the reading, but especially the preaching,
the explanation, the exhortation of the word of God is something
that even he himself in his earthly life gave attention to. Well,
Jesus has entered this synagogue and we see the sovereignty of
God in the ministry of his word. As it just happens, he’s going
to read Isaiah 61. It’s the it’s the passage about himself. And,
you know, sometimes we have sermons from different places in life.
We from the Reformation believe what’s called the Lectio Continua.
We pick a book of the Bible and we preach our way through it
verse by verse. And so the goal of a man’s ministry,
the goal of a church’s ministry is to preach through the Bible
over and over and over. And you see over time, God’s
grace and work. as that is done in the life of
the church. Every passage of scripture is
preached. Every passage is read. Every
passage is explained. The hard ones aren’t put to the
side. The difficult ones aren’t shut away in a closet. You’ve
ever been in church maybe and The word of God was read and
it was preached in such a way. And you said to yourself as you
walked home or as you went home that day, the word of God that
was preached and read and explained today was just what I needed.
It was as if the Holy Spirit tailor made his word for me. And friends, that’s what God’s
word does for us. When we faithfully sit under
it, when we faithfully preach it and proclaim it and allow
for that ministry to take place, it does its work wonderfully.
And here in Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 4, we see that put on display
for us so wonderfully. God knows what is needed in our
lives. He knows our sins, our idolatries.
He knows our hardships. He knows our ups and our downs,
our fears, our losses, and our crosses. And His Word, when it
is faithfully read, explained, and preached, and proclaimed,
is generally tailor-made for our lives. And so Jesus enters
the synagogue on what seemed to be an ordinary day. And he
picks up the scroll. He picks up the book of the law.
He picks up the Bible. And he reads verses 18 and 19
in your gospel of Luke, where it says, the spirit of the Lord
is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty
to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set
at liberty those who are oppressed. and to proclaim the year of the
Lord’s favor. Some of you maybe understand
a little young people jargon. Jesus essentially walks in, picks
up the Bible, reads it and says, by the way, this is about me
and my ministry. And then he drops the microphone,
right? Some of you newfangled younger
people, you know about that. Maybe you saw our last president
do that when he left office. It just means I’m done here.
I’m successful. What I have said, what I have
set out to accomplish is now done. And you can imagine the
boldness of Jesus Christ to say, Isaiah, the prophet was speaking
about me. Here I am. This is now fulfilled
in your presence. There’s a couple of things we
want to take notice of from this passage today. The first is that
we want to see the nature of Jesus’ ministry. The nature of
Jesus’ ministry is explained very well as Jesus speaks verses
18 and 19 in quotes from Isaiah 61 and a little from Isaiah chapter
58. You know, the people of Israel
have just been singing, as we do every Christmas during Advent,
come thou long expected Jesus born to set by people free. Now, these Israelites thought
Jesus was going to come set them free from Rome, set them free
from being governed by an outside leader, a Caesar, an empire. They wanted to be Israel again. They wanted the good old days
of King David and King Solomon. They wanted the good old days
of being a kingdom to which everyone around the world came to visit
and look at and wonder at. They wanted visits from the Queen
of Sheba again. They wanted to be the great nation
that everyone was speaking about and coming to look in on. Set us free from Rome. Set us
free from political weakness. Give us again our kingdom. But
Jesus was not coming to be a political king. He was coming to be a spiritual
king. He was coming as the Messiah. And the ministry of the Messiah
was not what they expected, but it is what had been promised. Dear friends, sometimes we misunderstand
the message in the ministry of Jesus. If you look around our
American culture, the American church has become one of two
things. If it’s not still centered on
the Bible, it’s become on the left hand side, a place of social
activism. And many good things are done
in the name of Christ, except proclaiming freedom from sin.
Or on the other hand, maybe on the right side, we might see
that the church has become a place of moralistic, therapeutic deism,
where we just tell people, you want to be good, you want to
feel good. And if you need God, he is there. And when you need
him, just reach out and touch him. Maybe like the old AT&T
commercials. He’s there. Just reach out and
touch him. But Jesus’ ministry is way more
radical than that. He says, I have come to proclaim
good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to proclaim
recovering sight to the blind, to proclaim freedom for those
who are captives, who are oppressed and need to be set free. He has
come to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And you can
look at these words and say, well, he has come to be a God
of social justice. He has come to be a God of fixing
what’s broken with the world. But friends, we have to understand
it from the top down. Jesus has come to set free those
who are captive in sin. He’s come to set free people
who are in Satan’s prison. He has come to set people free
who are not at liberty, who are blind and cannot see the gospel
and their own sin. He has come to set free those
who are oppressed by Satan and who are tormented utterly by
his ways and his darkness. And he has come to proclaim that
in me, in Christ, in the Messiah, there is forgiveness of sins.
Jesus has come as not as Moses, but as a greater Moses who will
lead the people of Israel out of a greater exodus, not from
the tyranny of Pharaoh and bondage to the hammer and the chisel.
But those who are in bondage to sin and a worse taskmaster
than Pharaoh, even Satan himself, and they must respond in faith.
But secondly, I want us to see what is their response. Is it
a response of faith or is it a response of wrath? So in this
passage, we see Jesus’ ministry, but we also see the people’s
response. Good preachers know their people.
Good preachers know their people. And when they preach to their
people, they know where God’s word most needs to land. And Jesus knows his congregation
this day in the synagogue in Nazareth. He knows that they
are full of pride. I’m of Israel. I’m a child of
Abraham. He knows of their prejudices. This is Joseph’s kid. This is
a kid with sawdust in his hair. Who is he to preach to us like
this? He knows of their apathy and
their generational apathy that for years, for centuries, they
have heard the voice of God and cast it to the side. And so he
reads the word of God and he sits down to explain it. And
the text tells us that he reads the Bible. They’re OK with that.
I mean, who wants to argue with God speaking? Their eyes were
fixed on him. They spoke well of him. They
marveled the passage says. And we’re okay with the Bible
being read, aren’t we? We can hear the Bible read and
say, this is the voice of God. He’s way up there. This is not
the voice of man. This is the voice of God. And
he loves me unconditionally. This is the voice of God. And
he would never be mean to me. He would never apply it the way
that the preacher does. And so the words of God are gracious
in their ears. But as Jesus sits down to explain
the word of God to these people, to his fellow kinsmen, the people
of his town, and he says to them, this passage I read in your hearing,
this Isaiah 61 is about me and the ministry of my father. He
makes four jabs at them, if you will. He goes from, how do we
say it? He goes from preaching to meddling
and he makes four jabs at them and he speaks a real word about
their hearts. He says, some of you will say
to me, physician, heal yourself. You’ve heard that I’ve done some
miracles in some other places. Do some miracles. We want to
see miracle man, Jesus. We want to see the fun stuff.
We wanna see a leper lose his spots, or a lame man get his
legs, or we want to see a woman who’s been sick for a long time
get healed. We’ve heard about it, do it in
our presence. And Jesus says, you’re not gonna see that today.
And then he brings up how a prophet is not respected in his own hometown. And then he brings up Elijah’s
ministry to widows and Elisha’s ministry to lepers. And he says
to them, in Israel, there were lepers. In Israel, there were
widows. And guess what Elijah and Elisha
did? They didn’t minister to them. They went outside Israel. And guess who got healed of leprosy? Naaman, the king of Syria. Yeah, and I know you don’t like
him. I know your prejudice. I know your pride. I know your
hatred towards those outsiders. And yes, God did not heal any
of your ancestors, but he healed Naaman, the Syrian, the king,
when he washed in the river. and came clean. But none of your
lepers did he clean. And then he speaks of Elisha
and says, there were a lot of widows, but the widow of Zarephath up
in Sidon, up in the north. Yeah, I know you hate the Sidonites,
but that’s who I healed because guess what? They did not reject
Elijah and Elijah. And what Jesus is saying to this
people who have gathered in the synagogue to go through the motions
of church Is he saying, I’m a prophet just like Elijah. I’m a prophet
just like Elisha. And there in front of me are
many of you who are sick and need to be healed. You’re captives. You need to be set free. You’re
blind and you need sight. And he’s not just speaking physically,
he’s speaking spiritually. You need God. You need Yahweh. You need salvation. And he is
proclaiming it before them. But he’s also saying, I’m going
to serve the Gentiles just like Elisha did. I’m going to go preach
to the nations just as Elisha did. Because guess what? You’re
religious. You’re apathetic. You’re full
of pride. And I will preach to you, but
I will move on and preach to those who will hear. I won’t feed your widows. I won’t
hear or heal your lepers, Jesus is all of a sudden gone from
favor. What does the text tell us? They
had wrath. They were angry with Jesus. Jesus will not be popular. This
foreshadows his future suffering ministry, where ultimately, though
he will not be thrown off the crown of the hill this day, he
will be nailed to a cross. And he will die. But he’s laid the axe to the
root. He said to the people of Israel, you’re keeping up appearances,
you’re showing up, you’re in church, you’re going through
the motions, you’re keeping up the rituals. But I’m here today
to break up appearances and to say that without God, you are
nothing. Without Jesus, you have no hope
of salvation. He spoke to them the word of
God, and he said today in your hearing, today in your hearing,
These words are being fulfilled. This is a moment of great hope. This is a great turning point
for Israel. In their presence is Jesus, the eternal son of
God, Messiah, who has been anointed to proclaim a gospel message. You know, a lot of folks today
on Sunday afternoon, they’ll be talking about the wonderful
World Series. They’ll be talking about that
game Friday night that went till 3.30 in the morning, 18 innings,
two games in one. They’ll be talking about last
night’s game, the Boston Red Sox, who came down from four
points and won by five. They’ll be talking about all
kinds of things. But you know, in a lot of dinner tables today, people will
be having roast preacher for lunch. And that’s what happened
here in Luke chapter four. They didn’t like what Jesus said.
Can you imagine that? You have Jesus preaching in your
church and you don’t like what he says. Goodness gracious. But
that’s what’s taking place. So they’re going to have roast
preacher for lunch that day. And they have this little rump
meeting is where want to do in the church. And look at verse
28. Verse 28 says, when they heard
these things all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. What do we like to hear about
a church? Oh, they’re growing. They got
a great preacher. He’s dynamic. He tells stories. And, you know,
he’s he’s he’s this and he’s that. We don’t want to hear that
the whole congregation was filled with wrath because they were
pricked to the heart that they did not yet believe in the gospel.
We don’t want to hear that. We want to hear the good stuff,
the big stuff and the glamorous. But verse 28 tells us their response. They were filled with wrath. Verse 29 says they rose up, they
drove him out of the town. And they brought him to the brow
of the hill so that they could throw him down the cliff. Dear
friends, Jesus comes and he offers good news. And he offers good
news that demands a response. And the preferred response is
faith, faith to believe that you’re a sinner, faith to believe
Jesus is a savior, faith to believe that if you put your faith and
hope and trust in Jesus, that he can set you at liberty from
your captivity to Satan and your bondage to sin. Coming to Jesus
is very costly. It may upset everything that
you have done in life. It may upset your appearances.
It may upset your habits. It may upset your relationships.
It may upset your business. It may upset every single thing
that you hold dearly. But that’s what the gospel has
always done. It has made some angry, but it has brought hope
and life and everlasting joy to others. What is your response? when you hear the gospel. Let’s
pray together. Our Lord and God in our ears
this day, your gospel has been read, it has been proclaimed,
it has been explained. Even Jesus has been in our presence
for when the word of God is faithfully read and preached, it is not
the voice of man, but it is the very voice of God. And so we
want to recognize that we have heard the voice of Jesus and
he has said, come unto me and rest, be at peace, be at freedom,
be at liberty. Oh Lord, let us not be filled
with wrath, but with joy. For nothing can save us, not
the work of our hands, not the traditions we have kept, not
our perfect attendance, not the money in our bank account, not
the good deeds we have done. Not a thing can bring us to God
except the person, the work, the obedience, the death, the
sacrifice. Everything that Jesus is, that
is the only thing. And so let us, by faith, lay
hold of his promises and his grace so that we can live not
as children of wrath, but as children of joy and peace. Help us in this. We do ask and
pray in the name of Jesus. Amen. ♪ Christ was the world we see ♪
♪ The world to Christ we bring ♪ ♪ We love Him still ♪ ♪ The
poor and weak and the poor ♪ ♪ The faint and the poor ♪ ♪ In sick
and sorrow ♪ ♪ Christ the Lord ♪ The world to God we bring, with
perfect prayer. The wayward and the lost, our
guest is at his door. We’ll pass the world to share,
we’ll pass it on to them, we’ll pass it on to them, we’ll pass it on
to them. ♪ Christ, Lord, on earth we sing
♪ ♪ The world to Christ we bring ♪ ♪ With joyful song ♪ ♪ The heaven-born Son of God ♪ ♪ Revealed from
heaven’s height ♪ ♪ Inside the Father we wait ♪ Look up and now receive God’s
blessing as you go to serve him. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of his Holy
Spirit be with and remain among you all. Go in peace.