Luke 24:44-49
Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of God’s Word to Luke chapter 24. Our reading
today will be verses 44 through 49. Luke 24 verses 44 through
49. Next week we’ll end our series
in Luke, but we will be not only at the end of Luke, but at the
beginning of Acts. where we see Jesus ascension into heaven and
sending his apostles into the world. Before we read God’s word,
let’s look to him in prayer. Pray with me. Lord, you have
said that your word will go out of your mouth and it will not
return to you empty, but it shall accomplish that which you purpose
and shall succeed in the thing for which you sent it. And so
that’s all we ask now. May your word accomplish its
holy ends this hour in our church, in our minds, in our hearts,
and in each of our lives. We pray this in the name of Jesus.
Amen. Luke chapter 24, beginning at
verse 44. Then Jesus said to them, these
are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the
prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened
their minds to understand the scriptures. And he said to them,
thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third
day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of
sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning
from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things
and behold, I am sending the promise of my father upon you,
but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on
high. Amen. The word of the living
God, please be seated. Some of you may have a military
background where you went off to boot camp and for six or eight
weeks or so, you learn the basics, right? They call it basic training.
You learn the basics of how to be in shape, how to persevere,
how to use a weapon, how to wage war, how to protect your life
or the life of your your comrades, your buddies, those sorts of
things. Well, we find Jesus and his disciples
in a sort of six week boot camp. Jesus has been raised from the
dead. And so for six weeks until his
ascension and until Pentecost, the spirit coming upon the church. Jesus spends this time with his
disciples. He says to them, you will be
my witnesses from Jerusalem to Judea through Samaria and to
the ends of the earth. And so we see in our passage
today, Jesus bootcamp and his bootcamp includes Bible school,
It includes a little brain operation, and it includes the promise of
power, but also it includes a sending of these apostles to proclaim
repentance and forgiveness of sins to the ends of the earth. And so we want to think for a
moment or two today about Jesus’ boot camp. And we first want
to look at Jesus bootcamp Bible school. Now, when we think of
Bible school, we think of a week in the summer. We think of crafts
and snacks and Bible study and songs and skits. But do we think
of the gift of redemption? Do we think of the mission of
Jesus? He seeks and saves the lost. And that’s the message, that’s
the content of Jesus’ Bible school. The mission of the church, which
Jesus has established on earth, is serious business, and it must
be done in God’s ways. And so Jesus takes his disciples
to Bible school bootcamp and he shows them, he shows his disciples
what the entirety of the scriptures means to the message of redemption
that they will preach and proclaim in the world as sent ones in
the coming days. Look with me, if you will, at
verse 44, Jesus said to them, these are my words, that I spoke
to you while I was still with you, that everything written
about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms must
be fulfilled. Now at this point in time in
history, the Bible consisted of those three sections, the
law, which would have been the five books of Moses, the writings
and the Psalms. And so you basically had the
Old Testament, And isn’t it interesting? You hear people today say, I’m
a New Testament Christian. Well, how did the New Testament
faith come about? It came about through the Old
Testament. What did Jesus say to them? Look,
you got Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, you got Acts and
Romans and first and second Corinthians and Galatians and Ephesians,
Philippians and Colossians, all the way through Revelation. You
got the New Testament, folks. You take that into the world
and you proclaim Jesus. No, he says, you’re going to
proclaim Jesus through the Old Testament. And so in Jesus’ boot
camp Bible school, he shows them that in the law of Moses, in
the writings of the Old Testament, yes, those boring books that
you suffer through as you read your Bible through in those yearly
Bible programs, Jesus is there. And in the Psalms, just a quick
example of each. Where is Jesus in the law? Well, Jesus is there on Mount
Moriah when Abraham by faith is about to plunge his knife
into the body of his own son, his only son, Isaac, because
he believes as the book of Hebrews tells us that God can raise his
only son, the child of promise from the dead and can continue
his work of redemption. And so Abraham by faith believes
that God will provide and some Two thousand, three thousand
years later, on the mountain, on that mountain of Moriah, God
does not pull a ram from the thicket. And sacrifice that lamb
for the sins of people, but he sacrifices his own son, the Lord
Jesus Christ, and so is Jesus in the law, he’s right there,
yes, in Genesis. Jesus, according to Hebrews,
is the point of the whole sacrificial system. Without the shedding
of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. We’ve seen in recent
weeks in the writings, Jesus’s wisdom. Jesus is the center of
the writings of the scripture. He is the center of the psalm,
Psalm 16, Psalm 22, Psalm 122 all through Jesus is the center
of the scriptures and so in Jesus boot camp Bible school for his
disciples He said he’s saying to them showing to them everything
in the law and the writings and the prophets is about me and
it must be fulfilled and it now has been the Son of Man suffered
and and was raised from the dead. And so, dear brothers and sisters,
we need to see that the whole of Jesus’ message during his
ministry to his disciples along the way up until the cross was
him saying, look, there I am. Let’s read some more Old Testament.
There I am again. Let’s read more. There I am again.
They didn’t get it. And so his job in this bootcamp
Bible school is to say, here I am in the scriptures. It’s
what I told you, but now see it plainly for it will be your
job to go preach and proclaim this to the dark and dying world. The whole of Jesus’ message is
now true. The gospels, the work of the
apostle Paul, the book of Hebrews, all the way through Revelation,
they now affirm what Jesus’ life and ministry was all about. A little something for us. We
need to go to Bible school, do we not? How many of us read our
Bibles? How many of us can’t wait to
dig into it and know from beginning to end, year by year, week by
week, day by day, who God is and what he’s done in the scriptures?
We ought to, in some way, shape, or form, Do something that suits
our personality, something that suits our mental ability, something
that suits our daily routine. We ought to somehow, someway,
systematically get through the Bible. For some of you it’s in
a year, maybe two years, three years. Maybe others it’s over
and over in your lifetime, but get familiar with the scripture.
Jesus’ boot camp Bible school was important for his disciples.
But it’s important for us. It’s one of the blessings we
have in this church. We have opportunity Sunday school
Sunday morning worship with a sermon Sunday evening service with a
sermon Wednesday night Bible study. different Bible studies
we have periodically for the men, the ladies, we have plenty
of opportunity in addition to listening and reading something
in our own to be students of the word. And so let me commend
that practice and that discipline to you. Well, Jesus, secondly,
in his boot camp with his disciples, not only takes them to Bible
school, but he does a brain operation. He does a brain operation on
the disciples. Now, remember when Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden sinned against God, they lost a lot
of things. They lost fellowship with God.
They were thrown out of the garden, his presence. They lost their
original righteousness. They were now sinners. Their
bodies would now decay. They would not live forever in
perfect bodies. They would die. The wages of
sin is death. But one of the things we very
often don’t think of that they lost, they lost their minds.
We call this in theology the noetic effects of the fall. The noetic effects just simply
is a connection to the Greek word for mind, nous. But our
minds were affected. We say in the fall of man, we
are now radically corrupted. We are corrupted in every part
of our being. And so the apostle Paul says
in Romans 12, be transformed. And you can fill in the blank,
I know. by the renewal of your minds. And so Jesus here does
a brain operation because he knows the effects of the fall
keep them from understanding what he is trying to teach them.
If you were to look at first Corinthians chapter two, you’ll
find a wonderful theology and practical application of this.
The Apostle Paul is saying to the Corinthian church, you know,
you like these preachers that use big words. You like these
preachers that tickle your ears. And we come to you and simply
preach the foolishness of the gospel. And he says, if you are
a Christian, you understand what we’re saying. But he says very
importantly in first Corinthians chapter two, the man without
the spirit does not understand the things of the spirit. In fact, he says to those who
are unsaved in that context, you without the spirit crucified
our Lord. Now, think back to what we’ve
learned recently. Would all of the church officials at Jerusalem
have crucified our Lord if they had been full of the spirit and
understood the scriptures of the law and the writings and
the prophets? Absolutely not. They would have
understood he is Messiah. He is king of Israel. He is savior.
But they were without the spirit and they crucified our Lord.
And so when we who are New creations in Jesus Christ. We are born
again, as Jesus tells Nicodemus. We receive the spirit of God,
not the spirit of the world, but we receive the spirit of
God that we might understand freely the scriptures. Let me say this a different way,
because this is a very important concept for us to understand
as Christians. If you are a Christian and you
have been born again by Jesus, born again by the Holy Spirit,
God is beginning to do that brain operation in your life. He is
beginning to roll back the darkness and let you have understanding
of spiritual things, of biblical things, of eternal things. And
so unless you are saved, unless you are converted, unless you
are born again, you don’t understand these things. It’s why every
Sunday when you leave your driveway for church, And all the neighbor’s
cars are still there. And what do they think of you?
There goes that wacky neighbor again, off to church. You know,
religion is a crutch. Religion is the opiate of the
masses. Religion is whatever you fill in the blank. You understand
something they don’t. You understand the truth of God’s
word because the spirit has opened your eyes to see it. and has not opened their eyes
to see it. And you pray that God might perhaps
give them new life as well. But Jesus performs here a brain
operation. Look at verse 45. He says it
so plainly. Then he opened their minds to
understand the scriptures. And it goes on to speak of what
he says to them. Now take a look back at verse
31. The two disciples on the road
to Emmaus did not know that it was Jesus who was with them.
But when he sits down that evening with them at supper and he broke
bread and he blessed it and he gave it to them, it says in verse
31, and their eyes were opened and they recognized him. Friend,
do you recognize God in his word speaking to you? Every Sunday,
we do lots of things in church. One of the things we do a lot
of is praying. And just as soon as we finish the pastoral prayer
and I say, we sing the doxology and I say, stand and open your
Bibles to whatever the passage of the day is. And I say, let’s
stop and pray. What do we pray? We pray a prayer of illumination.
Lord, open our eyes that we might see. Unstop our ears that we
might hear. Soften our hearts that we might
be willing to receive your word. Make our hands, our feet willing
and ready to go and live for you. Friends, if you are living
in darkness, you care not about the things of God, nor are you
able to accomplish. the things he wants his people
to accomplish. And so God gives to his disciples. He gives to us this brain operation. He shows us clearly himself in
the scriptures. And to use a phrase from the
two disciples on the road to Emmaus, when they told the other
disciples, Jesus is alive. We were with him. We walked with
him. We ate supper with him. They
said, we’re not our hearts burning within us. Tell you a common
experience I have during the week. I sit over here down the
hall in my study. It’s pretty quiet over here.
Not a lot goes on. The phone doesn’t ring too often.
Not too many people come by. But one of the things I get to
do is sit and read and study. And every week for a morning
sermon, a night sermon, a Wednesday study, whatever, there has to
be what I call the aha moment. And the aha moment is where I
get it. I get what the Bible is saying,
I get what God is teaching, I get what it means for the Christian,
and then I get to come say it back to you. And you may see
some weeks where, boy, he’s just getting through a Sunday. And
you may see some weeks where I’m gonna come flying over this
thing, and maybe I go on a little long, or I can’t wait to say
something to you. Well, I’m no good if it wasn’t
any good to me. That’s the reality of the scriptures.
It is that the spirit does his work in my life, but also in
yours. As we study the word of God together,
we need a brain operation. We need burning hearts and no
longer be slow of heart. So in Jesus bootcamp, there’s
Bible school. There’s the brain operation.
There’s a third element and it’s the promise of power. It’s the
promise of power. And I want us to think back to
the beginning of Luke. We’ve been in our study of Luke for
about three years now. And at the very beginning of
Luke, we recognize that there for Israel was a stretch of darkness. Remember Isaiah, the people who
walked in darkness on them in the person of Jesus being born,
a light has shown. And so darkness covers the people
of God. Jesus, God has been silent for
400 years. It’s been four centuries since
a prophet has spoken. We read in the beginning of Luke
of the birth narratives of Jesus, the birth narrative of John the
Baptist, the last two prophets. And we see the response of the
devout people of the day. They are in great joy and adoration
to God for redeeming his people through the ministry of John
the Baptist and through Jesus. And we, we get through Jesus
boyhood. We, we get to all of a sudden about 30 years of age
where we haven’t heard about Jesus in quite a while since
he was in the temple, maybe as a young man, impressing the teachers,
but we get to 30 year old Jesus as public ministry. And what’s
the first thing we see? He’s in the wilderness. He’s
carried out there by the Holy Spirit, where Satan tempts him
after 40 days, 40 nights, no food. And he tempts Jesus. I’ll give you the kingdoms of
the world. Toss yourself off this temple. Call your angels.
Let them get you. You’re hungry. Turn these stones
into bread. And every time Jesus says, by the word of God, no,
thank you. By the word of God, I’ll do it
God’s way. By the word of God, my kingdom is of a different
world. And so he tells Satan to buzz off. And then immediately
in the next verse, it says, and Jesus went out to do ministry
by the power of the Holy Spirit. Friends, even Jesus needed the
power of the spirit. for his earthly ministry. And
so as he sends his disciples into the world, as he sends us,
the church, into the world to do ministry, we don’t do it in
our own strength. No, we do it with the power of
the Holy Spirit. And so Jesus’ ministry to turn
back the darkness, our ministry as a church to turn back the
darkness, needs the power of the Spirit. And so here we find
in Jesus’ bootcamp the promise of power. The second Adam has
stood up to Satan, He’s used the Bible to push away temptation
and he begins his ministry in the power of the Holy Spirit.
His disciples will begin their ministry in the power of the
Holy Spirit. And let me say to you, the church in 2021, the
power of the Holy Spirit is all. that will accomplish our ends.
We can gimmick it. We can advertise it. We can make
it cute. We can make it fun. We can make
it palatable to the 21st century America. And unless the spirit
works through his word, it will be to no avail. And Jesus promises
these disciples who will be heralds of the kingdom. You’ll go into
the world, but it will be under the power of the Holy Spirit.
Just think ahead a few chapters into the book of Acts. Jesus,
or I’m sorry, Peter, the new main figure says to a beggar,
silver and gold have I none, but in the name of Jesus, rise
up and walk. And they continue on in their
ministry, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the gospel.
And it’s through the power of the Holy Spirit. that the work
of the gospel goes to the ends of the earth. Dear friends, that’s
that simple for the life of the church. It’s word and spirit,
word and spirit, word and spirit. No 21st century gimmick can get
it done. Simply word and spirit. And there’s
a there’s a goal here. There’s an end to Jesus boot
camp. His bootcamp, which includes
Bible school, it includes a brain operation, it includes power
from on high. It’s for this final thing we
want to think a minute or two on today. And that’s the ministry
of proclamation. In my office, thumbtack to the
edge of the shelf, I have an old Dennis the Menace cartoon.
Some of y’all remember when the funny papers were good. Dennis
the Menace is standing at the back of the church door. He’s
with his dad, and there’s the preacher. And he says to the
preacher, you must have been a really good swimmer. Preacher’s
probably wondering, what’s this mean? He says, yep, my dad says
you were really long-winded today. Why do we suffer through preaching? Why do we suffer through preaching?
Well, it’s necessary. As you see through this final
message of Jesus to his disciples before he blesses them and ascends
to heaven, he says, it’s about the scripture. And it’s about
the Christ of the scripture. And it’s necessary for lives
to be saved from sin. And it’s necessary for saints
to be built up in their faith for preaching. My first church
I served in down in Mecklenburg County, I caught this little
phrase from some of the older folks in the congregation. Our
church had been started, I think, in the 1850s as a preaching station. It became a full-on church as
the little town grew. And by the early 1920s, had a
sanctuary. And then in the 50s or 60s, they
built a bigger one to hold more people. But I noticed something
about the older folks in the congregation. They said, are
you going to preaching? After Sunday school, they referred
to the service not as a worship service, but as a preaching service. And I thought that was an interesting
phrase. Why do we suffer through preaching? Well, it accomplishes
two things. It saves sinners and it builds
up saints in their faith. The minister is set apart vocationally
to be a minister of the word and sacrament. His job, his call
is to labor in the word and to preach. Now, the preach word
here in the New Testament is a word unique to preaching only. Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware
of this. You’ve probably heard me say
it a time or two. Preaching is a specific activity in the New
Testament. It differs from teaching. It
differs from imparting knowledge. It is a preaching, proclaiming,
heralding word. And in fact, it is one of 33
New Testament verbs on the subject. Now think about that for a moment.
God and his sovereignty and the use of the Roman language or
the Greek language of Rome has given us 33 verbs in the Bible,
different verbs. for preaching and proclaiming
and exhorting and heralding and teaching. And the work of preaching,
which sometimes can be forgotten, is to move God’s people in a
direction, to move them into holiness, to motivate them to
godliness, to persuade them to forsake their sins and to follow
Jesus. So why do we suffer through preaching? because it saves our souls and
it builds up saints. Every moment of our worship service
is so Bible-filled that you can’t say, unless you don’t have the
spirit or you’re pretty thick-headed, you can’t say, I did not hear
God’s word today. Some of you know Darren Stone,
our friend who preaches when I’m away. He put out on Facebook
a couple of weeks ago, and one of you sent it to me, that he
was in church out in California And he says, in the entirety
of the service, there was very little prayer. There was very
little, if any, mention of Jesus. And there was very little use
of the Bible. Very little use of the Bible in the songs and
in the prayers and in the language of those who led that service.
You won’t find that here. We want the Bible to be front
and center with Jesus all over the pages of our bulletin and
the hymns and the things that we do. Think with me about the
ministry of proclamation. There’s two commands Jesus gives. He wants them to preach repentance
and forgiveness. Two very critical words. Repentance
is a word that simply means we turn from our sin to God. You
men who don’t like maps, you’re going the wrong direction. And
what does your wife say? Turn around, honey. That’s what
repentance is. It’s turning around. You’re going
north and should be going south. Repentance is turning from the
wrong direction to the right direction, turning from sin to
God. And without repentance, you cannot
be saved, Jesus says to his disciples, unless you repent, you likewise
will perish. Repentance is a gift of grace.
God, by his word, persuades you that your sin is wrong. that
your sin is an affront to his character. He persuades you by
his word and by his spirit that unless you turn from sin to God,
your days are numbered. And so repentance is a change
of mind. We grieve over our sin. We hate
our sin. We see the danger of our sin,
the filth of our sin. We want to forsake it and endeavor
to live the Christian life. That’s what we call conversion,
being born again. And God promises if we repent,
if we turn from our sins, he will forgive us. He will release
us. He will pardon us. He will cancel
our debt and give us relief. How does he do that? Well, that’s
what Jesus has been teaching his disciples all along. The
scriptures say about me that I must suffer and die. Why must
Jesus suffer and die? Well, without the shedding of
blood, there is no forgiveness of sins and all the blood of
the bulls and beast on Jewish altar slain could not pay for
our sins. And it took the death of death.
and the death of Jesus Christ to pay for our sins. And dear
friends, what a happy thing to announce and to proclaim that
when you come to faith in Jesus, we use that fancy word, he justifies
us, a legal term. He sees us just as if we’ve never
sinned, but just as if we’ve always obeyed. What a message
for the apostles to proclaim. What a message for you to believe. But as you go out these doors
in this dark and dying world, you read the news, see the headlines,
that is the only message of hope that will give this world what
it needs. We can social justice it, we
can elect the right people, we can throw money at a program,
we can do character education, we can do all the things that
we’ve tried and tried, but unless people hear repentance, and forgiveness
by the word through the spirit and respond in faith. They live
a hopeless life, but thanks be to God that he has proclaimed
it to us and we proclaim it week by week and he strengthens our
faith. Pray with me. Our Lord, we pray
that the words we have heard just now would burn within our
hearts and that our minds would pursue the knowledge of God through
the scriptures, and that we would see Jesus’ name on every page
of the holy scriptures, and see that you love us with a love
that will never let us go, and we would proclaim that love to
our families, to our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, to
people in the marketplace, so that the world may have hope
through salvation in Jesus Christ. This we ask and pray in his name,
amen. We want to respond to God’s goodness,
affirming what we believe by singing, your hand, oh God, has
guided. So turn to 416 and we’ll stand
and sing together.