Luke 2:21-40
Please turn in your copies of
the Word of God to the Gospel of Luke, to chapter 2. We want
to pick up our reading in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 2, at verse 39
and 40, and then pick up with the passage listed in your bulletin
today, which is verses 41 through 52. You’ll notice as you look
at Luke chapter two, verse 40, and then also verse 52, that
both speak about Jesus growing physically, spiritually, and
in favor with God. And so we want to keep that in
mind as we read what is between those two verses in particular,
this particular instance of Jesus being lost, as it were, and then
being found in his father’s house. Let us hear God’s word together
beginning at Luke 2 chapter 39. And when they had performed everything
according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to
their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew and became
strong and filled with wisdom and the favor of God was upon
him. Now, his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast
of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old,
they went up according to the custom. And when the feast was
ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in
Jerusalem and his parents did not know it. But supposing him
to be with the group, they went a day’s journey. But then they
began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances.
And when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem searching
for him. After three days, they found
him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them
and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed
at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents
saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, son,
why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have
been searching for you in great distress. And Jesus said to them,
why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must
be in my father’s house? And they did not understand the
saying which he spoke to them. And he went down with them and
came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. And his mother treasured
up all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom
and in stature and in favor with God and man. Pray with me. Our Lord, we give you thanks
that in your word you teach us who we are and who you are. We’re grateful that in your word
you teach us what we need and what you offer. And we are so
grateful that you offer Jesus Christ his obedience, his sacrifice
and all the gifts of the spirit in the church. You offer them
to us. Lord, this is such a great gift, but very often our hearts
and our affections, our wills and our desires are elsewhere
for the world offers us so much. Many voices call for our attention. And so we ask now that in these
few moments that you would cause our hearts and our minds to be
quiet, that you would open our ears, open our eyes. May we behold
wonderful things from your glorious scripture. May it be for our
good and for your glory. And we pray it in the name of
Christ. Amen. Yesterday we attended, our family
did a birthday party, a one-year-old birthday party, and hanging on
a string in the dining room were pictures of this one-year-old’s
progress over this one vast Year of life. There was a picture
from every single month and you could see as you studied the
pictures of this little fella that over time he grew in size.
His facial features that we have come to recognize more fully
developed each month and that different things took place over
the time of his growth. And you can imagine that as you
were to look at and study pictures like this over year one and year
two and year three and year four, even up to year 12, that you
would see quite a bit of development just in the physical appearance
of a child. But as parents, you. grow with
your children, you walk with your children, you see them not
only in how they grow physically, but how they grow spiritually
and mentally. And you see what their gifts
are as they grow older and desire to serve God in this. world. Nowadays, when a child grows
up, we can share in the experience. A child who is growing up even
halfway around the world, across the world, we can share in their
growing up experiences through photo sharing and emails and
social media. We can even take a video of a
child and send it via the internet. We’re in our household transferring
some of our old VHS tapes to DVD. We’re old enough to have
been married on VHS. We’re old enough to have raised
our children at least pre-iPhone. And some of those videos needed
to be transferred. And so we look at these things.
We look at the progress that our children have made. And we
can experience it minute by minute, moment by moment, even halfway
around the world. Now, can’t you imagine? Put on
your imagination caps for just a moment that Luke, when doing
the research for his gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, imagine
that he goes and visits Mary, which is very likely. And in
his research, he sits with Mary and she remembers raising Jesus. Now, this visit, if it did indeed
take place, would have been decades after the death and resurrection
and ascension of Jesus. But she remembers raising him. She remembers what it was like.
And of all the stories that could be put in the gospels, she picks,
no, the Holy Spirit chooses this one account. It’s the one story
from the birth narratives of Jesus, his early days. Skip 12 years and we get this
one. And then you skip another 18 and you get to Jesus about
the age of 30. This is the one memory, the one
vignette, the one story that we have of Jesus’ childhood. And it’s a significant one. And
it’s the one story that by God’s grace, by the working of the
Holy Spirit through the pen of Luke, his research and his study
and his care and his writing. This is the one story that we
do have. And I want us to take notice
of this account of the life of Jesus and learn a couple of things
about him that I think are significant in answering the big question
that these stories really answer for us. Who is Jesus? Not who
was Jesus, who is Jesus. And so the first thing we want
to consider from this passage is that Jesus was a regular kid. He was a regular kid. And we
could speculate, we could generalize, we could fantasize. Probably
we ought to be careful. We might end up in heresy and
end up maybe being a little too fanciful, but we can think about
what life for Jesus must have been like. It was probably about
like any other Jewish boy growing up in the ancient near East.
And we wonder, did he grow up hanging around the carpentry
shop? We wonder, did he say a swear word when he hit his thumb with
a hammer? Of course, he didn’t. He was sinless. But we think
like that, don’t we? We want to know what was life
for Jesus like? Well, he was just a regular kid.
He was a regular kid. And in our theology, when we
speak of the humanity of Jesus, we speak of the eternal son of
God becoming a man. And as our catechism says, he
took to himself a true body. Jesus really was human. When
we read about the human Jesus, the baby Jesus, the little boy
Jesus, the man Jesus, he really was a human who became the savior
of the world. He really was the son of God
who became man. He took to himself a true body
and a reasonable soul. He was two natures, both God
and man in one person. And he continues in those two
distinct natures, one person forever. But when we read of
Jesus in stories like this, We have to understand he was just
a regular kid. He slept and he ate. He grew up. He played probably
on the notches of the kitchen doorframe. Mary measured his
height. I mean, we’re speculating there,
right? But it was a normal childhood. He was a regular kid because
he was the eternal God, a son of God who became a man. Now, can’t you imagine, though,
the shaping influences that affected Jesus. Growing up in a carpentry
shop or a carpenter’s family, growing up poor, growing up in
Nazareth, growing up under the Roman Empire, growing up in an
occupied Jewish state, growing up a thousand years after the
great kingdoms of David and Solomon, growing up just as he did, when
he did, where he did, with all the shaping influences, for sure
had an effect on him and made him into the man that he would
become. One of the things we’ll see as
a regular kid is he had parents. He had parents to obey. He had
life to live just as any other kid would have done. There’s
another thing this passage teaches us. In addition to Jesus being
a regular kid, he was a covenant kid. He was a covenant kid. We walk through a bookstore. And we see different sections,
philosophy, history, education. We see books on art. We see books
on self-help. We see all kinds of sections.
And you come to a little section on marriage and family and parenting. And there’s all kinds of theories.
There’s all kinds of ways that this world offers that you can
parent a child. But the Hebrew way, the Judeo-Christian
way, the biblical way was this. You filled your children with
wisdom. Wisdom from God, wisdom from
above, wisdom from the law, wisdom from the ancient stories of God
redeeming a people. You filled your children up with
wisdom so that they could make good choices and live right and
well and long. And also at the same time, you
drove out of them foolishness. We’ve been reading our way through
Proverbs some this year, though we took a little break before
we returned back to it today. But you remember several times
in the chapters that we have read from Proverbs, things like
the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Train up a child in
the way he shall go, and when he is old, he will not depart
from it. And then there’s the hard passages,
the hard passages like driving folly out of your children to
spare them from death. In fact, one of the verses that
we parents so often like to quote is spare the rod and spoil the
child or he who spares the rod hates. his son. And so we recognize that the
Hebrew way, the Judeo-Christian way of raising children is to
insert, to impart, to put wisdom in and to drive foolishness out. And it’s in hopes that one day,
by God’s grace, as our children become Christians, as they become
followers of Jesus, the work of the Holy Spirit will do just
what God is doing for us. And don’t you see the parallel
in the Christian life? God is, by his word and grace,
putting wisdom into our lives. And by his chastisement, he is
driving the folly out of us in order that we may be his children
who delight in him. and serve him. And so Jesus was
like all other covenant kids of the day. His parents were
serious about their covenant obligations. As parents, his
children, his parents were serious about Deuteronomy six hero, Israel,
the Lord, your God is one. You shall love the Lord, your
God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And you shall
Teach your children when you sit, when you rise and when you
walk along the way. Mary and Joseph were serious
about teaching him the Proverbs, about wisdom and foolishness,
about death and life. But they were also, as this passage
will show us, they were serious about keeping the feast of the
Israelites. Now in the old covenant days,
every family was expected to keep the feast, but post-exile,
post-Israel being rebuilt by Ezra and Nehemiah, post-exilic
Judaism sort of slimmed the law’s requirements down a little. The
family was only expected to keep about three of the feasts of
the year. Generally, it was Passover. And usually what you did is you
went up to Jerusalem, you kept the feast for at least a day,
and then you returned home. But it is believed that Jesus’
family, even though they were poor and for sure traveling a
week, staying a week and then traveling a week home, being
out of work, as it were, for three weeks, was an obligation
to the law, which they kept. And so when we pick up in this
story of The family of Jesus making their way to Jerusalem
every year. And it wasn’t just Joseph that
made his way to Jerusalem. It was the family. It was Mary.
These were a devout people. It was only required that the
male, the husband show up. But here we see the entire family
keeping the law, keeping the feast. They were serious about
the covenant. And here we see that at the 12th
year of Jesus, they bring him along. Now, you’ve probably seen
friends and relations go through the bar mitzvah, becoming a son
of the law or a daughter of the law. This may have been what
was taking place with Jesus. He was going up to Jerusalem
with his family to learn himself to be a law keeper, to learn
himself what it meant to be a son of Israel, a child of Yahweh. And he’d been taught day by day
as he worked with his family, as he lived with his family,
as he dwelled with his family, he had been taught the law. But
this was now the time to show the little lad what it meant
to keep the law, particularly in the cultic worship and practices
of Israel with the feast of Passover. And we see Mary and Joseph keeping
these covenant obligations with Jesus, their covenant kid. But we also see Jesus in this
passage begin to take up his parents’ faith for himself. You know, one of the things we
as parents always hope is that the faith of mom and dad will
someday become the faith of the children themselves. They will
see the value in worship. They’ll see the value in growing
in God’s grace, sitting under the ministry of the word and
the church. They’ll see the value of faith in Jesus, walking with
the Lord. You know, and that’s something
that happens as we see in the life of Jesus. It’s something
that happens with a holistic way of living. You know, Christianity,
particularly in the Southern United States, has sort of become
a la carte. We pick and choose which aspects
of Christianity we want. And of course, we want the big
ones. We don’t want anybody in our family unsaved. We want everybody
in our family saved and going to heaven. And as you trickle
back on both the obligations and the benefits of life in Christ,
life in the church, life as children of God, we’re okay with skipping
church for soccer or basketball or sports league or whatever
else. We’re okay with trips and whatever,
but we still want the benefits. And we start to scratch our heads
as many parents of our generation have done. And we begin to say,
what’s wrong? How did the church fail us? And maybe the question
we ought to be asking is how did we fail our children? And we see a wonderful example
here that in the life of Jesus, who was a regular kid, he was
a covenant kid. And not only did his parents
keep the covenant obligations, but they began to be his. Now
you could stop and say, well, he was Jesus, of course so. But
think back to when you got serious about faith. Think back to when
you got serious about your parents’ faith and you made it your own,
and you couldn’t wait to get up on Sunday. And it was not
mom or dad who laid out the clothes, but it was you who the night
before began to pick out the clothes, because in your mind,
you were saying, tomorrow we go to the house of God. You see,
there has to be a transition, a time where faith for a child
becomes a reality. And right before our very eyes
in this passage, we see the faith the faith of Jesus becoming a
reality. He goes to the temple. And when
it’s time for his parents to go home, they’ve made it a day’s
journey. And where is he? He’s probably
sitting on one of the temple porches. And you can imagine
if it’s Passover, some of the best teachers of the law have
come to keep the feast. And what an opportune time for
Jesus, who is 12 years old, who’s soon to become a son of the law
and all else that Jesus will become. is the God-man, the Savior. But he gets to sit at the feet
of some of the greatest teachers who ever enter the vicinity,
the boundaries of the temple and the courts of Almighty God.
And he is there asking questions. He’s there giving answers. He’s
there astounding and amazing and wowing the people. What an opportune time for Jesus
to say, faith of our father strong and true. But now faith of our
fathers, it’s now mine. And it means everything to me. And dear children of the church,
dear young ones of the church, there ought to be a moment in
time. And I pray it’s very soon for you that you say, I get what
my parents are doing. I get why they bring me to church. I understand by seeing them week
after week, sitting in the house of God, worshiping the Lord and
reading their Bibles and telling me over and over, I see that
Jesus is important. Maybe he ought to be important
to me. So you begin to pray, Oh Lord, whatever love my parents
have for you, I want to have it too. For I see the value and
the benefit and the grace that is in it. Here we have Jesus
as a regular kid. We have him as a covenant kid.
But we have to understand, don’t we, that Jesus was a special
kid. I mean, after all, who else has
been born into this world as the eternal son of God become
man? Who else in this world was born because they were conceived
under the power of the Holy Ghost in the womb of a mother who had
not known a man and therefore the sins of Adam not transmitted
to that child? Who else? None other than Jesus. He was a special kid. Now, as
we think of Jesus as a special kid, I want us to think for a
moment back to our Old Testament lessons. Do you remember the
birth of Samuel? Samuel was born to a mother who
could not have children. And she begged and she prayed
and she wept and she cried and she held forth day and night
for years to God that she might have a child. And that child
would serve the Lord in a special way for there were some wicked
sons of Eli. There were some wicked sons of
Eli who did not keep the law of God. They did not serve in
the temple properly. And they did things in the temple
of God, in the house of God, that ought not be done. And God said to their father,
Eli, who was He’s described in Samuel as being dim in his eyes. And we might think he was spiritually
blind. The word says he was soft on
his boys. And God says, I’m going to kill
your two boys for they are worthless. But one day I will raise up,
I will raise up a prophet like no other. And he will be a prophet
whose house is established forever. And Samuel, in a sense, was a
down payment on that faithful priest. Samuel was consecrated
to the Lord. He was given over by his mother
to almighty God, and he served God faithfully. But you see,
it looks to the Christ child. It looks, that story looks from
worthless sons to valuable sons, sons who were faithful to God,
children or child of the covenant, loving God and keeping his commandments. And here we see the beginnings
of this special child, this favored one. And in contrast to other
priests, in contrast to Eli’s sons, Jesus grew not only in
stature and in wisdom, but he grew with favor from God and
from his fellow man. And we see in the temple, verse
47 of our passage tells us that the priests, the teachers, they
were amazed at his understanding and his answers. His parents
were astounded when they saw the young fellow, their child,
in the temple asking and answering questions. Isn’t it interesting
that when Jesus’ mother, who no doubt for these two days prior
was frantic, have you ever lost a kid? Somehow, by God’s grace,
we have it. But about a year ago, we were
at the soccer field, and a young sweet gal, about a three-year-old
girl, got away from her parents, and the group, maybe similar
to the group traveling to and from Jerusalem, the group of
soccer families sitting there, every one of them spread out
over the acres and acres of the soccer park. And it was a few
minutes before this little one was found, and she was a good
1,000 feet away, just wandered to the playground. And can you
imagine what Jesus’ parents were like? I mean, that was a five-minute
experience. But for days, where is Jesus? For days, where is
our boy? For days, where is this kid? They were frantic. The passage
tells us, in a sense, they looked up and down. They looked far
and wide. And as they made their way back to Jerusalem, made their
way back into the city, looking up and down and frantic, And
in a great panic, they see him, they find him in the temple and
they observe what’s taking place and they’re amazed. But you catch
the angst in Mary’s voice. Son, why have you treated us
so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great
distress. We’ve been in anguish. We’ve
been in tears. We have been in sorrow. We have
not slept. We have walked and frantically
looked for you. And what’s Jesus answer? I mean,
this would, in most generations, get you the back of a parent’s
hand, wouldn’t it? He says, why were you looking
for me? Did you not know? that I must
be in my father’s house. There’s a special moment here.
And the passage goes on to tell us that the parents didn’t understand
it. Had they forgotten what the angel
Gabriel had told them? Had they forgotten about the
visit of the magi? Had they forgotten the visit
from the shepherds and the angels? Had they forgotten that the son
of heaven had now become the son of earth and he was sent
into their family? and that he was not only gonna
be a regular kid, a covenant kid, but he was going to be a
special kid. Did you not know that I must
be in my father’s house? Some of you have the old King
James. Did you not know I must be about my father’s business? And this passage says a lot to
us. It says something about who Jesus is. He is the eternal son
of God, and he’s about to do the will of the heavenly father,
which is extra special. But it says to us, here is a
whole kid who has become a whole adult. Now, if you were to stop
there for a minute, we wouldn’t have a complete Jesus, but do
stop there for just a moment. And I want you to think through
parents, grandparents, but you young ones, I want you to think
about this. The goal of having children. is to raise worshipers
of Jesus. The goal of having children is
to bring young ones into the world who can learn to love God
and to live well in the world God has made and put them in
it as regents or kings or lords. We sang earlier, God, all nature
sings thy glory. I think it’s from verse two.
It says something like this, music, art, the beautiful garden. are our callings in this life.
Everything we do is to sing praise to the maker. And we can make
too much about education. We can make too much about jobs
and training. We could make too much about it and we can worship
our work and never worship God. But we need to understand that
when God gives us little ones, they’re to grow into big ones.
And they are not only to worship God and have families of their
own, but they are to make this world beautiful and special.
And so there’s a little bit of a challenge here to us. We need
to be raising whole children, not half children. We need to
be raising whole children and making them into whole adults.
But there’s even a greater spiritual jump here about Jesus. Jesus
came to do what the first adult failed to do. And that first
adult was Adam. Adam was put in paradise. And
he was told to obey God and worship him, not deep from the tree of
knowledge and good and evil. And we know the story, Adam failed.
Well, Jesus has come to be the second Adam, the Adam who will
not fail. He will live a life of perfect
obedience. He will live a life of a whole
man, a full man. And we remember the words of
the Prophet Simeon, who in our passage last week said this of
Jesus, Jesus will be the rising or the falling of mankind. And so dear friends, as we look
at the life of Jesus and we consider him to be a regular kid, a covenant
kid, but is he in your eyes because the word and the spirit have
confirmed it to you? Is he a special kid? Is he the
Christ child? Is he the savior of your life? Have you put your faith and your
hope and your trust in him, realizing that out of all the children
of the world, God has made and raised him special because it
is he alone who could bear your sins in his body on the tree. Let’s pause and pray together.
Our Lord and God, we thank you that in the midst of a world
of worthless sons, you have raised up a worthy son. A son worthy
of our praise and adoration, for he has lived the life we
could never live. He has died the death we could
never die. He has paid a penalty that we owe but could never pay. And we give you thanks that through
our faith and our hope and our trust in him, you see us not
as we really are sinners, weak and wounded and broken, but you
see us as sons and daughters who have obeyed you perfectly,
who have kept your law and are righteous in your sight. And
it’s for and through and by Jesus. And we give you thanks that you
show us in your word glimpses of his greatness. And we ask
that we in our lives, by your word and spirit, would show glimpses
of our future greatness. Sons and daughters redeemed by
the precious blood of the Lord Jesus. And we do long for the
day when our spirits and our bodies will be made perfect.
But until then, keep us close to Jesus. We ask it in his name. Amen.