And now if you will turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 4 verses 14 through 21.
Now the past few Sundays we've been looking at the glory of Jesus Christ.
We have seen Jesus glorified by turning water into wine.
We have seen him glorified by raising Lazarus from the dead.
Today we're going to look at another story in which Jesus Christ is glorified this time not by a miracle,
but by what he taught and who he is.
Let's now give our attention to God's word beginning at verse 14.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and news about him spread through the whole countryside.
He was teaching in their synagogues and everyone praised him.
He went to Nazareth where he had been brought up and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue as was his custom.
He stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.
On rolling it he found the place where it was written.
The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free.
To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendants and sat down.
And the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.
And he began by saying to them,
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Let's pray and ask God to bless his word.
Our Heavenly Father, we need your Holy Spirit.
We need the Holy Spirit so that we can understand your words so illuminate our hearts today.
So that we can see the glory of Jesus Christ.
In the task of teaching God's people.
Our Lord and our God, we come to you now.
Glorifying you.
And one day in the new heavens and the new earth, we will continue to glorify you.
I make this prayer in his name, amen.
Both teaching and learning are difficult.
I remember when I was in high school, I did not know what I wanted to do.
I did not know what I wanted to be.
And I really didn't want to go to college.
I wanted to work for the railroad or drive a truck or something.
Going to college was my mom's idea.
So I remember it being in a lot of classes, not caring, not understanding.
Now that was my fault. It was my own immaturity at that time.
But I would also have to say to you, I had some pretty lousy teachers.
I remember we had one biology class.
And now there were some interesting things about the biology class.
The dissection of the worm, that was fun.
But most of the time, you know what we did?
He would come in in the morning and write all the notes on these very long chalkboards.
And for the whole class, we did nothing but copy down notes from the board.
It took 40, 50 minutes for us to do that.
And it seemed like we did it day after day after day of doing nothing.
But that was one example.
But I can tell you, I've also had classes, yes, even classes in the Bible,
where I could not figure out what is this guy saying?
I don't understand it. The lectures don't hold together.
They're here, they're there, they're everywhere.
And I came out of it. I didn't learn a thing.
I also remember my first year at Covenant College,
we had a class called Foundations of Modern Culture.
And in this class, they went over a lot of philosophy.
And I remember thinking to myself, and I had to listen to those Francis Schaefer films,
which are hard to understand in places, and he would go on about existentialism,
and being a small town boy from Virginia, I was thinking, what's an existentialist?
I didn't know. I don't know if I learned anything, because I didn't know.
And I've also had some teachers, and this is basically at the college, graduate school level,
they were just grumpy with me.
I remember I had an interview at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia where I wanted to go,
and you had to have an interview before you got in, or they would accept you.
The guy who was there, who was a big wig in the United Presbyterian Church named James Smiley,
proceeded to yell and berate me for about an hour, because I went to Covenant College,
Reformed Theological Seminary, and I was classmates with Matt Barker, who I ran across country with,
and apparently at one time the Barkers were big league in the PCUSA,
and they had left, it was a big, I got yelled at.
Do you think I wanted to go there? No.
I'd have to tell you, a lot of it is that way in teaching, and then there's preaching.
That can also be troublesome as well.
For example, in Virginia went to a very historical church, preacher wore the robes,
which I think had been made in 1860, and he had this strange voice.
It was not the voice he normally talked in, and I don't remember anything about those sermons.
So part of the reason I decided I wanted to go to seminary, and I was not the only one.
I want to know something about what the Bible says.
Teaching and learning, it can be difficult.
What I want, and probably what you want, is someone who can explain things,
someone who's nice and approachable, so that when you don't understand or you made a mistake,
they can correct you.
That's what I was looking for, and I'm sure you are too.
What you really want is a teacher like Jesus.
And when you look at the life of Jesus, he was an excellent teacher.
Do you realize people came to Jesus because of his teaching?
Yeah, that's why they came.
He did not teach as the scribes and the Pharisees did.
His teaching was different, and what we find out is that people glorified Jesus
because of the words he taught.
And you can see that in verse 15.
Everyone praised him.
Now it may say something a little different in some of your versions.
Some it will say he was glorified.
They were glorifying him.
Actually, that's literally what the word is.
It's that same word in Greek that we get our English word doxology from.
It was the same word that we've seen in other places for his miracles.
They were glorifying him because of the way that he taught.
If we would put it in modern day English, they were saying, he's a great teacher.
We know what he's talking about.
And this morning, that's what I want to look at.
Why were people glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ?
Why?
To get to that, we've got to clear some landmines out of the way before we get into what is actually said in the text.
And some of these barriers or landmines we're going to find out have to do with the reason that people come to church.
Why do people come to church?
For some, they come to church because it's the right thing to do.
Now, back in the 50s and 60s, people came to church.
And the reason they came to church is because they wanted their kids to get a proper moral education.
That's why they came to church.
So what would happen is, the parents would drop them off at church and Sunday school and the parents would go home.
And then come back later to pick up the kids.
What was the purpose of going to church?
Because this is how good people are trained.
They went to church to get a good moral teaching.
You know, obey those commandments.
I got to tell you, that's not bad.
We all need moral instruction.
We do need to know the difference between right and wrong, don't we?
So I'm not going to complain about that.
But we've got to ask ourselves this question.
What's missing?
It's not bad.
But what is missing?
Or you may have gone to church, or no others who have gone to church, simply because of tradition.
My grandfather went to this church.
My father went to this church.
I am going to go to this church because they did.
It's what we do in this family.
And after you have gotten up 50 weeks out of the year on Sunday morning to go to church, it's part of your habit.
In fact, it used to be in churches, and I still think we have it here.
You'll notice on the side of the pews, we used to name pews for family members, I guess they bought into it.
Now that, in the colonial times, was very big.
You had the family pew.
You're not going to break family tradition by not showing up and filling up your pew.
And God forbid, if a visitor sat in your pew.
Wouldn't want to have that, but why did you go?
Merely tradition.
It's sort of like the Andy Griffith cartoon, where Barney is going to church, he's sleeping through it,
and he gets out of church and he says to the minister in one of my favorite lines in all of sitcoms,
great sermon creature about sin and all that, what's missing? What's missing from that?
Or you've got the, I call them the first church cry.
You go to church because this is where the elite of society go.
The bankers, the lawyers, the doctors, the judges, they all go there.
And by the way, you've got to have a preacher who's got to be well-heeled, well-educated.
And if he's not there on Sunday, well, we're just not going to go.
But it's the first church crowd.
Why are they there?
Because this is the social life.
This is where deals are made, but what's missing?
What's missing?
You know, I know in my own story that I went to church simply because my parents made me.
I remember the first time they told me I had to tithe, and that was in the days when the weekly allowance was a dollar,
and I had to give 10 cents.
I thought it was outrageous.
But I did it.
I remember sitting through those sermons and not knowing what they were about.
I wanted to know what the Bible said I wanted to, as it says in John, serve that we would see Jesus.
Now I tell you these stories why.
It's because this is a passage about the glory of Jesus Christ in his teaching.
And you want to know why people don't see the glory of Christ in the teaching and reading of his word?
Let me state it bluntly.
That's not what they're here for.
They're here for other reasons.
Now maybe I'm preaching to the choir this morning, and I probably am since most of you are here.
But beware, beware of coming to the house of God for the wrong reasons.
You are here to hear about Jesus, whether it is Old Testament or New Testament.
We are here to see Jesus Christ.
And part of the reason people get turned off the church, I think, is the reason that they have come.
It's in their hearts.
Well those are the barriers.
But let's get into why Jesus teaching is so glorious.
And I'll tell you why.
It's because his message is the good news.
And you can see that in verse 18 where it says this.
He, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
He is saying I am the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, which is what this is a quote from,
because he has anointed me to do what?
To proclaim the good news.
And later on to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Now I want you to think of people back then.
Did they need to hear the good news? Yes they did. And I'll tell you why they need to hear the good news.
First of all they need to hear the good news because the teachings they had received was awfully legalistic.
There were all these rules about how you eat, how you keep the salad.
Rules, rules, rules. You can only walk this amount on Sunday.
You've got to do X, Y, and Z. And by the way if you don't do all these rules, you're not pleasing to God.
And those rules that the Pharisees and the scribes came up with often had nothing to do with the Word of God.
They were merely human traditions.
And they had convinced people, by the way you want God to bless you.
You've got to do this.
There was also the idea that if you sin, you're going to pay for it.
Why are you sinned? Why are you blind? Why do you have leprosy? Well you sin.
That's why.
But is that what the Bible always says?
And then there is the socioeconomics of it all, high taxes.
Having to give all their hard earned money, either to Rome, to the local government.
These people that Jesus had to deal with were oppressed, spiritually, physically.
And they're coming to Jesus.
And Jesus is not adding on more bad news with more rules.
And if you work for the government, you know about the expanding rules that we all have to deal with, which will depress you.
Jesus comes to relieve them of that.
And in Jesus' ministry, he goes after those false teachers who put burden after burden on God's people.
Listen to what he says in Matthew 23, and it's quite harsh.
Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.
You yourself do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying.
Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You travel over the land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
That is not a very positive assessment of teaching in the time of Jesus.
And what does Jesus do? How does he respond to their misery and the false, lousy teaching of the day?
He tells them it's the year of God's favor.
They were thinking God is against us.
Jesus says no.
God in his mercy is for you.
He's not against you.
He's not here to destroy you.
God is going to have compassion on his people.
That is essentially what he's telling him.
That's why it's the good news.
Now, let's think a bit about this.
Let's think about church for a moment.
First of all, I'm not saying the minister or the preacher should not tell you about sin.
Yes, they should.
But I've also got to say this as well.
There's a reason it's called the good news, because it is to relieve you of some of the spiritual suffering that you are going through by sin and guilt.
And one day to relieve the physical ailments that you have as well.
Jesus has come to give you life and to give you life abundantly.
So beware if you go to a church or you're listening to sermons all the time where it's all negative, negative, negative.
Where it is all about the sins of you and the world.
There's more to the gospel.
Sin has always been there.
But we need to have some good news.
Beware if you go to church or you listen to messages where the grace of God is not present, but just more rules for you to follow.
That's not good news.
Are there rules to follow? Yes.
But let's remember the good news.
I'll tell you, here's one of the things that always bugged me when I went to seminary.
It was when we were told in one form or another, you guys are really dumbed.
Why were we dumbed? Because we didn't come into seminary knowing Greek and Hebrew.
Since the early 1900s that has been going away in college education.
So what are we supposed to do?
But do you see that negativity there?
Would you want to learn from somebody who's telling you you're dumb all the time?
Do you want to go to church if they're telling you the bad news about yourself all the time and believing there is bad news?
There's also the good news.
There's also hope.
And that's why Jesus is being glorified.
It's of who he is and that message that's going to be drawing people to the cross.
And let me tell you something else here about why this message is so glorious.
It is a message of grace.
Look at verses 18 through 19.
Look at what he's saying. His message is listen to what the spirit of the Lord is saying through him.
He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
Now let's look at that for a minute.
Poor.
Now in Luke's Gospel it does refer to those who are economically poor.
But that's not all it refers to.
It refers to those who are also poor in spirit.
They are humble before God.
And Jesus is coming to them and saying despite the fact that you are poor,
despite the fact that you are humble and believe me in our modern American society, humility gets you nowhere these days.
God's good news is I am for you.
He also says he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.
You are in chains by sin and guilt.
You are a prisoner but Jesus came to free you from the chains of sin and guilt.
He's feeling guilty all the time.
You don't have to feel that way.
He also talks about setting the oppressed free.
Free from Satan.
He also talks about in recovery of the sight for the blind.
Now literally Jesus gave people sight.
But let's also be clear here.
Sometimes that refers to spiritual sight.
Being able to see the kingdom of God.
And why is all of this happening?
Because it is all what Jesus accomplishes.
You can't do this on your own.
You can't free yourself from sin.
You can't give yourself sight.
You can't overcome your own oppression.
It's what Jesus does.
That's why it's grace.
He's doing those things for you.
It's what Christ has done for us.
We've got to keep in mind.
The ministry of Jesus is to get rid of the misery of this world.
Either because of sin or the effects of the curse.
Jesus says, I'm going to take care of it for you.
I'm going to take care of it.
What we've got to understand is when you come to church,
and what you need to hear from the pulpit is the glorious grace of our Lord.
Yes, you need to repent, but you also need to hear about God's grace.
A grace which overcomes our sin.
A grace which grounds us in the forgiveness and love of God.
A grace that's going to provide a new heavens and a new earth,
which is infinitely superior to what we've got to deal with today.
With all of the curse that's around us.
Isn't that what we all want?
The problem in the church today is it can become too negative.
It can become so many things that it is not designed to be.
It can be a church where they're talking about the social ills all the time.
It can be a church which is merely another form of behaviorism,
but the gospel is a lot greater than any of that.
It's to restore you by God's act.
God's grace brings glory.
And let me tell you, when you look at the teachings of Jesus,
why are they glorious?
Because they're the good news of His grace.
And as this year continues to unfold, let us glorify Christ.
Let us see Jesus, because He has given us the grace of our Lord Jesus.
Jesus Christ.
Let's pray.
Our God and Heavenly Father, be with us now.
And help us this day to understand the glorious grace found in the words of Jesus Christ.
And if we are tempted to turn away from those glorious words of grace which we find in the New Testament,
Holy Spirit, turn us back.
Help us to see that for your people you are favorably disposed
and are going to do wonderful works in the future.
Here are prayer. Amen.