I know you will be inspired by this message from my father, the Rev. Dr. William Craig, who challenges us to claim for ourselves, and to bring to others, the breathtaking goodness of the gospel which Jesus declared in his first public sermon...
One day, a very winsome and
charismatic young man returned to his home town, after some amazing experiences
in other parts of the country. He was welcomed
home like a celebrity and the initial reports were full of praise. In his travels he would teach in the local synagogues
and this particular day was the Sabbath in his home town of Nazareth, so he
went to the synagogue as usual. And
people flocked to church to hear him.
They were eager to listen to what he had to say because rumor had it
that God’s Spirit was upon him. But, of
course, this being his home town, everyone knew that he was just the eldest son
of Joseph the carpenter and his wife, Mary.
Luke, the meticulous historian,
writes that wherever he had ministered, Jesus “was praised by everyone.” Read with me, beginning with vs. 16:
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been
brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his
custom. He stood up to read, and the
scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.
He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me;
because he has anointed
me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release
to the captives and
recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Who wouldn’t want that kind of good
news? These were marvelous words of prophecy that
were penned hundreds of years before…words that promised liberty and
deliverance for God’s people who had been dominated and oppressed by one super
power after another. Or, at least,
that’s how they interpreted Isaiah’s words.
Let me remind you how these prophetic words came to be applied to people
like most of us here today who do not have a Jewish background, for -- This was
Good News for the World!
I. Good News for the
World
What happened that day was a turning
point for that congregation and for the world – not only because of what Jesus
said, but because of what he didn’t say…what he omitted. The quotation from Isaiah which Jesus read
ends with “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” But when we actually turn to that quotation
in Isaiah 61, we read “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day
of vengeance of our God” (Is. 61:2).
People of that day longed for God’s messiah who would come one day to
exact vengeance on Israel’s enemies. And
this young upstart dared leave out the very part of the prophecy they expected
to hear and longed for God to fulfill.
Luke continues:
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to
the attendant, and sat down. The custom of that
day was for a rabbi to stand to read Scripture, then to sit down when he began
his message. Luke continues: The
eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled
in your hearing.”
They stared at him, and Luke says
that at first, All spoke well of him and
were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. But the more the meaning of what Jesus said
and didn’t say sunk in, they quit speaking well. They were stunned at the implications. And for Jesus to say, “Today this scripture
has been fulfilled in your hearing” meant that he himself had come to extend God’s
grace to Israel’s enemies and to open the flood gates of God’s love upon the
whole world. Any first impressions that
were favorable soon turned hostile -- especially as Jesus went on to explain
and to make crystal clear what he meant.
Beginning at verse 25:
Jesus said: But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of
Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a
severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to
a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There
were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of
them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.
It’s right here in the Scriptures,
Jesus was saying. Many years before,
during the ministry of the prophets – Elijah and his successor Elisha – God
graciously and mercifully ministered to the needs of non-Israelites. One was a widow who lived in Sidon during a
time of severe famine, and the other was Naaman, commander of the Syrian army,
who suffered from leprosy, whom God healed.
Now, Jesus was saying: “I have
come to fulfill this promised outpouring of God’s grace upon, not just a few,
but upon the whole world. In the power
of the Holy Spirit you are going to see the good news proclaimed world-wide!” Good News for the World, and secondly, Good
News that Transforms!
II.
Good News that Transforms
What if Jesus misspoke? What if he was mistaken, misguided? What if he hadn’t meant business that day in
Nazareth? Where would you and I be
today? Think of the way our Lord came,
not only to deal with our sin problem, but also to make us whole persons. No matter who we are today, we know what it
means to be “poor” or lacking in some way….to be brokenhearted over something
or someone. We know what it means to be
captive to the hurtful, painful memories of the past and the limited
expectations we have for our futures. As
spiritual as we may think ourselves to be we are still so blind to our true
position and place and potential in Christ.
We truly need to be set free, because we know that it means to be oppressed
in some way from something we’ve brought upon ourselves, or by someone else. But, by the grace of God, the more whole we become,
the more God can use us as instruments of his healing to those around us. Last Sunday, I asked you to remember your
true address. Today, we praise God that
Jesus is not only in the transportation business, but also in the business of
transformation, and each of us can look back and praise God that even if we
have a long way yet to go, we can see by the grace of God how far we’ve come
and how much we’ve grown.
Continuing at vs. 28: When
they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and
led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they
might hurl him off the cliff. But he
passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
It was not yet his time, and he did
not allow them to push him over the cliff.
But the time did come, when he allowed them to do their worst to
him. Picture in your mind the Garden of
Gethsemane, where Jesus wrestled with the human drive for self-preservation and
the higher way of obedience to God’s will, and he allowed himself to be
betrayed to his enemies. Picture a hill
outside of Jerusalem where he willingly hung on a Roman cross for our sins. That
sounds so weak. We live in a day of terrorist
cells, drone strikes and cyber warfare, when even individual citizens claim the
right to own and use military style weapons.
How could such an act, not of self-preservation but of self-sacrifice,
have any power? What about the way of
Jesus?
I remember what Ernest Gordon shared
one time, when he was chaplain of Princeton University, and told how he found
Christ during the Second World War in the infamous Japanese prisoner-of-war
camp by the River Kwai. He was exhausted
from months of labor on a starvation diet, and lay dying of a dozen tropical
diseases. His buddies gave him up to die
and moved him into the death house at one end of the camp.
But a Christian boy from his company
volunteered to help him and to look after his needs. His offer surprised Gordon, for it was so
different from the “dog-eat-dog” attitude of so many. Slowly Ernest Gordon was nursed back to
strength, encouraged by the faith and determination of a young man who believed
that God has a purpose for life which even the horrors of a death camp can’t
erase. Can the compassion of just one
person actually make a difference in this world? The compassion of that one young man led to
the conversion of Gordon and a whole group of others. The life of the entire camp was transformed
as men regained the will to live. They
began making medicine from jungle plants, started a make-shift university, a
library, an orchestra, and built a church.
Wherever the Spirit of the Lord is
at work in a life—whether in a prison camp in the middle of a jungle, or in the
factories, schools, offices and homes and hospitals of our civilized jungles –
there is the power of God to transform lives.
Last week, Polly got a call from a twenty-year-old she has known for
years, who now lives out of state and in her first year of nurses’
training. She is a perfectionist and is
a wonderful, insightful, caring young woman, but she struggles with
anorexia. My Polly has a very special
ministry of encouragement with her. They
talk by phone nearly every week, and my dear wife prays for her and encourages
her in such a beautiful way.
Last Thursday she called to tell Polly
about her instructor who is a Christian and noticed that she was struggling
with one particular assignment. The
teacher met with her and listened to her story, and assured her that she was
available to meet with her regularly if needed.
Right there, that nurse and professor who is also a Christian asked her
if she could pray for her. And this is
beyond human understanding, but she is eating better, and we see her becoming
more and more the whole person God intends for her to be. For the first time, this young friend said,
“I’ve gained ten pounds and it scares me, but food tastes so good to me
now.”
She said that she and her instructor
talked for quite a while, and the teacher shared with her about the time she
was the nurse in charge of patients on a particular hospital floor late one
night, when one patient started calling:
“Help me. Help me. Somebody help me.” She went to his room and asked, “What’s the
matter?” “Help me,” he said again. “You’ll need to tell me what’s wrong, so that
I can help you,” she replied. “I’m
dying; I’m dying,” he said, “And I don’t know where I’m going.” There was no hospital chaplain on duty. “I’m a Christian,” she said, “May I pray with
you?” “Yes,” he answered. And she prayed, placing him in the arms of
Jesus. A tear rolled down his cheek, and
with a look of peace on his face, he quietly slipped away.
III.
Good News that Transforms the World
There is transforming power in the
Lord Jesus Christ, enough power, friends to transform the world! Last Sunday I told you the story of Abu-Jaz,
the young Muslim husband who met Jesus as the result of a miracle of
multiplying macaroni, and has become a leader and teacher among Muslim
background believers. About half of
these new believers come because of a dream or vision of Jesus, and step by
step the Holy Spirit is transforming their lives, but don’t expect all of them
to look like you or me. You and I are culturally
Western, and Muslims think that Christianity in the West is the same as Western
culture. They don’t know that we
believers are as distressed as they are over the oppressive, immoral, promiscuous,
self-indulgent and materialistic style of life that characterizes so much of
our western culture.
John 3:16 is a favorite scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal
life.” And the next verse: “For God did not send his Son into the world
to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him.”
Who
would have believed that the Savior of the world could be reaching out to those
we consider to be our enemies? The
leading authority on Islam in the U.S. is Dr. Dudley Woodberry of Fuller
Seminary, who told me last week that the fastest growing Christian movement
today is in – Iran! There, and in other Muslim
countries, it is happening quietly and gradually, like yeast that slowly
leavens the whole lump. Join me in
praying for the Islamic world, won’t you?
Pray that God’s redemptive purpose will be fulfilled in ways beyond our
imagining, ways that will be signs of hope as Christianity declines and loses
influence in the West. “Father, in the
name of Jesus we pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in those countries, and
also in our own. “We are in desperate
need, Gracious God.”
Was it about 25 years ago that, after
70 years of Marxist oppression of religion in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev
admitted that there is transforming power in Jesus Christ. He admitted two things: that (1) Communists had been wrong to
persecute religion, and (2) that the powerful moral force of religion was
essential to the success of perestroika.
Is what he said any less true of what is needed in modern day America
and the entire western world? We miss
the meaning of what God is doing today if we do not apply it to our own country
and to our own lives.
Claim who you are in Christ! Every member of this congregation is commissioned
by Jesus as a minister! You are not
powerless! You have his compassion! He has commissioned you and His Spirit guides
you to bring good news to some in your own family and to others around you. You have the power and ability to care and to
do for them what that Christian soldier did for Ernest Gordon that transformed
an entire prison camp. You can counsel
and pray for a young girl who is struggling and needs your support. You can be the chaplain who prays for a dying
man and helps Jesus usher him into the very presence of God. You can offer hospitality to your Muslim or
some other neighbor who needs to know the Savior who has conquered death, and
forgives sin and gives the quality of life that is abundant and eternal. Beloved, the Risen Christ says: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you!”
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon you;
because I have anointed you
to bring good
news to the poor.
I send you to proclaim
release
to the captives and recovery of
sight to the blind,
to let the
oppressed go free,
to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
“Let it
be, Lord! Make it so, for your glory and
in your name! Amen!”
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