Good News for All

Want to welcome everybody here in the auditorium and everybody watching on venue Facebook live. My name is Renee, and I'm another one of the pastors here at TLC. Now, Mark asked the question before the greeting time here in the auditorium: Are you a stay up till midnight person for New Year's, or are you a go to bed at 9 p.m. person for New Year's? So let me just see the hands once again. How many people midnight? How many people go to sleep at 9? How many people are like me, where you go to sleep at 9, but you turn your clocks ahead so it looks like it's midnight? How many? Makes me feel better, and it fools my kids too.

Well, I just want to start by extending my thanks. We had over 8,000 people here last weekend over nine different services. It took a huge team, so please let's put our hands together. Let's just thank them right now. Love you guys! Thank you for all your help. You know, I'm always so grateful when Christmas candlelight services go smoothly here because they don't always. Last week, somebody sent me this video right at the end of their beautiful Christmas services. The pastor in this church is closing in prayer, and watch what happens next.

Let's bow our hearts for prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Oh God, because joy has come. That pastor's awesome; he's just totally unfazed. It's like this happens every single week. Well, this morning we're going to look at another sermon that did not end well, and it went way worse than candles falling. Let's wrap up our series, "Good News for a Change." Grab the message notes that are in your programs.

The story we're going to look at this morning is full of tension and suspense and big mystery. The mystery is this: at the end of this sermon, why did these people try to kill the preacher? Quick recap: the first week of this series, we saw how people in Bible times were desperate for good news, just like people today. They were constantly under foreign oppression. Then the prophets said good news is coming. God is sending a Messiah who will set all things right, kick out the foreign oppressors, and after centuries of waiting, an army of angels announces good news: the Messiah is born today.

Then Jesus grows up, and his constant message is good news. In fact, Jesus' mission is called good news. Ten times in the Gospel of Luke alone, he was all about good news. This morning, I want to take you to the moment Jesus kicks off his ministry, his grand opening, his debut. I mean, Jesus' life has caused ripples in the pond of human history for 2,000 years. This is the moment the pebble drops, and it's one of my favorite stories in all the Bible.

If you're new to all this church stuff, this is a great way to discover what Jesus is really all about because in this story, Jesus announces what he's all about in his own words. If you're kind of a church veteran, this is a way for you to freshen up your possibly stale view of Jesus because you'll really see how revolutionary he is in this story. This is a great way to start the new year because this is going to give you your own sense of mission and purpose as you go into 2019.

So as the story starts, Jesus has been teaching all around the region of Galilee, and word about him is spreading fast. But he has not revealed himself as the Messiah yet. For that, he goes back to his own little town, to the village he grew up in, with a plan for the big reveal. Luke 4:16: When he came to the village of Nazareth, his boyhood home, he went as usual to the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the scriptures. This is like his home church that he grew up in, his little church in his little village, and he is asked to preach.

The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him, and he unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written. This passage he finds is a prophecy from Isaiah 61 in the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, written 600 years before about what the message of the Messiah will be. Jesus reads it out loud: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring what? Good news to the poor." That is the Messiah's purpose.

Then in the next sentence, that explains four ways that the Messiah brings good news. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord's favor has come. Then Jesus stops mid-sentence. The original verse back in Isaiah 61—watch this—has one more phrase: "and the day of vengeance of our God." But Jesus doesn't read this line; he stops mid-verse, rolls up the scroll.

Now, the people listening, they knew the whole verse, and they actually wanted the Messiah to show up with some vengeance against the foreign oppressors. But Jesus was not there for vengeance. His whole life, he didn't express vengeance. Not even when he was being killed did he breathe a word of vengeance. He was there for the good news, for salvation.

Now watch the amazing, unexpected thing that happens next. He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. In those days, the tradition was everybody stood for the Bible reading, and after the reading, the preacher sat down to preach the sermon, and everybody else stayed standing. I'm thinking of bringing that back here to Twin Lakes Church. It might help some of you stay awake.

So all eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently. Everybody's staring at him. Jesus sits down; he's staring back. Pregnant pause. And then he began to speak to them: "The scripture you've just heard has been fulfilled this very day." That Messiah character that you've been waiting for for centuries? Yeah, it's me. At first, people go, "Could be." Everybody spoke well of him and was amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. He was the best speaker they'd ever heard. Yeah, they said, "How could this be? Isn't this Joseph's son?"

Then Jesus kind of just throws a wet blanket over their enthusiasm. What a counterintuitive thing to do. He says, "You will undoubtedly quote me this proverb: 'Physician, heal yourself,' meaning do miracles here in your hometown like those you did in Capernaum. But I tell you the truth: no prophet is accepted in his own hometown." He basically says, "Yeah, you know what? Even if the whole world loves me, you guys here are gonna hate me." Why?

Remember the whole idea of the Messiah is he's gonna kick out the foreigners, right, and liberate Israel? Jesus says, "Certainly, there were many needy widows in Israel in Elijah's time." Now, Elijah was a prophet in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, centuries before Jesus. "When the heavens were closed for three and a half years, a severe famine devastated the land. There were many needy widows there in Israel, yet Elijah was not sent to any of them. He was sent instead to a foreigner, a widow of Zarephath in the land of Sidon." Now, Sidon was Gentile territory—Gentile means non-Jewish, of course—foreign, north of Israel where Lebanon is today.

And Zarephath—get this—was the hometown of the infamously evil Queen Jezebel's family. So Zarephath was like the icon of evil villages. It was a center of Baal worship. So this widow is a person who would have been despised in that culture for a bunch of reasons. She's a woman, she's a widow, she's poor, she's a Gentile, she's a pagan. Yet Elijah helps her of all people. And Jesus isn't finished yet. He says, "And many in Israel had leprosy in the time of the prophet Elisha, but only one was healed: Naaman, a Syrian."

Now, Naaman is not just a Gentile. Worse than that, he's a Syrian, their age-old enemies from the north. And worse than that, he's commander-in-chief of Syrian troops that are raiding Israel. And worse than that, he's a leper. So he's the outcast of all outcasts. But he asks Elisha for help, and Elisha says to him, "Okay, God's willing to heal you. All you have to do is go to our river and dip yourself in it seven times." Naaman is furious with Elisha. He's rich, he's powerful; he doesn't want to humiliate himself in some dirty river. He says, "No way." Later, he has second thoughts. He gets desperate, so he dips himself seven times back in the river, and guess what? He's healed.

So Jesus tells two stories of two Gentile outcasts who were helped by Jewish prophets. When they heard this, the people in the synagogue were furious. Jumping up, they mobbed him and forced him to the edge of the hill on which the town was built. Now, I don't know what you picture here, but to help you picture it accurately, this is the edge of the hill on which Nazareth is built. It's about 1,300 feet to the Jezreel Valley floor, and they intended to push him over the cliff. Now, that's a bad reaction to a sermon. I get nasty emails; never has this happened to me.

But he passed right through the crowd and went on his way. Now, how did he do that? Did he kind of phase through them miraculously, or sneak out, or run? Well, we don't know; it doesn't say. The real mystery is why, after a sermon that was really all about good news to the whole world—not just Israel, good news—why did the people want to push him off a cliff? Let's solve the mystery because I think this explains why any of us ever reject Jesus.

Now, I'm not talking about why people reject church sometimes. There's a lot of actually pretty good reasons for that because there's pain and distrust and abuse, which I understand. But when you understand why these people rejected Jesus and his message, you understand why if somebody actually transmits the message of Jesus, the gospel, they would still reject him. Do you ever wonder that? And maybe this explains why you're kind of stiff-arming Jesus in your own life right now.

The answer to the mystery is nestled right in the middle of the story in verses 18 and 19. This is either very, very good news, or this is very, very offensive news, depending on how you look at it. Jesus says he brings good news four ways. Jot this down: he came to, number one, release captives. And he's talking here about the worst kind of captivity: spiritual captivity. Jesus said, "Everyone who sins is a slave of sin." But if the Son sets you free, you will be what? Free indeed.

So my question is, how are you a slave to sin? Maybe it's obvious. Sin, of course, is another word for self-centered, self-destructive behavior and thinking patterns. Maybe for you, it's alcohol or drug addiction or less obvious ones: anger, envy, gossip, worry. Or maybe for you, it's pornography or addiction to a zillion other possible things. It could be shopping; it could be gaming. Maybe it's extreme sensitivity to every comment, so you go around with a bruised ego all the time. All of us have something in our lives that wants to make us its slave, and you do it even when you don't want to do it, and it takes away your freedom, and it takes away your time, and it takes away your joy.

And Jesus sees that in your life, and he sees that in my life, and you know what? He doesn't hate you for it; he came to free you of it. And this is why we have recovery groups here at TLC that meet on Mondays and Thursdays. I've learned in my own journey, freedom starts with one thing: it's impossible to find freedom without this step. The first step to freedom is admitting that I'm powerless over the sin that has enslaved me. I have had to admit that many times in my life personally, including over my crippling anxiety. And I found that turning it over to Jesus sets me free. It doesn't make me perfect, but it sets me on the path to freedom.

The answer is definitely not focusing on my sin and trying just real hard not to do that. The answer is surrender and turning my attention from my sin to Jesus and giving control completely to God. And Jesus says he'll set us free. That's super good news.

Secondly, Jesus says he'll reveal God. He says the blind will see. And Jesus did heal the physically blind, but even more often than that, he spoke about the worst kind of blindness: spiritual blindness. And here is what he says he does for the spiritually blind. This is such a huge verse: Jesus said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." Now, what in the world does that mean?

I've said before, people sometimes tell me, "Renee, you're a pastor. Well, I can't believe in God." And often I'll ask them, "Well, if you can't believe in God, tell me about the kind of God you can't believe in." "Oh, you know, the kind of God who sits up in a cloud with a long beard or a white robe and throws down judgment bolts." And I said, "Well, you know, I don't believe in that kind of a God either because you're describing Zeus. I don't believe in Zeus; I believe in Jesus." Because Jesus says he reveals what God is really like.

When I see Jesus in the Bible and how he interacts, you know, with little kids or with prostitutes and other people who were seen as despicable sinners or with nervous and ignorant and timid and weak disciples or with people who denied him, people who were crucifying him, and what I see is Jesus being gracious and welcoming again and again and again and again. I am seeing the heart of God. For me, that is the God I believe in. When I look at Jesus, my eyes are opened spiritually.

And then third, he says his message is good news because he came to relieve oppression. He says the oppressed will be set free. Now, when did Jesus ever set the oppressed free? Well, he was talking about the worst kind of oppression, worse than any other kind of oppression: religious oppression. Jesus said the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden. Do you relate to that? Have you ever felt that in your life? I relate.

Many of you know my story. The church I grew up in, just over the hill, was not a legalistic church, but I was personally legalistic. And that just means being performance-oriented about your religion. I've always been in my nature very performance-oriented. High achiever, you know, in high school I got the best SAT scores of all my friends. I was a lifetime member of the National Honor Society and I found ways to insert those facts into every conversation, like I just did with you. I'm still doing it to this day.

I became that way about my religion. It became all about my achievement. I kept score of everything—of exactly how many church services I attended each week, and I was proud about it. How many Bible verses I read, read through the whole Bible many, many years. How many Bible verses I memorized, how long I spent in prayer. And the better my stat sheet was, the more spiritual I felt about myself. Now, I still love all of that to this day: love, love, love church and the Bible and prayer.

The problem was back then I thought God loved me more the more I did those things. And this did two negative things to me. It both pumped up my pride relative to how I looked at everybody else; I looked down on everybody, frankly. And it exhausted me. I became crushed with unbearable religious demands, and I was turning into a Pharisee myself because you're never sure you're doing enough. Eventually, all my joy evaporated, and it manifested in anxiety attacks that put me in the hospital.

Look what Jesus says to people like me and maybe like you: "Come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, those burdens of performance and guilt, and I will give you what? Rest." You know, like we say around here, it says, "The Lord is my shepherd; he makes me lie down in green pastures." It doesn't say, "The Lord is my shepherd; he makes me mow the lawn." He's here to give you rest.

Now, some of you, your performance orientation doesn't come from religion; it comes from trying to please an unpleasable parent. Some of you, your parents have been dead for years, and you're still trying to please them or some other authority figure in your life. Jesus can give you rest. How? It all comes down to understanding point number four: Jesus says he came to radiate grace. He says he came to proclaim the time of the Lord's favor. Now, what is that all about?

Watch this: this phrase, "the time of the Lord's favor," is a reference to something in the Bible called the year of Jubilee. Way back in the time of Moses, God gave some instructions. He said, "Take every seventh day off," right? The Sabbath. But more than that, he said, "Give every seventh year off to the fields where you grow crops. Give them a chance to recharge." And he said, "Every seven times seventh year, every 49th year, have a year of Jubilee where all outstanding debts are canceled, all debts forgiven, total restart. Your mortgage is paid off, all personal loans paid off, all debts." And this phrase they used to describe the year of Jubilee was the year of the Lord's favor, the year of grace.

Well, how did that go for the people of Israel? We find out in the Bible that apparently they never practiced the year of Jubilee—not one time. This was given to them as a principle 1,500 years before Jesus. And in Isaiah, it says one thing the Messiah is going to do when he shows up is say, "Okay, it's Jubilee time. All the debts that have been accumulating since the beginning—BAM!—all forgiven." Now, if that's what Jesus said he came to do, when did Jesus ever do that?

Let me explain it this way: in nearly every world religion, there's this concept of sin debt. You hear it talked about in terms like karmic debt. Most people imagine something like this: a scale with all my bad deeds on one side and my good deeds on the other, and I have to do good that outweighs the bad. I have to work off this debt I owe God or I owe the universe from all the bad things I did and build up good karma that outweighs the bad karma. Jesus is saying, "Relax. I paid your debt for you on the cross." So now you can have a relationship with God based on his grace and not your debt. This makes a huge difference in how you perceive God, the freedom with which you approach God.

In those days, the religious teachers taught you approach God based on your debt, and God only answers the prayers and blesses those who are paid up with good deeds. But Jesus is actually saying, "Everyone who asks receives; everyone who seeks finds; and to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." He says, "If you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who what? Earned it? To those who worked real hard for it? To those who proved their worth? No! To those who what? Ask." You're not God's lone client; you're not God's employee; you're God's child. He loves you.

So when we talk here about receiving Jesus, what we mean is: have you simply asked him in humility for his forgiveness and grace? When you approach God, all you need is need. So look at these four things. I want to solve the mystery of why they tried to kill Jesus for what seems like super good news to me. But first, here's another age-old debate about these very verses: did Jesus mean these four things only spiritually, like we've been talking about, or did he also mean these things actually, like the actual poor and oppressed? And this is a big debate, and it has been for two thousand years.

Some people say we should only preach the gospel, and when we do social ministry, that it's a distraction; we go off mission. And others say, "No, we should focus on ministry to the poor and let our actions preach the gospel and just focus on social ministry." So what's the answer? What did Jesus do? Well, in Matthew's gospel, it says Jesus traveled throughout the region of Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the good news about the kingdom. So we preach the content, and he healed every kind of disease and illness. Jesus always did both. Jesus proclaims the good news and practices good deeds. In fact, healing people physically, helping them physically gave credibility to his message of healing people spiritually. He always did both.

You know, when John the Baptist asks, "Are you really the Messiah?" here's the evidence. Jesus gives; he says, "Go back and report to John what you've seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor." They go together. He did both, and his mission is our mission. Jesus said, "As the Father sent me, I am sending you" in the same way, doing both. And this is why you will always hear the good news of God's grace preached here every single weekend. We did it last weekend; I'm doing it this weekend; we'll do it next weekend.

And why we will always do things like People's Pantry. Did you know we give away free groceries here every Wednesday? And you don't have to qualify to get free groceries; we give them to whoever asks because that's how Jesus worked. And this is why we support missionaries like the Shine Ends up in the extreme north of Alaska. This year, they celebrated the completion of their life's work: the translation of the Bible, the New Testament, into the Yupik language for the first time. The good news can be proclaimed in Yupik. Last month, the Yupik tribal elders held a huge celebration. The Shine Ends are doing foundational work about the content, about the message of the good news, and we also support missionaries doing good deeds like Little Flock in India, a home for kids left homeless after the tidal waves hit horribly in South India, or the camp ministry called Play in South Africa, bringing together kids from every race, every economic class across boundaries, just like Jesus did. We teach the good news to them, and we help them with practical needs like shoes for school because Jesus did both, so we do both.

And not because every person we help will get saved; that didn't happen for Jesus either. But because over the long term, one gives credibility to the other, like in Jesus's response to John the Baptist's doubts. Okay, now let's solve the mystery: why in the world would the people want to kill Jesus after a message like this? This is awesome news, isn't it? It is if you are willing to say, "I need this, and I'm totally unable to get this on my own." If you're willing to say, "I can't; God can, so I will let him by turning over the leadership and control of my life to him." If you're willing to be that desperate, this is great news.

See, what did the widow and Naaman have in common? One was a woman; one was a man. One was poor; one was rich. One was from Sidon; one was from Syria. One an unknown; one was famous. The only thing they had in common was they were both desperate, and they knew they had no power to change their circumstance. The people who were enraged by Jesus' message weren't just offended that Jesus apparently loved Gentiles; they were offended by the mere idea that to receive this salvation from the Messiah, they had to be as weak as the widow and as needy as Naaman.

See, their whole lives, they taught God helps the worthy, and this is exactly what most religious people believe to this day: "Be a have, and God will be good to you. And if you're really worthy, he lets you into his heaven when you die. But if you're not worthy, you don't go to heaven." God helps the worthy. Jesus taught God helps the needy, and that's completely different. No one is worthy, but God is gracious, and this is very hard to accept for some people. It was hard for them in the village of Nazareth; it's hard for people to this day.

I'll close with the story of my own grandmother. She was probably an actual genius—probably the only real true genius I've ever known. Great artist in a variety of media. She was a professional fashion columnist in Switzerland. She was multilingual, played multiple instruments, had a great mind, great heart, volunteered to serve adults who were developmentally challenged. Fascinating person, but so offended by even the implication that she needed anything from Jesus. My mom or my sister would try to share the gospel with her, and she'd say in her native Swiss German, "Hey, don't tell me to receive Jesus. I'm a good person. In fact, I'm better than almost any so-called Christian I know." And she was.

And that's why people rejected Jesus then and reject him to this day. Now, some people reject Jesus because they really don't get the message. They think it's about trying hard to be good. They don't understand that it's all about grace. But sometimes we really do understand the message and reject it because we don't see ourselves as needing it. That's the one thing that is important: that you see that you need it.

Well, my uber-capable grandmother, toward the end of her life, had a serious stroke. And for the very first time in her life, she found she needed other people. She couldn't even feed herself. So my mother went to Switzerland to take care of her, and one day she asked her, kind of for the last time, "Mom, would you like to receive Jesus as your Lord and as your Savior?" And for the first time, my grandmother said, "Yeah." Yes, I think it's because for the first time she realized her need. And you know what happened next? After she prayed, instantly tears of joy just streamed down her face.

And she rocked back and forth and back and forth, laughing and crying at the same time and saying over and over and over again with joy and love, "Yes, yes, who see a sushi, a sushi, a sushi, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." This was a woman, a lifelong atheist, who was in no way set up for some spiritual experience. And yet when she cracked open the door of her heart, this proud woman finally found that the love she'd been pushing away her whole life was waiting to just flood in, and she was feeling the embrace of the living Jesus.

So my question to you today is: do you truly see your continuing need? You know, even religious people, church people—especially church people—can get to the point where we think this is all for real sinners, not for people like me. I'm worthy. So my question is today: can you start the new year by just humbly receiving that the good news is for you? It's for you. I don't think there's a better time than the last weekend of the year as we thank God for what Jesus did through communion. So let's prepare our hearts for communion right now. Would you bow with me?

Lord, thank you for the good news for us, for me. Whether we've been going to church our whole lives or maybe this is the first time some have been in church for years, we want to say on our own we sure need a Savior. And the good news is you are our Savior. And right now, during communion, we remember that it was by giving his life for us that Jesus paid our debt. And so we thank you and we receive your grace and just in gratitude say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, we love you." Amen.