Sermon Notes, January 11, 2015
Messengers, Luke 10:1-21
If you look at the life of Jesus in the gospel of Luke you’ll see that there’s a shift in theme around chapter 9 of the book of Luke. The first nine chapters of Luke are really mainly concerned with the question … Who is Jesus? Starting in chapter 9 and stretching on over the next few chapters, the theme switches, as it were, and becomes … If He’s the Son of God, if He’s the divine Son from heaven, how should we live? That’s the new theme.The general answer is that we should be disciples. But what does it mean to be one of His disciples?
The first answer to that question is it’s to be a messenger. Disciples are messengers. Every disciple of Jesus is given a message to publicly communicate, urging everyone to believe it.There are three things Jesus tells us He gives every single one of His disciples: A mission, a message, and a motivation. The motivation is all-important.
1.First, mission.
We read, “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.” Then verse 3: “Go! I am sending you …”
In 9:1, Jesus gets His twelve disciples together, the hand-picked future leaders of the church, the apostles, and He sends them out to preach, to cast out demons, and to heal the sick. Those are the three things Jesus does.Preach means persuading of the truth. Cast out demons means to liberate people’s souls from what is enslaving them. Then thirdly, heal the sick means to actually mend bodies and communities. Jesus sends out His twelve apostles, and He gives them the authority and the power to do those three things.
If we only had chapter 9 and not chapter 10, we would say,“That’s right. The clergy. That’s their job. They communicate. They do all of those great things. We pay them to do that. I hope they do a very good job. I’m sure glad they’re doing it. It’s not my job. That’s their job.”If you had chapter 9 and not chapter 10, yes, you might be able to say that. But in chapter 10 now Jesus gets 72 together. This is Jesus’ way of saying, “It’s not just the leaders, the clergy, I send. I am sending every disciple.”
The word send in Latin is the word mission, missio. Everybody who comes into contact with Jesus. We’re all in mission. Every disciple is in mission. Or put this way, a disciple is someone who is called radically in. You don’t just know God from afar; you know Him intimately. To be a disciple means to go radically in, to experience closeness to God through Christ. Intimacy, to be healed, to be blessed.
But now Jesus says, “At the very same timeI also call you radically out. I send you out.” What does that mean? They go together every time. God only calls you in into intimacy, into blessing, in order to say, “Now I want you to live radically for other people in a way you never have before, for their needs, for their concerns. I want you to go out into the world to be a healing agent.
In Ephesians 2:10we read, “For you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which he prepared in advance for you to do.”It’s not just that you are sent out in general into the world in mission, but there are particular things for you to do, particular people for you to help, and you have been shaped to be the instrument for healing.In other words, your experiences, not just your joys but even your sorrows, your gift mix, all of those things put together have shaped you so there are some needs only you can meet. There are certain people God has prepared for you to be the healing agent of His grace in their lives.
This is utterly different than the reigning worldview. The reigning worldview in our society is that biological life is an accident, that it happened by chance, and, therefore, there is no rhyme or reason. You’re not here for any purpose. You’ve just been sort of thrown into the world and there’s no particular reason for you to be here. There’s no rhyme or reason. There’s no purpose.
But Jesus says, “No, it’s not ‘thrownness’, but ‘sentness’ that is the mark of your life. I send you.”
2.So everyone has a mission. Secondly, everyone who meets Jesus has a message.
In other words, we’re sent out, but what are we sent out to do? Next week we’re going to see how we can put these two things together as we see that God has put us into the lives of certain people and we can be like Matthew who shared the message by inviting his friends to meet Jesus.
But we are messengers. Look at this middle part. “Go out,” He says. He sends them out. “Tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you” This is the fact. Every single disciple of Jesus is given a message they are to publicly communicate to others and urge everyone to believe it.
This is an amazingly hot issue in our pluralistic, politically correct society. A lot of people will say, even many of your friends will say, “Look, this is my problem with Christians. It’s all right that they believe in Jesus, but they shouldn’t try to convert other people.”
There’s a problem with that problem. Jesus Christ sends us into the world (the word is not used here, but it’s used a number of other places) to communicate what He calls the gospel. There are a number of places where He says to all of us, “Declare the gospel to every creature.”
What does the word gospel mean? A gospel was news of an objective, history-changing event that changed everyone’s situation, that everyone needed to respond to. For example, we have a document from antiquity that starts like this: “This is the beginning of the gospel of Caesar Augustus.” That’s what the word gospel conveyed—the declaration Caesar had ascended to the throne. It was sent out. Heralds took it everywhere and they declared, “The gospel of Caesar Augustus.”What is the gospel? A gospel is the announcement of good news of a major history-changing event that affects everybody.
When Jesus Christ said, “Go and proclaim the gospel to everyone in creation,” do you know the enormity of what He was claiming? You get a hint of it in v. 18. When He says, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning,” He was claiming almost casually, as He claims on almost every page of the New Testament, “I was there before the foundations of the world. I was there before the material universe existed. I am the uncreated second person of the triune God. I am God.”
Now if He’s just a prophet and He has some teaching about God, that’s advice. You might say,“The message of Jesus Christ is advice. Here’s how you can live. Here’s how you can pray. Here’s how you can find God.” You’d say, “Well that’s interesting. Should I take this advice or not?”
But if Jesus Christ is who He says He is, if He saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning, then His birth is gospel. It is a history-changing, momentous event that changes everything, and you have to respond to it or history is going to leave you in its wake.That’s the whole point behind this message going out here in the middle of chapter 10. They are to say to these cities, to these villages, “In Jesus Christ the kingdom of God is coming near, and if you reject him, history will leave you behind. This is an objective thing that’s happening. The situation is changing. You must respond to it.” You realize what Jesus is claiming.
Let’s get back to the problem. When a person says, “It’s okay to believe in Jesus; just don’t try to convert anybody,” what they’re really saying is, “You must not believe in Jesus.” They won’t come right out and say that because it sounds narrow-minded, but that’s what they’re saying. What they’re really saying is,“He can’t be the unique God broken into history who has changed everything.” If He was, then we should all go running out saying to everyone, “Rejoice, he has triumphed,” even if it means we’d fall dead in the attempt. To not take that news out to every creature would be the ultimate in wickedness, because it would be the most radically unloving thing possible.
It would be like finding the cure for cancer and saying, “I’m only going to keep it in my family. I’m only going to heal them. We’re going to be fine, but I don’t want anyone else to know about it.” That’s what it would be to know Jesus is not just a prophet who brings advice, but if He saw Satan fall from heaven He’s infinitely beyond any prophet; He’s God. Then His coming is a gospel.
Now we have a problem. This is the end of the second point of the sermon, and I want you to see the plot has thickened. On the one hand, the normal way secular people try to deal with all the anger, with all the oppression, with all the violence, with all the unraveling of the social fabric that absolute religious claims make, is they say,“Well nobody really has the truth, so no one should try to convert anybody.”But that is disingenuous at best and absolutely dishonest at worst and impossible. To say, “No one should make religious absolute truth claims” is a religious absolute truth claim. To say, “No one should try to convert people into Jesus” is to say, “Stop believing in Jesus. Believe in him the way I believe in Him, not the way you believe in Him.”It is the same thing you’re just saying you can’t do. It’s impossible to not do.We have a problem. But Jesus is wiser. He doesn’t take the modern approach, but He does not ignore the problem. Instead, He says, “It all has to do with your motivation.”
3.Finally, if you don’t have the proper motivation, the message will be destructive.
We get that in vv. 17–21. To say, “Oh, let’s not proclaim the message” is a message, so it’s impossible not to proselytize for God (or not God, as the case may be) and your cosmology. This is the solution. V. 17: “The seventy-two returned with joy and said, ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.’” Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning,” which means to say, “Of course My gospel is going to give you that kind of power.” Now look at verse 20: “However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you …” Jesus is saying something like, “I don’t like your motivation. This is not the joy that is to drive your ministry. I don’t like the satisfaction you are getting from dunamis(power). Rejoice not that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
What is Jesus doing there? He is saying there is a kind of motivation for absolute religious claims, for ministry, for going out and teaching the truth that actually is bad. It’s not helpful. And there’s a kind that is. On the one hand, let’s look at what He’s saying not to do. He says, “… Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you …”
What’s wrong with that? If you look carefully, you’ll see He’s not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Of course it’s fine to be glad, but they’re not excited about having liberated people. They say, “Wow, Lord. We are really something. Even demons submit to us.”
If you want to really get a gist of what Jesus is warning you against, you have to look at the second clause. What does it mean to have your name written? To have a name meant you were somebody. Jesus was saying, “Look at what you are resting in. Look at what you’re rejoicing in to get a sense that you’re somebody: power, your gifts, your accomplishments, your performance. That’s going to lead to the same thing that made Satan fall: pride.”You are going to be death on the people who reject you, because when people reject you, they actually threaten your very ‘somebody-ness,’ your very value, who you are.
When your self-image is based on your performance and your record and people don’t listen to you, you say things like, “Lord, shall we call fire down from heaven on them, those unbelievers, those nasty people?” But Jesus says, “Let me tell you what the gospel is. The gospel is your name is already written down.” Jesus says, “That’s what the gospel is. The gospel is don’t rejoice in what you do; rejoice in what you are in Me. The gospel is, when you have believed in Me, when you have trusted in Me, you’re already in. You’re already accepted. I stand in your place. Because of Me you are accepted.”
Jesus Christ says, “It doesn’t matter your performance. It doesn’t matter whether people believe you or not. It doesn’t matter whether people listen to you or not.”Jesus is saying there’s a motivation that’s always there and is gentle and yet courageous. It’s courageous because you speak the gospel regardless of what people think. You don’t care what they think because your name is written in heaven. On the other hand, you’re so gentle to people who reject. Why? There’s no reason to get angry because your name is written in heaven. Your name is written because of Jesus. You are accepted because of Him. He is your motivation. It never goes up or down depending on your performance.
Jesus says to the degree you are melted by the blazing heat of the joy of knowing your name is written in heaven, you can overcome discouragement, you can overcome rejection, you can overcome temptation and you will still have joy, none of which comes from success.Jesus says, “Rejoice not in your power, in your gifts. Rejoice not in your accomplishments, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Rejoice in grace.”