A Study Through the Gospel of Luke

LUKE

A Study Through the Gospel of Luke

Transcripts of Sermons

Red Oak Church, Andrews, North Carolina

November 13, 2016 –

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sermon titles correspond to podcast titles.

DATEPASSAGESPEAKER

11132016 – Luke Intro & Luke 1:1-4Brody Holloway

11202016 – Luke 1:5-25 & 68-80Brody Holloway

11272016 – Luke 1:26-38Rob Conti

12042016 – Luke 1:39-56Mitch Jolly

12112016 – Luke 2:1-7Spencer Davis

12182016 – Luke 2:8-20Brody Holloway

01012017 – Luke 2:22-52Brody Holloway

01082017 – Luke 3:1-20Spencer Davis

01152017 – Luke 3:21-38Brody Holloway

01222017 – Luke 4:1-13Zach Mabry

01292017 – Luke 4:14-30Brody Holloway

02052017 – Luke 4:31-44Rob Conti

02122017 – Luke 5:1-11Brody Holloway

02192017 – Luke 5:12-26Spencer Davis

02262017 – Luke 5:27-39Brody Holloway

03052017 – Luke 6:1-11Rob Conti

03122017 – Luke 6:12-19Brody Holloway

03192017 – Luke 6:17-26Brody Holloway

03262017 – Luke 6:27-36Brody Holloway

04022017 – Luke 6:37-42Spencer Davis

04092017 – Luke 6:42-49Zach Mabry

04162017 –Luke 7:1-17Brody Holloway

04302017 – Luke 7:18-50Rob Conti

05072017 – Luke 8:1-21Brody Holloway

05142017 –Luke 8:21-56Brody Holloway

05212017 – Luke 9:1-17Rob Conti

05282017 – Luke 9:18-36Brody Holloway

06042017 – Luke 9:28-36Brody Holloway

06112017 – Luke 9:37-62Brody Holloway

06182017 – Luke 10:1-24Spencer Davis

06252017 – Luke 10:25-42Brody Holloway

07022017 – Luke 11:1-13Rob Conti

07092017 – Luke 11: 14-36Brody Holloway

07162017 – Luke 11: 37-54Zach Mabry

November 13, 2016

Luke Introduction & Luke 1:1-4

Brody Holloway

Amen. I’m excited to get into this. It will be a long journey because we will follow up our study of the Book of Luke with a study of the book of Acts. Most of you probably know, but some of you may not know this, that Luke and Acts are a prequel and sequel. The same guy wrote those two books and tonight we will get into a little bit of why he wrote them and what his objective was in writing them.

I wanted to point out a couple of resources. Some of you like to know what we are going to be using. Personally, for me, in my preparation for the background of the book, I found that this is a good resource for you as a believer and is something that I recommend to new Christians or even non-Christians who are exploring the faith. This is a book by F. F. Bruce. I think he died around nineteen-ninety. He was a great commentator, pastor, and theologian. This book is called The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable[1]? If you are a new member at Red Oak, somebody has probably handed you a book along the way. We use different ones as we go through each cycle that are foundational resources for the Christian faith. We want to equip our people to grow in your faith and defend your faith. This is something that I recommend strongly because it’s real simple. It’s only around a hundred pages and it’s easy to read.The reason I pointed it out tonight is because chapter seven is strictly a look at Luke and Luke’s authorship. I read it exhaustively in preparation for tonight and the background of the Book of Luke, and it’s really, really good. I cannot recommend it enough. It was a cheap book and y’all bought it for me on Amazon for about five bucks, so thank you for that. So, I recommend that for you.

We will use multiple commentaries but there’s one that we plan to follow the outline of in regard to the breakdown of the number of sermons. We will basically follow the chapters of the NIV Application Commentary[2]. This is a series that’s really respected and we respect it and have used it for other books of the Bible. In the Gospel of Luke, we will use a ton of other resources, but this is the one we will follow most closely. We will post other commentaries we are using on our Facebook page. For this one, Darrel Bock is a very reputable commentator and professor of theology and history. This guy knows his stuff. So, those are a couple of resources for you before we dig into this, if you are interested and you want some outside resources to help you follow along.

So, we will get into our introduction to Luke tonight. I love introductions and I love the historical aspect of the faith and the writing of the Bible. In Red Oak Youth, which we refer to as R.O.Y., for the last couple of Wednesdays we have been talking about and kind of building up to our study in the Book of Luke. It’s been awesome because we’ve been talking in depth about who this guy was and what we know about him, because Luke is a fascinating character. He doesn’t talk about himself but he is very qualified as a minister of the Gospel. His resume and his qualifications are really impressive. So, tonight, we want to look at the man, Luke, in terms of how he wrote and put together these two works of Scripture, and some of the facts behind it, and how that can be helpful for us.

Historically, Luke gives us the most comprehensive information on the Early Church. So, if we take the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, Luke primarily tells the story of Jesus’ life and ministry, and the Book of Acts tells the story of the first century Church, covering about three decades. That’s a long time, isn’t it? So, when you are reading the Book of Acts, you are reading about thirty years’ worth of material. That’s a long, long, chunk of time. When you read the Gospel of Luke, you are reading about thirty years’ worth of material. Luke and Acts are about sixty years’ worth of material, so it is very exhaustive in terms of the details we get from Luke regarding the life of Jesus, and the impact He made on the immediate culture and society around Jerusalem, and Palestine, and Galilee, and other places. Jesus had several homes. One was in Nazareth when He was a child. We know that He lived in Egypt. We know that His family’s lineage and roots were in Bethlehem, and we also know that His hub and His headquarters for a lot of His ministry was in a place called Capernaum, in Galilee, which was more northern in the nation of Israel and the country of Palestine.

So, what Luke does, and we see it in the intro that Spencer read tonight, is that he goes and does this sort of investigative report. It literally lays out like a documentary. Some of you like documentaries. I love documentaries. I love to watch them. My family has watched documentaries on drug abuse and there are a couple of them about heroin that are crazy. A historical documentary that we watched several years ago that stands out was about life inside of North Korea. It was a secular, not a Christian, documentary. I love to watch documentaries because if a documentary is done right it’s a collection of personal, first-hand accounts. So, the documentarian or the investigative reporter goes to people and interviews them, and asks them questions, and takes down information, so that you get first-hand accounts of things that are happening. So, Luke is telling us in our text for tonight that what he is going to do is compile a list of stories through investigative reporting, so it’s going to lay out a lot like a documentary. It’s going to be a documentary of the life of Jesus and the life of the Early Church. Now, something else that is interesting is that after Luke closes the Book of Acts, in Acts 28, we don’t have any real clear Early Church history written until about the third or fourth century under Constantine. So, Luke really gives us this overwhelming abundance of information about the life of Jesus and the life of the Early Church and how it came together and how the Church was established. Then, we have to kind of go out and study secular sources until about the third or fourth century before we have any really good, Christian, Church history. So, Luke’s work is very valuable.

If you’ve grown up in the Church or if you are a new Christian, and you’ve studied or read through the Book of Luke, you probably, like most of us, have just read through it. We tend to read in a kind of nonchalant manner when we read through the Gospels, and just read the stories about Jesus healing people, and telling parables, and things like that. But, we’re looking at Luke through the lens of what he’s telling us in these first four verses, which is this, “I’ve gone around and compiled this narrative, this report, by eyewitness accounts, and I’ve talked to people who were there, and I’ve laid out for you this document.” He is writing specifically to this man named Theophilus, who he calls “Most Excellent Theophilus.” You see this in verse 4. Theophilus’ name just means ‘lover of God.’ We don’t know anything about this man, but Luke directs both the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts to Theophilus. We don’t know anything about him other than that his name means ‘lover of God.’ We don’t know if he was a new convert or an old convert and we don’t know what position he held. Luke only uses the phrase “most excellent” when he is referring to government officials. Luke introduces us to national officials in the Roman Empire; men like Quirinius, and Festus, and Felix, and Claudius Paulus. There is a guy named Serbius who is a proconsul in a place near Antioch that Luke introduces us to. Here is why that is important—these were specific people who were living at the time of Jesus and the time of the Early Church, who are being mentioned by name, and the credibility there is that someone could have said, “Whoa, I was there and that didn’t happen like that.” So, Luke is writing to an audience that could discredit him if his facts weren’t in order. Make sense? It’s not like Luke was writing a hundred years later and he looked back and said, “This guy named Jesus came along and here’s what happened. This is the story and it was awesome.” He didn’t embellish, and grow the legends, and stretch the stories. He is writing, and interviewing people for their first-hand accounts, and writing down what they say, and he’s publishing it internationally. It is a difficult endeavor for Paul to write his report because if he doesn’t get all his facts in order then he will be in trouble.

A couple of weeks ago in our youth group, the young men from Red Oak were sitting around and having a conversation, and we were talking about how we got the Bible and how we can trust it. One of the most fascinating things to study is the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls that happened in the 1940s. Some of you may never have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a series of documents that were found in caves in Israel that had been preserved because they were in the region of the Dead Sea. There is a lot of salt in the air and the salt had preserved these documents. And these documents were brought out, and we opened these documents up, and we began to read these documents, and they were copies of Scripture from the Septuagint, which is the Old Testament that had been translated to Greek. So, you go back to the time of Jesus, which was the first century, and the Dead Sea Scrolls were copies of Scripture from a couple of hundred years before that. When we take the Dead Sea Scrolls and we lay them out and you take your NSV Bible, or your ASV Bible, or your KJV Bible, and you translate it, it matches perfectly, which means that Scripture was not tampered with from the time of its writing before Christ until modern day translations and copies of Scripture. Make sense? So, we have this credibility that goes with the Bible and no other documents have this.

Well, Luke, in his own two works, the Books of Luke and Acts, gives us that same kind of credibility because he names people. For instance, Luke is the only guy who tells us the story of Zacchaeus. My imagination runs wild and I think that maybe Luke went around and was interviewing people who were healed, or other awesome stories happened where people met Jesus, and he ran across this guy named Zacchaeus who told him this story. Luke is the only one who tells us that story and the thing that is significant about that, other than the fact that it is just in the Bible and we accept it by faith, is this—Zacchaeus was an actual tax collector on a major trade route in that part of the world, where all anybody had to do was go say, “Hey, Zacchaeus, what’s up man? I just got a copy of this letter from this guy named Luke and here’s what he’s saying. Did that really happen? Is this how this went down?” And Luke’s account could be credited or discredited. So, Luke gives us an amazing opportunity to see credibility in the writing of Scripture. Are you tracking with that so far? It gives us this invigorating approach to the study of Scripture.

Luke also writes a ton of Scripture. Luke is responsible for writing about a third of the New Testament. So, one-third of the New Testament is written by this man. If you take all of the New Testament and divide it into authorship, Luke writes a third of it and the Apostle Paul writes about a third of it, and they were teammates. They worked together, traveled together, and did ministry together. So, Luke gives us this wealth of information, and knowledge that is really helpful for us in understanding the legitimacy and credibility of the Word of God.

So, Luke says,

“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us,…”

He’s saying that a bunch of people have told the stories about Jesus. We know he’s talking about the Gospel. A lot of people have told the story and compiled narratives. He’s probably talking about written narratives and there is debate about which Gospels were written first and what order they were written in, but most other Bible commentators believe that at least one other Gospel book had been written at this point in time. So, other narratives had been written, and in verse 2 he says,

“…just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us….”

There were also oral narratives that had been handed down. So, what Luke is saying is, “A lot of people know the story about Jesus. People have written about it and people are passing down information about it. But, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go interview and research the facts, and see if this is worth, O Excellent Theophilus, you losing your position as a Roman governor, or you losing your fortune, or you being in prison. Is this really a legitimate story—the story of Jesus and the resurrection, and all the fantastic details of it, is it legitimate? Is it real? Can we trust it?

Luke also brings a different credibility to the story because Luke wasn’t one of the Apostles. He wasn’t a disciple of Jesus. He is doing this based on eyewitness accounts. So, he’s not giving us an, “I was there and I saw it.” He has to go and do the work of research, and investigation, and ask people. So, he goes and he meets people, and what happens is that as Pastor Luke is going around and meeting people, he begins to hear stories. And let me tell you something, Red Oak, one of the things that I love about our church is the stories of the people in our church. Because, when you open the Book of Luke and you open the Book of Acts, you meet real people who meet a real Saviour, and their lives are changed by it. Luke tells us these stories in great detail.

For instance, one of my favorite stories is told in Chapter 7, and it’s one that you are probably familiar with. Let me just read it from Luke 7:36,

“One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and reclined at table. 37 And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, 38 and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.’40 And Jesus answering said to him, ‘Simon, I have something to say to you.’ And he answered, ‘Say it, Teacher.’

41’A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?’43 Simon answered, ‘The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.’ And he said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’44 Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. 46 You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. 47 Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.’48 And he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’49 Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, ‘Who is this, who even forgives sins?’50 And he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace.’