Sermon Tone Analysis
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Introduction
Imagine being poor.
I mean poor poor.
For years you hoped things would change and that perhaps you might just catch a break.
But as the years rolled on, you got further and further into debt.
Finally, you and your family knew that you would not survive much longer unless you did what was once unthinkable.
You first sold your land that had been in your family for generations.
That kept you a float for a little bit, but soon that money dried up.
Now, the real devastating decision had to be made.
You sold yourselves into slavery, hoping that your master would be kind and hoping that soon you’d be able to buy yourselves out.
You can’t even remember how long it’s been since selling yourself.
You can’t remember what life was like before it all happened.
As you work in the fields, you see that your fellow slaves are huddled up and becoming excited.
Finally, someone comes and tells you what all the fuss is about.
In a couple of months, the Year of Jubilee will begin.
You’ll all be free!
And more than that, all your land will be returned to you!
Your debt is forgiven!
Talk about good news!
As we open up the text this morning, we are looking at the most jubilant of Jubilee Years.
It was the Jubilee to end all Jubilees.
It can’t get any better than this.
And as we open it, I want us to see three parts that make up this section.
The first is the status of Jesus’s ministry.
The second is the substance of Jesus’s ministry.
Finally, the statement about Jesus’s ministry.
The Status of Jesus’s ministry
The Substance of Jesus’s ministry
The Statement about Jesus’s ministry
The Status of Jesus’s Ministry
The first part of this section focus’s on the status of Jesus’s ministry.
Luke doesn’t spend a lot of time here, and we won’t ever, but he points out two interesting and important remarks about Jesus and his ministry.
The first is that Jesus and his ministry were Spirit-powered.
The second was that Jesus and his ministry were man-praised.
Guess which one would last.
Guess which one would soon disappear.
Jesus’s ministry began in prayer.
Remember when we were looking at the passage on Jesus’s baptism, and we saw that only Luke pointed out that Jesus was praying when the heavens opened and the Spirit descended.
So it was started in prayer, but powered by the Spirit.
The Spirit came down as a dove.
He led him into the wilderness to be tempted and strengthened him through it.
Now that Jesus was on his way back to Galilee, the northern part of the Jewish people, Luke tells us that Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit.
It would be the Spirit who would make Jesus bold.
It would be the Spirit who would make Jesus a miracle-worker and a demon-exorciser.
That doesn’t mean that the Spirit always works in such a way.
Not everyone empowered by the Spirit of God will perform miracles or exorcise demons.
But only by the Spirit of God can we fulfill the purpose of God that he has for our lives.
But, as I said, He was not only Spirit-powered, but he was also Man-praised.
Jesus and his ministry had a growing reputation.
People were excited about it.
News of him had spread and he was the guest-speaker at all the local synagogues.
People would hear him and glorify him.
They’d praise him and honor him.
And many people would fall prey to this kind of laud.
They’d begin to believe their own hype.
They’d believe that they were the ones changing lives and minds.
But not Jesus.
Certainly Jesus deserved the praises of the people.
If anyone deserved to be glorified, it was Jesus.
But Jesus understood the hierarchy of ministry.
For a ministry to be successful, it needs God’s approval and not man’s.
For a ministry to be successful it must be Spirit-powered, whether or not it is Man-praised.
What the Christian world sees so much is a mix-up in this hierarchy.
What is often begun in the power of the Spirit, gets corrupted in the praise of man.
Celebrity pastors as well as country preachers mistaken man’s praise for the Spirit’s power.
Churches are growing, books are selling, tweets are retweeted, invitations are given to preach at conferences or just the association’s annual meeting.
At some point though, the Spirit is relegated to the back, and man is moved to the front.
And the hierarchy gets flipped on its head.
Man’s praise is not wrong in and of itself.
But it can reveal our hearts.
One of my favorite proverbs is
If we are in ministry (and I’m not talking just about pastors, but any ministry—any act of service), we must always beware of the pull of man’s praise and neglect of the Spirit’s power.
When Jesus sat before his own townsfolk, he read a passage that gave credit where it belongs.
Luke 4:18 (ESV)
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. . .
The Substance of Jesus’s Ministry
This leads us to the second part of the text.
The first dealt with the Status of Jesus’s Ministry, but now we need to see the Substance of Jesus’s ministry.
Before we get into the substance though, I want to take us back for a few minutes.
Earlier, I wanted you to imagine yourself as being poor—so poor that you had to sell your land and then sell yourself into slavery.
But then you heard that the year of Jubilee was coming.
This goes back all the way to
In the year of Jubilee everything changed.
It was truly a time to celebrate because restoration was being made.
Those who had to sell themselves in those last six years would be set free.
Any land that was sold would be given back at no expense.
Wrongs were made right.
Debts were forgiven.
It was a glorious time, especially for those who were poor.
To speak about the year of Jubilee was to speak of good news.
The major problem was that we have no evidence that the Jews followed this law.
They were supposed to, and perhaps they followed some of it, but some of it we know they didn’t.
Every Year of Jubilee was preceded by a sabbatical year.
The land was to remain fallow.
There was no plowing or planting allowed on the seventh year—any seventh year!
But the Year of Jubilee extended the fallowness.
So for two years no plowing or planting was allowed.
God would see to it that enough was harvested on the previous year and that the land would produce enough on its own without planting, so the people could survive.
But the people of Israel never allowed the land to be fallow.
For 490 years they ignored the commandments about the Sabbath and Jubilee years.
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