Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome & Notices

Praise: In Christ alone

Prayer

Children’s address

Do you know this chair can hold your weight?

This sweet will taste nice?

Praise:

When Zion’s fortunes God restored, it was a dream come true.

2 Our mouths were then with laughter filled, our tongues with songs anew.

Children leave

Reading

Prayer

Offering

sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli Deo gloria?

Obadiah

Annabelle home.

Care she needs.

Campbells home.

Julie and others who may be grieving.

Security forces in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, have ended a 15-hour siege of a hotel stormed by armed militants.

The gunmen entered the building after two bombs were detonated in the area.

At least 20 people were killed, and it is feared more bodies will be found as security forces search the hotel.

sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli Deo gloria?

Lord just as you transformed Martin Luther 500 years ago through the reading of your word in Romans and through him transformed the world, would you likewise transform each of us today.

Would you show us afresh the truths of your word.

Praise: By faith we see the hand of God

Introduction

As we look at these opening verses from the book of Luke this morning, my hope and prayer is that we will start to get something of a sense of the nature of Luke’s work, that we will appreciate the value of what we have here in front of us, and that therefore we will all get excited to dive in to this book over the coming weeks, months, indeed probably years.

My intention is that we’ll take the book in sections, interspersing it with a few one offs and short series as we go along, but overall I expect us to spend a considerable amount of time considering what Luke has to tell us in his gospel.

If you’re wondering why this particular book, my hope is that these opening verses will provide you with the answer.

Authorship

One of the questions which every commentary on a book of the Bible, or every introductory course at seminary always has to answer is: ‘who wrote it?’.

You might think that’s a straightforward question, after all it says it right there at the top, of the page, the gospel according to Luke.

It probably won’t surprise you that that’s not quite enough for most skeptical scholars, but happily in this case there’s very little debate.

Since the earliest fragments of the gospel we have, and the very first records of the compilation of the Biblical canon, there has been no serious contender for the authorship of this gospel than Luke, and more specifically that’s Luke ‘the beloved physician’ who was a companion of the apostle Paul for part of his journeys as recorded in Acts.

He crops up briefly in one or two other places too, like the list of greetings at the end of the book of Colossians.

Well, so far so good.

But why do we care?

Sure, it has to be talked about by the academics, but what difference does it make to us here today whether or not Luke wrote it?

If it’s all inspired by the Holy Spirit anyway, so what?

Well, I don’t think that the way the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of scripture makes the human author irrelevant, otherwise we wouldn’t have such a wide variety of styles as we see different characters coming through.

In any case, here are two concrete examples of why we care who wrote this book.

If the same person wrote different books of the Bible, then the one informs our understanding of the other more directly.

And that’s both in terms of thematic emphases, and in terms of the particular meanings of words.

If I want to know how Luke’s using a particular word, which facet of its meaning he’s focussing on, it doesn’t do me all that much good to look at how James uses the word.

But I can have a look at how Luke uses it elsewhere.

So if we agree that Luke wrote both this gospel and the book of Acts, we can understand the two together as a cohesive whole.

And that’s not just for people with degrees in theology looking at individual words in Greek, that’s something which will help you too.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be digging into specific phrases, it’s also true that simply reading through Luke and Acts together as a unified whole will enrich your experience of either one.

Let me encourage you to consider doing that perhaps over the next few weeks as we start looking at Luke’s gospel.

If you read for half an hour for a few evenings you’ll get through it quickly enough.

Knowing something of who he is and his background and who he’s writing to can be a reassurance to us.

For me personally, I’ve found it helpful to remember that the Bible has numerous models and examples for us of people who did not see Jesus in person themselves, yet they believe.

We see people in the Bible who are willing to believe on the basis of what they have been told, on the basis of the eyewitness accounts they heard.

When Luke refers to eyewitnesses in these opening verses he does so knowing that his first readers could go and find those eyewitnesses and check what he’s saying.

Whilst we may not have that opportunity ourselves, I find it reassuring that the writers of the New Testament opened themselves up to that kind of fact-checking.

If people within the Bible itself could believe on the basis of second and third hand accounts, then it’s not unreasonable for us to do similarly.

Luke is one such person himself, and he’s writing to another person, or people, in a similar situation.

He’s writing for those who are at some remove from Jesus’ ministry both geographically and in time, and writing to assure them that it’s reasonable for them to believe in Jesus.

Summary

The second thing which you always get at the start of a commentary is a bit of a summary of the major themes of the book, helping to orient you for what’s up ahead.

Any writer always has themes they tend to dwell on, and a purpose for which they’re writing, and it’s helpful to see some of that up front.

I think it will be helpful for us too to have an idea of where we’re going, so let me highlight three summary themes.

Firstly, Luke’s is a gospel of good news!

The teaching, the healings, Jesus’ recorded acts of compassion, are all aspects of the proclamation of good news.

We can easily lose sight of the fact that the gospel is good news, and good news not only in some distant far off future, but good news right now.

Jesus sets prisoners free and makes the blind see.

Luke records the good news which Jesus proclaimed in word and deed.

2. Secondly, Luke is consistently focussed on salvation.

Commentator IH Marshall says that “The central theme in the writings of Luke is that Jesus offers salvation to men.”

It seems such an obvious thing to say, of course the offer of salvation is a fundamental theme of a gospel account.

And yet how easily we lose sight of that.

When Jesus meets Zaccheus the tax collector, the account as recorded in ends with these words:

And how readily we narrow that down.

How readily we lose sight of the central importance that Jesus came to seek and save the lost.

And how readily we narrow that down.

How quickly we end up thinking, or at least acting like, Jesus came to seek and save people like us.

But no!

There is a wideness to God’s mercy.

Jesus’ ministry wasn’t primarily to the comfortable and middle-class, to the respectable.

No. Jesus ministry was especially for the poor, the needy, the social outcasts.

The people called “Sinners”.

3. Thirdly, the cost of discipleship

Whilst the gospel as good news is a central theme, Luke does not shy away from, indeed he dwells on, the nature of the response which is expected and the cost that will bring.

He’s clear that those who follow Jesus will receive the blessings of the kingdom, but also that we are called to a life of strenuous self-denial whilst we wait.

There are important passages on that in and following and in 14:25ff.

Jesus calls his disciples to a life of wholehearted discipleship, in contrast to and in rejection of the temptation of riches and of this world.

Be Certain

That brings us, then, to the question of why Luke wrote this gospel.

And that brings us to those four verses right at the start of the gospel which we read earlier.

If you’ve lost them, do please take a moment to turn to the beginning of Luke’s gospel just now.

Luke tells us here, in so many words, that he has set out to write a careful, reliable account, the objective of which is that Theophilus (and presumably others too) may ‘know the certainty of the things you have been taught.’

To my mind it is this purpose which makes this gospel particularly suitable for us as we set out on this journey together.

Whilst many of you have known many of the gospel stories and Jesus’ parables since the days of your youth, this gospel is written for people who already know, that they might have certainty.

This gospel is written for members of the church, or at least people on the fringe.

Now clearly it has enormous evangelistic value too, but primarily this is written to give certainty those those within.

Hence the Title for this talk, Be certain.

Luke the trustworthy compiler

As he sets out, Luke commends himself to Theophilus as a trustworthy source, as a compiler who can be relied upon to give a true record.

Note the various language he uses over these verses to build up that impression.