Out With the Old In With the New 1

RECORD

Last week I began a new series taking a fresh look at some of the parables of Jesus

Now there are several keys that we need to use to understand and make sense of the parables that Jesus taught

The first and the easiest is to continue reading after the parable because often Jesus would often explain the meaning of the parable after He had taught it, even if in private to just His disciples

The second key is a little more difficult but is crucial and that is to make the effort to understand the cultural meaning of what Jesus was talking about

Just like last week’s message where in order to understand the Parable of the sower we must understand the farming culture of Israel at the time

This key may take some research on our part but it is important enough to warrant that extra work

A third key is one that is often overlooked despite the fact that it is almost as simple as the first key and as important as the second key, and that is to make ourselves aware of the context in which Jesus is teaching this parable

More often than not the parables that Jesus taught were a response to something that was happening around Him, they were reactionary in nature and if we can understand what it was that Jesus was reacting to we can better understand His reaction

Such is the case with the parable I want to look at today, while the parable itself is found in , in order for us to truly get a grip on the point that Jesus was trying to make, we have to back up a little, to the beginning of chapter 5 to be specific

What we have recorded for us in Luke chapter 5 is the story of the very beginning of the earthly ministry of Jesus, let’s call it A New Rabbi

It was a ministry that was, first and foremost, to the nation of Israel and that would turn this nation upside down

Judaism was and is the oldest established religion in the world having been practiced for millennia before Jesus even came upon the scene

It was well rooted and established but even from the very beginning of His ministry there was something different about Jesus and what it was that He was proclaiming

His was a different Message

For what He was proclaiming was a message of “Out with the old and in with the new!”

In verses 1-11 of chapter 5 we have large crowds coming to hear Jesus teach because they had never heard anyone teach with such wisdom or authority, and to top it off, His teaching was very often punctuated with miracles just as it was in this passage

· Everywhere that this man went people were being delivered from any and every kind of ailment

It is also clear that the methods used by Jesus were far different than any other

Jesus was choosing His own disciples which went against the culture of the day

Next in verses 12-16 Jesus heals a man with leprosy, but not only does He heal this man, He reaches out and touches the man, showing him respect and compassion while making Himself ritually unclean in the process

No one would dare to do that

Next, in part I believe, because of the growing fame of Christ and because He had told the aforementioned leper to goes show himself to the priest, Jesus began to attract a lot of attention from the religious leaders, the keepers of the old ways, the managers of the status quo

Luke records in verse 17,

Luke 5:17 NIV

One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick.

This point is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the parable that is about to come and so keeping in line with that parable I want to call this point A New Day

The status quo of Judaism was being challenged and the ripples in the water had made it all the way back to the Pharisees, the religious teachers who held most of the power and so they launched an “INVESTIGATION”

They came from all over the place to see for themselves what was taking place and what was causing this stir among the masses

They wanted to see for themselves if these new teachings, and the man who taught them, were any kind of threat to them and so they showed up en mass filling up not only the house that Jesus was teaching in but the surrounding yard as well

Their fears were soon confirmed though when some men cut a hole in the roof and lowered a cripple down through it right in front of this teacher

Expecting to see with their own eyes one of these miraculous healings that they had heard so much about, they instead became “IRATE” when, instead of healing the man, this Jesus instead proclaimed the forgiveness of this man’s sins

They were dumb-founded, speechless, aghast

The audacity of this man to proclaim the forgiveness of sins when it was only God Himself could do such a thing and even then only through the well oiled machine of the Jewish sacrificial system

This was heresy and they couldn’t sit back and just let it happen

Luke 5:22:25

Luke 5:22–25 NIV

Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God.

This was their moment of “INSTRUCTION”

He took the time to teach these guardians of the Jewish way of life that things were indeed about to change and, as we mentioned earlier, to drive His point home He healed the paralytic man

Now you have to understand the stir that this would have caused, What this man was saying was so different than what had been taught for generations but He spoke it with such authority and was able to follow it up with such great miracles, how could it not be true?

Even if it was contrary

But Jesus wasn’t done yet, let’s consider A New Disciple

Luke 5:27–32 NIV

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Luke 5:27-

Luke 5:27-

Luke 5:27–28 NIV

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.

Almost as if to add insult to injury, Jesus walks out of the house after just just proclaiming a man’s sins to be forgiven and seeing this tax collector at the side of the road He calls him to become a disciple

First the CALL, almost as if to add insult to injury, Jesus walks out of the house after just just proclaiming a man’s sins to be forgiven and seeing this tax collector at the side of the road He calls him to become a disciple

Tax collectors were considered the lowest of the low, they were Jews who had traded their birthright to work for Rome in the enslavement of their own people, they had no right to participate in any kind of movement of God, not even a heretical one

Additionally they were were often corrupt taking much more than they were required to from the people and keeping the difference for themselves

This was strike 2 against this so called prophet and strike 3 was just around the corner

Luke 5:29–30 NIV

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

Luke 5:29-30

This was the “CALAMITY” for you can’t possibly be a holy man leading a move of God and associate with such a great crowd of sinners

Notice that Luke says that at the banquet was a large crowd of tax collectors and others, well one thing that you can be sure of is that those “others” did not include any good Jews because no self-respecting Jew would have ever associated with such a crowd

It was scandalous

And the Pharisees made sure that everyone knew

Calling aside these newly appointed disciples of this man they tried to point the error of what was taking place, this was their “COMPLAINT” that Jesus was going against the established order of doing things, that a Rabbi wasn’t supposed to be like this

And once again, much to their dismay, Jesus was waiting for them with an answer

Luke 5:31–32 NIV

Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

These are the events that transpired leading up to the parable that Jesus was about to speak, the Jewish religious way of life was being threatened, Jesus was doing new things and was doing them a new way and was looking for new results

In his book, The End of Religion, Bruxy Cavey writes, “Religion can be tiring - a treadmill of legislated performance powered by guilt and fear”

He continues on to say, “If Jesus is somehow God with skin on, God Himself coming in person to us, what might the radical implications be? Does this not completely reverse the direction of humanity’s spiritual pursuits? Religion is exposed as our attempt to reach God, and the climb is tiring. But if Jesus is God coming to us and becoming one of us, than religion is redundant.”

I want you to listen to what Jesus said in and I’m going to read it from The Message Bible,

I want you to listen to what Jesus said in and I’m going to read it from The Message Bible,

Now I want you to listen to what Jesus said in and I’m going to read it from The Message Bible,

(The Message)

28–30 “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

This is what had these Pharisees so upset and so worried, so much so that they are about to challenge Jesus in a very real and direct way, they were going to challenge Jesus on how He differed from them on one of their most core doctrines,the doctrine of fasting

Unfortunately I am not going to have time to get into that this morning or the resulting parable that is our text, so we will just read it this morning and consider its implications for us next week

But before we read it let’s stop and ask ourselves if, like the Pharisees we are too stuck in the former way of doing things to allow Jesus to do something new in us

Are we allowing the heavy and ill-fitting yoke of religion to keep us from experiencing the new freedom that Christ offers

Today is a new day and Jesus is looking for and calling to new disciples but it won’t work if we are just following the old way of things, the old status quo, we must allow Him to make us a new creation

Next week will pick it up from here

Luke 5:33-

Luke 5:33–39 NIV

They said to him, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.” Jesus answered, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast.” He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’ ”

Let’s pray