Important or Questionable Village

Please pray with me. Lord God Heavenly Father, we come before you in awe of Your wonder and Your grace. And the song we just sang, "Here I Am, Lord." That's what we want our hearts to be. We want your Holy Spirit to be working inside of us. Whether that's helping out with 320 some families that come for food. Whatever it is, Lord, let us be Jesus for them so that we can share You. In Your name we pray.

In Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, there's this town called Area of Fools. I need to say it's been called that for like 70 years. The people with their leader and said "Can we change the name of it? Cuz you know, 'where are you from?'" And the leader said, "Yeah, you have a point."

So they changed it to Area of Plenty, which I think is much better. But I did a little more research and the reason is is the river that went by the Area of Fools was called the Idiotic River. So I kind of see how they got from Idiotic to Fool with that. And you may be thinking to yourself. No one would name their city after that. Well. Let me tell you. How about Nothing, Arizona? Nowhere, Colorado? Satan's Kingdom, Massachusetts? Its probably back to the which burning way back when.

How about Knockemstiff, Smith, Ohio? Not named because of fighting, but that's the name of the distillery there. Their moonshine. Here's my favorite: Slapout, Oklahoma. Apparently Slapout's usual name comes from the local store having a low inventory of being "slap out" of whatever customers wanted.

Well, that's my lead into our theme verse where Philip - Philip has to have the gift of evangelism. Cuz remember, Phillip's the one that went and approached to Ethiopia, and that's kind of how that goes with that. He becomes a follower of Jesus, and he goes to Nathanael, and he says "This is the one that the prophets talked about: Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph." And Nathanael, you can almost hear" "Nazareth? Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

First of all, that's the city where God the Father wanted his Son to grow up in, so I think that's pretty good. Mary and Joseph moved there cuz they had relatives there, so they had tie-ins there. But Nazareth didn't do really well with Jesus either. And Luke chapter 4 - remember last week, we had the baptism of our Lord, then he was 40 days in the wilderness. He was tempted by Satan. He starts His ministry in Capurnum, but shortly after that, He goes to Nazareth, and what does He do there?

He gets up in the synagogue and He does what He normally does. He reads whatever is the scripture of the day like I do, and it came out of Isaiah. This is it right here.

What do we read?

"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn."

And He puts down, He sits down and it's absolute quiet. And then in Luke 4, it says, Jesus says, "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." And the people were shocked, they don't know what to do.

So, they said, "Is this Joseph's son?" And here's the part that's interesting, because Jesus doesn't treat Nazareth really well. He goes on and He says, "You quote this proverb to me 'physician heal yourself do here in your hometown what we have heard you did in Capurnum.' I tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted his own town." And then, He goes on to talk about Elijah, who we read from, and remember for three years, He stayed with the Widow of Zarephath. Not a Israelite widow, but from Zarephath. And there's all kinds of people that had leprosy and Elijah didn't heal any of them except Nahem, the Syrian. Well, after Jesus basically got done insulting the people of Nazareth, His hometown, they got upset. And they said, "Throw him off the cliff!" Now, to understand that, Nazareth was built up on a plateau cliff like this. I haven't heard recently of anybody throwing their Pastor off a cliff for a bad sermon. So I do want to give you guys any ideas.

But as he's going to the cliff - that's interesting, cuz in Luke 4, it just says He turned around and walked through them, and they didn't lay a hand on him. That's the dialogue they had with the people of Nazareth. And it wasn't really a healthy one, when you think about it.

We think about it in our life. We have to understand that Jesus wasn't accepted by everybody. And He didn't try to please everybody. In fact, a lot of churches, they'll go Old Testament, they'll go with Apposel Paul, but they'll stay away from Jesus' teaching, because it's pointed. Think about in Matthew 23, when the Pharisees and the Sadducees comes up to Him and He calls them whitewashed tombs. That's how to win friends, right? Or when He talked about money. If you're middle class or above, you get uncomfortable in America when we start teaching about what Jesus says about giving.

No, not everybody agreed with Jesus, and not everybody - as Tara said in her children's message - are they going to agree about you when you come to share Jesus.

They're comfortable where they're at.

When you think about it, every organism, every organism goes to its place of comfort and fights like mad to stay there. That happens with sin, that happens with a common cold - same principle. And we are sinful.

And we sometimes don't always say the right things. "They said," right? "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can't hurt me." Not. Actually, sticks and stones, I get bruised, I can heal. Sometimes those words, I can't heal.

She was a dancer (My daughter's a dancer. She teaches dance. Has since fifth grade. She hasn't taught since 5th grade, but she's danced since 5th grade. She went to New York just to take some lessons there. And that's what this young lady wanted to do). She wanted to go to New York and live there and be a performer on Broadway. So she practiced hours and hours and hours and hours.

One night, when she was out to dinner with her friends, they said, "I don't know why you're putting in that time. You're not going to make it."

That night, she went to the bridge, jumped off and killed herself.

When the police brought her up, there was just one note. It just said: "they said."

Words can damage. They could have said, "well, I don't think you're going to be a headliner, but you'll probably be in the chorus line," or they could have said, "maybe you won't be in the chorus line, but maybe you'll be able to help back and be a part of the whole Broadway experience," but they didn't say that.

They said. And that's how Jesus was approached in many ways, too. But he stayed true to His course. He said, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." He continued to teach, He continued to heal. He continued to share the kingdom of God and its righteousness. And He continued to walk towards Jerusalem.

In just a couple weeks, we're going to have the Transfiguration: second Sunday of February. And from Mark 9, where the Transfiguration is where where God the Father said, "This is my beloved Son in whom I well pleased. Listen to Him." From that time on, He was pointing to Jerusulem. He was pointing to Jerusulem over and over.

And He understood, because not "they said," but His Father said this is what He was going to do. Remember in the garden, He said, "Not my will be done, but Your will be done," and that was for us.

Because when we think about the cross, and we think about what we were asked to do, because we were created to worship Him. We were created to share Him. I was thinking of Ted's example here, and we at Trinity, every fourth Wednesday, we have a Meals and More and in August, my Canadian fishing group (but we'll get into that, whether we're going to Canada some other time this year). We have it, you know, and what was neat was we'd cook, and then our friends, they would just sit around and talk to the people who came to the Meals and More. I imagine that's probably the third Saturday, what Ted's looking at. And what you talk to people, what you get to do? You get to share. And part of sharing is: you may be the only Jesus people see. And when they see you and they see Jesus, then they understand that they're redeemed, that they're forgiven children of God. That's what happened in the last part of our lesson for today, when we talked about Nathanael. Because you remember the dialogue?

He says, "Here is a true Israelite." So He knew. Jesus knew who Nathanael was. And when Nathanael says, "How do you know that?" And he saw him even before Phillip came under a fig tree, I'm thinking to myself, Nathanael understood that Jesus knew everything about him.

Jesus knows everything about us. That's okay. He knows our faults. He knows our failures. Yet, He still knows us. He still loves us. And because of that, just like Jesus said to Nathanael, that you're going to see the heavens open and the angels descending upon the Son of Man - we, too have that promise. We, too will see Jesus in all His glory, because the cross happened. And the victory pronounced with an open tomb. We will see Jesus. Amen.

And now may the peace of God which passes all understanding preserve and keep our hearts and minds in Jesus Christ.

Amen.