Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Luke 431 through
37 he went down to Capernaum,
a city in Galilee,
and he was teaching them on the Sabbath.
And they were astonished at his teaching,
for his word possessed authority.
And in the synagogue there was a man
who had a spirit of unclean demon.
And he cried out with a loud voice, ha!
What have you to do with us,
Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are. The Holy One of God.
But Jesus rebuked him, saying,
be silent and come out of him.
And when the demon
had thrown him down in their midst,
he came out of him, having done him
no harm.
And they were all amazed and said
to one another, what is this word for?
With authority and power he commands
unclean spirits, and they come out.
And reports about him went out into
every place in the surrounding region.
Every.
Good morning and welcome to Christ
Community Chapel.
So, so glad you're here.
Thanks for coming.
How many of you were able
to come to premiere tonight?
Would you raise your hand?
How awesome was premiere night?
It was great.
I over 1700 of you,
braved the weather to get here.
Those of you
who weren't able to get here, boy,
we have created a recap video for you.
You should have gotten it in an email.
If not, you can go on our website
and see it.
Also, we have a table out in the atrium
that you can ask questions
and get the material that we handed out
at premiere tonight, but,
it was such a great time.
Sometimes,
we need to look back at what God has done
and just be amazed
and then dream about what God wants to do.
Can do, will do in the future.
And that was
what premiere night was all about.
Somebody sent me like, a
a snapshot of our Facebook post.
That was a conversation
between two of our members.
And what she wrote is what I felt.
She said, I cried.
I'm in my 37th year at the church.
Never dreamed we would see anything more
exciting than what has already happened.
But I left, filled with anticipation
and amazement
at the vision for the future.
I love that.
I love that
the next big event is commitment Night.
And I think that commitment night,
might be a very emotional worship
experience.
And I say that for a couple of reasons.
One is, you know,
Jesus says that where your treasure is,
your heart will be also, that
your treasure is connected to your heart.
And I think commitment night is a time.
I don't know
if you ever have another opportunity
to have 2000, 3000
people
who are throwing a bit of their treasure
toward Jesus and falling more
in love with Jesus at the same moment?
I think that will be overwhelming.
But the other thing is
that we have a tradition here at TCC
that whenever we replace
carpeting somewhere or flooring,
we give you a Sharpie and we ask you to,
to go and write on the cement
before we put the flooring back down
or the carpeting back down,
right on the cement.
Names of people
that you want to see come to know Jesus.
And we have all kinds of stories
of people walking with friends
or family members or coworkers
to a place in our building and saying,
your name is right underneath our feet.
I wrote it here
five years ago, and here you are.
Here you are.
So in Commitment Night,
we're going to peel back
some of the carpeting
and have you do that.
So don't miss Premier
our commitment night.
It's going to be great.
And well, we're asking you to register
because we need to know
that you're coming.
We're going to have a meal.
And then we're going to worship together
and make our commitment tonight.
Be great. All right.
Let's get into today's message.
I was reading in the book of Exodus, where
the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt.
And Moses is out in the middle of nowhere
and he sees a bush that's on fire.
So he goes over to it, and God
speaks to him out of the burning bush.
And God tells him what,
God wants to do
and what he wants Moses to do.
And Moses is supposed to go to Pharaoh,
the most powerful man in the world,
and tell him to let all the slaves go in.
One fell swoop.
And then Moses has some questions for God,
and they're good questions.
He he expects that he will have
to answer these questions.
And the first question
is, who am I when Pharaoh says,
who are you that I should listen to you?
What should I say?
And then the next question is,
who are who are you when they say,
who is it that sent you?
Who should I say sent me?
So great questions.
Anytime someone is sent to save someone
or redeem someone,
those are the questions
they need to answer.
The questions of authority.
Who sent you
and can you do what you say you can do?
We are in the second message of our ten
week series, Calling Jesus the Redeemer.
We're spending ten weeks
in the Gospel of Luke.
It's going to culminate on Easter
and we are at Luke chapter four.
So if you have your Bibles, you can go
ahead and turn to Luke chapter four.
You can wait for it
to come up on the screen.
If you want to use one of our Bibles,
it's on page 808.
Page 808.
The story that we just had
read to us is about authority,
and we find Jesus in the same place
that we found him last week.
He's in the local synagogue.
And it struck me that,
I don't know how many things rubbed
Jesus the wrong way about how they did
services at the local synagogue,
but it didn't seem like it bothered him.
Like he went to the synagogue
to connect with God and to worship,
and nothing else seemed to get in his way,
which was a good thing.
Now, here are the three points
that I want to pull out of this passage.
And they're on the card
you got on the way in.
I want to talk about the authority
of Jesus, the power
of Jesus, and the goodness of Jesus.
Authority and power,
the authority of Jesus, the power
of Jesus and the goodness of Jesus.
Authority and power.
First, the authority of Jesus.
Look at verses 31 and 32.
It says, and he went down to Capernaum,
a city in Galilee.
And he was teaching them on the Sabbath.
And they were astonished at his teaching.
For his word possessed authority.
Jesus taught in a way that they were not
used to in the first century.
Most rabbis, when they taught,
they cited sources
like they would, connect with a rabbi
in the past who had a good following.
And people
all believed what that rabbi said,
so they would build their argument
using what that rabbi said.
It's not a bad way to teach.
It's kind of like having footnotes
in an article.
Jesus didn't teach like that, though.
When you read Jesus sermons,
particularly like the sermon on the Mount,
Jesus says stuff like you've heard it
said, you shall not commit adultery.
But I say to you, Jesus,
Jesus cited himself, but I say to you,
any man who looks on a woman with lust
has committed adultery in his heart.
You've heard it
said, you shall not commit murder.
But I say to you,
if you're angry with your brother,
you're guilty.
Jesus spoke in a way
that was absolutely revolutionary.
And to speak with authority, you need
you need two things.
You need the knowledge to speak,
and you need the right to speak
first, the knowledge to speak.
I have a friend, who has a PhD in physics.
He had a his emphasis
was on molecular and cellular biophysics.
If that sounds smart, it's because it is.
My friend's crazy smart.
He did his dissertation
on the process of blood clotting,
and, he has since done research.
Groundbreaking research on the molecule
called fibrinogen,
which is, connected to blood clotting.
When I say groundbreaking research,
what I mean is that my friend Nathan, now,
he knows more about fibrinogen
than anybody in the world,
which is just,
you know, wild to think about.
If my friends sat down with
Jesus
and they began to talk about fibrinogen.
My friend
Nathan would end up taking notes.
Right, because Jesus would know
more about fibrinogen
than my friend Nathan.
There is no area of life
that Jesus does not have complete
knowledge about.
There is no area of your life where Jesus
doesn't know more than you know which is.
Which is why it's crazy that any of us
would ever disagree with what Jesus says
about how to handle our sexuality,
or how to handle our money,
or how to handle our relationships,
or our marriage,
or our kids or anything.
Because Jesus has complete
knowledge in every area,
which is why he speaks with authority.
He has the knowledge to speak.
But the second thing
is the right to speak.
Jesus comes as King
in the book Lord of the Rings by Token.
The third volume of Lord of the rings
is called The Return of the King.
And in the moment when the king is kind of
is coming into his own,
there's a paragraph where where
somebody like lists out
all the titles of the king,
and Tolkien
gives him a dizzying amount of titles.
There are like nine different titles.
And the reason that he has
all those titles is that he is the king.
He is the rightful king of every province
and every country.
Jesus comes with.
The title is King of Kings
and Lord of Lords.
There's a great quote that's attributed
to a theologian named Abraham Kuyper.
I'm going to put it up on the screen
and I want to read it to you.
This is what it says.
There is not a square inch
in the whole domain of our human existence
over which Christ,
who is sovereign overall, does not cry.
You read that again.
There is not a square inch
in the whole domain of our human existence
over which Christ, who is sovereign
overall,
does not cry
mine.
Jesus speaks with authority
because he has the knowledge to speak.
He has the right to speak.
And that brings me to my second point,
which is the power of Jesus.
Verses 33 to 37
it says, and in the synagogue
there was a man
who had the spirit of an unclean demon.
And he cried out with a loud voice, ha!
What do you have to do with us?
Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are.
The Holy One of God.
But Jesus rebuked him, saying,
be silent and come out of him.
And when the demon had thrown him
down in their midst, he came out of him,
having done him no harm.
And they were all amazed and said
to one another, what is this word for?
With authority and power he commands
the unclean spirits, and they come out.
And reports about him went out into
every place in the surrounding region.
This is early on in Jesus ministry.
We're only on chapter four of Luke,
and people don't know what to think about
Jesus yet.
What's interesting is the demons know
that.
They know.
They know who Jesus is.
They know the power he has because this
demon says, have you come to destroy us?
They know that Jesus is their enemy.
You are in the book of James.
There's a little part
where James is saying that it's not enough
just to say that you believe in God,
and what James says is
the demons also believe, and they shudder.
This is a demon shattering.
I think it's hard to imagine
what this must have been like
in this, this little synagogue.
They have all of a sudden
a man start to scream.
You know, in this version it says he.
He cried out with a loud voice.
And another version it says that he yelled
at the top of his lungs,
terribly disconcerting.
A grown man screaming right next to you.
You would. You would scatter.
I think people scattered.
But this isn't a man who's screaming
because, he's mentally ill.
This is a man who's screaming
because of evil.
And there's something
that is absolutely terrifying about evil.
When my wife and I are watching TV at home
and a commercial comes on
about a horror movie,
she will avert her eyes.
And if if the even the
the talking in the music is
is kind of evil, she'll look at me like,
turn it off, right?
And I have to mute it,
you know, find the mute button
because it's terrifying.
Even make believe evil is terrifying.
Y'all, I have done it.
I read enough in history
to know death stories about human evil.
I've read
stories about Stalin
when he was at the height of his power,
stories about Saddam Hussein
and his sons, the Taliban, Pablo Escobar.
There are bugs.
And I thought
about telling you some of those stories
to give you an example of evil
and then tell you, you got to multiply it
by a thousand, right?
But I was afraid that if I told you
those stories, that
they would be so disconcerting
that you wouldn't be able to get past them
and hear the rest of the sermon.
In fact, I ran it by my wife,
and I told her a couple of the stories
and she was going,
do not tell those stories,
Human evil is appalling.
It is,
incredible the capacity
that human beings have for evil.
But all human evil is diluted.
It's all diluted.
What happened in that synagogue
was not diluted at all.
It was pure evil.
Something you have never probably
been in the presence of.
And all of a sudden, there,
in the presence of this evil
and Jesus is there.
You know, I always love movies,
where there's a bully
and the bully is put in their place
because it always happens in the same way.
There's a bully who's terrifying someone,
who's weaker than the bully.
And then, a champion
kind of comes into the scene and takes
the person that's being bullied
and puts him behind him or her behind him.
And then that champion deals
with the bully.
That's what Jesus is doing.
Jesus is face to face
with evil, unpredictable,
powerful, dark, menacing.
But Jesus is not just unafraid.
Look at what Jesus does.
He speaks.
And, and the demon
right away has to capitulate.
This man is screaming, I know who you are.
Likes just yelling.
And Jesus looks at him
and says, be quiet and boom, he's quiet.
Jesus says, come out of him!
Boom! The demon obeys.
No negotiation, no struggle.
Jesus power is overwhelming
and that means a few things.
It means that we are not alone
in our struggle, struggle against evil,
against the darkness of a world
full of injustice and suffering.
It means that Jesus has the power to deal
with the evil outside of you,
the terrible brokenness of this world.
And Jesus has the power to deal
with the evil inside of you.
The terrible brokenness of your own heart.
It means that
Jesus didn't
just come with the authority to teach.
He came with the authority to rescue,
to set us free, to set you free.
And that brings me to my final point,
which is the goodness of Jesus
authority and power.
You know, there are times when
when you have a struggle
against good and evil,
and it's pretty obvious.
But then there are
there are casualties
that are kind of innocent casualties
of a battle
between good forces and evil forces.
And we see that in our world
many times there are civilian casualties
that we mourn.
When you have, struggle
between good and evil
in the human body,
where you have somebody with cancer
and they start to get chemotherapy,
then anyone who's had
chemotherapy knows that chemotherapy
not only kills the cancer cells,
but chemotherapy
many times will kill many healthy cells
as well.
My best friend in high school,
when we were, seniors, his dad had cancer.
And, his dad
was going through chemo,
and it seemed like the chemo was working
and the cancer was shrinking
and and that we were all hopeful.
And then his dad took a
turn for the worse.
And his dad died right around Christmas.
But two weeks later, as the new year
began, they received a letter
from his doctor
and the letter said, this is the year
we will declare Jack lives free of cancer
because the cancer was gone.
It was the cure that had killed him
with Jesus.
Jesus is dealing with a man
where evil has spread its tentacles
all the way through him,
and Jesus reaches in
and rips out the evil
but doesn't hurt the man.
That's the verse that says, Jesus rebuked
him, saying, be silent, come out of him.
And when the demon had thrown him
down in their midst, he came out of
him, having done him no harm.
You know, when Jesus
teaches us to pray in the Lord's Prayer
and he says, lead us, pray
this lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
The reason we can pray
that is because of Jesus.
Because Jesus has come
and he's more powerful than evil.
This means that evil will never have
the last word.
Not evil, not suffering,
not death, not disease.
Because Jesus has come.
That's why he's doing this.
That's why Jesus,
in the midst of a synagogue,
a man who is demon possessed, is there.
And Jesus confronts this man is what
I want you to get in your head.
Is that that image of a movie
with a bully where the champion comes
and takes
the person who is so frightened
and being bullied, puts them behind him,
and then says to the bully,
you deal with me, that's Jesus for you.
Whatever it is
that is causing you anxiety and fear,
I just want you to know
that you have a champion.
And that's what Jesus is doing right here.
I think if this guy could have asked
a couple of questions,
I think he would ask this.
I think he would have said,
Jesus, can you save me?
Can you save me?
To which Jesus would have said,
I am King of kings
and Lord of Lords.
There isn't one square
inch of this entire universe
that I do not say is mine.
I can save you.
But then the other question
is just as important.
And the other question that
he would need to ask is, Will you save me?
And that's the question that appeals
to love and goodness.
Are you willing to do this?
To which Jesus would say,
greater love is no one than this,
that a man
lay down his life for his friends.
And then Jesus goes to the cross.
So I want you to know you have a Redeemer
who is powerful, more powerful than pure
evil.
That which means Jesus is more powerful
than anything that you have ever faced
or will ever face.
But you have a Redeemer
who loves you so much
that he was willing to go to the cross,
die on your behalf,
then resurrect with power
so he can say to you,
you don't have to fear evil anymore
because I have delivered you from evil.
So great is Jesus the Redeemer for you.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven.
I come to you, and I am,
I'm always so grateful.
I'm grateful for all the stories
that you have chosen to put in your word.
But this story is one that,
is just amazing to me
that Jesus confronted not just human evil.
He he confronted the source of,
of all evil, a pure evil,
and defeated it with, with just the words
so powerful
is your son.
But then your son loves us
so much
that he was willing to go to the cross.
Thank you.
Thanks for giving us a wonderful Savior.
Thanks. Thanks for giving us a Redeemer
who has power and authority,
and also is so good
and so loving.
Thank you.
We pray this in his name. Amen.