Luke 4:16-21

What's your job description as a Christian? That's a little bit of a dicey question, isn't it? Most of us have job descriptions that we agreed to when we accepted our current role. Certain tasks we need to perform and certain levels of accomplishment we have to meet or else we get shown the door, right? We Christians often feel as if we have a job to do, and it's pretty common for people to take this section of Luke 4 as their Christian job description. After all, it's what Jesus said He had come to do, so shouldn't we do the same?

The people who think this way end up exhausted, burned out, and resentful. Thinking of this passage as your job description misses a crucial point: Jesus has fulfilled His job description. In other words, He did His job and did it so well that it no longer needs doing, and it certainly doesn't need doing by the likes of us!

So as we go about this life, let's be honest about who is poor, who is held captive, who is blind, who is oppressed. Sure, it's the people on street corners, the people in Third World countries, but it's also the people to the right and left of you. The people in your house. The preacher at your church. Everyone you see as you walk down the sidewalk. You. But know, always know, that on that day, all those years ago, Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 

Jesus' job is finished. Forever.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Psalm 23:4

Barry Zito was once known as one of the most dominating pitchers in Major League baseball, winning the 2002 Cy Young Award. Then in 2006, he signed a huge free agent deal with the San Francisco Giants and became known as the worst signing in recent memory, a choke artist who never lived up to a tenth of his contract, much less the entire $126 million.

Finally, during the 2012 playoffs (and eventually World Series victory), Zito began pitching well, in the face of all expectations. In an interview, he tried to explain why. He said he had been raised by a grandmother who had founded her own religion, called Teachings of the Inner Christ. It was finally in 2012, he said, that he realized how exhausted he was from "relying on his own strengths for so long." He realized that he needed to find " a strength outside" of himself.

He also talked about a "very odd" injury that he had in 2011 - a Lisfranc Ligament tear - that taught him about his lack of control. He illustrates it with a story: "A shepherd will be leading his sheep, and one of the sheep will be walking astray from the pack. The shepherd will take his rod and break the sheep's leg, and the sheep will have to rely on the shepherd to get better. But once the leg is completely healed, that sheep never leaves the side of the shepherd ever again."

Doesn't the name of Zito's grandmother's religion say it all? "Teaching of the Inner Christ"? That "religion" failed him. Zito finally realized he needed to find an outside strength, since the strength from within wasn't doing him any good.

Barry Zito needed the freedom that came from a reliance on the Outer Christ. It took a "very odd" injury for him to have his eyes opened. In the same way, having our leg broken by the shepherd is never something that we would choose for ourselves, but it is often the only way for God to open our eyes to our paralyzing need, and to the truth that there is a Shepherd there to nurse us.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

 

Luke 22:27

When the disciples have an argument about which among them was to be regarded as the greatest, Jesus gives a little illustration about a dinner, and asks them, "Who is greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves?" He answers His own question: "Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as one who serves" (v. 27). It is easy to think that, here, Jesus is redefining greatness; that to be really great, we need to "become as one who serves." So we Christians start trying to be great, but through obvious acts of service, rather than by trying to get to the front. It's like when you were at camp, and everyone raced for the back of the line, knowing that the counselors would say that "the last shall be first and the first shall be last." Though the route is different, it's still a race to the front.

So how can we be great if our only way there is cut off? It seems like a cruel trick: servanthood is the way of greatness, but servanthood, true, honest, and pure servanthood, turns out to be impossible. Jesus said that the one who reclines at table is greater, and He's right! And here's the kicker: we want to recline at table! We know the right answer is to serve, but sitting at the table is so much better. Left to our own devices, we don't really want to serve - we want to be served.

Thankfully, Jesus isn't just giving us a new route to greatness. He's showing us that we're not great. The great have no need for a Savior, and we are in desperate need. It was on the cross, because of our inability to be great, that the Great One, Jesus Christ, was stripped of His greatness. It is in our recognition of our lack of greatness that we can clearly see the greatness of Christ, manifest in that least great of events, a public execution. The less great we find ourselves, the greater we find His gift.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,


 

Matthew 22:10

A king throws a wedding banquet for his son. He sends out the wedding invitations, probably to the best and brightest. When he sends his servants out to pick up the people he's invited, they say they don't want to come! He tells the invited guests how great the party is going to be, but they make fun of it. Some of the guests even mistreat and kill the messengers! Talk about not wanting to go to a party! The king decides that he wants a full house at the wedding party, so he sends his servants into the streets to bring in whoever they can find.

This ia a great story for us. More than just being about a people who had the opportunity to accept the message of Jesus and didn't, it's about the next group of people...the ones wo get the next opportunity. The original wedding guests were the sort of people who get to go to the real Hollywood power weddings. It's as if when Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie got married, no one on their guest list had accepted the invitation. Imagine if Brangelina announces their wedding, and they ended up inviting hundreds of people just off the street. I don't know what street it would have been, maybe in California or in France or in Rwanda. Anyway, that would be quite the situation, wouldn't it? Hundreds of Joe Schmoes going to the wedding of celebrities?

And we like stories like this, right? This is good news for you and me. If the A-listers don't get to go, maybe our name will eventually come up. This is the gospel: Jesus didn't come for the good, fancy people who are self-sufficient, successful, and glamorous in their own eyes. He came for the needy, the weak, the unpolished. The gospel, in other words, is for the rest of us - the street people who live our lives in perpetual fear that we'll never make it, that we'll never be invited. The gospel is for us, and Jesus is saying that we're the ones who end up inside the wedding feast.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

 

2 Corinthians 4:11

In the 1997 Luc Besson film, The Fifth Element, there is a confrontation between the villain, Mr. Zorg, and a priest that perfectly illustrates the contrasting and complementary roles that the law and the gospel play in relation to one another.

Mr. Zorg claims that he and the priest are really in the same business: that of life. The priest accuses Zorg of only wanting to destroy life by being an agent of destruction and chaos, while Zorg insists that life cannot exist without destruction and chaos. They both have a point.

Zorg embodies the law. He causes death. As Paul so eloquently says in Romans 7, when the law came, "sin sprang to life and I died" (v. 9). Elsewhere, he famously said that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). So the priest's argument is true: Zorg, by his very existence, destroys life. But Zorg is right too.

At the beginning of Romans 7, Paul discusses his covetousness. He says, in essence, that he had no idea how much he was coveting, until the law came and told him, "Thou shalt not covet." All of a sudden, he realized the extent to which he wanted things that weren't his! That's when he says that he dies. There's a point for the priest. But then, most profoundly, Paul recognizes his need for a Savior: "Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" (Romans 7:24) and finds his need met: "Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:25). It was the law, and the resultant death (by "destruction, disorder, and chaos"), that led Paul to real life, that is, in Jesus Christ. There's a point for Zorg.

These two forces belong in the same room. Zorg and the priest. Law and gospel. The disorder and chaos of our lives drives us to an epiphany: We're dying! We need a Savior. Thankfully, the gospel always trumps the law, bringing us from death to life.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,


 

1 Corinthians 12:11

I'll bet you twenty dollars that as you think about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, you go through a mental checklist, hoping to find one of the gifts that you might actually have. I've done this a hundred times. Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, the interpretation of tongues. My bet is you get through the list and come out the other side worrying that you might not have any spiritual gifts at all. You're not alone.

The problem is simple: we are human. It is our nature to take control. We do it every day. We do it every hour. We do it in the morning. We look at ourselves as the main actor in our little dramas, and so when we think about the spiritual gifts, we think only of ourselves, and what gifts we might possess. We don't think about the Holy Spirit for a second, even though they are His gifts. Because of that moment on the cross a couple thousand years ago, when Jesus took our works of the flesh upon Himself and gave us His fruit of the Spirit, we are still regarded, whatever our fleshly works look like, as bearing the fruit of the Spirit and as possessors of all kinds of spiritual gifts.

When Jesus went to be with His Father, He sent the Holy Spirit to be with us, and to give us all the good gifts we could never earn on our own. When God looks at us, His gaze finds what His voice has declared! We have been given gifts by the Holy Spirit. And the real miracle is, it actually happens! We have faith where none existed before. We are given wisdom in a difficult situation. We understand God's will in a situation without even knowing how we do so. Each one of these things is a miracle, because they come directly from God. They are His gifts, freely given to us.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

 

1 Peter 5:8

In 2013, you couldn't search the name "Chris Tang" anywhere on the Internet without finding an attendant mention of Jeremy Lin. At the time, Tang was a Chinese American player at Virginia's Oak Hill Academy, a school famous for producing NBA talent such as Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and Rajon Rondo. He toiled in total obscurity until those magical nights in the winter of 2011-2012 when "Linsanity" struck New York. Tang was then labeled, for better or worse, "the next Jeremy Lin."

For the rest of his basketball life, Tang will likely be required to labor under the "next" banner. He can never just be Chris Tang, as long as there's a Jeremy Lin.

This reminds me of Peter's description of the Devil: "like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour" (v. 8). The law of "be the next Jeremy Lin" has devoured Chris Tang, and it will continue to devour Chris Tang until he eventually surpasses Lin. But the law will not then be satisfied. It never is. It will merely morph into "be the next Christ Tang." The law is a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.

But whence this lion? This can't be an infinite regression. It must have begun somewhere. Long ago, someone was the first "one you've got to be like." In basketball, it was perhaps George Mikan, the first "unstoppable force." In the world? It was God.

The reason that we all experience an irresistible desire for perfection is that God is actually perfect. His law is a reflection of that. Then the Devil comes like a lion to accuse us and to proclaim - rightly - that we deserve condemnation.

There is, unfortunately, no cure for the law. As Martin Luther famously said, the quest for glory can never be satisfied; it can only be exterminated. And this is precisely what Jesus does with that roaring lion, Satan. he shuts his mouth, crushes him to death, and throws him into his own fire.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,