Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 2601 to 2625 of 3160 results

2601. The Jewish Leaders as Negative Foil for Jesus’ Followers

Matthew 23:1-39

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Jeannine K. Brown

... how often such excessiveness still occurs in our own world. It would take too long to go into the details . . . of how I happened to be dining with a man—though no particular friend of his—whose elegant economy, as he called it, seemed to me a sort of stingy extravagance. The best dishes were set in front of himself and a select few, and cheap scraps of food before the rest of the company. He had even put the wine into tiny little flasks, divided into three categories, not with the idea of giving his ...

2602. Jesus Proclaims Judgment on the Temple and the Nation

Mark 13:1-31

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Grant R. Osborne

... the temple, but its meaning is difficult to ascertain. There are three main options. (1) When the Zealots took over the sanctuary (AD 67–68), they conscripted Phannias, a completely unqualified man, as their own high priest, allowing criminals to commit all sorts of evil behaviors, even murder, in the sanctuary (Josephus J.W.4.147–61). (2) Titus entered the sanctuary as the Romans were leveling the city and temple, followed later by his soldiers, who brought their standards into the temple and offered ...

2603. John the Baptist

Luke 3:1-20

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R.T. France

... baptism with water (outward and symbolic) and baptism with the Holy Spirit (a real inward change) sums up the difference between John’s preparatory ministry and the true role of the Messiah. the straps of whose sandals. A rabbi’s pupil was expected to undertake all sorts of mundane service for his teacher, but the removal of the sandals was too low even for the pupil; it was the slave’s job. Holy Spirit and fire. In the light of 3:9, 17, it is more likely that “fire” here refers to judgment ...

2604. Jesus’s Manifesto

Luke 4:14-30

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R.T. France

... place later in their narratives. Luke not only tells the story in much more detail, and with his typical focus on Jesus’s mission of deliverance, but also has inserted it at the very beginning of his account of Jesus’s public preaching to act as a sort of frontispiece (a decorative illustration facing a book’s title page) for Jesus’s ministry as a whole. The themes of deliverance, of good news for the poor, and of the universal scope of Jesus’s mission set the tone for all that is to follow. The ...

2605. Sabbath in Capernaum

Luke 4:38-44, Luke 4:31-37

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R.T. France

... ’s own understanding of his mission. He prefers to spell out his messianic role in his own terms, as we have seen in 4:16–30, and the adverse reaction on that occasion shows that his caution was justified. A further factor here is that demons are not the sort of witnesses Jesus would welcome, even if their perception was true. 4:43 I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also. Proclaiming good news is at the heart of Jesus’s mission, as we have seen in 4:18 (and see ...

2606. Feasting and Fasting

Luke 5:33-39, Luke 5:27-32

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R.T. France

... of damage is added. The (powerful, effervescent) new wine represents the gospel message and those who embrace it; they cannot be confined within the worn-out structures of formal religion. The parable is left uninterpreted, leaving readers to think out for themselves what sort of religious structures may be required for the new wine of the kingdom of God. 5:39 The old is better. This unexpected addition seems to turn the preceding imagery on its head. But perhaps that is the point: while Jesus offers new ...

2607. Jesus and Women

Luke 7:36--8:3

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R.T. France

... . Do listeners have experience of societies (whether Christian or not) in which women are still treated as subordinate to men? Thinking of such situations, encourage them to envisage the feelings likely to have been aroused by Jesus’s dealings with women. What sort of community would Jesus himself have promoted? How far did the early church follow his lead? In view of the prominent and distorted portrayal of Mary Magdalene in some recent popular literature (e.g., The Da Vinci Code), it would be good ...

2608. Hearing and Responding

Luke 8:19-21, Luke 8:16-18, Luke 8:1-15

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R.T. France

... to receive it. All three of the failed seeds represent the latter. Authentic faith produces spiritual fruit (James 2:14–26). Some teachers will want to delve deeper into the apparently “predestinarian” language of 8:10 and tease out the sort of issues raised in the “Theological Insights” above. Consider cross-referencing Paul’s discussion in Romans 9, where he shows how God uses even unbelief and rejection to accomplish his purpose. Illustrating the Text Jesus illustrates the reasons why people ...

2609. A Sick Woman and a Dead Girl

Luke 8:40-56

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R.T. France

... to differ: even a dead person can be “saved.” What matters, as in 8:48, is faith. Jairus has just witnessed Jesus’s healing power, but now the challenge to faith has become even more extreme. 8:51 Peter, John and James. These three formed a sort of “inner circle” of disciples (cf. 9:28; Mark 13:3; 14:33). 8:52 She is not dead but asleep. The derision that greets this pronouncement suggests that the onlookers took it literally: Jesus was disputing the diagnosis and believed that the girl was ...

2610. The Messiah and His Glory

Luke 9:28-36, Luke 9:18-27

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R.T. France

... opposed to any notion of the triumphant expulsion of the Roman armies, and he does not want to stir up such misleading hopes (or give a political handle to his enemies) before his paradoxical mission has been accomplished. He is the Messiah, but not that sort of messiah. 9:22 The Son of Man must. On this term, see the sidebar “The Son of Man” at 5:12–26. Its use here, as a deliberate substitute for Peter’s term “Messiah,” is designed to avoid the potentially misleading connotations of that ...

2611. “Love Your Neighbor”

Luke 10:25-37

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R.T. France

... of Jesus’s message of salvation. This is not a legal nicety; it is a fundamental spiritual issue. 10:27 Love the Lord your God . . . Love your neighbor as yourself. Deuteronomy 6:5 was very familiar as part of the Shema, recited twice daily as a sort of creed by all pious Jews; it is its combination with Leviticus 19:18 that produces a potent new manifesto for godly living. The lawyer had asked for something to “do.” His choice of texts does indeed provide a central ethical principle, but it goes ...

2612. Lessons on Devotion and Prayer

Luke 11:1-13, Luke 10:38-42

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R.T. France

... also to forgive; the Father’s grace should be mirrored, however inadequately, by his children. everyone who sins against us. This is literally “everyone indebted to us,” but the use of this metaphor in the second clause can hardly indicate a different sort of “forgiveness” (the verb is the same), since in the Matthean version the debt metaphor is used in both clauses. lead us not into temptation. “Temptation” and “testing” represent the same word in Greek (see on 4:2), and the latter is ...

2613. Negative Responses to Jesus

Luke 11:33-36, Luke 11:29-32, Luke 11:14-28

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R.T. France

... s Gospel, it is not obvious what more they wanted (as Jesus will point out in 12:54–56), and the demand looks more like an excuse for not responding to Jesus’s message. Hence he describes them as a “wicked generation” and refuses to give the sort of sign that they asked for. except the sign of Jonah. Matthew 12:40 spells out the sign of Jonah as a reference to Jesus’s resurrection (which, being still future, provided no sign yet for the people who were now asking). Jonah’s miraculous deliverance ...

2614. Priorities

Luke 12:35-48, Luke 12:22-34

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R.T. France

... of life. Understanding the Text Several themes from our last section are developed here: God’s fatherly care, the absolute priority of serving God over all other concerns, and especially the tension between material concern and true discipleship—12:22–31 is a sort of commentary on 12:15 and the parable that illustrates it. This last theme of “God and mammon” will be picked up again especially in chapter 16. It reaches an uncomfortably radical climax in the demand to sell one’s possessions here ...

2615. Interpreting the Times

Luke 12:54-59, Luke 12:49-53, Luke 12:35-48

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R.T. France

... to take timely action and not to let things drift. Once the legal process has been started, there is no way out. It is inappropriate to press the details of the cameo by asking who is represented by the “adversary,” what the offense was, or what sort of “reconciliation” is in view. The point is in being alert to one’s danger before it is too late. Sitting on the fence is not an option when the kingdom of God has dawned and God’s judgment is imminent. Theological Insights There is an overriding ...

2616. Table Talk

Luke 14:1-14

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R.T. France

... law left. Hassler writes: God knows how many quarts of ice cream Jackie forced down and brought up again to sustain his family’s hope. I know only that the more I saw of Jackie’s self-abnegation, the more fascinating it became. Wasn’t this the sort of God-pleasing humility the church had been urging on me since the first grade? But with this difference: Jackie wasn’t being humble for God’s sake . . . he was being simply himself.2 When we give, we should do it without drawing attention to ourselves ...

2617. The Cost of Discipleship

Luke 14:25-35, Luke 14:15-24

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R.T. France

... or oxen (let alone the considerable investment of five pairs) without first inspecting them. Such implausible excuses would be a calculated insult to the host, and his anger is understandable. But these excuses serve within the parable context to illustrate the sort of preoccupations (property, commerce, relationships) that (like the thorns in the field [8:14]) can get in the way of effective discipleship. 14:21 the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. These are the same four groups of people ...

2618. Lessons in Discipleship

Luke 17:11-19, Luke 17:1-10

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R.T. France

... for the outsider and the presence of grace in the most unlikely places. See “Teaching the Text” below for more on this. Teaching the Text The sayings of 17:1–10 raise several pastoral issues that should be considered in a lesson or sermon: What sort of “stumbling blocks” to another’s discipleship might Jesus have had in mind? What are examples of people whose Christian journey has been derailed by what other Christians have done or said (or not done or said)? Are there things in our own lives ...

2619. A Blind Beggar and a Rich Scoundrel

Luke 19:1-10, Luke 18:35-43

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R.T. France

... that its practical outworking may differ in different situations? 19:9 Today salvation has come to this house. “Today” indicates that Zacchaeus’s declaration, just made, is the evidence of salvation. It indicates so radical a change that it can be understood as the sort of “repentance” that causes joy in heaven according to 15:7, 10. Zechariah and Simeon sang of God’s “salvation” coming to the people as a whole (1:69, 71, 77; 2:30), but now it is brought down to the individual level. this ...

2620. Two Testing Questions

Luke 20:27-40, Luke 20:20-26

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R.T. France

... have evaluated what he in fact said? Where might they have placed him on the scale between patriotic insurgents and traitorous collaborators? This passage of course raises the difficult question of the relationship of the Christian to the state. Discuss what sorts of issues in our society raise the same question of God versus Caesar. Who or what is “Caesar” in our political system? Are there limits to the principle that both God and Caesar have legitimate claims? How should Christians today react ...

2621. “When Will These Things Happen?”

Luke 21:5-38

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R.T. France

... own),1but the reader should be aware that some will disagree with the following exegesis. Historical and Cultural Background Josephus’s account of the four decades leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem provides plenty of examples of the sort of events outlined in 21:8–11 in the area around Judea: messianic claimants, wars (both international and civil), earthquakes, famines, epidemics, and reported heavenly signs. His account of the siege and eventual capture of Jerusalem also fully justifies the ...

2622. The Trials of Peter and of Jesus

Luke 22:66--23:25, Luke 22:63-65, Luke 22:54-62

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R.T. France

... is concerned, the issue is already decided by the end of chapter 22. Historical and Cultural Background There has been much debate over the process followed in Jesus’s Jewish trial, and over its legal status. Luke’s brief account does not allow the sort of detailed comparison that has led many interpreters of Matthew and Mark to charge the Jewish leaders with flouting the rabbinic rules for a capital trial. But in any case, these rules were not formulated in the Mishnah until after Jesus’s time and ...

2623. The Roman Verdict

Luke 22:66--23:25

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R.T. France

... condemned (23:38). 23:4 no basis for a charge. Pilate will repeat this finding twice more (23:14–16, 22). Luke does not explain how Pilate (and Antipas [23:15]) came to this conclusion, but the dialogue recorded in John 18:33–38 reflects the sort of issues likely to have been in mind: Jesus’s “kingship” was nonpolitical. 23:5 He stirs up the people all over Judea. “Judea” may be used here in the broader sense of the land of the Jews (and so including Galilee), but even so, this ...

2624. “Weak and Strong” Should Get Along

Romans 14:1--15:13

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C. Marvin Pate

... patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore ...

2625. Applying God’s Wisdom to Life’s Issues

1 Corinthians 2:6-16, 1 Corinthians 1:18--2:5

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Preben Vang

... of the rhetorical schools (persuasion, demonstration, power), he erases any notion that God’s demonstration in some way should be less persuasive than the speeches made by human rhetoricians. As Aristotle taught four hundred years earlier, persuasion (pistis) “is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.”4 2:5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. It is not human wisdom that leads ...

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