Jesus who preached the good news with the Holy Spirit

Luke 4:14-30, Key Verse: 4:18

   "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor."

Today we are going to learn about how Jesus began his earthly messianic ministry in his hometown. In doing so, Jesus shows us what the good news is about and what we should be like to receive the good news. Most of all, we see the power of the good news and the impact of it on our lives. Let us pray to hear the word of God with all our hearts this time.

Part. I  Jesus’ humble, but powerful ministry led by God’s word and the Holy Spirit (14-17)  

Look at verse 14. “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.” Although Jesus was aware of his identity as the Son of God, he started his ministry very humbly in Galilee. Regardless of the size of his ministry, Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit and he revealed the power of God in his actions and words, especially by teaching the word of God in the temple (15). When people heard him say the word of God, they were comforted in heart and full of hope and vision in life. 

I am also comforted in heart because of the humble ministry of Jesus with power of God and the Holy Spirit.  In my last message three weeks ago, I told you to be filled with wisdom like the boy Jesus, not with materialism. In the world full of materialism, which is one of the most lethal weapons Satan uses, we are tempted easily to have more and more in quantity and want to be bigger and bigger in size and scale. People keep buying even unnecessary things and become shopper-holic. They eat more and more and become an overweight patient.  They put on something such as piercing, extreme makeup and eccentric hairstyle and fashion and even plastic surgery, and so forth. Do you know a movie named Shrek? I like the movie because it gives biblically important messages. One of them is as follows. In the movie, Shrek and its friend donkey got to the huge castle. In front of the castle Donkey says to him, “What a big castle!”  As we see the huge castle, we are inclined to expect that the owner or the king of the castle would be sturdy, handsome, tall, and charming in appearance like Leonardo DiCaprio or Hugh Jackman.  But the owner of the castle is a just ugly, short, hot-tempered old man. Long story short, what is the point here? That is, people are under the influence of materialism and use it to cover their problems such as inferiority and emptiness and loneliness. We build our own castle to hide all those problems.  In the middle of most of our problems, there must be materialism. I will talk more about materialism and the more later on in this message.

In contrast to materialism, when we look at Jesus, who began his ministry humbly even though he had everything in power and glory, we see that Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit and the power of God, not of materialism. As a result, what he has or looks does not matter. He is confident and lives a purpose-driven life. Our ministry is also very humble. We do 1:1 Bible study with Rutgers students in New Brunswick and Piscataway and with Princeton students in Princeton, and serve 2^nd generations from Korea, and live a common life as a big family in Christ. We do not have great things outwardly like mega churches do, and even each one of us seems so small like five loves two fishes, and yet I do believe our ministry and each one of us are filled with the Holy Spirit and reveal the power of God through our humble ministry like Jesus did. I pray that God may continue to bless our humble ministry to reveal God’s glory.  

Look at verses 16-17 “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:” Jesus went to Nazareth in Galilee. Nazareth is the place where he was brought up.  There, he had all good memories with his hometown people such as friends and relatives. I remember those days with my grandparents in countryside of Korea when I was just a little boy. When I got there first, people in the town said to me, “You are the grandson of Sohn’s family,” even though they had never seen me before. They were all like friends and relatives like a big family who knew who’s who and what’s going on in each household since the town was kind of small-sized. People in Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown knew who Jesus was just as those in my grandparents’ town knew who I was. However, they knew Jesus only from a human point of view, not from God’s point of view. They identified Jesus just as son of Joseph carpenter, but they did not know that Jesus is the Son of God who came down on earth as the promised Messiah in the form of humanity.  Now, it was time for Jesus to stand up to reveal who he is. For this purpose, on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue and read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah about the coming of the Messiah. Interestingly, what Jesus did to show his hidden identity to his hometown people was to go to the center as was his custom and studied the Bible together with them. Jesus depended only on the word of God to stand among his people. Just like Jesus, we must hold on to our identity as a servant of God among people by depending on the word of God alone, not on human backgrounds or abilities. The word of God is the only source and authority that gives us our identities and our missions. In other words, even though we are not perfect in human conditions or backgrounds or abilities, we can serve God’s mission as music player, title maker, singer, prayer servant, presider, and even messenger because we hold on to the word of God as the ultimate source of confidence as a servant of God. 

Part II. The power of the good news proclaimed by Jesus with the Holy Spirit (18-21)

Look verses 18-19. "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Isaiah's prophecy tells precisely what God sent the Messiah to do and how he would do it. These verses explain that God poured out the Holy Spirit on the Messiah so that he would preach good news to the poor. We learn several things here.

First, Jesus was anointed to “preach.”  The word “preach” means to proclaim. In other words, it is to announce as a herald, the message of the King. The messenger receives power and authority from the king, and exercises them on behalf of the King.  Do you know what you may call “the royal secret commissioner or undercover agent of the king?”  When I was a little boy, it was a very popular drama at nighttime among many Korean people along with “Legendary hometown” In the drama, the undercover agent of the king investigates a town. If he discovers the town head official to be corrupt, then he let his people storm into the office court with a big shout, “Here comes the royal secret commissioner.” Then he preaches king’s message and drive out the corrupt officials and put them in prison, and all the people in town are set free from the bondage of the corrupt officials and live happily ever after.  Like the royal secret commissioner, Jesus preaches God’s message, that is, “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”  He drives out all evil power and advance God’s kingdom on earth. Under the evil power of sins, we sinners suffer in great misery, but when we hear the herald from heaven proclaim God’s message we are set free.  Most of all, he brings God’s righteousness to sinners. Because of Jesus’ preaching, we can also live happily ever after.

With happy life in Jesus, I have surprising news for you. Guess what? That’s you are the very royal secret commissioner who proclaims the gospel of truth that sets sinners free from the power of sins and death and even drives out evil power in the name of Jesus. In Mark 16:15, Jesus said to his disciples, and his church, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” With this great commission and authority from the King above, we must be committed to the task of preaching the good news by sharing messages, or one-to-one Bible study, or sharing our personal story of God’s grace, or by demonstrating God’s love in action or all of the above.  For JBF members it is possible in practice to give their hearts to God while they are in worship service by listening to the message well and prepare worship programs by faith and through prayers. I pray that all JBF members may grow as God’s messengers who preach the good news to the world.

Second, it is the Spirit of the Lord that empowers Jesus to preach. Why did Jesus need the Holy Spirit in order to preach? It seems very easy to preach good news to others. But, in reality, it is not. It is a spiritual battle. To understand this, let me explain it in terms of business analysis.  There is a famous guru named Thomas H. Davenport in the area of economy analysis. He wrote a book entitled “The Attention Economy.” He says that in the past we needed three resources- land, labor and capital-for production, but now we need attention as fourth element of resources.  Our attention is limited and therefore we should divide it wisely. In other words, to do business successfully we should attract other’s divided, limited attention to sell our products.  To make it easy to understand, when we watch movies or dramas with our limited source attention, we can lose our track of studying very easily. It’s because we utilize 99 % of our attention on watching movies and 1 % of it on worrying about not studying.  Once your attention gets fixed on something, it easily becomes a certain pattern. That’s why I play soccer only, not basketball or any other type of sports with my full attention on soccer alone and a fixed pattern of my attention resource distribution. So, it is likely to be very hard for me to change my pattern unless there is a big impact or change on it. Another example is that when you open and run too many programs on your computer at the same time, it will crash or freeze soon because the resource of the memory runs out of its limited capacity in a condition that there is no virus.  Just the computer memory, if your attention on your mind is scattered too much here and there, your mind will crash as a mental disorder patient.  What’s the point of my story? The point is that people whose attention is consumed fully on bad news are very often slow to accept and believe good news, so there must be a huge and powerful impact, which must be the Holy Spirit, the power of God. That is why Jesus needed the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God who connects our mind and heart to God's own mind and heart. The Holy Spirit speaks to us with authority that plants certainty. He enables us to truly believe the good news from our deep hearts.

Third, Jesus preached “good news to the poor.” Let me ask you two questions? What did Jesus preach and to whom did he preach?  He preached the “good news,” and he preached it to “the poor.” Good news means “the gospel.” The Gospel is that Christ died for our sins, and that God raised him from the dead on the third day. Anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. At the time Jesus began to preach, he had not yet fulfilled the gospel. Later in his earthly ministry, when he tried to explain that he would suffer, die and rise again, his disciples had a hard time accepting or understanding what he said.  Just like the disciples, we might have the same problem to accept or understand the gospel, and yet to be sure God may bless us to understand and accept the gospel deep in our hearts through the Holy Spirit when we continue to pray hard.

We found out what the good news means above, and then who are the poor?  The poor refers to the humble in spirit who know their need for the gospel. If a person do not recognizes his need, the good news does not seem relevant to him. In the past years when I was comparably younger than I am, I never realized the need of the supplementary medication such as vitamin, so I was rich to the vitamin. But now I am really poor in health condition, and therefore taking vitamin is like hearing the gospel.  But some might say to me, “M. Joseph, I am pretty, smart, popular, and young. I cannot realize the need of the gospel.” Then, I will read it to them, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing. But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.’” We must be humble in spirit in order to realize that we are helpless against the power of sin and death. When we see ourselves as God sees us, we can realize how poor we really are, and receive the gospel with humble gratitude toward God.

Fourth, Jesus brings freedom, restoration and release and the Lord’s favor. Now I am going to talk more about materialism and the more related ideas as I said in early part of this message. We are surrounded by worldly thoughts and influences such materialism, mammonism, commercialism, and appearance-based judgment.  To make it easy to understand, we think the more we have the happier we are. We feel money talks. If you have lots of money, you can be popular among your friends because you can do with money things that your poor friends cannot do. We are all driven by advertisement or marketing strategies of companies. We feel we must buy I-Phone or MP 3 player and we want to replace old models with new ones because the markets keeps sending us their messages through TV or Internet, “Buy it, buy it because everybody has it, why not you! Otherwise, you will be way behind.” The market has power to plant all kinds of petty desires into our hearts, using psychology, math, media, and all kinds of marketing tools. Even though you do not need a thing, when you hear market’s voice, you would be touched and moved to buy it, forgetting you do not need it. People do plastic surgery because the society shows us all top models, movie starts that are handsome, beautiful, tall, charming and attractive. So we are likely even to think the pretty is virtue, the ugly is evil.  Everybody wants to look good. In fact, appearance is very relative and perishable. And all the past beautiful and handsome movie starts are now grandma and grandpa. In some country people’s eyes are all big. So a person like me who has small eyes is very popular. Furthermore, the market makes you feel inferior so that you would buy all kinds of beauty supplies, and beauty-related services and do even plastic surgery. Who will earn money at last because of your desire to become more beautiful? All those worldly thoughts and desires are actually from the power of sins and death.  But in the power of life and righteousness in Christ Jesus, we have absolute freedom, and open our spiritually closed eyes, and restore the image of God, which is our true image, not like Barbie image or famous movie star’s image.  I am one of the people who are now in the power of Jesus. My mouth was half-closed, but now mouth is opened to testify to his power. Not only me, we are all here released from slavery of sins and the power of death. Now, we are confident in what we are, we are sure we are God’s unique workmanship, we are free from worldly people’s wrong judgment. Truly, we can be what we are.  “Do not be somebody else! Be yourself that is unique and absolutely valuable,” How is it possible?  It’s all possible by Jesus’ good news, his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. Amen.

Part III.  Jesus rejected by his own people (22-30)

Look at verses 22-23 “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn't this Joseph's son?” they asked. Jesus said to them, "Surely you will quote this proverb to me: 'Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’” Even though it seemed people paid attention to Jesus’ message through their amazement, they just saw Jesus from a human point of view. That’s why they said, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” They should have said, “Lord, you are the Messiah and the Son of the living God.”  But they just ignored Jesus with their vain pride and wanted him to do great miracles for them, as he had in Capernaum.

Look at verse 24. ‘“I tell you the truth,’ he continued, ‘no prophet is accepted in his hometown.’” Here, Jesus reveals the truth. What is it? No prophet is accepted in his hometown. Why is it? As we see in verse 23, people were blinded by their human prejudice by saying, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” “He was just a little boy whose father was a poor carpenter, and he did not even graduate from college.” When I was in Korea, I lived a powerful life as UBF shepherd.  I did everything I could do in Chongro UBF as intern shepherd. So I felt as if I performed miracles every day by prayers and through the word of God.  But when I visited my hometown, I was also not accepted by my friends and even my father, and I got despaired. However, when I saw that Jesus not was accepted in his hometown, it gave me comfort and helped me to accept the situation as it was, and I could move forward. You may also some day have the same experience with Jesus through some people who know you well because of their prejudice, so be prepared for that!  On the other hand, we should not be the same as people in Jesus’ hometown. Otherwise, we may also ignore God’s message to us.

In verses 25-27, we see Jesus tell very interesting stories from the book of Kings to his people. Even though there were so many suffering widows in Israel, Elijah was sent only to a gentile widow to help and bless. And she was blessed with food, and even she experienced the power of resurrection through her dead son. In the second story, Naaman was the only one who was healed from his leprosy even though there were so many suffering lepers in Israel.  What was difference between the two non-God’s people and God’s people Israel?  The two obeyed the word of God with humble heart and the Israelites did not in their pride.  So we can say that obeying God’s word is more crucial than just being God’s people, and Jesus’ good news is for anybody and everybody if he or she is humble in heart.

Look at verses 28-30. “All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” Even though Jesus did his best helping them repent of their pride and receive the good news, everyone in the temple got furious and tried to kill Jesus by throwing him down the cliff.  That’s what his people did to Jesus.

In this passage we learn that Jesus is the Messiah who sets us free from the power of sin and death. Whoever believes this good news will experience Jesus' saving grace. Let's believe this good news with humble hearts. Let's also preach this good news to the people of our time by the power of the Holy Spirit, and with the same attitude of our Lord Jesus Christ.