Thank you for coming this morning. That sounds like we need a volume adjustment. Is that too loud? It's good.
Shall we pray? Heavenly Father, we're thankful that we have a standing in Christ, which is a standing of you having accepted us in Christ. We thank you for the mercies that we enjoy every day. We wake up every morning in a state of having received your mercy.
They are indeed new every morning. We pray that as we consider your word this morning, that your spirit would be present and that your word would speak to each heart according to its own need. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. I don't know if this is a coincidence, but the Chinese Bible study on Tuesdays, we started in Luca while ago and then not very different from the same time.
The men's study in that little room began in Luca while ago. So I've had an interesting experience of being part of a Bible study wherein in one case, I'm a recipient and I learn from the brothers in the room. And it's a very good blessing to be able to receive and to have the wisdom of my brothers. And then I go and look at probably a similar passage with people who don't know what a Pharisee is.
What's a Pharisee? So then we go into some detail about the meanings of these things, the actual events. Let's just think about the events themselves and think about what they mean. And it's almost as though you're stepping back in your own mind and looking at it through the heart and mind and eyes of people who have, in some cases, maybe only opened this book a few times in their entire lives.
So it forces one, it forces me to have a different perspective on the very same passage. And I really enjoyed that and I've enjoyed the book of Luc and something that has come home to me a number of times is this matter of authority. In our society, we have a lot of manifestations of authority. We may like to think that we are good with it all.
But in fact, you wonder about people's reaction to authority. Have you ever examined your own reaction to authority and how you might assess authority? Authority is inherently confrontational. And I want to meditate upon two chapters in the book of Luke, Luke, chapter four, and some passages in Luke four and five.
So if you have your Bible and you like to have Luke four and five in your own translation, which may well not be the King James translation, that may be good. I was listening to CBC Radio in the car one evening, not that long ago. And the program was called Ideas. I don't know if you've ever heard Ideas on CBC late in the evenings in the middle of the week.
And the lecturer, the speaker, he was presented as a learned man and he had a British accent. It seems like CBC likes to have people with British accents. It makes them sound a little bit more learned. And I'm about half from the United Kingdom ancestrally.
So I'll poke fun at my own sort of half my ancestry there. And he started with a presupposition for his entire lecture. And that was this. The subject this evening is, you might say, the design of society.
How should society operate? And he had a lot of views on how society it operated. You know what his starting point was? Let us start from the initial condition.
In engineering, we talk about initial conditions and boundary conditions. Let's talk about an initial condition that we have a society which is orderly. What? Is that a legitimate initial condition to simply assume and then say, now we can talk about the design of society?
I would suggest to you that that is not a legitimate initial condition. That there is a great deal that goes into making it possible to have an orderly society. One of those things is authority, the recognition of authority, and the legitimacy of authority. And all of that authority for the Christian is traceable back to God.
You take God out of it. You take the traceable authority out of it. Then actually, in fact, a lot of authority is completely arbitrary. And we see in Canadian society today a lot of challenging of authority.
In the view that authority is arbitrary. I once literally saw a poster where I work, that let us start a society. Let us start the society for the dissolution of all hierarchies. I think it came out of the philosophy department.
Can you imagine the society for the dissolution of all hierarchies? It literally, a fancy poster. And I stood there in amazement, and I read this, and it said that all of these structures that we have in our society, they're all makeup. They're all arbitrary.
They're all basically artificial constructs. Really? Is that a fact? Interesting.
Do you want to stand before a judge? And he says, yeah, I was hired yesterday. I was just walking down the sidewalk, and they needed a guy. So I'm sitting up here at the bench, and I'm going to judge your case.
Really? Does that sound good to you? Or maybe a person in a pastoral position? Or maybe somebody who's a medical doctor who's going to make a rendering on how long you're going to live?
Or maybe a military general with soldiers under his command? Or a king? If you do a little reading about the history of the United Kingdom's monarchy, what a mess? You know, you have the various kinds of kings, bad kings, crazy kings, megalomaniac kings, selfish kings, evil kings.
And it reads a little bit like the history of Israel when you look at the books of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings and 1 Chronicles. There's certainly no guarantee that one is going to get a good king, as we can see in the Bible. If you phone 911 and they're going to send a policeman, he has authority. That authority has been given to him by the state.
And if they were to tell you, well, we're kind of busy. We're just sending an unarmed plain clothes person. You might well say, don't send him. I need a real policeman.
On the other hand, we don't want policemen to over-extend or overuse their authority. If somebody who's teaching professor gives somebody a fail and somebody a pass, we hope that that is not arbitrary. I'm using the built-in notes, and I need the sliding bar, which has disappeared. I'm sorry.
That's how you do it. Disappeared again. Oh, dear. I'm not sure why the sliding bar keeps disappearing on me.
How do you react to authority? When authority is imposed upon you, when authority is presented in front of you, you sometimes would say, well, what right do you have to impose your will upon me? I'm not sure about the legitimacy of your authority. And I would say that there's some legitimacy to that.
So let's think about for a moment authority. And I posit that authority has three components to it. Inherently, the person exercising the authority must have ability. The person exercising authority occupies an office.
That magistrate didn't take that job out of a nonexistent position in passing judgment. That position, as a judge within the court system, has existed for a long time. He happens to be the person before you at the moment. And he was hired because he has the endorsement of the authorities, the Department of Justice.
So if these three aspects are faulty or missing, then we indeed would question authority. In addition, I would say in terms of ability, you see that there is the reality of the need for aspects of ability. If one is merely extremely powerful, then I think you are scary. Especially if you don't seem to have any wisdom as to how you are exercising your power.
On the other hand, if you are very wise, but you actually can't do anything, that does not reflect well on one's ability. As I have indicated, I think that authority is inherently confrontational. If I have authority, but you don't know it. When you come in contact with my authority, then you feel confronted.
There is an aspect of the revelation of the reality of authority implies automatic confrontation. Confrontation can come in many forms. We interact with people every day. You might say that all of our interactions with people are confrontations.
It's well known that if you are dealing with people all the day long in your job, you come home, probably tired, more tired than if you have fewer interactions. Interactions with people are inherently draining. That is because I think that we are always, in some sense, confrontational with each other, hopefully in a good sense. We have to come to terms with each other.
And there is a certain emotional energy that I think is expanded in this. And sometimes it might be joyful. The person brings joy to us. Other times the person might bring challenge or grief to us.
But all of us, as human beings created in the image of God, have our place in society. And we interact with other members of the society. And there is almost like a cost to this. And some of the impressions that we have of others are subjective.
We have a feeling about them. Some of our confrontations with others, especially those who are clearly in authority, have an objective feel to them. Look at what the Gospel of Luke shows us at the beginning. Luke was the good physician of the four Gospels.
We know that in the Gospels we have, in the book of Matthew, Jesus as Messiah and King in Mark, the perfect servant of God, in Luke, the perfect man, the Son of man and the Son of God, God the Son. And that leads into John, Jesus, the divine Son of God. And with his perspective, his perspective is very interesting in that it is focusing on the reality of Jesus' humanity. So we have harbingers or intimations of what is to come in the book of Luke, because you see things like the child was a strong child, filled with wisdom.
And the grace of God was upon him. And then he's in the temple with the doctors, the teachers of the law, the Pharisees, the scribes. And he's asking them tough questions, and he's about 10 years old. And they were astonished at his answers.
This is speaking of something that's to come about the person of Christ. They're astonished at his understanding and his answers. Luke is a people watcher, and he's recording for us. The Lord Jesus, even in his formative years before the Holy Spirit came upon him like a dove, and he was baptized, and he began his public ministry.
And we note that wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man growing up in Nazareth. Interesting. He sets the stage from the beginning, however. And this is what he does.
He goes to a synagogue, and he preaches, and he had been preaching in Galilee, and he goes to a synagogue, and he preaches again. And he opens to Isaiah 61. It appears that that was given to him on that day. Isn't it interesting, these subjective impressions of authority, the inherent ability of the Lord Jesus to communicate authority?
The eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. The other day I was lecturing, and I tried to sneak up on a student that had fallen asleep in my class. Her eyes were not fastened on me. Evidently, I was boring enough that I put her out, and I started to creep up the aisle.
The room holds 450. There's only 110 in the room, so I started. I was going to go up behind her, tap her on the shoulder. I got about six feet away into it.
She sat up straight. Her eyes were not fastened on me, but there was no getting away from the reading of Isaiah, even before he made his pronouncement, of what the Lord Jesus was saying. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears, three aspects to that. Right now, right here, you personally are now in contact and hearing the promised Messiah that this is written about.
What an astonishing claim that the Lord Jesus clarifies from the beginning of his ministry. And then you look at more subjective reaction, and you see there that all bear him witness and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth, a man who spoke with power and grace. And then we have what might be called the Nazareth syndrome, and that is Nazareth was a pretty poor community. You might say, it was the other side of the tracks.
Wait a minute, who is this? We know the relative poverty and ordinariness of that family and that community isn't this the same person that comes from beyond the tracks. And the Lord Jesus knew of this and said, no prophet is accepted in his own country. There is that inherent reluctance within all of us that you might say familiarity breeds contempt.
You want to impose your authority on me? You're too much like me. I don't see why I should allow you to dictate anything to me. I expect you to be someone bigger and greater than myself.
And we happen to know about your background, and it doesn't add up some of them felt. Luke uses the word astonished quite a few times. He also uses this phrase three times pertaining to fame, that without any effort, the subjective effect of the Lord Jesus ministry, the knowledge of it, the news of it spread like wildfire through Galilee. There went out a fame of him.
A fame of him went out. Went there a fame abroad of him. This was how the Lord Jesus became so well known. It actually helps us to explain how it is that subsequent people reacted to him.
At the end of that incident in the synagogue, there were those when he explained to them that he had not only come for the Jews, that the example of the widow of Zarifath, and the name in the Syrian who was a leper. These were not Jewish people, that he had also come for them. As in the book of Acts, this made them very angry. And they were filled with wrath.
And they thought of casting him over a precipice near that synagogue. But it didn't happen. It wasn't the right time. And it says Luke's word astonished.
Their astonished at his doctrine for his word was with power. The subjective appreciation of his authority was this amazement at what was being said, at how it was being said. And the word for power in the Greek language frequently doesn't translate easily into English, because there are two words. One might say a raw kind of power from which we get the word dynamite, or dynamic.
That is, there's a rawness to that power. But the other word, which is a more subtle word, is exusia, which means complete freedom to act. It's wonderful to think about the freedom with which the Lord Jesus could minister, could speak, could heal, could cause miracles to happen. Why?
Because he has complete freedom to act, because he has inherently enough power to make these things happen. Here's a way that I put it forward in the ESL Bible study one evening. What has happened is, in fact, Peter, James, and John have already been called because of that miraculous catch of fishes. So he had power in the preceding verses over unclean spirits, over the animal world, over everything.
And Peter, who realized, Simon Peter, who realized that this is no ordinary person. He had loaned him his boat so he could go offshore and teach. He said, depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. And then the Lord Jesus said, follow me.
Those two words, just two words, follow me, just before this passage at the beginning of chapter 5. And how can you explain this? If I give somebody an instruction, a very unusual instruction, and they do it, there must be some background to that. There must be some history to that.
Simon Peter had heard of the fame with which the power and the word of the Lord Jesus had spread. And now he had seen it with his own eyes. And he realized, this is the Messiah. He's just been teaching from my own boat.
He fell to his knees. And he worships the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus kind of picks him up and says, I'm going to make you fishers of men. These men's lives would never be the same.
Follow me. Do little words, authoritative words. And they pull up the boat and leave it on the beach. Now we come to a wonderful passage wherein you have the, it's a wonderful image of men carrying someone stricken with palsy.
And the room is full. And there's a debate going on. And there's people overflowing outside of the house. And the men take this man stricken up the outside of the house, onto the ceiling.
Whose idea it was, we're not sure, take the ceiling apart. Have the audacity to take the ceiling apart. And then they have ropes. And they lower him down.
I don't know how you would react to it. What's the dust? What's all the dust falling from the ceiling here? And then some daylight breaks in.
And then you see this rectangle coming to what? You know, the sunlight makes it hard to figure out what is that. There's something dark coming down from the ceiling. And then he comes down in front of you.
It's a man on a stretcher. And he says, the Lord Jesus says, your sins are forgiven. There's authority. There's some very pronounced, unique authority.
Your sins are forgiven. And isn't it interesting that the Lord Jesus hardwires that statement to his miracle, which is, get up and walk. You should get up and walk, which is exactly what the man does. And they are all amazed.
We always have astonishment and amazement in these chapters of Luke. And they glorified God. And we're filled with fear. And the King James says, we have seen strange things today.
Then moving on through the chapter, we see that Jesus calls Levi the tax collector, who then invites all his tax collector friends. These are the most hated people in the society. And Levi is going to follow the Lord Jesus. And there's a big feast.
And the Lord Jesus is criticized for being familiar with notorious sinners, traitors of their own political entity, you might say. And he makes an analogy. He says, the ill and the diseased have medical doctors. Sinners have, so I said to the people in the Chinese, who?
Fill it in. What is Jesus saying? There are physical infirmities for which a medical doctor might be able to bring you healing. Levi has a life of sin that he is repenting of.
Who is the person doing this? Me, Lord Jesus is saying, it's me. What? Can you grasp that?
I came. I came for sinners, like Levi. In the same way that a doctor can bring healing to the physically sick, I can bring salvation to the sinner. Who is this?
This is a confrontation. He's saying that he has the authority to forgive sin. And of course, they recognized that that is a very unique claim. But you know, office, ability, endorsement.
Let's look at a couple of verses from John. But the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of John the Baptist. The father has given me to accomplish the very works that I do testify about me, that the father has sent me. The healing of that man on that stretcher was directly linked to the forgiveness of sins and proof of who Jesus was.
And such works were testimony that the father had sent him, more than an endorsement, more than a matter of endorsement. He who does not love me does not keep my words. And the words which you hear is not mine, but the fathers who sent me. Not only does God the father endorse the son, the very words of the son are from the father.
Now I would like to change gears here at 5 after 12 and say that there is an analogy. There is an analogy between a human need and another human need. And I wonder whether we actually recognize the second one. The first one I will explain or try to, allude to try to explain by using a famous statement by a scientist.
There's more than a few engineers in the room today. And you may know that the unit of Pascal is a unit of pressure. And indeed, the scientist and mathematician worked with units of pressure. And Newton per square meter is named after him.
He was born in 1623. It appears that he was saved in 1654. He was what might be called a polymath in that his knowledge base was quite broad. His father was a tax collector.
It turns out, and his father realized that his son, at a very early age, was a prodigy and said, well, if there's one place I'm not sending him, it's public school. And began to school him at home. And the man went on to great things. Unfortunately died of stomach cancer at the age of 39.
And he said this in his thoughts on religion and certain other subjects. And then in the italics there, you can see that were found amongst his papers after he died, published out of Paris. There is a god-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man, which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by God the Creator made known through Jesus Christ. Instinctively, the Christian goes, yes, I know what you mean.
The Lord Jesus Christ occupies a place in my heart that nothing and no one else could satisfy or occupy. I wonder if you have ever thought about authority as a need. I wonder if you have ever thought about the Lord Jesus as the one who should hold a place of authority in your life. There is no higher office or throne than the throne of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is no greater king. There is no person in the universe with greater ability. He is the very power of God governed by an fully in possession of the wisdom and omniscience of God. And he loves you.
He is the Son of man, the Son of God, and God the Son. I think that every human heart, when it's confronted by authority, raises that question. Should I let you be in authority over me? I submit to you this morning, dear ones, that there is only one person to whom that you should submit yourself and fall in worship to.
And that is the person who loves you, who desires nothing, but the best for you, the one who should sit on the throne of your heart. That is Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I think of these wonderful words that a woman who was stricken with rheumatism most of her life wrote in 1921, king of my life, I crown thee now. I love those words.
There is no one else like the Lord Jesus Christ. No one more worthy than the Lord Jesus Christ as someone to whom you should come under his authority. Thine shall the glory be, lest I forget thy thorncrowned brow. Lead me to Calvary.
May that be every one of our prayers this morning, that we realize that we need the right captain of our souls. We need the right king of my life, and that the right thing to do is to crown him, king of my life shall we pray. Father in heaven, we pray that you would indeed show us more and more of the wonder of your son. We thank you that as the king in glory, we can worship him.
We thank you that we can know him through your spirit. We pray, Lord, that we would be in all subjection to him and have hearts that let his authority reign in our hearts, that we might worship him. We thank you for the food that we're about to receive and the potluck. We pray that you would bless our fellowship together.
In Jesus' name, amen.