I grew up in Alexandria and one of the things that I realized when Meredith and I moved here Seven or eight years ago was that there's a couple differences between Monroe and Alexandria The biggest one I found was people like actually like to move back home here Like that's a thing like growing up in Alexandria. You avoid like and you mean to hide so the inches like shaking right like I do not want to go back to that place It's a big difference. It's a really really unique difference in this area is how people desire to come back here How many of y'all are still like how many of y'all grew up here? You grew up where you live right now Okay, how many of y'all like have a hometown that's elsewhere Okay, you know, you know, think of that feeling what that's like when you go home My mom is from a town of 600 people in east Texas and when we go to the Dairy Queen, everybody knows her Everybody's like that's miss Naples 1971.
It's just like it's like so east Texas. It's pitiful Uh, but you know each other I know when I'm when I go back to Alexandria I know there's places that if I go I'm going to see somebody that I know see somebody that I Tippley not somebody I grew up high school with I'm gonna see somebody's parents I'm gonna see somebody else. I'm a preacher's kid. Um, I know when I go home my dad's been serving the same church since 1977 I wasn't born yet when he started uh, in ministry there I know if I go to my dad's church, I'm gonna see a lot of people I mean, I'll sometimes like I'll slide in the back and like get late because I don't have time It's like a gauntlet of like handshakes and like cheek kisses and all this and all this and last year um, I got invited It's the first time ever.
I mean, I've been in ministry for about 12 years now It was the first member and I to go back in that role with my dad's church I spoke at the senior adult lunch and this was like a room 300 people like every single one of them was responsible for me Like these are people who changed my diapers that were sitting in that room Um, there are people who there's all sorts of stories that people in that room if people in that room told just stories they told you I would probably not be standing in front of you today But the biggest thing I was nervous about was uh These are the folks that are responsible for me Like I probably was more nervous giving a 15 minute talk that day than I've ever been before I'm speaking in front of people's no big deal to me I was nervous that day because then these are a lot of people who matter a lot to me inside of this and today What we're talking about is Jesus when he goes back to his hometown and the gluks gospel the way that he tells the story This is really the first time we actually hear Jesus talk The first thing we know about his ministry and who he is and what he does is from this passage in the gospel of Luke And uh, we talked about last last week but this year we're gonna stay inside the gospel passage just for a full year Because if we really want to be a church that wants to see where would Jesus be who would Jesus be ministering to what's Jesus passionate about? How would he be this? Let's just spend a year looking at how he natively did that on his own Who are the things and the ways that he did that just as a person and today is about his first sermon in his hometown We can learn so much about it. We can learn so much about ourselves Because it really makes us ask the question is what we call the gospel really good news to everyone else or is it just good news to us Is what we say Jesus is about is that simply just self-serving or is that something that truly can change The world around us so let's jump in to Jesus first sermon blue chapter four We're gonna read this in two sections, but I will start in verse 14 You can read in your bibles if you brought them you can use your phone you can use it the screens behind me But let's read this together and then Jesus returned to Galilee filled with the holy spirit's power Reports about him spread quickly through the whole region.
He taught regular sin and was praised by everyone When he came to the village of Nazareth his boyhood home He went as usual to synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the scriptures The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him He unrolled the scroll and was and found the place where this was written the spirit of the Lord is upon me For he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor He has sent me to proclaim the captives will be released that the blind will see that the oppressed will be set free in the time of the Lord's favor Has come he rolled up the scroll handed back to the attendant and sat down All eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently and then he began to speak to them the scripture that you have heard Has been fulfilled this very day So jesus is there he's he's in his hometown these people that know him so well There's a a little bit of a timeline. You know jesus The way Luke's gospel works. There's the christmas story that we're familiar with most of our our ideas of the christmas story come from Luke's gospel And then there's a chapter of genealogy of wenja who jesus ancestors were immediately after that is temptation and the wilderness and then there's this story Luke's setting up a very particular thing for us and and this is when it all kind of starts to come to fruition But he's in Nazareth Nazareth It's a town of about 1500 to 2000 people to put that in relationship like That's about the town of starlington like municipal women It's not not the whole big school system. It just the north side appear It's about 1500 or 2000 people.
There's some of us when the high school is that big Now think about if you're only around 1500 people 2,000 people you probably know everybody right At least some basic level of a relational connection. They they knew who jesus was You've got to think about um, you know, they're hearing stories about him If you're like jesus did and joseph son. Yeah, he's been doing all this over there. He's been performing miracles He started this whole process.
They're aware of what's going on and now he's back home This is much of a bigger deal than my mother at the dairy queen in oma hontexas I imagine there's a lot of good jobs. There's a lot of handshakes backslaps of of old lady cheek kisses I mean, there's a welcome Like these he's ours. We produced this and we were last week. We talked about it on the th annual said get anything good come out of Nazareth I'm sure there are people like no, look at what we did.
He's ours We produced this this is what can come out of Nazareth. There's a lot of very happy Enthusiastic things going on with these people this day. He's hometown hero He's back home We've heard about these things. He's done and now he comes into the synagogue and he's handed to scroll for the daily reading Which is kind of a typical thing if you're a man of age you can stand up if you're willing to read and of course jesus stands right up and they hand him to scroll and he opens it he comes to this passage a very well-known passage that they're excited about The best way for me to really explain this this section of Isaiah chapter 61 Like this is the first century Jewish version of late green was god bless the USA Like it's loaded like they know what's coming there excited about this and jesus reads it and he says this has been fulfilled The stories you've heard are true and I am this person and then the story picks up in verse 22 Everyone spoke well of him and was amazed by the gracious words that came from his lips How can this be they ask is it this jose of son Then he said you will undoubtedly quote to me this proverb physician heal yourself Meaning do miracles in your hometown like those you didn't kapurnum But I tell you the truth no prophets accepted his hometown Certainly there are many needy widows in the israel and Elijah's time when the heavens were closed for three and a half years in a severe famine Devastated the land yet Elijah was not sent to any of them instead He went to a foreigner a widow of zeraphath in the land of sardon There were many lepers in israel during the time of the prophet alysha But the only one that was healed was naman a syria When they heard this the people in the synagogue were furious jumping up They mobbed him and forced him to the edge of the hill on which the town was built They intended to push him over the cliff but he passed right through the crowd and went on his way Oh, you got a you got a trap pretty hard to have folks that if you see ask about you and that quick one throw you off a cliff I would say that the dairy queen did not have a very good mood going on that afternoon later on First thing says is he spoke words of graciousness to them It's like the stories it kind of flips for a moment and we begin to see things through the eyes of those people in azareth And graciousness is an interesting thing.
It means life giving it means a restorative. It means returning It means all the things that this is a 61 men But graciousness also means he's such a nice boy Such a nice young man. He said those good words. He did such a good job Somebody said how can this be this is joseph's son You know, we think jeez being a carpenter and he was but the word in the original language is just It's not necessarily a carpenter of a person of skilled trade.
It's like a day laborer You see almost inside of this. Look, he rose. He did he did such a good job for himself, didn't he? I mean, you know, it's like saying all the patronizing things that can be said about somebody who kind of came up out of it I mean all of this and all of a sudden he launches into this this story.
This is completely different People in azareth are talking about graciousness Because it's nice because jesus is nice. The only problem is nice means easy And easy can't fix eternity That's what jesus is confronting that day easy can't fix eternity. They want things to be easy In this Isaiah passage, I said this is very well known This was written about 500 years before they were there It's when the israelites were in exile for the punishment of their sins and it's a hope is being projected upon them It's about an expectation of god coming It's about the things that they had worked for it and trying to become a holy people But this invitation if we kind of flip down and get into chapter 61, it's an invitation to change It's an invitation to exchange an old life that wasn't working for a new life That does have the capacity to work. It's released from its release.
It's a freedom But it's a way to change. It's not the way that humans can change things. So way to change that only god can change things It's different Now easy it can't fix eternity. That's what nazrith wanted Becomes the story of lysia, you know, we talked about lysia in lysia last year in a series Elijah Through the power of his own prayer god allowed him to stop the rain for three and a half years And a famine went out across all of israel and god rescued Elijah But pulled him out of the holy place out of the promise land out of the boundaries of god's people And sent him to a widow and her son inside on which was one of the sworn enemies of israel and then elijah performed a miracle To keep the three of them alive For these years during the famine but she wasn't one of god's people then alysia Elijah's understudy At a time where the seerian army was just consistently raiding and plundering and destroying the people of god naman was their general Then the name was a leper a disease that not only would disfigure you but would pull you away from society Allow you know contact with anyone else and would just stop you from doing anything you mentioned israel is rejoicing that naman has leprosy Like the general who's been who's been attacking us for all these years now has this disease that will kill him quickly We should be celebrating and now alysia goes and heals him the sworn enemy The people Understood the israel of back then we're bad.
We're wrong had had issues going on But they felt them and azareth in the first century. They thought we had fixed all the up We've been exiled we've we don't worship idols anymore We've gotten rid of all the weird creepy places of worship. We've done all the right things and we rebuilt the temple We're making sacrifices again. We're doing every single thing that you told us to do that we're supposed to be a holy But that can't fix it for them And jesus coming in the very first sermon and saying you need to increase and expand your ideas of who god is of where god is And of what god is doing So this did cause quite a reaction, right?
In verse 16 it said that nad that jesus was from nad as it was his boyhood home The original language it says that he was raised there the greek word for raised is the same word as the word for fit But jesus was fit is there Now you think of the mark of i know in someone's a really good friend of mine or when i'm a good friend somebody else's And i know what their snacks are in their house You know, there's like there's like a marker of friendship when you have fridge privileges You know talking about like we fed you We raised you Like we took care of you if you look at the bigger story jesus and his life remember that The angel came to his parents and said hey Harry's gonna try to kill you so go to egypt and hang out egypt for a while And then after egypt they're gonna come back home with that realizant. Harry son was now looking for them So they went to a town called nazareth to hide out I mean nazareth they're like we we kept you from heron for 30 years Like we kept you safe we fed you And now you've come in and said this like and i can imagine there was probably some sweet lady in that room that stood up and said We taught you better than this I'm just think of just these a moment we took you in this this this This started this notion like the greatest coming of age movie of like a homecoming to like the most anti-homecoming in the world Like i'm so mad at you i want to throw you off a cliff Like where do you get to where that's a viable option in life This was jesus you found himself inside of this because jesus knew There regardless of who who's talking with of where they lived in time what was going on jesus knew that the natural direction For human for humanity is to keep things contained To keep things controlled to keep things predictable Because that means it's easy. That means it's safe. That means we know what's going on.
We're not gonna be surprised He knew that was our natural direction, but that wasn't gonna work That wasn't what was gonna be had the ability to save this world So four things about easy that I think all of us can bring into our own lives now that we can learn from jesus message I say the first one is easy is easy easy. Easy doesn't require hard work. Who loves an easy job Who loves an easy Saturday? No, we thought there's the easy button What about easy easy easy?
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in the 1930s and 40s He wrote a book called cost of discipleship and it's about to turn around the mountain But he took bonhoeffer wrote the cost of discipleship while he was imprisoned for being part of an assassination plot against adult Fipper And this is what he says he calls this cheap grace. This is easy grace This is what he says cheap grace is the grace that we bestow in ourselves Cheap grace is preaching of forgiveness without repentance But baptism without church discipline of communion without confession Cheap grace is grace without discipleship grace without the cross in grace without Jesus Christ living in our world Easy is easy Easy is also comfortable It's contained is predictable people that the Nazarites the jesus is home his hometown There were good jewish people there were pious and they're at synagogue This is the way that the jewish people were worshiping when they did not live close to the temple and they would come and they would keep themselves pure And they would read scripture and they would pray together. They would teach the kid they would do all the right things Like all the church things they would do them there But jesus was also pious and inside of this what he's saying is jesus piety his holiness Was all together focused on something different Besides a passage that he read that day that was handed to him that he he read talked about release from sin and captivity What jesus was telling them is you know, we've got to change our understanding and framework where we used to think of sin being a behavior But it's not it's a state it's when when we as people are so utterly broken We do not have the ability to have a relationship with a father and i'm here to fix that I'm here to set you free from the thing that stops you from having this relationship But that's not gonna be comfortable. It's not gonna be it's not gonna be easy Also the thing that's going on here is that easy looks just like me Easy looks just like me I think so much of what made the Nazarites decided was start throwing people off of cliffs was what jesus said was the people who used to be close to god Can become distant to him and the people who were once far from god can now be blessed by god Then a world that is obsessed with social status that the king of the god does not follow the social order So much what he's speaking about 2000 years ago is about a world obsessed with social status and order and friends It doesn't take us about two or three scrolls on our phone to realize that we are still living in a world obsessed with social status in social order He's saying that those who are close to god can become distant but those who are far can become blessed The last thing about easy is this the easy is living in our world The king of god doesn't exist to just prop up our vision of the world But instead it's about the holy spirit asking us to tear down our own our own self-focused our own self-made walls in favor of being part of this expansion Of god's world is happening not just in our heart but in our midst all around us That the people the Nazarites were frustrated because they realized that they had an inhibiting vision that would stop them And withstands a primary obstacle to them receiving the fullness of god and when we Come into that sort we had the exact same way exact same idea We can stop ourselves and can create our own our own places of stopping our own walls our own Ways that we cannot encounter the fullness of god because we're wanting things to be easy See this is it tells a story.
There's not just so much social need This is not about this is not we would be thinking too small if we thought this was a passage This was a message about justice it is But it's bigger than that because it's about us realizing that jesus' mission is riding a world that has been ordered wrong And the only thing that can fix our world is him We cannot do good enough to make this place a good place But jesus can Easy can't fix eternity So a couple of questions to ask today, but also to ask yourself during the week You can always find these if you go to my foundry.life and you click on the message notes These questions are always there every week But a couple of questions just to think about number one is this how do we try to make our personal relationship with jesus easy What are the ways that we try to kind of contain him and keep it to where we can understand and it makes sense to us And we don't get that weird feeling that something's not right What are we doing to make our own personal relationship with jesus' season The second question is is how do we need to stretch the way that we are called to live out a public life with jesus? You know, I was telling somebody at 830 service this morning that uh, you know I spent about a month preparing for this whole idea of a year of jesus just kind of powering through the four gospels As much as I could and I kept finding there were places I did not feel right And over time I'm going to realize those places where I don't feel right are the places where I need to grow And if I'm not Getting to the place where I don't feel right then the problem is not God's the problem is mine What are the things that we need to stretch ourselves to live out this life? Because this story what this story is is in just a handful of verses it's the whole ministry of jesus It's the whole ministry his entire ministry was like of people at first Being excited and reveling in his presence and the exact same group of people saying we need to kill this guy because he's threatening things This first sermon is the story of the next three years of his life And it should confront us in the same way it confronted the people who heard it It should make us begin to question and feel in things because jesus is a challenge either leads to death or it's a challenge that leads to life And if we look at this world if we we look at things our world needs nothing more Then a visible expression of the love of jesus of of the power of jesus and the healing mercy of jesus And he's nothing more than these things And as his church, it's our call to be that visible expression of love and of mercy and of healing It's not an easy call, but it's the right call Let's pray together lord We realize that we all like things that we can control we can predict that we can Keep hold of God we realize that we can't contain you So Lord in your mercy Stretch yourselves out to our hearts and our minds for us to begin to ask these questions of where do we need to be Lord how are we asking things to be easy And God as we start off this year of just focusing on you And seeing you alive and active in our world God let us just take this first message this first sermon this first door I didn't apply to our hearts this we can apply to our minds and to our words and to our actions As we seek to be more like you God's not inhibit the fullness of the experience you've promised us Lord thank you for your power For your mercy and forgiveness For how you don't leave us there, but instead you stand us up on our feet