The Lord’s Day Morning
November 15, 2009
Luke 8:1-15
“Have You Heard the Word?”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Luke chapter 8.
We’re going to be looking at the first few verses of this chapter and you
may want to sneak a peek back to the last few verses of chapter 7 because
something that happens in verses 2, or 2 and 3, in Luke chapter 8, or something
that is described in Luke 8, 2 and 3, relates to the story of the woman, the
immoral woman, the prostitute that we met last week that had come to thank Jesus
for changing her life and who had been so moved by seeing the Savior of her soul
that she had begun to weep.
And then she looked down and noticed that her tears were falling on His feet as
He was reclined at the table. And
she knelt down and she anointed His feet with expensive perfume and ointment and
began to dry His feet with her hair.
It’s a deeply moving scene as she expressed gratitude to Jesus Christ for His
changing of her life and it feeds into what is described in Luke 8, verse 2 and
3.
As we read this passage today I do want you to be on the lookout for two parts
in the passage. Verses 1 to 3
describe what Jesus was doing and preaching in His itinerant ministry amongst
the cities and towns and verses 2 and 3 in particular in that section describe
who was with Him as He was doing this.
I want you to notice this because it’s important.
There’s a lesson in it for us.
And then the other part of this chapter, or this passage, is from verse 4
down to verse 15. This is a parable
that Jesus tells. It’s a parable
about hearing the Word of God and about responding to the Word of God and about
what truly hearing the Word of God means for our response to the Word of God.
Let’s pray before we read and hear God’s Word read.
Our Heavenly Father, only the Spirit can open our eyes to see our sin and see
our need and only the Spirit can enable us to say that Jesus is Lord and Savior.
And so as we read Your Word today, as we mark it, as we learn it, as we
seek to understand it and inwardly digest it, we come consciously depending upon
Your Holy Spirit to open our eyes that we might behold wonderful truth in Your
Word. Do this we pray, in Jesus’
name. Amen.
Luke 8:1-15
“Soon afterward He went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing
the good news of the kingdom
of
God.
And the twelve were with Him, and also some women who had been healed of
evil spirits and infirmities: Mary,
called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of
Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for
them out of their means.
And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came
to Him, He said in a parable: ‘A
sower went out to sow his seed. And
as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds
of the air devoured it. And some
fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no
moisture. And some fell among
thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it.
And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.’
As He said these things, He called out, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him
hear.’
And when His disciples asked Him what this parable meant, He said, ‘To
you it has been given to know the secrets of the
kingdom of
God, but for others they
are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not
understand.’ Now the parable is
this: The seed is the Word of God.
The ones along the path are those who have heard.
Then the devil comes and takes away the Word from their hearts, so that
they may not believe and be saved.
And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the Word, receive it with
joy. But these have no root; they
believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away.
And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as
they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of
life, and their fruit does not mature.
As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the Word, hold
it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.’”
Amen, and thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word.
May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
I want to ask you two questions this morning.
The first is this: How has
the Gospel changed the way that you treat people?
How has God’s undeserved grace and mercy to you changed the way you treat
people, especially people who are not like you, people who are different from
you, people that don’t run in the circles that you run in, people that don’t
share the normal social commonalities that you possess and share with your
friends? How do you treat people and
how has the Gospel changed the way that you treat people?
I’m going to suggest that one of the things that we learn not only from
the story we studied last week at the end of Luke 7, but just from the
description that we have in Luke 8, verses 2 and 3, teaches us something about
how the Gospel ought to change the way we treat people.
But the second question is this: How
do you hear the Word of God? Do you
hear the Word of God? If so, how do
you hear the Word of God? Do you
hear it in such a way that it bears fruit in your life, or are the words of the
preacher like the words of Charlie Brown’s teacher on your ears — Waa, waa, waa,
waa, waa? Does it fall on deaf ears
or was there a time where you responded to it with joy, but that was long ago —
it was long ago since you knew joy in responding to the Word of God.
Or was there a day that you responded to it, and you embraced it, you thought
with all your heart, but now the distractions and cares and frankly the goals
and ambitions and desires and pleasures of this life have changed all that and
you don’t receive it with joy anymore?
How do you hear the Word of God?
It’s those two questions that I want to concentrate on with you today.
1. How has the Gospel
changed the way that you treat people?
There’s so many other things in this passage that I’m tempted to concentrate on.
Just the description alone of Jesus’ explanation to His disciples in
verse 9 and 10 about why He taught in parables — doesn’t that tempt you?
Wouldn’t you love to wrestle with that for thirty of so minutes?
Or the parable of the sower itself – I’m sure many pastors have preached
four sermons looking at each of the kinds of responses to the Word of God told
in Jesus’ parable of the sower. But
I want to zero in on verses 1 to 3 and then the big picture of verses 4 to 15
with you this morning.
Now Jesus, in verse 1 we’re told, is going from village to village and Luke uses
a very important phrase. What’s He
doing? “He is proclaiming and
bringing the good news of the
kingdom
of God.”
Now Luke uses that phrase four times — three times in the gospel of Luke,
one time in the book of Acts — and he means something very specific by it.
Do you remember the passage Jeremy just read in Isaiah chapter 60?
Well you rightly understood that the prophecy of Isaiah in Isaiah 60 is
not going to be fulfilled completely until the day that we are in the land where
there is no sun and moon but the Lord Himself is our sun and our moon and our
light. Those words from the end of
the book of Revelation come right out of Isaiah 60.
But Jesus is telling the people of God, as He proclaims God’s kingdom,
the good news of God’s kingdom, that the King who is going to bring that
prophecy to pass is here.
Now this is staggering because the people of Israel are expected a king, a
descendant of David, who’s going to get rid of the Romans.
In their minds, the big problem is Roman occupation and inattentiveness
to God’s commands in Moses’ ceremonial law.
So finally, the king is going to sit on the throne again, he’s going to
get rid of the Romans, and God’s people are going to start obeying Moses’
ceremonial laws again like they’re supposed to.
And Jesus comes and He says, “Good news, God’s kingdom has arrived.
The King is here but it’s not like you were expecting.
This King recognizes your real enemy isn’t
Rome; it’s your sin.
And this King is going to deal with your sin, not by expelling the
Romans, but by dying for you on the cross and being buried and being raised
again so that you can have new life and communion with God.
And the righteousness that this King is going to give you is not
ceremonial righteousness where you’re wearing the right clothes, obeying the
right rituals, eating the right foods.
The righteousness you’re going to get from this King is going to be
total, inside out transformation, so that you are once again the image of God
that God intended you to be.”
So He’s proclaiming a message that is
absolutely breathtaking in its radicalness.
And He’s saying that “I’m the King that’s here to bring about the
purposes of God’s kingdom and I’m going to establish righteousness among God’s
people and I’m going to change your lives and it’s going to have absolutely
nothing to do with running the Romans off.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re here or not.
God’s kingdom is going to be established.”
And as He’s going around preaching this message, it’s so interesting — who’s
with Him? Well, the Twelve are with
Him. You remember Jesus had a larger
circle of about seventy two disciples that followed Him and this is the inner
circle of Twelve. Within the Twelve there were three that were particularly
close to Him. But the Twelve are
with Him. They’re going with Him
city to city. But along with the
Twelve, who else is with Him? “And
also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities:
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna,
the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager” – so the Gospel has even gotten
into the very courts of the wicked king Herod now — “and Susanna, and many
others, who provided for them out of their means.”
These women had been so deeply affected by Jesus’ ministry, their lives
had been so profoundly transformed by Jesus’ ministry that they were actually
supporting Jesus and His disciples out of their own substance and means and they
were travelling with Him.
Now you understand how scandalous that would have been.
Adult co-education was not the order of the day in Jesus’ time.
And to have women following Jesus around with men, no doubt tongues were
wagging. But is it surprising to you
at all that these women would have had this response to Jesus?
Let’s go back to Luke 7. Here
is a woman who is a prostitute.
Everyone in her town knows that she is immoral.
And she had come in to express her gratitude to Jesus for changing her
life and she weeps on His feet and she anoints Him with perfume and ointment and
dries His feet with her hair. Now
can you imagine, my friends, the shock if that happened today?
Let’s say that Derek had led a woman to faith in Christ and one of our
deacons had thrown a block party.
And Derek was at our deacon’s dinner table and suddenly this woman who’s known
in town as a woman who shares her favors shows up at the dinner table and takes
off his shoes – let’s hope Rosemary’s not
around – and begins to weep on his feet and anoint him with oil and dry his feet
with her hair. Everyone in the room
is going to be shocked. And indeed
Simon the host was shocked. And
everybody in the room begins to judge Jesus — “If He was really a prophet and
knew what kind of a woman this is, He wouldn’t let her touch Him.”
Do you see what Jesus is doing? This
may well have been the first time ever, or at least the first time in years,
that this woman had ever touched a man who respected her and loved her and cared
for her and wasn’t interested in using her for his own pleasure.
And Jesus, with absolute purity of heart, allows it. Even though everyone
else in the room is looking at Jesus and saying, “Well You’re no better than she
is if You’re going to let her touch You.”
Do you see what Jesus is doing?
He is treating this woman who is so despised and so spurned and so
condescended to and so cast out from and so excluded from her community and her
society, this woman who has come to faith in Him, He’s treating her with
dignity. Maybe for the first time in
her adult life she’s felt a man treat her with respect and dignity.
It is no wonder that that woman did not care with anybody else in that
room thought of her because she had finally been treated with dignity, with
love, with genuine care and concern.
She wasn’t being used, she was being cared for.
And look at the other women who are following Him.
These are women, one from whom Jesus had cast out demons.
What do you think her community thought of her?
Some who were infirm — we don’t know how.
Were they blind? Were they
lame? Were they deaf?
Were they mute? I don’t know,
but they were infirm like the other people in the gospel that Jesus healed from
their infirmities. These women had
been treated with regard and love and kindness and respect.
They had been shown dignity by Jesus.
No wonder they were following Him around.
I didn’t get to read it to you last week, but it’s so appropriate for this
passage as well. It’s a letter from
a woman who is part of a mission team working in the Middle
East primarily amongst Muslims, but she gets to watch all the
religions in all the cultures and how they relate to women.
And this is what she says especially about the passage in Luke 7 —
“The point that really struck me about
Jesus’ response to the woman was its complete departure from what was socially
acceptable. I’m not sure if one can
really begin to grasp how shocking it was unless one has spent enough time in
the Middle East for its attitudes to start
melding with his own. The worst sin
a woman can commit here is to lose or to appear to have lost her virginity
outside of marriage. The most
important asset she has as a woman is her reputation.
The whole honor of the family hangs on the reputation of its women.
If a woman has nothing but her reputation, as a chaste woman, she always
has a chance to succeed. If she has
everything but her reputation, she is lost before she begins.
And in some parts of the Arab world, all it takes for a woman to lose her
reputation is to be seen speaking to a man who is not a relative.
If a man, particularly a religious man, is known to have even spoken with
such a lost woman, his reputation will follow hers right down the drain.
It is a hard system and it crosses religious lines.
No consider that same system but take it back 2,000 years to a less
forgiving time. Then think about
Jesus’ encounter with this sinful woman.
Shocking, isn’t it?”
Yes it is and here’s what’s going on — Jesus knows everybody in the room is
looking at Him and they are thinking about Him in the same sort of way that
they’re thinking of that woman. And
you know what? He doesn’t care.
He cares for her soul and He doesn’t care what people think of Him in His
caring of her soul. Now understand
that Jesus is pristine in His purity in the way He deals with this woman.
This is not some sort of sensual thing going on here.
But Jesus knows just by letting her touch Him that His reputation is
going down the drain with hers and He doesn’t care.
No wonder she loves Him. No
wonder she loves Him. She’s never
been treated this way by a man. And
think of how these other women had been treated and He treats them the same way.
No wonder these women were following Jesus.
It’s not surprising at all.
And I want to ask you this — Has God’s
gracious dealing with you changed the way you treat people that others look down
on and despise? Do you show them
the same kind of love that your Savior has shown you?
Because you know what, you and I are sinners, and for Jesus to sidle up
next to us, well very frankly it costs Him His reputation because we’re not good
and we’re not pure but He does it anyway because He loves us.
And shouldn’t that make us loving towards those who are despised and
looked down upon and cast off?
Christianity has always reached out with the Gospel to those that everyone else
has discarded. Is that the
characteristic of our congregation that we reach out with the Gospel and with
love and show dignity to the people that everybody else has discarded?
Or is our love shown only to those who are just like us?
That’s the first question I want to ask you.
II. How do you hear the
Word of God?
The second question is this — How do you hear the Word?
How do you hear the Word?
Jesus makes it clear in this passage that hearing the Word is not just a matter
of plopping down in the seat in the sanctuary and listening.
Jesus’ point in this passage is that Satan himself has a real interest in
your not listening to the Word of God.
Jesus is indicating that for you to hear the Word of God, actually is to
engage in a spiritual battle because Satan does not want you to hear the Word of
God. Satan, if you’ll remember in
this parable, Jesus Himself says, is active in trying to keep people from
hearing the Word of God. In some
people, he distracts them immediately so that the Word never ever takes root.
In others, there’s an initial response of joy, but then in all too brief
a time, it’s gone. And still in
others there is a response to the truth, but what happens?
The cares and the riches and the pleasures of this world choke the Word.
What’s happening there? You are
caring more about the things of this life than you care about your eternal
well-being. Can you imagine that –
caring more about the things that will pass away than your eternal well-being?
And Jesus is saying Satan is behind that.
It happens all the time. It
happens all the time. So when you
come to hear the Word of God there is a battle going on.
Satan is not wanting you to see your sin.
Why did that woman who anointed Jesus’ feet and why did these women in verse 2
and 3 follow Jesus? Because they saw
their sin and they saw their need and they saw that Jesus had met it.
And so what does Satan want to make sure you don’t do so that you don’t
hear the Word? He doesn’t want you
to see your sin. He wants you to
come in and listen to a sermon and think about everybody else’s sins.
“Boy, they sure did need to hear that message!”
I can remember it now. It
reverberates in my brain with absolute horror.
Rodney Stortz had just preached a powerful message to our congregation in St. Louis at the Covenant
Presbyterian Church. Liz Stortz was
in the choir with me. I said to Liz,
“Boy did they need to hear that message!”
And she looked at me with terror in her eyes and I realized when I said
it, “Opps, can I get that back in?”
Have you ever thought it? “Boy did
they need to hear that message!”
That’s what Satan wants us to do. Or
he wants us to be so caught up with the burdens and the cares and the
distractions of our lives that we don’t think about our everlasting wellbeing.
He wants us to value stuff that will die, value stuff that we can’t take
with us, think about things that don’t matter more than we think about our
eternal wellbeing.
So you understand that every time you sit down in a pew of this sanctuary a
spiritual battle is going on. Will
you hear the Word of God? That’s why
you can’t just come here and plop down.
You’ve got to come here and you’ve
got to have prepared with prayer — “Lord God, come and speak to me.
I need this Word.”
It’s not that you’re coming here because we preach better than other folks.
I love what Spurgeon said that about.
He said, “Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Wesley may preach the Gospel better than
I do, but they can’t preach a better Gospel.”
So you may be able to go other places where they preach the Gospel better
than we do, but they can’t preach a better Gospel.
But do you come here knowing that you need it more than you need food.
That it’s the thing you need in your life?
How are you hearing the Word of God?
Jesus says that those who hear the Word of God right, they are ones who
recognize that what is being spoken to them in the Gospel of the kingdom in the
Word of God is more precious than anything this world can give them.
And it will always transform their lives because they will value it more
than they value anything else in this world.
So how are you hearing the Word of God?
Is it changing your life?
Is it shown in the way you treat
others?
Is it shown in the fruit that’s being
born in your experience — you love God more, you trust Him more, you want to
tell about Him more, you want to live for Him more?
Jesus is reminding us my friends that the hearing of the Word of God is a
spiritual battle. Now we’re going to
sing about this in just a few moments.
Pay close attention to what you’re going to sing because it’s going to be
a prayer to the Lord to help you hear the Word of God as you ought.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we need spiritual ears to hear the Gospel.
Give them to us we pray, in Jesus’ name.
Amen.