There I was last night, sitting in my office wondering what in the world I was going to say about the book of Luke. I'm just supposed to be working on an intro to the book of Luke, you know who was Luke, why did he write his Gospel and Acts, what was his favorite toothpaste, you know, stuff like that. But it was like three in the morning and I was staring into space thinking, praying and listening to the Album Leaf.
My mind had started wandering around, bouncing from weird thought to weird thought, feeling like I have to write something and the juices just werent flowing. And finally my mind hit on this though that Willy stuck in my head a few days earlier. We get to! Exclamation point.
Uhh. We get to what?
We were talking about that mental switch that happens in your brain from I have to do something to I get to do something I had this happen to me not to long ago when I moved into my new place. So one of my mental complaints when I moved in was that there was no dishwasher. I hadnt noticed before I moved in, and even if I had, I wouldve still rented the place. But either way I was now stuck doing dishes by hand. So I went to the store and bought some tools to help me out: liquid soap, a scrub brush and a drying rack. But every time I had the opportunity to pass off doing the dishes I would. I even made a rule that if I cooked for you, then you had to do the dishes. Some of you are smiling because you have done dishes under those conditions. And so the other night after I had made dinner for a friend of mine, I ran the water for the dishes and started washing them without a second thought. Okay there was a second though: I found myself incredibly thankful?- that I got to wash my dishes. It meant that there was now food in my belly when I know that there are so many people who know hunger. It meant that I had friends to spend some time with when so many are lonely, that I had a place to live and running water when a lot of folks in the world and even in our own city go with out shelter or clean water. And so I found myself incredibly thankful to wash my own dishes. There was amazing joy in it, but it still sounds weird to me.
And you are probably wondering what the heck any of this has to do with Luke- Im getting there I promise, But one more story first. When I was in my sophomore year of college, both of them, I started taking ceramics classes. I ended up taking like 5 classes, Id come in early and stay late making these pots that were like 3 feet high and have geometric designs and sunflowers on them. I dont know why, but I just really liked sunflowers in that period of my life. I loved doing it; it was pretty relaxing and became a time of quiet refection when I would throw on the wheel. The pots were good enough that I was able to sell a couple of them. And that was cool. But then I got requests for pots. Can you make something special theyd ask. Id try to show them stuff that I had already made but no, they wanted something special. And they would nag and call, and I wouldnt want to make anything let alone something for them. What had started out as an absolute joy was now drudgery because my I get to! Slash I want to! attitude had been replaced with I have to
I just heard this guy John Piper give a message that said kinda the same thing, when we have to do something that we would normally positively love, we get ripped off because we have to do it.
Dave is thinking to himself at this point where is Adam going?
Here it is. The Book of Luke is one of four in the bible that we call Gospels. Its a word that simply means the Good News.
Its the same word that the town crier would use to pronounce any good news that happened in the Roman Empire. Hed climb up to a special platform and basically yell into the air. Good news! The emperor has had a son! Good news! We have triumphed over our enemies in Germania! And its this sort of celebratory yell which Matthew Mark Luke and John wrote of in the Gospels, the challenge and cry that was given by Peter and Paul preached on, that all the fathers of the church for the last 2000 years and that we in this place have been proclaiming to you till this day. GOOD NEWS YALL: Jesus who is God loved us so much, that even though we had turned our backs on Him, he died on a cross so that we might be restored to a right relationship with him. Lets go shout that from the rooftops.
And that is the mode and the voice of Lukes gospel. Its what the angels say in the beginning of the book to the Shepards. I proclaim to you the GOOD NEWS of great Joy that will be for all people. Its the last thought of the book at the ascension of Jesus. While he was blessing them he left and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Jesus, knowing in advance the sacrifice he was to make on the cross for us, said this: the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lords favor.
Luke was excited to share the Good News. Between the Gospel of Luke and the book of acts, which he also wrote, he contributed more verses to the New Testament than anyone else. Here was a guy who, by profession, was a medical doctor, that got caught up with Paul and ultimately with Christ, that he set out to discover if this Jesus who Paul told him about was really God, The book was written probably about 30 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. He had all sorts of people who actually knew Jesus that he could go and talk to. And being a medical doctor, he knew something about how to research and investigate and look into things and the language that he used is precise. In fact one of my professors said the Greek thats used in Luke and in acts is some of the hardest in the New Testament because some of the precise medical and nautical terms are not found elsewhere in the New Testament.
So we are going to look into the same things that Luke did for the next couple of months following his research, his investigation until we can answer the question that Luke was ultimately getting at: Who was Jesus and what are we to do with Him?
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