Pastor Michael Neumann

January 24, 2010

Luke 4:14-21

Today this Scripture is Fulfilled in Your Hearing

1) Today Jesus still comes to you.

2) Today the good news is still preached to you.

3) Today God’s favor is still declared to you.

 What a simple message Jesus had for the people of his hometown. What a wonderful message Jesus had for the people of his hometown. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. It was a message of hope and comfort. Here was the promised Messiah – the Savior from sin. No Jewish teacher had ever explained these words of the prophet Isaiah in such a wonderful way. Jesus told these people – people whom he had grown up among and who all knew him – that he was the Savior promised in the Old Testament. The message was clear. It was easy to understand. Their wait for the Savior was over. The Savior had come. That was a message of hope and comfort that they had been waiting to hear.

 That message is also a message of hope and comfort for us. Jesus is also our Savior. That message of good news and salvation, the message that Jesus is our promised Savior is one which we need to hear, and desire to hear. Even today, in our own lives, God continues to fulfill all the promises he has made to us. Even today, God continues to come to us. The message which Jesus had for the people of his hometown is just as important and relevant today as when Jesus first spoke those words. Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing – Today Jesus still comes to you; today the good news is still preached to you; and today God’s favor is still declared to you.

 By the time of the events in our text, word about Jesus had spread. His miracles and his teaching had become known throughout the area. The people recognized that this was a special man; someone sent by God. Jesus had come to proclaim the good news of salvation and to point to himself as the Savior through whom that salvation would be secured. As the passage Jesus quotes from Isaiah says, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Anointing was a ceremony used in the Old Testament times to designation or single out a person for a special office or work such as a priest or a king. A perfumed oil was poured on the head of the person and he was told for what special work he was being singled out. At Jesus’ baptism, as he began his public ministry, he had been anointed with the Holy Spirit.

 Jesus began his work in Nazareth by visiting the local synagogue and teaching there. The synagogue was the center of worship in every Jewish community. Here the Jews would meet on the Sabbath day to worship God. Here they would gather to hear and learn God’s Word – including those prophecies concerning the coming Savior. 

The synagogues didn’t have any official readers; any competent male member might read one of the lessons. And so it was common practice whenever there was a visiting Rabbi or teacher, he would be asked to do the reading. Considering the fact that Jesus’ fame and popularity had already spread quickly throughout Galilee, he was probably expected to get up and read the Scripture lesson and to preach on it. And that is what Jesus did. He directed their attention to one of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the promised Savior.

 We are told that it was Jesus custom, his habit to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. We notice that Jesus was regular in his attendance at worship services when he lived in Nazareth. When we stop to consider that he is the Son of God, we might think that he could not benefit from attending a worship service conducted by a mere man. But here again we see Jesus’ love for God’s Word. We see Jesus fulfilling the third commandment for us, for our sins of neglect of God’s Word. 

  How important for us also to be in the habit of regular church attendance. How important to make regular study of the Bible. Jesus also comes to us and speaks to us. He hasn’t left us alone without direction. He is with us and he guides us through his written word. We need to hear that message that he has to preach to us. We need to hear God’s law condemn us as the miserable sinners that we are, but what great comfort and hope there is for us as well in Jesus words, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” We have a Savior who has rescued us from sin.

 We will want to be in the regular habit of taking time to listen to Jesus speak to us. How easy it is for other things to take become more important at times than our study and hearing of God’s Word. So how important to develop good habits in regard to God’s Word. Just as a person can develop bad habits, it is also possible for a person to develop good habits. Those good habits can help us to overcome temptations to set aside God’s Word at times. Work on developing those good habits of regular church attendance, regular Bible class attendance, regular personal and family devotions. Our Savior Jesus still comes to you, always be ready to listen to him speak to us.

How often don’t we need some good news in our life? There is always plenty of bad news, plenty of problems and sorrows that we have to deal with in our lives in this sinful world. Jesus comes to us with good news – in fact the best news possible for people, for sinners, living in a sinful world and dealing with the problems of sin. Jesus message to us is one of comfort and hope, sins forgiven, salvation and eternal life- all made possible through him. Jesus came as we hear through the prophet Isaiah, “to preach good news to the poor. ... 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.”

 The ‘poor’ that Isaiah speaks of are not those without any money, but those who are poor in spirit, that is, those who are poor in God’s sight. We are those poor. We have no righteousness with which we can stand before God. We are all sinners who deserve the punishment of God for those sins. We cannot rid ourselves of the guilt of our many sins. The more we examine the law, the more we realize how sinful we are, the more we realize just how terrible our natural condition is. 

 In fact by nature we were prisoners, captives to sin. Jesus tells us, “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”  We were held captive in the dark dungeon of sin. We couldn’t se the light of God’s Word. We considered it foolishness. We were doomed.

 Sin weighs us down, oppresses. We know what we are supposed to do. We know how we are to live. And yet we fail.  And our conscience lets us know that we have failed. It reminds us that we have failed to keep God’s law and that we deserve God’s punishment. Our guilt becomes a burden that seeks to overwhelm us. As Martin Luther writes in his one of his hymns, “Fast bound in Satan’s chains I lay; death brooded darkly over me. Sin was my torment night and day; In sin my mother bore me. Yet deep and deeper still I fell; life had become a living hell, so firmly sin possessed me.”

 But as Isaiah tells us, the Savior would come with good news for those in such dire straits. Jesus tells us in Matthew, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Blessed are those who recognize their sinfulness. Blessed are those who are led by the law to despair of their sinful condition. Blessed are those who realize that there is nothing that they can do to rid themselves of sin and no way to earn for themselves salvation. They are blessed because it is for just those people that Christ Jesus came into this world. God tells us through the prophet Isaiah, “This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.” Christ has come to preach good news, to proclaim freedom, to release the oppressed.

 Jesus accomplished our freedom. He won freedom for us in a costly battle, a battle that cost him his life. He defeated sin, death and Satan and set us free with his death on the cross. There on the cross Jesus set us free and gained for us eternal life. Jesus became poor for us. He left behind the glories of heaven, took on our human flesh and blood and then took our sins on himself when he went to the cross. The apostle Paul tells us, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Through faith that freedom has become ours, through faith all the riches that Christ won for us belong to us. That burden of sin which oppressed us and weighed us down, has been carried for us by our Savior. His victorious resurrection proves to all that we have been set free.

 Sin also oppresses us as we have to live with the consequences of sin in our world. We face many troubles and sorrows in our lives - things which can get us down, depress. But even from those things, Jesus has set us free.  That doesn’t mean that our lives will be trouble free, but we are able to have a different perspective on those troubles. Our Savior Jesus is with us to help us through them, to give us the strength to bear up in times of trouble. He also promises that he will always work things for our eternal good. And finally one day he will deliver us from sin and all of its effects, when he takes us to be with him in heaven. That good news is still ours today - Jesus is our Savior, eternal life is ours.

 And so instead of God’s punishment, we receive God’s favor. The final words that Jesus quotes from Isaiah point us to the Old Testament year of jubilee. In Old Testament Israel, every fifty years all slaves in Israel were declared free. Slavery in Israel was often a way the poor satisfied debts. In order to pay a debt he could not afford, a person would sell himself and perhaps his family into slavery. But every fiftieth year was to be a year of Jubilee, and in that year all slaves were to be set free, all debts were to be canceled, land and property which had been sold was returned to the original owner; and there was joy throughout the land. Here in our text we see what that year of Jubilee was to picture. The Year of Jubilee was to be a picture of the freedom and joy that the Messiah would bring. Jesus points to himself as that Messiah who had come to bring freedom and joy to a world captive to sin.

 Christ Jesus has proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor. For Jesus’ sake God shows us his favor by forgiving our offenses and sins against him, by forgiving our debts we owed to him. He has set us free, free then to serve him. The apostle Paul encourages us, “For you were once in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord.”

 Since we have been set free from our bondage to sin, no longer will we want to live as we did when we were slaves to sin, instead our lives will reflect that freedom we now have. We will desire to do God’s will. We will desire to live a life that is to God’s glory. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can do just that.

 The Messiah has truly come and he is Jesus of Nazareth. He has won for us freedom from sin, death and the devil and has brought us joy - joy in the forgiveness of sins, joy in the sure hope of heaven. Yes, all those promises which God made are fulfilled in the person of Jesus. He is our Savior. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Such a simple message. But what a message of tremendous hope and comfort for us and all people.