To the Gospel of Luke chapter 6, Luke chapter 6, That's page 914.
If you're using one of the Bibles in the seat around you,
take that. That's our gift to you.
Luke chapter 6. While you're opening there, I
want to welcome some new members to our church family.
So would you join me in welcoming Abel Madani, Kelly
Wilson, Mary Leonard and Nadine Hopkins to the Forward family?
I was thinking this week about how every generation has words,
slang words that are unique to their generation.
And I, I need some group participation here for the next
couple of minutes. So if you are a baby boomer,
what are some of the words that were unique to your generation?
Some slang words you used? Cool, right on.
Wow, Anthony, you just sold yourself out, man.
I, I, I've heard Chachi, BT says groovy, far out and square were
all words that boomers use. Gen.
X, Gen. X.
OK, if you don't know if you're Gen.
X born from 65 to 80, you are Gen.
X. What words were our generation?
What what did we say, dude? Radical.
What else? Nobody wants to own up to being
Gen. X.
Take a chill pill, gnarly. Those are all words, all right?
Millennials. Millennials between 81 and 96.
SUS sick. All right, I chat.
GPD said Cray Cray and basic. OK, Gen.
Z, Gen. Z, whatever you want to call
you. There are at least 6 or 7 words
where I have no idea what you're talking about.
And if you don't know what I meant when I said that, ask your
kids or your grandkids, because I also don't know what I meant
when I said that. Words take on different meaning
through the years. For example, the word nice first
showed up in the English language in the 14th century,
and in the 14th century it did not mean what it means today.
The word nice meant foolish or stupid.
So when a doctor wrote a note and said that was such a nice
patient, If you ever see your doctor's note say that you're a
nice patient, stop and ask yourself what kind of nice is
the doctor talking about? Another word was the word bully.
For 500 years, the word bully has had all kinds of different
meanings, but originally the word bully meant sweetheart or
darling. So today if you were to say to
that special person in your life, hello, my bully, just
don't say it in front of other people.
You might get them in trouble. I I think one of the great
challenges that we face in our culture is that we get really
worked up about certain things and we say things, but we quite
often have different definitions of words.
And so we end up talking over top of each other because we are
using words in different ways. If you ever find yourself in a
conflict with someone, getting into a debate with someone, and
you find like, why am I not getting anywhere?
Why do we seem to be talking over top of each other?
Take a step back and ask yourself and ask them, hey, are
we defining words in the exact same way?
Do we mean the same thing when we use this word?
And I think one of the words that has a very different
meaning for different people is the word power.
For for some people, power is what you aspire to in life.
You want more influence, you want more power in your job.
You want more control in your life.
You want more impact, greater impact in the world.
For for other people, power is the way that I'm going to use my
words. You, you desire language that's
going to be more direct and more challenging, and you find that
to be something that is powerful.
For others, power. Anything that sounds like power,
smells like power, makes you a little bit like afraid because
you've experienced incredible hurt from power.
And anytime you see something that looks like power, you, you,
you back off. For others, power is what we
would see, we wish we would see more of, especially in the
Christian community. But even amongst us as
Christians, we don't always agree on what power is and what
power looks like. What is a powerful word for some
people is a boring Sunday for other people.
What is a powerful experience for some people is something
that we just get used to for other people.
Even this morning, the baptisms that happened for those who were
baptized say this is a very powerful moment in their life.
But for many of us, we probably disconnected from the baptisms
and went, oh man, just more baptisms.
See, power is something that means something very different
for individuals. And as we come to Luke chapter
6, we're going to see a brief story involving Jesus and his
power. And how you define power is
going to shape how you're going to approach Scripture passages
like the one that we're going to look at.
So here's my challenge to you before we even open up the
Scripture. My challenge to you is this.
Will you even maybe right now in your own heart of hearts, pause
long enough and ask the Holy Spirit to show you and teach you
whatever He wants to say to you today?
Can you put your own definition of power to the back burner and
allow yourself to learn what Jesus wants to teach us about
power this morning? Because I think when you and I
do that, what we're going to see as we come to this passage is
that the power of Jesus looks very different from what power
often looks like in our culture. Let me read 3 verses from Luke
chapter 6, beginning of verse 17.
After coming down with them, He stood on a level place with a
large crowd of his disciples and a great number of people from
all Judea and Jerusalem and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon.
They came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases, and
those tormented by unclean spirits were made well.
The whole crowd was trying to touch Him because power was
coming out from Him and healing them all.
If you are new to forward over the last number of months, I
want to just explain to you why we are in this particular
passage in Luke chapter 6. Late in 2024, we started a
sermon series working our way through the book of Luke, and we
took a break over the summer months.
But today we're going to pick up where we left off before the
summer started. As a reminder for all of us, the
book of Luke is written by a guy named Luke.
He was a physician who's writing to another guy by the name of
Theophilus. And the whole goal that Luke has
with writing this book of the Bible is he wants to unpack to
Theophilus why you can trust that Jesus is who he says he is.
Luke says that, hey, I have done a careful study of all the
stories of all the accounts of Jesus, and I have come to a
point of being able to believe in Jesus.
And now I want to help you understand why all the evidence
points to Jesus being who he claims to be.
And as we reconnect with this story of Luke that that Luke is
sharing in these verses, we see the power of Jesus once again
showing up and healing people. But I think there's a lot more
we can learn from these verses about the topic of power.
The first thing we can see is this, that Jesus comes down to
be among people instead of standing above them.
In the first five chapters of Luke he put a lot of energy and
work into showing that Jesus is the Messiah that was promised in
the Old Testament that that the king of the Jews who was going
to come to rescue people, the all powerful one who would be
sent by God to rescue his people.
Jesus is that all powerful Messiah.
The Apostle Paul would later describe Jesus in this way.
Everything was created by him in heaven and in earth, the visible
and the invisible. All things have been created
through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and by
Him all things hold together. Now that is a picture of power,
that that Jesus, the Son of God, created all things, but not only
did He create all things, but He holds all things together in the
palm of His hand. There is nobody who has ever
lived in human history who can possibly claim to have that kind
of power. Jesus is the all powerful one.
That is real power. But Jesus does not use his power
to put himself on a platform. He doesn't use his power to
further solidify any level of control.
Instead, what we see in this passage is that Jesus comes down
to be among the people. It it happens at the very
beginning of his life when he's born in Bethlehem, the Son of
God, who who lived before he was even born as a human.
He, he was in heaven. He comes to be born in a Manger
in a small village in the Middle East.
And it happens here again in this passage.
After a night of being up on a mountain and praying with some
of his followers, Jesus comes down and the Bible says he
stands on a level place with a large group, large group of
people. This is the beginning of what is
often called the Sermon on the Plane.
If you spent any time reading the book of Matthew, you're
probably familiar with the Sermon on the Mount that shows
up there. And Bible scholars will debate,
is the Sermon on the Plane the same thing as the Sermon on the
Mount? And you can debate that if you
want to debate that because there are some similarities in
the teaching. But I don't want you to miss how
incredible it is that Jesus, the all powerful one, would come
down to stand on a place with the people.
Putting things on platforms is really normal in our culture.
We we put celebrities on platforms, we put musicians on
platforms, we put pastors on platforms in jewellery stores,
we put jewellery on platforms and we put ourselves on
platforms all the time. Every time that you have ever
tried to get ahead in your career, you are trying to sell
yourself to somebody else who can give you a certain type of
job. You are lifting yourself up and
basically you're competing with other people and saying, hey, I
have more, you have more reason to put me in this role than you
do another person. You're putting yourself on a
platform. We put ourselves on platforms
all the time. Whenever we post anything on
social media, we're saying to everybody, hey, pay attention to
me. Notice me.
If you're a reader, I want to encourage you to read a book
called Platforms to Pillars by Mark Sayers.
And I like how Sayers defines a platform, he says.
It's a mentality. It's a way of approaching life
that promises to reinforce our uniqueness, to deliver on our
desires and to offer validation and visibility.
And in the book, he, he tells a story to illustrate his point.
He was on an airplane ride and the flight, as many times
happens, was having problems with its Wi-Fi, with its
entertainment system. It was down for everyone on the
flight. Nobody had access to Wi-Fi or
any movies or anything like that.
And on this flight, there was, I'll just call her a Karen, no
offense to all the Karens in the room, but there was a Karen who
was on the flight who was quite agitated that her Wi-Fi and
entertainment system was not working properly.
And she called over one of the flight attendants and Karen
said, you know, it is your duty to ensure that all of us have
positive emotions and mental peace.
Well, they couldn't fix the Wi-Fi and they couldn't fix the
entertainment system. And so Karen got a little bit
more and more agitated and eventually called the cabin
manager over to be able to speak to to the cabin manager.
And the cabin manager offered a full refund to Karen, but that
was not enough for Karen. Karen says that the cabin crew
is targeting her and she demands immediate action to fix the
problem and she was not even paying any attention to the fact
that everybody else on the flight was in the same boat as
her. We laugh at that and go, I would
never do anything like that. But any environment where you
and I go looking for personal visibility and to pursue our own
desires as the primary goal is US putting ourselves on a
platform as being more important than others.
People do this all the time. We do this in relationships, we
do this in church. We live with an idea of as long
as you do what I want, when I want, how I want, then I'll
stick around. We put ourselves on a platform.
But Jesus treats power very differently.
He comes, he puts himself in an environment where he is in a
level place with the people. He he's showing us that there's
a different power that marks the Kingdom of God.
See, the power of Jesus draws people in rather than seeking to
to push people out. Luke paints this incredible
picture of this huge crowd of people, and they're all trying
to touch Jesus. There is just something about
Jesus that makes people want to be drawn to him, want to to even
just have a little glimpse of him.
And maybe, just maybe I can I can touch him because there's
power coming out of him. But I love the little details in
this story because Jesus comes and he stands on this level
place with this incredible diversity of people who are
gathered there. There's the people you would
expect. There's his disciples, the
people who already are fully convinced and committed to
Jesus, who see Jesus as their teacher, who see Jesus as the
one that they trust and want to follow with their life.
But then there's another group of people that Luke describes.
He says there's a great number of people from Judea and
Jerusalem. He he often whenever you see the
word, people show up in Luke. Quite often he's using that to
describe people who are not yet sold on Jesus.
They're there to check him out. They're they're exploring, they
want to understand more about who is this guy?
What's he all about? But there's something about
Jesus that is making them drawn to him.
But then there's another group of people that are described in
this passage. Luke says that they are from
Tyre and Sidon, and this one is if you lived in that day would
be very, very shocking to you. You would understand why you
would be surrounded. If you were there in the crowd
that day, you would go. It makes sense that all the
people who are already following Jesus would be where Jesus is.
It makes sense that some people who are asking questions about
Jesus might want to come and hear what Jesus has to say.
But there's another group of people, this group of people
from Tyre and Sidon. In the Old Testament, people
from these communities were described as wealthy and yet
godless oppressors. The historian Josephus described
people from these two communities in particular as
being our bitterest enemies. And yet here they are, something
drawing them to hear and encounter Jesus.
Jesus does not discriminate on who he stands ready to serve.
I want every person to hear this, even those of you who are
watching online. The presence and the power of
Jesus is available for you. It's for people who have money
as much as it is for people who have no money.
It's for people who come from Canada just as much as it is for
people who live in any other country on the planet.
The presence and power of Jesus is available for people from
Ukraine as much as it is for people from Russia.
The presence and power of Jesus is available for people from
Palestine every bit as much as it is for people from Israel.
The presence and power of Jesus is available for people who have
the highest degree of education and people who have none.
It does not matter what your gender or your sexuality is, the
presence and power of Jesus is available to you.
Jesus is ready to serve Muslims, Hindus, Jews, atheists, those
who are already Christians. He's ready to serve people who
have their life all together and people whose lives seem to be
falling apart. There is nothing about Jesus
that says you need to let me check your passport and check a
whole bunch of boxes before you can come to me.
I only welcome a certain type of person who agrees with me on
everything already. He is ready to serve both those
who believe and those who are skeptics, and he's also ready to
serve those who have not shown any history of wanting to
experience God in their own life.
Stop and think about how remarkably different Jesus is
than the environment we often find ourselves in today.
You know, world in a culture where we surround ourselves with
the people who think like us, act like us and anybody else
who's different than us, we push to the side, we cancel them out
immediately. And Jesus creates an environment
where all can come and experience him.
You know what it takes for someone to be able to do that?
You have to be really secure in who you are.
You you have to be secure in who you are and not threatened in
any way by someone else who's different than you.
And because Jesus is already all powerful, he's not threatened by
any other worldview. He's not threatened by any other
belief system. Because he's all powerful, he's
not worried about someone who might want to harm him.
And even though he is all powerful, Jesus does not see
this power as something to be used to control people or
manipulate people. Instead, the power of Jesus is
marked by compassion. I I don't know what each of you
are going through in your life right now, but I do know this.
No matter who you are or where you are, Jesus, the all powerful
King, sees you. He knows exactly your story.
He knows exactly your needs and he is moved with compassion for
people whose lives are broken. He's moved with compassion
towards people who are in the depths of pain in their life.
And every day, I know we see it on the news about how broken our
world is. But beyond the big picture of
how broken our world is, I know that in this room right now,
there are dozens, if not hundreds of stories of people
who are just going through it right now.
And I want you to know that Jesus sees you and he's moved
with compassion for you. And I'm also confident of this.
Jesus is still in the business of healing broken lives.
And I know that because also throughout this room there are
countless stories of people who've experienced the
compassionate, healing touch of God in their life.
The power of God that flowed through Jesus to heal these
lives. And this story 2000 years ago is
the same power that can heal broken lives today.
When we pray, we are doing the same thing that the people in
this story did. They're reaching out to Jesus,
hoping to encounter his power in their life.
And when we pray, when we go to him in prayer, that's exactly
what we are doing. We are asking Jesus to send his
power into our life, to show us his compassion and to bring his
power to be reality for us. But I think too many times we
miss out on this as people. We miss out on the power of
going to Jesus. You know, every time when we
invite you to go to our prayer wall out in the foyer after the
service, if you have a need to pray for it is beautiful how
many of you go and leave prayer requests and pray for our
elders? But I also know that there are
dozens and dozens of you who never take up the opportunity
and you're missing out on an opportunity to invite the power
of Jesus to come and bring bring his power to real.
Be real in your life and in your story.
This posture of compassion that Jesus has is so different for
someone who has power. Like think about the culture he
lived in. The Roman Empire was was often
known for using fear tactics to control people.
If you were to do anything in the Roman Empire that did not
show solidarity with Rome, you were considered quite often to
be dangerous. Even the religious leaders of
the day saw themselves as being above the people, using the
religious law to control people. But the compassion of Jesus
stands in stark contrast to the power structure that he finds
himself living in. But I recognize that even today,
in a lot of different environments, fear is still how
we use power. From parents to politicians to
postures, in marriages and in workplaces, instilling fear is
something that we lean into whenever we feel like we're out
of control or when things aren't going our way.
And a lot of us have bought into the idea that, well, if you're
feared, people won't take advantage of you.
But they will if it's all about love and compassion.
And, and that might be true if your goal in life is your own
survival, but the goal of Jesus is far more than his own
survival. See, Jesus leads with compassion
because His desire is for your complete healing.
In this story, there are three different reasons why the people
come to see Jesus. Some wanted to hear him teach.
Some wanted to be healed of their diseases.
Some were tormented by unclean spirits.
They're experiencing demonic oppression in their life.
And all of us as humans, we have our own idea of what it is that
we want Jesus to heal. But Jesus sees a bigger story
than what you see. See, Jesus came to heal the
whole person. Jesus came to heal people, body,
mind, and soul. Have you ever tried to build
something and then realized it wasn't going according to plan?
Like you're doing a DIY project at home and you're trying to
build something like this is not going well.
What's your normal reaction when a building project doesn't go
well? You get frustrated, throw a
hammer, maybe. Do you get angry?
Do you just like, tear it all apart and say, forget this whole
thing or, or do you just give up and walk away and say, somebody
else can figure this out? In the eyes of your Creator, you
and I, we are far more broken than what you and I realize.
But because Jesus is love, he moves with compassion to heal
instead of leading with anger to tear it all apart.
See, compassion wasn't weakness. Compassion was the most powerful
act of Jesus. It's the compassion of Jesus
that ultimately leads him to the cross.
At the cross, as one writer said, Jesus declares war on sin
on the cross. One of the most powerful things
that Jesus does is allow himself to be abused and killed instead
of using his power to fight back.
To every person who was there that day, it made Jesus look
like a complete failure. But there was nothing more
powerful that Jesus ever did than give his life for you.
And if you're here today and you're exploring the message of
Jesus, I want to welcome you. We are thrilled that you are
here exploring Jesus. And I want you to know two
things. Jesus is all powerful and he
loves you. But he also loves you enough to
say that what you think you need from Jesus is barely scratching
the surface of what needs to be healed in your life.
That he sees the full brokenness of your life, that you are not
the way that God designed and made you to be.
And Jesus has come so that you could experience his full
healing in your life. Jesus sees that for all of us as
humans, that we've all sinned. We all live in a world of sin,
and that sin leads to our death, physically, emotionally,
spiritually. The Bible tells us that the
wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.
And if you want to receive and know the power and the presence
of God in your life, you have to change directions from the path
you're going and put your faith in Jesus.
And the Bible says when you put your faith in Jesus, you are
saved. The promise of eternal life is
yours. It's a completed act.
But then the Bible also says this, that we are still being
saved. That even though you have the
promise of eternal life, that the Christian life is an ongoing
journey of being saved from the impact of sin on your life.
That God's power is at work constantly to heal every part of
your life and lead you and I to become the people that we were
always created and designed to be.
It's a healing that's guaranteed because the Bible says the God
who started a good work in you is faithful to complete that
good work. And for those of us who are
already followers of Jesus, what that means is that our lives
should look more and more like his.
And that means disciples of Jesus should use their power the
way Jesus did in this room. There are some of us who are in
positions of power. Whether you are a boss at work,
whether you are a parent, there are places that you give your
time to help others. You are in some type of a
position of power. And if this is you, to follow
Jesus means you also need to allow Jesus to shape how you
lead in the everyday moments of life.
There is no place in the life of a follower of Jesus for someone
to be a bully in the modern use of the word.
There's no place for a Christian to ever use fear or manipulation
in the life of another person. One of the most heartbreaking
things to watch happening in 2025 is how many times Christian
leaders miss being compassionate, miss seeking the
well-being of others as their goal, and live as bullies.
Now, most of us, we don't see ourselves as having any type of
position of power, but it doesn't mean you don't have
power because for most of us power is more about possession
than it is position. In our culture, we talk about
power as only from perspective of position.
But if you are a Christian, you possess power.
Every single person in this room, you all have influence on
the life of someone else. That's power.
But beyond that, if you're a Christian, you have the Holy
Spirit living inside of you. Second Peter chapter 1 says
this. His divine power has given you
everything required for life and godliness.
Every interaction that you have with another person, you are
operating from a position of power because you possess the
power of the Holy Spirit living in you.
You might not have a title that gives you power, but you have
something even better than a title you've got.
So be honest with yourself. Do you use the power in your
life to manipulate and use other people instead of move towards
them with compassion? Do you try to just get people,
other people, to do whatever it is you want them to do, or do
you use it to serve them? Do you do you create spaces
where people feel welcome? And ultimately, do you point
people to the full healing of Jesus in their life?
There are there are people in our community and in our church
who name the name of Jesus as being a Christian.
But when you go home through the week, you are being simply
abusive to your spouse or your kids.
Please stop naming the name of Jesus as Lord and Savior of your
life if you're going to live like that.
That's not how. That's not how my King shows his
power. The King of all kings uses his
power to come to the people and serve.
Jesus has used his power to show so much compassion and so much
kindness and so much patience towards you.
Allow that to shape the way that you relate to the people around
you. Jesus is different, and as his
disciples we should be different too.
Let me pray. Father, thank you for sending
your Son, the King of all kings, the Messiah that was promised,
the Savior of the world, who comes in power to serve and to
die, so I can have life, so people in this room can have
life, and so people in our community, in our city could
have life. God forgive us for the number of
times we lose sight of that power and the ways that Jesus
lived out the power that was His Lord.
I pray that for those who need some type of healing in their
life today, they would encounter the power of Jesus to bring
healing to them. And Lord, for those of us who
have used power in any way to manipulate or control or bring
about fear in the lives of other people, help us to see, to
really see the ways that Jesus has used his power to show love
for us, change our hearts God, help us to be different because
our King is different. In Jesus name I pray.
Amen. Amen.
Let's stand and sing this last song together.