Living Hope Church Green River
9/1/24 Faith and Understanding
So that'll be September 15th. So coming up soon. All right, so we're in the book of Luke. We've been in the book of Luke for a little while and it's an exciting book. There's so much to talk about. And you know, really before we jump in, you know, I have this. How many of you are like routine oriented people? Like you do the same thing every single day? Or maybe not every single day, but like every Monday, this is what you do. Every Tuesday, this is what you do. And like, how many of you get like freaked out of like something ruins the routine, right? Like I'm not that guy. I'm the guy who talks about liking routine and looking forward to it and then never actually having one. It's taken a lot of effort on my part in my journey to be healthier. It's been a discipline for the last like two years to like one of the first things I do when I get up is I go drink a glass of water. You think after two years of drinking a glass of water in the morning, you'd start liking it. That stuff is nasty. But you know, it's routine. And there's something that's beautiful about routine. There's something that's helpful, I think, about having healthy patterns in your life. But what I want us to look at today is like some of, the disciples, so Luke chapter nine starts off with Jesus sending the disciples on a mission. He sends the disciples. He gives them power and authority over demons and the ability to cure diseases. And he sends them out preaching the message of the kingdom of God, right? He sends them out on this mission. And I don't know what their routine was like and I don't know how long they were on this mission. Within Luke chapter nine, they come back from their mission. So this could have been a couple weeks, it could have been a couple months. I don't imagine it was more than a year because of the timeline of how long they were with Jesus. But they were on this mission and as you're living on mission, as you're going about your life, as you're working your job, like I'm sure you develop routines. Now, it's probably different for them because they're going different places. They're traveling to different cities or meeting new people all the time. It's not like they wake up in the same bed every morning and they brush their teeth at the same sink every morning. Like they're literally staying in other people's homes as they do this. That was Jesus's directive to them to go stay with whoever would open their home to them. So the disciples went on this mission and they were doing this work and they were enabled and equipped by God to do miraculous things. And then they come back from their mission. Now, a couple things happened. We looked a couple weeks ago at Jesus feeding the 5,000 and last week we looked at Peter, James, and John going with Jesus onto a mountain and they get to see Jesus in his glory. And so there's some really cool things, but here in this passage, it's right after Peter, James, and John saw Jesus in his glory on the mountain. It says verse number 37 there, it says, now it happened on the next day when they had come down from the mountain that a great multitude met him. And again, this is the result, I believe, of what Jesus is doing and the mission that the disciples were sent on to go tell people about Jesus, about this coming kingdom. And so people are coming to hear from Jesus. But here we see this kind of crazy story of a man who comes to Jesus and he's like, hey, my son needs healed. My son has this demon, like crazy things are happening. He's like thrashing around and we can't control him. We literally tie him up and like it's crazy and we really need help. And the hard thing about this passage is this man had gone to the disciples. You know, the ones commanded by God to go, the ones who were given the power and authority over demons and be able to cure diseases. This man had gone to Jesus' disciples and they couldn't help. They didn't have the power and the authority. They weren't able to cast out this demon. And so this man's last resort is to go past the disciples and go to Jesus himself and ask him to do something. And Jesus is very gracious. His response sounds a little short. He's like, he says, oh, faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you and bear with you? And it sounds short, but like, I want us to recognize, before we get to talk about the disciples more, I want us to catch a quick glimpse of Jesus in this. Because what we see, what we see first of all is that Jesus has the power in the authority, right? Now, he had offered that and it was his power and authority that the disciples were to go in, but it was his power and his authority. He doesn't have to worry about this at all. He speaks in the demon is cast out, the boy is healed, right? So Jesus does the work. Jesus has all the power and the authority over life, over death, over the spiritual world. He's got all power and authority. When he sends out his disciples after he's resurrected from the dead, he says it this way, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. And so Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. The disciples were gifted authority. Jesus has authority. And so the man coming to Jesus is like the right answer. And really that's the disciples job is always to be pointing people to Jesus, to bring people back to their Lord, to their Creator. So first of all, I want us to see that Jesus, he has all power and authority. But I also want us to see in this response he gives and in the next thing he says, tells his disciples, his immediate response is that he is a job. He is working towards something. He is literally walking towards accomplishing the purpose for which he came, right? He says this, he said, how long will I be with you? I think that's the question we need to be asking. How long will he be with us? And then immediately after this happened, it says verse 33, there were all amazed at the majesty of God that's happening. But then Jesus turns to his disciples and he says, "Let these words sink down into your ears "for the Son of man is about to be betrayed "into the hands of men." Jesus is not, he's not sitting here like overcome and short with these people because he has to heal another person and cast out another demon. Instead, what he is, is he's focused on the work that he is here for. He has sent his disciples, he has preached the kingdom of God, he has done a lot of teaching, but he has just told his disciples in the last few pages of the book that he is going to be headed to Jerusalem. And here he tells them, let these words sink into you that I'm going to go get betrayed so that I can be crucified and die. This is the work he came for. And he's going to state it again later in the chapter. Son of man has come to seek and to save that which is lost. He has come to lay down his life, to pay the penalty of our sins. This is the work that he's doing. And Jesus is not too busy that he can't heal people, but Jesus is constantly working to accomplish his purpose, which is the good of all people for all time. And sometimes we can get so focused on what our problem is for this moment that we can't see the work that God is doing for the good of all people for all time. And so Jesus is trying to draw the attention, especially to his disciples who he's told what's going to happen. He's trying to get them to see the work that he's working to, because in their mind, even though some of them just saw him on the mount of transfiguration, and they've seen him feed 5,000 people and they've seen the impossible happen time and time again, what they're thinking is an earthly kingdom. You're looking for an earthly king. And yet Jesus is saying time and again, I've come to pay the penalty of sin. I've come to lay down my life. I will be the Messiah through suffering and sacrifice. And so Jesus is, he has a plan. Jesus has all authority and power, and Jesus is working to accomplish his plan. And so it's a beautiful thing that we can trust in Jesus, because he has all power and authority, and because he's working to accomplish his plan. It's beautiful, it's wonderful. But I want us to spend the rest of our time looking at the disciples, because the disciples sent out by Jesus with power and authority, we're not able to accomplish the work that God sent them to do. They failed. Now, there's great successes, but in this one instance, for sure, there's a failure. The father says, I went to your disciples and they couldn't do it. And I believe Jesus, he gives us a few things that I want us to look at, like, why did the disciples fail? And so first point, if you have the outline, the first point is that the disciples lacked power. And this is an interesting thing, because Jesus gave them power. Jesus gave them power and the authority. But what I want us to recognize today is that the disciples have the power and the authority to bring others to Jesus. We have only the power and the authority that Jesus gives us. We do not have the power and authority to rule as kings on the earth right now. We don't enforce our will. We are given the power and the authority to accomplish the mission that he sent us. The verse I was mentioning earlier, where Jesus, after he was resurrected from the dead, he said, all authority has been given to me and head of the earth. So go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. See, God gives us authority. He gives us power to accomplish his purpose, not to accomplish our purpose. And it gets interesting because in this situation, this seems like what Jesus sent them to do. He gave them power over demons. Was it not Jesus's purpose and plan for this person to be freed from this demon? It's important for us to recognize that we don't follow men. We follow Jesus. And as I'm gonna mention in just a second, I think there's a danger when we're doing the work of God or when we're going about our life and think we're following God, that sometimes our desires and our will and our passion and our name and our kingdom and our purpose. Sometimes we begin to like mesh what God's purpose is and what our purpose is. And sometimes we begin to start saying that our purpose, well, God has to accomplish our purpose and God has to do the things I want. And God needs me to accomplish his purpose. And in all of these areas, when we begin to place ourselves above Jesus or on the same level as Jesus, or Jesus is the one that needs us, we begin to have a complete misunderstanding of who God is and who we are. And we need to constantly remember the disciples did not have power. The only power that they had was given to them by Jesus Christ. And we do not follow men because of their great ability to speak or because of their, I don't even have an awesome beard anymore. So like I chopped it off. Like I got no reason for you guys to follow me except to point to Jesus. And that should be our desire when we listen to others is never to worship men, but to worship Jesus. These disciples were not building their own kingdom. And this is something they struggle with. Later on in this chapter, they're gonna be talking about who's gonna be greatest in the kingdom. And sometimes we can be vying for our position and for what I get and for other people to listen to me. But we must all come to the realization that it is Jesus alone who has the power over life and death. And our job in being given power by God is to point other people back to Jesus, to bring them to Jesus. We don't follow men, we follow God. So the first point, the disciples lacked power. And as we look at this, I think Jesus gives us the response. And actually, I don't just think, in this passage, it's beautiful that we have so many different gospels. We have four gospels, four different people who wrote down the story of what Jesus said and did while he was on the earth. And in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all three of them tell this story. And all three of them have a little bit different accounting of the conversations and how, not necessarily how it happened. Like the details are still the same. But yet there's, in Matthew, if you have your Bible and you wanna turn there with me, in Matthew chapter number seven, Jesus gives the reason for why the disciples could not do this. That says, in Matthew chapter number 17, verse number 19, the disciples came to Jesus privately and they said, "Why could we not cast it out?" And so Jesus said to them, "Because of your unbelief." Surely I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there and it will move "and nothing will be impossible for you." However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting. And really in the book of Luke, it says it too. Jesus' answer to, "Your disciples could not do it." He says, "O faithless generation." The disciples lacked faith. They lacked the power to do it on their own and they lacked the faith, the belief in what Jesus was doing. And it's so hard for me to understand how does this work? How do they lack faith? They're literally on mission. They're casting out demons. They're watching diseases be cured. They watch Jesus feed 5,000 people. They see Jesus in his glory. I mean, how can you lack faith in this moment? I don't want to pose to you today the danger of routine. You see, the disciples have been doing this. Oh, here's another one. Here's, okay, so here's what we do. I have my checklist, like, I mean, we live in America, like we know like how many cells, pitches are there. Like, I mean, we know how to approach it. If you just follow the script, everything will work out fine. And I feel like maybe the disciples approached it that way. Oh, oh, here's a demon. Okay, so here's my script. I'm supposed to say in the name of Jesus, I cast you out and then if that doesn't work, then we get some water and we spray it on them and well, that didn't work. So now what do we do? What's the next thing on the script? Maybe there's some power in, like, if we burn this one instance and smoke it around, maybe the demon will run away from that or maybe, you know, we just have to say the right phrase over and over again and oh, maybe we just gotta learn the name of the demon. I mean, we have all these scripts. We have all these ideas about how we can cast out demons. And the simple truth is, is you can't cast out a demon. Jesus can. Your script is worthless if you're not relying on the power of Jesus. And I think there's a real danger in our lives that we go throughout our life. Oh, we know what we're supposed to do here. Oh, I know what the routine is. Oh, I'm supposed to read the Bible. Oh, yep, I went to church, yeah. Oh, yep, I didn't, I, you know, that person cut me off and I didn't knock him off the road. So we're doing good. And we have, we have all these things that ultimately, I think are just a script for what we think our life should be. And maybe it's what God said and maybe we think we're doing good, but like it's, it's not relying on God. It's not the, for the purpose of making him known. It's not for the purpose of knowing him. It's, it's just what we do. How many times have you read the Bible? And it's just what you do. And I'm not saying every single time you read the Bible, it's gonna be some great illumination where now your eyes are open and now you understand a new thing, but we should be approaching every moment of every day in our lives with a desire to know God and to make him known, a desire to rely on him and his power. We do not do these things 'cause it's what we do. We shouldn't be living on autopilot. We shouldn't wake up 10 years from now and be like, oh yeah, I think I'm a Christian still. No, it should be the drive of our heart. It's the beatitudes. Blessed are those who are hunger, hunger and thirst for righteousness. We should have a desire to know God and to be with him, a desire, not, not, not that we could have some power to cast out demons, but a desire so that others can see the glory of our God, a desire so that others can feel and experience the power of God. We can come to a place in our life where we are Christian by name, but our heart does not belong to God. We don't follow him. We don't see what he's doing. We don't have a desire to know him. We're just doing the things. It's unbelief. Faithless. May we, every moment, every decision, every choice we have, every situation we're in, may we have a desire to rely on God and to worship him in this situation, in this decision, in this routine, how can we worship Jesus today? How can I worship Jesus at work today? How can I worship Jesus as I teach my children today? How can I worship Jesus as I read the Bible today? How can I worship Jesus as I pray before I eat a meal? It's not for the sake of praying that we pray. It's for the sake of knowing our God that we pray. It's for the sake of knowing our God and making him known that we tell our children about it, about the Bible, about his story, about what he has done. Every moment of every day needs to be of everything we do. Literally, there's a passage in Scripture that says whatever is not a faith is sin. We need to rely on and seek after God, every moment, every day. The disciples couldn't do it because of unbelief, because they thought they had it in themselves, because they thought they knew what they were doing, and ultimately, maybe they didn't need God's help with it anymore. But we need God's help every day. Last point here. The disciples lacked understanding. They lacked understanding. I think one of the scariest verses in this passage is verse number verse 44, Jesus says, "Let these words sink down into your ears for the Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men." And then verse 45, "But they did not understand the saying, and it was hidden from them, so that they did not perceive it, and they were afraid to ask him about the saying." Listen, we all have things that are beyond our understanding. I'm not trying to pick on my wife, but I just had a conversation with my wife last night, and she still probably, because I don't know how to explain it, has no understanding the difference between Wi-Fi and cellular data. Well, guess what? I don't really understand it either. I can speak a bunch of mumbo jumbo, and I think that's what's going on, but I don't know. There are so many things that are beyond our understanding. There are events that happen in our lives that are beyond our understanding. Why? We ask the question, why? Why would this happen? Why would this happen to this person? Why would this happen to me? Why did this good thing happen? Why did this bad thing happen? And how? We ask how? How could good come from this? And how can God be glorified in this situation? And there's so many things that we don't have understanding from, and I don't have a good answer for you for why this demon couldn't be cast out the same way it was for every single other one. But Jesus gives us an answer. He told the disciples, he said, "This kind, there are some that only come by prayer and fasting." And what the disciples show at verse number 45 is they were afraid to ask Jesus about this saying, this other saying. They were afraid to ask Jesus. And yet that's what we need to show our dependence is we need to come and ask Jesus. That's what prayer and fasting is. It's not us trying harder. It's not us making a deal with God. We're okay. I give up ramen noodles for a week and then this great thing will happen. No, it's not a deal with God. No, it's us seeking after God. It's us asking Him. It's us trying to understand. It's us begging Him. This is the book of James says this beautifully. At the very beginning of the book, James, he talks to his people, says, "My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that this is a testing of your faith, but let faith have its perfect work that you might be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. Listen, God, it has all power and authority and He's working to accomplish His purpose, even in the various trials we face, even when we try to do what God told us to do, and it didn't work. Even when we face suffering, even when we're betrayed by men, God is working to accomplish His purpose. And then He says this and if you lack wisdom, if you don't understand, if you don't understand how God's working in this, if you don't understand how God can bring good from this, if you don't understand that God works all things together for good to those who are called according to His purpose. God is working to accomplish His purpose. How can it work in this? Don't be afraid to ask Jesus. Don't be afraid to ask Jesus. If any man likes wisdom, let him ask of God who gives liberally and without reproach, God answers our questions. Never be afraid to bring your questions to Jesus. Why are you afraid to ask Jesus for understanding, for wisdom, for deliverance, for freedom? Why are you afraid? Is it pride? Do you really think you don't need His help? Do you really think you can do it on your own? Is it shame? You're afraid to look stupid? You're afraid to look less than in front of your friends or your family? Don't be afraid to ask Jesus. Come to Jesus with your questions. Jesus equipped and commissioned His disciples to do the impossible because Jesus has all power and authority and Jesus is working to accomplish His purposes. In this passage, as it's told in Mark chapter number 9, Jesus is talking to the Father and Jesus tells Him, "If you can believe, all things are possible to Him who believes." And immediately the Father of the child cried out and said with tears, "O work, I believe. I hope my unbelief." God has commissioned you and He has enabled you to do the impossible, to share the gospel in this town, in your family. And we will fail in it. Whether it's due to pride or shame or mediocrity or ignorance, we will fail. And we will lose sight and we will not believe that God is working. But today I ask us to repeat the words of this Father. And today, let us ask Jesus to help our unbelief, to open our eyes, to give us understanding, to show us what He is doing. And let's live, let's live relying on His power and authority, and let's fulfill the purpose for what He created us for. Asking Him, ask Him, help my unbelief. Let's pray.