Luke 7:22
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Good evening, church. So my best friend, James, I've known him since we were kids in sixth grade. We went through middle school together, high school together. I was best man at his wedding. He was in my wedding party. He now lives in California with his wife and daughter. But we still kind of keep in touch. We text, we call, you know, all that. Last year, for my birthday, he door-dashed like a bunch of pastries to me from a local bakery. Super awesome.
You know, I was like, man, these are delicious. Unfortunately, there were some almonds in there, and I'm allergic to almonds, you know, so thanks a lot, James. But, you know, but it's delicious. I got to enjoy them. This year, he called me a few weeks before my birthday, and he's like, hey, you know, I just want to let you know, like, I've got a delivery coming to your house. Will you be home the next hour? I said, yeah, I'll be home, yeah. He's like, okay, yeah, well, I got you some, you know, stuff for your birthday, so just, you know, make sure you're here to kind of pick it up, right, so it doesn't sit on the porch and melt or whatever. I was like, okay. So an hour goes by, and I hear the doorbell, and I go upstairs, I open the door, and in front of me is, you know, this delivery guy with, like, a cap, sunglasses, like, a face mask.
And then I take another look, and I'm like, wait, I know this guy. Like, this is James. You know, like, his whole, like, get-up is like, I know who this is. This is James, but, like, he's in California, so why is he here at my front door? Well, it turns out it was like a little, like, ploy, like a surprise, you know, birthday gift, you know, that he tried to work with Emma to, like, you know, come visit me and just like, oh, my goodness, like, James, what are you doing here, you know? It was wild. And so we had a very nice kind of birthday weekend together.
The point of the story, though, is not about my awesome friend James, but it's the fact that I opened the door and I was expecting to see a stranger. I opened the door and I was expecting to see a stranger, but what I really saw was a wonderful friend. And that's the same kind of idea, the same kind of question that Luke wants to ask us tonight in our text. The question is, when it comes to Jesus, what do you expect? Who do you think he is. So our passage tonight is Luke chapter 7 verse 22. If you turn in your pew Bibles to the bottom of page 863, we're going to start at verse 18. So that's Luke chapter 7, and we'll start at verse 18. The disciples of John reported all these things to him. So Jesus has just been, you know, going on a healing ministry, casting out demons, raising people from the dead. And John, calling
two of his disciples to him, sent them to the Lord, saying, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another? And when the men had come to him, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another? In that hour he healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them, go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.
The main idea of our text tonight is that salvation is found only in Jesus, who meets your greatest need. Salvation is found only in Jesus, who meets your greatest need. And we'll talk about this in two points. The first point is what we think about when we think about Jesus. What we think about when we think about Jesus. See, our verse tonight talks about Jesus' identity.
It's his disclosure to John's disciples about who he is. And the thing is, they come to him and they ask him, like, are you the one who is to come? This is kind of like a very special, you know, Jewish phrase. It's basically, are you the Messiah? That's what they're asking. Are you the Messiah? Are you the one who's going to come and save us? See, the thing is about John the Baptist is that we first see him in Luke 3, and he comes on the scene, and he's got, you know, this preaching of repentance. He's talking about the Messiah is coming. You got to get ready, because when he comes, he's going to come with judgment.
That's the first time we see John the Baptist in Luke 3. Fast forward, we see him now, his disciples. He's in jail. His disciples are here, and they're asking Jesus, are you the one to come? Because, you know, the things that John heard about Jesus were maybe not exactly the kinds of things that he was expecting to hear about Israel's Messiah. There's healings. There's casting out demons. There's restoring dead people to life.
But where's the judgment? Where's the separation of the faithful and the unfaithful? Where's the separation of those who will repent and those who won't? and so he's, you know, more than a little surprised, and so because what he sees from Jesus doesn't quite match up with what he expects from Israel's Messiah, he sends his disciples. The thing we see about Jesus's response, though, is that he doesn't really give John like a yes or no, right? They say, hey, are you the one that we're waiting for, and what does Luke say in that moment, Jesus does some miracles. He heals people. He casts out demons. He heals all the diseases that they have. And then, instead of saying yes or no, he quotes to them basically like Isaiah's greatest hits, volumes one, two, and three, right? The blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life, the lepers are cleansed, and the poor have good news preached to them.
Jesus is telling John, yes, I am the Messiah, but the mission that I'm on is to bring the dead to life. The mission that I'm on is to show that the kingdom of God is breaking into this world and that God is going to save his people through me. You know, the thing about the story is that we actually never hear John the Baptist's response, The disciples go back, and then that's it. That's all we hear about it. We don't hear any more about John.
And it's not because Luke forgot about John. It's because that's not the point. That story is left unfinished because Luke's concern isn't about what John the Baptist thinks about Jesus. He's concerned about what you, as the reader, think about Jesus. Who is he to you? Who do you think he is? It's possible that some of us here tonight haven't really given that much thought about who Jesus is. Maybe you didn't really grow up in church. You're not really that familiar with Christianity. You're just maybe here because a friend brought you or something like that.
And maybe you don't really know. There may be others of us who have come here tonight and maybe you have thought about Jesus a little bit and you might think, well, he's kind of like a religious leader. He's like a quotable teacher who said some good things about loving your enemies and treating people like you want to be treated. And maybe for some of us, especially if you're younger here tonight, you're thinking, well, Jesus, we talk about Jesus when we go to church on Sundays, right? I'm here with my parents, and it's sort of just a thing we do with our family.
But friends, I want to tell you that if those are the only things that you think about Jesus, you've fundamentally misunderstood him. He's not just a moral teacher. He's not just someone with a religious figure. He's not just, you know, Thanksgiving and turkey. He's the one who can save you. What Jesus said to John the Baptist and his disciples is the same thing that he's saying to you today. He's the only mediator between God and man.
Every one of us in this room has sinned against God. We've all hated people. We've gotten angry. We've lied. We've hurt our friends, family. We've done all kinds of things. And we've rebelled against God as our creator. And yet Jesus comes on the scene to preach the good news, which is that all of those who will acknowledge their sin, turn away from it, and trust in him to forgive them, he will welcome them into the kingdom of God. He's the only one who can save us from our sins. There's nobody else.
And so, friends, if you're here tonight and you've never done that, I hope that you will see your need of him. I hope that you'll put your trust in him and that you'll be forgiven of your sins, that you will join God's family and be welcomed into right relationship with him. And that brings us to point two, what we think about when we think about ourselves. See, if you want to understand the high notes of the gospel, if you want to understand the high notes of what Jesus has said, you have to understand a little bit about his world, right?
Because, you know, there was something back in those days in some circles, and you see this in the other Gospels, that people thought that things like blindness or lameness, physical debilitation, was often related to some kind of sin. Either sin in your family, sin from your parents, sin that you did, sin that someone else did. And yet that's not the tact that Jesus takes for all of this. You see that people who are there that are lepers, right? They have basically some kind of skin disease that makes them ritually impure.
And so because of that, they have to be quarantined in like a section of the city that's separate from everybody else. And because of that, I mean, you can think about sort of what's going on with them, right? Physically, they've got something going on that they can't deal with, that they're unable to handle. They can't fix it. Socially now, you know, they can't work. They can't provide for themselves. They can't be part of a community. And these are terrible things, all true. But one of the most important things to realize is that all of these physical and social maladies all point to the deeper spiritual reality that they were essentially cut off from access to God.
What I mean by this is that you have to understand that by virtue of their being blind, by virtue of their being unwell, by virtue of their having these ritual impurities of skin diseases, they were not allowed to have access to the temple system, and by extension, access to God. Because when someone who was impure came into contact with something that was pure, it's not like it canceled it out or made it better. No, the thing that was pure became impure. And so to prevent this pollution from happening, they had to be kept over to the side.
They weren't allowed in the temple system. But when Jesus comes, everything is different. Everything is different. Because he comes and he touches the lepers. He comes and he raises the dead. And he doesn't become polluted, but he is a force of life and holiness that makes the impure pure, That makes the unclean clean.
And that in doing so, overcomes the power of sin and death and all of these healings. And friends, we need to understand that apart from Christ, we are the blind, we are the lame, we are the dead. It doesn't matter how much money you have. You're not rich in God's kingdom if you don't have Jesus. And if you're here tonight and you feel the weight of that sin, whether you're a Christian or not, go to him.
Go to him. Don't try and make things better. Don't try and correct things that you've done wrong to think you've got to fix yourself up before you can go to him. Because why? Jesus, he won't get corrupted. He is not afraid of impurity. In fact, he welcomes it because he can heal it. He can heal it, and he can give you life, and he loves to give life. You know, there are some of us also who've been here for a while, who've been around Christianity for a while, who've been in church for a while.
You know, there are a lot of us who are actually dealing with the Bible and with Jesus academically, maybe even vocationally. You might be leading a ministry. You might hope to be a pastor one day. And for those of us, you know, I just want to ask, do the high notes of the gospel still hit the same today as it did when you first believed? Does it still wow you that Jesus loves you, that he died for you?
It's not sophisticated. but it's beautiful and it's glorious. Friends, it's a good thing for those of us, especially those of us who've been in church for a long time, those of us who aspire to vocational ministry, those of us who are deep in the study of the Bible, to be reminded of who we really are, that we are the blind, we are the poor, but because of Jesus Christ, we've been healed, we've been brought into his family.
and tonight as we have the privilege of taking the Lord's Supper, we get to remember that again, that we're united to Christ in death and resurrection. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your gospel. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you sent your only Son. We thank you for his holiness that is not afraid of our sin.
We thank you for his holiness that overcomes all the sin and death, not just in the world around us, but also in our own lives. Father, we pray that we would come and remember again the wonder and the beauty of the gospel, that we would be wowed and awed again by how you died for us and how you rose again from the dead and how you live for us so that we might live with you. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.