Sunday Sermon

How to Receive from God

Luke 4:14-27 – Jesus Rejected at Nazareth

Luke’s history of the beginnings of Christianity provides an excellent view of

the attitude that enables people to receive from God. Repeatedly, Luke portrays
people who have the right attitude and therefore receive grace from God. There are
four elements to this attitude:
 First, we must be hungry for the things of God. We must have a holy
ambition to have a closer relationship with God. Nothing, including our pride
and sense of propriety, can get in the way.
 Second, we must focus all our hope and desire on God alone. We must
acknowledge our needfulness of Him. We cannot trust in anything other than
God, nor desire anything above God. He must be “plan A, B, and C” in our
lives. He must be the “apple of our eye” so that our desires find perfect
fulfillment in Him.
 Third, we must act in faith. Real faith corresponds with actions. Faith is not
just mental assent. If we have true faith in God, then we must speak and act
accordingly.
 Fourth, we must expect a miracle from God. We should live our lives in
expectation of what God is going to do. Whenever we gather together in the
presence of God, we should expect God to move.

We can see this attitude in several places throughout Luke and Acts.
Luke 18:35-43 – The Blind Beggar
 The beggar was desperate to receive his sight
o He did not give up, despite the shushing of others
 He expected that Jesus would certainly heal him
 “Receive your sight; your faith has healed you.”
o [Greek sozo is spiritual and physical salvation. The same word is used
in the next chapter when Jesus is in Zacchaeus’ house and says, “For
the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”]
Luke 8:40-48 – The Woman with Incurable Bleeding
 The woman was desperate to be healed
o She spent all her money on doctors—she was broke
o She was like this for twelve years
o Her condition made her ritually unclean
o It may have been an obstetric fistula, which is still a common ailment
in the developing world that occurs without access to adequate
medical care
 She expected she would be healed
o Mark 5:27-28, “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him
in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought: ‘If I just
touch his clothes, I will be healed.’”
 o She had a unique faith, an expectation, that drew power from Jesus.
Others pressed against Him, yet Jesus said that only she drew power
from Him.
Luke 6:17-19 – The Crowds Gathered to Meet Jesus
 They were desperate
o They came from the entire region (“all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and
from the coast of Tyre and Sidon”)
 They expected to be healed of diseases and demonic oppression
o “… and the people all tried to touch Him, because power was coming
from Him and healing them all.”
Luke 5:17-20 – The Paralyzed Man and His Friends
 The man was desperate to be healed
o His friends carried him all the way there on a mat
o They took extreme measures to get the man in front of Jesus
 They expected that Jesus would heal him
o “And the power of the Lord was present for Him to heal the sick.”
o “When Jesus saw their faith …”
Acts 5:12-16 – The Sick Brought to Peter
 They were desperate
 They expected a miracle
Acts 14:8-10 – The Man Lame from Birth
 He was desperate, with no hope in other forms of salvation as he had been
lame from birth
 His faith and expectation was built up as he listened to Paul preach
o He obeyed Paul by jumping up and beginning to walk

Jesus rejected at Nazareth

The previous verses show us the attitude of desperation, faith, and
expectation that we need to receive from God. However, Luke also includes a
cautionary example of how the wrong type of attitude can block us from receiving
from God.
Read Luke 4:16-30.

Luke 4:16-17
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he
went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll
of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is
written:

Here, we find Jesus in His hometown of Nazareth. He attends the worship at

the synagogue on the Sabbath, as is His custom, and He reads from the prophet
Isaiah in front of the congregation.

Luke 4:18-21
 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The
eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to
them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus proclaims the favor of God upon these people. He has come to them
with God’s promise of free grace and favor. He has come to set them free from
bondage to sin, to save them from sin’s ill effects, to restore everything that the
devil has stolen from their lives. He says, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your
hearing.” In other words: “Now is the time of salvation—everything you’ve waited
for, everything that you could not accomplish for yourself, that is what I’ve come to
give you right now.”
Notice that Jesus appealed to those who were desperate: the poor, the
oppressed, and those who realized they were slaves to sin. He came to bring liberty
and freedom from all bondage, both physical and spiritual. He came to bring [Greek
sozo], which is spiritual and physical salvation, wholeness, and restoration. In the
next chapter, at Matthew the tax collector’s house, Jesus says, “It is not the healthy
who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but [those
who acknowledge themselves to be] sinners to repentance.”

Luke 4:22-23
22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his
lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.
23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal
yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that
you did in Capernaum.’”

The people are amazed, then incredulous. They can’t believe that this man,
who may have installed a door in their house just the previous year, now is going to
bring the salvation of God. They demand Jesus perform a miracle to prove His
anointing—they will believe it when they see it.
It’s helpful to think about the issue of trust here. Many words in the English
language derive their meaning from the Latin word credere, which means to
“believe, trust.” These words include credit, creed, credence, credible (or
incredible), and credulous. Very often, we have good reason to doubt the things we
read and hear about. But, when it comes to what God promises in His word, we
must believe and trust.
 Abraham is called the father of our faith, and we are his offspring when we
share the same faith that he demonstrated. Abraham was not blind to the way
things naturally work. He fully acknowledged that it was humanly impossible for he
and Sarah to have a child in their old age, but he believed that God’s power
trumped natural impossibilities.
Romans 4:19-21 reads, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so
became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your
offspring be.” Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body
was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that
Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding
the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being
fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.”
Abraham was not a mindless believer. He used his reasoning powers, but
operated on the foundation of faith in God.
Hebrews 11:17-19 reads, “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered
Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his
one and only son, even though God had said to him, ‘It is through Isaac that your
offspring will be reckoned.’ Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and
figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.”
It is not wrong to use reasoning, but our reasoning must be based on faith in
God and obedience to God.

Luke 4:24-27
24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I
assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was
shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land.
26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region
of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the
prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

In reply, Jesus explains to the people in his hometown that God chooses to
give grace to those who have faith. (This is actually the simple version of Romans 9
—God sovereignly elects those who exhibit faith.) The examples he used showed
people who had desperation and faith.
The widow at Zarephath near Sidon was about to starve to death, but she
obeyed Elijah out of faith. She lived deep within Phoenician territory, near Sidon,
and certainly was not an Israelite. But God favored her because of her obedient
faith. Relate story from 1 Kings 17:7-16.
Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, could not be healed by anyone
and so sought God. Although he was tested, he obeyed the command to wash in the
Jordan out of faith and was healed. Relate story from 2 Kings 5:1-14.

Luke 4:28-30
28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got
up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the
town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through
the crowd and went on his way.

The people at Nazareth rejected Jesus and His message. They were not
desperate to receive from God and they lacked faith. Mark 6:5-6 says, “He could not
do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.
And he was amazed at their lack of faith.” Matthew 13:58 says, “And he did not do
many miracles there because of their lack of faith.”

What is needed to receive from God?

 Desperation
o Humbling ourselves, breaking laws of propriety and religious tradition, as
did the Woman with Bleeding, the Blind Beggar, and the Paralyzed Man
and Friends
o Realizing there is no other alternative but to put our hope in God alone, as
the Woman with Bleeding, etc., did
 Faith
o Belief in God
 Hebrews 11:6, “And without faith it is impossible to please God,
because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and
that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”
o Action that corresponds to our faith
 We demonstrate our faith through obedient action like Abraham did
 Faith without deeds is dead. “I will show you my faith by what I do.”
o Expectation
 Oral Roberts said, “Sow a seed of faith through action and expect a
miracle.”