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The first sentence of Luke is wonderful and insightful. It answers both “how” Luke is written and “why?"
Here it comes. Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and this is our new intro music, Do It Right. I don't know who the artist is. I have it written down here somewhere, but the English beat has faded off into rerun history and now we're Rodecaster Pro 2, living large.
So anyway, you can email me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com. Like I said, we're on a couple stations, radio stations in Alaska and in Wyoming. Of course, we're in areas where there's no population. The density is small.
We're not in Manhattan and Atlanta, Dallas. They wouldn't have us. We'd get run out of town on a rail. What's the etymology for that? Run out of town on a rail. It has to be probably railroad or something.
All right, what's going on here in Radio World? Gospel Assurance 31-day guide. You can still get that. If you want a bunch of them, email me. I'll get them to you for cheaper. If you want the 31-day devotional, that's easy.
Same thing if you want a bunch. I'll make it easier. I will sign the contract with the family of S. Louis Johnson, I think in the next week, to deliver Discovering Colossians. Sondrevin did not want it.
They had First Dibs. If you have a series, Discovering Romans, then Discovering Colossians, they had First Dibs and they said, no, thank you. And so we are going to Amazon it, Kindle, CreateSpace, SelfPrint, but you'll get it in your hot little hands.
I used it when I preached through Colossians not that long ago. Excellent little commentary. A must-have. Well, I'm thinking about, what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about this stupid monster drink I'm drinking.
No wonder my health is so bad. Blood test yesterday, lung doctor today, lung test next Tuesday. Who knows what's going on? With a stethoscope, they said my lungs sounded good, so they said it's more upper stuff, so I don't know what that means.
Who knows? I'm sure you'll send me your little quercetin recipes for getting better, bromides and such. I want to talk to you a little bit about Luke, the gospel according to Luke, the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Luke.
I'm going to start preaching through Luke on Sundays, and so it's just in my bones, and I want to kind of talk about Luke. I want to kind of talk about Luke today, because it's on my mind. I want to just kind of prep you, because you're going to hear a lot about Luke in the years to come.
You know what I think it's going to do? I think I'm going to turn to do a mystic. Not because of Luke, but remember the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, and Sarah Winchester lived there. Her husband was William Wirt Winchester, firearms magnate, and of course, New Englanders, and they ended up moving to California because of rheumatoid arthritis, and off from Connecticut to California.
Not a bad way to go. I mean, I did the opposite. Santa Cruz, Los Angeles to Massachusetts, the Commonwealth. Well, she started adding to the house, and she was particular and seven stories up, and she'd knock it down, and she just kept doing all kinds of things, and the house grew up and sideways as well, and she thought that if construction stopped, she would not only have bad luck, but she thought, you know what?
I just might die, and therefore, all kinds of towers and mazes and castle-like things were added, and she thought, as long as I keep doing this, I will never die. Salvation by expansion. Well, she died, and now we have the tourist house, the Winchester house.
So here's my pitch. Here's why I think I'm a mystic. My health has been bad the last, well, just mainly the last five weeks. I mean, COVID long suffered through, made it through. Now we've just got these, I don't know what it is.
We'll find out when the blood tests come back, and I'm going to start preaching Luke, and as long as I keep preaching Luke, I'm going to live. That's the new no-co superstition. As long as I keep preaching Luke, I'll be alive.
And so, since that's the case, I want you to know that it's the longest book in the New Testament. If you add Luke and Acts, because Luke wrote Acts 2, Acts as well, 27 of the New Testament is Luke Acts, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Holy Spirit.
So if you're going to pick a book, I mean, if I can only live as long as I preach through a particular book, Jude's out, right? Philemon's out. Maybe you do Hebrews, Romans, something like that, Acts.
So we're going to go with Luke. A real reason why I'm going to preach Luke, well, Cooley, the Tuesday guy, stole John a few years ago. I probably would have preached John. But what's interesting about Luke, well, there are many things.
Here's one. Did you know about 40 of Luke, what's in the Gospel of Luke, isn't found in Matthew, Mark, or John? Just kind of think in your mind, if this was a little test, what is in Luke that you can't find in those other three Gospels?
And things start popping up like the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the rich man and dives, Lazarus and the rich man, the parable of the Good Samaritan. There are things in Luke that aren't found anyplace else.
So that makes it kind of nice. You know, we call Matthew, Mark, and Luke synoptic Gospels, optic, right, syn-optic, S-Y-N, with, you know, looking with, they kind of are similar. But I like it that there's a lot of extra stuff, so 40 extra.
So we might as well go for the longer ones because the longer you preach it, the longer you live. One of the things you're going to find out about the Gospel of Luke as well is it kind of mimics Israel's history.
And I think that's intentional. One writer said, Luke tells his stories about Jesus in ways that deeply imitate and evoke key stories from Israel's history. This is called mimesis, like mime. From the birth narratives to post-resurrection road in Emmaus, Luke skillfully spices his stories with tastes of God's work in the world before Jesus, inviting his readers to taste and see that Jesus is truly the fulfillment of all God's promises from the past.
And that's one of the things we've been trying to do here on No Compromise Radio, is to show you the divine author and to make sure we're reading the Old Testament in light of the new, because we have old and new.
And as we go through and read this, you are going to say to yourself, it is wonderful. It is fast-paced. Essentially, Luke has three sections, chapter 1 through 9 .50, chapter 9, verse 50. This is the origins.
This is the beginning of the ministry. This is initial teaching of Jesus, 9 .51 to 19 .27, Jesus is setting his face like a flint toward Jerusalem. And we are going to see Jewish leaders rise up and we're going to see opposition.
We're going to see a militant attitude against Jesus. In chapter 19, verse 28, through the end of the book, we're going to see basically the culmination, that special emphasis on the last week of Jesus's life before he dies on a cross.
We're going to see things about Jesus and his trials, his excruciating death, and his resurrection and ascension. Did you know that, technically, Luke is anonymous? Well, we automatically say it's Luke and I think it is Luke, but technically it's anonymous.
The early church, unanimous. This is Luke, the Muratorian canon, AD 180, the third book of the gospel, that is according to Luke, the well-known physician, Luke wrote in his own name. Moreover, the acts of the apostles are comprised by Luke in one book.
So therefore we think Luke wrote it. If you're a liberal, you run around and you say, no, Luke didn't write Luke and Paul didn't write Philemon and Paul didn't write Titus and John didn't write Revelation and Paul didn't write Ephesus.
I mean, can you imagine living in such a world? Maybe there's money to be found in liberal Christianity. I think there is, but what a sad way to live. Probably one of the biggest reasons I'm preaching Luke, all kidding aside, it's not the length of it.
It's the subject. And of course the subject matter for all the books of the Bible, but especially the gospels, this unique genre of literature. It's about the Lord Jesus and what he was sent to accomplish, who he is as a person and then how he accomplished the father's will.
And if I maybe wanted to summarize all of the gospel of Luke in a verse, it'd be hard to do, and there'd be different competing verses certainly. But I think of Luke 19 .10, the son of man came to seek and save, what?
The lost. He came to seek and save the lost. I. Howard Marshall said, the key to the theology of Luke is salvation. I think that's right. And you see the words save lots of times in the gospel of Luke, save, savior, salvation, things that are used in Luke a lot more than they are in Matthew and in Mark.
What do we have here in front of me? Well, I have a quote from J .I. Packer. That's a good quote. Sometimes J .I. said some dumb things like when he wrote the intro or forward to the Roman Catholic Peter Kreft's book about Mary being the way we all become unified.
And, you know, Kreft got hit in the head by a surfboard and saw all these things. Last time I got hit in the head by a surfboard, I saw stars, but I didn't think they were looking like Mary. And there was a pressure wound on my forehead, so I had blood coming down, but it wasn't in the shape of Mary.
Now that would have been something fascinating. What if I was riding this big longboard, this log, and I was in Santa Cruz, and I was, and I fell, and I did, and I usually put my head when I'm going to fall, I put my arms over my head to kind of, in case I was going to slam down on my neck, that it would brace myself with kind of like fists over my head, elbows bent.
And I did, but then I came up out of the water, and what happened was the surfboard was kind of submerged a little bit, and it came, because it's buoyant, it came flying up, and it came kind of shooting up.
And then after I'd already put my hands down, the hands that were over my head, the surfboard slammed into the, not the top of my head, but on the kind of front left. And it hit so hard that it split the skin open.
And I kind of like, like I just got hit, like I was boxing, and I thought, am I going to pass out? Didn't pass out, but then I could just feel the blood coming down on my face. What if that blood came down in such a manner that it coagulated in the shape of the Virgin Mary?
Would that turn you into Roman Catholic? Would you worship my face blood? I just looked at the clock here, it said 1348, remind me of Acts 1348, the Arminian's most hated verse, Acts 1348. Just go to Acts 1348 and say to someone, would you please read this and tell me what it says?
Not what you think it means, but what does it say? As many as appointed to eternal life believed. According to Acts 1348, what's the order? Ordination slash election unto salvation and then believe, or is it believe and then you're ordained to believe?
I mean, ordained, elected. See how ADD radio works? My lungs aren't too bad, it's just the rest of me. What you don't know is I've pushed the cough button like six times today, but hey, it is what it is.
It's only once every two minutes. Chad Packer, he's stressing the importance of reading the gospels. Should you read Proverbs, Psalms, the epistles? Obviously, obviously, obviously. But he frames this well, kind of the good Packer.
We can correct willingness of view, W-O-O-L-L, as to what Christian commitment involves by stressing the need for constant meditation on the four gospels over and above the rest of our Bible reading.
For gospel study enables us both to keep our Lord in clear view and to hold before our minds the relational frame of discipleship to him. The doctrines on which our discipleship rests are clear in the epistles, but the nature of discipleship itself is most vividly portrayed in the gospels, because you're learning about the person of Jesus.
Packer goes on, some Christians seem to prefer the epistles as if this were a mark of growing up spiritually, but really this attitude is a very bad sign, suggesting that we are more interested in theological notions than in fellowship with the Lord Jesus in person.
We should think, rather, of the theology of the epistles as preparing us to understand better the discipleship relationship with Christ that is set forth in the gospels. And we should never let ourselves forget that the four gospels are, as has often and rightly been said, the most wonderful books on earth.
Isn't that good? J .I. Packer in his book, 2005, published by Baker, Keep in Step with the Spirit, Finding Fullness in Our Walk With. Mike Ebenroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry, working kind of on a parenting book.
I'm an expert on parenting errors. Working on an End Times book. I'm an expert on End Times. That's the problem. I mean, I try to tell all these young guys around church and other places where I go and speak, they're 30 years old or 25 years old and they want to have End Times stuff nailed down.
And of course, the push these days for young men wanting to be post-millennial and reconstructionist and theonomist and a hybrid of all of them. I don't know if it's a pushback against culture, I don't know if it's a pushback against dispensationalism, I don't know if it just appeals to young men, I'm not exactly sure of all the issues.
But I'm going to try to put together an End Times book that might surprise you. It's not going to be post-mill, it's not going to be dispensational pre-mill, I wonder what it might be. I guess I only have two other options then, right?
There are only two options in no-co-world and of course everybody wants me to tell them what I believe and why and how and I think the older I get, the more important bibliology, soteriology, pneumatology, biblical theology, historical theology, all those ologies are helpful as we're trying to put together a good eschatology.
There are certain passages that just have to be dealt with exegetically to work your way through. It's easy to just come up with a system, but the battle is in some of the details. It takes a while, my point is this, it takes a while for you to do all the legwork of the hard passages to figure out where you are.
You could say it seems to me that mill is the best or pre-mill, historical pre-mill is the best or something or post-mill is the best, but there's more work to be involved. When I meet a 22-year-old, 25-year-old and they really think they know, well, of course, one of those three is right and they've got it correct, it's true, but I think it's in spite of themselves, not because of themselves, so I'm just, all that to say, I'm working on a few other projects.
As long as I keep working on projects, I stay alive. And after I'm dead, a few of you will listen and remember me and then it'll fade to black and you'll continue in your life and you'll keep working on what you're doing and then one day you'll die too and then Ecclesiastes says, all is vanity.
So we might as well fear God now, live for the moment and live in the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ and walk in a manner worthy of his calling and preach Christ, die and be forgotten. There you go. Be warmed, be filled.
Here's the intro to Luke. It's one sentence and it is very much like other kinds of writings that are similar in genre but kind of different when it comes to New Testament. One sentence and it's going to answer the how Luke is going to do this gospel and the why.
Why would he do it? Super interesting one sentence, four verses, Luke chapter one. This is all to whet your appetite for you to start reading Luke ahead of time and to like Luke and to like Luke's object that is the Lord Jesus.
In as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, God lover, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
So, he gives in this one sentence in the original and actually one sentence here in the English, just a lot of commas after each verse. He tells us how he's going to do it, undertakes this, compile narrative things that have been accomplished among us as an eyewitness, as not over the word but ministers of the word.
It's been delivered, it's been handed down to us. It is to be closely examined, it should be orderly. That tells us how, that's going to be Luke's approach and you can think, if in fact it's Luke the physician, I think it is, a physician's approach, orderly, detailed, handed down, scientific, historicity involved, historicity, historicity, historicity, historicity.
Yes, in fact, Charlton Heston, it is a madhouse. You can watch the original Planet of the Apes, I think on YouTube with ads. I don't know anybody who has YouTube TV, but I heard it's a thing. I think it's kind of expensive, I don't know.
I mean, it's kind of amazing. Is it not? You go to Blockbuster in the old days to get a VHS and you're like, okay, you know what? It's Friday or it's Monday night, Monday's my day off as a pastor, honey, let's go out and let's rent something and we'll put the kids to bed early and we'll just sit and watch it show and enjoy ourselves and this is going to be fun.
And then it's frustrating because you can't find a movie that's any good. You can't find a movie that you agree on, the movie that you wanted, somebody else checked out. Remember that? Remember that? You want a movie, it's already checked out and you just got to get a blank little slip.
It's almost the same thing now, is it not? Except you don't have to go anywhere. You know what? Let's relax tonight. We got everything done. I just had the 25 guys over for the leadership thing. Let's clean up a few things.
Thanks for helping, honey, to get all the food ready and all that stuff. And let's just sit back and let's watch something. Hulu, nothing, HBO Max, nothing, Amazon Prime, nothing, Peacock, nothing, Paramount Plus, I don't have all these, nothing, CBS, nothing, Fox, nothing, Netflix, nothing, YouTube TV, nothing.
And then you're frustrated. You've wasted a half hour trying to find a show and then you're like, let's just read and go to bed. This is so dumb. So I guess what we've fallen back to is maybe documentaries, watching some documentaries or I cannot believe I do this, watch cooking shows, cooking challenges.
And it's not even really about the food to me, it's about some of the people. So Luke says, I'm going to write this in a very physician-like manner, and I'm also going to write it with a purpose. Here's this man, I think it's a man's name, Theophilus, God lover, like Philadelphia, Theos, Philadelphia, God lover, brotherly love God, that's his name, that you may have certainty concerning the things you've been taught.
So this man, Theophilus, knows some about Christianity. Maybe he's a believer, maybe he's a mature believer, maybe he's an immature believer, maybe he's an unbeliever, but he knows some. And he's been taught these things and now Luke wants him to have certainty.
That's really the purpose of the book. If you're a Christian, that you would have certainty. And if you're not a Christian, that you would have certainty that in fact Jesus is the only God and that you would believe in him.
If you're a believer that you would keep believing in him, even though a trial comes up, even though the doctor report comes up, even though this comes up or that comes up, there's an orderly account with all kinds of words that are going to help us about eyewitnesses and servants of the word and handed down and organized properly like a doctor would for a purpose.
What's the purpose? So that you have certainty, that you have been taught the right things so that you might believe, that you might keep believing. And that word certainty comes from the same word in Philippians chapter three.
It's where we get to our Greek, sorry, our English word, and it's a Greek word too, asphalt. Asphalt without the A is totter and you put an A in front of totter and it's not tottering, it's an alpha privative.
If you have the word typical, it's normal, and if you put the A in front of it, atypical, it's not normal. And so it negates it, it tells us the opposite. So something that's tottering, we don't want to totter so we put an A in front of it, asphalt.
It's firm, it's stable, it's not wavering back and forth. And Luke comes across in this book as someone who documents, someone that is a historian. I almost said history again. What's the police song album?
There's some police album, Synchronicity, yeah, Synchronicity, is that right? I think the police, I want to say, maybe, maybe, what do I have here? I have all kinds of things. I see dead people. Oh yeah, that's true, but I'm looking for synchronicity.
As a historian, Luke is wanting to write, Luke is wanting to write something that's accurate, and he's going to talk about the Savior's birth, he's going to talk about details, he's going to talk about Quirinius, the governor of Syria, he's going to talk about things that probably really, really bother liberal Bible scholars.
And as time goes on, those men, those liberals are found to be lacking, and if you just wait long enough, you're going to find out that the Bible, in fact, is true, even when it comes to historical things like Pilate's rock, Pilate's stone, and we're probably going to talk about that next time.
Luke is going to come across as someone who's very precise, very historical, and we're talking about not Narnia and not Middle Earth, but a real man in a real place, really accomplishing salvation for all those that would trust in him.
Luke tells us how orderly, Luke tells us why, so that you can have certainty. So that's kind of my little intro to the Gospel of Luke today, why it's exciting, it's about the Savior, why it's good to study Gospels, because we can get to know our Lord even better.
You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. If you want to order Sexual Fidelity, you can do that as well. If you buy one online, you can get one free. I just put it right there in the packaging, it's not like you have to click something online.
And we're working on new websites, we're working on new, pretty much new everything, new swag, Spencer's helping. Spencer does a lot of work behind the scenes, and so I'm thankful for Spencer. My brother, Pat, the Pactum Avendroth, he's got the cool stuff going on, so I'm gonna need to catch up to be somehow close to Pat.
This is Mike Avendroth, No Compromise Radio, thanks for listening.