12 Themes From the Birth of Jesus, Pt. 3

All right, Yannick and his family couldn't be here today and he texted me and said he apologized and we look forward to having them back, but give me just a little more juice back there,

Benjamite. It's probably my ears, but anyway, now I can hear me, so that's good. Is it too loud?

So anyway, aside from him missing, this is one of my perfect kinds of days because it's just home, folks.

So I'm going to do something now that I promised not to do again for a while, and there are no visitors or I wouldn't do it, but let's stand and we're going to play the

Southern Baptist game a little bit today. We're not Southern Baptist, but I want everyone to find someone to hug.

All right, so go find someone to hug. It can be all the way across the room. No kissing, no holy kisses, just hugs.

All right, now we're

Biblinarians, let's get back to our places. All we do is study the

Bible. People of the book, we don't believe in love and affection.

We don't believe in healing the sick. We don't believe in the

Holy Ghost. That's what they think, that's what they say. I don't believe in what they're saying, do you?

But you know what they miss is it all has to start with the Bible. They say we're Bible worshipers, isn't that something?

But you know the Bible says that God put his word higher than his name. His word is...

How many of you have had a loved one that's passed away, gone on to heaven, maybe a mom or a grandmom, and they wrote letters and you have one or two of them with their handwriting, old fashioned script, right?

Don't you agree when you look at that and you read it, it's like they're there with you? It's a little bit of them because of their handwriting.

Well, that's just a small picture of what it's like to read this book that God wrote for us. It's him with you when you read this book.

And everything, including praise, has to start with the word of God and preaching. It doesn't start with loud music.

I love loud music. Get it louder, Matt, it's fine with me. But it doesn't start with that.

That's not what causes it. It's the scripture that causes praise to come up in the heart. And also thinking about things like Matt was sort of reminiscing up here about just things that God does good for us.

And you can't help but praise him when you do that, right? Good job, Matt, as the praise leader.

And anyway, glad you didn't mind hugging one another. Now, I have to admit, if I go visit a church and they do that,

I don't like it. But I made sure there were no visitors, okay? And you guys out here, we give you a big hug, all right?

All right. We got to hurry because Cheryl and I have to catch a plane today. And planes are fast, so you got to really go fast to catch them.

So let me do a quick review. We've been talking about 12 important Bible themes found in the

Christmas story, which I had never seen before this year. And the first one was the Abrahamic covenant, and then salvation by grace, and then election and limited atonement, and then the deity of Christ, and the responsibility and sovereignty of God found together in the same place.

And then the doctrine of divine revelation, that humanism is the most ridiculous thing because they think you can just pull things out of the mind of a human.

A human doesn't know anything other than what he's taught. And so he has no inspiration from outside the universe unless he believes in God, the

Father, who is outside the universe, and he gives it to you. And we saw that, that divine revelation is important because man can't know anything about God without it.

And then we saw responsibility to be witnessing to other people and to have great compassion.

And then we saw responsibility to study the Bible, and that was Anna and Simeon, if you remember that.

And then we saw...now here we are, we're at the ninth and the tenth points, and that's what we'll talk about today.

And that is that if you'll turn to Luke 4 with me, that's where we'll be. And this section is about the first and second advent of Christ, his first coming and his second coming.

And this is, to me, one of the most amazing passages in the whole Bible, because here we have

Jesus standing up to preach. And as he does it, the custom of the day in the synagogue was to take the scrolls, which was the

Old Testament scriptures, and hand it to the one who would be delivering the message, and he would simply read.

And you don't see a lot of expository, breaking it down type preaching, you just read it.

And I find that most scripture, most, not all, but most scripture, if you just read it, it will speak to you, and you don't need someone telling you what it means.

Now, there are difficult passages, not many, but there are a few, and those require deeper study and getting into the grammar sometimes, and sometimes into the word definitions, and always the context, and then does it fit the whole of all scripture?

And all those Bible interpretation rules are required for a few difficult passages, or you never know what they mean.

There's a few of those. Most of the Bible is written from God to the farmer and to the kindergarten student, so that the children, all the way up to the farmer who has no advanced education, in some cases, back in the

Bible days anyway, that they can understand it. It's written plainly, and the best way to interpret the

Bible is to read it plainly. And where the Bible is allegorical, it will indicate it in the passage, in the context.

You will know it's allegorical by just reading it.

So, it's plain. So, Jesus just took this passage of scripture, he read it, and what's funny, it's from an

Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah 61, and he reads it, but he only read a portion of it, and then he closed the book and said, this is fulfilled in your ears today, saying,

I am the one this is talking about. But more than that, I'm the one. These are the events this is talking about.

These are the events that the first coming are about, and he didn't read any of the material starting in the next breath to talk about the second coming.

He left it out, closed the book, because that wasn't going to happen yet. Now, the Jews didn't realize it, because the

Jews, I always like to picture it this way, like you've got a mountain here and a mountain here, two mountaintops and a valley.

And if you got over here on this mountain and just looked across the top of it, you would see this, and you might not see the valley, you just see this.

And so, here's the first coming, and here's the second coming of Christ, then they don't see the 2000 years, some odd years of church history of the church here.

They just see it as one thing sometimes. The Jew just kind of didn't understand real clearly that it's two events that are different.

Well, Jesus taught it to the Jews this day, so let's watch him do it in Luke 4, verse 13.

And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season.

So Jesus had just been taken into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by Satan, and Satan had tempted him and Jesus defeated him with what?

The word of God interpreted what? Properly, because Satan was using what?

The word of God interpreted how? Improperly, and that's your whole battle.

You know, you're going to fight the whole rest of your life, you're going to fight kinfolks at Christmas, you're going to fight guys and gals at work, and you're going to fight people that are going to say, well,

I don't believe that's in the Bible, or I think it means this. It's a matter of interpretation, they'll say.

Well, you know what? Yeah, it is, but there's 10 rules of Bible interpretation. If you follow them, you're only going to get the one right interpretation.

There's not like five correct interpretations of anything in the Bible. It is like God said what he meant, and it's there, and people are going to miss that, and it's a battle because Satan even used the scripture to prove wrong things.

Your neighbors and your friends and family do the same thing, and you are held responsible to always be ready to give account for why you believe what you believe, and part of my job as the minister is to give you ammunition, to give you all the scripture you need and the understanding of it so that number one, you've got it when you need it.

Number two, you're learning how to go get more of your own ammunition, and that's my job, and if I fail at that, it doesn't matter if I'm a good speaker or if I'm a church builder, which

I'm not. I'm not a church builder. I'm just a Bible student and a teacher, and I am called to be a pastor because the way you know that is when you like to go do a hospital visit.

No one likes that, but I like it, so that's how I know I'm called to be a preacher or a pastor,

I should say. Okay, so let's watch Jesus teach the Jew that there's two mountaintops, not just one, and not only is he teaching the

Jew 2 ,000 years ago this truth, he is teaching a lot of people who claim to be

Christians, and many of them probably are born again, but they totally get it wrong about the second coming and how that works because they've been taught in a seminary that it works like this when they're 20.

Sorry if you're 20, but when you're 20, you're very impressionable. That's why I'd rather you listen to me when you're 20 than to go to seminary, all right?

Because what'll happen if they're so liberal, they'll just suck the faith out of you, and many of the professors are not saved people.

They're just intellectual people who Satan put in there. Read the book of Jude. You'll see where they come from, and they're teaching young people that the

Bible doesn't really mean that, kind of like Satan did in the garden, and you don't want that, so I forgot what

I was talking about, so I'm just going to pick up somewhere else. What was I talking about? I got on a big time rabbit trail.

Sorry. Y 'all don't know either because I lost you, so let's just start over right here. Jesus, oh,

I know what I was talking about. He's also teaching us today, these people that are teaching incorrect things about the second coming, he's teaching how it works because one of the biggest flaws in their thinking, and you've had some people, if you read what they believed about salvation, you would think they were giants of the faith, and they are.

Some of them are giants of the faith, and they get this one thing terribly wrong about the second coming. They get it terribly wrong in the midst of all the wonderful stuff they know about God and salvation, how it works, and they get that part right, which is important.

It's maybe more important, but they get the second coming wrong because they get taught this mess in seminary when they're 20, and then they can't get over it because then everything else they read in the

Bible, they put it through that sieve as if it starts there and ends up here, rather than taking the Bible and letting it lead them, into what

God was really saying, so it messes them up for a while. Now, you can come out of it. I did because I was taught the same thing they believed when

I was doing my theological studies. I was taught that same stuff, but God led me to study it on my own, and I realized that's not what the

Bible teaches, so I changed. So you can change. It's okay as long as you're changing toward truth and not away from it, but you got two main heretical positions,

I think. I don't know if I'd call them heresy. I wish Ben was in here so he could shake his head this way or this way, but he's not in here.

All right, so what if you were to teach this? What if I were to teach you, by the way, that's called the amillennial position.

It's taught in seminaries around the world and has been for hundreds of years, not for thousands though. It's kind of a new belief.

They'll say it's ancient, but it's not. So here's another one. Okay, the way it really works is there is no millennial kingdom, but the church,

God is going to work within the church to make this world that we're living in right now better and better and better until it's so good that Jesus can come back.

What do you think about that one? That's called the post -millennial theory. Now, what do you think people thought in World War II when they realized six to eight million

Jews had been killed by one man in his evil machine? Did that look like the world was getting better and better that most people stopped believing post -millennial position at that point?

But did you know there's a revival of it? Ben tells me. There's a revival of post -millennialism among young Calvinistic believers in this country right now.

Very frightening, but it's because they want to feel like they're intellectual and amillennialism and post -millennialism give them the feeling that they're very intellectual if they understand those viewpoints.

So that in itself is pride. So Jesus is speaking to them too today in the scriptures all over the world if they'll just simply read the scriptures.

So let's look how Jesus taught it. Luke 3, verse 16. John answered, oops, sorry.

Luke 4, verse 13. We just saw he just finished being tempted by Jesus.

I mean, by Satan who used the Bible out of context improperly to try to get

Jesus to sin. Jesus came back and said, no, here is what that scripture means.

And he interpreted it correctly and defeated Satan. But look what it says about Satan. And Satan departed from him forever?

No, for a season. And that's how it's gonna work in your life too. You are not free of Satan until the rapture or you die physically.

While you're on this earth in the church age until the second coming and all that happens, you're not gonna be free of Satan.

You can get free of him for a season. And you should, you should never, listen, you never have to allow

Satan or demons to come into your life and actually indwell your body and be in your brain and cause you to do stuff.

And a lot of teachers teach that's impossible with Christians and they're wrong about that because I would simply ask the question, okay, if the

Holy Spirit lives inside of you, where does he live in your flesh or in your spirit? How would you answer it?

In your spirit. So if a demon lived in you, where would he live in your spirit or in your flesh? So they can both be there at the same time.

But a lot of preachers say impossible. But I knew the man who had the largest family counseling practice in Fort Worth for 25 years and he helped to get demons to leave a lot of Christians.

And I know the testimonies of it. And so they bother Christians too. But let me just say this, you never have to let them bother you.

It's as simple as this. Memorize this, first learn this, you cannot cast them out like the apostles because you ain't one, you're not an apostle.

But what you can do is what all of us in the church age can do, but since it's a faith -based age, it's not based on sight, but faith is you can pray and you can ask the invisible

God that you can't see to do things for you. And that's what we're allowed to do. And it's way more powerful than seeing stuff.

Seeing stuff is like baby stuff. Living by faith is like the apostle

Paul stuff or Jesus stuff, walking on water. That's what that's like. So you pray and you say,

Jesus, would you please bind the demon, rebuke him? And I added this one,

Rocky Freeman taught me that. I added this one. And put a herd on him when he comes around my family and make him leave and then go to sleep because he's gone.

Jesus will honor that prayer in your family. That's how you deal with it. And, but let me say this.

He leaves for a season and then he's going to come back and mess with you. And when he does it, he doesn't shoot rifles, he shoots shotguns.

So he's going to hit several of the people in your circle of life, either at work or at home all at once so that you can't help each other because you're all being attacked.

So what the Bible says to do about that is to stand against the devil and he will flee. So you never run from him.

You stand, you put pressure on him with these spiritual warfare prayers. Dear Jesus, bind them, rebuke them, put a herd on them and send them away and then go live your life.

And then eventually, like after a day or two of that, they will go, they won't be there anymore for a season.

Maybe two years later, they'll come back and mess with you. That's your life. And then this other battles with your flesh, right?

And people say, well, I'm a spirit -filled church. No, you're not. Spirit -filledness is a word

I invented, but I like it. And I'm going to use it for the rest of my life. Spirit -filledness is a moment -by -moment decision that you make all the time every day to do it or not be.

So you cannot defeat the flesh by standing against it. It's stronger than you are. So you put, for me, you put that donut right there.

I will eat it. But if you put it there and I go over there to get away from it,

I'll leave it alone. So with the flesh, you flee from it. You flee youthful lust,

Paul said. You get away from the stuff that you're weak in. And I just confess mine like it's donuts and mainly banana pudding, actually.

But anyway, so this is how we deal with the enemy. Now, Satan left

Jesus for a season. Verse 14, and Jesus returned in the power of the spirit. So now don't you find that interesting that Jesus, when

Satan comes to him and tries to tempt his flesh, tries to show him the world, which he showed him, he tempted him in all three areas, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

He offered him the kingdoms of the world if he bowed down to Satan. That's the world system. It don't get bigger than that.

You'll own all of it, Satan said. Well, Jesus knew he already owned all of it, didn't he? That was like silly to Jesus.

But he, you know, he put it out there and said, no, no, I should only worship the father, not you.

I'm not gonna bow down to you. I only worship the father, which is pretty biblical, wouldn't you say? All right, so when

Jesus was attacked in his flesh by the world system and by Satan himself, when it was done, he was stronger than before it happened.

You testified to that today. And that is exactly what it is in our life too.

We are stronger. Anything you live through makes you stronger. If you survive it,

I don't care how bad it is, it makes you stronger. And God put it there for that reason.

Like you say, well, does God cause all this bad stuff? Well, let me ask you this. He knows about it, don't you think?

And you had two choices. You can say, well, he knows about it and he won't stop it or he brings it for good.

Which one do you wanna choose? You wanna say, oh, wow, he's watching me get the pants beat off of me by the devil.

He's just watching me. You like that viewpoint? Or how about like Otis said, yeah, you know,

God sent it, but when it left his hand, he meant it for good in your life.

He's in control of everything. I like that plan better. You can take it either way from scripture.

Like you can do like the devil. You can make the Bible say what you want it to say or you can let it just say what it says.

And my Bible says, God is sovereign. Because there's only one God, you don't get to be God. So he is sovereign.

So everything is within his will. And that will really bother your neighbor if you wanna get some interesting things going at Christmas time with your family.

Say, yeah, God's in control of everything. It's all his will. I don't get out of his will. I can't say that to him.

That will blow their mind. I can't get out of his will because I'm not God. He's in control of everything.

And they're gonna say, what? Because their pastor taught them, there's a permissive will and a whatever will, other will he likes to talk about.

So all of that stuff is seminary nonsense. But look at Jesus in verse 14.

So now he's returning in the power of the spirit after being tempted by Satan himself. He's more powerful.

He comes in the power of the spirit to Galilee. And they went out of fame of him through all of the region roundabout just by him walking around, okay?

And then he taught in their synagogues. Notice it didn't call it his synagogue, their synagogue.

Who is they? The Jews. Were they good teachers and good Jews or were they

Pharisees? They owned the synagogue, didn't they? The bad, false teachers of the world of that day, just like they own the seminaries and the religious systems of today, even most denominations now are controlled by Satan.

I got a story I could tell you, but I gotta leave early today about a church I grew up in in Mahea and what just happened there.

You had a guy that I've known since five years old. He and I was at his five -year -old birthday party.

And we went all through high school together. In fact, his dad was the superintendent of the school and he pastored that church longer than any single pastor since the 1800s.

And they just fired him because they didn't like the music and some other things. They didn't like that.

They wanted it a little bit more like Matt's doing it where it's got a little guitar in there and not just pipe organ, but it's a little bit where the kids would like it too.

He got fired over that. No gold watch, no thank you. Just dumped.

Okay, so that's the synagogue. Now, you know what's funny about that?

My mentor, Dr. Freeman preached a 14 -day revival with over 200 and something people saved at that church in 1975, two, three, four, five, six, no, 78.

In 1978, he's famous. There are people in seminaries today that talk about that revival because there aren't many like that in our lifetime.

All right, after it was over, he told me in his house, he said, well, it was great, but they didn't receive it.

And God has written Ichabod on that church. Same church that just fired this preacher that's been there forever and gave his whole life and soul to this church.

He's not perfect. I'm not saying he's perfect. He's my friend. I know him really well. He's not perfect, but he knows I'm not either.

But he was not treated correctly. But my mentor said God took his hand off that church in 1978.

And I tend to believe it. That's why we left when we did. Because we grew up in that church.

And when we left, we helped start this church. That's how long it's been. So since 1980 is when this one started.

Well, so he goes out and fame goes out. And he taught in their synagogues being glorified by everyone.

So everyone that heard him teach gave Jesus glory because his teaching was different. All right, and he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up.

And as was his custom, he went into that synagogue on the Sabbath day, which was what?

Saturday or Sunday? Saturday, right. And he stood up for to read.

I like the King James is written in Texan. He didn't stand up to read. He stood up for to read.

I like that. All right, verse 17. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet

Isaiah. Now the Bible wasn't in one book like this, back then it was in like a big wooden thing with slots in it.

Almost looked like a thing that would hold maps, you know. And it had scrolls in there. And all of the books of the

Old Testament were in those slots. So they pulled one out, handed it to him. He opened it up. He didn't get to choose what he preached on, but yet he's

God. So he actually chose what he was gonna preach on, didn't he? But they thought they picked it. And either way, maybe

Jesus just reached in and grabbed it because it's the one he wanted. I don't know exactly how that worked, but it seems to me there was delivered unto him the book.

I don't think he got to pick it. I think they picked it and they picked the one he wanted them to pick. Think about that.

You're talking about walking in the power of the spirit. I'm just gonna stand up here and preach. What do y 'all want me to preach?

And y 'all tell me, and it's exactly what I'm supposed to preach. Wouldn't that be something? But we're not gonna try that. But Jesus can do that.

And he pick it up and he opens it and it's Isaiah chapter 61. And he begins to read from this.

And it says, the spirit of the Lord is upon me. He's reading from Isaiah 61. And I don't know if he's reading from it in Hebrew or the

Greek Septuagint, which was the Old Testament in Greek. It could have been either. The spirit of the

Lord is upon, we could find that out by the way, because you can measure this against the Septuagint, see if it matches word for word, and then you'll know.

But I didn't take time to do that. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

Now he's reading a prophecy from Isaiah where he's talking about a Messiah that's gonna come in the future.

And they know the passage. I mean, these are the Pharisees he's preaching to and some people, but they know the passage.

It's about the coming Messiah, the savior of, they thought, Israel. They didn't understand it's the savior of the world.

But the very book he's reading from, if he went back to chapter 53 of Isaiah, if he had chosen that to preach from, it would have shown them that he was coming for the

Gentiles too, to save all men, which means all kinds of men,

Jew and Gentile. Not every individual, but all kinds, some from every kind of man. And it says the spirit of the

Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives.

Ben taught about that in Sunday school. And recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised and to preach the acceptable year of the

Lord. Now watch this. And he closed the book. That wasn't nearly finished, that passage.

As you'll see, probably next Sunday, because I'm out of time. I'm just going to talk about this part of it.

But next time I'll show you what he left out. And it's the most important part for us. We're going to learn more by what

Jesus left out of this sermon that day than by what he talked about that day. You'll see.

But anyway, so it says, and he closed the book and he gave it again to the minister and sat down.

He didn't preach on it. He just read it. He sat down and the eyes of all of them were in the synagogue were fastened on him.

And he began to say unto them, here's his sermon. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

What scripture? The party read. Isn't it interesting that not the party left out and that should have been a lesson to them too.

And it certainly is a lesson for us and for the amillennialist and the postmillennialist. But we'll do that next

Sunday. Okay. We'll talk about that next Sunday. But look at what he preached, what he did preach. We learn a lot by what he said.

We're going to learn more by what he didn't say. But the one thing he said was that he was the anointed one. He said, this is fulfilled right now in your ears, which means

I'm him. I am the Messiah. He is the anointed one.

Secondly, he is the one who was sent to preach the gospel to the meek. Now in the scripture, in the

King James, it says to the poor. But if you look up the Greek word, the word actually, and even the old

English word, tokos is the Greek word, but it literally means to the meek.

Or you might put it this way, in the old English, they would talk about a meek person. They would say he's poor in spirit. Have you heard that?

If you're a Christian, you hear it because the Bible talks about it. But even in English in 1611, if you said they're poor, you would mean they're meek.

Not that they don't have any money. Isn't that interesting? So Satan changes words. So it confuses us. But that's why

God wrote it in Greek, not English because Greek hasn't changed. So it's like math. All right. So here's what it means.

He preached the gospel to the meek. Now, you know how I see I'm sensitive to this because at Tradeway, we teach people how to have freedom from poverty.

We teach them biblical principles, how God says you escape poverty. My family escaped it. And my great grandfather's generation, who was a sixth grade junk dealer, where they,

I'm a sixth grade education. He was a junk dealer and totally poor. And by the time he died, he owned an oil company, an oil field, an entire oil field, and more than one.

And then he died of lung cancer. Didn't even get to enjoy the wealth, but five years, maybe. But my mom,

I mean, her mom, my grandmother and my mom and me, three, four generations later, still enjoy.

And then my kids, five generations later, my grandkids, six, still enjoy what that one man did.

We call him Captain Brown, see? And we teach people around America how you could be his name.

We call him Captain Brown. How you could be the Captain Brown of your family if you want to be.

We teach people how to do that. And yet people will come and say, well, why, if you're a Christian, why are you seeking wealth?

That's evil. Where did they get that from? Well, they get it from looking at America, English wording of things where it says that Jesus came to preach the gospel to the poor.

So that proves he hates the rich. That's what they say. He stayed away from rich people. He only preached it to the poor.

It doesn't even say that. Is that important to know? I think so. It is if you're in my business, in the stock trading business and you're teaching

Christians how to become wealthy so that they can influence who the next president is.

Because the people with the money make that happen. You know that, right? It's not about voting. It's about marketing. And it takes enormous amounts of millions of dollars to market any person to get them up to a level where they even have a chance.

Either you got to be a self -made billionaire, like one of the ones running as a Republican this time who probably ended up being the vice president.

Or you got to raise the money. Billions of dollars probably is what you'd have to have to get to be president.

So if we can get enough Christian millionaires that become millionaires together where we have enough, we can influence that.

And if we influence that, we can change the world. You say, we're only supposed to do that through prayer. Well, I thought we were supposed to do it through prayer and living.

Living for Jesus and walking with him in his business, in his country. Who do you think put

America here and invented it? Where it'd actually be a country based on the Bible. Who do you think invented that idea?

George Washington? Or you think maybe it was Jesus Christ? You see? So like you can work with him and things like this.

But if you misinterpret scripture, then you get, then people have a way to fight it against it and try to keep everybody poor by making

Christians think it's evil to seek wealth. And that's what they do. You should hear Myron Golden talk about it. And he'll tell you that I'm, I was his mentor.

That I taught him what he knows about wealth. He would tell you that because he lived in our home when he was like 19.

Stayed in our home almost every Christmas and a lot of times because we introduced him to his wife who was from Mahea.

So he was a young man. Do you know that Myron Golden? I don't know if you even know this, Katie. Did you know that Myron Golden, there was a day at our table, the same, well, it's not the same table.

It's in Ashton's house now. But at that table, Myron was sitting there and I was sitting with him.

I took my Bible and I read Ephesians chapter one to him. He was in Bible college when I did this. And then

I read Roman chapter eight to him. And I said, you ever seen predestination before?

He said, what do you mean? I said, well, you probably been taught it's a bad thing, but look what the

Bible says about it. And I just read it to him. And he looked at me and he said, you believe that? I said, let me just read it again.

I read it to him. I said, what do you think? He said, are you messing with me? Same thing as when

I taught him golf. He asked me that question. And I was messing with him when I taught him golf. But I said, no, it's right there.

It's just, you'll never see it at the college you're going to because they don't believe in it. And he became a

Calvinist that day and maybe the next week because he went and looked it all up to see if I was telling him the truth or messing with him, right?

He's one of the strongest Calvinists I know. I may not should call him that. It's not Calvinism.

Calvin didn't invent it. It's Bible. It's what Paul taught. It's what Jesus taught. It's what John taught.

It's what Peter taught. It's what the whole, and Isaiah taught it, everybody. It's the Bible. So I'm glad you guys know that preaching to the choir.

So, so Jesus closed the book. He just read the scripture to him because most of the time the scripture is so plain.

It will speak to you if you don't let other people tell you what they think it means. And it'll just speak to your heart.

And then he said, this day is fulfilled in your ears. And so he came to preach the gospel to the meek.

And then it goes on to say, and it was out of Isaiah chapter 61.

The next thing is he came to heal the brokenhearted. That's what the Messiah was prophesied to do.

He came to heal brokenhearted people all over the whole world for 2000 years.

Number four, he came to preach deliverance to the captives. Now, do you think there were a lot of Jews, Jews, sorry.

Do you think there were a lot of slaves in Rome in the day Jesus lived? How many did Ben say there were?

He said the number, what was it? 60 million in Sunday school this morning. Did you hear it? 60 million slaves in Rome when

Jesus lived in Israel. And Israel was part of the Roman empire, right?

He came to preach deliverance to the captive. And the New Testament talks about how you can be a slave and still be free.

It's the only book in the world that wrote that. It's the only thing anywhere you'll read anywhere that says you can be a slave and be free.

Or you can be a slave owner and be a captive to sin, right? You can be a slave to sin and be a slave owner.

And you can be a slave and be free from sin because of your Lord Jesus because he frees you from every lesser

Lord including the guy that owns you. He sets you free from him in reality. And if you live right, it can be de facto in your lifetime.

You can be set free. And it's beautiful. He's teaching about it at Sunday school starting today.

It's going to be fascinating. So then the fifth thing is he preached recovering of sight to the blind.

Now he actually healed blind people, didn't he? But did he heal all the blind people?

Or did he only heal the ones the father told him heal that one? That's what he said he did. And do you know, we're going to see at the end of this study, you might probably two

Sundays from now, Lord willing, that that doctrine that God the father chose whose eyes would be open was hated by the people that Jesus preached it to which were

Bible scholars of the day, the Pharisees hated it and tried to kill him for teaching it. I'll show that to you for teaching

Calvinism. Because what is Calvinism? It's not Calvinism. It's just the teaching that God is

God. God is sovereign. Man is not. And they hated it because what they thought was

Jesus should heal every blind person. Wouldn't you think that? But he didn't. He said, no,

I just heal the ones God chose for me to heal. I gave sight just to the ones he chose for me to give sight to.

There's another blind man right next to that one. I didn't heal him. They did not like that.

Because who did that put in control? They couldn't even come to Jesus and pay him money.

Hey, heal them all. They were totally out of control. They could not make him do what they wanted him to do. He did what

God the father said to do exactly to the T of each person he was supposed to heal from anything, whether it was blindness or whatever.

But anyway, they knew the Messiah would do these things. So all of these things were done. The father did give him people to heal from blindness, from being crippled, even from dying.

And so that they could authenticate Jesus's and the apostles method of teaching the

New Testament, which was different than the Old Testament system. God would authenticate it by these miracles. And also that he was the

Messiah by the very miracles that Isaiah said the Messiah would do. Jesus is pointing out right now,

I'm sitting here and I'm the one doing these things right now. In your life, in your world,

I'm doing them. So who am I? Was the question to these Jews. I'm recovering the sight of the blind.

I am to set at Liberty them that are bruised, the downtrodden.

I am to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, which is the first coming, the first coming of the

Messiah. If you read in Isaiah chapter 53, which the Jew would know that comes before chapter 61.

If you go back and he had pulled that scroll out and read from it, it literally tells that he would be a suffering

Messiah who would die for the sins of the people who would be bruised to heal their bruises and so forth.

And yet they never looked for that Messiah because their targums had removed that from Isaiah 53. They're paraphrased

Bibles. It said, no, no, no, no. That's just talking about Israel's bruise. Not it's not talking about a person. And so they didn't see it because they weren't reading the actual

Bible anymore. That's for 300 years before Jesus came and preached this. They were reading paraphrases.

So don't read paraphrases. Read the King James version. It's the most accurate from the actual Greek of any anything else.

You can read other stuff you want to, but King James, where there's a difference, the King James is going to be accurate to the

Greek. I spent two years studying. I don't just say that. I'm not like a King James only person.

I studied it myself for two years. It's all I wanted to study for two whole years.

And I don't think that the translation is perfect. So I'm not a King James only person, but I do think it is the closest to the original word of God, Greek and Hebrew of any

American, English, I should say Bible. So stick with it is my advice. So now he preached the acceptable year of the

Lord. Now, what's interesting, if you look up that word acceptable in Greek, dektos, it means it is the most propitious year of the

Lord. Now, how many of you know what propitiation means? It means it's something

Jesus did for the father when he died on the cross, not for us. He satisfied God's justice so that he didn't have to send us all to hell because he died in our place and paid the sin debt that propitiated the father.

And don't you find it interesting that he told these Jews that he came to preach the propitious year of the

Lord, which was the year of his death on the cross. In the

Septuagint, the terms are connected with the sacrifices. Is it assumed that the sacrifices, which are declared to be pleasing to God are infallible.

So he is telling them, I came to die for the sins of your people of God's people and to satisfy

God's justice so that he can let them go to heaven because their sins are removed. And that's the year he was talking about.

But when Israel apostatizes, the prophet says that its sacrifices are no longer acceptable to Yahweh.

Well, yeah, that's what the Jews thought. So this is very clear what

Jesus taught and closed the book. He spoke of the first advent, the first coming of Christ and said,

I am he. What will you do with me? That was his message to them that day. I could ask you the same message today.

What will you do with him? Like, is it enough just to come here and study, study about him?

Or should we consider that maybe as we go out in the world this week, the dude that bags your groceries, it's an important person, the person who cuts your hair, if you're a guy that gets a haircut.

Um, anybody that God puts in your path this week, maybe you have a larger duty than just to selfishly gobble this thing up.

Maybe you're supposed to share it with people. Right. And maybe if we did that, we'd have to build a new sanctuary.

I'm not a church builder. You have to be. I am not a church builder. I'm a people builder.

If I can build you where you're literally walking out of here and living like you're supposed to live, this would be the biggest church in town, wouldn't it,

Brother Davis? It would be. So it's not about going visiting on Thursday night.

We don't do that. It's about you just living your life. And when, as you live it, realize that you're just like Jesus.

You just came from being tempted. You're not perfect. He was. You're not. You got tempted.

Maybe you succumbed to some of it. You sin. And then you go to 1 John 1, 9 and you confess it, which means you agree that it's sinful and God removes all of it and you're totally clean to go minister for him.

So you get up and you go out into that world and you share the stuff you're learning here and on your own with these people and be light and salt and see what

God does. That's all Jesus did that day. He just said, well, what I just read to you, that's me.

Deal with it. What will you do with me? Let's stand and pray together. Father, we thank you for your word.

We ask you to bless it as you always do, but specifically in our hearts that we might be better Christians.

We'd be more like you and that the world would benefit from the light that you shine through us and go with us into our time of fellowship today.

Protect us as we travel and others as they travel this week. Bring us back safely to our home here and we ask it in Jesus name.