FBC Daily Devotional – August 27, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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of the Lord and to serve him with our attention, our praise, our fellowship with one another, our praying together.

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Always look forward to the Lord's Day. Much to learn and a lot of growing that can take place just week after week, attending to the things of the

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Lord in God's house. Hope you can make it to the Lord's house on Sunday. Well, today we're reading the last chapter of Luke's gospel,

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Luke chapter 24. And there's a couple of things that strike me as I read this. One of them is the significant contrast between the ways of God and the ways of man.

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Here's what I'm talking about. When we are thinking about somebody who wants to advance an agenda for a company or even a nation, for whom do we look?

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To whom do we look? We look to the charismatic, to the type

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A leader kind of a person who's got a persona that people can just gravitate to him.

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Somebody who has made it in his career or in his accomplishments.

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That's the kind of people we look to. And we gravitate to them, to put them in those positions of influence and authority and so on and so forth.

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What about Jesus? It strikes me in Luke 24 how contrary that is for God.

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I mean, think about this. Here are these two obscure disciples.

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I mean, we don't know who they are. We haven't read of them anywhere else in the

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Bible. Cleopas and this other disciple. I mean, who are these people?

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And they're leaving Jerusalem. They're going home to their town of Emmaus after a

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Passover. And they're downcast. They're followers of Jesus, apparently.

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I mean, they were looking to Jesus to be the Messiah. They thought he was going to deliver them, deliver

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Israel from the Romans and so forth. So they were counting on that. But they're totally downcast.

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And it is to them that Jesus appears and walks along with them, explains, opens up the scriptures to them, helps them understand how that the

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Messiah did indeed need to die and to rise again.

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And it was to them that in the breaking of bread, he revealed himself to them.

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Who are these guys? These two disciples. And then later on, the two disciples that were on their way to Emmaus, they got to Emmaus, got home.

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They came when they realized it was Jesus. He was risen from the dead. They ran back to Jerusalem.

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They found the rest of the disciples. And no sooner did they walk in the door than the disciples there in that upper room.

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They said to these two guys, Jesus is alive. You know, we've seen him. And so they're having this conversation.

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And then again, Jesus appears to them, the whole group of disciples at that point, he appears to them all.

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And it says he just all of a sudden showed up. I mean, just all of a sudden appeared, didn't knock on the door, just appeared.

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And it said, and he said, peace to you, because he can see the startled look on their faces, as you can imagine.

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And it says, but they were terrified and frightened and supposed that they had seen a spirit.

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I've seen a ghost, but Jesus goes on to say, why are you so troubled?

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Why, why are these doubts rising in your mind here? Look at my hands, you know, go, go ahead.

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Look at me, handle me, touch me. If I were a spirit, you wouldn't be able to touch me. I have a,

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I have a body. This is resurrected body. And he showed him his hands and his feet.

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And it says, they still did not believe for joy. And they marveled and said, do you have anything to eat?

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They give him something to eat. And he joins with them and having a bite to eat. He took it and ate in their presence.

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And so here are these huddled disciples again, and who are they? They're a bunch of obscure, no name people in the culture that they're not, they're not big leaders.

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They're not strong, powerful people that are going to overthrow the military, you know, the foreign military or anything.

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No, they're fishermen, just, you know, common people, just ordinary people. But then it goes on to say that Jesus said, these are the words that I spoke to you when

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I was walking with you. And I told you, this is all going to happen. And then he did the same thing with a whole group of disciples that he did with those two on the road to Emmaus.

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He opened up the scriptures to them. He explained the scriptures to them so that they could understand how the whole program, the whole plan fit together from the beginning.

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And it was like an aha moment for them as he did that. But here's the thing, as this chapter ends, he says to them, thus it is written.

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And thus it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

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And you, he says to these, these individuals, you are witnesses of these things.

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Behold, he says, I send the promise of my father to you. And, and, and one of the other gospels says is as the father has sent me, even so send

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I you, he entrusts the whole future of the

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Christian faith into the hands of these common, no name men, people, and off they go.

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And now here we are, here we are 21 centuries later, just about.

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And if you're a believer in Christ follower of Jesus, you are because of them because of what

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Jesus did and sending them out with that message of the gospel. So yes, quite a different approach to accomplishing great things between our way of thinking and God's way of thinking.

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And I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for it because that means he can use anybody. He can use you.

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He can use me and he will. Thank you, father. Thank you for whom you choose by your grace, not the, not the mighty and the powerful and the whom the world considers to be intellectual powerhouses, but just common, ordinary people that you use to accomplish your purposes in this world.

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Thank you for using even us. And we pray you'd bless these thoughts to our hearts today in Jesus' name and for his sake.

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Amen. All right, we'll have a good rest of your Friday, a wonderful weekend.

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And I trust that you can join together with God's people in worship on the Lord's day, a good day.