Why Are You Taking Up Space on Planet Earth Part 2 Luke 4:17-19 Evolution… First off, it’s not a theory. It’s a hypothesis. In order for something to become a theory it must be put through multiple tests. To suggest that we evolved from lower primates cannot be tested, so it shouldnt be called “the theory of evolution.” It should be called “the hypothesis of evolution.” That’s not to say we should dismiss evolution all together. Most Christians that dismiss it don’t know much about it. They certainly have never read Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. I for one am not willing to reject evolution outright, nor am I willing to accept it Carte Blanc. I can say with complete honesty that I do not believe in the theory of evolution. Today there are atheists who in their rejection of God made evolution their God. They believe that evolution can explain everything. That is turning evolution from science into religion. The problem is that if we are the end result of a genetic accident, there is no meaning. If a person says, why do I exist, or for what reason was I born, the answer is that a couple million years back in a pool of slim, some single celled organisms decided to throw a party and it got out of control. That’s not a good answer. Also, if we are just accidents, is evolution done? Are we just some step on the way to being something else? Creationism and the doctrine of a young earth with a literal six days of creation is not a good alternative to evolution. The first King James bible, published in 1611 contained a note telling readers the creation occurred on the evening before Oct 23, 4004 BCE. In 1616 the Catholic Church banded any and all books that taught that the earth moved. The problem with all that is it cannot be supported with facts. That right up there with turning evolution into a religion. There is a way between Darwin and a literal reading of Genesis. Creation is neither dependent on a literal reading of the Bible nor on random variations of genes. What some are beginning to see is that we exist because of laws of complexity that we are only beginning to understand. There is something beyond blind chance at work. There is more going on than a collection of genetic accidents. There are patterns or designs in nature, and these things point to a designer. Here is one example. Sir Fred Hoyle researched the carbon atom to answer the question of why there such an abundance of carbon in our galaxy when its creation requires a triple collision of helium nuclei, which is quite rare. The answer lay in the internal resonances of carbon and oxygen nuclei, where figures as small as half a percent make all the difference between carbon and no carbon. Since carbon is essential for life, that half a percent makes all the difference between us and no us. Hoyle was an Atheist whose belief in the absence of God was shaken. He said, “A common sense interpretation of facts suggest that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” In other words, physics points to God. When we as believers are asked the question of why we exist, we can come up with a better answer than Darwin. Why this matters and why I am talking about it is that the reason our lives can have meaning is because God created us. Meaning in our lives is a result of the fact that God created everything with us in mind. We are the high point of creation, the object of his love. The history of the universe covers 15 billion years. However up until the creation of humankind, the universe was not conscious. We are the first living thing to be aware, to be able to give praise to God. He created us to have fellowship with us. God may have used things like natural selection to create us but it stops with us because are the end product God had in mind. People will never evolve into something else. When God decided to paint a picture, the thing at the center is us. Just because we have meaning as a result of the fact that we are more than a genetic accident doesn’t mean that our lives automatically have personal meaning or purpose. A person can lived a wasted, useless, meaningless, selfish life if they so choose. If evolution could account for everything you might even be excused for living that way. But for a believer, it is shameful. We started to talk about this two weeks ago. My question was why are you taking up space on planet earth? What are you here for? If you dropped dead today, would it make a difference to anyone? If life has meaning, and if you want your life to have greater meaning than there are a number of principles in this passage of Luke that will help you get a clearer sense of why you are taking up space on planet earth. 1. Your purpose will emerge out of your relationship with the Spirit 2. Purpose requires fuel, and the fuel is knowledge, which comes from teaching. Always be open to learning something new. 3. Purpose and meaning is found in community. We ended on this point and will pick up on this today and talk a little more about both the synagogue and church. Synagogue is like church. It isn’t quite the same because church is the body of Christ, but it is similar in that it is comprised of a community of people gathered together to worship God. It is a place where teaching takes place. In order to have a Synagogue there had to be at least 10 men. Even small towns could have one and larger cities could have many Synagogues. It is estimated that in Jerusalem at the time of Christ there were 480. No one knows when synagogues began. A common point of view is that they began after the temple was destroyed in 586 BC. Synagogues where built of stone and faced Jerusalem. They existed for instruction in the scriptures. A typical Sabbath service involved the reading of a passage from the law and prophets followed by a teacher explaining the meaning to the congregation. Synagogues did not have full time pastors or teachers. They had person in charge who allowed anyone approved to teach. If we were to do things the way the synagogue did, I would pick one of you at random, you would come up here, read a text and preach on it. Keeping in mind that Synagogue is like church and that it was Jesus’ custom to regularly attend, how does church help us to know why we are on planet earth? In the New Testament Christian’s discovered their purpose in community. When you become actively involved in a church it becomes clear what you place is, what you are to do, what your gifts are. My point is that when you commit to being a part of God’s people in a local setting, God will use that to help you discover why you are here. We’ve looked at three principles. Again, they were that your purpose comes out of your relationship with the Spirit, Purpose requires the fuel of knowledge and regular attendance and commitment to church will help you know your purpose. Going on, looking at Jesus’ statement about his purpose also helps us to define why we are here. Jesus’ purpose can become our own. Let’s look at the text. 17And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: The book that was handed to Jesus would have been a scroll. Back then books as we know them had not been invented. People didn’t have books in their homes. Jewish children were taught to read and as a society they were literate, but reading material was limited. A scroll would have a spool on both ends so that it could be rolled and unrolled to the appropriate passage. The scroll that Jesus was given to Jesus was of the book of Isaiah. Jesus, when he was in the wilderness and thinking about how to proceed in ministry while being tempted, came to some conclusions about the type of ministry he would have. Now in Nazareth he picks a passage that not only defines his ministry, but fulfills prophecy. He picks Isaiah 61:1-2, which is one of the suffering servant poems. He reads the text and that paraphrases it. What Luke records is the paraphrase, which also adds a verse from Isaiah 58. 18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed me. All effective ministries are empowered by the Spirit. We have already talked about this. Isaiah 61 is one of the servant poems. They are prophetic because the servant is the Messiah. There a number of servant poems in Isaiah that predicts the life and death of Jesus. When the text says the Spirit is upon me because he has anointed me, the word anointed means Messiah. Another way of stating what this verse says is that the Spirit picked me to be the Messiah. As we will see later Jesus applies this text to himself. As the Messiah, Jesus defines his purpose. The first thing he says is… 1. To preach the gospel to the poor; If you have any questions at all about your purpose, why you are here, these words, to preach the gospel to the poor, should answer some of those questions. In the Bible there are two types of poor. The first is physical poverty. There are many passages that condemn the rich and support the poor. When the rich and powerful exploit and mistreat those who have less, God condemns the rich. However God is not automatically on the side of the poor. There are people who are poor because they are lazy. God’s advice to them is to get a job. Proverbs has much to say about those who become improvised because they are unwilling to work, have no ambition. The church has always had questions about its purpose with regards to physical poverty. How involved should the church be in helping the poor, which includes political action to change things that are unjust? Some of the things that Jesus did in his ministry were to protest evil social structures the exploited the poor. The best known example of this is when Jesus clears the temple. One mistake churches and dominations have made is to put all of their efforts into addressing this type of poverty without considering that this is not main type of poverty that Jesus was concerned with. Speaking out against social injustice is important, but comes in second to the main type of poverty that Jesus speaks about. The second type of poverty is spiritual poverty. When Jesus says that God appointed him Messiah to give good news to the poor, poverty is more a spiritual condition than a physical condition. People can have a lot of money or a little money and be spiritually poor. What is spiritual poverty? Spiritual poverty can be summed up in three key ideas. First, a person is spiritually improvised if he or she believes that he or she is good enough to merit salvation. This was a problem for the Jews. They felt that because they were chosen, they were automatically saved. Today I still often hear people say, “I’m basically a good person. I never killed anyone. There is a whole lot of room between goodness and killing in which a person can be bad. The problem with notion that a person is good enough is that God’s requirement is not that you be good, but that you be prefect, which you cannot be without Christ. A second indicator of spiritual poverty is the lack of a relationship between what a person believes and what he does. When people profess to believe in God but act in ways that lack integrity, they are often blind to their own spiritual condition. Say you go to Home Depot and by a ceiling fan. You take it home and in the process of installing it, you break it. You put it back in the box and take back to Home Depot, tell them it was broken and exchange it. Let’s be clear about what you have just done. You have stolen and lied. Or you check out of a store and realize that you got more change then you should. You got an extra $20. You pocket it and consider it a bargain. It is stealing. These types of acts are common even among Christians. Step it up a bit and it used to be that people got married and had families. Not anymore. Kids, even those that grow up in church, don’t adhere to what the Bible says. Our problem is we like being sick. We like the sin disease. That’s our spiritual poverty. We want to be spared from the consequences of evil. We want evil to stop happening to us, we just don’t want to stop it from happening through us. Third, being spiritual improvised means being unaware of the spiritual resources that are available to us. In Ephesians we are told that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. God has given us all that we need, but we have no idea how to draw on those resources. We have Beverly Hillbilly Syndrome in that we have vast riches and no idea how to use them. Jesus says here that his ministry is to address this type of poverty. He will say in the Sermon on the Mount, blessed are the poor in spirit. In other words when a person sees their true spiritual condition then they are reachable. When I understand that I have nothing to offer God, that all of my righteous deeds are nothing but a filthy rag (Isa 64:6) then it becomes possible for me to be in right relationship with God. Jesus cannot help those who do not sense the need to be helped. Without poverty of the spirit there is no felt need to be saved from anything. With an awareness of our spiritual poverty, there is good news. Jesus ministry is to preach the gospel to the poor. That must be the number one purpose of the church. But don’t misunderstand that. It doesn’t mean that all sermons need to be evangelistic. The pulpit is not the place for evangelism. There are times when in the teaching of the text I will explain how a person becomes a Christian, but it isn’t what I should be doing week after week. I’ve heard people say, you need to share the gospel every week because you never know. If you aren’t sure about someone, get to know them and ask them and share Christ with them. In other words when you stop to think about why you are on planet earth, one of the reasons you are here is to share the gospel. It is not optional. It is not just for some believers. It is for all believers. The goodnews of the gospel should be a joy to share. Suppose you discovered a cure for cancer. Would you go out and tell everyone? Sure you would. For each person, God wants you to preach the gospel. He doesn’t want you to be obnoxious about it, or tactless. But he wants sharing the goodnews to be a part of God’s purpose for your life? Conclusion and more next time. We’ll stop here for today and talk more about this next time.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 20:34:13 +0000
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