Immanuel Sermon Audio
Luke 24:36-53
Well, for the very last time, at least for a good while, I will tell you to take a Bible and find the Gospel of Luke. There's a sermon outline. You can follow along. So we talk about this passage in Luke. Next week we're going to start a new sermon series. I mentioned it last week and just remind you, starting next week we're going to work through the book of Psalms. We're not going to look at all of them, but we're going to look at a good number of them. There's 150 in the book, longest book in the Bible. We're going to look at about 27. And I'm excited about this series. I hope you're excited about the book of Psalms. It'll be a good change of pace from the Gospel of Luke. We'll go from the New Testament back to the Old, and a different style of writing. And we're going to start with Psalm 1 next week. If you want to read ahead and study up, you can look at Psalm 1. And down the road, we're going to end with 150, the last Psalm. That'll be the last one we look at. And in the middle, like I said, we're going to look at about 25, 26, 27 of them. We're going to look at a lot of your favorites, a lot of the ones that you say, "Oh, this is one of my favorite passages in the Bible." We're going to look at those. We're going to look at the shortest chapter in all of the Bible. Two verses. We're going to look at that Psalm. And we're going to look at the longest chapter in the Bible, 176 verses. We're not going to do that all in one week. We're going to break it up. We're going to look at the shortest, and we're going to look at the longest. And we're even going to look at at least one that's going to make you really uncomfortable. You're one of the hardest passages in all of the Bible to understand and to apply and to interpret. So we're going to jump in next week to the book of Psalms. I hope you'll be here for that. This morning is the end of the road for Luke. And by my count, we've spent about 64 weeks working through the Gospel of Luke, passage by passage, story by story. And I'm kind of a nostalgic kind of person. And so allow me one nerdy, dorky pastor moment here at the end of this series. I'm going to miss these guys. I've spent every Monday morning with these guys. And I know that the authors and theologians of those books weren't really in my office, but it was kind of like they were. And we sat down every Monday morning, and we read through a portion of the Gospel of Luke. And then we sat down and talked about, well, what does this mean? What's the significance of this? Why is this important? And on some things we agreed and on some things we disagreed. But it's been fun to read through these books and to study Luke. And I'll tell you, when Brooke and I were in college, I led a Bible study at our apartment complex, and I taught through the Gospel of Mark. When we got to the end of that, I said, Mark is the best Gospel. Mark is my favorite Gospel. I love Mark. And then at the first church I pastored in Kentucky, I preached through the Gospel of John. And I got done with that series, and I said, John is where it's at. John is so great. He's such a good book. And then in Oklahoma I preached through the Gospel of Matthew. And I got done with Matthew, and I said, nothing tops Matthew, man. How are you going to beat Matthew? It's the best. And I'll just tell you now. I don't know that I would say Luke is my favorite, but I have a little more perspective to say it was a great book, and I've enjoyed studying it on Sunday mornings. I hope if you've been here, I don't know, at least a week or two, that when we close the book on Luke, you know at least one thing from the Gospel of Luke. I hope you know Luke 19-10, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. And I have tried my best to just drum that into your brain. And so I put it on the sermon notes every week. We titled the series after that verse. We put it up on the screen in big black and red letters for you. I try to mention it every single week. I think I made it all 64 weeks somewhere in there. We talked about Luke 19-10. And so I hope you go away. If you don't know anything else about Luke, you forget everything else. You at least say, "Hey, I know what the book is about. It's about Jesus coming to seek and to save the lost." And it's a great summary of what we've talked about. Here's the big idea of our passage this morning. It's really simple. We're on the other side of the cross, Jesus has done what he came to do. And the big idea this morning is Jesus left his followers with supernatural peace and a global mission. He has given us peace. We're going to talk about that. And he's also given us a mission. And we're going to talk about that as well this morning. So if you have your Bible open, we'll read from the Gospel of Luke the very last verses. We're in chapter 24 and we'll start in verse 36 and go to the end. As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace to you." But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, "Why are you troubled and wide do doubts arise in your hearts? Me my hands and my feet that it is I, myself, touch me, see." A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and he ate it before them. And then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was at still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, "Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem." You are witnesses of these things. "Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high." Then he led them out as far as Bethany and lifting up his hands. He blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven and they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God. Let us pray. Father, we are grateful for this book. We are grateful for Luke writing an orderly account of all of the things that took place so that we might have certainty about our faith, that we would have a foundation underneath our feet to stand on that will not give way. Father, we believe that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. And as we're now on the other side of the monumental accomplishment of the cross, and we read about Jesus appearing to His disciples, we read about Jesus ascending to heaven, help us to understand what Luke is telling us, help us to see how it applies to our life today, and help us to leave this place as always changed in submitting our thoughts and our beliefs and everything that we are, everything that we do to the authority of your word. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. So when you read this story, it really reads like one continuous event, and it just picks up from where we left off last week, and you remember there was these two guys on the road to Emmaus and they're walking and Jesus comes up and they had this conversation, and then they realize who it is. God opens their eyes as they're breaking bread, and they immediately, when Jesus disappears, they run back straight to Jerusalem to tell the others that they've seen Jesus, that He really is alive. And you remember they get there, they don't even get the first word out, because the other guys say, "Hey, Jesus appeared to Simon," and they begin to share their stories, and then Luke just goes right in with verse 36, he says, "They were talking about these things." Those are the things that they were talking about, and then as you read through what we just read, again, it sounds like one continuous story. But when you compare Luke's events in this last section to how the other gospels end, and when you compare this last chapter of Luke to the first chapter of Acts, which Luke also wrote, you realize that he's taken three different events in this last little chunk, and he's just sort of squeezed them together into one story, and it doesn't really give you a lot of direction is this is a new part, some time went by here, but there's some time between these events, and most translations, if you look at your Bible, mark those transitions, those gaps in time with the paragraph. So in between verse 43 and 44, there's a little break, and then in between verse 49 and 50, there's a little break. So it's actually three stories combined into one, and some people laugh at Luke and they say, "Oh, I got confused," he didn't know how things really happened, and he didn't know when it all went down and how it all fits together. You can read the paper any day of the week, and you can read a story in our very own paper that will take a variety of events and collapse them down into one story. And if you don't know all the specifics, you may not know exactly when did this happen, and when did that happen. Writers do that all the time, and so Luke's taken these three stories, he's combined them into one last conclusion to the book, and what we're going to do is just sort of break them apart. Look at these three paragraphs and think about what they mean and how they might apply to us. It takes place in the upper room. Luke 24 is verse 36 to 43. This is still the evening of Easter Sunday, right? The guys walking to Emmaus, it's Easter Sunday, and they just heard the women that morning, their report about Jesus being alive, they go to Emmaus, they realize Jesus has been with them, they run back straight to Jerusalem the same day to tell everybody what happened. So it's still the very first Sunday that we would know as Easter. And the big idea, or the big thought of this section is really simple. The resurrection of Jesus gives peace to his followers, it's not complicated. Jesus shows up among them, and the first thing he says, the first thing out of his mouth, verse 36, "Peace to you, peace to you." As Luke describes these details in verse 36 to 43, you read this story and some of these details you may say, "Well, why would you include that?" That's kind of a weird thing to mention. Why twice does, first it says, "Jesus himself appeared," why not just say, "Jesus appeared," "Jesus himself appeared," and then when Jesus looks at the guys and they're struggling to believe, Jesus says, "It's me, it's myself, I'm here, it's really me." And he says, "Look, you can touch me, come touch me if you want to touch me." And come, look at the scars, if you want to see the scars, it really is me. And there's this almost comical verse, did you notice it in verse 41, it says, "While they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling," he says, "What does that mean? What does it mean to disbelieve for joy? It means you're confused. It means you're sitting there trying to take it all in, trying to figure it out, and it's just not all adding up in your brain, and you're excited, but you're skeptical, but you're really excited and you really hope that it's true, but you don't believe that it can be true, and Jesus says, "Look, you got anything to eat?" And Luke just gives us this strange detail, they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he ate it, and they watched him eat it. And all these details are piling up on each other, and what Luke is trying to say to you, Luke, Dr. Luke, the physician, he was really there, physically present in the room, heart beating in his chest, lungs breathing in and out air, blood flowing through his veins. He was really, really there, a digestive system that works. I mean, it was him, and they touched him, and they saw him, and they talked to him, and they saw the scars, and they watched him eat something. And it was really Jesus there, and what Luke wants you to understand, when Jesus rose from the grave, he wasn't some phantom, he wasn't a ghost, it wasn't a spirit. He had a real body, and he's combining this in this story, telling you all these details. He was really there, he had a real body, and he's telling you all these details so that you understand the significance of verse 36 when Jesus says, "Peace to you." You read that, and you say, "Well, I understand how Luke 19-10 might give me some peace. Jesus came to seek me and save me, he died on the cross for my sins." That's some peace, I feel peace about that, that's great. How does Jesus having a body and being able to eat fish give me peace? That just sort of seems like extra on the top. You really need to know that. I know what I need to know, Jesus came, he sought me, he saved me, he died from me on the cross, and you tell me he's alive. Great. Luke says, "That's not enough." You need to know, Luke says, that he was really there, physically there. His body was there. Was it somehow different than his old body? Yes, but it was a real body, and that gives you peace. This is important, because you say, "What's the connection, a physical body?" And I have peace, I don't understand. To understand what Luke's trying to say to you, you can't just go back to the beginning of Luke, you've got to go back to the beginning of the Bible. You've got to remind yourself that in the beginning, when God created people in his image to know him, to love him, to serve him, to enjoy him, he made them, male and female, and he gave them an immaterial soul, he breathed life into them, and he also gave them a physical body. And sometimes we think, you know, when we die, we get to go be with Jesus, and it's just, your spirit's going to be up there forever, you're going to be floating around with Jesus. In the end, it's not going to be like that. Bible says, "In the end, you're going to have a body. God made you to have a body." The problem right now is that your body is like my body, it gets sick, has aches and pains. I have aches and pains this morning. We had a pre-teen event Friday night, and we played basketball. We played parents against the kids. It was dads against the kids and the moms. And at some point, Matt Potter ran into me and broke my shin, and so I'm doing my best not to gimp around the stage and act tough, so I'm playing it off. But I also, you may have noticed when I walk up these steps, I'm kind of walking up with "I'm just aches and pains and hurt." You guys know what I'm talking about. Bodies don't work right. And beyond just the comical things, we all know about death. It's coming sooner or later for every last one of us. God made you to have an immaterial soul and a physical body, and because of sin entering the world through Adam, both of those things are messed up. Your soul is prone to wander from God. You're not just a sinner because you do bad things, you're born a sinner, and you do bad things because you are a sinner. Your soul is broken, twisted, is not what God intended it to be, and your body isn't either. It's going to die. God talked to Adam about that right after he sinned, and he looked at Adam in the physical eyeballs. He looked at Adam, physical body soul, and he said, "Look, I brought you out of the dust, but because of what you've done, one of these days you're going to go back to the dust. It's not the way I intended it to be. Have you ever read the promise of Revelation 21 that when everything's wrapped up in all the events of the end take place and we all get lined up on our eschatology and our timelines and all that stuff, Jesus is going to sit down on the throne. He's going to say, "I have now made everything new, and you're going to have a body." It's not going to be like the one you have now. It's going to be like the one Jesus has now. God made you to have a body and a soul, and sin has messed that up to put it lightly. And what Luke is saying is, not only did Jesus come to seek you and to save you, but he came to fix everything that went wrong because of our sin. He came to make it new and to make it right, like God intended it to be in the beginning. That's the idea in this word peace, peace to you. We think about peace and we think, okay, peace is like hippies with the fingers up or pieces when two nations that are fighting sign an agreement and they're not going to fight anymore and they stop fighting. That's peace to us. In the Hebrew worldview, peace meant wholeness and completeness and rightness. And Jesus is saying, "Listen up, fellas, I'm here, physically here. Give me some fish. I have a body. I'm fixing everything that your sin ruined. I'm setting it right and I'm making it whole and I'm making it complete." And so he comes amongst these guys and what does he say? Peace to you. I'm bringing completeness and I'm bringing wholeness. His resurrection proves two things. The bodily resurrection of Jesus proves two things. It first proves that he did what he set out to do in seeking and saving the lost. He accomplished his mission. Secondly, it reminds us that he's bringing peace and wholeness and completeness to the world that our sin warped and twisted and ruined. He's making it all new. So Jesus comes and he stands among them and he says to them, "Peace I give to you." That's why the resurrection is part of just orthodox Christianity. Not even evangelical Christianity or Protestant Christianity, orthodox, just no one disagrees about this who reads the Bible. The resurrection is key, not only the resurrection of Jesus, but of us. Look what Paul says to the church in Corinth, "If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection from the dead? If there's no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We're even found to be lying misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it's true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Those who also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. Here's what Paul's saying, Luke 19-10 is great and all, but if you don't tack on to the end of that, Jesus physically rose from the dead. Luke 19-10 doesn't do you a whole lot of good. It's proof that he came to do what he set out to do and he accomplished his mission and it's also proof that he's putting it all right. He's making it all new. Jesus rose from the dead. One day you will rise from the dead. God originally intended you to have a body and a soul in the beginning and in the end when it's all done, you will have a perfect body and a sinless soul. Jesus will not let Satan have one inch of what he originally planned to have. That was the plan from the beginning and he's going to make it so in the end and it gives you this peace. Second story is what you might call the Great Commission. It's in Luke 24, verse 44-49, so this is Luke's version of the Great Commission and there's just a couple of things you need to see about how Luke envisions our mission as he records the words of Jesus. The first thing is that our mission is based on the promises of the Scriptures. Our mission to make disciples is based on the promises of the Scriptures and so he talks about that in verse 44. Jesus says, "Look, all this is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms. Those are the three Hebrew divisions of the Old Testament canon or what they would call the canon." It's saying the whole Old Testament talked about this, guys, we're not just making this up as we go. This isn't an audible. This isn't plan B. This is the plan from the very beginning. This has been the plan. You understand when you go out on this mission that I'm about to define more specifically, when you go out on mission, you're not doing something we dreamed up here at a manual Baptist church. You're not doing something that William Carey, the father of the modern missions movement, dreamed up when he went as a missionary to India. This is not our invention. This is the plan from the very beginning. It's not something we made up, it's something that God made up. Second thing Luke tells us is that our mission is proclaiming, repentance, and forgiveness of sins to all nations. This is way different than what a lot of people think of as missions. A lot of people think missions and all they think is go do nice things for people. You can find some Bible verses that say you should do nice things for people. I'm not telling you not to do nice things for people. I'm just telling you, if all you do is nice things for people, you haven't jumped in on this mission. The mission is proclaim, repentance, and forgiveness of sins to all nations. You find other people who say look, we just, we got enough to do here locally, our town, our community, our neighborhood, our state, our country, whatever is a mess, let's just worry about here. Well, we have lots to do here, I agree. And there are some Bible verses that say we ought to care about here. I'm not denying that. But if you're not somehow some way part of the mission of proclaiming repentance and forgiveness to all the nations, you're not in on the mission. The mission is not just about you and people like you. It's about all the peoples of the earth, all the families of the earth, all the nations. You have a lot of people who go out on quote unquote mission, and they're not just doing nice things, they're talking about Jesus, and they're not just staying home, they're going to all the nations, but what they do when they go out is they try to get people to pray some prayer and quote unquote invite Jesus into their heart. That's not the mission. Luke tells us what the mission is. You go out and you proclaim repentance. Use the word. Don't use the word. I don't care. Tell them to turn. Tell them to repent. You pick the vocabulary, but you need to communicate people that sin is a serious problem and they need to be moving away from it. That's part of the mission, and you explain to them forgiveness of sins. You explain to them, Luke 19, 10. Your sins can be forgiven because Jesus came to seek you and to save you. He died for you on the cross. He rose physically to bring you peace. You need to repent, and you need to believe in Him. Luke says that's the mission. Last thing Luke tells us is that the mission is empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is really good news. We talked about this last week, and I told you, I can't preach a sermon good enough to convince you of anything when it comes to faith in Jesus. I cannot preach that good. No one can. I can't argue with you on an apologetics level, on a worldview level, to try to convince you of the things of the Scriptures. I can't win that argument on my own. It's impossible. I can't change your heart. I can't open your mind to the Scriptures. Jesus can. He did it to the guys on the road to Emmaus, and he did it to the guys in this upper room. Did you see what he said? In verse 45, he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. How is that going to happen going forward? Verse 49, "I'm sending the promise of my Father on you, and you'll be clothed with power from on high. The Holy Spirit will go with you. I will be with you. I Jesus will be with you, the one who can open their minds to the Scriptures. Your job is to proclaim these things. My job is to open their minds to the truth." That's the mission. Go to all the nations, proclaim repentance, talk about the forgiveness of sins. You do it in the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting Him to open people's hearts to the truth. That part of it's not on you. That's his job. That's the mission. The last story is short. It's the ascension of Jesus. It's in Luke 24, 50 to 53. Book of Acts tells us that this happened about 40 days after Easter. So again, Luke just sort of flows right into it, but it was over a month later. And it's a fitting into the Gospel of Luke. It's fitting on two counts. On the one hand, it's fitting because Jesus, Luke 19, came to seek and to save the lost. He left His throne in heaven. He came to this earth on a mission. He accomplished that mission. He rose bodily from the grave. And when the mission was done, He went back to where He was before the whole thing started. His work was done. He came to seek and save the lost. Once He did that, His work was finished. He went back to His throne. The book of Hebrews explains this. Look what we read in Hebrews. "Every priest stands daily at His service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until His enemies should be made a footstool for His feet. And by a single offering, He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. By a single offering, by one act, He did what He came to do. He sought you. He saved you. It happened at the cross. When He was done, He was done. He finished His mission, so He went back to heaven. It's fitting that He'd go back. His work is done. It's also fitting that He'd go back to heaven because after accomplishing His mission, He looks at His disciples and He says, "Now I'm giving you a mission. I've done my end of it. I came to seek and save the lost, and I did it." Now your job is to go and proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all the nations. Go out and do that. I've done my end of the mission. Now you do your end of the mission. I'm going to be with you. You're going to be clothed in power. I'm going to open hearts as you go and preach. But you have a responsibility to go out and to finish this mission. We talked at Christmas about missions, and the series was called "Finish the Mission." When Jesus gives marching orders, He doesn't expect us to debate about it, to talk about it, to only preach sermons about it. He expects us to do it. Go out and proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all the nations. And so this is how Luke ends. It ends with this unresolved tension. And if you've read it from chapter 1 all the way to chapter 24, you come to the end and you just heard Jesus give them this mission, and then Luke says they went back to Jerusalem. And they were blessing God, praising God, worshiping God. And if you're paying attention to what Jesus just said, you're left wondering, did they do it? Jesus did what He came to do. Did they do what He sent them to do? Acts begins to tell that story. And there were advances, times of obedience, and there were retreats, times of disobedience. You look around today and you say, have we done it today? We've had 2,000 years for the mission to proclaim repentance and forgiveness to all the nations. It's not done yet. You still have a role to play. That role might be in sacrificial going in saying, I'm going to leave my home and I'm going to go to the nations. That role might be in sacrificial giving, saying, I'm best served to stay here and to work and to give sacrificially so that somebody else can go. But listen, listen, everyone who follows Jesus is called to make a sacrifice. So you go or you give, that's the mission to proclaim repentance and forgiveness to all the nations. And so Luke just leaves us with this unresolved tension and you're left wondering, did they do it? Well, they started, they didn't finish, and here we are 2,000 years later and you realize this isn't just a story about Jesus and Peter and some Roman leaders and a guy named Herod and all these people who live back in, this is a story about me. You're part of the story. You're in the gospel of Luke in this mission to go and to preach repentance, to proclaim repentance and forgiveness to all the nations. You have a role to play in that. And so we're going to end with prayer. I'm going to ask you to bow. I'm going to pray that God would use us as a church family to advance this mission, maybe even to finish this mission. Father, we're grateful for the time that we have been able to study the words that your spirit inspired Luke to write. And we've seen his personality on these pages. We've also seen evidence of you and your truth and we read these words and we believe that they're true. They're more than just a story written down by a physician who lived 2,000 years ago. They're your words. They carry your authority and we pray this morning that you would help us to be mindful. Not only of the peace that you have given to us through Jesus and through His resurrection, but help us to be mindful of this mission that you've entrusted to us. Help us to be as serious about it as you are. Help us to be as serious about our mission as Jesus was about His mission. Father, we acknowledge that we need your power. We need your help. We need your spirit to go with us and to open hearts. And Father, maybe there are people here this morning who need to have their heart open to the truth. Maybe this morning for the first time they've understood what Jesus came to do for them. Father, we pray that you would open their heart to the need of repentance and the beauty of the forgiveness of sins. Father, as we sing together, we sing to you and we sing for your glory and we do it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Stand up, and we are--