[Morning Sermon] A Community of Hearers and Doers (Luke 8:19-21)

Alright, would you please open your Bibles to Luke chapter 8?

Luke 8 · chapter mention

Today we're looking at verses 19 through 28.

Sorry, 19 through 21.

Luke 8, 19 through 21.

So pretty much any time anyone mentions the musical, Hamilton, or just the president Alexander Hamilton, I get that song stuck in my head.

You know which one I'm talking about.

He wasn't a president.

Oh my goodness.

Thank you, Caesar.

The founding father, Alexander Hamilton.

I went to college, I promise.

I get that song stuck in my head, right?

You could probably guess which one.

The room where it happens.

I think of, you know, Aaron Burr.

I don't know how historically accurate it is, but I think of Aaron Burr just seething because he wants to be in the room where it happens.

He wants to be on the inside.

And there's a sense in which we all want to be on the inside.

For some, like Aaron Burr, it's because we want power.

We want to be respected.

We want to be in control.

We want to be in the room where it happens.

We want to make the decisions.

For most of us, though, we just want to belong.

We want to be a part of something.

We want to feel love, we want to feel welcome, we want to feel embraced, we want to feel included.

And today's passage is really about belonging.

It's about how we come to belong, not just in some room somewhere where it happens, but in God's family, as a part of God's people.

And in this particular people, this people who Martin Luther called a creatura verbitivini, a creature of the divine word, this people, we are a people of God's word.

We are a people who hear, we are a people who do.

And that's what Jesus is talking to us about today as we look at this passage, how we come into God's family by hearing and doing.

So with that said, I'll invite you to rise as I read today's text.

Again, this is Luke 8, verses 19 through 21.

Luke 8:19–21

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd.

And he was told, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.

But he answered them.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Father, thank you for your word.

Send your spirit now, we pray, to help us hear and to do it.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So this week we're working on something like the third installment in a mini-series on hearing the word.

The first installment was the parable of the sower or the parable of the soils in verses 4 through 15, where Jesus explained the mystery of why some people hear and produce fruit, and others don't really hear, don't really produce fruit.

The second installment was verses 16 through 18, where Jesus exhorted us to take care how we hear the word so that we might rightly receive and reflect God's light.

The third installment today is about the community in which we hear and do the word.

The Bible is not primarily addressed to individuals, it's a word for God's people.

And so, even though it's good to read the Bible on our own, we're ultimately meant to come together around this book and through it to draw near to Jesus as his spiritual family.

And that's what we're gonna think about today.

And just like we ended last week with a practical thrust in terms of how we hear the word and do it as individuals, we're gonna end this week with some practical words about how we read and hear the, sorry, hear and do the word in community.

Now, as we dive in together, we need to note something.

This whole passage is couched in relationship.

We hear the word and do it, not so that we can please Jesus, not because we owe it to him, not because life will be better if we do, not because we'll be healthy, wealthy, and hashtag blessed.

Those things are true by and large, but at least in this passage, in the story we're looking at, the end of hearing and doing the word is one thing: relationship.

Relationship with Jesus.

That's why we hear and do the word, so that we can draw near to him.

So we're gonna look at the story from that angle.

We'll talk about who gets near to Jesus, how we get near to Jesus, and what it looks like to hear and do his word as members of his family.

Who, how, what.

So we'll start with the who.

Who gets near to Jesus?

This passage starts with a fairly nondescript time marker.

The ESV translates it as then, the word then, but it just as well could have translated it as and or but.

And I mention that because if we were to look at Mark's gospel in this same story, that story comes before Jesus tells the parable of the sower, as opposed to here, where it comes after.

So it's likely that Luke is arranging things more topically than he is sequentially.

That's not a contradiction, it's just a difference in authorial choice.

And it's not, it's not the only difference between we see between Luke and Mark on the subject of Jesus' family.

After Jesus called the twelve apostles in Mark 3, verses 20 through 21, it says his family went out to grab hold of him because they thought he was out of his mind.

Mark 3:20–21

It's crazy, right?

We're gonna go reprimand Jesus because we think he's out of his mind.

Now we can't be sure if that incident was connected to this one primarily or another one, but regardless, Luke doesn't actually say anything about that.

There are no negatives here about Jesus' family.

Why?

Because it would actually obscure the point that Luke is making in his telling of this story.

The reason Jesus' family can't get near to him isn't because they've done something wrong.

It's not because they've doubted him in some way or they've offended him in some way and forfeit their access to Jesus.

There's no family friction here at all, no estrangement.

And in fact, the only picture Luke has painted of Jesus' family in the gospel is a positive one.

Mary is a positive example of faith.

So the reason the family can't reach Jesus isn't because of something they've done wrong.

The reason is because they're crowded out by the crowd who's done something right.

See, Jesus is surrounded by people who've come to hear him.

And the throng is so great that the family just physically cannot break through to see him.

And that's really interesting, isn't it?

Because you would expect Jesus to part the crowd and to make or make a way for his family.

You would expect, or you would think that if anyone were going to get a backstage pass to Jesus' show, it would be his mom, right?

But she doesn't.

And neither do his brothers.

The privilege of access belongs to the crowd.

Now there's deep encouragement in that if we slow down and mark it.

Because what we're seeing here is that our access to Jesus does not depend on how we've been born or where we've been born or who we've been born to.

You don't have to be a part of a particular family in order to become part of his family.

Jesus welcomes anyone.

Jesus welcomes everyone to come to him.

Whether you grew up in a trailer park or a palace, whether your parents were strong Christians or militant atheists, whether you went to a good school or a bad one, whether you come from America or Uganda or South Africa or Lebanon, wherever.

Not Lebanon, Lebanon.

It's another country.

It doesn't matter.

Jesus sends out his invitation to any and everyone.

Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Go to him, and he will grant you a backstage pass to the Holy of Holies.

He will invite you to sit before his throne of grace.

He will prepare a room for you in his father's house.

He will wrap you in his arms and draw you into the divine life forevermore.

He will make you a part of his family, the family of God.

That's what this is saying.

And it's important that as we hear that, as we read that, we see that this isn't any kind of a rebuke of the natural family.

It's an important qualification that we have to keep in mind.

That family in general is a good gift from God.

Family is the fundamental building block of human civilization.

And when I say that, I'm not just talking about families with kids.

I'm talking, first of all, about that core of the family that is the husband and the wife.

It was not good for Adam to be alone.

And then God gave him Eve, and that's when things got very good.

And the stage was set for human beings to multiply and fill the earth.

In that sense, the story of humanity begins not with one person but two people.

Not the individual, but the family.

And in the order of nature, God built that original family to give us not just husbands and wives, but fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and whatever else there might be.

These are all good gifts from God, hardwired into the fabric of creation, to order our social lives, to give structure even to our civic and national life.

And the new creation in Christ does not take away the good given in the old.

Grace does not annul or destroy nature, it perfects nature, and it brings nature to its proper end.

That's why the family of faith that is the church builds on the natural family.

The Abrahamic promise is made not to him as an individual, but through him, to his descendants, and ultimately to us, who Galatians 3 says are sons of daughters of Abraham by faith.

Peter stands up and says on Pentecost, the promise is to you and to your children and to those who are far off.

In Acts, when the head of the household comes to faith, it's not just the individual who gets baptized, it's the entire household, the entire family.

This is how it's supposed to work.

And how it has worked for the vast majority of church history.

When God rescues an individual, he doesn't just deal with them in isolation, he works through them to rescue entire branches of the family tree.

And so that was just a two-minute detour, but it's really important that we make sure we're 100% clear on this.

Nothing about this passage is meant to denigrate or take away from the natural family.

Instead, what we see is the putting of that natural family in its proper place.

Because as vital as the natural family is, the supernatural family is paramount.

That's why Jesus could say in Luke 14, 26, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

And we'll unpack that verse when we get there in a few months.

But what Jesus is saying that is that if there's a choice to be made between him and the natural relations, we have to choose Jesus.

If our natural family keeps us from Jesus, then that natural family has failed to honor its original design, and we have no choice but to turn from them to Jesus.

And what this passage offers us is the promise that when we do that, wherever we turn from, no matter what the background, what the circumstance, what the situation, when we turn to him, we will be welcomed into the family of Jesus.

Not as some distant third cousin twice removed, but as close to him as his own mother and brother.

So who gets near to Jesus?

In principle, anyone can get near to Jesus.

But in practice, only some do.

Which leads us to our second heading: how we get near to him.

In verse 20, Jesus gets the word that his mother and brothers are standing outside the crowd desiring to see him.

And of course, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's a perfectly desirable thing to do, to desire to see your son or brother.

But instead of inviting them in, Jesus takes the opportunity, as he often does, to challenge everyone to think, not just about who his family really is, but how it is that we come to be a part of his family.

In verse 21, he answers the report.

So again, Jesus opens up the possibility for anyone to join his family.

And there are only two requirements for joining.

Hear his word, do his word.

If you want to be a part of Jesus' inner circle, if you want to draw near to him, if you want to have him more intimately than even his biological family has him, then hear his word and do his word.

That's it.

Now, if we zoom out a little bit, we see this as uh kind of the capstone of the passages we've looked at over these past few weeks.

This is why we want a fertile heart that's prepared to receive the seed of God's word.

This is why we want to take care how we hear that word.

Because even better than the fruit we bear and the light we receive and reflect is that union that we're given with Jesus Christ.

That's what this passage is ultimately talking about.

When we hear the word of Christ and when we respond with a true and living faith, we are engrafted into the spiritual vine that is Jesus Christ and adopted into the family of God.

We talked about that this morning.

We talked about union with Christ in our Sunday school class.

So often, evangelicals have a very transactional understanding of redemption.

I put my faith in Jesus the same way I put a coin in a vending machine.

I confess him as my Lord.

I believe in my heart that God raised him from the dead, and then he doles out the benefits.

He saves me, he wipes my ledger clean, he gives me my very own apartment in his celestial city, he doles out all the spiritual goodies in his own time.

And those things are true.

I don't want to say they're not true, but there's a relational dimension that's often missing from that transactional picture.

If you read through Paul's epistles, and we did this together in Ephesians 1 this morning, you'll see that the entirety of our redemption is comprehended in Christ, with Christ, through Christ, never apart from him, never at a distance.

And here's the way it works: the Holy Spirit convinces us of our sin and misery.

The Spirit enlightens our minds in the knowledge of Christ, renews our wills, persuades us, and enables us to embrace Jesus Christ as he has freely offered to us in the gospel.

And through that faith, the Spirit unites us to him in a bond of union that is more intimate even than marriage.

He makes us one with Christ, such that whatever Jesus has, we have.

Whatever Jesus does, we do.

And whatever happened to him happens to us.

So if you are in Christ, when he died on the cross, you died with him.

And when he rose from the grave on the third day, Romans 5 tells us, you rose with him.

Everything we have in terms of our redemption, our right standing with God, our adoption into his family, our being made to look more and more like Jesus, the promise that God will never quit on us until the day he comes again.

All of those things are ours insofar as Jesus is ours and we are his.

There is no greater gift.

This is not a hyperbole.

There is no greater gift than our union with Christ because it is the source of every other one of God's gifts and graces.

It is the treasure chest whose bottom we could never reach.

And our passage reminds us that when we open that chest, one of the gifts we find sitting there right at the very top is the grace of adoption.

When we are united to Christ, we are adopted into his family.

God becomes our father, Jesus becomes our big brother.

And how do we lay hold of that gift?

We hear the word and we do it.

Simple.

Because what he's not saying is that in the hearing and doing of the word, we merit our salvation.

As though he's standing at the front door of his father's house with a checklist to see if you've heard enough and done enough in order to clear the threshold.

What Jesus is doing here is he's talking about faith.

Not the kind of faith that only issues forth in words, legal fictions, easy believism.

What he's talking about is a true and living faith that bears the fruits of love and good works.

John Calvin said that we are saved by faith alone, but the kind of faith that saves is never alone.

It's like I talked about last week.

Biblical truth is practical truth.

The hearing and the doing are inseparable.

If the word does not move you to respond, whether that response is the invisible fruit of a greater love for God and neighbor, or the visible fruit of good works, if the word does not move you to respond, then you've not heard it.

If the word does not change you in some way, then you're not paying attention.

If the words of Christ do not draw you closer to Christ, then you're not hearing and do that.

You're standing on the outside of the crowd looking for a way in.

For some of you here today, hearing the word may be as simple as hearing the good news of Christ's life and sacrificial death for sinners.

And doing the word may be no more complicated than deciding to put your trust in him for the first time.

If that's you, then you need to know, then the simple act of hearing and doing, that simple act would be enough.

It would be enough to get you through the crowd, it would get you your backstage pass, it would bring you straight to the feet of Jesus in your place in the family of God.

But now I want to talk about what comes next for those who have done that.

For those who've come into the family and join the community of hearers and doers that is the church.

So that leads us to our third and final heading: what it looks like to hear and do his words as memory members of his family.

Last week we unpacked question and answer 90 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as we thought about our hearing the word as individuals, how we ought to attend to it with diligence, preparation, and prayer, receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts and practice it in our lives.

This week I want to draw a little more broadly from Scripture and tradition to think about how we do that together as a church.

Specifically, I want to spend just a few minutes talking about the preaching of the word, Sunday school, and small groups.

So preaching first.

In the Middle Ages, it was typical for priests to have a pretty weak education.

In the parishes where there was preaching, it would typically be a weak sermon that the priest picked up out of a book somewhere.

And as a result, the ministry of the word was severely lacking in the vast majority of Christendom.

Nobody had a Bible, nobody knew what the Bible said, it was just lacking.

That's why the Protestant reformers emphasized the right preaching of the Word as one of the marks of the true church.

So great was the emphasis on the ministry of the Word that the reformer, the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, wrote in the Second Helvetic Confession the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.

And that may sound like an overstatement until you realize it comes straight out of the Bible.

1 Thessalonians 2 13, Paul says, We also thank God constantly for this.

That when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God which is at work in you believers.

And so when we come together to hear the word preached, we come together to be addressed by God Himself.

And when we do that, we ought to tune ourselves to it.

We ought to prepare ourselves for it.

We ought to approach it the same way we would approach our own private devotional reading, knowing that in that moment we have an appointment with God and He means to speak to us.

So that means we come with diligence.

We've all got a hundred things on our mind right now.

We've all got a constant pull to stop listening and to start thinking about all the other things that are on our plate right now.

Resist the pull.

Be diligent.

Be here.

Be present.

Tune your ears to what God is saying in his word.

We ought to come with preparation.

It means preparing our hearts on Saturday night for what God is going to do on Sunday morning.

But it also means preparing our minds, reading ahead, praying through the passage, developing our own sense, developing our own questions so that we can come with this sense of anticipation about what God is going to show us in His Word.

We ought to, as in speaking of prayer specifically, pray for me.

Pray for me as I prepare to preach during the week.

You want to do something for your pastor, you could pray for me.

But also pray for yourself.

Pray that God would open your ears so that you can come into this room and hear what you need to hear.

Pray for everyone in the church that God would do that for all of us and that he would use these seemingly weak and foolish and ordinary means of a guy standing in front of a room with a book and talking for a while, that he would use something as facially silly as that to build up his kingdom.

That's not a ridiculous request.

That's how he's been doing it for 2,000 years.

Hearing the word together requires spiritual and intellectual work.

Not just of the guy up here preaching it, but of all of us.

We are all engaged actively in this holy moment.

At least we ought to be.

Richard Baxter, the great Puritan theologian, mostly great, said this.

You have work to do as well as the preacher, and should all the time be as busy as he.

You must open your mouth and digest it, for another cannot digest it for you.

Therefore, be all the while at work and abhor an idle heart and hearing as well as an idle minister.

If you came into my office and you found me playing solitaire all week instead of preparing a sermon, you would call for the elders to do something about it.

In the same way, you gotta be here when you're here.

Do the work, pay attention.

Not for my sake, for Christ's sake, for your sake, so that you can hear what God has for you here today.

So that's preaching.

Now let's say just a few things about Sunday school.

Sunday school is kind of passe these days.

You won't find Sunday school in a ton of churches.

Many churches in evangelicalism have opted for small groups instead.

And they generally kick kids out of the adult service and have them do their typical Sunday school Bible curriculum during worship.

Sunday school, or Christian education more broadly, is an incredibly part, an incredibly important part of the church's life as a community and of hearers and doers.

The sermon is not supposed to be a lecture.

The pulpit is not supposed to be the place where I teach you all the ins and outs of doctrine and systematic theology, or I give you a full-throated explication and application of biblical marriage.

Churches that don't have Christian education try to cram all of the teaching into this moment, into the preaching of the word.

And what happens is you end up with an hour-long sermon that sounds more like a lecture on how to live the Christian life than it sounds like a heralding of God's people.

I'm even pressing that limit a little bit right now.

Sunday school gets you behind the sermon, so to speak.

It allows you a time and a space to learn the precious doctrinal truths that undergird so much of what you hear from the pulpit, or to dive deeper into books of the Bible, like what Jason and Al are doing with their class on Nehemiah and the fellowship hall.

It's also the place to wrestle with the implications and applications of biblical truth, like the classes we've had on the Proverbs and Wisdom and Finances and most recently on parenting.

And so I'm glad you're here for the preaching.

But if you really want to grow in your faith, if you really want to go deeper as a hearer and doer, come to Sunday school.

We got classes for you and classes for the kids, classes for everybody.

Third thing, let's talk about small groups.

It is a pretty well-worn cliche in churches at this point to say that transformation happens in circles, not in lines.

I think that's a false dichotomy.

But it points us to something true.

That one of the best ways to dig into what we're hearing from the Word and to figure out how it applies in our lives and all of its dimensions is to sit together and to chew.

To chew on passages of scripture together, to chew on good Christian books together, to chew on the sermon.

I have a small group that meets at my house every other Wednesday, and that's what we do.

We we talk about the sermon from the previous Sunday and how it applies to our lives.

Now that can look formal, right?

That can look like a small group that circles up in someone's home.

We've got those in our church, and if you would like to join one of them, send me an email.

I'd love to get you plugged in.

But it could also look informal.

You and a handful of friends, you and your spouse, you and a coworker on your lunch break, a neighbor on your porch, a group of friends on a text thread.

I'm not advocating here for a particular program.

What I'm encouraging all of us to do is to get into the word and to wrestle with it, not just on our own, but with other people.

The most edifying times that I have had in my life in terms of Bible reading have come when I'm sitting with others and we're trying to figure out together what the word means and how it applies to our lives.

It's with that last thing, the idea of doing, right?

Not just hearing, but doing, that I want to bring us to a close.

I remember one fairly prominent evangelical preacher.

He used to do all the conferences.

And when he went to the conferences, you know, he would say that the last thing the world needs is another Bible study.

That's wrong, but it resonated because the audience that he was speaking to was tired of circling up and reading the word, but never breaking out and doing what they heard.

That's a struggle.

It's a struggle in churches like ours and in our Reformed and Presbyterian circles.

Because we're really good at hearing the word, right?

Our ministers are highly trained.

I spent like 32 years in seminary.

Our traditions, resources, are thicker and deeper and richer than anything else you'll find in all of Protestantism.

We know our Bibles backward and forward.

We're really good hearers.

Doers.

Anyone getting uncomfortable?

So where I think we need to challenge one another is not in our hearing so much as our doing.

Our doing in terms of evangelism.

Are we gorging ourselves at the table of God's truth and walking around fat and happy while our friends and neighbors starve?

Are we?

Are we doing in terms of moral renewal?

Are we allowing the Bible to challenge the way we behave?

Are we letting it school us in how to say yes to the things that God loves and no to the things that God hates?

Are we doing in terms of daily life?

Are we letting the Bible speak into how we treat our spouses and our children?

How we interact with our coworkers, the decisions we make at home, at work, in the community.

Are doing in terms of service?

Are we showing our neighbors the love of Christ, not just with our words, but with our deeds?

Are we?

Again, biblical truth is practical truth.

The word demands a response.

Belonging to God's family means hearing the word and doing the word.

And so this is my challenge for you this week, for all of us.

And I don't often ask you to do something specific, but today that's what I'm gonna do.

And here it is.

Do something nice for your neighbor.

Got it?

Do something nice for your neighbor.

The Bible says love your neighbor.

We've all heard that, right?

Now let's do it.

Wash their car, cut their grass, buy them a meal, give them a ride, send them a note.

I don't care what it is, just do something.

Something tangible, something helpful, something kind.

And here's the kicker.

And when you do it, tell them why.

Hey, this Sunday our pastor talked about hearing and doing the word, so I'm just trying to get better at showing people the love of Christ.

Those are my words.

Use your words.

Whatever you do, and however you talk about it, do it remembering the great privilege that we have in Christ.

Someone did something for us.

Something said something to us that kicked off a chain reaction that ultimately ends with us spending eternity in the presence of our Savior.

So as you hear and do, remember that He has first sent the Holy Spirit to prepare our hearts.

He has sown the seed of his word in us.

He's shined the light of heaven on us.

And now he's calling us not just to hear what he said, but to do it and to do it in faith, to do it in love, to do it in the hope that as we sow the seed and reflect the light ourselves, he will bring more hearers and doers into the family.

We are surrounded by people who are orphaned, spiritual orphans, strangers to the covenants, foreign, alien to the promises of God, without God, without hope in the world.

We have that hope.

We have that word.

If only we will hear it and do it.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your word.

That is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.

Thank you that we have the word more fully confirmed in Christ and by his spirit.

Help us, Lord, to hear that word always.

Whether it's here in the room when we're hearing it preached, or when it's when we're sitting in a Sunday school class, or in a coffee shop or a living room, or in our own chair, in our own quiet time.

Help us to hear what it is you want us to hear.

And Lord, not to stop there, but to do.

Whether the doing is believing, whether the doing is loving, whether the doing is serving, or speaking, or stopping.

Whatever it looks like, Lord, help us to respond in faith, knowing that you will bless us and that you will bring others into the family through the works and words of your hearing and doing church.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I'm going to invite our ruling elders forward now to prepare the Lord's table for us.

This table is a gift that Jesus gave to his church in order to facilitate our hearing and doing.

When you come to this table, you get to hold in your hands a token of the reality that all of these things are about.

The Christian faith is not just a moral system, it's not just a worldview, it's not just a set of inspirational truths that kind of hang up there in the air.

It's real, it's practical, it's tactical.

Jesus descended out of heaven to touch the ground.

And so this is where we're reminded that we haven't just heard things today, but we have taken part in realities that affect us to the very core of our being.

So if you're in Christ, if you've professed your faith in him, if you've been baptized and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, if you have joined yourself to the visible body of Christ, then come and partake of these elements and be reminded of the truth of the gospel.

Be reminded that this word that you've heard is real.

And be strengthened and encouraged so that when you walk out those doors today, you can go and do what you've heard.

Whatever that looks like for you, the Spirit will lead.

Take this strength and put it to work today and this week.

If that's not your story, if you have not yet put your faith in Jesus, if you have not yet been baptized, if you have not yet joined yourself to the visible body, Scripture says, hang on a minute.

Let's settle those things first.

Because if you come to this table looking for anything but Jesus, you will not find Jesus.

You will not find strength, you will find weakness.

So we would love to talk to you more about what that looks like.

Just come see any one of us or see the person who invited you here today.

And we would love to have that conversation.

Let me pray for us before we partake.

Lord, thank you for this meal.

Thank you for these gifts.

Thank you for the way in which you implant your word into the soil of our hearts.

You water it with the water of your spirit and the gifts of your sacraments.

Strength and faith in us, we pray this morning in Jesus' name.

Amen.