A Different Power (Kirk Giles) | Different

To the Gospel of Luke chapter 6, Luke chapter 6, That's page 914.

Luke 6 · chapter mention Luke 6 · chapter mention

If you're using one of the Bibles in the seat around you,

take that. That's our gift to you.

Luke chapter 6. While you're opening there, I

Luke 6 · chapter mention

want to welcome some new members to our church family.

So would you join me in welcoming Abel Madani, Kelly

Wilson, Mary Leonard and Nadine Hopkins to the Forward family?

I was thinking this week about how every generation has words,

slang words that are unique to their generation.

And I, I need some group participation here for the next

couple of minutes. So if you are a baby boomer,

what are some of the words that were unique to your generation?

Some slang words you used? Cool, right on.

Wow, Anthony, you just sold yourself out, man.

I, I, I've heard Chachi, BT says groovy, far out and square were

all words that boomers use. Gen.

X, Gen. X.

OK, if you don't know if you're Gen.

X born from 65 to 80, you are Gen.

X. What words were our generation?

What what did we say, dude? Radical.

What else? Nobody wants to own up to being

Gen. X.

Take a chill pill, gnarly. Those are all words, all right?

Millennials. Millennials between 81 and 96.

SUS sick. All right, I chat.

GPD said Cray Cray and basic. OK, Gen.

Z, Gen. Z, whatever you want to call

you. There are at least 6 or 7 words

where I have no idea what you're talking about.

And if you don't know what I meant when I said that, ask your

kids or your grandkids, because I also don't know what I meant

when I said that. Words take on different meaning

through the years. For example, the word nice first

showed up in the English language in the 14th century,

and in the 14th century it did not mean what it means today.

The word nice meant foolish or stupid.

So when a doctor wrote a note and said that was such a nice

patient, If you ever see your doctor's note say that you're a

nice patient, stop and ask yourself what kind of nice is

the doctor talking about? Another word was the word bully.

For 500 years, the word bully has had all kinds of different

meanings, but originally the word bully meant sweetheart or

darling. So today if you were to say to

that special person in your life, hello, my bully, just

don't say it in front of other people.

You might get them in trouble. I I think one of the great

challenges that we face in our culture is that we get really

worked up about certain things and we say things, but we quite

often have different definitions of words.

And so we end up talking over top of each other because we are

using words in different ways. If you ever find yourself in a

conflict with someone, getting into a debate with someone, and

you find like, why am I not getting anywhere?

Why do we seem to be talking over top of each other?

Take a step back and ask yourself and ask them, hey, are

we defining words in the exact same way?

Do we mean the same thing when we use this word?

And I think one of the words that has a very different

meaning for different people is the word power.

For for some people, power is what you aspire to in life.

You want more influence, you want more power in your job.

You want more control in your life.

You want more impact, greater impact in the world.

For for other people, power is the way that I'm going to use my

words. You, you desire language that's

going to be more direct and more challenging, and you find that

to be something that is powerful.

For others, power. Anything that sounds like power,

smells like power, makes you a little bit like afraid because

you've experienced incredible hurt from power.

And anytime you see something that looks like power, you, you,

you back off. For others, power is what we

would see, we wish we would see more of, especially in the

Christian community. But even amongst us as

Christians, we don't always agree on what power is and what

power looks like. What is a powerful word for some

people is a boring Sunday for other people.

What is a powerful experience for some people is something

that we just get used to for other people.

Even this morning, the baptisms that happened for those who were

baptized say this is a very powerful moment in their life.

But for many of us, we probably disconnected from the baptisms

and went, oh man, just more baptisms.

See, power is something that means something very different

for individuals. And as we come to Luke chapter

Luke 6 · chapter mention

6, we're going to see a brief story involving Jesus and his

power. And how you define power is

going to shape how you're going to approach Scripture passages

like the one that we're going to look at.

So here's my challenge to you before we even open up the

Scripture. My challenge to you is this.

Will you even maybe right now in your own heart of hearts, pause

long enough and ask the Holy Spirit to show you and teach you

whatever He wants to say to you today?

Can you put your own definition of power to the back burner and

allow yourself to learn what Jesus wants to teach us about

power this morning? Because I think when you and I

do that, what we're going to see as we come to this passage is

that the power of Jesus looks very different from what power

often looks like in our culture. Let me read 3 verses from Luke

Luke 6 · chapter mention

chapter 6, beginning of verse 17.

After coming down with them, He stood on a level place with a

large crowd of his disciples and a great number of people from

all Judea and Jerusalem and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon.

They came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases, and

those tormented by unclean spirits were made well.

The whole crowd was trying to touch Him because power was

coming out from Him and healing them all.

If you are new to forward over the last number of months, I

want to just explain to you why we are in this particular

passage in Luke chapter 6. Late in 2024, we started a

Luke 6 · chapter mention

sermon series working our way through the book of Luke, and we

took a break over the summer months.

But today we're going to pick up where we left off before the

summer started. As a reminder for all of us, the

book of Luke is written by a guy named Luke.

He was a physician who's writing to another guy by the name of

Theophilus. And the whole goal that Luke has

with writing this book of the Bible is he wants to unpack to

Theophilus why you can trust that Jesus is who he says he is.

Luke says that, hey, I have done a careful study of all the

stories of all the accounts of Jesus, and I have come to a

point of being able to believe in Jesus.

And now I want to help you understand why all the evidence

points to Jesus being who he claims to be.

And as we reconnect with this story of Luke that that Luke is

sharing in these verses, we see the power of Jesus once again

showing up and healing people. But I think there's a lot more

we can learn from these verses about the topic of power.

The first thing we can see is this, that Jesus comes down to

be among people instead of standing above them.

In the first five chapters of Luke he put a lot of energy and

work into showing that Jesus is the Messiah that was promised in

the Old Testament that that the king of the Jews who was going

to come to rescue people, the all powerful one who would be

sent by God to rescue his people.

Jesus is that all powerful Messiah.

The Apostle Paul would later describe Jesus in this way.

Everything was created by him in heaven and in earth, the visible

and the invisible. All things have been created

through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and by

Him all things hold together. Now that is a picture of power,

that that Jesus, the Son of God, created all things, but not only

did He create all things, but He holds all things together in the

palm of His hand. There is nobody who has ever

lived in human history who can possibly claim to have that kind

of power. Jesus is the all powerful one.

That is real power. But Jesus does not use his power

to put himself on a platform. He doesn't use his power to

further solidify any level of control.

Instead, what we see in this passage is that Jesus comes down

to be among the people. It it happens at the very

beginning of his life when he's born in Bethlehem, the Son of

God, who who lived before he was even born as a human.

He, he was in heaven. He comes to be born in a Manger

in a small village in the Middle East.

And it happens here again in this passage.

After a night of being up on a mountain and praying with some

of his followers, Jesus comes down and the Bible says he

stands on a level place with a large group, large group of

people. This is the beginning of what is

often called the Sermon on the Plane.

If you spent any time reading the book of Matthew, you're

probably familiar with the Sermon on the Mount that shows

up there. And Bible scholars will debate,

is the Sermon on the Plane the same thing as the Sermon on the

Mount? And you can debate that if you

want to debate that because there are some similarities in

the teaching. But I don't want you to miss how

incredible it is that Jesus, the all powerful one, would come

down to stand on a place with the people.

Putting things on platforms is really normal in our culture.

We we put celebrities on platforms, we put musicians on

platforms, we put pastors on platforms in jewellery stores,

we put jewellery on platforms and we put ourselves on

platforms all the time. Every time that you have ever

tried to get ahead in your career, you are trying to sell

yourself to somebody else who can give you a certain type of

job. You are lifting yourself up and

basically you're competing with other people and saying, hey, I

have more, you have more reason to put me in this role than you

do another person. You're putting yourself on a

platform. We put ourselves on platforms

all the time. Whenever we post anything on

social media, we're saying to everybody, hey, pay attention to

me. Notice me.

If you're a reader, I want to encourage you to read a book

called Platforms to Pillars by Mark Sayers.

And I like how Sayers defines a platform, he says.

It's a mentality. It's a way of approaching life

that promises to reinforce our uniqueness, to deliver on our

desires and to offer validation and visibility.

And in the book, he, he tells a story to illustrate his point.

He was on an airplane ride and the flight, as many times

happens, was having problems with its Wi-Fi, with its

entertainment system. It was down for everyone on the

flight. Nobody had access to Wi-Fi or

any movies or anything like that.

And on this flight, there was, I'll just call her a Karen, no

offense to all the Karens in the room, but there was a Karen who

was on the flight who was quite agitated that her Wi-Fi and

entertainment system was not working properly.

And she called over one of the flight attendants and Karen

said, you know, it is your duty to ensure that all of us have

positive emotions and mental peace.

Well, they couldn't fix the Wi-Fi and they couldn't fix the

entertainment system. And so Karen got a little bit

more and more agitated and eventually called the cabin

manager over to be able to speak to to the cabin manager.

And the cabin manager offered a full refund to Karen, but that

was not enough for Karen. Karen says that the cabin crew

is targeting her and she demands immediate action to fix the

problem and she was not even paying any attention to the fact

that everybody else on the flight was in the same boat as

her. We laugh at that and go, I would

never do anything like that. But any environment where you

and I go looking for personal visibility and to pursue our own

desires as the primary goal is US putting ourselves on a

platform as being more important than others.

People do this all the time. We do this in relationships, we

do this in church. We live with an idea of as long

as you do what I want, when I want, how I want, then I'll

stick around. We put ourselves on a platform.

But Jesus treats power very differently.

He comes, he puts himself in an environment where he is in a

level place with the people. He he's showing us that there's

a different power that marks the Kingdom of God.

See, the power of Jesus draws people in rather than seeking to

to push people out. Luke paints this incredible

picture of this huge crowd of people, and they're all trying

to touch Jesus. There is just something about

Jesus that makes people want to be drawn to him, want to to even

just have a little glimpse of him.

And maybe, just maybe I can I can touch him because there's

power coming out of him. But I love the little details in

this story because Jesus comes and he stands on this level

place with this incredible diversity of people who are

gathered there. There's the people you would

expect. There's his disciples, the

people who already are fully convinced and committed to

Jesus, who see Jesus as their teacher, who see Jesus as the

one that they trust and want to follow with their life.

But then there's another group of people that Luke describes.

He says there's a great number of people from Judea and

Jerusalem. He he often whenever you see the

word, people show up in Luke. Quite often he's using that to

describe people who are not yet sold on Jesus.

They're there to check him out. They're they're exploring, they

want to understand more about who is this guy?

What's he all about? But there's something about

Jesus that is making them drawn to him.

But then there's another group of people that are described in

this passage. Luke says that they are from

Tyre and Sidon, and this one is if you lived in that day would

be very, very shocking to you. You would understand why you

would be surrounded. If you were there in the crowd

that day, you would go. It makes sense that all the

people who are already following Jesus would be where Jesus is.

It makes sense that some people who are asking questions about

Jesus might want to come and hear what Jesus has to say.

But there's another group of people, this group of people

from Tyre and Sidon. In the Old Testament, people

from these communities were described as wealthy and yet

godless oppressors. The historian Josephus described

people from these two communities in particular as

being our bitterest enemies. And yet here they are, something

drawing them to hear and encounter Jesus.

Jesus does not discriminate on who he stands ready to serve.

I want every person to hear this, even those of you who are

watching online. The presence and the power of

Jesus is available for you. It's for people who have money

as much as it is for people who have no money.

It's for people who come from Canada just as much as it is for

people who live in any other country on the planet.

The presence and power of Jesus is available for people from

Ukraine as much as it is for people from Russia.

The presence and power of Jesus is available for people from

Palestine every bit as much as it is for people from Israel.

The presence and power of Jesus is available for people who have

the highest degree of education and people who have none.

It does not matter what your gender or your sexuality is, the

presence and power of Jesus is available to you.

Jesus is ready to serve Muslims, Hindus, Jews, atheists, those

who are already Christians. He's ready to serve people who

have their life all together and people whose lives seem to be

falling apart. There is nothing about Jesus

that says you need to let me check your passport and check a

whole bunch of boxes before you can come to me.

I only welcome a certain type of person who agrees with me on

everything already. He is ready to serve both those

who believe and those who are skeptics, and he's also ready to

serve those who have not shown any history of wanting to

experience God in their own life.

Stop and think about how remarkably different Jesus is

than the environment we often find ourselves in today.

You know, world in a culture where we surround ourselves with

the people who think like us, act like us and anybody else

who's different than us, we push to the side, we cancel them out

immediately. And Jesus creates an environment

where all can come and experience him.

You know what it takes for someone to be able to do that?

You have to be really secure in who you are.

You you have to be secure in who you are and not threatened in

any way by someone else who's different than you.

And because Jesus is already all powerful, he's not threatened by

any other worldview. He's not threatened by any other

belief system. Because he's all powerful, he's

not worried about someone who might want to harm him.

And even though he is all powerful, Jesus does not see

this power as something to be used to control people or

manipulate people. Instead, the power of Jesus is

marked by compassion. I I don't know what each of you

are going through in your life right now, but I do know this.

No matter who you are or where you are, Jesus, the all powerful

King, sees you. He knows exactly your story.

He knows exactly your needs and he is moved with compassion for

people whose lives are broken. He's moved with compassion

towards people who are in the depths of pain in their life.

And every day, I know we see it on the news about how broken our

world is. But beyond the big picture of

how broken our world is, I know that in this room right now,

there are dozens, if not hundreds of stories of people

who are just going through it right now.

And I want you to know that Jesus sees you and he's moved

with compassion for you. And I'm also confident of this.

Jesus is still in the business of healing broken lives.

And I know that because also throughout this room there are

countless stories of people who've experienced the

compassionate, healing touch of God in their life.

The power of God that flowed through Jesus to heal these

lives. And this story 2000 years ago is

the same power that can heal broken lives today.

When we pray, we are doing the same thing that the people in

this story did. They're reaching out to Jesus,

hoping to encounter his power in their life.

And when we pray, when we go to him in prayer, that's exactly

what we are doing. We are asking Jesus to send his

power into our life, to show us his compassion and to bring his

power to be reality for us. But I think too many times we

miss out on this as people. We miss out on the power of

going to Jesus. You know, every time when we

invite you to go to our prayer wall out in the foyer after the

service, if you have a need to pray for it is beautiful how

many of you go and leave prayer requests and pray for our

elders? But I also know that there are

dozens and dozens of you who never take up the opportunity

and you're missing out on an opportunity to invite the power

of Jesus to come and bring bring his power to real.

Be real in your life and in your story.

This posture of compassion that Jesus has is so different for

someone who has power. Like think about the culture he

lived in. The Roman Empire was was often

known for using fear tactics to control people.

If you were to do anything in the Roman Empire that did not

show solidarity with Rome, you were considered quite often to

be dangerous. Even the religious leaders of

the day saw themselves as being above the people, using the

religious law to control people. But the compassion of Jesus

stands in stark contrast to the power structure that he finds

himself living in. But I recognize that even today,

in a lot of different environments, fear is still how

we use power. From parents to politicians to

postures, in marriages and in workplaces, instilling fear is

something that we lean into whenever we feel like we're out

of control or when things aren't going our way.

And a lot of us have bought into the idea that, well, if you're

feared, people won't take advantage of you.

But they will if it's all about love and compassion.

And, and that might be true if your goal in life is your own

survival, but the goal of Jesus is far more than his own

survival. See, Jesus leads with compassion

because His desire is for your complete healing.

In this story, there are three different reasons why the people

come to see Jesus. Some wanted to hear him teach.

Some wanted to be healed of their diseases.

Some were tormented by unclean spirits.

They're experiencing demonic oppression in their life.

And all of us as humans, we have our own idea of what it is that

we want Jesus to heal. But Jesus sees a bigger story

than what you see. See, Jesus came to heal the

whole person. Jesus came to heal people, body,

mind, and soul. Have you ever tried to build

something and then realized it wasn't going according to plan?

Like you're doing a DIY project at home and you're trying to

build something like this is not going well.

What's your normal reaction when a building project doesn't go

well? You get frustrated, throw a

hammer, maybe. Do you get angry?

Do you just like, tear it all apart and say, forget this whole

thing or, or do you just give up and walk away and say, somebody

else can figure this out? In the eyes of your Creator, you

and I, we are far more broken than what you and I realize.

But because Jesus is love, he moves with compassion to heal

instead of leading with anger to tear it all apart.

See, compassion wasn't weakness. Compassion was the most powerful

act of Jesus. It's the compassion of Jesus

that ultimately leads him to the cross.

At the cross, as one writer said, Jesus declares war on sin

on the cross. One of the most powerful things

that Jesus does is allow himself to be abused and killed instead

of using his power to fight back.

To every person who was there that day, it made Jesus look

like a complete failure. But there was nothing more

powerful that Jesus ever did than give his life for you.

And if you're here today and you're exploring the message of

Jesus, I want to welcome you. We are thrilled that you are

here exploring Jesus. And I want you to know two

things. Jesus is all powerful and he

loves you. But he also loves you enough to

say that what you think you need from Jesus is barely scratching

the surface of what needs to be healed in your life.

That he sees the full brokenness of your life, that you are not

the way that God designed and made you to be.

And Jesus has come so that you could experience his full

healing in your life. Jesus sees that for all of us as

humans, that we've all sinned. We all live in a world of sin,

and that sin leads to our death, physically, emotionally,

spiritually. The Bible tells us that the

wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.

And if you want to receive and know the power and the presence

of God in your life, you have to change directions from the path

you're going and put your faith in Jesus.

And the Bible says when you put your faith in Jesus, you are

saved. The promise of eternal life is

yours. It's a completed act.

But then the Bible also says this, that we are still being

saved. That even though you have the

promise of eternal life, that the Christian life is an ongoing

journey of being saved from the impact of sin on your life.

That God's power is at work constantly to heal every part of

your life and lead you and I to become the people that we were

always created and designed to be.

It's a healing that's guaranteed because the Bible says the God

who started a good work in you is faithful to complete that

good work. And for those of us who are

already followers of Jesus, what that means is that our lives

should look more and more like his.

And that means disciples of Jesus should use their power the

way Jesus did in this room. There are some of us who are in

positions of power. Whether you are a boss at work,

whether you are a parent, there are places that you give your

time to help others. You are in some type of a

position of power. And if this is you, to follow

Jesus means you also need to allow Jesus to shape how you

lead in the everyday moments of life.

There is no place in the life of a follower of Jesus for someone

to be a bully in the modern use of the word.

There's no place for a Christian to ever use fear or manipulation

in the life of another person. One of the most heartbreaking

things to watch happening in 2025 is how many times Christian

leaders miss being compassionate, miss seeking the

well-being of others as their goal, and live as bullies.

Now, most of us, we don't see ourselves as having any type of

position of power, but it doesn't mean you don't have

power because for most of us power is more about possession

than it is position. In our culture, we talk about

power as only from perspective of position.

But if you are a Christian, you possess power.

Every single person in this room, you all have influence on

the life of someone else. That's power.

But beyond that, if you're a Christian, you have the Holy

Spirit living inside of you. Second Peter chapter 1 says

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

this. His divine power has given you

everything required for life and godliness.

Every interaction that you have with another person, you are

operating from a position of power because you possess the

power of the Holy Spirit living in you.

You might not have a title that gives you power, but you have

something even better than a title you've got.

So be honest with yourself. Do you use the power in your

life to manipulate and use other people instead of move towards

them with compassion? Do you try to just get people,

other people, to do whatever it is you want them to do, or do

you use it to serve them? Do you do you create spaces

where people feel welcome? And ultimately, do you point

people to the full healing of Jesus in their life?

There are there are people in our community and in our church

who name the name of Jesus as being a Christian.

But when you go home through the week, you are being simply

abusive to your spouse or your kids.

Please stop naming the name of Jesus as Lord and Savior of your

life if you're going to live like that.

That's not how. That's not how my King shows his

power. The King of all kings uses his

power to come to the people and serve.

Jesus has used his power to show so much compassion and so much

kindness and so much patience towards you.

Allow that to shape the way that you relate to the people around

you. Jesus is different, and as his

disciples we should be different too.

Let me pray. Father, thank you for sending

your Son, the King of all kings, the Messiah that was promised,

the Savior of the world, who comes in power to serve and to

die, so I can have life, so people in this room can have

life, and so people in our community, in our city could

have life. God forgive us for the number of

times we lose sight of that power and the ways that Jesus

lived out the power that was His Lord.

I pray that for those who need some type of healing in their

life today, they would encounter the power of Jesus to bring

healing to them. And Lord, for those of us who

have used power in any way to manipulate or control or bring

about fear in the lives of other people, help us to see, to

really see the ways that Jesus has used his power to show love

for us, change our hearts God, help us to be different because

our King is different. In Jesus name I pray.

Amen. Amen.

Let's stand and sing this last song together.