Followers | Luke 4:14-30

Hey everyone, thanks for joining us for the Downtown Community Church podcast.

To continue our series, Followers a Study Through Luke, Pastor Ben Kemford teaches on the different expectations we have of Jesus and what this can mean for us when we're following him.

Pastor Ben left us with some key questions to consider as we go into our week continuing our walk with him.

In what ways have your expectations of Jesus differed from your experiences with him?

And in what ways have those expectations caused you to reject Jesus?

When we have our own expectations of Jesus and what he is like, it's easy for us to then reject him when he shows up in an unexpected way.

Yet there is good news.

We get to love a God that forgives us and loves us anyway.

The mission of Downtown Community Church is to love God, make disciples, and be great neighbors.

And this mission extends beyond what happens during a Sunday service.

It shapes the way we use everything God has entrusted to us.

And generosity includes our tithes and financial offerings, but it also involves using our time, abilities, and energy to care for others and strengthen the body of Christ.

If you are ready to grow in your faith, find meaningful community, or use your gifts to serve, visit downtowncommunitychurch.com to learn how you can take your next step.

You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook to keep up with everything happening at DCC.

We are so thankful that you decided to listen in today, and we pray that this message encourages you to follow Jesus deeper and find a more meaningful connection with him.

Now let's hear this week's message through Luke.

Let's hear God's word.

This is from Luke chapter 4, verses 14 through 30.

Luke 4:14–30

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.

He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he'd been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of the sight of the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.

He began by saying to them, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.

Isn't this Joseph's son?

They asked.

Jesus said to them, Surely you will quote this proverb to me, physician, heal yourself.

And you will tell me, Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.

Truly I tell you, he continued, No prophet is accepted in his hometown.

I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years, and there was a severe famine throughout the land.

Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.

And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet.

Yet not one of them was cleansed.

Only name in the Syrian.

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this.

They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built in order to throw him off the cliff.

But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

It's the word of God.

Amen.

You may have a seat, kids, you may be dismissed.

Love you guys.

Finally, let's go.

It's amazing.

Love you guys.

See you, kiddos.

All right.

My name's Ben, and I have the honor of serving as the lead pastor here at uh at Downtown Community Church.

And uh just want to say welcome.

I mean, this time of year, especially, we know folks are coming from um, you know, some of you are it's your very first time, maybe second or third time at this church.

Um, and what part of my hope is that you would just kind of see a true and a genuine, authentic Jesus.

Part of what we're doing is we're spending um the fall going through Jesus Galilee ministry according to Luke.

Luke chapters kind of four through nine or so.

Um record Jesus having a specific ministry kind of towards Galilee.

We're gonna come back and pick up one, two, like we talked about during Christmas, three during baptism.

It's gonna be a really cool time.

Um, I'm gonna pray for us because I think what here's what I'm praying for us this morning.

Let me just tell you what the sermon's all about.

Um, there is such a tendency to have an expectation of Jesus.

But when we read this, it's it's oftentimes different.

Um, and so I'm just gonna pray that God kind of illuminates our heart to those things.

So, Jesus, we ask that we're in your presence.

Every single one of us, we're from different places, spaces, walks of life.

We're from different um religious backgrounds, even different, different variations of thoughts and following you.

For some of us, we've been following you for a long time.

Some of us, it's it's just a really recent, really new thing for us.

For some of us, God, we're here, we're still trying to figure all of this out.

Not even sure if you're there, not even sure if you exist, this whole Jesus Church God Bible thing.

But when you were on the planet, Jesus, and people saw you, you changed what they thought about you.

You changed what they thought about God, and you changed what they thought about themselves.

And so, Jesus, we pray that that would be true of us this morning.

And it's in your name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

So we're reading the book of Luke, and I want to tell you again briefly why.

We, um, if you're in here and you consider yourself a Christian, a Jesus follower, a disciple, um, there's a sense in which we are trying to live a life contextualized in 2026, but none of us have actually walked and talked and followed Jesus physically when he was on the earth.

And I know that's shocking to everybody, but what's really helpful is the book of Luke was actually written in the same kind of context.

Luke, who was a doctor, Luke who was a historian, Luke who followed and talked with Mark, Luke who followed and talked with Paul, Luke who followed and talked with all kinds of different early Jesus followers, sat down to basically write for this guy named Theophilus about Jesus.

And the reason why is because there were so many people who had written about this man named Jesus.

And Luke's point was I have documented, I have had conversations, I have talked to the people who were there.

In fact, I've followed this for a while in Theophilus.

I know you've heard a lot about Jesus, but I want you to have certainty of which of these things are true.

And I think part of the reason is because there was so much that was different about their expectation of Jesus.

Because similar to them, we have an expectation of what we expect Jesus to be like.

And every single one of us was handed at some point in time a picture of this is who Jesus is.

It was sometimes a physical picture, and sometimes just a conceptual picture.

And what's actually really interesting is as you go and study cultures, you see how cultures can create Jesus to be a cultural representation of their kind of culture.

So let me just give you a couple of cultural representations of Jesus, okay?

So first off, we have white Anglo-Jesus, okay?

First one, he's kind of like holy, but he's like the leader, Jesus.

He's like looking resolutely into the future.

And the other one, he's your best friend.

He's kind of like, he's like, what's up, fellas?

You know?

He's kind of giving you the peace, kind of giving you the finger guns at the same time, some kind of like uh holiness, but he has a nice little glow behind his head because obviously he has a good backlit Jesus.

Um, so that's that Jesus, okay?

Next up, so this one's cool.

This one's from Istanbul.

Um, this is from like a piece of artwork and that's created, and you can see there's there's differences.

I mean, this Jesus, you gotta like this Jesus because he's tired like me.

He has bags under his eyes sometimes, Jesus, right?

This is exhausted Jesus.

Um next up.

There we go.

See?

So we've got, y'all, this Jesus, like this Jesus is fantastic, Jesus, one of my favorite Jesus, all right?

So this is this is both kind of like the black African Jesus, right?

This is um this is this idea, and you can even see within kind of culture, it creates different versions, different sets, different subsets from different places.

And again, you can find this all over the world.

Um, next up, we've got uh this is um this is from Japan.

This is from different parts and different places from books and some kind of some tellings, but this is kind of the the Japanese uh version of Jesus.

And all of us, all of us were handed different versions.

In fact, we got one more.

This is the, I'm gonna call this the Middle Eastern slash chosen Jesus, right?

Have you ever seen the chosen?

This is kind of what the the thought of like the best representation of potentially what he looked like.

But the truth is we don't know.

We don't know.

We don't know exactly what he looked like.

But every single one of us has a picture of what he was like.

And in fact, even if you weren't raised in church, isn't this true?

You have a picture, and your picture wasn't because somebody handed you a picture, it was what people talked about when they talked about God.

It was what people said, and in fact, even more so, and we know this in the information age, our picture of Jesus currently, in fact, this is probably more true the younger that you are, that your picture of Jesus has to do partly with what people told you about Jesus, and the other part is how Jesus people responded to things.

You saw how Jesus people responded to something socially, you saw how Jesus people responded to something politically, you saw how Jesus responded to somebody who walked into your church one day, or when you walked into a church one day, and it informed you about an expectation of Jesus.

And here's the problem, here's the problem.

Over and over, what we read is that it's almost innate inhumanity to have a picture of what this Messiah looks like, what this messiah is going to be like, the things that he cared about, the things that he loved, the things that he hated, the things that he stood for.

And almost every single time it's wrong.

Almost every single time in Scripture there was something that they were missing about God.

Because let's be honest, he's God, and none of us fully understand or fully grasp him, but we all have an expectation, and that's exactly what happens to Jesus this morning.

He runs square into the expectations of interestingly, his hometown, of anybody who would think we have the right expectation of Jesus.

We are the religious people from where Jesus is from.

In fact, we remember when they took him from Nazareth, they took him to Bethlehem.

We were honestly kind of ticked about the fact that they took him to Bethlehem, then he was born over there, because we wanted to be able to be born in Nazareth, but he was and he was born in Bethlehem.

But now that he's back in Nazareth, in fact, he's been a carpenter for a little while.

I've got Jesus' table in my living room.

You think about that?

Like somebody had Jesus' chair.

That'd been incredible.

So Jesus, who was a carpenter, who has just been baptized.

Then he's led in the desert.

Or into the wilderness more so.

Tempted for 40 days.

And he comes back.

In chapter 4, verse 14, it picks up.

And he returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee.

And reports about him went out through all the surrounding country.

And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

And he would go and he would teach.

In fact, we even know that he would perform miracles because he's going to say in a little bit that, you know, you guys are going to expect some miracles like I did in other places.

And John, if you ever read the Gospel of John, Jesus' first miracle.

He's at a wedding, Cana of Galilee.

And after the until you talk about something that will kind of disrupt your theological box of Jesus.

He was at a wedding, very first miracle.

They drank all the wine at a multi-day party too early.

They don't know what to do.

At first, Jesus says, Jesus' mom says, Do something.

He's like, I don't know.

This is not my, and his mom looks at the people and says, Do whatever Jesus told you.

Do whatever Jesus tells you.

And he turns hundreds of gallons of water to wine.

Very first miracle.

So now he shows up to his hometown.

And like he would do, like a traveling rabbi would do, or the rabbi of the particular temple where they were, he would walk in, and on the Sabbath, as everybody was gathered, they would read something from somewhere in what were the Hebrew scriptures, to us is the Old Testament, but they would read something, and whoever was the rabbi of the place would sit down and go begin to teach.

And so Jesus, knowing this custom, he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, hometown.

And as was his custom, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and when he stood up to read, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.

He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written.

And what he does is he opens up to Isaiah.

Isaiah has, this is in fact what he's going to pull from in Isaiah 61, because of the language, there's four different definitive suffering servant chapters in Isaiah.

Stuff like where he says, it was by his wounds we were healed.

It was the will of God to crush him.

It would be these really clear things that for somehow God was going to provide this leader.

But this leader was going to be this servant.

And this servant was going to suffer, and this suffering servant was somehow through him.

Nobody really understood this because almost every leader had been a leader that created prominence through power.

There was going to be this leader who suffered and served and somehow restored and renewed and redeemed by the people of God.

And he reads this.

In fact, this was kind of part of the rhythm, the annual structure, that people would read this section of verses.

And for decades, centuries, generations, people have been gathering and reading and listening to Isaiah.

And so Jesus stands up and he says that the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

What does that mean?

He has sent me to proclaim liberty, freedom to the captives, the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

And what happens next is what would happen every single time.

He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

Why?

Because that's what would happen.

In fact, most times in their sermon, the people would remain standing.

The rabbi, the visiting rabbi, would read from the skull and he'd sit down and he'd begin to talk.

And there was something special about this particular day because again, they had heard all of the things, all of the ideas.

And Jesus gives probably the shortest sermon in the history of church.

In fact, it's possible that he said more words because of this, because of something he says in a second, they say in a second.

But this is his sermon.

He reads, Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me to proclaim liberty, freedom, the oppressed, the captive, the poor, the blind.

And then he looks at the crowd and he says, Today, today, as in right now, right here, in this moment, today, this scripture that people have been reading for generations has been fulfilled in your hearing.

In other words, it's like he's announcing, and that suffering servant, the one that you've been reading about, that's me.

I'm here.

And it was an interesting response.

Because it's almost like, and you can imagine yourself in the room, you're you're not expecting this.

You've heard of Jesus.

He's been around.

Maybe he went to middle school with you.

I don't know.

He did really good on tests, by the way, right?

And and he would go through and you would have seen him and you would have known him.

And they're kind of doing this cross-reference, which is well, we we like him, we think well of him, but man, this is a lot.

This is their response.

And all spoke well of him, marveled at his gracious words that were coming from his mouth.

Maybe there was more words that he was saying, maybe it was just these words, but they were in awe.

And what's interesting is when it says marvel, the marvel that that's kind of an idea of awe.

It really doesn't have a positive or a negative connotation.

It gets his connotation from the surrounding context, which means to some degree they were like, wow.

And some people, like any crowd, right?

I say that about Jesus, and some of you were like, wow, that's amazing.

And some of you are like, wow, I don't know.

I, you know, wow, that's a that's a big claim to say that you are the Messiah.

You, wait, wait, wait.

I'm like the Messiah, the Messiah, the Savior?

Like you, you, that's you.

And they said, Is not this Joseph's son?

And some of them were like, yo, isn't this Joseph's son?

And some of them were like, wait, isn't that Joseph's son?

So many times in the Bible we want to put a crowd as a particular motive, but as you know, with every motive, there's a mixture of crowd, every crowd, there's a mixture of motives.

But there was this interesting kind of thought.

But what Jesus knew is that all of them had an expectation.

Every single one of them had an expectation.

And he uncovers it.

And he said to them, doubtless, in other words, I'm sure this is going to happen, you're going to quote this to me, the quote to me this proverb.

Physician, heal yourself.

What you have heard, we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.

In other words, Jesus says, and I know that there's an expectation.

The expectation is because, because God, you know, Jesus, if you're the Messiah, we've been doing this, we've been coming, we've been going to temple, we've been heard, we've heard this scroll.

In fact, we've heard, in fact, I could just quote for you Isaiah 61.

I don't even have to have you read Isaiah 61 to me.

And we've heard it over and over, we've come here, we've prayed, we've we've made our offerings.

In fact, Jesus, this is your hometown.

This is what you're gonna do for us.

Now, here's why I say that.

Almost every one of us has a similar expectation of Jesus, whether we ever admitted it or not.

And our maybe doesn't look like this, but it's a similar dynamic, because essentially what they're saying is, Jesus, look at all we've done, look at how close you're supposed to be to us, aren't you gonna do good things for us?

Here's how we think about it.

I love God, God loves me, I do what God says, God blesses me.

God loves me, I love God, I do what he says, he blesses me.

It's really simple.

That's what happens, right?

When I love my wife, she loves me, I do things for her, she does things for me, right?

This just seems like what's natural.

It's almost what's naturally causal.

In other words, obedience, obedience creates a blessing.

Obedience creates a blessing, and here's the problem with that.

If obedience creates a blessing, then God is now indebted to bless us because we're obedient.

What we didn't realize is we put an expectation on Jesus for something He was to produce for us.

God, I have an expectation.

When I read your word, when I pray, I'm going to get something out of it.

I'm going to feel your presence.

I'm going to feel the close.

In fact, God, what I mean, this is what God, this is what you've done for others.

This is what I, I mean, I've got I know I've seen it because people put it on Instagram, and they don't ever embellish anything on Instagram or anything on social media, right?

But they had this thing, and they they were praying, right?

And then this beam of light felt like it came down, and and and they opened your word, and it was just angels are just singing every time I open the Bible, and every time I pray, and it seems like God, that's what happens for everybody else.

And I I love you, I pray to you, I go to church, I feel like you know, I do a hundred different things.

I'm a part of a group, I give, I serve, and now I read your word, and I don't get anything out of it.

God, I deeply want the forgiveness and the grace that you've given me.

And God, because you love me, I know because I I've given my life to you, I know that you have a tendency to love the people I love and care about the people I care about, and then interestingly be frustrated with the same people that I'm frustrated with.

And so, God, when the people who are less obedient than me are blessed in an area that I'm struggling with, I look at you and I say, Why?

Why?

Why them?

God, why did you give them the boyfriend or the girlfriend and not me?

I've been following you for forever and they barely know you.

God, why did they get into that job?

God, why is it that they get to have kids?

God, why is it that they get to move in that house?

God, why is it that they seem like they don't have stress and frustration in their life?

Because I've been following you and loving you and serving you for my entire life, maybe.

And Jesus says, doubtless.

You're gonna think because you're in my hometown, that I'm gonna do more for you.

And it comes from this motive that I'm actually indebted to you because of what you've done.

And if it started off with them talking positively, the things that Jesus said next to them were so infuriating because they were so culturally charged.

And he said, Verse 24, truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.

But in truth I tell you, he said, There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah.

And when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, a great famine came over all the land.

And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow.

Now, some of us think, oh, that makes sense.

Jesus cared about widows.

God cares about here's let me just pause real quick.

If that's what you think, that is partly true.

But that's not nearly the emphasis of what he's saying.

What he's saying is crazy.

He's saying, okay, remember Elijah.

And they'd say, yeah, remember Elijah, and there was this there was this kind of Old Testament thing that happened where Elijah prophesied to the king and told the king, hey, it's not going to rain for a number of years, and sure enough, it didn't rain for a number of years, where the king hated Elijah because he thought Elijah could control it.

And so he said, Okay, Elijah, if that's true, somebody find Elijah so we can get him flip this thing around.

And he couldn't find Elijah anywhere for years, no rain.

People are dying, people in drought, all this kind of stuff.

God hid Elijah in this one particular place, but everything ran out of that particular place as the drought continued, famine continued.

He eventually says, I want you to go to this widow, Zarephath, in the land of Sidon.

And here's what you and I don't get because geographically we don't necessarily look at the map all day, but every single person in Jesus' audience knew that in those days, God could have sent Elijah to any widow in the nation of Israel.

And you know what he did?

He sent Elijah to a Gentile woman, not of the people of God, not of the place of God.

In fact, here's it wasn't just Gentile.

They were the enemy.

They were the problem, they were the reason that Israel needed in some ways to repent.

And so he says, okay, God could have sent them to anybody in Israel, anybody from from the Jewish folk, but he didn't.

In fact, he sent to the opposite.

He sent to a Gentile.

They would have said, Well, are you kidding me?

Jesus, you could have used any example.

He says, Okay, well, if you had a problem with that, it's about to get worse.

He says, There's a second person that happened.

Verse 27.

And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha.

And none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.

He says, Okay, okay, so so if you thought Gentile was bad, Gentile was bad.

Now, now let me just say this.

If we think that we have ever experienced tension, especially in our country, we have no clue the level of Jew versus Gentile, because this was not just this geographical battle that would continue to war.

It was a geographical, it was a religious, it was the ethnocentric, it was all I mean, these people were the enemy.

And then he brings up Naaman.

Naaman, who, the nation of Israel, had a warring army.

Naaman is the commander in the warring army.

And the only reason Naaman even knows anything about Israel, this is this is this is crazy.

I mean, think about it.

You're just hearing Jesus say, I'm the Son of God, I'm the Messiah.

You're thinking, great, because we're the oppressed, we're the ones who are down, we're the ones who are blind, we're the ones who are poor.

Yay, Jesus came to restore our power.

And he says, I want you to remember Naaman.

The only reason that Naaman had any hope of the God of Israel is because some of Naaman's military servants, basically, stole a Hebrew woman.

Stole her, kidnapped her, brought her to their home.

Naaman gets leprosy.

As Naaman gets leprosy, this Hebrew woman says, There's somebody in the camp of Israel who can do something about it.

And this prophet's name is Elisha.

Naaman talks to the command, talks to King Ahab and says, Hey, give me all kinds of stuff.

So gives them all kinds of silver, all kinds of gold, all kinds of clothes, takes this whole loot of people, a whole loot of men, and goes down and meets the king.

The king says, I don't know what you want me to do, King of Israel.

Go talk to Elisha.

Goes down to Elisha, goes to Elisha's place.

Elisha doesn't even go meet him outside, sends his servants out and says, Tell Naaman to go wash in the Jordan seven times.

Naaman is so offended at the fact that Elisha didn't even go meet him, that he says, no.

It's not till Elisha's servants go talk to him and say, Hey, for real, for real, if he would have told you to do something crazy, you probably would have done it.

So if he just told you to go wash in this muddy water in the Jordan, why don't you do that?

Well, Naaman says, fine.

And Naaman, a pagan-worshiping Gentile, God says, is the only person in all of Israel who is healed.

Naaman washes seven times, comes out, is cleansed.

He says to Elisha, Elisha, this is.

I can't believe this.

He says, Elisha, this, your God is God.

Here, you can take all of this stuff, all this stuff.

You can have all of it.

Elisha says, I don't want any of it.

God doesn't want any of it.

He doesn't need your stuff.

He doesn't want your stuff.

God, he wants you to know that he is God.

And he basically responds back and says, He is God.

In fact, from now on, I will serve no other gods except for the God of Israel.

And I will serve only the God of Israel.

And he pauses and he's like, okay, except for the fact that I do work for the king.

The king serves this other God.

And when the king goes to bow down to this other God, he's going to put his right hand on me to support him, and I will also have to bow.

Is that okay?

And Allah says, Go in peace.

In other words, he's saying, I have no way of healing myself.

I had no way of making myself clean.

I had no way.

The widow that he is sent to, this Gentile widow.

In fact, when he gets there, she basically says, Hey, you've come too late.

We've got a little bit of flour, we've got a little bit of oil, we're going to make that my son and I, and then we're going to eat it and die.

That's all we've got.

And God says, I could have been sent.

And Jesus could have used any example.

But at the very first time in his hometown, when everybody had an expectation, because you're like us, you love us.

Because you're like us, you're for us.

Because you because you're like us, you're going to prioritize us.

Because look at what we've done for you.

Look at how we've been around.

Look at the temple.

Look at all the places.

Look at all the times.

Look at all the verses.

But Jesus was more concerned with a broken and contrite heart than he was with all the sacrifices in the world.

Because as long as I'm making my way to God through my sacrifices, I'm actually saying, Jesus, I don't need you.

I can do enough.

I can provide enough for you to now owe me.

But it's the heart of the Jesus Father, someone who truly understands the gospel, that understands.

That Jesus' heart.

His heart is to proclaim good news to the poor.

And that's not just the physically poor.

That's the spiritually poor.

Naaman was rich.

Very wealthy.

The widow was not.

It's the spiritually poor.

It's a spiritual captain.

It's a spiritual blind.

It's a spiritual oppressed.

It's to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Here's the point.

We have an expectation that if we do good for God, God will do good for us.

But the gospel says that we're not good.

The gospel says I'm aiming.

The gospel says, I'm Zarefath.

I'm the Gentile widow.

There's nothing that I can do to make myself good, to make myself holy, to make myself pleasing to God.

But only God can do that.

Only Jesus can do that.

And here's what's interesting to me.

At the end of this story.

When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.

They rose up.

They drove him out.

They drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built so they could throw him down.

I mean, you talk about what a what a welcome to ministry.

I'm the son of God.

Isaiah 61, today that has been fulfilled, and you're hearing.

That's amazing.

Word and all.

Okay.

But you also need to realize that my heart is not for the people that you think it's for.

It's not for the people who think that they look good, who think that they don't need a doctor, who think that they're doing well.

It's for the people who are broken, the people who are poor, the people who realize that they're sinful.

It's for the people who don't walk into church this morning thinking God loves me, I'm so blessed.

It's for the people who walk in this morning thinking perhaps God will strike me with the lightning bolt because I walked in because I know I'm sinful.

And did you know that if you felt like that, you are more close to the heart of God in this story than anybody else who walked in feeling holy?

But here's the problem: that's not our expectation of Jesus.

And so when that Jesus shows up, we kick him out.

Which is why almost every single person in this room who is opposed or questioning or skeptical about Christianity, I don't know you.

And isn't this part of your story that you have seen you and it maybe you didn't have the words to put it to this?

But you saw a Jesusless Christianity.

You saw one that had the Christianity with the moral framework, but but where were the poor?

Where was the orphan?

Where was the widow?

Where was the where was the spinge yourselves on behalf of the poor indeed?

I mean, don't do we see that, right?

Like Isaiah says this so clearly.

He talks about this.

One of my favorite verses, and he and he he says, if you spinge yourselves on behalf of the poor and on the needy, and your light will become like the noon day.

We live in a context where how churches try to have the biggest light, is try to have the biggest show with the biggest band and the biggest thing and all that kind of stuff, and the most holiest thing in the world.

And Jesus says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not my people.

Because if we have an expectation that's different than the Jews we experience, when the Jesus of the Bible shows up, we kick him out.

This is why we love a God who forgives us, but we struggle with a God and does it feel just for God to call us to forgive other people.

This is why we love a God who so generously gave everything to us and for us.

We struggle with a God who calls us to live our lives as a living sacrifice to Him.

This is why we have a difficult time with the fact that the gospel says, I mean, you are more sinful and broken than you ever dare to believe, but more loved, forgiven, and accepted through Christ than you ever dared hope.

And if ever there was a time where Jesus did the unexpected, it was in the last few hours of his life, because he got his bread and final supper, and he broke it.

And he said to his disciples, This is my body which is going to be broken for you.

Took the cup and he said, This is my blood.

It's gonna be poured out for the forgiveness of many.

You see, everybody expected a conquering king.

But when he became the suffering servant, they rejected him.

And when he became a servant to those who suffered, we rejected him.

Let me ask you this question.

What's your expectation of Jesus?

And in what ways has that differed from your experience?

And you've rejected the true and the real and the authentic Jesus.

Is your Jesus a Jesus that calls you to power and to conquer?

Or is your Jesus a Jesus that calls you to love and to serve and to be poured out for the forgiveness of many?

Is your Jesus a Jesus that cares so much about your righteousness that he actually makes you incredibly self-righteous?

Or is your Jesus a Jesus that you realize there is no righteousness that you have in and of yourselves, and the only ways that we're righteous is to spend time in his presence and as his spirit draws us and makes us righteous.

He said, This is my body which is broken, and my blood, which is shed.

You see, at the core of our faith stood the ultimate injustice, the ultimate suffering for us.

And he said, that is the kingdom.

So we're gonna end this service together by taking communion.

And during this time, we're gonna sing one more song.

And I don't know what your version of Jesus is, I don't know what your expectation of Jesus is.

I don't know maybe the ways that you have been disappointed because he didn't do for you what you thought he was going to do.

I just want you to know.

This one time in Psalm when David is praying to God, and he says, God, all the sacrifices, if they mattered, that's what I would give you.

But what you deserve, what you require, what you look for is a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

A spirit and a heart that says, God, I can't do this.

I need you.

God, I'm not capable, only you are.

And so I surrender my expectations of you.

And I want to follow you.

The Jesus whose body was broken, the Jesus whose blood was shed.

So as we take communion as a church family, as you're ready, we're just gonna invite you forward to come take communion together.

So, Heavenly Father, we pray and we ask that you would be here with us.

Help us to see who you are.

We all know that we have a tendency.

We all know that we have a tendency to when the Jesus that we experience is different than the one that we expected.

We do the same thing.

We want to reject, we want to explain away.

We want a Jesus that doesn't cost us anything, but gives us everything.

We want a Jesus that helps us help ourselves.

But you were a God who so loved that you gave.

You were a God who so loved that you said, My heart.

Because the Spirit of the Lord is on me, he has given me, He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to the captives, recovering sight to the blind, and set liberty to those who are oppressed.

Jesus, would you help us to see that we're the poor?

We're the ones held captive by our sin.

We're the ones who are dead in our sins and are spiritually brought blind, and we stand oppressed.

But thanks be to God who came, who died, who set us free.

And now we walk in freedom, in newness to you, King Jesus.

Help us to examine our expectations, to surrender them, and to follow you, only you, King Jesus, the God who loved, the God who served, the God who died, who died so clearly for our sins.

And so as we take this communion together, help us to be a church who does the same thing.

We help the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed, because we realize we are the poor, the captive, the blind, and oppressed.

And by worldly standards there might be differentiation, but we're just a beggar telling other beggars this is where to find bread.

So Jesus, you're the bread of life.

You died for us.

Help us to see who you really are.