0072 A Day at the Office with Jesus

How do we stay on track, how do we stay focused on God’s calling for our lives in a hectic world with all sorts of distractions and all sorts of noise and all sorts of competing demands in our lives.

Healing Pete’s Mum

Does God still heal people today? Well, does He? Heard a funny man, Mark Lowry, he used to be part of Bill Gaither’s quartet of sinners. Talking about this on a DVD of a Gaither concert a while back. As I recall the point that Mark was making was that so many people are out there promising so many different things about healing. They’re promising, some of them, that everyone can be healed. But the facts that Mark set out were these: one out of every one people is going to die.

Unless Jesus comes back first we’re all going to die at some point. At some point my body is going to stop functioning and give up my spirit and so is yours. Of course Jesus may return before then, I hope He does. But He may not. He may have another time plan for that. Now that puts all these unrealistic promises about healing into perspective. We live in a fallen world, a sinful world where everyone is going to die one day sooner or later. So if God healed everyone, would we all die?

The other mistake we can make is this: we can behave as though God isn’t in the healing business anymore. We can behave as though no healing takes place at all and that just isn’t true either. The very first time I ever prayed for someone to be healed, this an older woman who had knee problems, I avoided her for weeks, I felt so embarrassed. Anyway she eventually cornered me at church. She said, “After you prayed for me my knees were healed.” You could have knocked me over with a feather.

So what’s the truth about healing. Well lets have a look. Today we are continuing in our series that I’ve called “A Day at the Office with Jesus”. We are in Luke’s gospel account of Jesus life and ministry. And I guess through this account we’re kind of tagging along behind Jesus to see what He went through and see how He reacted and what He’s like. See it’s so easy for Jesus to be this distant figure in the pages of some stuffy old book.

The point is He’s not. He’s risen. He’s alive. He’s sitting at the right hand of the Father. He’s passionately interested in your life and my life and wants to make a difference. So it seems to me that it makes an enormous amount of strength to discover what He’s like, for the reality of Jesus to become the overriding reality of our lives. Don’t you think?

And today we’re going to continue on in Luke Chapter 4 just looking at each story of what Jesus did. So here we are. Jesus has been kicked out of His home town of Nazareth for claiming to be the Messiah. They actually tried to kill Him as we saw last week. He’s then gone on to Capernaum, the home town of some of His disciples, which becomes the home base of operations in His early ministry. He’s cast the demon out of a man and now after preaching and casting out this demon, pretty exhausting ministry time, He comes to the home of Simon Peter, one of His Disciples.

Let’s have a listen to what happens next. Beginning at Luke chapter 4 and verse 38. If you have a Bible grab it:

”After leaving the synagogue he entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her. Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she got up and began to serve them.
As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah.”

Now at this point Jesus hasn’t yet chosen the Twelve Disciples. That comes a little later, and we’ll have a look at how He did that next week on the program. The word ‘disciple’ literally means a follower or a learner. Back then there were scribes who would start up their own kind of following, half way between a church and a bible college.

Now some were more prestigious than others, so people would pick the one they wanted to follow because they liked his theology or they thought the prestige of hanging around with some of the beautiful people in that group would help them in business or social climb and they would become disciples of that scribe. They would follow him and all the rules he invented on top of the scriptures so they could work their way into the Kingdom of God. It’s called religion. It’s not what God wanted but it’s how people lived.

So here’s this amazing Rabbi teacher, Jesus. He not only speaks with power and authority and amazes people with His Godly wisdom that makes a real difference in their lives, He’s casting out demons, He’s healing people! So a whole bunch of people started following Him. It wasn’t long before He started drawing crowds of many thousands of people. Don’t you think the other scribes loved Him for that? Not!

So Jesus is visiting this guy’s house, Simon Peter, who one day in the not too distant future is going to become one of the Twelve Disciples, the inner circle of leaders in the Jesus flock of followers. And right there a need presents itself. I guess they were going to Pete’s place for a bit of a feed and a rest from the crowds and some solitude.

Imagine poor old Pete. He tells his family in the morning, ‘Hey you know that rock star rabbi, Jesus who everyone’s talking about, He’s probably coming over for dinner tonight so cook something really special. And He finally gets home with Jesus at the end of a hard day’s ministry, walks in the front door expecting to smell some nice dinner roasting in the oven and there’s silence and there’s no food cooking and His mother-in-law is in bed sick.

Fantastic! My one time to impress Jesus and she has to get sick! What a blow. We’re not told any of that of course in the text, but put yourself in Peter’s shoes. It was all about impressing the Rabbi so that you might end up as one of the inner circle. That’s how things worked back then. And Jesus, Jesus leans over Pete’s mother-in-law, rebukes the fever and immediately she gets up and cooks them a meal. Immediately!

Have you ever had a high fever. It’s completely debilitating. I remember having one on a Saturday and Sunday. I was supposed to preach on the Sunday and unbeknown to me it was the one morning that the woman who is now my wife would be visiting our church from interstate. If I hadn’t fronted that morning we wouldn’t have met and we wouldn’t have married. Pretty life changing.

Saturday I could barely get up off the bed. Sunday morning came. I was leading worship and preaching, that’s an hour and a half on my feet, but I could barely stand up. So I dressed myself slowly, somehow I knew God wanted to get up there that day. I had no idea why. But I drove ever so slowly up the hill to the church building. I was slumped in a chair in our pastor’s office when one of the women of the church came and laid hands on me, Kim was her name, and I felt the fever leave me. I led worship, I preached, I met Jacqui that day, and the rest as they say is history.

Jesus can heal. He did back then, He does today. But here’s the thing. He didn’t heal everyone back then. We are going to see that on the program shortly. There was such great need but not everyone was healed, not everyone had demons cast out of them. God is sovereign. God chooses who and when and where. Invariably He heals people for a reason. Sometimes it’s not obvious to us, sometimes it is. Sometimes He lets people die who we think deserve to live and heals people that we think don’t deserve it.

The point is, God is sovereign. He chooses whom He will heal and whom He won’t. That’s the truth. And as we see in this story that healing brings such great glory to God. It draws people to Jesus. And you know, my hunch is that’s kind of the main game.

Staying on Course

One of the easiest things in this world is to get distracted. To be drawn out of the game we’re meant to be playing by all the other good things out there that need doing. After all, in this day and age there are so many, many distractions. I’m a pretty focused person, I pray, I figure out the objective, then no matter how hard it gets, I try hard to reach the goal whatever it is. That’s in my nature, my personality type if you will.

But for someone like that the easiest thing in the world is to take on too much. But I see so many good things out there that need doing. So people that need a hand with this or with that. And I’m kind of addicted to the joy of helping other people, not because I’m some fantastic guy, not that at all, but because in the last decade and a half of walking with Jesus I have discovered how much fun it is to help people along the way. It gives me such a buzz.

So whoever we are, however we’re wired, whatever our motivations are, it’s easy to get distracted. So imagine how it must have been for Jesus. Preacher, healer, such a great need out there, so many people who needed healing and teaching and so many people who tried to lead Him off course.

Right now we’re going spend another day at the office with Jesus. And it’s a powerful lesson here for you and for me in how He dealt with these competing pressures. Now let’s pick up things from where we left off. We saw how Jesus had a really torrid time of ministry. He’d been preaching at the synagogue, He healed Peter’s mother-in-law, and probably planned to have a quiet night, but the crowds came to Simon Peter’s house and He healed more people and cast out more demons.

Now I haven’t quite done that sort of thing in the same way, but I can tell you, when you’re visiting a large church and preaching and meeting people, and praying for the sick and listening to their stories and you pray some more with them, and as rich and as satisfying as that is, I’ve got to tell you it’s exhausting. I come away from that sort of a day delighted that I’ve had some small part to play in people’s lives, awestruck many times at how God’s moved in peoples lives but just plain flat out exhausted. Let’s take another look at Jesus’ day. Luke chapter 4 verse 38:

After leaving the synagogue he entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her. Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she got up and began to serve them.
As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah.

Well, see it was a pretty flat out sort of a day. He was tired, He was exhausted and as the sun was setting and He was hoping for a quiet night watching the news on TV, early night to bed, good night’s sleep, all these sick people and these demonized people turn up on the front door step. It’s easy to get the impression that this was no big deal. This was Jesus. But man, healing the sick, dealing with demons was exhausting work. So the next morning what does Jesus do? Does He sleep in? Sunday morning does He head down to the local café for a latte and pancakes? Let’s catch up with Him there. Luke chapter 4 beginning at verse 42:

At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place. And the crowds were looking for him; and when they reached him, they wanted to prevent him from leaving them.
But he said to them, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.”
So he continued proclaiming the message in the synagogues of Judea.

Jesus often went to a deserted place early in the morning to pray, to be with Dad, to recover, to recuperate, to recharge His batteries spiritual and physical. How many of us every consider that it’s in that deserted place alone with God that we recover. There’ve been times in my life where I’ve chased for that peace and rest and cafes and holidays and all sorts of places only to discover I only find it in the very presence of God in a deserted place.

If that’s you can I point you to a recent teaching series that I’ve produced here at Christianityworks. It’s called “Oh God I Need a Rest”. If you need a rest you’ll find that series at our website, www.christianityworks.com For anyone who really, really needs a rest.

So here’s Jesus resting with His father early in the morning, instead of sleeping late because He knows that this is where His rest and replenishment is to be found. But even here the crowds come after Him and find Him in this deserted place, (it used to be a deserted place until all the crowds showed up) demanding more and more and more. And what were after? They wanted to prevent Him from leaving.

Now God may well love Him, but they all had a plan for Jesus life. And that plan was to hang on to Him. Sure there were all these other towns and cities that hadn’t yet heard the good news. Sure there was need everywhere, but they wanted Him to stay with them and start his own rabbinical school in their midst. ‘Jesus, have be got a plan for you. Let’s set up a mega synagogue in our midst. Imagine how good it would be.’ They knew a good thing when they saw it. They wanted to hang onto it.

But what did Jesus say? No, my job’s to go and proclaim the good news of God in the other cities too, that’s why I was sent. So off He went and He did what He was sent to do. His Dad in heaven had placed a call on Him to preach, to preach the good news across all Judea. Not just here in Capernaum but right across the land. And as tempting as a permanent place of residence and ministry probably was, the call of the Father on the Son’s life ended with a cross. It involved pain and suffering and nothing, nothing was going to divert Him from Dad’s plan.

Friend can I tell you the number of times people have approached me with all kinds of tempting offers. Come and pastor our church, come and settle down here with us, a safe regular income and a congregation and all that. But the call of God on my life is to be here with you right now. It’s a harder road. It’s out on the edge walking by faith. It can be a lonely place sometimes, a challenging place. But it’s the course God’s set for my life and I need to stay on that course.

And it’s Jesus that inspires me to do that. He knew the plan for His life and His death and His resurrection and His ascension. He knew it by God’s Spirit in Him through faith because He laid all His glory aside to become one of us. He had to lay hold of it by faith the way that you and I have to lay hold of God’s plan for our lives. By faith.

Friend, the focus of our Lord Jesus Christ, not all the things He was capable of doing, not all the thing He could have done, not all the things that other people wanted Him to do, but on the journey that His Father had laid before Him, that focus is what inspires me. It’s what keeps me going and my hunch is, it’s exactly what God intends.

Now in the next section I want to pause with you to examine the focus of your life, what you’re doing with your life. Are you where God means you to be? Are you doing the things, living the life, heading in the direction that God means you to go? How do we stay on track? How do we stay focussed on God’s calling for our lives in the hectic world with all sorts of distractions and all sorts of noise and all sorts of competing demands in our lives? That’s exactly what we’re going to look at now.

On Course, On Course

Jesus staying on course. Just as well He did, you know. His course took Him on a hard road to the cross. Where would you and I be if He hadn’t stayed on course. Doesn’t bare thinking about, does it? I really relate to how He was pulled every which way. People wanted Him to do this and to do that. There was so many good things that He could have been doing but instead of allowing Himself to be crucified after just three-and-a-half years of public ministry in His early thirties, He could have seen the need and built the Rabbi Jesus mega church and lived happily ever after.

It is easy to imagine that the course that God has planned for our lives is about the sort of success that we would expect in a worldly sense. I mean, forget what you know about what happened to Jesus, if God gave you the opening part of the plot, “I’m sending my Son into the world as a man ….” And asked you to finish the story, would you have finished it the way God did? Probably not.

But see we kind of imagine that staying on course means ever upward, ever forward, ever bigger, better, brighter. There are so many things that could pull me off course. People often offer me this opportunity and that opportunity, pastor this church even though I’m not called to pastor a church, sit on this board, become involved with this marketing campaign. It’s so easy to get pulled off course. It’s not just a problem I have. It’s a problem we all have.

How do we stay on course? It’s not easy. My course involves getting up in the morning, 4.00 am often. Preparing radio programs, its involves tracking to a drab little radio studio, it involves a whole bunch of things that in the world’s eyes don’t constitute success. But here, here’s how it works for me. Every morning I get up and first – first things first – first I spend some time with God in quiet prayer reading the Bible, often just short passages. I’m not one for reading 3 or 4 chapters at a time. Sometimes, like this morning, it will be just a handful of verses then I’ll just quietly sit quietly with God and think, ‘God what are you telling me? What do you want me to hear in this today?’

I can’t tell the number of times He’s shown me something that I needed just for today. The number of times He’s nudged me back to the centre when I was heading off to the right or to the left. The number of times I’ve experienced His Spirit speaking through His word saying, “Yes” to this and ‘No’ to that. Giving me a new idea. Something I needed. I can’t tell you how many times that it’s happened. I just can’t tell you.

And the easiest thing in the world when we have a busy life, the easiest thing, is to compromise. To say, ‘No, no, no. I’m too busy. I just can’t sit there for half and hour with Jesus today. I have things to do. I have a long commute. I have kids to get off to school. I have all these things.’ And do you know why we’re too busy? Because yesterday we didn’t while away that half an hour with Jesus and so today we flat out doing a whole bunch of things He never meant for us to do. Hello?

The Bible calls those things ‘dead works’. They may well be good, they may well be admirable, but if they are not from God, then they have eternal purpose. They’re just dead. A whole bunch of God’s people are absolutely killing themselves doing dead works. Does that make sense to you? Do you think that’s what He wants us to do?

Jesus went to Simon Peter’s house. He healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and He healed a whole bunch of other people that found Him. A tough day at the office. Hard yakka. And then He drew away. He’d often go to that deserted place to be with His Dad, His Father in heaven, to praise, to pray, to draw strength, to receive guidance, to know what Dad wanted Him to do today, to make sure that He wasn’t pulled off course by other people who presented such admirable, such worthy things for Him to do.

Amongst all the good things that are out there today, Dad, which are the ones that you want me to do? John 5:19 when He’s only healed one man out of the many that He could have healed that day, Truly I tell you, the Son of Man only does what He sees the Father doing.

Let me say that again. Jesus said of Himself – l this is the Son of God, this is the Son of God that has so much power, who could do so many things, He said – Truly I tell you, the Son only does what He sees the Father doing.

I once heard an American preacher translate it this way, he said, “Do what Dad’s doing”. You know, I couldn’t say it better myself. So let me ask you this. Is your life on course? Are you doing the things that Dad’s doing? Are you? Or are you racing around exhausting yourself, chasing after, chasing after that, letting other people dictate what you should be doing. Friend, if Jesus only did the things the Father was doing, my hunch is we need to do the same.