Misc. Luke sermons
Vos and Ridderbos both inform this reading of the Pharisees’ own hope for obvious, immediate signs of blessing, a hope Christ’s answer in Luke 17 deliberately disappoints. The contested phrase ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ in 17:21 gets careful exegetical attention. Three observations about Christ’s kingdom close out a chapter that resists the very kind of sign-seeking it describes.
Audience analysis dominates a great deal of modern church strategy, a trend this sermon measures against how Matthew and Luke themselves actually treat their audiences. The Lord’s own denunciation of Pharisaic behavior in Luke 6 offers a different model than market research. Knowing an audience, on Christ’s own terms, is not the same as catering to it.
Luke functions as the New Testament’s own theologian of repentance, a role this sermon argues the modern church has largely failed to recover in its teaching. Calvin’s own account of repentance gets drawn in as a corrective. The woman who anoints Christ’s feet in Luke 7 models exactly the encounter between real sinfulness and real holiness that proper repentance requires.
Luke keeps its narrative eye on a journey, Christ’s own journey to the cross and, by extension, the church’s journey alongside him, a frame this sermon applies to the parables clustered in Luke 18. Careful attention to 18:15-17, Christ welcoming the children, uncovers what children specifically teach about receiving the kingdom. The journey and the parables turn out to be making the same point from different angles.
The parables of Luke 15, the lost sheep, coin, and son, are read here as being about church discipline rather than evangelism, a reversal of how they’re usually preached. Luke 16’s puzzling ‘mammon of unrighteousness’ gets its own careful treatment alongside that shift. A heavenly orientation, weighing earthly riches against heavenly ones, runs through both chapters together.
Jesus’ own relationship to the Word of God is close enough that Luke can describe him simply preaching ‘the word of God’ in 5:1, language that echoes 4:4 and 4:22 deliberately. Luke’s narrative keeps its focus tightly on Jesus alone, resisting distraction even from otherwise interesting side characters. That singular focus is itself part of Luke’s argument for who Jesus actually is.
Luke’s own historical method gets attention here, distinct from the other Gospels in its vantage point: suffering consistently comes before glory, not the reverse. Several examples across Luke and Acts show God’s power bringing real glory out of real humiliation, not around it. Theophilus, the Gospel’s original addressee, is read as representative of every later reader needing the same reassurance.