Sunday message · Luke: Jesus For Everyone series
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Message Summary
In the first message of the Luke: Jesus For Everyone series, Pastor Phillip Santillan starts where Luke starts, with the introduction in Luke 1:1–4. He gives the bottom line of the whole twelve-week series up front: Luke is all about Jesus, and Jesus is for everyone.
Phil begins with doubt. When one of his children asked at bedtime this week whether it was okay to question whether God is real, Phil was glad, because some of Jesus’ greatest disciples doubted even after seeing his miracles. “Just because you have questions doesn’t mean you’re out,” he says. Phil himself doubted God during a painful first year of college, not for intellectual reasons but because God did not feel real, until he challenged God to show up over a summer of study and prayer, and those months proved incredible. Doubt, he adds, does not devalue trust.
A few years ago Phil ran into someone from his previous church who had stopped attending after sharing doubts at a Bible study and being shut down. He apologized, and he says Clarity was started to be a safe place to explore faith in Christ. The series is for doubters, for those who know doubters, and for those who already follow Jesus, who will be challenged to ask how they should then live.
Luke himself proves Jesus is for everyone. Most scholars believe he was not a Jew, so those who did not grow up in church can know Jesus is for them too. He was also a doctor (Colossians 4:14), and Phil urges believers to embrace medicine and science, since Jesus, the great physician, sometimes heals miraculously and sometimes works through physicians. Throughout his gospel, Jesus reaches women, Gentiles, fishermen, a thief and sinners of every kind, for the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10).
In verses 1–4 Luke says many had already written accounts drawn from eyewitnesses, and that he carefully investigated everything so Theophilus could be certain of what he had been taught. Luke knew Peter and James the brother of Jesus and traveled with Paul, so Phil imagines him answering Theophilus’s questions about the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection by checking with the people who were there. Two truths follow. Christianity is not a philosophical system but a historical reality, built on the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus is for those who feel a gap keeps them from him; Luke was no eyewitness and had no reason to believe, yet came to faith later in life.
Phil closes with Larry Osborne’s book Accidental Pharisees, which says Jesus’ teaching has to make room for the kind of struggling, fearful and unready disciples he actually called, like Peter, who denied him, John Mark, who went home, and Joseph of Arimathea, who stayed a secret disciple. Those failures may leave us at the back of the line, but none automatically disqualifies anyone from it. The series, Phil says, is an invitation for everyone, doubting or devoted, to jump in line.
