The Christ of Luke

A clear and bold look at the ministry of Christ among men, according to the Gospel of Luke.

Rubén Chacón

Over the past two years I have been led by the Lord into an experience which I had never previously imagined possible for me. I am full of expectancy, joy, amazement and this is what I want to share with you.

The Lord gave me a new dimension of Jesus Christ through the gospel of Luke and this is what I am experiencing at the moment. I warn you that it could be a little bit contentious; but listen, meditate, pray and may the Lord confirm it in your hearts by the Holy Spirit.

You know that we have four gospels. It is good that we do not have just one, but four. If it were not so, we would not have a complete revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. One gospel would not have been able to express the full glory of the Lord.

Traditionally we all know that Matthew reveals Jesus Christ as King, represented by a lion; Mark reveals Him as a Servant, represented by an ox; John reveals Him as the Son of God, represented by an eagle in flight. Luke reveals Him as a Man, represented by the face of a man which the living beings had. (Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4)

Therefore Jesus Christ in Luke is a man, a true man. Just as with John we can confess and proclaim that Jesus Christ is truly God, with Luke we confess that - still being God - He is also truly man. However, Luke is going to tell us that He is not just any man. He is a unique man: He is the man chosen by God.

Luke reveals Christ as the Saviour, the man chosen and sent by the Father to bring salvation to all men and even to every class of men.

In every society, in any age, there are those who society looks down upon as second-class citizens. The gospel of Luke reveals in a wonderful way how Jesus spent time among those people who were looked down upon and discriminated against.

Who were the marginalised at that time? The lepers, the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the Samaritans, the poor, the disabled. Jewish Old-Testament theology taught that God prospered the righteous and looked after him. Therefore when they came across a poor person, they used to say, ‘If he were righteous, he would be blessed by God’. In this way the poor were discarded.

The disabled. Nobody could participate in the priesthood if he was deformed, lame or lacking a part of his body.

The demon-possessed. I saw a report on the TV about the miracles of Jesus and they were showing the passage where He went to Gadara. I had never understood this passage and I liked the insight that it gave. The marginalised could not live with the people and had to go and live in regions that were allocated for them. In Gadara, a region for the marginalised, there was a demoniac who was not accepted among the people. It was not only demoniacs that lived there but also people who reared pigs, people who were detestable to a Jew. Therefore the marginalisation was not only cultural but also territorial.

A leper could not go near the other people. He had to make people aware when they approached him so that they wouldn’t come into contact with him. How beautiful it is when the Lord encounters a leper who says to him, ‘if you are willing you can make me clean’, and the Lord not only says ‘I am willing’ but he touched him; he didn’t reject him.

Jesus didn’t just bring salvation to Jews and gentiles but He brought salvation to every class of mankind. Today, we would have to say that salvation is for the drug-addicts, the neo-Nazis, the homosexuals, the rich etc.

If we read the genealogy of Jesus Christ according to Luke 3: 23-38, we see a great difference from the genealogy of Matthew. When Matthew writes, he goes back as far as David, to show us that Jesus is the son of David and then as far as Abraham. He is interested in showing us that Jesus is the son of David and of Abraham because the Holy Spirit guided him to show that Jesus was a Jew and that He was of the royal lineage, since Matthew reveals Jesus as King.

Luke also says that Jesus is the son of David and also goes further back. In verse 34 it says that Jesus is the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham. However, the interesting thing is that Luke goes even further back and in verse 38 he records: ‘the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.’ Why does Luke do this? In contrast to Matthew, Luke is interested in telling us that Jesus is not only the son of David, not only the son of Abraham but also the son of Adam. In other words Jesus Christ, the man chosen by the Father is the representative of the entire human race.

So when He brings the salvation of the Father to mankind, he brings it in His status as the son of Adam, including all of us who weren’t Jews as well. Blessed be the Lord!

To lose or to save?

In Luke 9:51, there is an incident only recorded by Luke that says ‘When the time had come for Him to be received above, He set His face to go to Jerusalem’. ‘He set His face’ in other words He took the firm, determined, decision to walk towards Jerusalem. Jesus’ last journey was made from Mount Hermon, in Caesarea Philippi, towards Jerusalem where He was going to face His death. This journey would take Him the last 6 months of His earthly life.

On that road heading south, the Lord was going to have to cross the intermediary region of Samaria. So the Lord sent some of His disciples to go before Him to Samaria and prepare a place to stay. ‘But they didn’t receive Him because He was travelling towards Jerusalem’. It’s as if the Samaritans said ‘In truth, He isn’t interested in us, he is going to Jerusalem. It’s of no interest to us that he comes.’

How did the disciples react towards the offence at their master? They brought news to the Lord and said to Him, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’ (v54)

Now pay attention, because this is the part that Luke wishes to emphasise: ‘Therefore, turning towards them, He rebuked them saying: you do not know what spirit you are of…’ (v55). It’s a matter of spirit. Their spirit was not correct. ‘for the Son of man has not come to destroy souls but to save them.’ (v56). The Lord established, at the start of this journey towards Jerusalem, that His reason for being here on the earth, His mission as the man chosen by the Father and sent by the Father, was the salvation of souls.

We, as the Lord’s church, can say just as He did, that we’re not in this world to lose souls. We’re not here to condemn. We’re not here to say, ‘these don’t deserve salvation’. We’ve come to save souls.

At the end of His journey, when Jesus was entering Jerusalem, He says something that synthesizes the whole gospel: ‘Because the Son of man came to seek and to save what had been lost.’ (Luke 19:10).

In this verse, there’s a verb which comes before ‘save’. What is the verb? ‘seek’. This is extraordinary, it’s a 180° turn in the economy of God. When Jesus Christ is sent to the world as the man chosen to bring salvation to men, God Himself comes down to men to bring them salvation; however, in order to save them, He himself goes out to seek them.

It’s not that He is going to establish a point on the earth from which He says, ‘Here I am, if anyone wants salvation, come’. Because when people are lost, they don’t understand, they don’t see, they don’t want it and God knows that. He comes to save them; but in order to save them, He has to first go out and seek them.

When we as the church, shut ourselves in and say, ‘If anyone wants to save himself, let him come’, the Lord would ask us what spirit we are of, because the Son of man, in order to save what was lost, came to seek them. You are here because God went out to seek you. If He hadn’t done it you probably wouldn’t be here. How extraordinary and how admirable the Lord Jesus Christ is!

The spirituality of the Old Testament said that the people of God should be separate from the pagans, from ungodly people. When the Lord Jesus Christ taught in the sermon on the Mount he says, ‘You have heard that it was said: love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ You not only had to keep yourself separate from God’s enemies but you had to hate them. It was a shut off and exclusive spirituality.

We criticise and even ‘demonise’ the Pharisees a lot but they were following through with their theology. They represented the Old Testament spirituality. You weren’t meant to associate with the marginalised, those who had been discarded by God.

For this reason, it is important that we understand what dispensation began with the coming of the Son of man. Of course, it was the start of something completely new, something that broke away from Old Testament spirituality along with all that those people knew and did. That’s why the Son of God wept, lamenting the fact that Israel didn’t recognise the visitation of God. It’s not that what was before was bad, but Jesus was inaugurating something new. The year of jubilee had arrived and the Son of man, God Himself, had descended from heaven to bring salvation to everyone.

What impacted me about this was that Jesus went out to relate with sinners. While we hear this, please think about yourself, that you used to associate with sinners before you came to know Christ, because you were a sinner along with them. But once you were converted, did you stop associating with sinners? Did you cut yourself off from them? Isn’t there something strange in our spirituality which seems more Old Testament than New Testament?

If there’s someone who’s spiritual, it’s Jesus Christ and the Lord didn’t act as we act. He related with sinners. Whats more, he went to their houses to eat with them. We, after we’re converted, eat amongst ourselves. This is ok too and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but Jesus did something strange: he ate with sinners. To contextualise, we might say: he had barbecues with his neighbours and he didn’t just eat with them but he drank wine with them. (in saying this, I’m not trying to offer a defense for drinking wine; I’m simply relating the fact).

Jesus had an especially glorious spirituality. He was separate from sin but He never separated Himself from sinners. He was absolutely set apart from sin in His heart. But the extraordinary thing is that being completely separate from sin, He associated with adulterers, swearers, people who smoked and got drunk, and those who told lies.

I, on the other hand, have a spirituality which tends towards the thought that in order to be separate from sin I need to be separate from sinners. That is the spirituality that I used to have. It was as if my mind was thinking: if I begin to mix with sinners, I’m going to get contaminated. If I begin to mix with people who swear, I’ll begin to swear, if I begin to mix with adulterers, I’ll end up commiting adultery; if I begin to mix with those who drink, I’ll end up drunk; and if I mix with those who smoke, I’ll end up smoking.

Now, I have to be really clear on this point: if this is what would happen to you, of course you can’t do that since we are meant to save souls, not to lose them. If you are going to mix with adulterers and end up commiting adultery, of course you cannot go. However we would at least recognise that our spirituality is a strange one, that doesn’t correspond with the spirituality of Jesus. His spirituality was to be separate from sin in His heart, but not separate from sinners. We tend to detest sinners.

Levi’s Party

Let’s have a look at Luke 5:27, the conversion of brother Levi. This is the same brother Matthew who wrote the first of the gospels. Levi was neither loved nor admired amongst the Jews. He was a tax-collector. “After that He went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, ‘follow me’. And he left everything behind, and got up and began to follow Him.”

Brother Levi was converted. He understood that Jesus Christ was His Lord, He left everything, he followed Him, and like any newly converted… how does a newly converted act? Christ changed his life 180°, he was happy. It is likely that even though he still had things wrong in his life, Christ saved him and he had the joy of his salvation. Because he was so happy, he put on a great banquet in his house, saying: “We have to celebrate this’”

I agree that every conversion is cause for celebration. So he put on a great banquet in his house. Since Matthew was a tax-collector, he wasn’t poor. He invited his friends and filled the house with guests. Do you think he invited the church? No; he invited his colleagues from work; the house was full of tax-collectors. “and there was a great crowd of tax-collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with them’”(v 29) When it says ‘others’ these were not people who were socially respectable according to the Jewish parameters. In other words, there were tax-collectors and others of a similar social class.

Brother, would you have gone to that party? If a recently converted brother filled his house with worldly relatives and acquaintances, would you have gone? Think about it, don’t answer me. A while ago, I wouldn’t have gone. I don’t go to birthday parties at my relatives’ houses; I want nothing to do with trivial, worldly matters…. However, Jesus went, and He went with His disciples!

It doesn’t record this in the bible, but I think that Jesus was happy, he felt comfortable. Let’s put this party into our present day context, so that we can imagine the scene a little bit. The people, the relatives and acquaintances of Levi, were eating and drinking. Suddenly, a tax-collector, talking to Levi, started using foul language.

‘and the scribes and the Pharisees started murmuring against the disciples saying, ‘why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners?’ (v. 30). Let us for a moment pay attention to the scribes and the Pharisees. Do you understand that what they were thinking was completely logical? This is not what you were meant to do, it was not what was taught, it wasn’t the spirituality of the Old Testament. Something strange was happening here, Jesus and His disciples were breaking with tradition.

He came to show a new spirituality, hitherto incomprehensible, which consisted in being separate from sin but not from sinners. Jesus came to seek and to save and so He went to the people who didn’t have salvation. We associate with the people who already have salvation.

Jesus came to relate to those who weren’t saved. There are parables that say this: that He leaves the ninety-nine that don’t need repentance and goes to seek that one that doesn’t have salvation. We still have a spirituality that is more Old Testament based than New Testament.

Matthew’s gospel says that they criticised Jesus. Here, it only mentions the disciples but it’s actually Jesus and the disciples. The question is ‘why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners?’, and the answer seems so simple but for them it was totally incomprehensible. ‘It is not those who are well that need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’ (31-32) But in order to call sinners to repentance, what did He have to do first? Go to Levi’s party. How can you call sinners to repentance if you don’t associate with them, if you don’t go where they are?’

Now you’re going to say to me ‘In my job I associate every day with the unconverted and I don’t need anything extra’. Ok, but I’m talking about attitude, because you can associate with sinful people in your workplace without actually engaging with them. You have lunch apart, in a little corner, eat quickly and start reading your bible. You don’t ‘contaminate’ yourself with others in the workplace.

I was a student. I went to the high school, ‘Dario Salas’, and I separated myself from everyone, because I was an evangelical. How was I going to associate with the riff-raff? How was I going to contaminate myself? Moreover I weighed so little, spiritually speaking, that of course, I would have contaminated myself. So I didn’t mix with them. If I had gone to a party with them, I would have ended up off the rails and lost.

I repeat: we at least have to be honest today and say that the spirituality that we have is not the spirituality of Jesus. And the spirituality of Jesus is that which He brought with Him, which corresponds to the era of the church, the age of grace, the dispensation which we are in. But we seem more like people from the Old rather than the New Testament.

A glutton and a drunkard

Luke 7:33. Here, the Pharisees are criticising the Lord and in verses 33-35 He ends up saying something tremendous: ‘Because John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine and you said: he has a demon’ How strange the Pharisees were! There came one who was like them, separate from sinners, who kept himself pure and didn’t drink wine, and they said: he has a demon.

Luke says about John the Baptist that he withdrew to deserted places until the day of his manifestation, in other words he never associated with the riff-raff. Because he was the last prophet of the Old Testament. Glorious though the ministry of John the baptist was, his spirituality, not withstanding, was of the old covenant. When he appeared, he brought in the kingdom and prepared the way for the Lord. But even though he was outwardly similar to the Pharisees, they said: He has a demon.

“The son of man came, eating and drinking, and you say: He is a glutton and a drunkard a friend of tax-collectors and sinners” (v 34). Tell me if it isn’t terrible what we’re reading. He was a friend of the unconverted, a friend of those neighbours who still didn’t know the Lord.

To my shame, when I woke up to this truth, I said, ‘Well, I have to start associating with my neighbours’. Do you know? I didn’t use to say hello to them. You can be so caught up in your own world, in your church world, in your Christian world. I used to think when I went out with my family, what would people make of us? ‘There they go, they look so tidy, the wife, the kids…’ But I didn’t even greet them brother! It was as if we were from another planet.

I was so stirred up by this word that I said, ‘I’m going to have a barbecue straightaway and invite my neighbours’. So I prepared a barcecue, I bought wine, barbecue material and everything to receive them and do you know? No one came! But do you know why they didn’t come? Because for thirty years that I’d been living in the neighbourhood, I didn’t even greet them.

I understood that I had to start from even further back. I had to start by greeting them. Today, I try and greet all of them and little by little draw near to them. I am ashamed to relate this. I had to start from zero, take notice of my neighbours, greet them and begin to show an interest in them. Because they will never come unless they see that we have a sincere interest.

“A friend of tax-collectors and sinners”. We on the other hand, if we’re not going to preach to them, don’t associate with them. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t preach to them, but how can we start to preach to them suddenly out of the blue. First, receive them, create an atmosphere in which they will want to hear. Often, you go and preach and the other person isn’t even hearing because it’s a stranger talking to him. You can’t start off from there.

I was afraid. I think that the devil has tricked us in this respect. I was afraid that if I met up with sinners, I would end up doing as they do. But even so, I went in the name of the Lord and I continue to go in the Lord’s name. I am learning what is written, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” and in the measure that I see people’s response, I’m expectant. I don’t want to stop doing it.

Recently, I was with a cousin who is far from the Lord and one night, with other brothers, I shared with her about the Lord. The following day, she came back to the house where I was and said to me “you know what, last night something happened to me while I was with you. Every time that I’m with someone who talks to me about the Lord, I perceive in the spirit with which they speak to me that I am automatically disqualified, that I am being judged and condemned. Last night, for the first time, someone spoke to me of the Lord and I felt welcomed; I felt that there was hope for me and that I too could be restored.”

After she left, I said to the brothers that were with me, “The day in which we leave people with an impression that is different from this one, we are no longer serving the Lord, we would be failing Him”. She has not yet converted, but I prophesy that she is going to return to the Lord, that the way for her return has already started. Something was broken.

Do you want to be like Jesus? If you want to be like Jesus in this respect, you will get a bad reputation, they will say that you are a glutton and a drunkard. ‘Now he is a friend of sinners’. “But wisdom is justified by her children”. When you see this and learn this, you will say, ‘Oh, God knows more than we do’.

Dealing with “what will they say?”

Luke 7:36 “one of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him. After entering the house of the Pharisee, He sat down at the table”. See how beautiful is the spirit of Jesus. The Pharisees are those who were opposing Him, who were criticising Him. They represent those evangelicals who are saying: “look at that brother, he is going off the rails”. But Jesus, if a Pharisee invited Him, went nevertheless. How wonderful!

Now, the scene which is coming is terrible. A woman comes into the house, uninvited. “Then a woman from the city, who was a sinner -read prostitute- knowing that Jesus was at the table in the house of the Pharisee, brought an alabaster jar of perfume; and kneeling behind Him at His feet, she began to wash His feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the perfume.” Isn’t this a wonderful scene? Would your spirituality allow a prostitute to come near and begin to wash and kiss your feet?

There is no explanation in the bible of what had happened to this woman previously, which made her go into the house where Jesus was and do what she did. I imagine that when Jesus was on His way to the Pharisee’s house, this woman was in the street. Up to that moment, she had only known two types of gaze from men. The scribes and Pharisees who looked at her with disapproval, condemning her and also the other type of look from men who passed by.

But this time, for the first time, a man passed by, the Man of Luke, our blessed Lord, and He looked at her with a look that no other man had given to a prostitute. It was neither a look that condemned her or desired her. For the first time, a man looked at her with love. That’s how I imagine it. You know what? I don’t even think there was any dialogue; just a look from Jesus was enough for this woman to feel loved for the first time.

This woman saw Him going into the Pharisee’s house, she went to her house, brought the most valuable possession that she had, the perfume, and went into that house. She poured herself out in tears at the feet of Jesus and dried his feet with her hair, then she took out the perfume and put it on his feet. She had found a man who loved her in truth. I think the Lord confirms this when He talks to the Pharisee to explain the attitude of this woman, he says ‘she who was forgiven much, loves much’.

But what did the evangelical brother, the Pharisee do? “Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, ‘if this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a sinner” (v39). Was the Pharisee joyful that a sinner was about to be saved? Jesus knew perfectly well what He was doing. The one who didn’t discern the times, the time of God’s visitation, was the Pharisee.

We will have a look at a few more examples so that you can see that this is not an isolated verse but is the tone of this gospel, time and time again. I am overwhelmed by this. In the light of this word I have to acknowledge that I’ve been more like a Pharisee than a disciple of Christ and that the spirituality of Jesus is far from my spirituality. With our attitude, we’ve shut the door to so many people. How strange it is, that we pray for people’s salvation but with our attitude we alienate them.

I finish with this: we began to associate with a brother of the cousin who I mentioned earlier, another cousin in the same situation as her, an alcoholic. I would never have associated with him again if it weren’t for this word. I don’t know how many years had passed since I’d seen him.

One day, we both went to a party and he began to drink. At one point, I said to myself: does he realise that he’s reaching his limit? I saw that he wasn’t stopping and thought that since he was with me he would look after himself. I was worried because he carried on drinking and I plucked up the courage to say to him, “Cousin, don’t you think that this is the moment to stop?” and he said “but I told you that this is my problem: when I start to drink, I can’t stop”. I didn’t remember that he’d said that to me, so in that moment I said “what shall I do?”.

I came face to face with this truth. Was I going to act accordingly or not? The only think that came out was to say to him “Go ahead and drink then. Drink, but I want you to know that I’m going to be with you, I’m going to be at your side until the Lord brings you into victory”. He carried on and on drinking; he got completely drunk, to such a point that that day he had to sleep in that same house. I stayed by his side, I kept on going out with him, and talking to him about the Lord.

Today, he is free from alcohol and it’s been more than ten months since he’s been drunk. He is beginning to know Christ, he is loving Him and he wants to go everywhere with me because he has a hunger for the word of the Lord. I am talking about family members, why, how many of you have family members who don’t know the Lord? It just may be that one of the reasons is our Phariseism, that we have been too ‘holy’ for them, that they see you as a person to whom they don’t have access.

My own brother, the youngest of seven in my family, doesn’t go to meetings but he gives tithes. One day they told me: ‘Do you know what your brother says about you? That the last person that he’d go to to ask for help would be you’. This shocked me. I said: ‘Lord, what image am I portraying? A pastor is supposed to be someone that sinners can come to so that anyone at anytime can ask for help.’

A pastor is someone who is there to help, to have patience with and show favour to people even to the misguided and the ignorant. But my own brother saw me on a pedestal, in an appearance of spirituality, of such ‘holiness’ that I would be the last one that he would trust to draw near to for help. Because he knows that if he tells you something, he will receive the sword of Jehovah. These things began to break me down. Today, I want to be like Jesus.

Staying in the house of a sinner

Luke 19: 1-3. “He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was man called by the name of Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Zaccheus was trying to see who Jesus was”. What strikes me is why is this tax collector interested in meeting Jesus. Why do you think at this point in Luke 19? What had he heard people saying about Him? “Sure, they say, here is someone who doesn’t despise the tax collectors, someone who goes to parties with them, eats with them, receives them”. And so somehow this chief of the tax collectors knew about this. 

At this point in Luke, several tax collectors have already been converted and he is also interested in meeting Him, but how beautiful! He is interested in meeting Jesus because Jesus’ reputation is not as someone who rejects people, but someone who welcomes them. But he had a problem: he was short, so he climbed up a tree to see Jesus who was going to pass through there.

“When Jesus arrived at that place, looking up, he saw him and said, “Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house” (v5). Jesus had entered Jericho, and where did he stay? At the home of the pastor of the church in Jericho? At the home of a tax collector! When we travel to another place to preach, where do we stay? At the house of our brothers! And so Zaccheus who was interested in getting to know Him “got down hurredly and received Him joyfully”.

Jesus was staying at the home of a sinner, a sinner who was joyful to receive Him, who wanted to get to know Him; but Jesus showed the willingness to stay at his home. What did the other brothers make of this? “Seeing this, they all began to murmur amongst themselves saying that he had gone to stay at the house of a sinner”. But wisdom is justified by her children. This act won over Zaccheus. And he “…standing up said to the Lord: Look, Lord, I’m giving half of my possessions to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much. Jesus said to him: today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.” (v8-9).

If you’re going to put this word into practice brother, you need to get ready for criticism. You will get a bad reputation just like Jesus did. But the wisdom of Jesus will be justified by her children, by those who benefit from it, by those who will be eternally grateful, because you didn’t discriminate against them, but you loved them and led them to Christ. Praise the Lord!

There is the passage that we read before, where the Lord reaffirms, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost”.(v10).

Note how, throughout the whole gospel, time and time again, Luke wants to show us a Jesus who associates with the lost, who doesn’t discriminate against them, and even when He acts in such a clear and decided way, He constantly receives criticism and rejection from those who represented the Jewish spirituality of that time.

And He was numbered amongst the transgressors

Luke 22:35. This already seemed too great to me in the Lord’s attitude. Look how strange this passage is before the arrest of the Lord Jesus in Gethsemani. Jesus says to His disciples, “when I sent you out without money belt and bag and sandals you did not lack anything, did you? They said, ‘no, nothing’. And He said to them, ‘but now, whoever has a money belt is to take it along, likewise also a bag, and whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one.”

Do you understand what the Lord was trying to do here? There’s nothing strange in Him saying “…the one who has a money belt is to take it along and likewise also a bag…” but what does He then say? “…and whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one.” The Lord is arming His disciples! Brothers, have you noticed this passage?

The Lord is about to be arrested and before that takes place, in a premeditated fashion, He asks His disciples to arm themselves. If we take this into our own context, it wouldn’t be ‘buy a sword’ but ‘buy a gun’. What is the Lord wanting to do? This seemed very stange to me when I noticed it. And the answer to this is tremendous: “Because I say to you that it is still necessary that what is written finds its fulfilment in me: ‘and He was numbered with transgressors; because what is written about me has its fulfilment”.

Why did He make His disciples arm themselves with swords? So that, when they arrested Him, the scripture was fulfilled that said, “and He was numbered with the transgressors”. Can you believe this? Do you believe that this was the Lord’s intention when He said to them, ‘sell your coat and buy a sword’? He is saying: when they arrest me I want the scripture to be fulfilled that says, ‘I was numbered amongst the evildoers, the sinners, the wicked’. It gives the impression that the Lord did it in a premeditated fashion. He wanted it to be written that He was associated with sinners. May it form part of your testimony, brother, that you mixed with people who had AIDS, amongst homosexuals.

And if that wasn’t enough, when He went to the cross, they put an evildoer on his right and another one on His left. Just to die on a cross, is one of the most shameful things, but the Lord died amongst the evildoers. He didn’t just associate with sinners in His lifetime but when He died, He died amongst robbers. And you know that even in that moment, one of them turned to the Lord and was saved.

But, to be saving the lost up until the last minute, you need to be up until the last minute alongside the lost! Our Lord died, crucified in the middle of evildoers. Mark says that there, when He was crucified, the Scripture was fulfilled which says “and He was numbered with the transgressors”.

Therefore, let us listen to our brother Luke, who is preaching to us today and saying to us, ‘Do you know, the Jesus who was revealed to me by the Holy Spirit was a Man who brought salvation to all men, to every class of men, and from the beginning of His ministry to the last minutes before His death, He lived in their midst’.

His disciples were not at His side when He died. He died in the midst of sinners, not in the midst of His disciples. Today, we die surrounded by our brothers. How glorious! Our brothers accompany us and sing as we depart this world. We die with a good reputation and a good name and our beloved Lord died in the midst of the lost. Isn’t He admirable, isn’t He glorious our Lord?

I know that what I’m saying isn’t simple: ‘How, when, where, who. And if our young people begin to do that…?’ I know that there are hundreds of things, but something must be done. I think that the way we are today isn’t right either. For that reason, instead of just teaching this word, I want to commit to living it. I want to know how it’s done, what it involves, what results it produces. Up till now, I’m excited, since wisdom has been justified by her children.

The heart of Jesus

I want to keep on learning and to have this heart of Jesus. There are so many people that need us. We see reports on the television of how things are on the outside. But what do we feel for those people? Do we go along with those who say: shoot them, kill them? Or are we those who feel pity and weep and would be prepared to do something for them?

If the Lord has ministered to you, if the Lord has spoken to you, respond to the Lord, and let’s respond in our hearts. When God speaks, He waits for a response from those who’ve heard. Amen.

Synthesis of a message shared in Temuco (Chile), September 2006.

Copyright © AGUAS VIVAS | CHILE 2006