Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Right. Now then, we started off talking about the childhood of Jesus, and "I do always those things that please him," "I have to be about my Father's business," and of course, we've touched on "man does not live by bread alone." We're looking at the life of Jesus and some of the key things that he said. And we're trying to figure out what made him tick, what was the motivation that moved Christ around our world when he came to visit it, when God intervened in human history.

And today we're going to do the ministry of Jesus in 35 minutes. So that is quite an impossible task, as you will realize. And what I've tried to do is to peak it for you, but the next time I speak to you, we'll be into the approach to the cross and Gethsemane and the trials. And so today, what I want to do is to look at two or three years, because that's all the ministry spans of Christ—his preaching ministry, his teaching ministry here on earth.

And you'll need to turn to Luke chapter four before we begin here. Having overcome Satan's attempt to stop him doing his predetermined work, Jesus set out into his ministry. And the first phase begins. He moves from Nazareth, from where he was brought up, to Capernaum, and he begins his first tour. Now his tour didn't go very far, as we'll see, but it was around the area that he had lived, moved, had his being for thirty years.

It was a preaching, teaching, and healing campaign, and it was wildly accepted and wildly successful. Everybody began to talk about him. And in the days when they didn't have the media, they did very well indeed. Maybe they just told the women and the men, and it just spread. And of course, you can't get somebody that is healed of an incurable disease, just one person, and not have a system of media like they did in those days not picking it up and passing it on and passing it on. Jesus healed many people on his first tour.

And his preaching was preaching that people had never heard before. It was a totally different style to the preaching they'd heard the rabbis using. He spoke in simple ways, with simple words. He used stories or parables, which are heavenly stories with an earthly meaning, if you want a definition of a parable. And people just flocked to hear the preacher-carpenter from Nazareth.

About this time, John was put into prison. As soon as Jesus' ministry began, John had been put in prison by Herod. Herod was an interesting character. He was a puppet of the Roman government. He was not a Roman, of course, but he was not a Jewish hero either. He was an Idumaean, and he had been used by the Romans to keep control around Galilee, or part of Galilee. He built a palace on the lake side, and the doings of that palace were spread far and wide.

He had not very much appreciated John the Baptist talking to him about his sex life. We've seen a little bit of that on television, haven't we? Somebody's sex life being examined. Well, Herod's sex life was not only examined but preached about for all the world to hear by John the Baptist. And in front of him and the wife that he should not have been living with, John preached a little sermon and said, "You shouldn't have your brother Philip's wife."

What had happened was Herod had two brothers, both called Philip, actually. One had the tetrarch or the area on the other side of Galilee, and the other brother lived a little further away. And Herod went to stay with the other brother that lived a little further away and had an affair with his brother's wife while he was there. And so there had been a divorce, and Herod had married Philip's brother's wife and brought her to Galilee. Well, John said, "You know it's against the law while the brother is still living to marry his wife, and so it's not lawful what you're doing."

Well, you can imagine his wife was very thrilled to bits with this, and she and her daughter, Herodias, who was into all sorts of things—she eventually married her uncle and goodness knows what else was happening in her life, like mother, like child, apparently—decided, the daughter and the mother, Herodias and her daughter, decided to get rid of John the Baptist. And so they plotted at a wild party where Herodias danced a very sensual, sexual dance and pleased the men. And Herod was highly delighted with his wife's daughter doing all of this stuff.

And he said, "Tell me what you want." And she said, "Well, I'd very much like the head of John the Baptist on a plate." She was a nice sort of lady. And so they went to the prison and beheaded John and brought his head on a plate to the party. That's the sort of thing that was going on in Herod's palace. Not wanting to get the authorities riled up, Jesus decided to get out of that politically volatile situation and move to the other side of the lake, which is what he did.

And he went to live in Capernaum, and he began preaching and teaching in the villages. Basically, it says he went on a Saturday and he had Saturday services. But Jesus preached on a Saturday in the synagogues, it said continually. So he was just there on a Saturday, and people began to get in the synagogues and hang outside the synagogues and try and hear him speak. "Have you heard the preacher?" You can just see everybody saying to each other.

His message was quite simple. Matthew 4:17 tells us that: "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is near." Well, why wouldn't it be? The king was very close—the King of the Kingdom of Heaven was very close indeed. And his message said, "Believe the good news," Mark 1:15. What was the good news? "I am," said Jesus. "I am good news. The gospel, I'm coming to bring you some good news, and many of you have had lives when quite honestly, you could just write across them 'bad news.'"

So he began to heal and to preach, and by the time we get to Mark chapter one, right at the beginning of Mark's Gospel, verse 33, it says, "Everyone was looking for him." Everyone was looking for him. And he had withdrawn because he was getting so popular to pray. And then he said in answer to the "everyone is looking for you," "Let us go someplace else to nearby villages so I can preach there also. That is why I have come."

You see at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, the people were really flocking around Christ for what they could get out of him. It's the same today. It's a question of what can Jesus give me, what can God give me. He is the need meeter in the sky for so many of us, instead of what can I give him. And it was very much so when Jesus first began his ministry. And so they kept coming around for the wrong reasons. It wasn't that Jesus didn't heal them and help them and bind up the broken-hearted and listen to their troubles. He did all of that.

But he kept having to remind everybody, "I came to tell you about eternal things, not temporal things. I can heal your body, but you will only die again. What you need is your soul, the part that will never die, to be addressed. That's why I came. And I'm talking about another kingdom and another king, not Herod's kingdom, not the Roman kingdom, not an earthly kingdom—a heavenly kingdom." So constantly, in those two to three years of ministry, especially at the beginning, he was trying to keep out of political trouble.

And this wasn't easy. Now to help him, he called twelve disciples to train and assist him. The leading rabbis had disciples; they would gather around themselves on a personal basis a group of men. And they would say, "Follow me," and what they meant by "follow me" was "walk with me," and they would go from village to village teaching. And the disciples would imitate the master. They would teach by rote or repetition. And you still see the Orthodox Jews in front of the Wailing Wall doing this. You wonder what they're doing. They're repeating Deuteronomy or they're repeating the Law.

And you repeat it long enough till you know it. It's a very good method of learning. We all know if we have to learn lines for a play, you have to repeat them over and over again. So this was the method used by the rabbis of the day, but Jesus was so different. His method was this: You grasp the basic principle, and then you use your discretion and initiative in communicating it to other people. Okay? That was his method.

So he gathered the twelve disciples, and he kept pulling them away, telling them some truth, getting them to grasp the basic principle, then say, "Go on, off you go in twos." And at one point, he sent 70 of them out. "Try and share what I've given you. Get the principle. Use your initiative. Use your personality." Preaching is just the dissemination of truth through personality. That's a good definition of what preaching is—the giving out of truth through personality. So it's going to be different through everybody's personality. And he sent off his disciples to do that.

Now at the very beginning, you can see how the teachers of the law, the rabbis of the day, were very concerned, because he was talking basically about getting to the spirit of the law, not the letter of it. They were teaching the letter. They were teaching it by rote. And they were saying you have to obey every little jot and tittle, every little comma and full stop, that means. And Jesus was saying, "No, get the point of it! Just get the point of it." That's what you've got to do.

And of course, they didn't like that at all. They felt very threatened by that. But the common people heard him gladly. And having completed his first tour, he came home to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And Luke chapter 4, verse 16 tells us that. 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. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

It's not really known whether this passage Jesus read was the reading, the set reading, which they had of the day, or not. We don't know that. It could have been, which might have been why he chose that particular time and day to go into the synagogue, knowing that Isaiah 61 was the set reading of the day. However, Jesus was an original teacher and was often getting outside the traditional thing to do, and he might just have read what he wanted to read out of the scroll of Isaiah.

For the whole scroll was given to him, and he had a lot to pick from. But of course, he picked the passage—and we've talked about this in these studies before—the passage that everybody in that synagogue would know spoke of the Messiah in a very dramatic way. "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He's sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Then he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, sits down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. You bet they were. He began to say, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." Now, the Living Bible says this: "These scriptures came true today." That's what he said. "These scriptures came true today." Now, everybody was mesmerized, and that's what it means: the eyes were fastened on him. Again, another translation: gazed at him intently.

I'm sure you could have heard a pin drop. I'm sure as he began to read that passage of scripture, some men knowing Isaiah by rote said, "Oh, I know what he's going to do. He's going to have the audacity to stand up there and say this carpenter is saying I'm the Christ." And that's exactly what he did. "Today these words came true in your ears."

Now, it says he began to say, and it appears he preached a little sermon here, which we do not have in our scriptures. We don't know what else he said. Luke only saw fit that we needed to know this was the important punchline of his sermon. Maybe he said more and took it to pieces, exegeted it. Maybe he said more about the other verses from around the certain passages. We just don't know. Wouldn't you love to know? I would love to know what that whole sermon was about.

Because traveling preachers were most times offered to give a spontaneous sermon. And he'd had his first tour, remember, and things had been coming back to Nazareth. They had been hearing about the healings, but it was only hearsay. And some of them were saying, "Well, then why doesn't he do..." they were saying it up here, "Why doesn't he do some of these healing miracles here? I mean, we've heard he did this and opened a blind man's eye and cast a demon out and all that stuff in the other villages, but he hasn't done any here."

And Jesus, reading their hearts, reading their minds, which he did so many times, says to them, "Well, of course, a prophet has no honor in his own country." We know that to be true too, perhaps in very small measure. They said many, many times, "Isn't this Joseph's son? Isn't this Joseph's son? Oh, Joe, you know, he had all these kids and Jesus was the eldest one. He took on his father's business. What's he mean, 'I'm the Messiah, I'm the Christ this day'?" And they were offended at him.

It was very difficult for them. Not that they could count any sin in him; we know over and over again he said, "Okay, anybody seen me sin?" They couldn't come up and say, "Yes, we did." And yet he was so familiar. And we get back to the old familiarity problem, don't we? He's so familiar; it almost breeds contempt. And so he began to point out that perhaps the Gentiles, as in the Old Testament days, might hear him.

Well, at this their good impression was spoiled. At first they said, "I'm amazed, what a wonderful sermon! This is terrific! Isn't this Joe's son? Da da da." And then when he came down on them, they turned as a mob will often turn, and as they turned many times in Jesus' ministry against him. And they rushed him outside and they tried to throw him over a cliff, which wasn't a very nice way to end the first Sunday in your home church. But that's what happened at the end of his first sermon.

Verse 28 says that he just simply walked through the mob. And the words are "mobbed him." They mobbed him and rushed him out of the village. Nazareth was on a cliff, and they tried to push him over, but he just walked through them. And many, many times you see this incredible authority. You can just see him commanding this incredible power of authority. Here is a mob wanting to throw him over the cliff, and suddenly they all draw back from him, and he simply looks around and walks through them and goes on his way.

His Father had not planned his son's ministry would end before it began. His hour had not yet come. And as the Living Bible puts it very well, "His time had not yet run out." You know, it keeps coming through the scriptures, doesn't it? His hour had not yet come. His time hadn't run out. You know, God has a clock on each of our lives, and it keeps perfect time. And when that tick, the last tick is ticked, that's it. There is not one of us, as Ecclesiastes says, can keep himself alive.

It was so for Jesus, for he chose to live his life inside our humanity. There were so many minutes in his life that added up to 33 years approximately. And his time had not yet run out. He was on a divine calendar, as you and I are. But he, in a greater way than any other human being, he had certain things to do every minute of the calendar that his Father was keeping in heaven. And so after this, what did he do?

Right at the start of his ministry, he exercised that huge authority which we will see as we peak his ministry and go through the scriptures here. After all, this was his world, and he'd come to get it back. And his time was running out, so he needed to move on into phases. The second phase of his ministry, after his first incredible tour—and that ended with the time in Nazareth and he only went back I think once after that to his own hometown, very sad—after that he sets off and lives in Capernaum.

He moves out of Nazareth, as I'd said before, and starts around Capernaum where it was a little bit safer. This was the other Philip, his tetrarch, his ground or his area that he was in charge of, and it was a little bit safer. Things were calmer over there. At this point, Jesus did not want to bump into too many Pharisees or leaders or people that were going to get him into trouble. The parameters of his environment were very small. Jesus wasn't a globe-trotter. 125 miles by 50. That was it.

You know, when my husband was being introduced the other day, they introduced him as having traveled in over 80 countries. I must have traveled in nearly—nearly that many. Jesus traveled 125 miles by 50 in the whole of his lifetime. And most of his life was lived in a very tiny part of that. Now if that doesn't mean anything to you, England is about the size of Tennessee. That's all. Very little country. Good things come out of little packages though, don't they?

But England is a very little country, about as big as Tennessee. Just a little piece of Tennessee is about 125 miles by 50. So that's where Jesus lived and that's where he moved. Incredible, really. But that were the parameters of his environment. The political environment, let's think about that for a minute, was interesting too. Judea was made up of Galilee, Jerusalem, and Samaria, and it was all under Roman rule. Okay? Galilee, Jerusalem, and Samaria. All under Roman rule.

King Herod ruled around Galilee, as his brother also ruled, so they were the puppets. They were accountable to Rome. But what had happened was there were certain religious freedoms won by a group of people between the Testaments. You know you've got the Old Testament and the New Testament, and there's a period of a few hundred years in there. And you can read about that in different books, and it's a very fascinating period.

One of the things that happened was a family rose in that intertestamental period called the Maccabees. Judas Maccabeus and his brothers. And they became very zealous to win Israel back from under other rule. And so they began a campaign which was a military campaign, basically. And they did win a huge amount of political freedom and religious freedom, which when Jesus was alive was still more or less in place. The religious freedom, not the political freedom.

They got too greedy, however. If they had just lived with what they had, when Rome came in in power, they might have been allowed to keep it. But they got greedy and it was crushed, the revolt was crushed. Well, the Romans then realized they had a people that they needed to keep really under in the Jews. They were always having uproars here, and they were always causing trouble all over the place. They were always so zealous.

And some of them began to be known as the Zealots. And that all came from this one family that paid an incredible price—incredible price. You should read the Apocrypha sometimes; that gives you some of the wild, terrible tortures that the Maccabee family and the people that rose with them went through to win religious freedom for Israel again. And it was still up there in Jerusalem, in measure, when Jesus was here.

Every so often, another man would rise up to be a Maccabee, you know, to try and do it again. And it's very interesting, when Jesus and his family came back to live in this area—you remember they had to run away from Herod the Great who tried to kill him—and when Herod the Great had died and his son came in his stead, what happened was that the holy family came back, remember? They felt it was safe, and so then they settled at Nazareth where Joseph felt it was the safest place to be at the time.

What happened at that period, when Jesus was just a little boy, maybe four or five, another man called Judas from Galilee tried to do it again. He got a whole big following—thousands of Galileans around him. And they raided Herod, his palace, and they raided the armory. And they got all the stuff out of the armory and they armed their forces and they took on Rome. And they did very well; they liberated the whole of Galilee, the whole of the area.

Now this had just been going on before the holy family came back. But what had happened as the holy family returned and all this turmoil was going on, the Roman governor called Varus took two legions and "pacified," quote, the area. His idea of pacifying the area was to take 2,000 of those people and crucify them all. And so the roads around Galilee, every single main road had crosses alongside them as a lesson to the inhabitants.

And 2,000 bodies were left to rot there. These were the crosses that Mary and Joseph would have seen. Perhaps this gives us an understanding of the growing alarm of the political and religious leaders in Jerusalem twenty years later, when this Galilean preacher arises. And Rome as well as the hierarchy start to say, "Hey! If this Jesus of Nazareth is going to try and do it again, if he's a zealot, if he's coming to do what Judas Maccabeus tried to do and what this Judas from Galilee tried to do, then we might even lose the religious freedom we've got."

That's why one of their hierarchy said later, "It's better that one man dies for the nation than that the whole nation loses the freedom that we've got and that's been hard-won for us by people giving their lives." And so everybody's eyes began to watch this man. And Jesus over and over again said, "I haven't come. Love your enemies, live, give tribute to Caesar, be good citizens." He was preaching his heart out that he had not come to lead a popular uprising.

But they weren't hearing him. The people weren't hearing him, the leaders weren't hearing him, and Rome wasn't hearing him. Herod was getting very nervous himself. I mean, this was his area and his brother Philip's area, and he was responsible to Rome. They were responsible to Rome. So he was keeping an eye on Jesus as his popularity began to roll on and gather momentum. The preaching environment that Jesus had, therefore, was very volatile.

"This is why I've come," he said. "He's anointed me to preach, he's sent me to proclaim," and he started to use the words of Isaiah which must have made everybody that was politically and militarily thinking very excited indeed. "I've come to set the prisoners free! I've come to release the oppressed! I've come to open the prisons!" But Jesus meant the prisons of men's hearts. And when he talked about the oppressed, he meant people possessed by demons and set them free.

Or people that were depressed, or the downtrodden, or people in pain. "I've come to heal the broken-hearted." And so it just depended what you were hearing when you sat in church. And isn't that true today? Just the same today. So yes, he met human need and he touched it whenever he met it. But it was on the way to doing what he'd come to do. He did not come to be a great healer; he came to save our souls. That's what he came for.

But on the way, because he's God and because he loves and because he cares, he would meet a blind man and give him sight. And he would touch all manner of physical ailments and make people well. But remember, everybody Jesus healed died. And that's what he was after—what was going to happen to their soul. In Matthew 14, the end of that phase begins to come to the end, and they try to force Jesus into being king. It's the story of the feeding of the 5,000, remember?

And at the end of him doing this incredible miracle to meet the human need—and they'd been with him a long time, they were hungry and they'd come out without any food, so he gave them lunch, that's what he did—and they took him by force to make him king. Now again, it doesn't give us the details, but he managed not to be mobbed and not to be taken literally picked up and taken, the word means, where to? Maybe to Jerusalem! Maybe that's what they had in mind.

Maybe this was their Judas Maccabeus. This was somebody come back, a new prophet, a new king, the Messiah, surely this time it would work. And again, he withdraws to pray, and they don't get it. They don't get it. The next day they come looking for him again and he says, "What you want? You want to feed yourselves like pigs like you did yesterday?" That's the phrase. "Have you come to feed yourselves like pigs? Are you after me because you want some more lunch, you want some more food? Don't you get it? I'm the bread of life. He that comes to me will never die."

Every single time Jesus performed a miracle, there was usually significance to it, and it was far deeper than filling somebody's stomach or opening a blind man's eye. "I am the light of the world," he said after healing somebody that was blind. Don't you get it? Always the deeper, always the deeper. Well, his teaching now began to get him into real trouble. Not so much what he was teaching, either, as to who he was teaching.

And when I look through the Gospels in this last week or so, it interested me that all the people that he taught were really a rabble. I mean, he did have the leaders there, he did have the bright people, he did have the Nicodemuses, who was the leader and teacher of Israel that came to be taught. But really, when you see even the men he picked were a poor lot, if you're just looking at them like that. And one of them, as he says, a devil.

Eleven of them were all right, but they weren't the sort of men you would have thought would turn the world upside down, which later they did, as their enemies said about them. First of all, there were the disciples, of course—his own disciples. Secondly, there were the disadvantaged and downtrodden. "The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to the afflicted," he said. "Blessed are you who are poor, the kingdom of God is yours." Spiritually poor, physically poor.

"You're the ones I've come to." The lepers. Nobody would touch a leper. Maybe—maybe some of the rabbis would shout at a leper a blessing or leave something for a leper outside the city gates, giving alms to the lepers. But Jesus touched lepers. That's like bandaging up somebody with AIDS with no gloves on, blood all over the place, or giving somebody mouth-to-mouth resuscitation who has AIDS. That's what he did.

He touched the lepers, and he interacted with beggars—filthy, dirty beggars—touching them. So he was always preaching and teaching to the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. When you think about it, shepherds, who are the lowest of the low in everybody else's eyes, were the ones that were the first witnesses of his birth. Women, who sort of had equal status with dogs and cats—in fact, when we were in a country which shall be nameless not too long ago, outside a place of worship I saw a sign that said "dogs and other animals and women not allowed."

Well, so it was in Jesus' day, only worse. And so the first witnesses of his birth were shepherds; the first witnesses of his resurrection were women. And a black man carried his cross. Something, isn't it? Jesus came for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden, and he gave them a part of his ministry. Then, of course, the disreputable and the despised were part of the crowd as well. The tax collectors—they were the scabs of the day.

They were sort of on a level in people's thinking with prostitutes. It wasn't that either prostitutes or tax collectors were poor, necessarily; some of them were very wealthy for obvious reasons. Zacchaeus, for example. But he chose Matthew to write a Gospel. He was a scab in the eyes of the people. I wonder if Matthew had sent his manuscript to a publishing company if they would have taken it. Jesus enjoyed these people's company, and they obviously enjoyed his.

They were nice pagans. If you'd ask Jesus, "What do you think of these pagans?" He'd say, "Aren't they—aren't they great? I just love them! I just love to be with them! Love to eat with them, love to talk with them, love to hear about their problems and also their joys. I just enjoy them!" Do you know any nice pagans? I do. Just nice people. Poor, yes, downtrodden, yes, disadvantaged, raw, oh yes, sinful, oh yes. But they were Jesus' sort of people.

He was a friend of sinners. That was not used in a nice sense at all. And even his parables were about the downtrodden and the despised—about prodigal sons and Good Samaritans, who were certainly despised. And then there was another group as well: the demented. So you've got the disadvantaged, the despised, and the demented. These were the people that Jesus spent most of his time—his two to three years of his ministry—with.

At one point, there was a man came rushing out of the tombs where he lived, because they'd chain him, literally, to the tombs, and he'd break the chains with the demonic power that was filling him. And nobody would go near that particular graveyard because this Gadarene demoniac lived there. And Jesus was preaching along that side of the lake, and this man came whooping out of the graveyard, presumably, after—after them.

I'm sure the disciples weren't very pleased about that. Jesus, however, with that same incredible word of authority that you see all the way through the Gospels, commanded Satan to leave him. And the man became totally self-possessed and sat at Jesus' feet. And understandably said, "Lord, please don't send me away. Let me come, let me be your disciple, let me follow you." And Jesus said to him, "No, I want you to go home and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you."

So he used a recently demoniac man to again be one of his preachers. And I ask myself, would this man have made a good missionary candidate? Would he have been accepted? What I just love is how Jesus took us. And he demonstrated that it doesn't matter how disreputable, how despised, how disadvantaged, how downtrodden, how demented any of us have been before we become his friend and his spirit indwells us.

He wants to take us and make us new people. In Ephesians, Paul says, "Such were some of you," and he gives a whole list of the most incredible disreputable people that you can imagine, into all sorts of stuff. But he said, "You're washed, you're sanctified, you're made different. Now then, go and be my disciple." And so this was the sort of crowd that was getting the leaders riled up as well. Not just what he was saying, but the company he was keeping.

He's a winebibber, he's a glutton, he's a friend of sinners, he has dinner with tax collectors, he lets a prostitute touch him, fondle his feet, anoint his head. Doesn't he know what sort of a woman she is? Oh yes, he knew what sort of a woman she was. "Go and sin no more," he said to her. She became one of his disciples too. So the preaching environment was quite incredible, when you think about it.

And by now, the thousands that came to hear him could not be contained in the synagogues, which was just as well, because they'd closed all the synagogues to Jesus by this time. And he met with them on the beautiful slopes that framed Galilee. There he taught them the Sermon on the Mount, and there he told them about the Kingdom of God and the love of God and the concern of God for them. And how he, the King, had come to take them to a kingdom away from all of this when they died.

And that this life was just like being a little flower that faded, you know, just a breath, just a moment, and then there was eternity. And then the poor would never be poor, and those that were in pain would have their pain taken away and tears would be wiped away by his heavenly Father. Well, everybody wanted to hear it. But there was a power environment too. And the miracles of Jesus are absolutely wrapped up with his preaching. You can't divorce the two. You can't separate them.

There were twenty miracles of healing, 36 with the exorcisms. There were paralysises healed, blindness, deafness, dumbness, leprosy, dropsy, fever, hemorrhage, bone disease, even a severed ear put back in place with a touch. All kinds of diseases, it says over and over again. Some would be healed just by touching the hem of his garment, like the woman with the issue of blood who'd spent all she had for twelve years trying to find a cure.

But the whole impression of the miracles was irrepressible power—the authority of Jesus again. No exhibitionism, no magic man, no wand he waved above them. Just power. It said power went out of him and healed them all. Virtue went out of him and healed them all. And even the demons acknowledged that authority. "What have we got to do? We know who you are, the holy one of God!" Isn't it funny? The devil knew, but the people didn't.

And the devil acknowledged him. "What have we to do with you? You're the Christ! Don't do this to us, don't tell us to do that to us!" They acknowledged who he was. And remember, created beings can never rise higher than the creator who created them. They can only stay on their own level, and the fallen angels can never be God. They belong to the beings called angels, not to the beings called God.

And so Jesus with that voice of authority spoke to them. And the people said, "What is this? Some kind of new teaching? This man has authority! He gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him. Orders!" This word of command, this word of authority, even though rabbis were into exorcism and were expected to be, so were Jesus' disciples and expected to be. But it was this new thing—just a word. "Come out!" And out they came.

This was new. But of course, this was God. So of course it was new. And then the miracles of nature: eight in all. To do with food and fish and wine, and two over the elements—stilling a storm. "Even the winds and the waves obey him," they said. "Even the winds and the waves obey him." And the significance of all of this is that God is taking decisive action against the powers of darkness and, of course, exercising his control over the elements that he after all made.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shined in the darkness. And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. That was Jesus, and here he was.

So the first phase you could call popularity. The second phase you could call proclamation and power encounters. And now the third phase begins, and you've got problems because Jesus ran head-on into dangerous opposition. Now then, what was the principle of Jesus' ministry as we close? Dependence. "I do nothing by myself. The Father who lives in me does the works." I wanted to have time to read the whole of John chapter 8. I don't have time. I want you to read it when you go home.

John chapter 8 is the chapter. It's the chapter where Jesus takes on the Pharisees and over and over again says, "I do nothing by myself. The Father who lives in me does the work. I teach nothing by myself. The Father who lives in me is saying the things that I am saying. Without him, I do nothing. I will do nothing." He chose to do nothing. He chose to model the principle of dependence. "I live by the Father."

And so it's very natural to come to the application of all of this. "As I live by the Father, so you are to live by me," he says to his disciples, which is more than twelve men, folks—it's us. John 17, he prays for all those that will believe through the witness of the disciples, through the witness of the people they witness to, to them and on down to you and me sitting in this church under this wonderful illustration of God's sovereign power and creative genius as we're rained upon from on high in more ways than one.

So, "as I live by the Father," he said, "so you are to live by me." And that's the principle. He said, "I don't think my own thoughts, I don't talk my own words, I don't do my own actions. The Father that lives in me, he does it." In the same way, he said, you live by me. Without him, we can do nothing. His are the words, his are the thoughts, his is the power. He drew upon the Father for everything. When he was praying, he said, "I know you hear me always." We can say that. We know he hears us always.

So as he lived by the Father, so we are to live by him. That's a wonderful word to finish with, because Jesus chose to say to his followers, "When I'm gone, I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, Jesus without his body, and greater things than these shall ye do too because I'm going to my Father. As I have lived by the Father, so you are to live by me." What do we know of living in dependence on Christ? He did nothing of himself, and he could have done, but he chose to model something for us.

He chose to live within our humanity and model total dependence as the second Adam, as a perfect man trusting God. Now, we can follow on. We can be his disciples, and we can choose not to live by our own strength, by our own gifting, by our own abilities. We can choose to live by the power of the Holy Spirit. For as he did nothing, so we need to do nothing apart from lean, rest, draw, use the power that he has given us.

I have a great illustration of these words, you know. Jesus kept saying to the Pharisees, "The words that I'm giving to you, they're not mine, they're God's. He gives me the words." And then this lovely method he had of giving his disciples the principle and then giving them the initiative to use all that he had given them in gifting and personality to pass it on, leaning on the power that God would give them to do that.

And as I was going down to a pastors conference with Stuart—we had 300 pastors and wives from all over California. It was one of the best conferences we've had for a long time. It was just absolutely wonderful. And as I was on the plane going to join Stuart from my meetings, I thought, "Now what am I going to do? I've got two sessions with these people." And I got out my little notes that I knew I'd used all around the world with missionaries and preachers and teachers, and I thought, "Well, this would I know be helpful and good."

And I started to think about it. And then I prayed, "Lord, help me not to depend on my good little talks and help me not to depend on any gifting that you've given me. What do you want to say to them? Because I've just been preparing this for you." And so I tried to put that principle into operation. As you live by the Father and got your words and your messages from him, I would like to live by you and get my messages from you.

And into my mind came the lesson I'd given to you on the temptations last time I spoke to you. And immediately I began to complain and to argue with God and say, "But Lord, I don't have those notes with me! And I'm afraid sometimes my notes are my security blanket. And I can't remember what I said about the temptations because I've only done it once, and now I'm onto other things. And this is pastors and wives! I mean, I really have to do a good job here."

"I'm talking in front of 300 preachers! So my talk has to be correct, and it has to have an outline and it has to be good. And this is a good talk, Lord, don't you think this is—this one? What do you think about this one?" And that little still small voice kept saying, "No, talk about the temptations." "The temptations? How can that possibly be relevant?" Well, I just said, "Well, give me some thoughts, Lord," and suddenly into my mind came those three temptations: legitimate needs, temple gifting, and just out-and-out "I'll give you the world" satanic oppression and power encounter.

And I thought, "What do pastors do? They come up against those three things all the time. Legitimate needs and the temptations involved with that. Temple gifting and the temptation to throw themselves around the temple and to do all sorts of things with their gifting that they shouldn't. And then just those power encounters with Satan where he stamps his feet and says, 'I'll give you the world! Be king for a day! Be queen for a day!'"

And so I told the men and women what I was going to do—that I didn't have notes, that I probably couldn't remember it very well, that I wouldn't be able to tell them where the verses were in the Bible, that this would not be a good sermon as good sermons go. But as best as I knew my heart, God had given me some words, and I was going to try and give them to them. And I would have to tell you, it was powerful. It was powerful.

And I'm still getting repercussions, which I know I will go on getting, from the men and women. One woman came up and said, "I was queen for a day and my husband doesn't even know it." Lots and lots of things going on. We've got to live by the Son as the Son lived by the Father, in total dependence on him.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, thank you for your life. Thank you that you came. Thank you that you came with one thing in mind: to walk towards the cross. The next time we meet, Lord, we're going to be talking about that approach and we're going to be thinking about the trials and the experience you had in Gethsemane. Prepare us for that, Lord, as we come to study.

But Lord, today we have thought about all those people that you taught—the disadvantaged and the downtrodden—and the healing and the touching and the loving and the caring and the talking and the training. Such a short time, Lord, and yet just right, before your time ran out. What God had ordained for the time that his Son should walk on this our planet.

And Lord, such full years! Thank you for them. And Lord, as we look at them again and again in the Gospels, may they come to life for us. But may we see the theme. May we see your footsteps. Really, your footsteps didn't wander around Galilee; they were really straight from Nazareth to Calvary, weren't they? They were always pointing towards Jerusalem. Help us to see what you were trying to say, understand what you did, and acknowledge that you indeed were the Christ, the Holy One.

Lord, if the devils acknowledge it and tremble, what about us? Help us to convince our world that you indeed were Jesus Christ the Messiah. We ask it for Christ's sake. Amen.