When we speak of child prodigies our default reaction as Christians should be to point to Luke 2:41-52 where a 12-year-old Jesus is found by his parents in the temple asking and answering theological questions, listening and understanding theological debate, as mingled among the religious Ph.D.’s of his day. But unlike the child prodigies we tend to celebrate today, a teenage Jesus was actually more than that! In point of fact, he wasn’t a prodigy at all insomuch as he was a child perfected. Jesus Christ, in other words, was absolute perfection in the flesh, even as a prepubescent kid.
10 - The Teenage God-Man
Luke 2:39-52
March 10, 2024 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 2:39–52
More from
Luke
15 - The Homecoming of Jesus
May 5, 2024 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 4:14–30
The Jews of Nazareth, in Jesus' hometown, demanded miracles from him when he returned after a full year ministering down in Judea. They wanted miracles from Jesus but what they got instead was a lecture, and a most unpalatable one at that. Rebuking their unbelief (cf. Mark 6:6), Jesus invoked the Old Testament stories of the widow in Zarephath and Naaman the leper, turning the synagogue crowd against him. They took umbrage with him when he read aloud Isaiah 61:1-2 and 58:6 and applied those texts to himself, but they were fit to be tied when he invoked the stories of the Gentile window and leper as a rebuke. To suggest that God would favor Gentiles (who repent) over natural-born Jews who didn't was both unthinkable and unforgivable to them. But Jesus miraculously escaped their murderous intent to throw him off a cliff.
14 - The Temptation of Jesus
April 28, 2024 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 4:1–13
Generally speaking, when Christians fall victim to temptation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Temptation, we are told in James 1:14, comes from deep within our own decadent heart and unredeemed flesh. For the perfectly sinless Jesus, however, in whom there was no decadence or fallenness, his temptation came from outside him--from the devil. Each of Satan’s temptations were met with the same answer by Jesus: “It is written,” followed by three citations from the book of Deuteronomy. In other words, Jesus didn’t dialogue with the devil. He didn’t debate the devil. And he didn’t dance with the devil while in the midst of temptation. Instead, he defeated the devil using the only weapon he had on him at the time—the Word of God embedded in his mind.
01 - Introduction - The Son of Man
December 17, 2023 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 1:1–4
Luke wrote his gospel from the perspective of a Gentile writing to another Gentile, named Theophilus, about Jesus being the Son of Man. Despite his anonymity, we see in the first four verses of his prologue a few elements that hint at, or point to, the type of Christian man that Luke was. They are both implicit and explicit. In addition to being a physician (Col. 4:14), Luke is revealed to be a biographer, a historian, and a theologian who took it upon himself to write the most expansive, complete, and thorough gospel on greatest story ever told—the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.