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.
15 - The Homecoming of Jesus
Luke 4:14-30
May 5, 2024 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 4:14–30
19 - The Lord of Lepers
June 9, 2024 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 5:12–16
Leprosy! The very word filled the first-century Jew with horror. They regarded it as “the stroke of God.” In Luke 5:12-16, Jesus shows compassion to a leper and cleanses him. In doing so, Jesus' fame reached new heights, forcing him to become more reclusive. The Lord was willing to trade places with the leper, so to speak; the Savior was willing to become the outsider; relocating to isolated places so that this untouchable leper, the ultimate outsider, could be rescued and restored and brought back into the city. Therein is pictured the reality of the Gospel—Jesus traded places with sinners in order to make them clean and deliver them from sin.
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.
02 - The Parents of John the Baptist
December 31, 2023 • Pastor Ronald H. Gann • Luke 1:5–13, Luke 1:18–25
In writing to Theophilus, it was essential that Luke begin the saga of salvation with the forerunner, John the Baptist. His story is the tie that binds the Old and New testament together. He’s the last of the prophets to come the order of the Old Testament but the first to grace the pages of the New Testament. Most significantly, the story of John the Baptist established that he was in fact the divinely prophesied forerunner to the Messiah. His testimony concerning Jesus, therefore, carried a lot of weight and verified that Jesus was in fact the Christ. And John’s story first begins with his godly parents, an aged priest named Zechariah and his barren wife Elizabeth, and how God broke 400 years of silence in Israel with a personal revelation to them about the miraculous birth of their son that was to soon come.