The Sending of the Twelve

Information is needed in almost every day, all within years of founding the Corinthian congregation needs to see them reforms we can't be surprised the church is performing regularly in history of the church. Sometimes that reform is more the nature of a revitalization, but I think people have, especially in America, been to content to be satisfied with entertainment and with shallowness and we need a seriousness about God about Christ and about his word and I think should be drawn again to passionate interest in the word is gonna take a major reformation of the church today. My hope is that this series will serve the church by causing people to reflect on what the church ought to be. According to the word of God, the necessity of reforming the church teaching series with W. Robert Godfrey visit Lincoln here.org/teaching series to learn more today on the Lord's day addition of Renewing Your Mind. The authority by which the New Testament was written was by the authority of Christ, so that if you reject the New Testament apostolic witness you reject the one who commissioned the apostles to write the word of Jesus when Jesus called his disciples chose them and commissioned them to proclaim the gospel to the world as we continue our study from the gospel of Luke today. Dr. RC Sproul shows that when Jesus sent the 12 gave them both power and authority and that's important. As we read and study their divinely inspired writings by this morning were going to continue our study of the gospel of Luke, the reading from chapter 9 verse one through verse nine.

Now that's congregation place to stand for the reading of the word of God.

Then he called his 12 disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick, and he said to them, take nothing for the journey. Neither staff nor bag nor bread, nor money and do not have two tunics a piece. Whatever house you enter, stay there and from there depart, and whoever will not receive you, when you go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet as a testimony against them and so they departed and went through the towns, preaching the gospel and the healing everywhere are not going to leave the rest of this text for the next time we come back to chapter 9 and just concentrate now on the first six verses, but those verses that you've just heard come to us like play weekly from the divine authority and inspiration of God the Holy Spirit.

This is the word of God given for your edification and for your instruction. Please receive it as such in BC.

Let us pray now. Oh Lord, we ask, we would prepare for the hearing of your word and prepare me for the proclaiming of it, for without you are understanding is dim and our proclamation is feeble and so we asked now for your kind and gracious presence in our midst and we ask it in Jesus name, amen. This passage that you've just heard is very brief, but in the history of redemption is one that is extremely important because it marks a transition point in the earthly ministry of Jesus that will have radical ramifications for the whole future of Christianity. Notice in verse one of chapter 9. Jesus called his 12 disciples see someone them, and he summoned them for a particular reason that in this Psalm I should we say a critically important transition in the lives of the 12 disciples. Now the disciples are becoming apostles mentioned this before, that sometimes we have the tendency to think that since the Scriptures speak of the 12 disciples, and that the 12 apostles that the term disciple and apostle are mere synonyms, but that's not the case at all. I disciple in the Greek the modified case is a learner, a student one who followed after Jesus the learning at his feet, but to be an apostle is something quite different and apostle the word means one who is sent is one who is commissioned and called by a superior, such as a king or a general in the Army or in this case by the Lord of glory, and is sent out from those in supreme authority carrying the authority of the one who sent them, such as an ambassador may have been authorized in the ancient world to speak with the authority of the King, who sent him. 12 would bring that over into the church. Jesus selected from his 1212 men home he would send Wes his authority as he would say.

Elsewhere he receives you receives me and that they reject you. They are rejecting me.

Of course, the first apostle in the New Testament, the supreme apostle in the New Testament was Jesus himself who was very conscious that he had been sent by the father and remember one he was engaged in controversy with his contemporaries such as the Pharisees who repudiated him and claim to be followers of God, Jesus response was you can't have it both ways. If you believe the father you have believe the one whom the father sent you can't have the father and not have the son, and then like manner, you can't have the sun and read objectives apostles and it's been commonplace in our culture, particularly in the movement of radical feminism that has a certain distaste for the teaching of the apostle Paul, the feminist will say Jesus we like but we don't want anything to do with Paul. He was misogynist and all have been well if you reject Paul. You reject the one who sent him to can't reject Paul and keep Jesus just as you can't reject Jesus and believe the father. So here Jesus calls the 12 to himself for this purpose, to give them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases they had no power in and of themselves they had no authority in and of themselves, but the authority and power by which they were to exercise this ministry of healing and of preaching was by the power and authority of Christ, who now distributes that power and authority to his apostles were remember when in the book of box Peter and John healed the man by the gate beautiful they were dragged before the Sanhedrin, then the leaders of Israel said by what's power have you done this thing and they responded by the power of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, you crucified, and so on.

But again they were saying. The power by which this man was healed was not ours that was Christ's, and the authority by which the New Testament was written was by the authority of Christ, so that if you reject the New Testament apostolic witness you reject the one who commissioned the apostles to write the word of Jesus. So now, after he gives them this power and authority.

He sends them to do what to preach the kingdom of God which was the central theme of Jesus alone preaching just as John the Baptist said come on the scene earlier and said repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. Then Jesus came with the same message. This is a new time in history. This is the time of the breakthrough of God's kingdom. Why, because God's anointed king was here and so now Jesus would been preaching the kingdom of God throughout his earthly ministry and the idea here is that in all probability the time of Jesus ministry in Galilee is coming to an end. But before that ministry in Galilee is completed he sends his disciples as apostles to preach his message through every village and town in Galilee and so he said preach the kingdom of God and heal the sick take nothing for the journey. Neither staff oral nor bag nor bread, nor money and do not have two tunics of peace that one of the other gospel writers has Jesus saying don't take a staff and so they critically there is a contradiction or nice. I do take a staff and visions the same.

Yes, you could have one staff but not to want tunic but not two tunics.

In other words that mandate the Jesus is giving it your to go out there and travel light. Your to be on the move. Every moment, and you don't take anything Stephen to make your own basic needs and then he goes on to say that here basically to depend upon the Jewish principle of hospitality that was part of the law of Moses, that if a stranger is in your gates. You are to give shelter and food and hospitality to them. And so Jesus is now sending his representatives to the Jewish people that he says whatever house you enter staying there and from there the part that is when you're finished with your ministry in that particular village believe that house but I don't want you going into one house to be not like the menu going to another house and see better quarters or better food you go to one place you stay there until your mission is done and that's the people's responsibility to support you while you're involved in this measure. Now here's the part of the text that I want to focus on because it is scary. Jesus says that whoever will not reach a few when you go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet as a testimony against if you've never read the Bible and that can't be true of anybody in here this morning, but if you're not familiar with Scripture.

You probably have heard this idiomatic expression of shaking the dust off your feet. Borders that come from Jesus uses an idiom that he doesn't invent on this occasion. This was an idea with which his disciples were all ready familiar. Remember when God called Moses out of the Midianites wilderness when he spoke out of the burning bush. He said Moses. Moses take off your shoes from off your feet. Why because the ground on which you are standing is holy ground. To this day we refer to the land of Israel as the holy land. It was the land promised by God to Abraham and to his descendents and the holy land, which began to be inhabited and owned by the Jewish people in the Old Testament was considered sacred and everything outside of the borders of Israel was taken and the pagans were considered to be unclean. So when a Jew went on a journey that would take him over the borders of Israel into a pagan laying where he would be standing on ground that was not holy ground. But come emanated ground contaminated by the sin of the residence in these pagan regions when the Jew came back to the border of Israel. His custom was this the before he crossed into the holy land again.

They would stop literally shake the dust off his feet left, bringing pagan contamination to the holy land. It's easy to understand but what's radical about Jesus directive here is he's sending his people not into Gentile countries, or to the pagan communities, but to the Jewish villages into preaching the gospel, the gospel of the kingdom of God and he says to his apostles here if you come to a village and they do not receive you if they project you before you leave, shake the dust off your feet which would be a testimony to their paganism. Now, if we follow up on this. We see a scary concept that is found throughout Scripture from Genesis to the book of Revelation, and that this bed God and his patients and long-suffering will not last forever, and we have a tendency to postpone our repentance and say I will be committed to God tomorrow I will change my ways tomorrow. I will give my life to Christ tomorrow, but not yet.

Like the young Augustine's prayer in the ancient world work. Augustine prayed to God, oh God change me and make me righteous, but not yet. They were taken advantage of God's patience and long-suffering. But the Bible warns us that God's patience does not endure forever.

There is a limit to which and there may come a time in a person's life where it's too late now before I said anything more about that. Let me say I know at least five or six people personally who came to Christ on their deathbeds they repented of their sin and came to Jesus in their dying moments and I believe that such deathbed repentance. This can be genuine and authentic, and that many people have been converted in their writing tests. You know the Holy Spirit came like a dog but never like him on some of my friends think that this thing is the escape from my wallet. And so we say well it's never really too late but two things I want to say about that. Well, after you die, it's too late.

You can have 150 masses said for you after your dad, but the Bible tells us it's appointed for man once to die, and then the judgment after you.it's too late to postpone your repentance. Make sure the postponement until after you die, because then it's too late.

But here's the scary thing.

In some instances, friends. It may be too late. Before you.let's go for a second back to the Old Testament the book of Genesis, the familiar story. There story of the flood. Flood that wiped out the whole world except for the family of Noah that this comment that God makes right before the flood. In Genesis chapter 6 when he saw that the earth was completely corrupt. In verse three of chapter 6, God said then the Lord said my merit will not drive with man forever, for the earth at that time, the end of God's patience had come in. They destroyed the whole creation, except for the family of Noah. We go all the way to the end of the New Testament of the book of the Revelation 4. Jesus announces that in the judgment all who are wicked. Let them be wicked. Still, let all who are immoral. Let them be immoral. Still, what does that mean there's a point we see this here in Genesis and Revelation all through the Old Testament prophets that there comes a time when God gives impenitent sinners over to their sin.

Let us, please, not time the Lord in his grace and in his patients and their people in this room who've heard the gospel. Time after time after time after time and every time they hear it there. Next become more stiff greater calluses, come on, their soul, their hearts are hardened and become like stone. You cannot hear the gospel and be neutral to it. If you receive it you enter into heaven forever if you rejected you hardened your heart and your heaping up wrath against the day of wrath and even in this life God may give you, may give you over which is poetic justice they saying you don't want me okay you don't have to have me you love your send more than you love me, go ahead, take your sin, but him who is wicked be wicked.

Still, you love your immorality.

You love your adultery and you don't love me fine. Take your adultery. You can't have me and the adult so I plead with you today.

Do not ever expose yourself to the point where the Lord God Almighty shake.

Jordan just from his that is a sober warning, one that should cause us to stop and consider her grateful that you joined us today for Renewing Your Mind that this is the first time you tune in our teacher Dr. RC Sproul is believing is through study of Luke.

He said the he examines the historical and theological context of each verse. Let me recommend you request or resource offer today. It's a digital download of Dr. Sproles expositional commentary of Luke nearly 600 pages of easy-to-read insight that will help you in your own study, you can request it today with a donation of any amount to look at your ministries or offices are closed today but that you can give your gift and make your request online@renewingyourmind.org. Let me also encourage you to take advantage of leader ministries interactive question-and-answer service questions about the basics of Christianity can be entered in real time when you go to ask.linear.org. For example perhaps you heard that Jesus is one person who possesses two natures and you're wondering how that can be, and why it's important. That's the kind of question that my colleagues here are well equipped to address will also provide you with additional resources for study there available 24 hours a day, Monday through Saturday that web address again is ask.linear data work would let you join. Just today I hope you return next week as we continue Dr. Sproles first fiber series from the gospel of Luke. Here on Renewing Your Mind