Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Luke 14 and more.
Good Morning, Good Morning my brothers and my sisters and welcome to Turning On the Lights for Tuesday, March 4 2025.
Today we continue our journey through the gospel according to Luke and into Easter taking a look at Luke 14 and the humbling of the haughty – especially those who are haughty in their religion.
Watch, or have a listen – check out the podcast – however you choose, engage with the Word of God so that you may learn, grow, and become the disciple of Christ that your Savior knows you can be.
This is a video recorded copy of the FaceBook Live event of Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Watch here via the YouTube link!
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This is a transcript from the audio of this episode of Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Good morning, good morning, my brothers and my sisters and welcome to the church town church of God. You, if you are looking at the YouTube video or maybe you are tuning in live, whatever the case may be, maybe you’re watching the live video later. You are looking from the back pew to the altar of the church. Pretty cool, huh? Pretty cool old church. It’s wonderful. Now, if we move to the very, very back seat, that’s a little different. This is the view you have. If you are a bride being married here at church town, you turn the corner and then you head up toward the altar. But it is Tuesday morning. It is supposed to be a decent day, 60 degrees or so. I think rain tomorrow, but here we go. It’s hopefully springtime. Let me show you. It’s what it looks like. Lookie there. The Yamaha is flashing. You know what that means? We have a, there it is. I’ll show it to you. We have a humidifier system inside the piano and it requires regular maintenance, regular filling. It’s pretty cool. It has these pads that go up and down. Let me show you in this tube you fill with this water and a solution and you fill the tank up and the pads go up and down and regulate the humidity inside the wooden box and it keeps it healthy, keeps the wood healthy and it keeps the tune for at least six months. Wonderful. So here we are. It’s Tuesday morning. I’m feeling pretty good. I don’t know about you. I’m feeling pretty good. Felt pretty good over the weekend. Got a little hyper spiritual. I mean Sunday was amazing. Good morning, Sandy. And you can really feel, I mean it’s, it’s always a two headed monster. You can always feel, I mean you feel the power of the Lord and you feel the resentment of the enemy. It’s a thing. You feel the resentment of the enemy because you are in the power of the Lord. It’s wild and you as Christians know it. We just had a talk last week about being able to maintain yourself in this environment and how can we hold each other accountable and who throws in the towel and who doesn’t and we experienced that in the kingdom all the time, don’t we? I mean it’s a thing. You know, sometimes at church I talk about, you’ll hear me say two things. One is pretty negative, but it really helped to ground me when I was learning. And that is everybody leaves. So my mentor taught me that and it’s a little extreme, but it helps me to understand and stay grounded in the fact that church is a very unique environment. Education is a very unique environment. Leadership in the church is a very unique thing. All of that friendships in the church, God’s Holy Spirit and the way he works. But also, good morning. I think we’re up. I think we’re close to 30 here this morning. It’s pretty balmy out here. And so he said, just, you know, everybody leaves there. You know, you’re going to say or do something or they’re going to perceive something or they’re just going to want to move on or they pass away, whatever the case may be. So that helped. And I know it sounds very negative, but I hope that you can understand that it puts you in a place where you can sort of accept a lot of things. I won’t say anything, but a lot of things. And then the other thing that I always talk about is a reason, a season, a lifetime. And I really, that old saying, I really do believe that it applies to church and congregation. And I believe that the Lord works in all three of those. You know, if somebody is experiencing a very traumatic event in their life and they come into church town and they find congregation and Holy Spirit filled people and they find relief, if you will, they find love, they find comfort. And then that traumatic, dramatic situation goes away and they go away. Well, we pray as a congregation that we’ve done what we were led to do. God brought that person there. They experienced the power of God’s Holy Spirit. They experienced the power of God’s love, forgiveness, all of those things. They heard the gospel message because it’s preached constantly. And then there’s a season. And sometimes it’s not just the person. Sometimes they’re passing through. Sometimes they move and move away, whatever the case may be. But a season would be an individual or a family that is an extended period of time and then begins to seek something else for whatever reason. And again, those reasons can be from the very negative to the ultra positive, right? I’ve got this promotion and I’m moving on. And then a lifetime. And that speaks for itself. So you look at congregation interestingly. And one thing I can compare it to, my son is a manager at Rudder’s, a very, very busy Rudder’s. And I know that this is not apples to apples, trust me, but he is constantly dealing with a turnover there of employees. Even though, I know I’m giving my age away. I began making a $1.80 an hour plus dinner when I was a busboy at 15. They’re making $22 an hour working at Rudder’s. But still the turnover is great and he deals with that all the time. And in the church environment, some people come to check it out and then they don’t come back. Some people come and they want to stay for a little while to check it out. And then they leave. Some people come and stay, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as a pastor, you never know on any given Sunday, you could say something that you have no idea was something that people freak out over or somebody freaked out over. Remember when you said that? And I’ll be like, actually I don’t. Is that bad? Good morning everybody. So we have a good talk on Thursday that we had. Father, we pray that your word will go out today. We welcome all of those who are joining us online. We welcome all of those who will be listening on the podcast or watching the video later. Oh Lord, we pray your word will go anywhere you want to send it. It’s yours. It’s yours. Set that lion free. We welcome our friends from round knob in Jesus name. We pray that you are being blessed, blessed beyond measure as you stick together as a congregation and you seek the Lord’s guidance. I admire that. Oh my goodness. I admire that in Jesus name. Amen. So that was a good talk on Thursday and we had a wonderful time on Sunday. If you listened to both live streams Tuesday and Thursday and read the devotion on Thursday as well, then you had a precursor, an idea of what was going to happen on Sunday. And then I tried to bring everything together and more, right? So that’s the fine point. Excuse me on all of the teaching this week. And I thought it Chapter 13 of Luke is a very intricate, rather complicated teaching. And in my opinion, it is further complicated by our Bibles. What? Because you know what I’m going to say. Indeed, indeed. You know what I’m going to say. The Bible isn’t written with chapters and verses and subheadings and 13 is just a lot like that. When you read Chapter 13, you’ve got all of these subheadings, a call to repentance, parable of the barren fig tree, Jesus heals on the Sabbath, parable of the muster seat, parable of the yeast, the narrow door, Jesus grieves over Jerusalem. And you can get this idea that Jesus taught Sunday school lessons, right? He sat everybody down and then he, boom. And sometimes in our preaching, which I try to get away from, a pastor will take a verse or two and really exposited and maybe exposited extremely well, but it still lends to that idea that Jesus taught in little clips, little lessons, that it was a school room setting, a Sunday school setting, a church setting, whatever the case may be. Sometimes it was more like a church setting than others, but you know what I mean. And so I encourage people, and we did this on Sunday, even though this chapter is very complicated, it really has a one unified theme to it, that Jesus is really trying to get across in several different ways. And we brought out a few of those ways on Sunday, and then I challenged everybody to take 13 and read the passages we did not read and make all of the other connections. And you will see it all begins, the cornerstone is a call to repentance and everything flows from there. And so that’s what we did, and I really do, and I will never apologize because we’ve gotten into this here. I see people digging in their Bibles while I’m preaching. I’m okay with diving, I see notes being taken, marks in the margins, check this out, read this, whatever connections. I see all the, and it’s inspiring to me that God’s people are in his word because what we talk about in 13 is being quote unquote fertilized, or I prefer gardened by the word of God, by the spirit of the Lord and the word of God. And these things cultivate us as Christians, help us to grow and produce fruit. So that’s where we want to go, right? And I always say, yes, I wanted to say something like that. Now I only have that, I was only actually able to find that in the English Standard version, which is a fine translation. My daughter calls it a good rough draft, but my daughter is an egghead and a language person in all of this stuff. So we argue over translations and she said, “Oh, the ESV, that’s a good rough draft.” Yeah, yeah. But anyway, that’s all geeky conversations that we have. But I have a reader’s Bible, no breaks whatsoever. And if you get the Septuagint, I know it’s not the New Testament, but you get the same flavor for that. Anyway, so Jesus is walking around and he is behaving in such a way that he is challenging people in what they believe, why they believe it. He is challenging people to know that the kingdom of God is at hand, it’s by his mere presence and by his behaviors and by his teaching. And he is challenging leadership, as we always say, the Pharisees, right? And Pharisees becomes metaphorical in our language, like you’re acting like a Pharisee, don’t be Pharisee. And I even said that on Sunday, like we’re not going to be like those, the Pharisees and deny the power of God’s Holy Spirit because of some rule or regulation. And that’s what was Jesus’ teaching. He said, “You guys will pull your donkey out of a hole on Sunday, but you will not allow for healing on Sunday because of a rule? You’re denying the power of God’s Holy Spirit for the sake of a rule?” And he goes on again, here it is, at the beginning of 14. One Sabbath day, he wants to go right in the face of the Pharisees. And so the Sabbath, right, being ordained, being made holy, that sort of thing, he wants to do these things on the Sabbath so that they will be very challenging to the religious structure, to the rules. You don’t do anything on the Sabbath. “So pull your donkeys out of holes.” I don’t know why I’m stuck on that. Like I don’t have a donkey. My dog had a donkey. Why? He had a stuffed donkey made out of Kevlar. Kevlar stuffed donkey. And its guts are all over my living room. Like how does she rip apart Kevlar toys? Anyway, the donkey’s gone. Donkey Kong, donkey gone. One Sabbath day, I have Balaam’s donkey up in my office. Did I ever show you that? We taught it at school in Carlisle Christian Academy. It was years and years ago, obviously. And this one student brought in this big stuffed donkey and said, “Here you go.” Like we were there and we were talking about it. And I read the story of Balak and Balaam just in my Bible reading program. I know I’m scatterbrained, but I read it just yesterday and it struck me for the first time. I must have read this 15 times, 12, 15 times. I’ve taught it. I’ve preached it. And I realized yesterday that I have faith, no doubt whatsoever, that God in His sovereignty can open the mouth of the donkey and the donkey can talk. None whatsoever. But it really struck me yesterday that Balaam doesn’t bat an eyelash. He just answers the donkey. Like I would be going, “What?” You know, like, “You’re talking.” He just goes like, “Oh, you know.” So maybe it’s just the way it’s written, but it just struck me yesterday. It reminds me of the old joke. What did one muffin say to the other muffin? “Oh my goodness, a talking muffin.” Okay. That’s it for today. Boom, boom. I’m here all day. One Sabbath day, because the plumber’s coming over today. We have no water in the fellowship hall. So we’ve got to get a plumber in the basement. Oh, the life of a mega church pastor. Yesterday vacuuming. Today, plumbing. Oh yes, trash. Love it. One Sabbath day, we got that far. It’s the Sabbath day, right? One Sabbath day, Jesus went to eat dinner in the home of a leader of the Pharisees. And the people were watching him closely. There was a man there whose arms and legs were swollen. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in religious law, “Is it permitted in the law to heal people on the Sabbath day or not?” When they refused to answer, and they probably refused to answer because of the incident in chapter 13, right, they’re like, “Eh, this guy, what are we going to say?” When they refused to answer, Jesus touched the sick man and healed him and sent him away. And he turned to them and said, “Which of you doesn’t work on the Sabbath?” Here you go. “If your son or your cow falls into a pit.” It wasn’t a donkey. “If your son or your cow falls into a pit, don’t you rush to get him out?” Again, they could not answer, right? And we’re going to learn further as Jesus teaches about the Sabbath and what it truly means in that we can experience Sabbath rest. Under the new covenant, we can experience Sabbath rest anytime, anywhere. When we go inside of ourselves with the Lord and we spend those moments, minutes, hours, alone with him because he’s here and we can experience that Sabbath rest. I know that I am an individual who Sunday morning is finished and in a couple of hours, I’m like, “Okay, next week, let’s get on it.” And I drive and I drive and I drive and I drive and that’s the way I was raised. I was raised by working class parents. Their answer to nearly every problem in life was work harder. When I didn’t do so well in school, work harder. When I wasn’t making the money that I needed to make so I could buy my first car, was it a gift? No. The answer was get another job, work harder. And so that translated even though I became a man of words instead of a person who works with their hands, so to speak, although I was a shorter to cook, I guess that could be counting. That translated very well through the course of my life. Having that as a core value pushed me through college, through grad school, two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, all these different things and that’s not a brag. It’s just I set my goals and I work harder. Well, that doesn’t translate so well in spiritual care. When an individual has a physical ailment and you’re praying and you’re in communion with God and communion with that individual and it’s not getting any better and so the answer is work harder. And this is where, and that’s in my head, that’s the answer. Pray harder, do more and all you can do is all you can do because the kingdom of God, Jesus flipped it on its head. And sometimes the answer is rest in the good news. How about you sit with that individual, good morning Dale, and rest with them in the good news? How about you sit with that individual and share time together in the spirit of the Lord? Wild. I mean, a tough lesson for me to learn and still I was just expressing over the past couple of days, there’s frustration that builds up. There is antagonism, you just feel like you can’t get your arms around this and you really can’t as a human. As a spiritual leader, as a pastor, as a teacher, whatever the case may be, you’re not going to get your arms around it because it’s not yours. And that lesson, like I talked on Sunday about looking in the mirror, check out your own call of repentance. Where are you? You’re not going to get the fruit in your own life. That applies very directly to me and should apply to all who consider themselves to be spiritual leaders. You’re not going to ever get your arms around this thing called church because it belongs to the Lord and you are his vessel and his servant. Tough lesson to learn. I mean tough lesson to live. It especially when, and I said, the Lord did, he trained me so well for this, but he also flipped a lot of my personality upside down. My rough hewn, goal driven, get after him, football coaching, all of that. I was never much of a nurturer, still aren’t really, maybe nurturing as a whole. But again, they could not answer. And this goes right into this next teaching. And this is where we’ll end for today. When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice. When you’re invited to a wedding feast, don’t sit in the seat of honor. What is someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited. The host will come and say, give this person your seat. Then you will be embarrassed and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table. Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, friend, we have a better place for you. Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Then he turned to his host. Remember, he’s in the house with the theresies. He just humbled them. Whether they wanted to be humbled or not, he humbled them because they had already gone through this in the previous chapter. If you always talk about chapter, don’t don’t don’t pay attention to chapter breaks, but it’s an easy reference point. So in the last chapter, they already were humbled, right? Taught a lesson. And now they’re humbled. And now he turns to them and he says, when you put when you put on a luncheon or a banquet, he said, don’t invite your friends, brothers, relatives and rich neighbors, for they will invite you back. And that will be your only reward. Trading tit for tat, right? That will be your only reward. You’re living in your own echo chamber. You’re living in your own circle of friends. You’re never exposing the world to anything other, right? You’re not exposing the world to anything of God because you won’t. We could go on and on. Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you. Now he goes on and we’ll talk about that. He’s going to continue using this banquet feast food metaphors that he’s been using for quite a while. But you see the imposition on the ruling religious leaders there and he’s doing it sometimes. Boom. He humbles them in Chapter 13 and then they are humbled more passively. They are humbled in Chapter 14 and he’s at their home and basically is indicating you guys need to get out more. Supposedly, according to the scriptures that I read, you know, and Jesus knows the scriptures, of course, because he kind of wrote them, you are to speed vessels and servants of the people. Yet you only serve yourselves and each other. And the people are nothing to you. They are pittance to you. They are people who serve you. They are people who come to you. You have become very self-righteous and there is nothing, whether it’s then or now, that will break down your self-righteousness more than getting out in the world and being okay with the individuals who God brings across your path. You will be humbled as you stand there. Even as a small church pastor, you can get to start feeling like a big fish in a small pond and then you get out there and there is a world of hurt. There is a world of sin. There’s a world of darkness and it is humbling because now you feel like you’re floating in the ocean with one of those little life preservers. That’s a whole different feeling. And that’s where Jesus is trying to take them. They don’t ever really get there. A couple of them do. We learned, especially in John, a couple of them are, see the light of Jesus Christ, but most don’t, but he is teaching us this now. He’s teaching us this as leaders because in essence, we’re all leaders in a certain context in your home, at your job, wherever you may be with your grandchildren, whatever, husbands, wives, whatever. He’s teaching us this as Christians to not hide in the bunker of a church. The world is there, the crippled and the lame and the poor, and those are literal people, of course, and also in scripture, metaphorically, those are the lost sinners of the world. The crippled, the lame and the poor, the lost, the blind, all these metaphors are used to indicate those who did not know the grace of God. Good stuff, huh? So yeah, that’s what I do with my time. I dig into scripture and examine and do all these different things. I hope that you are very intentional with your time. And if you’re watching this like about Sunday for the first time, you know what, I didn’t, I don’t think I converted it to a YouTube yet, but I can do that. And you can listen to the sermon and the challenges that I have for chapter 13, and then bring that right over to chapter 14 and say, “Oh, I see the continuation of all of this. I told my folks, my folks, you know what I mean? I love them.” On Sunday, you can take a Sharpie and you can cross out the chapters and the subheadings and read it like Barbara said, as a reader’s Bible. It’s called a reader’s Bible. And like I said, the only one that I found is in the ESV. It’s very, very interesting. All right, so that’s where we are for Tuesday. Thanks for listening to me ramble at the beginning of this. Right? And all of my pastor friends who are with me on this, you know, you never, ever, ever quite get your arms around it. Well, you’re not meant to. If you could get your arms around it and if you could control it and you, first of all, you would not be dependent on your faith. You would not be dependent on the power of God’s Holy Spirit. You can do all of those things, but now you’ve excluded God’s Holy Spirit and you’ve created a cult. If you are truly led by the Spirit of God, you’ll always have this feeling of dependence upon God. And man, it can drive you crazy, right Dale? You’re like, “Oh, I just want to get this right. Why?” That’s what we pastors do. We sit around wine all the time about, “Lord.” Not true, but you get a little insight like that’s the way it works. We all have our gifts. There are as many associate pastors in the Church Town Church of God as there are submitted believers. That’s the way discipleship works. But Father, we pray that you would have impressed that upon the hearts of every individual who is watching this now, who hears this, who is in your word, in your will, Lord, as we repent and we submit and we give our lives to you as a living sacrifice, we sacrifice our pride, our old selves, and we become dependent upon you. Lead us, Lord. Lead us. Guide us. Show us. Show us the light of Christ and let us be a light into the world. In Jesus’ name. Amen. God bless you guys. Thank you for joining us today. Good Lord willing in the river don’t rise, which there’s supposed to be a lot of rain tomorrow, so I don’t know. Good Lord willing in the river don’t rise. We’ll see you Thursday morning for turning on the light.
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