I mentioned it only briefly, in passing really, last week.
Time to talk about it in earnest this week.
As you will hear in this PODCAST, THIS is our hope.
A bright and beautiful hope indeed!
BTW, the cheering you will hear in the background are the precious high school students whom I met at Hartland Christian Camp in July. A better group of students you will not find. Anywhere.
May it be a blessing, to you as it was to them. Enjoy.
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While you are enjoying this PODCAST, I have the privilege of speaking to the greatest group of High School students you’d ever want to meet—the heaven-sent and happy campers at Hartland Christian Camp.
Be encouraged. There is hope. Hope for anyone and everyone who has ever appeared to be beyond redemption.
You are about to see a snapshot of Jesus that you will hopefully never, ever forget.
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The Apostle John turned out to be quite the lyricist. One could almost sing some of his melodious verses. In fact, many of us have.
As you will hear in this PODCAST, John wasn’t a scholar, not by any stretch of imagination. Quite unlike the Apostle Paul, for example.
John engaged in virtually no complex doctrinal discussions involving the nuances of theology, the kinds of stuff in which Paul reveled.
John’s Greek is so simplistic that 1 John is invariably the first book every 1st-year Greek student translates.
John was a passionate soul, one who wrote far more emotionally than he did academically.
Consequently, John had the uncanny ability to relate to us all on such a visceral level that you get the sense that he understood exactly what it’s like to be us — fragile, fearful, human.
When their paths first crossed, Jesus met a rather unremarkable, uneducated fisherman from the provincial little town of Bethsaida. Yet, by the time Jesus got done with him, John became a prolific author (with one Gospel, three letters, and his magnum opus, the majestic book of Revelation to his literary credit).
John was the only one of the twelve who stayed with Jesus on that fateful day of the crucifixion. So devoted was he to Jesus, that with one of His last, dying breaths, Jesus committed the care of His dearly beloved mom, Mary, to John.
It was John who went from being known as a “Son of Thunder” for his uncontrollable temper, to the “Apostle whom Jesus loved,” as John so referred to himself because he could not get over that fact that Jesus saw in him someone who could be loved.
Among his other glistening credentials, John was for a time the pastor of little family of faith in Ephesus. John was arrested, charged with being a leader of a Christ-following community, sentenced, and subsequently banished to penal colony on island of Patmos.
Separated he now was — by the Aegean Sea — from the people he so loved, his modest little flock in Ephesus. Which explains why, when John was allowed to see the splendors of Heaven, the very first description he wrote was so curiously cryptic to us, but not to him. Just a fragment of a verse that spoke volumes to John: “There was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1).
Anyway, John was eventually released from Patmos. He then apparently became reunited with several people from his former congregation in Ephesus.
Much to John’s delight, many of his former flock had continued in his absence to follow Christ faithfully, and to raise their children to follow Christ. This brought John such enormous joy, as you can imagine, that he wrote this in 2 John:
“How happy I was to meet some of your children and to find them living according to the truth, just as the Father commanded.”
“To find them living according to the truth.” Nothing brings more joy to a parent’s heart than that.
Likewise, there is nothing that brings to a parent more grief and heartache than to watch his or her child reject the truth they so love, and the God whom they so cherish.
That same anguish of soul floods the heart of every spouse whose husband or wife rejects truth, the family’s faith, the one true God. Just as it does anyone who watches helplessly as a beloved friend, relative, whomever, reject the truth.
The gallons of tears shed. The many sleepless nights spent worrying, agonizing, questioning, praying.
Our unnerving lament, written in a minor key, that invariably results from the knowledge that the thing we hold most dear they ridicule with contemptuous disdain.
The ever-present, nagging thought that perhaps if I had only said more, or said less; tried harder, or didn’t try so hard; or hadn’t
succumbed to my own weaknesses and hypocrisies. Maybe then I could have successfully passed onto my children a godly heritage one generation to the next.
And then, of course, there are those self-righteous parents whose own children are thriving in the faith. And they never seem to let you forget that you failed where they succeeded, causing us yet all the more guilt, shame, heartache, and heartbreak.
Just ask the mother of Zacchaeus.
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You and I are embroiled in a cosmic collision of good and evil, a spiritual war that is taking place in real time, in the present tense, on a scale of epic proportions.
As you are about to hear in this PODCAST, there can be no doubt in any thinking person’s mind that this war is real, and that it has a profound affect upon our world and our lives.
Even an atheist who denounces the existence of God as a delusion, the reality of Satan as a myth, and the authority of Scripture as a collection of fairy tales, cannot deny that operating in our world today is a force for righteousness and a force for unrighteousness, and the daily-if-not-hourly collision of the two.
This is how the Apostle Paul described this to the Christ-followers in Ephesus:
“A final word: Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on all of God’s armor so that you will be able to stand firm against all the schemes and the strategies and the deceits of the devil. For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places. Therefore, put on every piece of God’s armor so you will be able to resist the enemy in the time of evil. Then after the battle you will still be standing firm.”
Words that are downright sobering, if not outright chilling. But words that are equally revealing and encouraging.
Sobering and chilling because who are we to stand firm against an unseen enemy like that? Specifically, the Devil and his many demons?
Revealing because this does indeed describe exactly what we are witnessing in our world on a daily basis.
Encouraging because as Paul made clear in Ephesians 6, as Jesus made equally clear and His 70 messengers indeed experienced here in Luke 10, this war is eminently winnable.
Indeed, as you will soon hear, this war has Already.Been.Won.
We are less than 6 months from the crucifixion. Jesus will spend these final days visiting every town and village in the South of the Land: Judea and Perea. In anticipation of His visits, Jesus sent out 70 emissaries to prepare the way.
He sent them out as gentle lambs in the midst of ferocious wolves, an unmistakable allusion to the hostile spiritual climate they were about to enter. This was but the latest skirmish in an ongoing spiritual war.
The battle lines were drawn. The harvest was ready. Even as they stood on the cusp of the Crucifixion, there was a godly remnant primed and ready to hear and receive their message:
God’s peace could be theirs.
So off they went, on a several-weeks’ excursion into enemy territory, all to bring God’s message of peace to the tormented souls just trying to survive day-by-day.
Back to Jesus they finally returned, in order to give Him their reports and to debrief their experiences. Which is where we join the narrative here in Luke 10:17…
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Faced with yet another passage (if you can believe it) too often ripped out of its context, twisted into a pretzel, and made to say something other than what Jesus intended it to say.
There is an issue addressed in this passage, and in this PODCAST — a monumentally important issue — so important that we must understand what this passage means.
The fact of the matter is that this issue — what this passage DOES actually mean — is so absolutely important that Jesus said something here in this passage that He never said anywhere else.
Jesus actually said that we must even stop worshipping God and first fix this issue — whatever this issue is (I’ll tell you in a moment) — before we can resume our worship.
So this issue, addressed in this passage, must indeed be a vitally important issue, yes? Yes!
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Dewey Bertolini 