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When a winter forecast keeps bouncing around, most of us know better than to cancel everything over what might never arrive. Luke opens his Gospel with the opposite claim: this is no chance of grace next week, but the report of what has already been fulfilled among us—Jesus actually coming in history.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
You’ve been following the weather forecast for the last few days, maybe even wondered if we were going to be online tonight. Did anyone wonder that? I actually did wonder that because they were talking about the possibility of a winter mix on and off all day, and I thought, well, I wonder what it’s going to do. But one thing I’ve learned, I think most of us who live in this area know, and really most areas, right? Weather’s unpredictable.
And so I try the vast majority of the time, when we’re talking about what are we going to do as a church, not to make the decision way ahead of time because whatever decision I make is probably going to be wrong. I was thinking about that this week when I saw the announcement from our neighbor Lindenwood. They have, it used to be called the Christmas Walk, now it’s called Winterfest, but this Christmas gathering towards the end of the semester where the students do various things, but they invite the community in and there’s beautiful luminaries.
I have some pictures from back when I worked there of a night where it was sort of like tonight and it aired just a little on the side of wintry weather, and so there was just this light rain falling, it was just above freezing, and the luminaries were beautiful reflecting on the wet pavement, the wet pavers. It was beautiful. But this week, as the forecast bounced around, I saw the notice go up on social media. They weren’t going to do Winterfest this year because of the threat of winter weather. It was going to be below freezing, it was going to be icing and sleeting, and so they canceled it for the year.
And then as the forecast changed, I thought, for one, I know what it’s like to make one of those decisions and realize you got it wrong, but two, I just thought it’s where you really need to make sure, if you’re going to make a decision, you need to make sure you’re sure of the information behind it first, right? And so if there’s a giant front coming and we’re five or ten hours out from it and they say when that front hits everywhere it’s going, it’s just laying down the snow and there’s not going to be any traffic going anywhere, well then you say, okay, we’re going with this.
But if there’s a front five or six days from now that might be coming through and it’s going to be borderline thinking about doing something, I just don’t trust that it’s going to. I want more, right? I want to know more because it doesn’t matter if the meteorologists, even my favorite meteorologists say, yeah, you know, it could be downright slick out there, well, but is it going to be? Whenever I talk, no matter how dramatic, it could be an ice skating rink on 70, well, but if it doesn’t actually do it, all that exciting talk doesn’t really do anything, does it? It only actually needs to happen.
And so whether it’s a forecast or a news report or reading history or whatever it might be, especially if it’s going to affect what we’re going to do, what we want is we want to know it’s not just lofty talk, it’s not just speculation, it’s actually attached to something consequential.
We’re turning to the Gospel of Luke tonight as we continue to think about what makes the ultimate Christmas tree. And as we turn to that second root, last week we looked at the root of prophecy of God working, speaking throughout the ages, now we’re turning to history. And at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, what Luke wants to make sure that people understand is he’s not talking about an interesting forecast. It might, it’s not that there’s a chance of grace next week, but rather that the grace blizzard has already come, it’s already happened.
And if you’ve, if you approach that rightly, if you have all the nice makings for soups and a warm home and plenty of blankets and everything that you might need to do out already arranged so you can do it without going out, if it snows a bunch, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could even be a nice thing. But if you have to go out in it because you didn’t plan, it’s bad. And Luke wants the people to understand this isn’t something that’s lofty talk. This is something that has happened, that has consequence, and therefore you want to make sure as you’re preparing the decorations of your life that you’re acting accordingly.
Some things, it’s just not worth canceling an event over. Some things, it’s not worth redirecting our lives over. But when God comes into the world and actually acts in history, it is. To decorate your Christmas tree, and you’re decorating this ultimate Christmas tree we’re talking about, we want to make sure that we don’t miss the memorable ornaments, right? It’s not about just staging something beautiful. You can go to Walmart or Target and get some nice big ornaments and put them on the tree and it’ll look really pretty, but it won’t mean as much as if you go find that crate that has the ornaments that your family’s passed down that you’ve treasured every year. They mean something, they’re not just staging something.
As Luke talks about the ultimate Christmas tree, we’re talking about something that means something. It doesn’t just stage something. Let’s pray tonight that we can understand that more deeply as we come before God’s Word. Please pray with me.
Father, we do pray that you’d help us to understand you’re not just talking about something we can put in performance that we can sing about, that we can have a celebration over, but rather something that actually changed something, something that did something, something that made the world totally different after than it was before, that nothing will ever be the same. Would you help us to live our lives in accordance with that? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Here’s the full stop, big idea that Luke wants everyone to understand when you open up his gospel, because he doesn’t waste any time. He talks about it in verse one, and that’s that Jesus came in history. Take a look at verse one.
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled in the world, and the things that have been fulfilled among us.”
There’s lots of ways you can start a gospel, and we don’t have to speculate on how you can start a gospel, because we have four of them, right? We can look at the different gospels and say, oh, well, what do you know? They each do it differently. So there are at least four good ways that you can start a gospel. There are other ways that people wrote false gospels. They aren’t necessarily good ways to start a gospel, but here are four different ways and that’s interesting to ask, well, why does Luke start like this? Why does he talk about different people giving an account of things that have happened?
Because as he’s prepared to give his account, what he wants to say is, I’m not about to tell you a really neat story, a fun folk tale. Oh, you know, something I wish could happen someday. I’m going to embark to tell you about the thing that people have been talking about actually having happened. And everything you’re going to read from this point on is my effort to do this. And of course, because he was guided by the Holy Spirit, we know that it was a good effort.
But to the first person opening up the gospel to me, to the first person opening up the gospel according to Luke—and incidentally on early manuscripts, it does say according to Luke, that’s how it was often referred to—Luke wants to make it clear, this is my point. I’m not just trying to talk about something I wish were theologically true. I’m not talking about something I hope to be true. I’m talking about something that people know is true because it actually happened.
Jesus didn’t just come to put some lights on our tree or make some noise, something that kind of just comes and goes. Jesus came into the world to actually change the world and its history. So that as we rightly reflect, we try to maybe obscure it a bit today, but as even our calendar shows, we divide the history of the world into two eras: the time before Jesus and the time after Jesus.
That’s our dividing point on the modern calendar. And whether some people love that or not, I’m thankful that’s there because it says something profound happened. Something so profound, we’re going to number our years off of it. Jesus didn’t save us by wishing us saved. He didn’t save us by thinking good thoughts about us. He didn’t save us by anything other than actually coming into the world and doing what we needed to do and taking on our punishment for us.
He came into the world, and in his presence and in his actions, he did something not theoretically, but in actual time. The author of time came into time and accomplished something. Some translations take that word accomplished and say as many were convinced, and that’s theoretically possible, but doesn’t seem to fit what Luke’s going after here. What Luke is interested in us thinking about here is he is a historian. He’s also a doctor, but he’s a historian as well. That’s what he’s aspiring to do, and that’s the form he writes in.
As he writes this, anyone who is well acquainted with Jesus, as he writes this, anyone who was well acquainted with Greek literature and understood how to write to educated Greek folks that read Greek that had been passed down over the ages and went to the academy and so on, if they started to read what Luke’s writing here, they’d say, “Ah, Luke is writing history.” Today we might put on the spine of the book, if it’s in a non-fiction section, history, right? Or history slash American Revolution or history slash ancient Rome or whatever it might be, right? And we’ll say, “Oh, now I know this is a history book. It’s not historical fiction. It’s not just musings about what it might have been.”
No, the person writing this, it may or may not be true, but the person writing this is aspiring to tell me what happened in history. And Luke gives that signal to the people he’s writing. Now he’s going to make the case. He’s going to explain it and give the details and so on necessary so that people say, “Well, I don’t just think that Luke is trying to give history. I think Luke is giving history.” But the first part of that is to say that’s what he’s trying to do.
And both in those days, in our own time, I think that’s an important thing to have sink into our heads about what Luke has to say about Christmas and everything that transpires after. Because sometimes we just think, well, if it makes us feel good, right? Yeah, yeah. Reading Luke, I can think back to the Charlie Brown Christmas. I can think about around the family Christmas tree or the Christmas pageant when I was a kid or whatever it might be. It makes, it gives me a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling. And isn’t it nice?
He says, well, great. That’s fine. Good for you. But that’s not my point. My point isn’t to make you feel good. My point is to tell you what is good. And so he starts off the very first sentence, and incidentally, this whole introduction is a long sentence, but his point in that very first clause of that sentence even is to say, this is what I’m here to do.
He goes on in verse two: “Just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Two really important things here. Now, Luke, we know and we learn more about Luke in the book of Acts. Luke was not an eyewitness. Luke was not one of the twelve. Luke wasn’t traveling around with Jesus during his earthly ministry. But Luke is someone who travels around with people who did.
And so Luke does what every good historian does. He talks to the people who actually saw it. He looks at the documents of people who have actually seen it. And he’s going to report on that. Been a lot of discussion over the last few weeks. I didn’t actually take the time to watch it, but people were discussing all over the place Ken Burns’ new documentary on the American Revolution. Was this a good and faithful telling of what happened? Was he trying to spin it a certain way? Was it insightful in telling the right moments or not? And notably, no one said, well…
But was Ken Burns there with George Washington as he crossed the river to go into battle? And if not, then I don’t want to hear what he has to say. No. The question is, did he go to the people who were their sources, the documents that were written? Did he filter them in a useful and faithful way to describe what did happen? We know Ken Burns isn’t that old. If you run into someone who claims to be that old and is going to report what happened, well, they have other issues, right?
Because no one alive today is old enough to say, “Yeah, I was there. I crossed the Potomac.” You can’t. But we understand that, right? And we understand, well, I may like this, I may think this is a good and faithful reporting, or I may not. But we understand what’s going on. And it makes sense. And it’s a good thing. And that’s what Luke is doing here with the one advantage that it’s like, oh, say, writing a history of World War II today where you can still go to eyewitnesses. Or maybe even a history of the Vietnam War, where you can go to witnesses. And there are bountiful witnesses still alive.
So Luke isn’t writing as one or two people are still left alive, a handful of people. He’s writing as there are still a lot of witnesses around. People, not only has he found the witnesses, but people could read what Luke wrote and then conceivably talk to the witnesses, right? So modern wars have happened in the last 60, 70, 80 years. That’s sort of what we’re talking about. If you were talking to a historian today, someone writing on that. Probably a little bit, I’d say, on the closer side. Maybe even Iraq War, right? First Gulf War, maybe. Not that far. Not that far.
So Luke’s going to tell a history. And then he’s going to tell a history also. And this is another key thing. Of people who stake their lives on it. He says servants of the word. Incidentally, if you were wondering, and if you were, that’s a great thing to wonder. Yes, the word that Luke uses here for word is the same word that John uses in John 1.
He’s not using it quite in the same way, obviously. But in a way, he sort of is. Because there’s kind of a double meaning here, right? Who are these servants of the word? Or they can also be translated ministers of the word. Well, they’re people who, one, serve the good word, the gospel, those who are proclaiming what Jesus has done. And what do you know? They’re servants of Jesus, the living word.
And I think there’s a very good chance that Luke means for us, intends for us to hear both of those as they’re being said. But notably here, the key thing in both cases is we’re talking about people who heard, responded, and then were living in accordance with that, right? They were actually going and serving the purpose of Jesus or the purpose of the gospel. They were going out and doing it.
And incidentally, if you’re going out and doing it, what do we know by the time even that Luke is writing this? If you’re going out and doing it, you’re staking your life on it because there are people that are going to want to kill you for it.
We could write another modern history today. Maybe it’s a history of some of the different philosophical movements of the 1960s, say. And there are a lot of those where it was purely people, you know, this form of meditation or this Eastern philosophy about just approaching life. And you could find someone who lived through the era and embraced it and now is telling the history of that movement and has never for a single moment had to stake his or her life on it. Because if you’re living in the United States and you hold to slightly out-of-the-normal bounds views, that’s perfectly permissible.
And so someone could be telling you a history of some ideas that have never actually gone from ideas into any kind of life consequence, right? But as Luke is describing here these ministers of the Word, he’s not talking about philosophers who went into cafes and talked about whatever big idea struck them and now are reminiscing about the days they did that. No, he’s talking about people who lived in this history, saw the history, and then lived with the consequences of believing that history, even if it meant they might die.
And as Luke talks to these eyewitnesses, he knows not just Jesus, but others around Jesus have or will be shortly thereafter dying for consequence of believing this. They lived it. It was a lived act of history.
Does anyone else here like when the big car shows happen? You see the concept cars and the new cars that are coming out. I don’t usually watch programs about it, but I’ll go online and I’ll… there’s maybe at CES, they have the new electronics that are going into the cars. Of course, you know, that’s what I’m going to be looking at. But you’ll see these different things and they’ll have these concepts, right? And a couple of years ago, there was this car that took the internet by storm because it could change color.
Well, that’d be pretty neat, right? If you had a car that, oh, at Christmas, I want it to be, or to have a red hood and green doors, right? Okay, I’ll take that. And then Easter, nice pastels, red, white, and blue, 4th of July. This is great, right? Well, I knew which company was showing off this car. Maybe you saw the car too. It looked really impressive. But even if I could have afforded it, I did not rush off to the dealer.
Do you know why? Well, because the dealer isn’t going to have it. And today, they still don’t have any because it was a concept car. They managed to make it show off on a video or on a stage, and you can see what this vision for what could happen someday could be. But we know over the years, time and again, there have been all these different concept cars that they never come out, right? You see the Popular Mechanics covers from the 1960s about how everyone’s going to have a flying car within a few decades. If you’d gone and stood in line for that, you’d still be standing there today, and you wouldn’t have gone anywhere because they’re still not out, right?
So I’m not going to rush to buy one because they don’t exist, not at least in any kind of meaningful form. Maybe a demo, maybe a picture, but not in reality. There’s nothing to act on, and it won’t get me anywhere.
But those ministers of the Word, why did they act? Because they’d seen something they could act on. Jesus wasn’t a concept video. Jesus wasn’t a demo of divine love that could be. Jesus was actually God incarnate in the flesh coming and acting, living. And so they acted, and they lived in accordance.
And when Luke reports what these ministers of the Word did, they lived in accordance. And when Luke reports what these ministers of the Word have been preaching and living, he speaks of active people because he’s speaking of people who have seen action in history. That it’s an act of history, therefore it’s a call to action, too.
When Luke says that these people saw something accomplished and then went and were servants of the Word, the implication is, as we read this, if we believe it, if we answer the call that this text is calling us to, the appropriate answer is not just intellectually assent to it, but to actually go and believe it by living it.
We don’t just remember something. Christmas isn’t about remembering. Christmas is about the living, full, enfleshed reality that is true right now. It’s not just some philosophy. It’s not, to borrow the phrase that we hear so often today, “my truth.” I hate that phrase, incidentally. I really do. And I don’t mean that to insult you if you like using that phrase, but here’s why I so strongly dislike that phrase.
There isn’t any such thing as my truth versus your truth. Something is either true or false. I don’t mean to insult anyone, but something is either true or false. Despite what we might see in the cartoons, it doesn’t matter if we’re a coyote running off a cliff and fail to look down so we can keep running until we look down. When we walk off the cliff, gravity is pulling us down. It just is.
We don’t have that grace period where we haven’t realized we walked off the cliff yet. Doesn’t usually work out well for Wile E. Coyote anyway, but we don’t have that grace period. Truth is truth. And if it isn’t truth, it isn’t my truth, it’s my misunderstanding or my falsehood. It’s either true or it’s not. And it sounds so diplomatic to say, well, we’ll just have different truths.
But fundamentally, what Luke is bringing to the people is either Jesus lived and did these things, and walked amongst us, and people responded to it, and now people are going and willing to die for this. Either that happened, or there are a bunch of fools out there willing to die for something that didn’t happen. There’s no nice, soft, warm, fuzzy in-between that we can hold on to.
So Luke’s going to make the case that it really did happen. So then the people, the next generation that read the gospel of Luke, actually read all the gospels and read God’s word, were confronted with, here is where Jesus has left his mark on history.
Go back to verse two: “Just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” It seemed good to me also, he goes on in verse three, also having thought about the fact that, also having followed all these things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.
And you think about that. He says, verse two, here are these things that other people have said. And he says, I’ve traveled with the people. I’ve read the documents. I know the information. I know it really, really well, because I’ve been blessed with this position that I’ve been in. I’ve traveled with actual apostles.
And so I want to write it down. So there’s this orderly account, so you can realize this really did happen that, that as I’m asking you to believe something, I’m not saying try walking off that cliff. And if you don’t look down, maybe you won’t fall. But let me tell you what that cliff is. And let me tell you the path away from the cliff. Because it’s actually something real.
You think about how Jesus has worked time and again, how he’s worked in us and through his gospel. And Luke says, look here, look here. You can see there’s an accumulation of witnesses. 1 Corinthians 15:
“…and he appeared to James and to all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me also as to one abnormally born.”
And he tells that as someone who’s experienced Jesus, Paul’s encountered Jesus. But when Paul says that, he lists out not just himself, but all these other people. These are the people that Luke is talking about having talked to and read writing from.
Because Luke traveled with Paul. Luke met these other people. And so the key thing that we see as Paul lists all those people out is there weren’t one or two people that knew something firsthand. There were a whole bunch of people.
And so a careful mind like Luke’s, he’s an academic, he’s someone who’s going to carefully analyze this. He can pull it together and say, “And here is what actually happened.” Because I’m not just talking about someone thought they saw something with Jesus being raised from the dead. I’m talking about a whole bunch of people that saw that.
I’m not talking about Jesus. Someone said, you know, it seemed like there wasn’t very much food, but somehow we fed a lot of people and it really worked. No, I talked to different people who said, yeah, there wasn’t anything in the basket. I mean, I looked in and I had to look around the basket a little bit to realize there was this piece of bread there and this piece of fish. And then all of a sudden the baskets were overflowing.
Luke says, I talked to these people. Now I’m going to tell you what happened. I’m not asking you to just have a truth. I want you to know that there is the truth and I can report it to you because it happened. There’s a mark in history. There are people whose lives were changed by this I can write about.
It becomes so easy today to say just about anything and for some people to run with it, right? We see all kinds of things in our society where someone said something, somehow it got people’s attention, and now it’s next to impossible to get people to believe otherwise. They really think it’s happened.
It struck me, thinking about the matter of truth, something that’s changed in the way I see news reported, and I really think it’s a consequence of the ease of saying anything. Do you ever hear a news report now and it says, the odds on Polly Market for this happening were, and maybe, I’m not sure if you’ve encountered Polly Market, but Polly Market is this site where people can bet on the likelihood of different world events happening.
And I think if I’d seen reporting like that, I don’t know, 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, where like in news reports, one of the key things was, here’s what the gamblers think is going to happen. I mean, I know that Vegas has always had odds, but like this is a news headline: “You know, this candidate shot off the charts is likely to win the election.”
I think, why is that? Why are you reporting that? That dawned on me. It’s so easy today for people to claim anything and to get traction with it, with no cost to them, with very little effort to them, that now when we’re grasping for what’s actually happening, the news reporters have started to say, well, at least we need to go to the people that are pulling out their pocketbooks and putting down money because they think that they figured this out. And they’re pretty certain of it because you don’t bet money on something just for grins, right? You do it because you think it might be true.
It’s kind of a sad testimony if you think that that’s how we try to determine if people have the right inside sources or if they’re just making things up out of whole cloth. But it’s sort of one of those places where it’s money meet mouth, right? We need to connect these things together. That’s still actually an attach when it comes down to it.
There’s plenty of people who may, I’m sure on these markets, there’s plenty of people who are just compulsive gamblers who just love betting on things and they haven’t researched it. They don’t have inside sources into the industry whether GM is going to announce a new car tomorrow or not. They just say, why not? I’ll bet on it.
Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. And I bet many of them lose more often than they win. I’m certainly not offering an investment strategy here. It’s still detached. But when Luke says, here’s what I’m going to tell you about. I’m going to tell you about these ministers of the word, these people that were eyewitnesses to Jesus who now serve the risen word, he’s not saying, here’s the people that are willing to bet that maybe Jesus is God and they’ll make some extra money if it’s right.
He’s saying, here are the people who are saying, I’m going to uproot whatever I’ve been doing in my life, whatever I thought my life was about, and I’m going to put my actual life on the line where if this isn’t true, that’s really, really a tragedy because I’m probably going to die prematurely for this. And I’m willing to do that because I believe there’s something bigger at stake, both for myself and for the world.
And so it’s not where you write off a loss at the end of the year. You might write off your life.
Luke says, I want you to know as I’m telling these things, I’m not telling fanciful tales of what people wish might have happened. I’m telling what people put their lives on the line. And Luke wrote that knowing people could check. That Theophilus, we could get into a whole discussion on who he is and whether he was one person or if that’s an honorary title to whomever happens to be reading. We’ll save that for another day. But certainly the letter was written in such a way that Luke anticipates different people reading it. And as he anticipates those people reading it, he’s anticipating that someone might go up to someone who’s actually witnessed it.
The next time the apostle Peter is traveling through town, you go up to him and say, “Sir Peter, I read this thing from this guy named Luke.” And he says that all this stuff happened, did it? That Peter could say, yeah, yes, it did. In fact, I actually told him this detail here. Let me tell you about it. And Luke’s writing at a time where someone could do that. And Luke’s making a big deal so people know, yeah, you can actually go do that, right?
If Luke said, I got this secret bit of wisdom that only a few select people know, that’s saying, well, okay, if you’re going to know it, you’re fortunate to have my letter because it’s the only place you can know. But Luke’s saying, no, this is something so consequential. It’s outside of just what I know. It’s just so important. I want to write it down so that it can be passed down over and over again.
Where does that leave us today? We can’t go to eyewitnesses, right? If I can’t go to an eyewitness of the Civil War, I can’t go to an eyewitness of the resurrection of Jesus and sit down with Peter or James or John or even Paul and say, what was it like when you encountered the risen Lord? I can’t do that. But I can see that there were recordings of what they saw. And these recordings, when people still could do that, match so clearly the history that those people had experienced that they said, and I’m willing to die for this.
And that over the ages, there’s been an unbroken chain of people who have received it from the previous generations that I knew the people that were willing to die for this. And so I’m going to continue this chain because I know that it’s worth dying for it too. Not some idea, but history. That Jesus came into history. And not just for this moment of a vapor passing through, but rather he left us history. Jesus left us history so that we could be assured of what he’d done.
So we’d understand that Christmas tree is rooted not in wishful thinking, not in hopes and dreams and warm fuzzies and vibes and whatever else we want to throw at it today, but that it’s rooted in history itself and something that changed history and therefore can change our lives. I’m going to pray.
Lord, as we come to your word, we’re reminded that your word, it’s not just some fanciful hopes. It’s not some mystic’s wild visions. It’s people throughout the ages, from Abraham whom we heard of in the call to worship to Moses whom we read about in the confession to Luke that we’ve been just looking at, who have seen a part of your mighty work in history, the mark that you leave on history and has passed that on to us because, in each case, what? In each case, people have encountered you and seen that you are real and that your promises are real and good and true and lasting.
And Lord, I pray for anyone who might not be sure that tonight, even as we reflect on what we’ve read, that you might provide that surety. And Lord, that for all of us, as we face times of doubt and challenges and points of weakness, that you would strengthen us with the knowledge that what you’ve placed in here is actual history, is actual truth, the sort of thing that will keep us from falling off the cliff. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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