Most of us like to watch the news, or listen to it on the radio, or read the newspaper.  But really, there’s precious little good news.   Jesus said He had good news for the poor.  So, what did He actually mean?

One of the little rituals that I love to perform every night is to watch the evening news on television. It’s just, I don’t know, my way of unwinding for the day and I guess it’s my way of finding out what’s been going on at home and around the world. But have you noticed whether you watch it on TV or listen to it on the radio or read it in the newspaper, there’s actually precious little good news.

Generally the news starts with the biggest conflict or natural disaster or court case or murder or car accident and it just goes down hill from there. In fact when they drop in the odd piece of good news we say, “What have they run out of news tonight?” But we do need good news too. In fact truth be known we desperately want good news. Good news about ourselves, our lives, who we are, but where do you get that?

Have you ever wondered, this whole Jesus story, this whole Jesus thing, if its true why did Jesus, the Son of God, step out of heaven, become a little baby, become a boy, become a teenager, become a man, wander around for three and a half years preaching all sorts of stuff, healing people and then allow himself to be killed on a cross and rise again? Why did He do that? I had an email recently from someone who visited our website www.christianityworks.com and she said, “Look, Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed I mean they’re really all the same, just pick one and get on with it.”

The big difference between Jesus and all those other guys is that firstly, Jesus made a unique claim. Jesus said, “I AM God.” The other’s pointed somewhere else, Jesus didn’t, Jesus said, “you’re looking at Him, I’ve arrived!” And the second difference is, that Jesus said, “Look being a Christ follower, being a Christian, believing in Me is not about working hard and becoming a better person so that you become acceptable to God.” Effectively, that’s what all the other religions say.

Jesus said, “No, no, here look at Me, I’m going the cross to die for you so that you can be forgiven, I’ll pay for your sins, I’ll fulfil the righteous requirements of God’s law and I will pay. And all you need do is believe in me and I will help you to have a new life, and yes new life is about change, new life is about regeneration, new life is about getting rid of the rubbish, but it’s not the starting point. The starting point is the grace of God on the cross of Christ.”

But is it authentic, I mean why did He come? Is there something real here and now that’s going to make a difference? Gospel, the word gospel literally means “the good news” – is it? Jesus was born in Bethlehem; He fled as a little baby with His parents to Egypt because they tried to kill Him. Then He moved to Nazareth in Galilee which is kind of “Hicksville” and at age thirty Jesus began His public ministry.

One of the very first times that He spoke publicly He got up in a Synagogue in His own home town in Nazareth of Galilee, and He quoted something that the prophet Isaiah had written a long time before. He read this from the scrolls in the synagogue. He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recover sight for the blind and to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Now effectively by reading this, what He was saying to all those Jews who were sitting in that synagogue and very clearly and very unmistakably was, “I am the Messiah, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me and God has sent me to do these things. Why have I come? To preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for prisoners, the recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Now there’s an opportunity in that for you and for me. And so this week we’re going to be looking at those five reasons, those five promises that Jesus made about why He came. Then you can make your own mind up about this Jesus, do those reasons make it worth while for me to just live my whole life for God? And today we’re looking at the first of those which is, good news for the poor.

The poor literally were lonely and afflicted in the first century as in many places in the world today there was no social welfare in Israel. I’ve a vivid recollection of going to San Francisco and seeing a black man with blood streaming down his head begging outside the McDonald’s store and he looked at us and he said, “Just because I’m black doesn’t mean I’m a bum.” And in India I remember seeing a woman begging and she had a little baby strapped to her, the shop keeper where she was begging came out and chased her away with a stick and beat her across the back. Two thirds of this world live in literal poverty, yet many wealthy people are still poor.

You may have heard me use this quote before but it says it all for me, by a columnist called Bernhard Levin in the UK. He says, “Our world is full of people who have all the material blessings and comforts they desire, together with non-material blessings like a happy family and yet they lead lives of quiet and sometimes noisy desperation. Understanding nothing but the fact that there’s a hole inside them, and however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motor cars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it, it aches.” He’s putting his finger there on that silent desperation in so many lives.

Well does that mean Jesus only came for losers? No! Jesus is speaking into a reality; a reality that Bernhard Levin here identifies is so wide-spread even in the wealthiest of societies. We have that materialistic façade but deep down the inner us, the inner you and me, there’s a deep sense of poverty. We’re made in God’s image and that hole inside us is a hole that only God can fill. And when we look at ourselves when that hole is empty, that first century picture of the beggar, the one that’s destitute of wealth and influence and position and power and honour, is so perfect.

I mean today’s mantra is “you can have everything”, but it doesn’t ring true does it? Inside we still feel poor, I mean people can have people around them and yet feel so desperately alone and empty. And Jesus, the very first reason that He lists when he first gets up to speak in His public ministry, the very first reason He lists which is the reason why He came, was to bring good news to the poor, to speak directly into that reality – and boy that hits the mark!

He’s not talking about harsh rules and judgement, he’s talking about good news, a gospel, profoundly good news. The good news that says that the God who created us wants to have a relationship with us, the God that says, “I will be your God and you will be my people and I will walk among you.” The good news of a God who wants that so much that He sent His Son, not just to tell us but to die for us, to pay the price so we can be reconciled back into a relationship with Him. The good news that God knows, the good news that the one person who can fill it has been anointed to come and bring that to us, Jesus Christ.

We have a choice, the people who listen to that, they actually rejected Jesus, they drove him out of the synagogue, that was his own home town, and they rejected him. We can do that or we can accept from Him the good news of a life in relationship with God – not just here on earth but for all eternity. It’s up to us really!

It must be an amazing feeling for a prisoner – after years of incarceration – to be set free. I wonder when they step out of the prison – what that freedom looks like, tastes like, smells like.  

I’m not sure if you every saw that movie in the mid 90’s called The Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman. But it’s about two men essentially who find themselves in jail, one played by Morgan Freeman is there because he committed murder, the other one is there because he’s been framed. Anyhow there’s a scene in the movie where the Morgan Freeman character finally gets parole after decades, and he walks out of the gate, and for the first time in a long time stands as free man. When you think about it that sort of freedom, well, it must be a huge adjustment and certainly it was for this character in the movie. Freedom is something we all want and yet somehow that sense of freedom can be so illusive, like a mirage painted by the advertising industry, you see it but when you get there it’s gone.

Why did Jesus come for you and for me? What’s the relevance of his trip to earth for thirty something years? I mean the real here and now relevance, that’s the question that we’re exploring on A Different Perspective this week. It’s one thing to talk about God, it’s one thing to talk about Jesus, about the cross, about all the things Jesus did, but why did He do them? What was the point? We sometimes have a picture of God which is rules or a stain glass window or being old-fashioned but let’s go straight to the source.

Let’s have a look, as we are right through this week on the program, at what Jesus said about the reason that He came. One of the very first times that He stood up to speak publicly He read from an Old Testament book called the book of Isaiah, and He read this about himself, He said:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he’s anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind. To release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Yesterday we looked at the good news for the poor. Today, we’re going to look at the second of the reasons which is, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. Now that Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption, if we put ourselves into his shoes for a minute he spent decades in prison, I can’t begin to comprehend one or two nights in prison, this character spent decades in prison. When you think about it, the walls of that prison, the big grey stone walls, were his world for decades. The advances over ten and twenty and thirty years on the outside in technology and society and just the way we live, you think of the things that have happened just over the last thirty years. Automatic teller machines, the way we do shopping, the way we use credit cards, televisions, DVD’s, video’s, the list goes on it’s just a massive amount of change.

But he could not imagine what was going on in the outside because his world was purely the routine, the politics, everything to do with what was going on inside that prison. You’d loose sight of all of that outside stuff. Life would be dominated just by the guards and the power struggles and the grey walls. And every night when those bars locked closed in the cell and clang closed that would be just a way of life, day after day after day it’s the norm, you’d stop noticing. I mean to maintain your sanity you’d actually have to resign yourself to the fact, just to stay sane. Freedom, well what’s freedom, what does that look like, what’s that like?

What about in our lives? What are the bars, the prison walls, the routine that lock us away from a full rich abundant life? Whether it’s the things we do everyday at work or at school or maybe you’re someone who stays at home, the routine, the humdrum, the relationships that we’re in day after day after day. Maybe the deep sense of our own failures. People have addictions, people have an acute sense of their own limitations.

Before I met this Jesus I had it all. I was so well off with a house and a car and job and a career and future and a family, truly I had it all, but it still felt like a prison. What was it, why, what was going on? It’s not that I was a rotten person but looking back on it now from the outside looking in, it was all about me. And as I reflect on that I discover that ‘I’ was my prison, “I” the “me” was the walls that locked me away from that abundant life.

The ads on TV promise freedom, cars, holidays, but when I drove the car or went on the holiday I didn’t feel free, does that makes sense? My world was inside the bars and the walls of my own selfishness, each wall had “me” written on it, me, me, me, me. And looking at the world from in there, well, what was freedom? What did freedom look like, what did it feel like, what did it taste like? Didn’t matter where I went I didn’t feel free, even though I had everything.

And Jesus comes along and says, “That’s why I came for you, to set the captives free.” Later on he also said, “And when I set you free you’ll really be free, you’ll be free indeed.” And I decided I wanted that ‘indeed kind of freedom’ I wanted that real kind of freedom. I know people who call themselves Christians who believed in Jesus for years who haven’t experienced that sort of freedom. What is it, how do you? It’s so illusive. Well, I can only tell you what happened in my life.

When I entered into a relationship with Jesus, the natural consequence of that was to stop living for me. It’s not something that I really had to decide on, it just seemed obvious to live for Him rather than live for me. And when that started happening, all of a sudden, brick by brick, stone by stone the walls of the prison started crumbling down. The thing that was holding me back, the thing that was my jail, my selfishness my me, me, me attitude, I started to lay those down and the walls started to come down. And what I discovered as I stepped over the rubble on the outside was, it was like that scene where the Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption stands outside the prison for the first time.

It was a strange feeling, and it took some getting used to, but it was like going from black and white TV to colour TV. It was like all of a sudden I was still me but there was a vibrancy, there was a life, there was a freedom. When I get up every morning I now feel free, still me, I’m still the same guy with the same talents and with the same weaknesses and I’m still me but I feel free. And it’s an extraordinary freedom, it’s a real freedom, ‘me’ no longer keeps me bound up, I am no longer bound up in me. Jesus said:

I have been anointed, I have been appointed, I have been sent by God to set the captives free.

And when we live in the prison of our own selfishness and our own self we can try as hard as we like to knock the walls down and rattle the bars but it’s not until we lay our lives down for Jesus that the walls come tumbling down. The people who listened to Jesus when He said that rejected Him. We’ve got a choice, we can accept Him or we can reject Him, it’s up to us.

Imagine for a moment that you’re blind and all of a sudden, your sight is restored.  Wow.  What would that be like?  How would it feel?   

As a young man I used to have 20/20 vision but like just about everyone else, when you get to your late 30s and early 40s the old vision gets a bit blurred, and I needed glasses. These days I wouldn’t even think of driving a car or reading a book without the old multifocals. When you think about it, little by little without us even noticing, our vision becomes distorted. It’s like that with glaucoma too, little by little people lose their sight and by the time they notice it, it’s just too late. Being able to see clearly is one of the most precious gifts of life and if you ask anyone who’s lost their sight, ‘What would you like most in life?’ Well one of the things that would be right up there on their list, would be being able to see again.

They say that seeing is believing, that’s the old saying but what we see, tends to be influenced by how we look at the world. I guess that’s why we call this program A Different Perspective. But when you think about it the glasses I wear, they give me clarity of vision that simply doesn’t exist when I take them off. And you know when I go to the optometrist to have my vision re-checked you know every couple of years, they put all these funny little lenses in front of you and they flick them and “is this one better or is that one better, is this one better or is that.”

And it’s amazing how many different perspectives you get on the world, with all the different combinations and permutations of lenses that they flick, flick, flick in front of your eyes. Our view of politics for instance, is influenced by what? Well mostly by our parents and by the socio-economic group that we come from. Our view of the status of men and women in marriage and workplace, well a lot of that depends on what we’ve learned, and what we believe.

I remember as young officer in the Australian army, you know I’ve been through four years of training at the Royal Military College at Duntroon and they’re all blokes, I mean women at Duntroon was just, well I mean that would never have happened – it does now of course, but not in those days. And I remember as a young officer getting my first female boss, can I tell you? I was devastated, I could not believe that I would be working for a woman, I was horrified. Now, I had the honesty to sit down with her and tell her that. I look back on that now and I think, “How could I ever have had that attitude, that’s a bizarre attitude” but yet it was a very powerful attitude as young officer who spent four years at Duntroon. Where we sit really influences what we see and how we respond to it.

There’s a wonderful little story, I have used this occasionally, I have used this before but I think it’s a powerful one, written in the naval journal of the US and it goes like this:

Two battleships were assigned at the training squadron and had been at sea on manoeuvres in heavy weather for several days, I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog so the Captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities. Shortly after dark the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, ‘Light bearing on the starboard bow,’ ‘is it steady or moving astern?’ The Captain called out. Lookout replied, ‘steady Captain’ which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship. The Captain then called to the signalman ‘signal that ship we’re on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees’, back came the signal ‘advisable for you to change course 20 degrees’. The Captain said ‘send I’m a Captain, change course 20 degrees’, ‘I’m a seaman second class’ came the reply ‘you’d better change course 20 degrees’. By that time the Captain was furious he spat out ‘send I’m a battleship, change course 20 degrees’ back came the flashing light ‘I’m a lighthouse’…we changed course.

Our sense of reality can get really distorted by just the way that we’re brought up and the way that we’re seeing things. What was the point of Jesus coming to this planet? Well we’ve looked over the last couple of programs this week, at what Jesus said about the reason that He came as the Son of God to be a man on this earth, and the first two reasons we looked at were that He came to give good news to the poor, and release to the captives. He actually told us that, in one of the first sermons He gave when He began his public ministry.

The third reason he gave was to give recovery of sight to the blind. Now he literally did that. He healed the blind physically, it’s a matter of historical record, but he also used that as a metaphor for our spiritual and emotional sight too. Now maybe you think ‘well that’s a bit patronising, the notion that we’re not seeing straight that we need someone else to sharpen our focus, my perspective is my perspective, your perspective is your perspective, they’re equally valid, why do we have to have one that is absolutely right?’

I was spending some time with some students the other night at a college where I teach and we were doing a tutorial on effective communication. Now obviously the question of listening came up and one young woman shared a disagreement or an argument that she had recently with her husband. And she said, ‘You know the crazy thing is that I agreed with what he said, we were actually in violent agreement, it was just the way he said it, the tone in his voice, I just snapped back at him.’ We talked about that as a group for a while, and we all do that, don’t we? But why do we do that? Why do we react that way? Well, because we put me at the centre of the discussion. The set of glasses that we look at that whole situation through is a set of glasses that says, ‘my feelings are more important than what that person is saying’.

We all get scratchy, everyone does but what’s a more effective response? And we talked about that in the group. And one of the older men pipped in, and he sort of said, “You know everyone gets scratchy in a marriage, I think love is providing a space where my wife is allowed to be scratchy and I still love her, I accept that she can have scratchy days and I won’t bite back at her” I thought “ah wow this is some experience of wisdom with age.” Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be the servant of all.”

Now we all go there, we all have our blind spots, our own weaknesses, the impact on the weaknesses that we have on our own lives and others, our prejudices, the stereotypes. You know, all Asians are bad drivers, and so we put everyone in that box and the moment you see someone who’s Asian you say ,”they must be a bad driver”. Well, come on! Sometimes we just dislike people and we just don’t give them a chance. We have misconceptions. The crazy thing though, is that we hang on to them for dear life, and should anyone criticise them, we fight to defend them.

You look at how many people vote for the same party at every election only because that’s the way their parents have voted. That is called dogma. Dogma happens at a political level, at a social level, in the level of attitudes of people. And dogma happens when our attitudes are more important than getting it right. When we hang on to bad attitudes and wrong attitudes for dear life irrationally, we are blind. And Jesus said:

I’m the Son of God, the Spirit of the Lord is on me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight to the blind.

You know Jesus went out there and told it the way it was, that’s why they crucified him.

You have a look in the Bible at John chapter 9 and 10:

There’s a man whom he healed on the Sabbath, which was the day of rest for the Jews, and all the religious leaders got in his face and said, ‘How dare you heal this man on the Sabbath, you’re doing work on the Sabbath.’ And Jesus said ‘What’s the matter with you, you blind guide? You’re the blind leading the blind’.

I love how Jesus brought sight to the blind physically but also mentally, and socially, and spiritually, and emotionally. One of the reasons He came is to help us to work through our blind spots. Would you ever have thought of that? Would you ever think, “Well that’s one of the reasons Jesus came to this earth? He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind?”

Now we can reject that, we can say, “No that’s not me”, or we can grab that with both hands and say, “Lord I want to have a better life, show me my blind spots.”

We tend to think of oppression in global or national terms, but normal, everyday people experience all sorts of oppression – sometimes, in the most unexpected of ways.  

Oppression is just a fact of life in this world, we tend to think of it in political and in social terms, on a national or international scale, and it is huge. But oppression happens right at home too, oppression isn’t about nations, it’s about individuals like you and me. To be oppressed means to be down trodden. A husband can oppress his wife, a mother can oppress her child, a boss can oppress their employees, and ideas about how we should and shouldn’t live our lives can oppress us without us even knowing.

Oppression shatters who we are. It’s like being broken into pieces and it happens whether the oppression is political, social, economic, or personal. We all experience it sometimes, even without really putting a name to it, all we know is that we’re carrying around a heavy burden and it just seems to be crushing us.

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at the reasons that Jesus gave for coming to earth as a man. Here we have the Son of God, He could’ve lived in the air-conditioned comfort of heaven for all eternity, yet He chose to lay all his glory and power aside and become a little baby that grew up into a man, and to walk around on this earth in Galilee, and in Judea, and to tell people who God is. And right at the beginning of that public ministry when He was about 30 years old, He stood up in a synagogue in His own town Nazareth, nowheres-ville really, and He read this from the book of Isaiah about himself. He said:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Now we’ve looked at the first three of those so far this week – preaching the good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind.

Today we’re going to look at the fourth out of the five reasons – to release the oppressed. Why did Jesus come for you? Why did Jesus come for me? Well one of the reasons is to release us from oppression.

This is an amazing quotation because by quoting Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 and 2, (and if you have a bible go and read it later, or we’ll have a look at that particular passage tomorrow as well on the program). But He’s really saying God has anointed Me, God has appointed Me, He is really saying to the people who were there on the day listening, “I am the Messiah”, which is whom they were expecting; they just didn’t expect Him to be a carpenter out of Nazareth.

He said, “God the father has sent me to let the oppressed go free” – literally to send the oppressed away in release. And we might think, “Oh well that’s not really me, I’m not oppressed, you know I have a pretty good life, I go to work every day, earn a bit of money, come home, go watch a movie, I’m not really oppressed.” But the word that’s used there in that quote for oppression the original Greek word that sits behind our English translation means literally, to be shattered into pieces, to be broken-hearted, to be bruised. Now those are things that we can relate to, those are things that we all go through.

The most common complaint of adults in the developed world is stress, we are overstretched, we are stretched to the point of breaking, and lives, and marriages, and families are consistently shattered into pieces. The world is full of broken-hearted people; the world is full of hurting people.

Now when you look at some of those reasons that Jesus gave there, poverty, freedom, oppression, in a sense they sound like macro social justice issues, but Israel in the first century well, it was under Roman occupation, it was under a tyranny from religious leaders. But Jesus didn’t tend to speak into those macro social, political issues. Jesus here was talking into the lives, the inner lives of individuals like you and me, He was wanting to see people set free to have a real relationship with God.

We see that right through the Gospel accounts, I mean in Mark chapter 1 verse 40 a leper comes to Jesus and the leper says:

‘Lord if you are willing you can set me free, you can heal me’ and Jesus is moved with compassion.

This leper was diseased, he was oppressed, he was ostracised from society, he couldn’t go near an able bodied person like you and me, he couldn’t go into the synagogue, or the temple with other people, and this leper comes to Jesus and Jesus is moved with compassion, and reaches out, and touches him, and heals him, and integrates him back into society.

The bleeding woman in Mark chapter 5, Jesus is about to go and heal the very, very sick daughter of the leader of the synagogue, and instead He spends time with a woman who has been bleeding, and again bleeding was a sign of being unclean, she was ostracised from society, and he healed her, not just from her sickness but from being ostracised, from being oppressed.

The Gerasene Demoniac you know this man who’s living like an animal among the tombstones, who’s full of demons, again Mark chapter 5, this man was in isolation and Jesus when and cast the demons out, and the man said:

 ‘Jesus I’m so wrapped I want to come with you in the boat’ and Jesus said, ‘No go back to your family, go back to your society, stop being oppressed you’re now free’ (Mark 5: 18-19)

 Jesus did what He said He was going to do.

Now Israel had what we call messianic expectations, Israel were expecting the Messiah because all through the Old Testament the prophets were all saying, “one day the new Messiah will come.” But here they were in the middle of a Roman occupation of the promised land, they were an occupied territory, they were expecting a King, a Messiah like David, a warrior King, someone who would fight the Romans and get them their freedom. And yet Jesus said ‘no, no that’s not what I was talking about, I didn’t come here to deal with geo-political issues.

He said, “the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, and to release the oppressed”.

He said, “I’ve come for the nobody’s” I mean in those three stories; the leper, the bleeding woman, the demoniac, none of their names are recorded, they’re such little people that they don’t even get names, they don’t get billing in the New Testament, you know.

And the affliction wasn’t their fault and they experienced the healing touch of Jesus the Christ but at the same time (I love this), at the same time He raged against the religious leaders who oppressed people with their religious rules and hypocrisy. This Jesus didn’t come to lay rules on us, this Jesus came to set us free, and we go through times in our lives where we’re oppressed, and we’re broken hearted, and when that happens we feel so lonely, and so isolated, and we feel like no one cares, we feel like that leper, or that woman, or that demoniac.

And by and large people don’t care, they walk past us day and night, and day and night, and no one does anything, and no one can do anything, and Jesus is precisely the person we would expect not to do anything because He’s God, ‘God hasn’t got time for me, God’s too busy, I’m too little’ look at who he came for!

The four groups of people in that very first sermon that He talks about that he came for, the reason He came were the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed.

That is awesome! He came for you and me. He came precisely because when we are experiencing oppression, when we’re so stretched, when we’re broken hearted, when we’re shattered, when our lives are falling apart, he came precisely for you and me. Even though it’s dark there, even though we wouldn’t expect that, Jesus came for the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed

And we’ve got a choice, we can accept him, or we can reject him – it’s our choice.

Sometimes, life gets so rough and rocky – we think to ourselves, surely, surely it must get better soon. But sometimes, we give up hope completely, and just live in a constant state of despair.  

When we think about God, whoever that is, it’s easy to get a distorted picture. The older we are the more we tend to think of Him as being judgmental, and the younger we are well, younger people, how do they see God? I saw an article published recently that reported younger peoples’ views of God, it was based on a survey that had been conducted nationally in Australia with young people, and they commonly see Him as an “online butler”. He’s nice and loving and friendly and forgiving but with a consumer mentality God’s there to fit in to my life when I need him to help me, when I need Him. Hmm.

So how do we make sense of God in our lives today? Why did He send Jesus? What was the point? Does Jesus make a difference? Is this whole Christianity thing worth exploring? Is it worth pushing deeper into a relationship with Jesus? This week on the program we’re looking at those questions, and today let’s explore this whole idea of God’s favour, of God’s blessing, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but God the Butler???!!!

People talk about Jesus but what was He all about, why did He come to earth? Why did He leave the air-conditioned comfort of heaven to be a little baby in a disgusting smelly little manger, to go and live in a grotty place like Nazareth and then to be crucified and misunderstood? I mean why did he do that?

Well, He tells us actually, He tells us His reasons in an early speech. One of his earliest public addresses was in his hometown in the synagogue, Nazareth. And he quoted Isaiah Chapter 61 verses 1 and 2. Now we’ve worked our way through the first four of those reasons this week, looking at in Luke’s Gospel Chapter 4 exactly what Jesus said.

But today we’re going to do something a little bit differently, and to look at the last reason we’re going to go back to the original text in Isaiah which was written centuries before Jesus walked the earth. And this was the text that Jesus actually was quoting, this is what Isaiah wrote:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from the darkness for prisoners and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance of God. To comfort those who mourn and to provide to those who greaves in Zion, to bestow on them,” (this is good stuff) “to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of morning, the garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair, they’ll be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for a display of his splendor, they’ll rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated. They will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations. (Isaiah 61:1-4)

Now it’s interesting, Isaiah here is writing to the nation of Israel after it’s been exiled in Babylon for almost 70 years. Israel spent about 400 years as slaves in Egypt. They then went through the exodus for 40 years where they wandered in the desert and finally Joshua led them over the Jordan into the Promised Land, and there they lived. And the promise of God was, “This is the land I’ve promised your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, this is the Promised Land, and if you obey me, if you live with me as your God you’ll be blessed, this is the land of milk and honey and I’ll bless your socks off.” “But,” he said, “if you don’t, if you go and worship other Gods, if you do the things, the very few things I tell you not to, I will punish you and you will loose the land.” And that’s exactly what happened.

The Babylonians came into Jerusalem, they destroyed Jerusalem they took the nation into captivity in Babylon and there they’d been for 70 years. And this is the context that Isaiah is speaking into. That’s why he’s talking about the good news to the poor and binding up the broken-hearted, and freedom for the captives because they were captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners, because they were prisoners. And he said:

This is the year of the Lord’s favour. This is the year you get to go back.

So that’s what Isaiah was talking about, but Jesus took that and he said it of himself in Nazareth, but he’s also saying it to us. Those people were oppressed by the Romans, they were oppressed by the religious leaders, they were poor, they were broken-hearted, they were captives, they were prisoners, but He wasn’t dealing with a geo-political situation. Jesus was talking about lives, He was talking about individuals, He was talking about poor, broken hearted captives and prisoners that he was about to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour over. Hmm the favour of God!

So what is that favour? Is it God the butler? Well, let’s have a look again, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”, and He then goes on to list five things to comfort all who mourn, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of despair, and to rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated, “they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”

God’s favour looks like this; comfort for all who mourn, we all need comfort, we all mourn some day’s we loose someone, a relationship breaks down, we’re just finding it hard, we mourn and grieve. Where do you get that comfort from? Well others can support us but it’s not the same. Jesus said:

My favour, the favour of God that I’m declaring to you and bringing to you today is comfort for those who mourn, and secondly a crown of beauty instead of ashes.

This is how God sees you, with a crown of beauty on, that’s how much God loves you, “That’s how much I love you, I bring a crown of beauty, you look at the ashes in Jerusalem, you see that the temple was gone, you see that everything that was destroyed.”

Replace that with a crown of beauty because that is what God thinks of you. The oil of gladness instead of mourning, I mean olive oil is a real fad food these days isn’t it? But it was a symbol of God’s blessing, people would rub it on their skin like moisturizer today. And this beautiful picture of olive oil, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. You know when we feel oppressed, when we’re struggling we sometimes despair, and yet when God touches our lives, when God changes things, when we experience that goodness and that grace we just want to shout His praises. Rather than a sense of despair over our circumstances God wants a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

And the last one, he talks about rebuilding and renewing and restoring. Now that must have seemed hopeless, “these ruined cities have been devastated for generations,” writes Isaiah, it’s hopeless. But God comes along and says rebuild, renew, restore, out of the ashes will rise something better. Isn’t that an interesting cycle, the five things that Isaiah writes and then Jesus goes on to quote that make up the favour of God are: First, comfort; secondly, putting a crown on our head to say “this is what God thinks of you”, our reactions – gladness and praise. And finally the process of renewing and rebuilding and restoring. Isn’t that beautiful?And Jesus said:

That’s what I came to do in your life, got it? Not some butler, not some sugar daddy but to deal with the real issues in the real lives of real people.

People in his own hometown rejected him, we can do that we can reject him or we can believe him from a distance, and you know something, in practical terms that’s the same as rejecting him. Or we can embrace the passion of Jesus for us with an equal passion, with an intent to live in that promise that God wants to comfort me, to crown me, to give me gladness and praise, to renew and rebuild and restore my life and that is the favour of God.

This year is the year of God’s favour in my life. Will we grab it? Because that’s what Jesus came to give us.