4-18-21 Grace-Benson & Vail Sermon

Pastor Tim Patoka

3rd Sunday of Easter

April 18, 2021

Jesus Connects Us to the Scriptures Luke 24:36-49 1) Through His Necessary Suffering and Rising 2) Through the Preaching of Repentance and Forgiveness How many of you have someone try to sell you something, claiming that if you get this one thing, you’ll get all the more and won’t be sorry for it? Most of my recent spam phone calls and internet ads have been for a house refinance or lower car insurance, but I still get some unsolicited offers of this kind. If I get this, I’ll get much more. You know as well as I do that most of these offers are false or misleading at best. But sometimes, it’s actually worth it! I know how much my wife and I have enjoyed having our Netflix subscription this past year of reduced in-person activities since we don’t have cable or satellite TV. At the price of a small monthly fee, we can choose from any of their shows and movies to while away our down time.

But one offer that is as good as it promises to be is our connection to the Scriptures through our Savior Jesus Christ. Because the one who trusts in him for salvation has much more than just a Savior. They also have God’s entire written Word telling and promising us so much more. And as we look at our verses this morning from Luke chapter 24, we’ll delve into our connection to the Scriptures through Jesus. For it is through Jesus’ necessary suffering and rising that we see all of Scripture come together as one cohesive unit with a singular focus on our Savior Jesus Christ. It is also through the preaching of repentance and forgiveness that we remain connected to the Scriptures in our daily lives as we make personal use of it and share it with others.

1) Through His Necessary Suffering and Rising We turn our attention this morning to Easter Sunday and what happened during the evening in the locked room. Jesus’ followers are in a locked room for fear of what the Jews might do to those who follow the one they crucified 3 days earlier when, out of nowhere, Jesus appears in their midst! Knowing that there was no physical way for Jesus to come in, they all doubted if it was Jesus who was really there instead of some other look-alike spirit. So Jesus puts their doubts to rest and confirms his identity by showing them his nail-pierced hands and feet.

With their fear replaced with joy, the believers now doubt if it’s truly the risen Jesus because it seems too-good-to-be-true. So Jesus again puts their doubts to rest by asking for some food and eating the broiled fish in front of them. If Jesus had only been a ghost, the food would have passed right through him like I imagine it with the ghosts in the Harry Potter movies. But since Jesus wasn’t a ghost, he ate the fish like any person would. It’s after all this 1

Pastor Tim Patoka

3rd Sunday of Easter

April 18, 2021

that the people finally believe the truth that was standing there in front of them – Jesus has risen, he has risen indeed!

But what draws our attention this morning is not what Jesus does to prove his bodily resurrection. Rather, it’s the Scriptures that looked forward to their very moment. As Jesus says, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms….46This is what is written and so it must be: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44, 46-47 EHV) When Jesus mentions the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, he’s referring to the Old Testament. And from this collection of inspired books, Jesus points out that there are 3 things that are necessary – his suffering, rising, and the preaching of repentance and forgiveness. We’ll just look at Jesus’ suffering and rising for now.

There are a handful of places where Jesus draws the connection between the Old Testament Scriptures and his suffering and rising. With the Law of Moses, Jesus twice summarizes the 10 Commandments that Moses received on Mt. Sinai and correctly concludes that if a person can keep them perfectly, they will see eternal life. Because no sinful person can ever do this, we all deserve to suffer the eternal punishment, a punishment that Jesus willingly suffered to be our Savior. With the Prophets, we have people like Isaiah who talked about Jesus’ hardships in line with the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53(:12) and his rising from the dead as the good news that’s mentioned in Isaiah 61(:1-2). With the Psalms, we have sections like Psalm 118(:22) where Jesus would suffer like the stone the builders rejected and Psalm 110(:1) where his rising would place all his enemies under his feet like a footstool.

It is these Old Testament promises, plus the ones we didn’t mention, that unites all of Scripture into one cohesive unit that is focused on Jesus’ suffering and rising. What the Old Testament promises, the New Testament fulfills. As a telescope or a projector focuses on a single point, so the Scriptures are focused on Jesus’ necessary suffering and rising. For there is nothing else more important in all the pages of Scripture.

But is that where you see Scripture focusing in on as its most important topic? Or do doubts tempt your heart to look elsewhere? We know that the locked room’s believers struggled with doubts of their own. If all of Scripture is so focused on Jesus’ suffering and rising as being most important, than why do so many Christians think something else is more important? Why do so many people across the whole world fail to see Jesus in the Old Testament, let alone as their Savior from sin?

And so the doubts easily begin to grow in our hearts. Maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe Scripture is focused on something else than Jesus’ suffering and rising. Maybe someone else is more important than Jesus. And so the doubts continue. But if any of this is true, then how do 2

Pastor Tim Patoka

3rd Sunday of Easter

April 18, 2021

we make sense of Jesus’ own words that say his suffering and rising are necessary from the Old Testament if they may not? Why does Jesus take such great pains to show his nail-pierced hands and feet and eat the broiled fish to validate the Scriptures’ singular focus on his bodily death and resurrection if it’s supposed to be somewhere else?

That’s because the doubts are wrong. What the Old Testament promises, the New Testament fulfills. And chief of all these promises is Jesus’ own suffering and rising because through it we have a Savior and all his blessings.

2) Through the Preaching of Repentance and Forgiveness Not only was Jesus’ suffering and death necessary to fulfill the Old Testament’s promises, they are the basis of Scripture’s promises and comfort for us today. A comfort that we hear about in the third necessary component of the Old Testament from before. Listen again to what Jesus said in the locked room about this. “This is what is written and so it must be: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:46-47 EHV) When it comes to this third necessary component of preaching repentance and forgiveness, it’s good to understand these terms fully mean.

When we typically think of preaching, we think of what I’m doing right now. But when the Scriptures mention preaching, it usually refers to something more general like basic proclaiming or heralding something as they did in olden days. This preaching is not just something that pastors can do. It’s what every Christian can do.

And the thing that every Christian can preach is the message of repentance and forgiveness. We typically define repentance as having 3 steps: 1) genuine confession of sins, 2) trust in God’s promise to forgive, and 3) living a life that strives to be free from those sins. If any step is missing, then repentance is probably going to be lacking in some way. Repentance is also a practice that we should be very familiar with for we daily sin and daily need the forgiveness that comes through repentance.

Once we have repented, we then get to the last part – forgiveness. You’re probably familiar with some of the word pictures used to illustrate forgiveness. The one that I’ll share with you this is that of release. When a person is forgiven of their sins, they are released of all their wrongs, guilt, and eternal consequences with the same joy that a prisoner has when they are released from captivity.

While it’s good to know what Jesus means when he talks about preaching repentance and forgiveness, it’s even more appreciated when we see how this connects us to the Scriptures. In order for us to genuinely preach repentance and forgiveness, we need to practice and receive it 3

Pastor Tim Patoka

3rd Sunday of Easter

April 18, 2021

ourselves. This in turn will bring us back to the Scriptures. It is the Scriptures that tell us what a sin is in the first place so we know what to confess of. It is the Scriptures’ singular focus on our Savior Jesus Christ that gives us confidence to trust in him for his forgiveness, to receive that joyous release from all the wrongs we have done. It is the Scriptures that stand by us through thick and thin, even when we doubt it in any way.

We also remain connected to the Scriptures as we preach this repentance and forgiveness to others. This is exactly the charge that Jesus gave to the locked room’s believers when he said, “You are witnesses of these things. 49Look, I am sending you what my Father promised. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24:48-49 EHV) While it wouldn’t be for another 50 days that this would be literally fulfilled when the Holy Spirit came in power on Pentecost, we are just as much witnesses of these things as were the believers of old.

We’ll have to wait until we get to church season of Pentecost to fully dig into this idea of witnessing to others. But we can consider how such witnessing keeps us connected to the Scriptures. We keep the focus where Scripture does – our Savior Jesus Christ whose suffering and rising was necessary to fulfill the Old Testament. It is through these necessary steps that he paid the price for our forgiveness and is worthy of the name Savior. We prevent ourselves from getting a big ego when calling others to repent because we need to practice it ourselves. And whenever we repent in its 3 full steps, it will bring us back to the Scriptures and its promise of forgiveness. Because we know that our preaching of repentance and forgiveness will not be universally welcomed, we remind ourselves that we go as the Lord’s witnesses. It’s not ourselves that we talk about or what we have done. It’s about the Lord and what he’s done. If we get rejected, it’s the Lord they are rejecting, not us.

Conclusion I don’t know about you, but when I get an offer for something with the promise of much more to follow, I seldom believe it. But when it comes to our connection with Jesus, there will always be more to follow such as our connection to the Scriptures. As Jesus stated in Luke chapter 24, it is his necessary suffering and rising that not only fulfills the Old Testament, but also unites all of Scripture into one cohesive unit that is singularly focused on our Savior Jesus Christ. As the Old Testament’s promises looked forward to Jesus’ suffering and rising, so the New Testament fulfills them as it did with the chief promise of our Savior Jesus Christ. Because of his necessary suffering and rising, there is now forgiveness to be had. As witnesses of our Lord, we hear his charge to preach repentance and forgiveness to all. Ad as we preach that joyous message, to ourselves and to others, it will keep us connected to the Scriptures and our focus fixed on our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

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