I love really good public speakers. I love speeches, I study on, I watch comedians, I watch some politicians, I try to study and what I love most is when a speaker is able to correct people and they almost didn't know he did it. You know, in seminary our professor called that a boomerang sermon. A boomerang sermon is when you throw some truth out there just over people's heads where they think they got it but they didn't really and they're all happy and then he hits them in the back of the head. That's kind of what you're looking for. You know, kind of draw people up and build them up so that they're ready when you hit them in the stomach and it really hurts. So that they're ready to take the correction and you know, there are different people throughout history have been better at that and sometimes they don't want to correct. Sometimes they just want to criticize. You know, Steve Largent was a speaker at an event in Washington DC. He was hosted by the Tulsa World and he began by saying, I want to thank the Tulsa World who do the City of Tulsa great service by not confusing people with more than one point of view. You're ready for that, weren't you? It just kind of came back around. Our Winston Churchill is the best at this. He said, Ramsey McDonald, the rival of his, has the rare gift to be able to stuff so many words into so little thought. You say, you know, you're just going to call you, but you know who the best ever in the history of the world at catching you unexpected was? Jesus. There's a book about his parables called the sting in the tail. The end, the last sentence, the last verse of so many of his teachings called people unexpected. The best example being what we call the parable of the good Samaritan. But when he was first telling that story and he's describing this generous, gracious, man doing life saving stuff to a complete stranger. And then he says, and that one was the Samaritan. People got curious. That was the enemy. Sting in the tail. And what I want you to see these mornings, we began to study Jesus' teachings is that he was perfect in every way. He's Jesus. So he's a perfect speaker and he builds his people up so that they're ready. They're prepared. They know he doesn't build you up for no reason. He builds you up so that you know I'm on your side. I love you. I like you. I want what's best for you and what's best for you is something you're going to hate. But you need it. It's different from his cousin. His cousin John the Baptist was terrible. You know how John the Baptist preached. He looked at the crowds and went, you snake. Who told you to come? That's not. See that doesn't build people up. That doesn't lift anyone. You're not like, oh, he loves me. Jesus. Jesus used that boomerang approach and he says to this congregation. He's back in his hometown. He's just left the wilderness. He's been tested for 40 days. He's starving. He's skinny and gone. He's going from from synagogue to synagogue city to city through Capernaum through Galilee and teaching in their synagogues. It's kind of common when someone who had a reputation for knowing the Bible well would be new in town. They would get a chance to teach in the synagogue and so they would go and they would get to scroll and they would read it. And then it would sit down in the chair. The chair was kind of like our pulpit. I like that idea. The preacher would sit. Everybody else would stand. Why don't we do that? Oh, well, if you'll come in next week and there's one chair, just know it's for me. I probably won't do that to you. Jesus would sit in the chair and he would tell them that he's been anointed for good news. And then everybody wanted what he had to offer. And just when they were at the most excited, he hit them in the back of the head. Please stand as we read this great text from from Luke chapter 4. And I'm going to show you a hope to show you that grace exhilarates and then it infuriates on the way to saving you. Grace exhilarates and then it infuriates on the way to saving you. Here's the word of the Lord. And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee and a report about him went out through all the surrounding country and he taught in their synagogues and was glorified by all. And he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And that was his custom. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day and he stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. And he enrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind to set it liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And he rolled up the scroll and he gave it back to the attendant and he sat down and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him and he began to say to them today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, is this not Joseph's son? And he said to them, doubtless, you will quote to me this proverb, physician heal yourself. Well, we have heard that you did in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well. And he said, truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown, but in truth I tell you there were many widows in Israel in the day of Elijah. When the heavens were shut up for three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, but Elijah was sent to none of them, only to Zerefa, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman, the Syrian. And when they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built so that they could throw him down the cliff, but passing through their midst. This Father reading of God's Word, all men are like grass, and all of our glories like the flowers of the field, and the grass withers and the flowers fall, but not God's Word. God's Word stands forever. You may be seated. Grace exhilirates. Grace infuriates on the way to saving us. The first thing I want you to see is that Grace exhilarates the crowd and makes them excited. It's important that you understand this. I used to when I was reading this text, I mean, the big question is what makes them so mad, right? And they get furious. They get murderously angry. And so I always jump to that, and I jump to it, thinking it was because he claimed to be the Messiah, which unfortunately is just not in this text, so that's not the reason. And thinking that maybe he claimed to be God, and that would be blasphemy, but again, he didn't do that, and that's not the reason. And then I noticed, thanks to Tim Keller and others that I studied, that when he first preached, the first half of the sermon, they were excited. And they weren't excited about him, they weren't just excited that the boys come home. They were excited specifically about the words of grace that came out of his mouth. What are those words of grace? What does he say? He said, I have been anointed, he's just reading straight out of Isaiah 61, I've been anointed to preach good news to the poor. Good news to the poor. This is a side note, but it's a note that's worthy of saying, and I'll say it now, for those who insist that there's a difference between kind of a preaching gospel and a social gospel, there's not. It's all, there's the gospel, and then everything else is not. So, there we go, now I said that. But let us good news to the poor. Good news to the poor is not. Congratulations, you won the lottery. Now you're not poor anymore. Good news to the poor was, there's a new economy. The money that everybody else is holding onto, it doesn't count anymore. There's a new economy, there's a new currency, and you have it. You who have been cast out, the poor in this day would have been, people with no social capital, it would have been especially a single woman divorced women or widows, it would have been children, it would have been anybody refugees or anyone from a different nation. It would have been people who were down, who had sided with the Romans, it would have been anybody who wasn't just right in the middle of a good, anybody who wasn't a good Jewish boy would have been considered poor outsiders. And Jesus is saying, this is good news for you. I'm about to change the currency. Think of it, the term good news is, you heard me say this before, it's the report that there's a new king or the old king is back, that a battle has been won, a war is over. And you who were faithful will now be rewarded, there's a great picture of this, when I grew up I grew up on the whole Robinhood myth, you know, as it fun little stories. First it was Disney and then it was, there's an ultimately, sadly the Robinhood of my college years was Kevin Costner, and he did a terrible job of it, but there was one scene and it was awesome. If you remember the story of Robinhood, good King Richard is gone, he was gone on the crusade, we're not going to talk about that right now, but he was gone. And in his absence, his brother, the selfish, the tyrannical king John was there in his place. And he was awful. And he was taxing people and making them poor and all for himself, but some were faithful to King Richard. And at the end, this night comes in and honesty, he takes his helmet off and it's shown Connery and it's best role ever. King Richard is back. And there's a huge celebration, that's the message of the good news, your king is here, you who have been looked down upon, you're valuable now, you are precious. Now, you were on the right side, you're on the side that is one, there's a show that one of my favorite television shows ever, it's called The Detectorists, it's a British show, it's about these two guys who go all over the English countryside with metal detectors looking for treasure, and the true treasure is their friendship, but that's not what this is about. And, but they're funny and one of them, I should have looked his name up in the, in the, between services because I forgot his name for service too, but he's a common actor that if you watch British TV every day, like I do, you see him all the time, he's short, he's kind of chubby, he's not really very attractive, and he's explaining to his friend who's tall and thin, he says, you know, your day is pretty much over. If you study history, the, what, what culture, what culture considers to be beautiful is always changing, and the tall, thin man, that's been considered beautiful for a, for a long time, and I'm telling you, the day of the short, chubby man is just right around the corner. And, and that's, if you can, that's kind of what Jesus is saying, the, the stuff that nobody considered to be important, I do. Your humility, your poverty of spirit, your kindness, your maintenance, that's what's important in my kingdom, you are the beautiful, you are the beautiful. I'm here to preach good news to the poor, I'm here to preach liberty to the captives, liberty to the captives, the opening of prison doors to the prisoner. If you've ever studied or watched anything about slavery, you know that on top of just the work they had to do and the living conditions was this indignity, the terrible indignity of just knowing they could never escape. When I was in high school, there was several different kind of hostage situations in Beirut, and there was a bishop named Terry Wait. He thought he was able to negotiate freedom for hostages, he wasn't, but he thought he was, and people let him get the glory. And so he went and volunteered to be kidnapped to these Beirut thugs, and they were like, okay, and so they kidnapped him. And he, you know, so he was held together with the other hostages, and he thought he was going to be able to negotiate and they weren't in any mood to negotiate and ended up being kidnapped for over a year. And he described it and he said the worst part were the times when they would take me to the restroom. And so I would tell him I needed to go to the restroom, they would unhand cuff me from my bed, it would walk me into the restroom and they would hand cuff me to the pipes so I couldn't escape. And he said sometimes they would forget to hand cuff me to the pipes. And I knew if they came into that bathroom to get me, and I wasn't hand cuffed, they would beat me, so I would reach down and hand cuff myself. Can you imagine the indignant, just the giving up of that? That's what a lot of us experience when it comes to our sin, isn't it? Why even bother to make a New Year's resolution? Why even bother to say that I'm done with drinking? Why even bother to say that I'm done with monography? Why even bother? I know I'm not, and you feel the slavery of your spirit. I love that line we sing and come boldly to the throne of grace when we say you bankrupt souls who feel and know the hell is sinned within. Jesus says to us, come, I've come for you, I've come to take away your slavery, I've come to set you free. He's come to preach good news to the poor and liberty to the captors and recovery of sight to the blind. There would be these physical miracles that would unveil the spiritual reality that what Jesus has come to do is to show us what God looks like. This is what he actually looks like, he's so much more beautiful than you ever imagined. He's come to you, he hasn't stayed on his mountain, he hasn't put all these laws in between us and him with the hedge so that we can never get to him. He's come to you, he's way more gracious, way more kind than you would have ever hoped. This is what he actually looks like. I met my counselor Tuesday, it was really interesting, I was at a little thing in Dallas and he was there and he and I have been talking twice a month since March and we've never seen each other. And so when we finally were in the same room together it was hilarious, we took down our masks and we just stared at each other. That's what you look like. And he even said, he said, not me, he said, you're much better looking than I thought. So there you go, see if you've only seen me online, I'm actually much better looking than that. He actually could say that, but that's not the point. The point is that Jesus reveals to us that God is much better looking than you thought. He's much kinder, he's much more gracious. When people heard this message boy, they were excited. They were just wondering at the words of grace coming out of his mouth. I mean if he stops the sermon now, he gets taken to the buffet for lunch. He gets taken to the country club. When I used to go around preaching in small churches in Mississippi but I really just drove a home run, I get taken to the country club. If he quits right now, he's going to be first in line for the rose beef but he doesn't. Grace exhilarates, but Grace also infuriates. He keeps going. And specifically he does two things that infuriates them. It's infuriating because of the people that it includes and because of the righteousness, the things you take pride in that it excludes. First of all, what he does, he has my application to a sermon, he says, you remember those days of Elijah? You studied that since Sunday school? There were all kinds of widows in Israel that he could have gone to hell. They were starving, they were poor, but he went to a widow in another country in another city. That was bad. Well, God, I'm not taking care of our widows. Why don't we take care of a widow? That's bad. Then he says, in the days of Elijah, there were all kinds of lepers in Israel, but the only one that was healed was Naman, an army general of the enemy army in Syria. A murderer. That's going too far. Why don't we God withhold his grace from all these sick people in Israel, but give grace to somebody like that? That message of who grace includes, it's infuriating, it's infuriating then, it's infuriating now. Have you ever gotten just really angry about who grace includes? Then you probably haven't thought about it if not. We had an insurrection, a riot in the Capitol building. Three weeks ago, do you know what they did when they got to the floor of the house? They prayed to Jesus. And he heard those prayers because many of them were Christians. Now, I know what you're thinking. They weren't real Christians. You know what they think about you? They're not real Christians. You don't get to decide that. The people who were chanting hang Mike Pence, and Mike Pence, are both Christians. They named the name of Jesus. The guy, the football player who calls all the stir of a few years ago, Colin Kaepernick, heard about Jesus from his grandmother, calls himself a Christian, the follower of Christ, had Bible verses on his arms, and he said the reason for his protest was he was trying to do what he thought Jesus would want him to do. The co-founder, Hawke, what's the name? Hawke Newsom, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter. You know what he does every morning opens the Bible to read it and pray. Every Sunday, he goes to church twice, he goes to his home church in the morning, and he goes to Hillsong at night because he just loves those songs. I think I've said enough to make everybody mad. Stonewall, Jackson, taught the Bible to his slaves. That sounds good. That's a weird sentence to say, isn't it? And over and over again, we want to say, but they weren't real Christians. And over and over again, they look at us and go, you're not real Christians, and we don't get to decide that. There was a time in the 14th century, when the Roman Catholic Church was just in a mess, and they basically, we're not basically, they had two popes. They had a Pope in Italy and a Pope in France. And you know what the Pope in Italy did? He ex-communicated everybody in France. You know what the Pope in France did? He ex-communicated everybody in Italy. You know what that meant? Every Christian was ex-communicated. You know the difference between them and now? Now we have 10,000 little popes. Basically, every congregation, every denomination, we all got our popes. And it makes us mad. And sometimes it's not even the political stuff, or the theological stuff, or the social stuff. Sometimes it's even closer, more personal, right? I've sat with people and heard them say, if my dad, if my mom, if my brother, if my sister, if they're in heaven, I would rather go to hell. It just makes us mad who grace includes. How dare him save people like that? How dare he save my enemy? Curiating. We get furious about it. We realize that we drastically underestimate the indwelling sin in our own hearts. And the deceptive power of our own sin. Grace is infuriating also. Not only that, but grace is infuriating because of the righteousness that excludes when he's telling these Israelites who have fought day in and day out. They have struggled to maintain righteous Jewishness. That they were God's people. They had His word. And they weren't going to give in to the Romans. And they were going to be persecuted for it. But they were going to keep the law. And when he had the audacity to come in and say, God's going to save Gentiles too. He was saying that thing that you value so much, that it is the thing you've based your whole life on, you're going to have to let that go if you want to receive grace. You've got to let go of all those things you take pride in. The only thing that qualifies you for grace is that you need it. And Jesus only feels empty hands. One of my strongest memories of raising my kids is the first time I took a child to an Easter egg hunt. And it was really funny because this couple had invited us over. And they don't even buy two families. So there's just two children. And they decorated these eggs. And the man was the art professor at college at the university. So they had to be beautiful. And they gave Brondage a little basket. And they went to the first egg. And they grabbed it. And they handed the basket to me. And he went to the second egg and he grabbed it. And he was done. Because he wasn't putting those eggs now. And they were all over the place. But it didn't matter. He had two. And I kept trying to tell him, you've got to put it down if you want more. And Jesus keeps trying to tell you, you've got to put that righteousness down if you want my grace. As Tim Keller says it like this, the only thing you need is nothing. The problem is, so if you have you have it, that's what Tim Keller says, how do Jesus say it? In Revelation chapter three, he's talking to the church in Leo to see it. He says it like this. You say that I'm rich. I have prospered. I need nothing. Not realizing that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy for me gold, to find by fire, and white garments, so that you may close yourself, and ashamed of your nakedness may not be seen, and sad to anoint your eyes so that you may see, those whom I love, I approve, and discipline, so be zealous and repent. He's there. He's holding his grace out for us, and he's saying just empty your hands of all that stuff you're proud of. That theology that you think qualifies you, that obedience you think qualifies you, whatever it is you think makes you special, and more important than the person next to you, lay that stuff down and grab his grace. I think I finally began to understand this when I was going through a program called Sunship, and Sunship's all about repentance, and basically all they do is they just keep pressing your face down into God's law until you understand it. No, I really am a sinner, not just everybody else, and then you begin to repent, and then I was so excited one day, and I was telling my counselor, I was like, I think I finally get it, it's all about repentance. And he laughed, he goes, you know what you're going to have to repent of tomorrow? I'm thinking you got it today, because you're about to get really proud that you repent nobody else does. Empty hands. Empty hands. Grace exhilarates, and then it infuriates, but this infuriates you on the way to save you. Because what does Jesus do here? He intimates about the end. He intimates about the cost of grace. He insinuates that he's the one who's going to pay it. He says, well first of all, the first conspicuous thing he does is what he doesn't say. He stopped his text early. He didn't read the whole Bulletin. See, when you read the scroll, the very next passage is, I'm preaching good news to the poor, the sight to the blind, freedom to the captive, and I'm going to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, vengeance upon all those enemies. They didn't say it. Why not? Why did he not proclaim vengeance upon all the enemies? Because he was the one who's going to take the vengeance. Because our sin was going to be put on him, and he was going to pay it because we are God's enemies. And he suffered for us on our behalf. He took it. And he looks at them and he says, today is coming when you'll say to me, position, heal yourself. When did they say that? They said it when he was on the cross. And they looked at him and said, you healed others, heal yourself. Not knowing that that was the very reason he had come. To suffer, to volunteer. He could have healed himself. But he came to volunteer. It's not that grace is free. Grace is expensive. Grace can only be purchased at the price of innocent blood. And he shed the blood for us. And that's why it's so important that we get this infuriating message because when we say that someone so can't really be saved or saying that the blood of Christ isn't valuable enough to save him. How dare we say that? And when we hold on to our righteousness, we're saying, I don't need your blood, I just need this. Now, dare we say that? How dare we compare our obedience to the blood of Christ? So we empty our hands. And we rejoice that the cross has lumped us all together. If God Himself has had to die for me, how can I possibly judge another? And all this stuff that I'm holding on to is just worthless in comparison with the blood of Christ. So we lay it down so we can fill our hands with Him. Please pray with me. Father, heaven, we come to you to fill our hands with Christ. We repent of all the things we take pride in, our family, our religion, our morality, all good things, but worthless in comparison with Christ. And we want Him. And we ask you to pour His grace out upon us and enable us to see the world the way He saw it. And Jesus, precious name, Amen.