LUKE: YEAR OF OUR LORD (WEEK 1) - PEOPLE OF HOPE

We are beginning a new Bible book series this week - the Gospel according to St. Luke.

What is cool about Luke’s gospel is that Luke, a doctor (we learn that from his second volume entitled “The Acts of the Apostles”) has decided to do some investigative reporting about Jesus. Luke acknowledges he is NOT personally an eye-witness; BUT he has eye-witness accounts available to him and has put in a lot of time and effort to check out the claims and the stories and the timeline to put things in an orderly account.

Luke begins his story of Jesus in an intriguing way. He will introduce us to an extraordinary Savior by first introducing us to some very UN-extraordinary people living in a very UN-extraordinary place and a seemingly UN-extraordinary time…

Israel has lived in divine silence for 400 years. 400 years, no prophetic voice of God.

Now - here’s a valid question… WHY is God staying silent? Is He ignoring us? Why isn’t he moving in a way that I can understand?

Have you ever been there? We say, “God moves in mysterious ways.” But do we REALLY believe that? At times, we probably do. At times, I would imagine we don’t. There are those who say, “I believe in God….as long as He does it in THIS way; as long as He does it in THIS timeframe.”

And when He DOESN’T move the way we want Him to - when He DOES move in mysterious ways, where does that tend to send YOU?

There’s a reason that JOY is considered a fruit of the Spirit. Joy is a divinely inspired thing because in our sinful nature, we tend to fall into gloom and pessimism when things are rough. JOY comes when we are able to trust the truth of Scripture that GOD’S ways are higher than OUR ways. His plans, much more extensive and entailed and eternal than ours. Joy grows when our faith gets to the point where we are okay with that fact.

So here’s Luke, trying to make an orderly account, and he’s got to open with some kind of tie-in to the Old Testament, right? He’s got to show how his story fits perfectly into the timeline of the other stories of God’s people. And since those people have been in darkness for 400 years, it makes sense to Luke to open with a ray of light, a glimmer of hope, shining into this spiritually dark landscape.