“Jesus on Community Outreach”

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“Jesus on Community Outreach”

Sabbath School Class

July 30, 2016

Teacher:  Larry R Evans

Introduction

As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

“Who touched me?” Jesus asked.

When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” – Luke 8:42-46

·      Was Jesus unaware that someone, in fact many, touched Him?

·      Why was it that “power had gone from Him” when the woman touched Him?

·      How was Jesus aware that someone in that vast crowd would respond to His words?

·      What does this experience tell us about our own ministry or “Community Outreach”  to, for and with others?

As we lay the foundation for this week’s important lesson about the Christian and her or his outreach into the community, there are a few key concepts we need to keep before us..

1.     Outreach doesn’t begin with us!  It begins with God. His work always precedes our own.

2.     God doesn’t ask us to dream-up what we want to do for Him. The effectiveness of Noah, Abraham, Gideon, Saul (Paul) didn’t begin with what they wanted to do for God but rather what God was about to do. They cooperated with His plans.

3.     God wants us to adjust our lives to Him so He can do through us what He wants to do.  He will then accomplish “His” purposes through us. We must first recognize the activity of God around us.  We then join Him in what He is doing.  To do this, two things must be in place:

a.     We must be living in an intimate love relationship with God.

b.     God must take the initiative to open our spiritual eyes so we can see what He is doing.

4.     We must be careful to identify God’s initiative and distinguish it from our own selfish desires.  We must compare what we see to be His initiative with prayer and Scripture to make sure that our perceptions of circumstances align themselves with the direction we sense God is leading us.

5.     A sense of thankfulness permeates our very being when we see God working around us with the dominating impression: “Thank you, Father.  Thank you for letting me be involved where you are.”  (These principles are expressed quite clearly by Blackaby and King in Experiencing God)

Note the following insight by Ellen White in 9T:130,

“Opportunities are opening on every side.  Press into every providential opening.  Eyes need to be anointed with the heavenly eyesalve to see and sense their opportunities.  God calls for wide-awake missionaries.  There are ways that will be presented before us.  We are to see and understand these providential openings.”

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With the need to see “what” Jesus sees,  consider now “how” He sees:

“How little do we enter into sympathy with Christ on that which should be the strongest bond of union between us and Him,—compassion for depraved, guilty, suffering souls, dead in trespasses and sins! The inhumanity of man toward man is our greatest sin.

Many think that they are representing the justice of God, while they wholly fail of representing His tenderness and His great love. Often the ones whom they meet with sternness and severity are under the stress of temptation. Satan is wrestling with these souls, and harsh, unsympathetic words discourage them, and cause them to fall a prey to the tempter’s power.... { GW 140.3}

We need more Christlike sympathy; not merely sympathy for those who appear to us to be faultless, but sympathy for poor, suffering, struggling souls, who are often overtaken in fault, sinning and repenting, tempted and discouraged. We are to go to our fellow-men, touched, like our merciful High Priest, with the feeling of their infirmities.—The Ministry of Healing, 163, 164. { GW 141.1}

Questions & Reflections

In the early part of Luke 4 we are introduced to the temptations of Jesus.  In the account of the temptations, Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus was brought into the wilderness by the Spirit, but Luke alone says that he was full of the  Holy Spirit. He also says that it was ‘in (rather than by) the Spirit’ that Jesus was led. Satan indeed tempted Jesus, but there was more to the story than that. The activity of the Spirit shows that it was in God’s plan that right at the outset Jesus should face up to the question of what kind of Messiah he was to be.

In Luke 4:14 we are told that “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.”  We then learn that He went to Nazareth, went to the synagogue and then read from Isaiah 61:2,

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

1.    What was the good news that Jesus proclaimed?

a.    What is the “year of the Lord’s favor”?

b.    Why did he leave off the last part of verse 2 of the Isaiah passage which included, “and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn”?

The good news comes after the Satan tried to persuade Jesus to leave his mission.  Jesus not only did not abandon the plan but He came back with a determination and a renewed focus fueled by “the power of the Spirit.” (Lk 4:14)

Four groups are mentioned as targets for this ministry: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed.  In doing so Jesus defined what kind of Messiah he was to be.  He came to announce, to proclaim “the year of the Lord’s favor.”  This is a reference to Lev. 25 where the Year of Jubilee is described.  Isaiah is painting the picture of the deliverance of Israel from exile in Babylon as a Year of Jubilee when all debts are cancelled, all slaves are freed, and all property is returned to original owners (Leviticus 25).  Jesus is announcing that a new kind of Jubilee, freedom was about to take place because of His ministry.

The part of the Isaiah message that He left off, and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, is a reference to the Second Coming but the focus now is the liberation that comes with this phase of His mission.  This becomes very important for us because we are the extension of this very mission.  We become the hands, the feet, the voice of Jesus.  We too are being sent in the power of the Spirit!

2.    In Luke 10:27 we find these words:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.” 

a.    Why does “love the Lord thy God” precede loving our neighbor?

b.    How does Jesus define “neighbor” in the story of the Good Samaritan?  -- As a noun or as a verb? (Lk 10:25-37)

In the story the Samaritan was wounded.  To those who heard the story the Samaritan was an “outsider” and in a sense an enemy.  Jesus defines “neighbor” with “neighboring” – a kind of action and not just by physical descriptions or locations.  In doing so He also defined who we are from heaven’s perspective.  We are all “outsiders” yet we were included in the mission of Jesus which gives us hope.  The very kind we are to share with others.

3.    Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” (Matt. 5:13) Why not diamonds or the majestic mountains of the earth?

a.    Why salt?

b.    When does salt not live up to its purpose?

Salt has many uses. It was used as a preservative but salt was also used to bring out the flavor of the food.

The salt dug from the shores of the Dead Sea could gradually become unsalty.  The rabbis referred to salt as a symbol for wisdom.  To lose its saltiness is to become foolish.  If we in our attempt to mingle with the world, which we need to do, and lose our distinctive characteristics we will foolish and fail for to do the purpose for which we have been called.

This is what happened to God’s people in Deuteronomy 12:30.  Despite all that God had done for them they began to inaquire about the god’s of the land where they had gone by asking, “How do these nations serve their gods” and this led to the worship of their gods.  They were curious, captivated and then caught.  The 3 “C’s” of temptation.

4.    When sharing in our community, why is it that we need to have our eyes “anointed”? (See Rev. 3:18)

Jesus uses the story of farming to explain why anointed eyesight is so important. But what is that is driving Jesus own passion for to complete His mission?

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matt 9:36)

“Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”  John 4:33-35

The Greek word for ripe (leukos) is “white”.  Jesus saw a harvest while the disciples were concerned for food.  In is likely Jesus what Amos prophesied in Amos 9:13—a coming age of great fertility.  Looking at those who were responding Jesus saw the white turbans of the Samaritans.  The disciples saw outcasts.  Jesus saw a harvest, the fulfillment of His mission.

5.    Jesus sent His disciples into Israel but he did so with a strange command, “Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts . . . “ (Matt 10:9).  Why?

a.    Why only to the house of Israel?

It was the practice at that time for travelers and solicitors to request funds as part of a business enterprise.  What the disciples were about was not a business for earning but rather an announcement of debts paid! Jesus wanted to make sure there was no confusion.  He was not establishing business.  His mission and that of His disciples was built on sharing the good news which meant at times self-sacrifice – not self-gain.

Once the “lost sheep of Israel” were given an opportunity to see and accept the real mission of Jesus, other nations would be blessed through her! (Gen. 12:3; Isa. 60:3)  Nevertheless, they weren’t to wait but they were to “Go” and share first with the lost of Israel and then into all the world.

Concluding Thought

The gospel is a liberation not a bondage.  Within each person is a prize that God sees and often times we do not.  So valuable is that prize that Jesus came in person and from that coming the image of God can be and is revealed.  We are the ambassadors to reveal to others the value God sees in them regardless of their past, their disability or the shadow cast over them by people and circumstances.

Annie Dillard, 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner for General Nonfiction once wrote:

 “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

The mission God has given to us is just that.  Expose the bell in others.  Strike that bell and let them find the joy in singing praises to their God.  It all begins by seeing what Jesus sees.  Why not start there?