The Unwelcome Prophet (Luke 4:14–30) from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

On a few occasions through the decades of preaching, someone has said to me at the end, “I liked your speech.” Although they meant it as a compliment, it’s not. A speech and a sermon, if the latter is based on Scripture, operate in two distinctly different spheres. A speech tends to earthly, temporal matters. A politician might wax eloquent on some issue of the economy or national security, with high praise for bearing the audience along in the subject of the speech. But a sermon considers eternal matters. Its roots lay in the Word of God—or else it’s not a true sermon—so that it comes with authority and the power of the God-breathed word that judges “the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). It is “the activity of proclaiming God’s word to one another, and from one generation to the next,” as Phillip Jensen put it [The Archer and the Arrow, 15].

The sermon, or to qualify, the biblical sermon, has the authoritative, inerrant Word as its foundation and Jesus Christ as its subject. The sermon is not about the speaker or his desires or his ambitions. It’s not about his great gifts or oratory. I remember listening to a fairly well known preacher at a very large church some years ago. Throughout his sermon he spent time extolling his entrepreneurial skills and the way that he had grown the church. But I learned nothing of Jesus Christ throughout. He gave a speech not a sermon.

The sermon has Jesus Christ as its focus. It recognizes the Christological center of Scripture. It aims for the mind and understanding to grasp the biblical message by the work of the Spirit, so that the heart responds with repentance, faith, obedience, and worship. It has nothing to do with voting or buying a product or choosing a party or volunteering for an activity. It has everything, though, to do with relationship with the living God through Christ.

But the sermon in our text is different than any other biblical sermon. Here we have the first recorded sermon of Jesus Christ. Jesus did what no other preacher should ever do and what He alone has the right to do. He made the sermon about Himself. Jesus declared who He is and what He came to do. He didn’t spend His time calling for a new morality or a new wave of volunteerism or a new approach to civility. He declared “today” as marking the decisive point of hearing and believing that He is the good news. In His first sermon, Jesus declared Himself to be good news for the nations. Yet the very people closest to Him did not welcome Him or His message. If they rejected Him, how do we know that His sermon is good news for the nations? Let’s think about that by considering what Jesus said about His mission, His distinction, and His rejection.

Jesus’ Mission

Verses 14–15 serve as a preface to Luke giving Jesus Christ’s first recorded sermon. He had preached in other places around Galilee, meeting with praise by them before returning to His hometown of Nazareth. That preaching mission demonstrated the power of the Spirit, as people began to see the uniqueness of what He proclaimed.

When He came to Nazareth, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. The Jewish people gathered in synagogues from the time of the Babylonian captivity until Jesus’ day. They usually sang some psalms, read from the Law and heard an explanation, read from the Prophets with another explanation, and ended with reciting the Eighteen Benedictions. Instead of a regular preacher, men in the gathering could stand to read from the Hebrew, translate into Aramaic, and then as they were seated, give a short explanation of the text just read. At the reading of the prophets Jesus stood to accept the scroll of Isaiah. Luke makes a special point: “And He opened the book and found the place where it was written . . . .” The scroll contained words upon words with no division between words or sentences or paragraphs. Finding a particular place required knowing [...]