January 7 Sermon: Acknowledge

In this week’s message we see the importance of acknowledging Jesus, facing persecution with the Holy Spirit's strength, and Jesus' advocacy before God, urging believers to boldly live out their faith.

Consider these questions as you listen to this week’s message from Luke 12:8-12:

1. The passage emphasizes the importance of acknowledging Jesus before men and the promise that if we do so, Jesus will acknowledge us before the angels of God. How does this message impact your understanding of professing and living out your faith in your daily life?

2. The concept of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is discussed in the passage. What does it mean to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, and why is it described as an unforgivable sin? How can believers ensure they do not commit this sin?

3. The passage suggests that the disciples and believers will face persecution and challenges in acknowledging Jesus before authorities and rulers. How can Christians today prepare themselves to stand firm in their faith and witness to Jesus in the face of adversity or opposition?

Transcript:

We like to be acknowledged, don't we? When you see someone and you acknowledge them with a wave or in our case it's more of a finger or a nod of the head and you don't get one back, it kind of invokes a variety of feelings in you, doesn't it? Am I just not important to this person? Did they not see me? Do they not even remember me? Did I do something to upset them? And at the same time, if you are acknowledged by someone who you don't expect to acknowledge you, you feel really good, right. Well, back in October I was at the Reformation and Worship Conference in Georgia and I had a conversation with an author who was there that he's sort of well known in Presbyterian and Reform circles. I had approached him about a question on a resource and asked him for some advice, and we had a great conversation. Well, a month after that I was back in Georgia for my cousin Cali's wedding and during the reception he came up to me and asked me how my research was going and how my planning was going. I didn't even know if he would remember who I was. Here's this guy whose books I read, and he came up to me. It felt really good to be acknowledged in this way. We had a conversation and he had actually remembered what I had talked with him about and we continued our conversation from the month before. That made me feel pretty good. But on the other end of the spectrum, I've had people I know well fail to acknowledge me, and I think that felt worse than having somebody I barely know acknowledge me felt good. Acknowledgement is something that we desire. We want to be remembered, and as we come to this short passage from our gospel lesson today, we have an interesting passage and it starts out with this idea of acknowledgement. But it is far more important than the wave of a finger or a hand or the knot of a head that we get. It's about the importance of acknowledging Jesus, the importance of acknowledging Jesus before men, and Jesus tells us that if we acknowledge him before men, that he will acknowledge us before the angels of God. An extremely strong statement that Jesus has for us today. But it's not the only potent statement in the passage for today. So let's get into the text here and see what it has for us this morning. So, even though we're limited on time today, with everything we have going on, what we see in this passage is really important. It's important that we slow down and we remember the context of this passage. Now, this statement about acknowledging Jesus makes a lot more sense when we remember where we were last week. What did we do just a week ago? We were in the first part of this chapter and we saw Jesus challenging the disciples to be prepared for persecution.

Luke has told us about the popularity of Jesus all throughout his gospel. As we have been reading this story that Luke tells, there's been this building fervor around Jesus, this building anticipation of who he is. He is a popular guy, people are following him, and in the beginning of Luke 12, we see that there are crowds everywhere and Luke tells us that the crowds are filled with excitement. They're pressing in against Jesus and we have this idea of the masses following Jesus. Luke says there's thousands, but what does Luke tell us that Jesus does? In that moment?

Jesus actually talks to his disciples. We're seeing the many, but Jesus is talking to the few, and the conversation that we read last week was basically Jesus saying yeah, I'm popular right now, but the Pharisees, the leaven of the Pharisees is going to spread. And so, while Jesus was popular at that moment, the Pharisees were going to spread discord through the crowds like yeast works its way through a dough, and it's going to cause this discord, this animosity towards Jesus, to spread Again, something they wouldn't imagine in that moment. But Jesus tells them it's going to happen. So what does Jesus do? He charges the disciples to fear God instead of fearing men, and he said that they should be far more concerned with the things of God, because God has power over all things, and he talked about eternity and the power that God has over that. He says that, hey, your fellow men, they can only end your life. Fear the one who has the power to throw you into hell. And Jesus also reminded them at the beginning of this chapter that God loves them and that he could even number the hairs on their head. God knows them that intimately, and so it's with this context in mind that we come to this idea here of acknowledgement that they are to acknowledge Jesus before men, and that Jesus would then acknowledge them before the angels of God. This is a significant part of what it means to fear God instead of fearing men. What he tells them here is that he will recognize those who acknowledge him at the day of judgment, the ones who stand firm in their faith in him. And this is a very bold statement here and we're getting the idea of something very important, because we get from Jesus here this idea that he is a mediator between God and man.

Now, most of us we're pretty familiar with this verse. This is a rather well-known verse and there's other versions of this in the Gospels this statement about the one who acknowledges me before man, I'll acknowledge before the Father or before the angels of God. So we're familiar with this. So we don't probably stop and think about what this means. But for a second I want us to consider what this would have sounded like in a first-century Jewish perspective. Because when we hear these words, we think like Christians who have, at minimum, a working knowledge of the Apostles Creed and a working knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity, and beyond that, we have an understanding of Jesus being the one who turned aside the wrath of God to pay the price for our sin, that wrath that we deserve. He turned aside. And so we have this basic idea of Jesus as our crucified, risen and ascended Savior, interceding for us, being our mediator in our very own flesh, at the right hand of God. We have this basic idea that this is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ for his people. This is what Jesus is doing now. Again, that's a big part of our understanding of who Jesus is.

But remember that wouldn't have been the case for the disciples in the first century. They didn't have this understanding that we do. For them to hear Jesus' claim that he has any kind of role in who is acknowledged before the angels of God. That's a claim of divinity and it would have blown their minds. It would have been the idea that, wait, who does this guy think he is? He has the power to say who is acknowledged before God. Again, this is an amazing and important claim and it's about Jesus being an advocate for his people.

Jesus here is claiming to be more than just a mere man. Remember back to what I refreshed our memory about from last week we were told that we were to fear God and not men, and now we're being told to be sure to acknowledge Jesus before men. And here Jesus is claiming to be more than just a mere man. He is claiming a role of judgment, and the way that we are able to stand in the judgment is to acknowledge him. And we know, we understand that we need an advocate.

We know that we cannot go before the Father on our own, because we are rebellious creatures. We have rebelled against a holy God and we need someone who can cover our sin, and Jesus here points to the fact that he is the one who is able to do that. Here we see that we need to acknowledge him and to stand firm in him, and when we fear God in repentance and in faith, we then have the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. This is good news for us, because as humans, we have no power over death. God is the one who holds the power of death and hell. But in Christ we have one of us, someone who took on our flesh, who is more than a mere man. We have the God-man who acknowledges us in the presence of the Father, the one who promises that he will never leave us or forsake us. So what we do is we receive this gift of faith and we hold fast to that faith because we understand that this is the only hope we've got. No mere human can promise this to us, but when we acknowledge Jesus before men, we have confidence that we will be acknowledged in heaven. This is our only hope, and when we spoke with those who were making profession of faith this morning, we had a few different questions that they acknowledged, but I want us to take a quick look at the first two.

This is what we're talking about here. Do you acknowledge yourself to be sinners in the sight of God and without hope for your salvation except in His sovereign mercy? He's our only hope. This is all. We've got to acknowledge Him. And do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as the Savior of sinners, and do you receive and depend upon Him alone for your salvation, as he's offered in the gospel? We ask them to confirm this in the presence of the people of God. They've acknowledged God before men.

In doing this, and when we do this in true repentance and in faith, we trust that the one who is our Savior will acknowledge us before God, because we have an advocate and he is the one who is faithful to the promises that he makes to his people. And we see that we have a deeper promise that allows us to live this life in confidence, because we have the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit as well. The one who quickens faith in our hearts and brings us from death to life remains with us and causes us to grow in faith and strengthen us to continue to confess Christ in the presence of men as we live this life in faith, and while a public profession of faith in the presence of the people of God is vital, this is the easy part. This is the easy stuff. Professing faith amidst the potential scorn of the world or under the threat of persecution is much more difficult, and that is why we need the work of the Spirit. This is why we need this indwelling Holy Spirit, so that we might continue to be faithful to the one who promises to be faithful to us, and it's with words about the Holy Spirit.

That is the next part of this passage, and it's once again a pretty well-known statement from Jesus. We see this here as he talks about anyone who speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. This is a well-known statement from Jesus, and in order to fully grasp what Jesus is telling us here, we have to think back again, even further back in the book of Luke, and we need to think back to when we were seeing that Jesus was casting out demons, and the people around him were claiming that he was casting out these demons in the name of Bilzebol. Hey, I said it right again, that's a hard one, and what we saw there, in that part of Luke, was that they were attributing the works of God to evil spirits, and so Jesus was talking about.

These people didn't have faith. They rejected what they saw right in front of them. It was obvious that Jesus had power from God because he was casting out demons, and they were so filled with rebellion in their hearts against the work of God that they attributed this obvious work of God to be a work of demons themselves. They were rejecting the one that God had sent. That was the point, and so the point that Jesus is making here about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is that to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to reject the work that he is doing, and the disciples have not rejected the Holy Spirit. Why? Because they believe. They believe that Jesus is from God, they have faith, the Holy Spirit is at work in them. They have not turned away from Jesus, and Jesus assures them that they will have the Holy Spirit at work in them when they remain faithful to him, and so this theme of persecution comes through once again and it's a somber prediction for those that Jesus is speaking to Remember.

This is a moment where it seems like Jesus is going to be the guy. He's popular, they're pressing in around him. It seems like, hey, this point where we're going to rise up and take over and Jesus is going to be the one in charge, this is what they expected the Messiah to do. Luke makes us think that this is possible, that there's these thousands upon thousands who are following Jesus. And yet Jesus comes into the intimate, to his closest one, and says guys, it's going to be hard, persecution is coming. The popularity of Jesus has been increasing and building. We would not expect that persecution would be on the way. This wasn't even in the realm of possibility, more than likely for the disciples, but Jesus lets them know it is coming.

This is on the way. He tells them that they will be brought before authorities and before rulers, but he also tells them they're not to be anxious about what that looks like, because they will have the gift of the Holy Spirit. They have not rejected the work of God, they have not blasphemed the Spirit, and so they will have him working for them in the face of these hardships that they'll face. So as we close up today and think about this passage, we see a lot that put some of the pieces together for us on the equipping of the disciples and what the early church faced. In the book of Acts we see what they faced there.

But the Holy Spirit was with the disciples and because of their refusal to deny God before men, the faith has come down to us through the ages and we have seen that even today people acknowledge Jesus as Lord because they were faithful, because they acknowledged Jesus in the face of persecution. He has remained faithful to his people, just as he promised. And as we seek to apply these words to our lives, you and I will likely never face the persecution. That's anything like what the disciples faced, and we will probably never face even what our sisters and brothers in other parts of the world are experiencing right now. But that does not mean that we do not need to be prepared Well.

Our lives might not be on the line in the coming week. We're not going to be told that if you acknowledge Jesus you will die, like maybe some of our sisters and brothers in other parts of the world will experience. We're not going to see that, but we are going to have the opportunity to acknowledge Jesus this week. We will have the opportunity to acknowledge him before men at some point in our comings and goings this week. It might be the opportunity to share your faith, or it might be a challenge that we face to stand firm for the truth of God's Word. I don't know what it's going to be, but I think that you know just as well as I do that you are going to have the opportunity. It will arise, so may we be filled with the assurance that in those situations we will not be abandoned.

God, the Holy Spirit, enables us and we are equipped with what we need to stand firm in the faith and to witness to his work. Trust the gospel that you have heard and the faith that you have given witness to. Trust that it is sufficient to do what the Holy Spirit does for people to hear and believe, not because you're going to have the right words, not because you will be convincing, but because God works through the proclamation of the gospel to bring rebellious, dead sinners to life. That's how he works, and I know we are also nervous about what we will say and whether or not we can say the right thing or whether it will be enough. That's not the challenge. The real challenge we face isn't what we're going to say. The challenge we face is to be faithful to the message of the gospel of Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension to save a people for himself. That's the challenge, not what to say, but to remain faithful to the gospel.

Our words don't need to be perfect. They need to be faithful to the gospel and to the Word of God. The Spirit does the rest. Stand firm and acknowledge Jesus before men and live with a great trust that the Word and the Holy Spirit is sufficient to do the good work that he does in the hearts of those who hear the message of salvation in Christ. Amen. Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting God, we thank you for the gift of your Word and we pray that through the power of your Word and Spirit, you would build us up in faith that we might acknowledge you before men, for we know that you have acknowledged us before the Father. You are our advocate, you are our mediator, the one interceding for us in this very moment, in our very own flesh, at the Father's right hand. So we pray that as we leave from here today, you would embolden us with faithfulness to your gospel that we might be your willing servants. It is in the name of Jesus that we pray, amen.