[Morning Sermon] Receive and Reflect the Light (Luke 8:16-18)

God decided who He reveals Himself to, yet He calls us to take care how we receive His word. In today's sermon, Pastor Kenny will explain how we can receive the light of God's word, store it up in our hearts, practice it in our lives, and so reflect it out into the world He's called us to reach and serve.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I'll invite you to open your Bibles, please, to Luke chapter 8, 16 through 18. Luke 8, 16 through 18. Are anybody's ears still ringing from last night? Mine are, but mine are ringing all the time. Because my ears have been absolutely wrecked by the life I've lived. When I was in the Air Force, I spent most of my time working in a box the size of about a minivan next to a twistron power tube that pumped out 1.21 gigawatts of power. Few of you got that. It's actually 2.5 megawatts of power. And it was loud. And then when I got out of the Air Force, I went to professional music. So then I spent all my time standing on stages in front of big speakers and amplifiers. So I have been doing violence to my ears for decades. And sometimes I really have to strain to hear people. Talk to Suzanne about that. But especially my children. They got those high little voices that get dry. If I don't intentionally tune out the world, if I don't get down on their level, if I don't pay, make a concerted effort to pay very close attention to what they're saying, I'm not going to hear them. And that's how I end up nodding along mindlessly and accidentally acquiescing when they ask me for like ice cream and a new puppy. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, that is fun. So in today's passage, we are picking up a thread from last week as Jesus tells us to take care how we hear his word. Tune out the world, right? Focus. Pay very close attention to what it's saying, to what you're hearing, to what you're reading, so that you can actually hear it. So that you can actually receive the light that's shed forth in the word and reflect it out into the world. That's what Christ is calling us to today as we read and consider this passage. So I'll invite you to rise as I read it. Again, this is Luke 8, verses 16 through 18. No one, after lighting a lamp, covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Father, send your Holy Spirit now, we pray, to enlighten and illumine our understanding so that we can take care how we hear your word and reflect your light into the world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. So, like I said, we are picking up a thread from last week. If you weren't here, Neil led us through Jesus' well-known parable of the sower, or really, when you think about it, his parable of the soils. And one purpose of that parable, along with Jesus' explanation of it, was to help the disciples come to grips with the mystery of divine revelation. To some, Jesus has given the fruitful secrets of the kingdom. They hear the word, they receive it, they produce all kinds of fruit. But to others, his words appear to have no effect, right? They fall on the soil and nothing happens. They fall on the path and nothing happens with them. And that's not because there's something wrong with the words of Jesus. It's because there's something wrong with the hearers that can only be healed by his grace. And when Jesus explained this, Jesus shared this, the disciples needed to hear it because Jesus was training them to go out into the world and to sow the seeds of the word after he was gone. And as they went, we see some of this in Luke, but especially in Acts, as they went, they would experience all of the things that Jesus described in this parable. Sure, a great many people would hear the word and accept it with joy and bear fruit. They would hold it fast with an honest and good heart, and they would be fruitful over the long run. But others wouldn't. Some would reject it outright. The devil would snatch the seed away. Others would thrive for a while, only to fall away at the first sign of trouble. And yet a third group, they bear a little fruit, only to have it choked out by the cares and concerns of this world. So that's what the disciples could expect to happen. It's what they could expect to happen in themselves if they didn't take care. And it's what they could expect to see in other people as their time came to go and sow the seed of the word. It's the thing that I've seen and will continue to see as I seek to sow the word from up here. It's the thing that I'm sure you have seen as you seek to share the truth of the gospel with people. And some people accept it, and some people are, hmm, no, thank you. Now, what Jesus explained in verse 10 is that if we were to trace the chain of cause and effect all the way back to its first link, the deep reason behind all the different responses that we see to the sowing of the seed of the word is the sovereign choice of God to reveal himself to some and to not reveal himself to others. The baseline fact of our human reality is that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That's what Paul says in Romans 3. We are all held fast by our sin. We are all blinded by the darkness in our hearts. And Scripture teaches us that unless God renews our hearts, unless God sends his Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds, we will never see him as he is. We will never hear him as he speaks, at least not in the obedient and loving way that Neil talked to us about last week. And so Jesus takes that reality and he applies it to the sowing of the seed of God's word. Whether it's the formal authoritative preaching that I do here in the pulpit, or it's the informal sharing that you might do with a friend over coffee. And he does it to remind us that our job is to sow the seed in faithfulness to the Lord. His job is to see to it that it bears fruit in the soil that he has prepared. And so we don't try, right? We don't try to assess the soil of other people's hearts before we scatter the seed. We simply speak the word. We do the work. And if they accept it, we rejoice. Not because we have argued them into the kingdom or we have used our own powers of intellect and rhetoric to convince someone to believe the gospel. We rejoice because we know that God is the one who's prepared their hearts to accept the word. And if they reject it, if they turn us down, if they say no thanks and they don't want to talk to us anymore, we don't kick ourselves for having failed to do something that only God can do. We entrust that person to God in prayer and we carry on. Now, you might hear all that about the sovereignty of God and the mystery of divine revelation, and you might decide that you are going to become the worst kind of Calvinist there is. The kind that sits back and sings, K, Sarah, Sarah, whatever will be, will be. You don't have to do anything because God will do everything. It's his soil to prepare, it's his seed to scatter, so you might as well be a weed because he's gonna do whatever he wants to do, irrespective of what you decide to do. Bad Calvinist, don't do that. Because if you read any of our forebears in the Reformed tradition, from Calvin himself to Jonathan Edwards to R. C. Sproull to Francis Turitan, anyone else you want to put in there, they will be quick to point you to the fact that at no point does the Bible's teaching on God's sovereignty and redemption and revelation, at no point is it meant to slow us down or to make us passive. It's actually the opposite. First Peter. First Peter tells the beneficiaries of sovereign grace to be all the more diligent to confirm our calling and election by supplementing our faith with virtue, our virtue with knowledge, our knowledge with self-control, our self-control with steadfastness, and so on and so forth. And more important for us here today, Jesus himself tells us in our passage take care how you hear. So don't just sit on your duff. Act as if God has given you ears and take care how you receive the word, so that you might reflect that word rightly. Receive, reflect. Those are the two words that encapsulate what Jesus is saying to those whom God has chosen from before time to hear his word, to do his word, to share his word in the full expectation that it would bear much fruit in our lives and in the lives of others. So in verse 16, we we have this metaphorical shift, right? We shift from the image of cultivation to one of illumination. So we're not talking about plants and seeds anymore, we're talking about lamps and lights. Jesus says, No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Now this isn't a parable so much as it is a proverb, and it sounds with a it starts with a painfully obvious truth. The purpose of a lamp is to illuminate a space. That's what it is. That's what the lamp is for. And so the idea of putting a jar over that lamp or hiding it under a bed is not only a fire hazard, it is just utterly ludicrous. It defeats the purpose of a lamp. Why turn on a lamp if you're gonna hide its light? Okay, so how does that apply? How does that apply to the hearing of God's word? Well, think about it. What is the purpose of God's word? What is it for? That's a big question, right? With big answers. We can find lots of them in the Bible. Uh but here's a good one from Psalm 119, verse 105. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. 2 Peter 1 picks up where Psalm 119 leaves off to describe the Bible as the prophetic word more fully confirmed because of Jesus, to which we would quote, do well to pay attention, as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So we can multiply verses here, but the summary is the Word of God is the light of God that shows us who He is and tells us what He requires of us. That light shines preeminently in Jesus, who is the Word made flesh and the light of the world himself, but it also shines in the scriptures he inspired to be written by the power of the Holy Spirit, whenever and wherever they are read or spoken. So this thing that we're doing right here in this room, where I preach the Bible and you listen to me as I preach, is one of the many ways in which God breaks forth his truth and light for his people. So how silly would it be, right, if we were to decide that we're not going to do this anymore because it's kind of culturally passe. Maybe we'll have dialogues or something like that. I'll put on a video for you. Or how silly would it be if you decided that you weren't going to share the truth of God's word anymore because you were worried that your neighbors and your friends wouldn't like it. The word of God is the light of God, and it is meant to shine. And when it shines, when we are faithful to speak it, or when we are faithful to sit and read it, the light of God's word does not just reveal God and his ways to us. It reveals, or maybe we could say, exposes us. We see that in the enigmatic words of Jesus in verse 17. He says, For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. At first blush, that kind of seems like Jesus is getting ready to unload the full truck of divine mysteries. That literally everything that is hidden in God will be revealed. But that can't be the case. Sure, there are the secrets of the kingdom that the Spirit reveals to God's people. Jesus said so in verse 10. The going forth of the gospel itself, Paul says in Ephesians 3, is a revelation of the mystery that is God's plan from eternity to unite all things in Christ. But what does Deuteronomy 29-29 say? The secret things belong to the Lord. And the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever. So there are secret things that God has chosen to withhold. There are secret things he's chosen to withhold from his people. There are secret things he's chosen to withhold even from the human mind of his son. Jesus Himself in Matthew 24, 36, concerning the day and hour of his return, no one knows. Not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. So Jesus is not saying here that God will reveal absolutely everything about himself. Jesus is saying he will reveal everything about us. The proverb isn't just about the light revealing God to us, it's about the light exposing us to God, exposing us to ourselves, even exposing us to other people. When we're confronted with the truth of God's word, you know this if you've read the Bible, when we are confronted with it, it uncovers the hidden things in our hearts, doesn't it? It lays bare our secrets. If you've seriously read the Bible, then you know what I'm talking about. When it says do not covet, what happens? Does your conscience start afflicting you, interrogating you, talking to you about how much time you've spent on Zillow this week? When Jesus says the two commandments, I'm saying you, but I'm talking to me, right? When Jesus says the two great commandments are to love God and to love neighbor, what happens? Me? I go over the past week and all of the ways in which I have failed to love my neighbor as I love God and as I ought to. See, when the Bible points out all the secret sins of the heart that other people could never see, we become like Adam and Eve, naked and ashamed before the Lord. And we could try to put on a fig leaf, we could try to hide behind a tree, but there's nowhere to hide. The hidden things have been made manifest, the secrets have come to life, to light. We are exposed. Not for the Christian. That exposure is a gift. Because I know, I know that the light of the world has already died to kill all of the sin and darkness in me. And so I want it. I want the light to shine into the dark corners of my heart. I want God to expose all of the ways in which I fall short, because I want Him to draw every last lingering bit of spiritual poison from my veins. I want to be rid of all the sin and darkness that Jesus died on the cross to forgive. But for the unbeliever, for the one whose soil has not been prepared to receive the word, the light is a terrifying thing. It is like the eye of Sauron fixed on all of your faults. And even though it's every bit as futile as Adam and Eve trying to hide in the garden, those who love the darkness would rather retreat into the shadows than be exposed. That's what Jesus talks about in John 3. This is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. This is why Jesus says in his in in our passage today, take care how you hear. Pay attention to the word, receive it wholeheartedly, do what it says, even if it hurts. Accept what it has to say about you. Let it expose you, because even though it might feel like death, it is the word of life. Submit yourself to the light, and it will not just expose you, it will cleanse you. It will draw the guilty stains from your soul just like a white t-shirt hanging out in the sun. And get ready, because if you do that, the more you get, the more God will give. Take care how you hear, Jesus says in verse 18, and more will be given to you. Receive the light, and you will be blessed with even more light. Reflect the light and how you live and how you love, then you will shine all the more brilliantly. But if you reject it, even what you thought you had will be taken away. The light will not illumine you. It will blind you. The word will not encourage you, it will condemn you. This is a really important line of biblical teaching that we don't talk about enough. The more attentive you are to God's word, the more willing you are to receive it and to do what it says, the more you'll want of it, and the better you'll understand what God gives to you. Inset, sorry, insight begets insight. We find that in Proverbs 1 at the very beginning of the book. To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing and righteousness, justice and equity, to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise hear and increase in learning. And the one who understands obtain guidance to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. Insight begets insight. But of course, the opposite of truth is true. Ignorance begets ignorance. Proverbs 14, 24, the crown of the wise is their wealth, but the folly of fools brings folly. Proverbs 15, 14, the heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on folly. We can multiply Proverbs here to show that the more we reject biblical wisdom, the more foolish we become. The folly of fools brings folly. The more we recline from the light, the further into darkness we plunge. And so again, we come back to Jesus' words in verse 18. Take care then how you hear. That is the central imperative of this section. It's what Jesus is driving at. Yes, the soil of the human heart is corrupted. By default, we we walk in darkness. It's up to God to till the soil and prepare us to receive the light. Yes. An amen. But when and how God does that is his business. Your job, my job, is to take care how we read or how we hear the word so that we might receive it in our hearts and reflect it in our lives. We don't get to ignore God and to blame it on the soil. I mean, you could try that, but it's probably not going to work out for you. So, what does it look like? How should we take care that we hear? For centuries, our tradition has used the Westminster shorter catechism to train children and nowadays to train adults in the basics of the Christian faith. And the shorter catechism has a wonderfully helpful answer to the question I just asked. Cooper, could you put it on the screen? It asks How is the word to be read and heard that it may become effectual to salvation? And the answer is this that the word may become effectual to salvation, we must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation, and prayer, receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts, and practice it. In our lives. Let's unpack that just a little bit. Let's get real practical with this. First, let's talk about diligence. Sinclair Ferguson is this great Scottish theologian, professor, preacher. He once said that the Scripture will not yield its treasures to those who are not willing to dig. The Scripture will not yield its treasures to those who are not willing to dig. So if Jesus says we ought to take care how we hear, then that means we're going to have to put in some effort as we read the word. We can't just rifle through a few chapters a day the same way we would read the newspaper or the TV guide. So slow down. Take your time. There are no gold stars in heaven for people who read the Bible through in a year. Take two years if you need to. The pastor has given you permission. Take three if you have to. That would be far better than trying to speed read your way through the Bible without actually stopping to pay attention to what it says and how that applies to you. And if you don't understand it, if we don't understand what we're reading in Scripture, then we should ask for help. Whether that means we pick up a Bible commentary or a study Bible or we ask a friend or a teacher in the church, that's okay. The only caution I'd say is don't be too quick to ask. The revelation often comes in the wrestling. And if you're too quick to outsource your understanding, you might shortcut or short circuit the very process that God would use in order to lead you into hard-won truth. So that's diligence. And it brings us to preparation and prayer. The Bible. If you come to it willing to pay attention and to exert yourself using the ordinary gifts that God has given you in language and reading, then you will pick up what it's putting down. But because the Bible isn't just a book like any other book, because the Bible is the word of God, there's more to reading it than just that. There's more to it than just parsing grammar and doing word studies. We read the word of the Lord in the presence of the Lord, and he uses it not just to inform our minds, but to transform our hearts. And so there is, or at least there ought to be, a spiritual transaction that takes place every time you sit down to read the Bible. And that means that in order to take care of how we hear, we need to prepare ourselves by getting somewhere quiet, by silencing our phones, by putting away our to-do list, and by praying, praying that God would come and prepare the soil of our hearts to receive whatever He has for us as we come to the Bible to read, or as we come to the church to hear the Bible read and preached. And as we do read or listen, the catechism reminds us that we ought to receive God's word with faith and love. By faith we understand that these words are not the words of man, these words are the words of God. They're not merely the thoughts of pious people who lived way back when and wanted to record their experience of the divine. No, these are the inscribed words of the incarnate word, whose spirit inspired its authors to write down exactly what he wanted them to write down. And so we receive them in faith, knowing that they reveal to us the truth of God, but we also receive them in love, knowing that this God of the Word is our heavenly father. Right now, my kids are still young enough to want to hear from me all the time, or at least most of the time. I know that'll change. It changed for me personally. I stopped hanging on to all of my father's words. I stopped desiring to hear his voice as often as I could. And before I could grow old enough to come back around, I lost my father. And I would give anything right now to have just a few words from him. In Scripture, we have the words of our Heavenly Father. Anytime, anywhere, we can crack open this book and we can hear from the maker and lover of our souls. And so when we read it, it's important that we remember that we are not primarily reading someone else's mail. We're not reading a manual of doctrine. We're not reading a history book. Yeah, the Bible contains elements of all of that, but first and foremost, most primary, most fundamentally, we are reading the gracious words of a heavenly Father who has loved us infinitely and invincibly in Christ. And so when we come to this word, we ought to receive it with faith and love. And as we receive it in that way, the catechism tells us that we ought to lay it up in our hearts. This is the advice that comes straight out of Psalm 119, 11. I have stored your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. What does it mean? What does it mean to lay or to store up God's word in our hearts? It means that we don't just read it, it means that we pour over it, we chew on it, we roll it around in our minds and meditate on it long enough for the truth to get stuck in there. We memorize the verses and the passages that stick out to it, not so that we can show off in church, not so that we can pass some test, but so that when life comes at us and we find ourselves run down or afraid or tempted to sin and doubt, we can hold on to the truth. So that when Satan reminds me of all my failures, when Satan tempts me to despair, I can remember what Paul said by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, for the law of the Spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death. When someone tempts me to go down the wrong path, my mind can reach into my heart's store of truth and remind me that blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, for his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. You may not be a perfect memorizer. You may fumble with the words here and there. You may have to paraphrase a little bit. That's fine. It's not about perfection, it's about storing up the truth in your heart so that whenever life comes at you and whatever life throws at you, you can respond in faith. You can fight back the lies that the world would speak or the enemy would speak in your hearts with truth. Finally, the catechism reminds us that all of this biblical truth will be of no ultimate use to us unless we do something with it by practicing it in our lives. This, of course, comes from James 1, where he says, Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For anyone for if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and he goes away, and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. Biblical truth is practical truth. Theology is not meant to be pure theory, says the theologian. If our doctrine does not cash out in the practical fruits of devotion and discipline, then it is not worth the parchment that it's written on. So we could sit and we can read our Bibles for hours on end, and we can supplement that reading with all the best scholars and all the best theologians the church and the tradition has to offer. But if the end result is a fat head with no change in the affections of our hearts or the works of our hands, then we have profoundly misunderstood the assignment. Biblical truth is practical truth. You can't just hear it, you have to do it. And when you do it, don't be surprised, just like Jesus says here, when you do it, don't be surprised when God cranks the light up to 11. The more you respond, the more he gives. The more you receive, the more you reflect. I'll close with this. 250 years ago, a group of extraordinary men gathered to give birth to the greatest nation this world has ever known. Many of them were Christians. They were deists who assumed the Christian faith in a number of ways. But many of them were Christians who self-consciously applied God's word to their endeavors to form a more perfect union. The light shined, the light exposed their sin. The light rescued and cleansed them from it. And they used their newfound freedom in Christ, they used their deliverance, they used their liberty to advance the cause of liberty and justice for all. I'm talking about building a kingdom. Remember what Jesus was doing in this passage over these past couple weeks. Jesus was preparing his disciples to go out and preach the coming of a kingdom that would change the world. Guess what? He's doing the exact same thing right now through the preaching of his word. So take care. Take care how you read and how you hear that word. Attend to it with diligence, preparation and prayer. Receive it with faith and love. Lay it up in your heart. Practice it in your life. If you want to change the world, then the truth of God must first change your world. To bring you out of the darkness of sin and into the radiant kingdom of his only beloved Son. Receive His light. Reflect His light anywhere and everywhere you go. And watch what happens. Let's pray. Father, we are the beneficiary of gifts we did not earn. We stand on the shoulders of those who have seen far off into the horizon and have perceived your light, received it, and reflected it. And the preaching, the teaching, the sharing of your word. Everyone in this room is here. Everyone who names the name of Christ does so because someone else has shared that name with him or with her. So, Father, I pray that you would help us this morning to take care, to take care how we have heard this word, to take care how we continue to hear it in preaching and reading and teaching and all the ways in which we encounter Scripture. Lord, help us to take it to heart. Help us to receive your light so that we in turn might reflect it to others. Help us, Lord, to love you and to love our neighbors well. Help us to speak of you and to speak of you well. And Lord, we pray that by your grace you would root the gospel more deeply into our hearts and give us occasion to share it with others so that, Father, you might bring fruit to them. I pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Invite our elders forward now to prepare the Lord's table for us. This table, it's a gift to us, it's a gift we did not earn. It's a gift that Jesus gave to comfort us and to sustain us. It is a visible word that He has granted to the church in order to help us take care how we attend to the oral verbal word that we have just heard. So as you come this morning, and we want you to remember the words of Robert Bruce, an old Scottish theologian, that when you come to this table, you don't get a better word, but you do get the word better. So as you hold the bread in your hand, as you smell the juice or the wine, as you take them both, remember the broken body of Christ for you. Remember the shed blood of Christ for the remission of your sins and the ratification of the new covenant. Remember the great and precious truths that apply to you, the great and precious gifts of the gospel that have been reckoned to your account. That you are forgiven, you are free, you are a son, you are a daughter, you are cleansed in Christ. And whatever darkness might remain in your heart, it does not define you. You are not ultimately a sinner, but in Christ you are a saint. And if you need to be reminded of that reality and encouraged, then it come to this table and partake, whether you've had a good week or a bad week. But if that's not your story, if you have not yet come to Christ for deliverance and freedom from your sin, then Scripture says, wait. Deal with that relationship first. Come to Jesus first before you come to his table. Be cleansed with the waters of baptism. Join yourself to the visible church, then come to the table and partake alongside the body of Christ. And if you want to know more about that and what it means and what it looks like, please don't hesitate to come see one of us. But for now I'm going to pray and I'm going to ask God to bless this meal as we come forward to partake. Father, thank you for the great gift that is your word. Thank you for these visible words that help us to understand it better and to literally grab hold of the promises that are ours, that are yes, that are Amen in Christ. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.