Download Audio Download Text “The End in the Beginning” Matthew 2:13-23 December 23, 2018 The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn Text Comment v.13 God preserved the life of his son in Egypt as, long before, he had preserved the life of Israel there. Here we are introduced to a theme that is going to […]
Download Audio Download Text “The People of the Nativity” Luke 2:1-20 December 16, 2018 The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn I could have chosen any number of paragraphs in Luke 1 and 2 or Matthew 1 and 2 as a text for the sermon I am about to preach. The observation I wish to make […]
Download Audio Download Text “A Time for Angels” Luke 1:5-20 December 9, 2018 The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn This morning we turn from the Psalms to the Gospel narratives of the birth of the Lord Jesus. Today I want to consider the interesting fact, a fact we take far too much for granted and […]
We began our series of morning sermons on the Gospel of Luke on the 28th of August 2011. We conclude the series this morning with this, the ninety-second sermon. Remember, though we have largely avoided preaching twice on the same paragraph, Luke&…
Last Lord’s Day we read of the Lord’s appearance to his disciples on that first Easter Sunday evening and considered how and why the Lord laid such great emphasis on the fact that he was again a body, that the very body that had died o…
The Lord rose early in the morning of the Sunday following the Friday on which he was crucified and buried. That is, he rose in the Jewish way of calculating on the third day . In the morning he appeared to Mary and some other women; in the after…
We left Luke’s narrative of the Lord’s resurrection last Lord’s Day morning with the fact having been announced by the angel but no one yet having seen the Lord. From the other Gospels we learn that this was to change throughout …
We pick up Luke’s narrative, after Prof. Allen Ross’ sermon on Psalm 73 last Lord’s Day morning, with the narrative of the resurrection that begins in Luke’s history, as it began on that long ago Sunday, quietly, softly, wi…
Two Lord’s Days ago we completed the account of the Lord’s crucifixion, reading to verse 49 of chapter 23. Today we complete that long and immensely important chapter.
Text Comment
v.51
All the Gospels report that Josep…
In the last sermon in this series, I read and commented on vv. 32-43. I will read those verses again but without comment. I will offer some comment on vv. 44-49 which we are reading for the first time.
Text Comment
v.44
The sixt…
Text Comment
Last Lord’s Day we left the Lord being escorted from the palace of the governor to the place of his execution and considered the brief exchange that he had with some of the women who were mourning as the procession made its …
The travesty of the Lord’s trials now completed, and Pilate having acquiesced to the will of the religious leaders and the crowd that had gathered, Jesus was delivered over to be crucified.
Text Comment
v.26
It was customary…
Text Comment
v.13
You’ll notice that Pilate also called “the people” together, how he did so and how many we are not told. He knew how bitterly the clerics hated Jesus but perhaps the general population would be more kindly disposed. …
We left Jesus in the hands of those who had arrested him in the Garden of Gethsemane and who then took him to the house of the high priest. Luke then interrupted his account of the Lord’s interrogation to recount Peter’s betrayal. We r…
We left Peter, no doubt chastened by the Lord’s having rejected his violent act, cutting off the ear of the servant of the high priest with his sword as he had, though Luke does not mention that that act had been performed by Peter. But when…
Text Comment
v.47
In other words, this happened immediately upon the Lord’s return to his disciples who had been asleep in the olive grove and the arrival of Judas and the others interrupted the conversation he was having with th…
After a month’s hiatus we return to the Gospel of Luke, taking up where we left off, with the Lord in the Upper Room, having spent the evening with his disciples over a Passover meal.
Text Comment
v.39
Luke says only that wh…
In the Gospel of John we learn that the hours the Lord spent with his disciples in the Upper Room that Passover night were crowded with interactions and conversations of various kinds, including his washing the disciples’ feet and his long d…
The Lord’s public teaching was now concluded. With chapter 22 Luke begins the account of the Lord’s passion. That account begins in the Gospels, as you know, with the hours the Lord spent with his disciples over the Passover meal. It w…
I’m going to depart this morning from my ordinary practice of commenting on the text as I read it. It is a longer text, as you see, and so loaded with material that begs for comment it would be difficult to get through it and still have time…
We have before us this morning two short paragraphs which together disclose a fundamental principle of both biblical anthropology (that is, its teaching about human beings) and biblical ethics (that is, its teaching of the moral standards that gove…
Remember, we are now in the Passion Week, in the first half of that week. Each day the Lord would come into the city from Bethany, where he had spent the night at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Each morning he would arrive in the temple an…
Text Comment
v.1
“Preaching the gospel” is an arresting description of the content of the Lord’s sermons in Jerusalem. More on that later.
This group that came to question him was a delegation, perhaps an official …
Technically, Luke does not tell of the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, only what happened as he drew near to the city, but as the end of the chapter makes clear, he did enter the city, so the editors are not incorrect to entitle this paragrap…
It is wonderful reading through the gospels. They are works of pure genius. There were a great many miracles that our Savior performed and they might have been related to us one after another after another so that even an account of the miraculous he…
Text Comment
v.1
Apparently Jesus had not intended to stay in Jericho, he was passing through. Events would change his plans! A remark like this reminds us how completely the Lord lived a human life. As with any man, events altered hi…
It has been some weeks since we were last in the Gospel of Luke, so let me remind you where we are. The days of the public ministry are near an end. The Lord has spent some months traveling through Perea, east of the Jordan, and though Samaria, no…
We’ve come in the Gospel of Luke to the eighteenth chapter and the paragraph that begins with v. 18, “The Rich Ruler” or, as Matthew tells us, “The Rich Young Ruler.”
As so frequently in the Bible, the author gives…
As you may remember, since Luke 9:51 we have been in a section of the Gospel of Luke in which most of the material — both historical narrative and teaching — is without parallel in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Assuming Mark to have been the …
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The editors of the ESV entitle this paragraph “The Parable of the Persistent Widow.” You may remember that it was always called in ages past “The Parable of the Importunate Widow.” But “importunate” has fallen ou…
All the Jews of that time, readers of the Bible as they were and believers in biblical prophecy as they were, expected at some point what the prophets called “The Day of the Lord.” Like their ancestors, they tended to indulge the illus…
It is sometimes possible to follow Luke’s thinking in the arrangement of his material and perhaps that is possible here. The recognition that it is impossible for us to put God in our debt — the subject of the previous verses — leads natur…
What we are about to read is a collection of pieces of the Lord’s teaching that in three of the four instances are found in the other Gospels, though in different settings. The last piece, the parable of the “unworthy servant,” i…
We have before us this morning another of those most memorable of the Lord’s parables that are found only in the Gospel of Luke. One such is the parable of the Good Samaritan, another the parable of the Prodigal Son, and today the Parable of…
Tucked between two more memorable and intriguing pieces of the Lord’s teaching — the parable of the dishonest manager and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus — we have these few verses that record teaching that, in largest part, is fou…
This parable, among all of the Lord’s parables, is widely thought to be the most difficult to interpret. There are too many questions without absolutely certain answers. The largest problem of interpretation is created in v. 8 by what s…
The chapter began with two short parables: the lost sheep and the lost coin. We come now to the third parable in this set, the parable of the lost son. However your ESV editors didn’t dare call it that because it has been beloved throughout …
Luke chapter 15, one of the best known and best loved chapters of the Bible, having left its mark on Christian art and Christian hymnody, is composed of three parables, all devoted to the same general theme. Two of them are short and they are foll…
Once again this morning we find ourselves considering teaching that bears on the great themes that have occupied us for a number of weeks. In the previous paragraphs the Lord has spoken of bringing not peace but a sword, that he would be the cause…
We are still at the banquet to which Jesus had been invited by a prominent Pharisee on a Sabbath day. They were setting a trap for him and hoped to catch him in something he said. But they got for their pains memorable table-talk such as they ha…
While you are turning up Luke 14:1-6 I’ll mention that Mr. and Mrs. Bechtel are in Salem, Oregon today to be with Chris and Jackie in expectation of a baby to be born to them relatively soon. As a result we have been listening to the piano r…
We are taking a bit longer reading this morning, four paragraphs, but though devoted to different subjects, they combine to make a point.
Text Comment
v.13 Notice that the woman glorified God. She may not have under…
In our reading this morning, we are continuing the theme of some of the other specimens of the Lord’s teaching that make up this section of the Gospel. We have heard the Lord warn his hearers that those who refuse to acknowledge him before m…
We are still in a section of the gospel devoted to specimens of the Lord’s teaching. The Lord came to bring peace, but some things are more important than peace, or better, sometimes division and conflict are necessary finally to obtain true…
We are in a section of Luke’s Gospel devoted to the Lord’s teaching and among the various pieces of that teaching are several that have cast our attention forward to either the end of life or the end of history. We have called this &ld…
The paragraph we have before us this morning continues the thought of the parable of the rich fool. That will be obvious to you as we read, but Luke leaves us in no doubt by his use of the word “treasure” both in v. 21, in the concludi…
This is material in the gospel arranged according to a theme. The Lord may have delivered this teaching at different times, but Luke has collected them here. You will be able to see very quickly next Lord’s Day how the next paragraph follows…
We’ve come in our sermons on the Gospel of Luke to chapter 12 and the first three short paragraphs of that chapter, vv. 1-12. The Lord has just completed a series of addresses against the Pharisees and these three paragraphs seem to continue…
Text Comment
v.38 The translation provided in the ESV is a perfectly fine example of a contextual rendering: “he did not first wash before dinner.” Perhaps “lunch” would be better than “dinn…