Are You Sure?

Sermon Transcript

I was on a plane once and when the flight attendant came around, I wanted something hot to drink, but I also wanted to sleep, so I wanted something without caffeine. I asked for a decaf coffee. The flight attendant said, “It’s instant coffee.” I said, “that’s fine”. The flight attendant then said something that rocked my world. She said, “are you sure?”. Suddenly, I was not sure. Doubts began to creep in. After all, decaf instant coffee does taste terrible. Maybe a hot tea would be better.

“Are you sure?” is one of the most terrifying questions that you can be asked. You’ve just started a new job. Are you sure that it’s the best one for you? You’re thinking about proposing. Are you sure you want to spend the rest of your life with this person? With all the alternative options available on the job and dating market, how could you possibly be sure that your choice is the right one?

There are even more fundamental things that we build our lives around, things that we believe that set the direction for the rest of our lives. Those are the things that we better be sure about, but they’re often the things we spend the least time examining. We inherit them unexamined from our parents, or are worried that if we look at them too closely, we’ll see cracks in the foundations of our lives.

Which religion, if any, should you follow? What is the thing that will bring me fulfillment if I have it? Will you stand before God in judgment when you die, and if so, how will your life be assessed? How can you be sure of any of those things?

Luke tells us in this passage that he wrote his gospel to Theophilus so that he could be sure of the things that he has been taught. The things Theophilus, probably a Gentile convert of some status to Christianity, had been taught, are the fundamental facts of Christianity: that Jesus had died for his sins, had been resurrected on the third day, and had ascended into heaven where he had prepared a place for Theophilus when he died. Theophilus is a name that means “loved by God”. I do think that was the name of the real individual person to whom Luke addressed his Gospel, but I agree with the church father Ambrose, who says, “the Gospel was written to Theophilus, that is, to him whom God loves. If you love God, it was written to you”. The Bible was not written to us, but it was written for us. And Theophilus, a believer in the first century, had to answer the question, just as we do today, “are you sure?”. Are you sure enough of the message of Jesus that you would lose your job, your friends, or even your life for it? 

Here’s what Luke wants Theophilus to know, and what I want to convince you of this morning: “You can be sure of the message about Jesus.” We’ll look at three reasons why: the message is already fulfilled, the message is reliable, and the message is orderly.

 

The message is already fulfilled

First, the message you’ve heard about Jesus has already been fulfilled. Luke begins by explaining what others have already written about Jesus: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative [that is, a story] of the things that have been accomplished among us”. When explaining why he’s writing his own Gospel, he says, “it seemed good to me also”. Luke isn’t disparaging those others who’ve written about the things Jesus has done, he wants to build upon their work. Ditto for the eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word who delivered the message to Luke.  Luke’s Gospel is a message that builds upon existing accounts of things that have already been accomplished and have been testified to by eyewitnesses to them and ministers of the Word.

Is that how you view Christianity, as a message about things that have already been accomplished? If Christianity is something else other than a true message about real things that have been accomplished by Jesus in history, then we have no reason to be sure about building our lives around it. Three popular interpretations of Christianity are that it is a set of moral teachings, a call to follow the example of Jesus, and a message that if you have enough faith, God will give you what you want.

What if the message of Christianity was that Jesus gave us a set of moral teachings to obey? Consider the words of Jesus in Luke 6:27-31: “27 “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29 To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. 30 Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. 31 And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”

Is that the standard that you want to be judged by when you stand before God? Have you always done good to those who hate you? Have you always prayed for those who abused you? If so, then you can stand before a holy and perfect God on judgement day and say, “I have done all that you have commanded”. If not, then join the rest of us. If Christianity is a message about Jesus’ moral teachings, then the only thing that we can be sure of is that we are condemned already.

Also, if Christianity is a set of moral teachings, can’t we get those teachings from other religions too? Why do we need the whole believing in Jesus thing? But where religions and philosophies disagree, how can we tell which one is right? What objective standard could there be to determine which moral teaching are the best? If Christianity is a set of moral teachings, then we cannot be sure when we build our lives around it.

What if the message of Christianity was that Jesus is an example to follow? Popular author John Mark Comer subtitled his book on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, Practicing the Way, “be with Jesus, become like him, do as he did”. Consider some of the things that Jesus does in the Gospel of Luke. In Luke chapter 8 alone, he calms a storm by rebuking the wind, heals a man possessed by many demons by commanding them to leave, heals a woman with a flow of blood when she touches him, and raises a dead girl to life. Does this sound like your typical Wednesday? Does the wind listen to you when you tell it to stop blowing? Is your life characterized by miraculous healings, exorcisms, and resurrections? Even if we reduce “what Jesus did” from his actual actions to basic principles like “loving his enemies”, “being self-sacrificial”, of “being forgiving”, how could you know that you’re enough like Jesus? Could you be certain that you’re enough like Jesus to merit heaven?

Some of the things that Jesus did were not only impossible for us, but would be downright sinful if we did them. In Luke 22:70, the chief priests and scribes ask Jesus, “Are you the son of God, then?”. If someone asks you that question, you better say “no!”. But Jesus says, “You say that I am”. John Mark Comer is right that discipleship does mean becoming more like Jesus, but there are many things that Jesus did that we cannot and should not do, because Jesus is an utterly unique person, the Son of God who added humanity to himself to become the God-man. So the message of Christianity is not fundamentally that Jesus is an example to follow.

Finally, Christianity is not a call for blind faith that things will work out well for you in the future. Believing really hard that you’ll have a great house, a beautiful family, and an easy life will not bring those things to you, since God has not promised them to you. 

Some of you should realize that your hope in life is something that you will get in the future. What reason do you have to be sure that you’ll get the house, the job, or the spouse? If you do get that thing, what reason do you have to believe that those things will actually fulfil you?

So if the message about Jesus is not a set of moral teachings to follow, an example to be like, or a call for blind faith, what is it? Luke calls it “a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us”. Christianity is not a message about what we are supposed to do, but a message about what someone has done for us. 

This is the main message of Christianity: the forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of Christ. Jesus has lived the life we should have lived, died the death we deserved for our sins, and rose again from the dead so that we now have the guarantee of eternal life with him. It’s a done deal. Jesus has accomplished those things. He’s fulfilled the Scripture and accomplished all that was necessary for our salvation. 

You cannot be certain that you’ve lived a good enough life to merit heaven. You cannot be certain that you’re enough like Jesus to earn eternal life. But you can be certain that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and because those things have been accomplished, you can be certain that he will come again. So stop trying to be good enough, confess that you are a sinner in need of a savior, and believe that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is enough to make you right with God, and you will be saved.

Christian, is your life built on the foundation of knowing that Jesus has already accomplished everything necessary for your salvation in his death and resurrection? If you assess how you’re doing based on your good works or lack thereof, it may indicate that you’re having a hard time believing that his righteous life is counted as yours. If you notice that you’re not confessing your sins to God and to others, it may show that you’re having a hard time believing that his death was really enough to cover all your sins. If you never rest, and are always asking the question, “If I don’t do it, who will?”, it may show that you’re having a hard time believing that Jesus really has been resurrected and is seated at the right hand of the Father to rule over all things. Is your life characterized by meditation on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, or by your striving to replicate those things in your own life?

Brothers and sisters, you can be sure about the message of Jesus because it’s a message of things that Jesus has already accomplished on your behalf. Many things can still cause us to doubt: suffering is still in the world, the Gospel has not yet been proclaimed to all nations, and Christ has not yet come back. But if Jesus has risen from the dead, why should we doubt that he will accomplish all that is yet to be fulfilled?

 

The message is reliable

The second reason Luke gives us to be sure of the message about Jesus is that it’s reliable. Luke tells us that he’s writing his Gospel “just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us”. Luke’s gospel will build on these eyewitness accounts that have been delivered to him. In a world before video and DNA evidence, the best way to make sure that something really happened was to talk to someone who was at the scene. In the Old Testament, for example, a person could only be put to death on the evidence of two or three witnesses. So Luke is telling us to trust the message of Jesus, since it’s about things that were accomplished in front of a bunch of people who saw them with their own eyes! Luke wrote his Gospel within the lifetimes of those who were eyewitnesses to Jesus, and by tying his Gospel to eyewitness accounts, he’s saying, “if anything I’m saying is untrue, anyone who was there can come forward and say, ‘it wasn’t like that!’”.

According to Islam, the Quran was revealed by an angel to Muhammad, who was alone without other eyewitnesses to confirm his account of what happened. According to Mormonism, the Book of Mormon was written on gold plates thousands of years ago in a language called “reformed Egyptian” not recognized by scholars, and which only Joseph Smith could translate by a special divine gift.  But the events Luke described took place within his lifetime and in public view of tens of thousands of people, many of whom would have been able to easily challenge his portrayal of events if they were not true. The crucifixion took place in front of a large crowd. In 1 Corinthians 15:6, Paul writes that Jesus appeared to more than 500 people after his resurrection, many of whom were still alive at the time he was writing. If you had made up a lie about something, you’d say you were the only one who saw it, not that you could ask any one of 500 people if it was true! And many of those who saw the resurrected Jesus died for their proclamation of it! Scripture records at least the execution of James, and the unanimous tradition of the church is that the other apostles, except John, died similarly. Someone might be willing to die for a lie that they believe, but who would die for a lie that they know is a lie?

So we can trust the message about Jesus because it’s the same one that was delivered to Luke by the eyewitnesses who saw it and later became ministers, or servants, of that same message and delivered it to others. Perhaps you’re wondering, though, is the message Luke received about Jesus the same one we’re hearing today? When we read Luke this morning, aren’t we reading an English translation of “copies of copies of copies of copies”? These are important questions, because if the message of the eyewitnesses wasn’t passed down accurately to us, then we have no way of knowing what the original message about Jesus even was, much less if we should believe it! 

Fortunately, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the words we read this morning in English are an accurate representation of the text Luke wrote in Greek to Theophilus (called the autograph, meaning ‘self-writing’ in Greek). Consider just a few arguments presented by New Testament scholars Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace. 

1. A generous estimate of classical Greek texts we have from non-biblical authors would be that if we stacked them all on top of each other, they would be about 4 feet high. Those are all the ancient copies we have of writers like Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. If you stacked the roughly 5,800 Greek or very early translations into other languages of New Testament manuscripts, you would have a pile about a mile and a quarter high. If you turned that pile on its side and put it on Broad Street, it would reach from here to about Spruce. We’re actually finding more and more of these manuscripts all the time. Moreover, the gap between the autographs, or original writings, and the earliest copies we have are a few decades, versus a few centuries for the best copies of other Greek writings. As has been said, there is more textual evidence that Jesus Christ rose from the dead than that Julius Caesar ever existed.
2. It is true that many of the manuscripts we have don’t agree on the exact wording. These disagreements are called “textual variants”. There are tens of thousands, if not more, textual variants between different New Testament manuscripts. The important thing to realize about these textual variants is that they don’t change the meaning of the text. Most of the textual variants are just spelling errors or slight variations in spelling, proving that scribes in the ancient world couldn’t spell any better than we can. 
3. Greek also contains a very large number of ways to say exactly the same thing in ways that would appear identical in a translation. One Greek expert decided to write all the ways he could think of to say “John loves Mary” in Biblical Greek with all the variations in spelling and grammar he could think of. After 8 hours of writing, he figured he could probably write another 150 but felt he had made his point.
4. When there’s a more serious disagreement, the sheer volume of manuscripts means that translators can compare them with dozens or hundreds of other manuscripts to determine the most likely reading with a high degree of confidence. In the entire New Testament, there are a handful of sentences that are seriously disputed and 2 longer sections (the story of the woman caught in adultery in John and the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel). And even these disputed passages don’t change anything about the message of Jesus. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann, himself an agnostic, says this: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament”. 
5. These textual variants are not a secret that Christians have been covering up for centuries. If you’re using the Bible under your chair, you can find three notes in small text on the page we read today showing textual variants. 

We don’t have the piece of paper Luke spilled coffee on while he was writing to Theophilus, but we can say very confidently that it contains the same truths about all the things Jesus accomplished and which were reported to him by eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word.

So if you have doubts about whether the message of Jesus has been passed down accurately, the best thing you can do is to examine the evidence for yourself! If you’re a believer in Christ, you may be tempted to believe that faith looks like not needing to examine the evidence. But Luke mentions these eyewitnesses in a way that encourages their examination! If you really believe God, you have nothing to fear from what you may find when you examine the evidence for the historicity of Christ. There will always be some unanswered questions since we ourselves aren’t eyewitnesses, but we have excellent reasons to believe that the message we’ve received about Jesus is the same reliable message delivered to Luke.

 

The Message is Orderly

We’ve seen that we can trust the message we’ve heard about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection because the message has been fulfilled and it’s reliable. Finally, we can trust the message because it is an orderly message. Luke writes, “it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account to you, O Theophilus”. Luke’s account is an orderly one, as opposed to a chaotic account. It’s not a stream-of-consciousness collection of his thoughts. It’s not a collage of Jesus’ best zinger lines. It’s intentionally arranged by someone who’s followed the events closely for a long time and knows what he’s going to write, and why he’s writing. He’s writing an orderly account in a way that makes sense so that Theophilus, and us, will know that we can trust the message we’ve heard about Jesus.

So what kind of “order” is Luke referring to? You might assume that an “orderly” account must be in chronological order, reporting things that happened with no interpretation in an unbiased way. But this is not Luke’s intention. In fact, no one actually tells stories like this.

A four year old might tell a story like, “when I woke up this morning, my tummy hurt, then I went downstairs and played with my blocks. Then I didn’t eat breakfast. Then I went to preschool and played with my friends. I’m hungry.” That is a strictly chronological and unbiased reporting of events, but it’s not a good story! What makes a good, orderly story a good story is that it has a point!

Consider a story an adult might tell: “I took I-676 to church this morning. Last week, I drove down Spring Garden, but I think I hit every red light on the way. The week before, I tried going through center city, but that was even worse. So you probably should just take 676.” The events reported in that story are certainly true, but they’re described “backwards”. But it’s a better story, because it has a point! 

Luke gives us an orderly account about Jesus. He leaves out, includes, and orders information for specific reasons. For example, he changes the order of temptations that Jesus experiences at the hands of Satan compared to Matthew to conclude the account at the temple, emphasizing Jesus’ role in bringing about the new temple. ”. Luke is certainly reporting true events, and he’s relying on the evidence of eyewitnesses, but he’s not trying to make a chronological point that the events happened in a certain order, but a theological point that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the whole world. The order Luke is after is theological, not chronological.

Let’s look at a couple examples of “theological order”. 

For example, in Luke 1-2, which we’ll look at in the coming weeks, Luke intentionally pairs the birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus to show that Jesus is greater than John. Angels announce that both represent the fulfillment of promises made by God in the Old Testament, but John will have the power of Elijah, a prophet, while Jesus will be called the Son of the Most High, God himself. John is born to a barren woman, Elizabeth, but Jesus is born in an even more amazing way, to a virgin, Mary. John will “make ready for the Lord a people prepared”, but he’s preparing the way for Jesus, who will “sit on the throne of his father David and reign over the house of Jacob forever”. He is the one of whose “kingdom there will be no end”. 

John in his Gospel shows us several of Jesus’ adult visits to Jerusalem for feasts, but Luke shows us only one. He does this to make a kind of “geographic” point about the central importance of what will happen in Jerusalem. Jesus ministers in Judea and Samaria in Luke 4-9. Then, in Luke 9, Peter confesses that he is the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus begins to teach his disciples about the suffering they will undergo as his followers, and they see him transformed on the mount of transfiguration. From there on out, Jesus makes his way towards Jerusalem, where the most important events in human history take place: the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. In Acts, we see a reversal of this pattern. The message of the forgiveness of sins is preached first to those in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria, and finally to the ends of the earth, where even Gentiles like us and like Theophilus hear the call to repentance and faith. 

So, the message of Luke’s orderly account is actually a message. It’s not a bare reporting of facts where the conclusion is left to the reader. There are not a bunch of equally valid interpretations of what Luke has written. Everything Luke does is to help us have certainty about the things we’ve been taught about Jesus. Read Luke’s gospel as an orderly account, informed by eyewitnesses, of the fulfilment of Scripture in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Is that how you read the Gospels? Or do you read them as a collection of beautiful but disconnected stories, like a string of pearls? I’ve found a good question to ask is, “how is this story or teaching related to the story or teaching before or after it”? Do they have a common theme, address a similar question, or reveal a similar truth about Jesus? Are there two paired characters to compare or contrast? I’m excited for our church to go through Luke together so that we can see the richness of Luke’s orderly account.

 

Conclusion

So we’ve seen this morning that we can trust Luke’s message about Jesus. It’s a message based on things that have already been accomplished, a reliable message, and an orderly message. And yet, all of us have doubts. Maybe you wonder if you’ll discover your life is a lie if you really dig in to those parts of the Bible that seem to contradict each other. You read a hard passage in the Bible, and figure you’ll think about it more when you have a chance, but never seem to get around to doing it. Maybe you’re afraid to share the gospel with your neighbor because you’re worried they’re going to ask a question you won’t be able to answer. Maybe you could never see yourself as a missionary, because who’s to say that you’d actually be bringing a message that people would listen to and need? So you content yourself with sweeping those questions under the rug, not sharing the gospel, and maybe praying for more faith.

Brothers and sisters, that is not the kind of faith that God is after. That kind of faith can actually reveal a lack of trust in God, as if he were unable to answer your hardest questions. Luke wrote an entire Gospel for Theophilus, not so that he could pick out the parts that he liked and skip over the rest, but so that he could dig in deep and have certainty about the things he’d been taught.

But the good news is that we are not the first ones to have doubted the things we’ve been taught about Jesus. In Luke 24, the final chapter of Luke, even Jesus’ disciples, who had been taught by Jesus himself, doubted when they heard about his resurrection. Jesus appeared and said to them in verse 38, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” He continues, “These are the words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.” All of Scripture points to the death and resurrection of Christ so that repentance and forgiveness of sins may be proclaimed to all nations. Luke wrote an orderly account to Theophilus so that he might have certainty concerning the things he had been taught, but Jesus himself opens up the entire Scripture to reveal that it has been written in an orderly way to point to himself as the one who must die for sins and be resurrected. How glorious is that?

So if you don’t believe me that the whole message of the Bible is that you are a sinner before a holy God who needs Jesus’ death on the cross to be cleansed from sin, and that you need his resurrection to live a new life, don’t listen to me, listen to Jesus. Real forgiveness of sins has been proclaimed to all nations in the death and resurrection of Christ. If you turn away from your sin and believe that Jesus has died in your place and has been resurrected from the dead, you are forgiven. Examine the whole Scripture, and you’ll see the same message pointing to Jesus. Don’t believe me, believe in the things that have been accomplished for you in the presence of many eyewitnesses and passed down to you in writing.

Believers, when you have doubts, how do you deal with them? Do you examine the Scriptures closely and remember the death and resurrection of Christ, or are you content to ignore the questions? Too often, when we pray for more faith, what we’re really praying for is a vague feeling of trust. But in the Scriptures, we have the possibility of something so much better. Do you see how Jesus himself has equipped you to put to death every doubt that you have? He has given you the Scriptures. When the question arises, “are you sure?”, go to the Scriptures, and let the Lord Jesus reveal himself to you through the Holy Spirit. Remember the certainty of what he’s accomplished in his death and resurrection.

Ask hard questions of the Bible. Read systematic theology. Listen to opposing viewpoints that make you uncomfortable, and discuss them with other believers. Share the gospel with those who might reject it. Christian, you have nothing to fear from doubts. 

Doubts are not based on historical facts, because they have not died and been resurrected as Jesus has. Doubts do not appeal to eyewitnesses, but to speculation. They ask, “what if?”. Doubts do not present an orderly account of a better way to live than as a follower of Christ. They are disorderly, and want to tear you down without building you back up. 

So when you have doubts, as Tim Keller said, “doubt your doubts”. Because, by definition, you can never be sure about your doubts, or they wouldn’t be doubts. But you can be sure of the message you’ve heard about Jesus.

I trust that many of you do go to the Scriptures when you have doubts. And yet, sometimes, you go to the Scriptures and they just bring more questions. Sometimes, the Bible seems to just remind you on every page of the things you’re having trouble believing.

If that sounds like your experience, there is still more good news for you. Because we were not meant to examine the Scriptures by ourselves. Theophilus needed Luke’s help to have certainty about the things he’d been taught. The disciples needed the risen Jesus to help them interpret the Scriptures. And when you have doubts, what you need is the help of the risen Jesus and all his saints to help you have certainty about the things you’ve been taught.

Brothers and sisters, Satan wants to use your doubts to isolate you. He wants you to believe that God will condemn you for your doubts if you bring them to Him in prayer. Satan wants you to believe that your brothers and sisters will condemn you if you bring your doubts to them. But this is so far from the truth. Jesus did not condemn the disciples for their doubts, but opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. So ask for his help in prayer. And he has has commanded his followers, as in Jude 22, to “have mercy on those who doubt”. Our master is not harsh with those who doubt, and we ought not to be either. 

If you have doubts, take them to Jesus and to your church. Your friends, and Pastors Mike and Mark, want to help you towards certainty. If you do have certainty, who can you help along the path? Who is your Theophilus, the brother or sister that you can reassure of the message about Jesus?

In our postmodern age, the very idea of certainty has fallen on hard times. But it is attainable, though the process is often long and frustrating. You really can be certain of the message about Jesus because it’s a message that has already been fulfilled, it’s a message that is reliable, and it’s a message that’s orderly. And it’s a message that you have the help of all the brothers and sisters, and the risen Lord Jesus, to understand and be certain of.

May the Lord Jesus reveal himself to us in every Scripture until he returns and we see him face to face!