Luke 8:16-18

Today, Pastor Jack shares with us that when God shows off, He turns on the lights. Like putting a lamp on a lampstand, people can see, and there is safety and calm. God is there to deliver us from the power of darkness, and He wants to reveal to us the way of salvation.

Luke Chapter eight. And we’re looking at a message that’s entitled when God shows off when God shows off and you might be thinking when God shows off, maybe it’s in an awesome electrical storm.
I think God does show off in electrical storms. I think they’re awesome. I think they’re incredible.
Maybe God shows off when there’s an earthquake. I don’t know. Sure makes you feel tiny though, doesn’t it?
Maybe God shows off when you go out at night and I live in an area where it’s a really nice black sky at night, you look up and the stars are so great.
Maybe it’s the heavens that, as the Bible says, declare the glory of God.
Maybe that’s how God shows off. I guess he could show off anyway. He would want to show off.
He’s God, he could do anything he wants and he can use anything. He wants.
The amazing thing to me is that God uses his Children to show off.
And I mean that in a good way, I’m not talking about strutting around in pride and arrogance.
I’m talking about God showing off God who is perfect God who is holy God who is altogether precious and incredible.
When you read his book, you find out God loves me. God’s for me.
God wants to be in my life when I read about that and find out about my God, the God of the Bible and that He wants to take his Children and show them off, parade them as it were before the world for a reason.
It makes me think how much I realize in my own life, how God is regarding us.
What I mean by that is when your kids are growing up, those of us who have had kids or we have them.
Now, you know, if you’ve got young kids when they’re playing sports, for example, you being the parent on the side, you would, there’s times when you’re tempted just to run out there on the field and help your kid out that coaches are trained to watch for people like you, you see your kid out there and, or, or when they cross the, the end zone or when they score that point, you go crazy.
I think that’s an awesome thing.
There’s something about a parent when their child is singing in the school choir at Christmas, their heart just wells up.
That’s a great thing. If we’re like that toward our kids is not God like that toward us when we walk with him and, and listen to him and we, we step out in an effort to bring glory to him.
Listen, I know that’s true because the Bible says that when one sinner comes to Christ and they’re forgiven of their sins, what do the angels do?
Anybody? They rejoice. If angels have a party every time someone comes to Jesus, then how much more does God get so excited when you and I find out that He wants to use us in this world?
I think God if, if, if I might be able to put it this way, I think God smiles from heaven above and looks down and says, you know what?
There goes, my daughter, there goes my son and I think all around the world, you know, I love this.
I love that there’s 24 hour time zones around the world. And I love that.
Even if someone is just praying on a Tuesday, thanking God for their dinner.
You realize that if they’re thanking God for their dinner on a Tuesday and there’s 24 hour time zones around the world, someone’s eating somewhere all the time.
And if they just both their head and say, thank you God, it’s got to give Satan a bad day.
I don’t think Satan ever has a good day ever.
As long as God’s Children are on this planet, praying as long as they’re loving on the Lord and finding out more about their lives.
Jesus in the lesson this morning wants us to find out more about what he wants in our lives.
He wants us to learn more about what God would have us experience in this life.
And so keep this in mind, he’s going to be talking to us about our lives being light and how that might affect the world around us.
And so as we look to our study this morning, keep this in mind.
We are in chapter eight when we’re verses 16 to 18, just a small little portion of scripture that’s very powerful to us.
Jesus said no one when he has little lamp covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed, but he sits on a lamp stand and those who enter may see the lights for nothing is secret, that will not be revealed nor anything hidden that will not be known or come to lights.
Therefore take heed how you hear for whoever has to Him more will be given and whoever does not have even what he seems to have will be taken from Him.
So when we consider God showing off in the lives of his Children in the life of the Believer, we realize this in verse 16 is that it’s God who turns on the light in the illumination of the Gospel through our lives.
God throws the switch. God turns on the light in our lives this morning.
As Christians, you are either here today because you’re curious about Christianity, you’re here today because maybe you have a uh maybe you have a argumentative spirit and you want to kind of argue and debate and that’s great too.
Maybe you’re here this morning because some friends have brought you here. You have no intention of even listening.
I understand that maybe you’re a believer this morning or maybe you’re trying to find out if you’re a believer and you want to hear what God has to say.
Well, listen to the words of Jesus.
What he’s saying to us in a sense is that God in the person’s life throws the switch.
It is the Lord who wants your life radically different.
And he goes about doing that in this thing of conversion. It’s an amazing thing.
Conversion that is we were once a certain kind of person, we’re living for ourselves with our own thoughts occupying our head, our own demands, our own passions occupying our energy.
We lived and we did what we wanted to do.
And if we were doing anything for somebody else, it was because if we did it for them, it would somehow translate into bettering ourselves.
Then we’ve been or since then we’ve been converted that as we’ve come to Christ, and we have found out that our lives are truly, truly fulfilled, living them for the Lord Jesus Christ, reading the Bible, understanding what God says and what God would have for us.
And we find out all of a sudden that we have a direction and we have a path in our lives.
And in that sense God turns on the lights And gives us a brand new life.
And what happens when that happens? This is that light rejects the darkness.
We begin to see that in our lives.
It says in verse 16, no one when he has a little lamp covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed.
So the first thing we see here is that when the lights are turned on, light will reject the darkness.
And this word lamp right here that Jesus used. The Greek language is beautiful.
The word means a very small portable common lamp.
These little lamps, by the way are so common that you can buy them.
They’re thousands of years old, you can buy them in Israel, you think, aren’t they like a piece of antiquity and very expensive?
No, there are so many of them unearthed all the time, by the way, in the ancient world, from Rome to Baghdad, literally, they’re on earth and they were so small, they’re so common.
They’re made out of clay. They’re very, very, very simple.
They have a little wick that hangs out of them and you’d light that wick and you would walk over, it fits perfectly in the palm of your hand.
You’d walk over and put it up on a, on a shelf or on a lamp stand and it would be the light that would allow you to get that room going.
Meaning this, that, that little light provided enough in that dark room for you to get other things going.
Maybe other lights, maybe to light the oven or the fireplace and it is the light that removes the darkness and gives you opportunity to bring forth more light.
Do you have that in your mind today? We don’t use that. We would use a flashlight, wouldn’t we?
We would walk into a room. Maybe we had a power outage. We’d walk into the room with a flashlight.
The room is black. The flashlight is only for a purpose to illuminate enough of the room to get me started.
You see, I have the flashlight, I go to the power box there I switch it and then the power is on.
That’s the light that Jesus is speaking about.
He’s saying, listen, my Children, my followers, they’re like little lights, they start out little.
But with that little light, great darkness is displaced. Darkness is an amazing thing in a laboratory.
You can measure darkness. If you go to the Oregon caves up in Oregon, you can go to those caves.
And after they take you into the cave for so long, The park ranger pulls out a photometer and a photometer measures the volume or the amount of light in a room and 0.0 is dark, 0.0 is a darkness that can be felt.
In fact, a 0.0 light can make you go insane.
People have been known to hyperventilate, pass out in a room that is huge with nobody choking them because it’s, as Exodus says, it was a darkness that could be felt, darkness can get so dark that it feels like it’s choking you.
You go into that Oregon Cave and that park ranger turns off the lights and he holds out a photometer and he’s talking to you and you think for a moment there’s somebody right in front of your face.
You start to feel it and you start backing up.
There’s been people who have been lost in the Oregon caves and have gone insane in three days Because of the depth or strength of the darkness.
But in that darkness, that ranger struck a match and held it up and there were about 50 of us in that cavern.
And when he struck a match, that match looked like a torch in such great darkness.
That’s the life of the Christian where you go, love goes where you go, grace goes, where you go, peace goes.
When you come into a room, listen, it could be a room at work.
It could be maybe somewhere around town. They may not like what you believe.
But when you come in, they know this. We don’t have to worry about him.
He’s not going to rob us. We don’t like his doctrine. We don’t like his love for God.
But you know what he’s honest, they may not like what you and I believe and stand for but it’s funny how even an unbelieving boss might hand you the keys to the office because he knows he can’t explain it.
But he knows that there’s something very light about you if I can put it that way, wherever you and I go, there’s the example of Christ and it’s a very powerful thing.
And so we see the fact that light rejects the darkness.
Jesus says no one takes a lamp, that little lamp, no one lights it and puts it underneath a, a basket.
Nobody puts it underneath a bed and you know, we could just move on right from there and, and go to the next thing that Jesus says, and we’ll miss a very key thing.
The reason why when Jesus used this word uh vessel or be you got to this in your Bibles, it’s very, very uh current.
You know, Jesus is always current.
He’s never, he’s never out of touch when he uses the word vessel or basket or bushel.
Jesus was implying something very, very powerful for us today.
Nobody lights a lamp and puts it underneath the bush to extinguish it. That’s true.
But no one lights a lamp or no one is a lamp and goes out of the fellowship out into the world where they work and extinguish their light that way.
Either that’s what it means, the vessel or the, the bucket, the basket in many things uh in antiquity that have been on earth in storefronts.
I know for those of us who have been in, when you go down the, the, uh, a, the main street of that ancient marketplace where King Saul once was at there in front of the stores.
They had, uh, what we call the, you know, the, the shingle.
If you’re going to go start your job, it’s an old term. A shingle. What’s your shingle today?
We call it logo. Oh, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be a butcher.
The logo or the shingle would hang outside and on the entry way of that marketplace and it would depict what you do.
And it would be often displayed in a bucket or a vessel.
A vessel of bread meant you were a baker, a vessel of fish sticking out meant that you dealt in fish or you were a fisherman, a fish market.
If you had fabric coming out of the vessel, it was that you were one who worked in tapestries or dyes and fabrics.
You’ve seen this before. We’ve seen it on tables where they have a vessel with things coming out of it, making the announcement.
Jesus is saying that you don’t become a Christian and go out into the world.
You are like a little candle but don’t make fun of that little candle.
That little candle can really be bright in a dark world.
And when you go back to work on Monday, when you go back to university on Monday when you go back to the neighborhood today, you are like that little light going into a very dark world, shining huge amounts of light dispelling the darkness.
You don’t stop. You don’t go to your place of commerce, maybe being a fisherman or maybe being a baker.
You don’t leave your Christianity at home and go to the office and live all together. Different.
Jesus is saying that your commerce should not extinguish your witness.
So the vessel, the basket should not, cannot extinguish the light and then the bed, this is a bed, more of a couch, a couch for rest, leisure, relaxation.
It was about 8″ off the ground, had four ft and you reclined on it.
Not necessarily something you slept in. It’s what you re reclined or rested in with when friends were over.
Jesus is saying when you uh take a break, you don’t leave Christianity out and all of us who attend this church.
You know that well enough That Jesus Christ is 24, 3 65.
When we go on vacations, we don’t, we don’t take our bed of leisure and leave our bible home.
We love God’s word. That’s how we’re light.
That’s how that little bit of light has such a great power when you go to on your times of leisure.
Um Look, I’ve traveled with many of you, some of us have been on vacations together. We get everything ready.
Either we’re gonna be taking a trip by car. We’re gonna be taking a trip by plane.
We all say it OK? You got everything packed, everything back. Where’s your Bible?
I got my, you got your Bible. I got my, you got your Bible.
Let’s go and then you get in the car and go. That’s how we live.
It’s not a Sunday, Christianity. Jesus is saying that this light that you have. It’s an everyday thing.
Why? Because there’s darkness all the time everywhere and we take it to our place of commerce.
Now, watch this. He asked the question, where would Jesus go? If Jesus were here right now?
Where would he go? I want to know because if we’re going to follow him, that’s where we’re going.
Do you know where he would go? He’d go to work with us. He would go to leisure with us.
He would go down the street, he’d go to the market with us.
He said, are you sure Jesus would go to work with us?
There’s people who cuss at my job, Jack, they cuss like they’re contractors, they’re cusses.
He had to be a contractor to cuss. I used to work at a company.
Uh, you had to sign in, you had to sign a statement.
This is a non-christian company Like 60,000 employees. We had to sign a statement.
I will not cuss on company time. I’m dead serious. Why?
Because they prided themselves in education. They said in that statement. That cursing is a display of ignorance.
Lack of vocabulary. Wow. Ok. You sign here and it’s what’s called a fiduciary agreement.
You willfully agree with this. It’s not binding by law. It’s a moral thing he said.
Well, I wish I lived in a place like that. And let me tell you something.
The moment lunchtime came, those people cussed. Are we on lunch? Now? We’re on lunch.
Well, you don’t and beep and beep. And what do you do with that as a Christian?
Oh, my virgin ears. I cannot. Oh, you’re killing me. Stop.
No, your Christianity is tougher than that when somebody says, oh, Jesus Christ.
Oh, you pray too. I’m a Christian. Wow. Oh, you were what?
Oh, you’re not a, oh, I thought you were praying. I’m sorry.
Come on, Jesus would go where you work? He’s in heaven right now.
Jesus goes with you. When you go to work, when you go to the office, when you go to the hospital, when you go to school, you’re that light going into the class.
Well, Jack, I’m just a little tiny light. Yes.
But this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. That’s what he’ll do.
And even when you go on your time of leisure, you’re gonna go water skiing, snowboarding, surfing.
What are you gonna do? Take Jesus with you? He’s already with you. Take him.
The Bible tells us in Colossians chapter one verse 13 that he the Lord has delivered us from the power of darkness and has conveyed us into the kingdom of his son of his love.
Isn’t that awesome? You and I once lived in darkness, we lived for ourselves, did our own thing.
Jesus brought us out by the gospel, set us free. And that’s a great thing.
Secondly, we realize this, he turns on the light because light shows the way we all know, this light shows the way he says that this man sets it on a lamp stand that those who enter may see the light.
That means people are going to be coming into this room.
And Jesus said that someone who is showing the light, someone who is my child who is of the light, they’re put in such a place on a lamp stand so that it gives light to the entire room.
Why others will see it? He wants to put us as it were lights on display.
And in that sense, he wants to show us off announcing the kingdom just by the way we live.
Listen. When you put a light in the room, you have a decorated room.
One of the things you eventually get to is where are we going to put that light where you put it in a place that it’s first of all convenient for people to access it.
How convenient should the Christian be with the message of the gospel to the world? Very available?
Don’t you think that’s why he sends us everywhere in the world. God’s people are everywhere.
Secondly, he puts us in places that are not only convenient but places that will dispel the darkness.
That’s why you work where you work, I’m going to quit my job because those people just won’t come to the Lord.
Don’t, you can’t do that. You stay there. That company I told you about 13 years.
I was a Christian at that company. They knew it. Some people had come to the Lord there.
But the guy that I wanted to come, the trophy guy that I wanted to come to the Lord there.
My boss was the guy that interviewed me. When I first got the job.
I wanted him to come to Jesus.
And I, I witnessed 13 years to that guy and sometimes I didn’t say a word to him.
It’s just what I decided to do. I wanted to go home. But Jesus said, go the extra mile.
So, OK, I’ll stay, take him, Lord, save him.
I worked there 13 years resigned from that job to take this church full time.
And yet he didn’t come to the Lord. And I thought, you know what? That’s the pits.
That’s a bummer. It wasn’t until later on that.
He called me up and he said, Hey, you know what?
I know it’s been some years since I didn’t even talk to you.
And I just want to let you know that I wound up moving away and wound up hearing the gospel and I came to know Jesus Christ and I want to thank you for those 13 years.
And then it’s like, what? And many of you, many of us we live with family or we have family that visit us or they know us.
You know, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna go to Christmas. I’m not going to go to Easter.
I’m not gonna go to that party to that birthday. They’re godless people. Listen, you gotta love them.
You gotta take that little out of yours, man and you just gotta be there because if you don’t go out after them and reach them, who’s gonna reach them?
And here’s the thing, Jesus said that the prophet has honor everywhere he goes except in his own home.
You know why you’ll tell people about Jesus? I wanna tell you about Jesus changed my life.
Um We know you, I remember when you were eight years old and you burned the cat. Remember that?
Don’t you talk to me about Jesus?
I mean you threw a rock through the window of my house, don’t you talk to me about Jesus?
But listen, you stay at it.
You think you’re gonna go quit your job or run around and find the perfect place where all these Christians work.
Listen, I work at a church and we’re all Christians, ok?
But Satan’s real, don’t think Satan is waiting out there at that gate.
I think he pulls up in the morning, gets right out. He’s on time.
We are to shine and we are to be bright for him.
Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs here on real life radio with his message called when God shows off, thanks for being with us today.
You know, when God shows off is part of Pastor Jack’s new series called The Gospel of Luke.
It’s a series on the book of Luke and the unveiling of Jesus Christ to this world.
And we’ll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio.
Now, imagine what could happen to your spiritual life when you make devotions a part of it.
Now, a special time with the Lord to both talk to him and listen to him is a great thing to read a verse from scripture.
Let God know what it means to you.
And Pastor Jack understands the importance of devotions and it’s why he shares personal experiences in a devotion type setting at his website.
Simply go to Jack Hibbs dot com. Click on that tab that’s labeled devotions.
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