A sermon on Luke 4 and 2 Timothy 3 by Rev Richard Keith on Sunday 17 May 2026
Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking about essential doctrines. The truths about God that are vital for Christians to believe. We’ve seen that God alone is God. We’ve seen that Jesus is truly God and truly human. And last week we saw that the Holy Spirit is a real divine person. Not just a force that we can control, but a person who feels and chooses, who draws us into a genuine, personal relationship with God.
But if I’ve learned anything about relationships it is that they require communication. And communication requires patience and understanding and honesty. It requires speaking clearly and listening carefully to prevent misunderstanding. Look, I’m no expert. I don’t pretend to be a good communicator. But I do believe in a God who is. Our first point is that God has spoken. He is the God who speaks, the God who listens, the God who understands and wants to be understood.
God has not left us in the dark, wondering who he is and what he is like. He has made it abundantly clear. Because into our darkness he has shone the light of his Word. As we saw two weeks ago in John chapter 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. No one has ever seen God, but God the one and only who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” Jesus Christ is the Word of God through whom God has spoken. Jesus makes God known to us. In his words we hear God speak. In his actions and choices we see the character of God on display.
Jesus’ twelve disciples witnessed that revelation of God in human form at close hand. They saw Jesus and heard him and learned from him in an intense apprenticeship over three years. And before he returned to the Father, Jesus sent them out into the world with the word of the gospel, God’s good news to all people, promising the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. And he gave them his Spirit to lead them and to guide them and to give them strength for every challenge they would face.
Wherever they went Jesus’ disciples shared what they knew and what they had heard. They taught the growing number of believers what they had learned from Jesus. And because they longed for the new believers to have the same experience of Jesus that they had had, they started writing it all down. They wrote down what they had seen and heard of Jesus, and they shared it with others. What they wrote was copied and handed down to the next generation. And God in his love and care preserved it for us in the words of Holy Scripture. What we call the Bible contains both the Bible that Jesus read and believed and the testimony about Jesus that the disciples wrote down for us.
Our second point is that Jesus himself lived by the Scriptures. In Luke chapter 4 we see Jesus reading his Bible: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.’ Then he sat down and said, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.'”
For Jesus, what we call the Old Testament was his Bible. He was born a Jew, a descendant of Abraham. He was circumcised on his eighth day. He visited the temple with his parents for the Passover when he was twelve years old. As his regular habit, he attended the local synagogue in his home town and learned to read and understand the Scriptures. Jesus lived an ordinary life as a believing Jew, fed on the promises of God made known in the history of Israel and in the writings of the prophets. Their faith was his faith. Their hope was his hope. Israel’s God was his heavenly Father. And Jesus didn’t just read the scriptures of the Old Testament, he believed them and obeyed them, and their story, promises and commands shaped his understanding of his ministry.
Again we see that clearly in Luke 4, where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 and boldly declares that its promises were being fulfilled that very day. That Jesus was the one chosen by the Lord to be anointed with the Holy Spirit to preach good news, announcing that at last God was coming to rescue his people from the long shadow of exile. Though God’s people were poor and broken, Jesus would bring them the riches of God’s kingdom. Although they were prisoners under the rule of evil, he would bring them freedom. Though they were blind and lost in their sin and rebellion, he would bring them light and sight, proclaiming the coming of the Lord’s favour and grace after so many years of suffering.
Everything Jesus said and did in the three years of his public ministry was shaped by his understanding of and obedience to his Father’s will revealed in the Old Testament. When the devil tempted him, Jesus obeyed the law which he quoted: “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.” When his disciples acknowledged him as the Lord’s Messiah, he reminded them that according to the scriptures the Son of Man must suffer many things and be killed before being raised to life. When tested and asked to name the most important commandment, he replied in the law’s own summary of itself: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself.” And on the cross he cried out in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus was not just a man of his word. He was the Son of God, a man of his Father’s Word written in the Old Testament.
And Jesus’ Bible is our Bible. Our third point is that the Scriptures point to Jesus. For example, in Genesis chapter 1, where God creates the heavens and the earth through his Word. In Genesis chapter 3, where we hear God promise that one will come to strike the serpent on the head, although his own heel will be wounded. In Genesis chapter 22, where we see God command Abraham to offer up his son Isaac, to foreshadow that one day God will offer up his only Son for us all. And that’s just three examples from the first book of the Bible.
And the same Isaiah whom Jesus read in the synagogue wrote this in chapter 53: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, because he poured out his life unto death.” Isaiah wrote those words 700 years before Jesus was born, but every sentence, every word of it points to the coming of Jesus as the hope of Israel.
Many look down on the Old Testament as Jewish and old fashioned, but it is also a very Christian book. Not because we have stolen it from the Jews but because every page of it points to Israel’s Messiah, the Christ, whom we believe is Jesus. We don’t worship the scriptures. We don’t believe in the holy trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Bible. We worship the Father in Jesus’ name and in the freedom and power of his Spirit. But the only Jesus we know is the Jesus we find in the Bible. The Jesus who speaks to us in his Bible, saying to us right now, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today Jesus is shining the light of his truth into our darkness. Today he is still setting us free from the power of sin. Today, in our hearing, Jesus is the Lord’s anointed announcing his good news to us. For today is the day of salvation.
Which is why the apostle Paul wrote these words in his second letter to Timothy: “From infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the people of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” This is our fourth point: God still speaks to us today in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
Paul wrote those words to a young man named Timothy. Timothy was not a new believer or a recent convert. Like Jesus and Paul, Timothy had been brought up a believing Jew, knowing God’s promises written in the scriptures of the Old Testament. As a young man, Timothy had been persuaded that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah and he’d become a student of Paul. But Paul had asked Timothy to serve as the pastor of a difficult church, and Timothy was often afraid to tell people the hard truth that they needed to hear. Paul wanted to encourage Timothy without discouraging him, and so he drew him back to the great power of God’s written Word.
The Bible is not merely the blueprint for the perfect society. It is not just a source of inspirational quotes. Its main purpose is to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. The scriptures make us wise, showing us what is real and true and good. Their commands challenge us and convict us without condemning us, and their promises awaken our faith to believe in God’s good news revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. They help us realise that despite our failures and regrets, we can change, but that we can’t truly become the people we are meant to be without the guidance of the scriptures and the Spirit changing our hearts. For all scripture is God-breathed. The Bible is not the product of spiritual geniuses. Nor did God dictate his thoughts to mindless robots. Rather, the Spirit of God, God’s living breath, so worked through the thoughts and experiences of God’s faithful prophets and apostles that they were able to write down and preserve the truth that God wanted his people to know. This is what makes the Holy Bible holy.
Like our Lord Jesus, the Bible is truly human, speaking through human experiences to our human needs. But like Jesus it is also truly divine, shaped and inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, so that it can not only lead us to saving faith in Jesus, but also lead us through all the challenges of following him. Or in Paul’s words, it is useful — useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. We don’t worship the Bible, but at the heart of our worship is an encounter with the true and living God through the reading and teaching of his written Word. Because God sent Jesus to live in a real place in a real time, we can know God and love him and serve him. But because that place is now far away and that time is long ago, we can often struggle to understand what Jesus meant and what he came to do. So part of the pastor’s job is to explain the message of the Bible in the language of people here and now. Because the Scriptures are useful for teaching, and through the things we learn we don’t just know about God, but we come to know him more and more each day.
The Bible shows us the way, both the path that leads to eternal life and the way we should conduct ourselves in our daily walk with Christ. But sometimes we wander from that way, and we need the truth of the Bible that maybe we don’t want to hear, but we need to hear it. Because the Scriptures are useful for rebuking us and for correcting us, showing us that we have left the way of righteousness and showing us how we can return to Jesus’ way of love and grace and holiness. God’s will for us is not that we stay lost in our sins or stuck in our bad patterns of behaviour, but that we become transformed by the power of his Spirit to become like Jesus. Jesus shows us what God is like. And Jesus shows us who we should be and can be. And in that process the Bible performs two vital functions. It shows us who Jesus really is, and it shows us who we really are. Like a mirror. I don’t know about you, but one of the worst things I do every day is look myself in the mirror. The only worse thing I could do is not look myself in the mirror, because I’d never be ready to walk around in public. The Bible is like that mirror. It shows us who we really are. Not just so that we can be decent and respectable, but that we may grow in godliness.
Finally, the Scriptures are also useful for training us in righteousness, for training us in justice and fairness and equity. For teaching us how to keep to the way of Jesus, so that we see his footprints in the daily choices we face and can follow them. Our heavenly Father has good work he wants us to do. People we will meet. Challenges we will face. Opportunities to help people in need. He has prepared that good work for us to do in advance. Nothing we face is outside God’s love and care. Every experience we have is a chance to learn something new and to do something good. And through the truth of the Scriptures God is equipping us for those moments, so that we will be ready and able to do his will.
Paul wrote to Timothy because Timothy was often afraid to say what he needed to say and what his people needed to hear. He needed to remember that God’s Word written in the Scriptures was enough. It was powerful. It was useful. And through it God would equip him for every challenge he would face and for every good deed he was called to do.
And we need to remember that too. Our creator is the God who speaks, who wants us to know and love and serve him. So he has made himself known in his Son Jesus, whom we meet in the holy scriptures. We may not have to confront Timothy’s particular fear. But we all face the daily challenge of following Jesus when the world around us pulls us in many different directions. Which is why we need the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Because through them the living Christ still speaks — teaching us, correcting us, training us, making us wise for salvation and equipping us to live as his people in the world today.