He Who Began This Good Work Will See It Through

Pastor Ray was out of town for his parents' fiftieth anniversary, so another member of the church family stepped in to lead worship and bring the message. He preached from Luke 13:10-21, focusing on the healing of a bent woman and the parable of the mustard seed, and he tied both together around one question: what does the kingdom of God look like, and can it be trusted?

What was said

The passage opens with Jesus in a synagogue on the Sabbath, where he sees a woman who has been bent double for eighteen years. He calls her over, says "Dear woman, you are healed of your sickness," touches her, and she stands straight. The synagogue leader is furious because it is the Sabbath. Jesus calls him a hypocrite, pointing out that every one of them unties an animal and leads it to water on the Sabbath, and asks whether this daughter of Abraham, held in bondage by Satan for eighteen years, should not be released on the very same day. The crowd rejoiced at what Jesus did; the leader was shamed.

That contrast, between the leader's indignation and the crowd's joy, is where the message pressed in. The leader put the letter of the law before the person in front of him, and that is a pattern easy to see in someone else and hard to see in yourself. The preacher held up a slide Ray had used in a previous sermon showing a list of ways people miss the mark, and said plainly that calling out the synagogue leader means calling out yourself too, because none of us have to work hard to land on that list.

But the whole point of Jesus entering human history, the preacher said, was not to condemn but to save. He returned to that theme more than once: God sent Jesus into the world to save the world, not condemn it. The mercy in the way Jesus spoke to that woman, "dear woman," and the praise that broke out of her, and the rejoicing of the crowd, are all evidence of what happens when a person gets pulled into the center of God's love and truth.

Jesus then moves from the healing into two parables about the kingdom of God. The mustard seed is the one the preacher stayed with. The seed starts tiny, grows into a tree, and birds make nests in its branches. He connected that final image to a passage from Ezekiel where God promises a cedar from which birds of every sort will find shelter, and read it as a prophecy about Jesus and the kingdom, showing that God's intention was always to give all people a place of refuge in the family tree of God.

The preacher described watching an animated map of how Christianity has spread across the world since its small beginning, and spoke about going with a church team to Guatemala and attending an Easter service there. The music was different, the clothes were different, people were dancing, and yet it was the same, because there they were celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. That firsthand experience of the body of Christ at work in another part of the world put flesh on the parable for him.

He closed by tying the mustard seed back to Philippians 1:6, the promise that he who began a good work in you will continue it until it is finally finished. Growth is not something that happens all at once. He used the image of an orchid sitting by a window, rarely noticed, and then suddenly there is a new bud. God is doing that work in each person and in the church together, carving people more into the image of Jesus over a lifetime, not in a day.

The final word was from Hebrews, a call to hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, because God can be trusted to keep his promise. The preacher said he had been going through Luke and kept hearing the same question surface: do you trust me? He said he could not find any part of Jesus' life that cannot be trusted, and that is the ground on which the call to hold fast rests.