Challenge Accepted

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Would you please pray with me? Lord God, as we follow along with Jesus this morning, we are amazed. Open our ears more than His hometown opened their hearts to Him. Open our ears, Lord, so that we hear what You have to say to us today. Speak into us, Lord, and then speak through us the rest of this week. We pray, Lord, that You'd be with all the churches in our area today that are confessing Your gospel and proclaiming Your truth and Your love and Your mercy and grace in line with the genius of Jesus. And we pray, Lord, that You would bring about a movement in Southwest Florida that would change many lives, that would transform us from the inside out, that would bring about Your tangible kingdom, Lord, in this world that will also stretch into eternity. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, good morning. We are in the third week of the Genius of Jesus series, and we're going to be starting with the Bible verse that we're looking at, Jesus' first sermon. It's Luke chapter 4, so you can follow along either in the You version with our different notes or in the screen right now, on the screen or in whatever you got. We're going to read Luke 4, verse 16 to 30. And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him, and he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth, and they said, Is not this Joseph's son? And he said to them, Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, Physician, heal yourself. What we have heard you did in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well. And he said, Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up for three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian. When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away. Wow, even after 30 years of preaching and teaching on Jesus, I am still amazed time and again as I read different scriptures and I study them during the week. And this is the first time I've ever preached on Luke for his first sermon and his first time. And yet I was just amazed and shocked and thrilled and challenged at the same time. And I hope you will be too with me. So the first week in this series, we studied the genius of Jesus' temptation, the fact that he was tempted just like we are yet without sin, and that he provides a way for us through temptation. The second week, last week, we spoke about the born-again identity, the fact that in Christ, we are born again into a living hope. And in Christ and through his birth, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem, to buy us out from being under the law. We have an inheritance, a new identity. We are children of God. We are gifted. We are given a great future. I mean, it's amazing what we have. And by the way, last week, I talked about affirmations that I had written years ago, Christian affirmations from different Bible passages. And I guess they were all taken last week. There are another dozen or so copies, I think, out in the lobby if you're looking for those, 30 different affirmations based on each scripture. And if they run out again, we can print some more, okay? But just to let you know, they're in the lobby, okay? Today, we're focusing on the genius of Jesus, challenge accepted. And he shows from his first message that he accepted the challenge of being the unexpected Messiah. Now, this might be the shortest sermon in all of the Bible, by the way, much shorter than mine. That's not saying much, though, right? But this sermon is only eight words long, eight words. It's all he got up, just like they do in the synagogue at the t...