FULFILLED
[ God’s Promise Completed in Luke’s gospel ]
Series Dates: 11/29/20 - 11/14/21
Through our human experience we all, at times, feel a lack of fulfillment, a sense that things are not complete as they ought to be. Often, this lull comes after something we expected to fill us: the morning after your team wins the championship, the weeks after a big promotion, the day after the birth of a child, a few hours after a feast. Sometimes it manifests in our discontentment through criticism of others, sometimes it shows up in sadness, other times in an emptiness that we attempt to fill ourselves, with things that end up leaving us less complete than when we began. If we are honest we have this experience more often than we would like to admit. We are like cracked pots, we leak with a continual question: “Will we ever be whole, full, complete?”
In the early 60’s AD a doctor and traveling companion of the Apostle Paul named Luke, undertook his most important life’s work- to compile a narrative of the life of Jesus Christ, an account that answers the longing for fulfillment in the human condition. He writes to a man named Theophilus, who was probably a Gentile of high social status who had likely become curious about Jesus or come to identify as a Christian himself.
Beginning in v.1 of his gospel “1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us”. In some of Jesus’ last words in the last chapter “44 Then he said to them, “These are my 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.” and on every page between, Luke has one purpose- to address the deep longing in the human condition for fulfillment, to show his 1st-century audience and his 21st-century audience how God, in sending His son Jesus into the world, was fulfilling the unfinished story of the Old Testament and the unfinished story in the human condition- to offer the aching world a kind of lasting fulfillment only found in Jesus.
Over twenty-four chapters, in each narrative Luke accounts for, Jesus is found fulfilling promises made throughout the Old Testament and experientially fulfilling the deepest longings in the most unlikely people of the 1st century- legalists, social outcasts, sinners, children, demon-possessed and women. Luke is continually making the point that the entire world is looking to be filled- aching for love, forgiveness, encouragement, acceptance, mercy and grace. Jesus has come to rescue, to liberate the person in bondage, to heal the sick, to welcome the outcast and marginalized. He is constantly emptying the self-filled religious leaders and filling those who are honest about their sin and need for a savior. Each section and account is building on this one point- Jesus has come to fulfill the promises of old and fully fill the human condition in ways the world can not.
Each Sunday at our Gatherings we will be taught section by section, each week, in our personal time of abiding with the Lord we will be studying each verse of that section using The Daily. In our Communities and Discipleship Bands we will be studying and discussing Luke together. Our Community and Discipleship Band leaders are equipped with some simple resources to help us make sense of this incredible letter.
We believe this is a season of deeper development and formation in Christ as he prepares us for the field before us. We believe that studying Luke and then Acts (2021-22) back to back will equip us deeper and transformed further in the gospel of grace.
grace + peace,
The Downtown Hope Theology Team
