God sees the heart that responds and work with it. Holy Spirit speaks to an open heart. We won’t go forward if we don’t grow. Be able to receive grace, don’t beat yourself up. Ask God to help, guide, show you, and enable you to get up – have a heart good to God. Ask forgiveness, help – grace and goodness will come to the humble. You will then be able to show grace and minister to others, to enter other people’s lives. We need to take responsibility to grow and change otherwise we don’t have anything to give to other people. Authenticity with God is to be passionate and wiling to grow. Don’t stay where you are, step forward, move on, step up.
I want you to open your Bible with me in Luke, Chapter 10. We've been looking at fig leaves, or how people cover up, and stop being authentic and real, and being a great pretence. There's a heap of people are - you could probably call them this: The Great Pretender. [Laughter] God doesn't want the church to be full of great pretenders. You know at Christmas we celebrate that God sent His Son into the earth to represent Him, and so now when Jesus left He said: as the Father sent Me, now I send you; and He doesn't send a heap of pretenders. He sends a heap of real people to represent what God is really like, to be authentic.
Last week we were looking about how Jesus had described what it means to love, and to be a mature believer, it means there's a spiritual dimension, emotional dimension, physical dimension. Every part of our life is engaged in passionately loving God, and it always overflows to those around us, so we can see how authentic, how mature we are in the way we deal with the people around us. Well unfortunately many aren't doing too good there and Christmas time is a great time for people not to treat one another too well. They get busy all year, bury all their problems, get together at Christmas and they're all on holiday, then they start to get upset with one another. It shouldn't be like that should it really? It doesn't need to be either.
Notice here there's a man who's been beaten up in life and been wounded and it says of the Good Samaritan - Verse 34 - he went to him, bandaged up his wounds - that's the word trauma. He went to him, he initiated action to go to the man who had been traumatically impacted by what had happened to him, pouring on oil and wine; set him on his horse, took him to an inn and took care of him. So this man entered the world of someone who was traumatised, found out what was wrong in his life and then brought the life anointing of the Holy Spirit to impart, to heal and to bring restoration to him. All of us believers are called into this ministry. Jesus said the spirit of the Lord is upon Me. He's anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor - that's to bring people into an encounter with the living God, become saved - but God's got much more for us than that.
He's anointed Me to heal the broken hearted. That means God wants to heal brokenness in our lives so we can enter into meaningful relationships, because without relationships you don't have a life. It's true isn't it? Without relationships you don't have a life. People who've got no relationships, you know you kind of - he hasn't got a life has he really? Got no friends, got no - you're just buried in something and many times we substitute - I know people that substitute model trains for relationships. Watching it go round - wonderful hobby I suppose but not my thing. But usually it's a substitute for having genuine relationships. Some have a pet instead of a relationship, have a relationship with a pet. Well that's a strange thing really. Nice to have pets, they're wonderful, part of God's creation - but we're made to relate to people, made to relate to God so we've got to learn to have a relationship with God.
So the anointing on Jesus is to heal those who are broken hearted and many times we saw people cover over what they're really like, so in this story here we saw genuine love, the love of God. What God is wanting to do with us is to put into us a love and to grow us so mature that we can actually enter into the world of others and help them. Now the trouble is how can you enter the world of other people very successfully if you won't even enter your own world? How can you be authentic to other people if you're covering up who you really are and what's really going on? The biggest complaint against church, although it's often unfounded but there's some truth in it, is they're hypocrites. They play. They're nice on Sunday but the rest of the week you want to see what they're like pastor. I don't know whether I do - rather be in denial and look at all these happy faces and say aren't they all wonderful. The reality's a little bit different though isn't it?