Latest / The Daily Word / October 7 – You Don’t Have to Know Everything
Transcript
- Cory: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good wee hours of the night, whenever you're joining us. Welcome to the Daily Word Podcast from Lakeshore Christian Fellowship. My name is Corey, and it's my privilege to serve as our Kotapa Campus Pastor. And I'm excited to be sitting down with you for another Daily Word episode where we're going to be doing a devotion from the New Testament portion of our life journal Bible reading plan. Today is October the seventh. That means that Luke 20 is our daily reading. Now, this whole chapter is basically just Jesus dodging bullets left and right, like conversationally. Anyway. He have all these different religious leaders coming after him. You got you got chief priests and teachers of the law and they're challenging his authorities. You got scribes, you got Sadducees, you got people coming and just just just swinging at him. Everybody's trying to trap Jesus, but he but he sees it coming. Jesus in this chapter is like Neo from the nature. He's just dodging. He's dipping. He's diving. Nobody can touch him. That kind of reminds me of something I've seen trending on social media lately. It's this kind of idea where where a wife will be on a video and she'll be asking her husband something like, Am I more beautiful today or was I more beautiful when we were dating? And you can see like the look on this guy's face immediately. He's like Admiral Akbar. It's a trap. See, and then the the the comedy in this video is that she'll give him option A and option B to choose from. And he knows neither of those options are safe, so he will quickly dip and invent an option C. And and somehow it's funny. Haha But I think that there's a really real version of that fear of answering a question wrong. That a lot of Christians experience when it comes to sharing our our faith. Maybe you've thought about talking to someone about Jesus, but then this thought creeps in what what if they what if they ask me something I don't know how to answer? What what if they challenge something I believe? What if they know more about science or philosophy or history or maybe even the Bible than I do? And what if they aren't even looking for an answer at all? What if really they're just trying to bait me in and trap me and make me look like a fool? All these thoughts can kind of race through our head in in a moment. And that fear can keep us silent. And that's why I think verse 26 in this chapter gives us a great snapshot of what happens throughout this whole chapter. And that's that after Jesus avoided the trap and gave a different answer than they were expecting, this is what happened. They were unable to trap him and what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent. See, they tried to trap Jesus and and they couldn't. But here's what I want us to see today. Jesus promised his disciples that when they found themselves in situations where they didn't know what to say, they wouldn't be on their own. Let's take a look at Matthew 10, 19 and 20. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. And this all connects together because we know that Jesus only did what he saw his father doing. He only said what he heard his father say. So in Jesus' answer, That avoided the traps that were set for him. He was speaking what the Father had to say, just like he promised his disciples that the Spirit of the Father would speak through them when they were arrested. Now we need to understand, like there's some context to this promise from from Matthew 10. Jesus is specifically preparing his disciples to be persecuted. He tells them that they're gonna be Arrested and they're gonna be brought before governors and kings become him. And and that would eventually become very, very real for them. After all, every one of those disciples, except for John and and Judas Iscariot, did actually end up being martyred for their faith and and all that. They they were gonna find themselves standing before people who are hostile to their faith, and they were gonna be questioned about what they believed. But Jesus told them that when that happened, years before it ever became reality, Jesus told them, don't be afraid about what you're going to say. When the moment comes, the Holy Spirit will give you what you need. And when you look back at the book of Acts, we can see this actually happen. Think about Stephen, the deacon, Stephen, the first martyr of the faith. Stephen finds himself standing before people are hostile towards him. And they start interrogating him, and he gives an absolutely incredible scripture-saturated defense of his faith, something far beyond what the Bible gives us any indication Stephen would be able to produce. Now, unfortunately, that answer, that spirit-given answer, doesn't save Stephen's life, but that wasn't actually the promise. The promise was the Holy Spirit will give you an answer. It's not that the Holy Spirit will make everybody like you. It's that he will be there. The Spirit of my Father will be there with you, giving you what you need. He will speak through you. God would give them what they needed to faithfully bear witness to Jesus. And I think that there's a principle here that we should consider that should give us confidence when we talk to people about our faith. So you don't need to know everything before you can talk to somebody about Jesus. You don't need to have a theology degree or memorize a bunch of obscure facts in preparation. You don't have to be ready to go for any question someone might throw at you, sometimes the answer the Lord gives you might just be, I I don't know. And in most conversations, honestly, with someone who has a good heart and good pure motives, there's nothing wrong with saying that's a really good question. I don't know that answer, but let me look into it and I'll get back to you. When when those conversations come, like humility isn't a failure. You're not supposed to know everything. It's okay to be humble and say, I don't know. But But but those aren't so much the conversations we're worried about. I think sometimes there's more of a worry about those conversations where what if someone isn't asking a question from a sincere heart? What about they what about they really are trying to trap? Well, that's where we have to trust the Holy Spirit, because the same spirit who was with Stephen is with us. And if we approach those conversations humbly, n not assuming we know everything, not trying to prove how smart we are, not treating the other person like an opponent we need to defeat, we can trust God to help us faithfully. Represent Jesus. So let's talk application. Maybe there's somebody in your life you've been hesitant to talk to about Jesus because you're afraid you won't know what to say. Well, don't let that fear keep you silent. Recognize that when you go into that conversation, the Holy Spirit is there with you. He is ready to help you out. And if you don't know the answer, be humble, admit it, say it. Then go find the answer and bring it back. And ultimately know that that is not a failure to say I don't know. The only failure is not engaging that conversation to start with or getting in pride and just talking off the top of your head and speaking nonsense because you don't want to look like you don't know everything. Your confidence is not in what you know though. Your confidence is in the Holy Spirit. So trust when the Lord gives you an opportunity to speak. Let's pray. Father, I just thank you for who you are. I thank you, Lord, that you have good plans for us. I thank you, Lord, that you're positioning us in people's lives so that we can have conversations that point back to you, that give people hope, that show people your salvation, that show them you love them. Lord, we just glorify your name and we thank you that you are with us even till the end of the age, and that Holy Spirit, you are giving us what we need to faithfully represent Jesus in the name of Jesus. Amen.