Hello and welcome to our program. We're in number 11 in our lessons from Luke. Stay tuned. Today we continue our study in Luke chapter 5, a very action-packed chapter in the book of Luke. It begins, there's a crowd of people on a shore there by the seaside, and Jesus is preaching to these people. It's very early in the morning. We have four fishermen who had previously agreed to travel with Jesus, but somehow they're not traveling with him anymore. They've gone back fishing, and Jesus is on the shore, and a crowd of people, and he sees, the Bible says, two ships, and verse two says the fishermen were gone out of them, and they were washing their nets. Well, Peter owns one of those boats, and so Jesus says, you know, may I use your boat? Of course you can. Peter's in the boat with him, and they launch out a little from the shore, and Jesus preaches a message. Well, we have Peter in the same boat with Jesus, and that's a really good plan. And he's thinking that message is for those people on the shore. Well, really, he's very close in getting everything that Jesus is saying here in this ship. And verse number four says when he had left speaking, that is when Jesus finished his message. And we don't know what the message was. It doesn't tell us here. I would like to hear it. But anyway, at that point, Jesus said in verse number four, he said to Peter, Launch out into the deep, let down your nets for a drop, and Simon Peter is questioning this. He says, look, we fished all night and we haven't caught anything. The nets are all clean now. We're going to get them dirty again. Fish don't, you can't get fish in the daytime. They go down deep where it's cool. Launch out into the deep and let down your nets. Well Peter says well Okay, nevertheless if you want and he lets down one net well he should have let down the nets as he was told to do then first thing we find out the net is broken and and They call to the other fishermen to come out, and they fill up two boats full of fish. Well, we have Peter's response here in verse 8 through 11. It says, When Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. What we have here is repentance, and we find Peter doing that quite a bit. Peter was always talking when he should have been listening, and Peter was always doing things when he should have been waiting a little bit. and getting direction from God. And I like Peter because I can relate to doing the same things. But Jesus is always there, always there, when he knows the heart, and he knew the heart of Simon Peter. Well, we read that in verses 12 through 16, another story, in this chapter five of the book of Luke. And this has to do with a man that the Bible says was full of leprosy, and Jesus healed him. And as a result of that, great multitudes began to follow Jesus. And interestingly enough, it says in verse 16, Jesus withdrew himself, went out in the wilderness, and prayed. Now, we'd see a great multitude. We'd have to get some kind of promotion together to keep him. Jesus knew a better way to keep him. He went out in the wilderness alone with his father and prayed. As the story continues down through Luke chapter 5, we see verses 17 to 26. There's a handful of hypocrites in the house with the Lord. He is teaching these hypocrites who have come in from all over the place, scribes and Pharisees. Their crowd is outside, they can't get in. There's four men who sought means, it says in verse number 18, to bring their friend to Jesus. They couldn't get in because of the crowd. The thing they did though, you know those old houses, you see them, pictures in Bible times of a staircase going up the side of the house to the roof. Well, they took this man on his bed, up onto that roof, busted up the roof, ended up busting up the meeting. The Bible says in verse number 20, Jesus saw their faith, but what the hypocrites and the religious hypocrites that were there saw was an opportunity, and that's why they were there, an opportunity to try and trap Jesus. We read in verse number 21, they reasoned within themselves and said, who is this which speaketh blasphemies? Well, after these things, now we get down to verse 27, where we left off in our last program, And we have that phrase after these things. After his confrontation with the religious hypocrites that were in that room, after that, he goes out, it says here, and he chooses Matthew, who was a publican, who was one of the most hated men in all of Israel. Jesus chooses him to be one of his 12 special people that are going to travel with him. I'm reading in verse 27 of Luke chapter 5, it says, after these things, he, that is Jesus, went forth and saw a publican named Levi sitting at the receipt of custom, and he said unto him, follow me, and he left all rose up and followed him. And Levi, that is Matthew, made him a great feast in his own house. And there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them. Now, if you listen to our previous broadcast, we give you the details of what these publicans were, and they certainly were hated by the people in Israel. Jesus didn't hate them. Well, it says in verse number 30, the scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and with sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick I came not, he said, to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Now, I'd like to stop here and preach a series of sermons on repentance at least 20 times in the book of Luke. Luke refers to the importance of repentance. Now, I know in this age in which we are living, there's a damnable heresy that has been introduced into our fundamentalism, so-called fundamentalism. that you don't need to repent in order to be saved. Well, you can either believe these false prophets or you can believe Jesus. It's really not much of a contest for me. I'm going to believe Jesus who said, nay, I tell you nay, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. We got this new incentive salvation program If you just bow your head, pray a little prayer, and you can go to heaven. Anybody want to go to heaven? Say, I do. That's it. Just pray this little prayer, and then you can go to heaven. No, Jesus said, except you repent. You can pray all the little prayers you want to, except you repent. The Bible says, you are going to perish. Jesus said that. And so let's just get back to preaching the true gospel of Jesus Christ. He said, I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Now, it's a very important principle here. Jesus is having a time with these sinners, these publicans, and yet he is not compromising his message. He loves them, he's concerned about them, but he says what they need to do is they need to repent. He's not fellowshipping with unsaved people so they'll like him. He's not fellowshiping with them at all. Fellowshipping is two fellas in the same ship. He's not doing that. But here we have this man, Matthew, he's been saved, and when someone's saved, he wants his friends to get saved, so he throws this big banquet, and Jesus is preaching, and he says, what you fellas need to understand is that I did not come to call the righteous, but I came to call sinners to repentance. make sure that if we're dealing with unsafe people, we're not fellowshipping with them so they'll like us. What we're needing to do is to give them the message so they'll like Jesus. And he says in verse 32, I came to call sinners to repentance. Well, in verse 33 it says, and they said unto him, that is, the hypocrites said unto Christ, why do the disciples of John fast often and make prayers? And likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but thine eat and drink. And he said unto them, can ye make the children of the bride chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? Notice he says, the disciples of John, and the disciples of the Pharisees, and thine, or the disciples of Jesus. The word disciple, you need to look at it carefully when you're studying the Bible to see who it's really talking about. It's very important. Disciples, sometimes we get the idea that's just 12 men. No, no, no. There's the disciples of John, there's disciples of the Pharisees, these hypocrites, Jesus had some disciples, and so he says here, he gives them three illustrations here, very interesting, I think. In verse 36, it says he spake also a parable unto them. Here's what he said, no man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old, If otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the peace that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old." Now, what he's basically saying here is that God is not offering a patch-up religion. If you have a car and you have some problems with that car and so you go down and buy a brand new car and then park it in the backyard and then you take out the transmission because you need it in your old car or you take out the windshield wipers because they're not working on your old car, that's just dumb. Why not just drive the new car? Well, that's what he's talking about here. He's saying, I'm not offering a patch-up religion here. Then he said in verse number 37, No man put a new wine in old bottles, else the new wine will burst the bottles and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put in new bottles, and both are preserved. Now the bottles they're talking about, they were like bags back then. What basically the lesson that he's talking about here is you do not mix law and grace. The law talks about the things that Israel had to do, and the phony Israelite leaders, they had added about 600 things to what really the Bible said they had to do. We'll talk more about that as we get on into the book of Luke. But the law has to do with doing, and grace has to do with the fact that it's done. The last thing Jesus said on the cross is, it is finished, it is done. To compare what he's saying here about putting new wine in old bottles, it would be like buying a bottle of pop from the grocery store, bringing it home, And you have some cans of pop that you have finished, but the cans are empty. So you take the bottle of pop and you take the lid off and you pour it in the old cans and put it in the fridge. That's just ridiculous. It's like buying a new car. and using the parts off of it to fix your old car. And so what he's saying here is it's a case of not mixing the two, one with the other. That's what he's talking about here when he's talking about new wine in old bottles. And then in verse number 37, this is the third time he said no man, that phrase here. It says, no man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new, for he saith the old is better. Now the Lord's not saying here, you know, that old wine's better, you better go and get some of that. He said, no man, no man having drunk old wine straightway desires the new. This is the position of the people who drink booze. He said they want the old stuff. They say the old is better. Well, that was the position of the Pharisees. Here was the Lord coming with a new program. This is the age of grace. No, the old is better. And they were fighting for the traditions that they were keeping under the law. Well, we want to look about the subject of lessons from Luke and see what lessons we have here in chapter five. Just summing it up quickly, we saw that Jesus was preaching a message on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and we find that the remnant was teachable for the most part. The remnant were the only ones who were really listening, a small group of people out of that crowd. The second thing is the remnant was in need of being taught. We get the idea sometimes, I think, well, yeah, I want to be part of that remnant. I'm going to stick plain and true to the cause of Jesus Christ. Well, then most of the Bible is written for you because the rest of them aren't listening anyway. So let's not get the idea because we have decided that we're going to remain true in this age of apostasy that we've arrived, most of this Bible here is to help us to do what we need to do. Well, most of the people were missing God's best for them. God had a purpose, most people miss it. Some of them, a very small group of them, made the right choice, and now they're glad they did, thousands of years later. This life is very short, the Bible calls it a vapor, What kind of vapor trail are we going to leave? Vapor is not lasting very long compared to eternity. We saw the call of Matthew. He made a choice. He made his choice known to everybody. The message for all of his peers was this. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repent. The message was repentance. And we are all required to choose. Matthew had to choose. all his friends had to choose, and so do you. We saw also the religion versus the reality. The religion was a work of do, reality, the work is done, and we see that there is a remnant of people here that were being used by the Lord, and it's always, always been just a small remnant of people all the way back to Noah, right on through to today. I just want to make one more thing about a little bit off subject but the subject about disciples and apostles Matthew chapter 6 in verse number 12 through 16 talks about the choosing of the apostles and I'm reading in verse 12 and it says it came to pass in those days that he that is Jesus went out into a mountain to pray and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples, and of them he chose twelve whom he named apostles." It's very important to notice the difference between disciples and apostles now sometimes you'll get people say well there's contradictions here he talked about he chose the 12 here and he chose these over there there's a difference between disciples and apostles and so the verse goes on here to in in math in matthew chapter 6 in verse 14 he names them and it says Simon whom he also named Peter, Andrew his brother, James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot. He names them all here, but the important thing to remember is when somebody's talking about well there's contradictions in these lists, is he talking about the list of disciples or is he talking about a list of apostles? Again, verse 13 says, And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples, and of them he chose twelve, whom he also named apostles. There is a difference. There's no contradiction if we understand that. Well, we're trying to learn some lessons from the book of Luke. Be sure and tune in for our next program. We'll be looking in Luke chapter 12.