Woe
Dr. Larry Thorson
Luke 10:10-12
This is the fifth week of a seven week series from
Luke 10 which describes how Jesus prepared his advance team of 72 to go into
every village and town they could find on their way to
All good coaches know that in every game no matter
how weak the opponent there may be the moment when defeat seems
inevitable. Like the Super Bowl in 1988
when Doug Williams was the quarterback for the Washington Redskins. He was sacked and injured in the second
quarter against
The difference sometimes between winning and
losing is simply how you respond to the woes in your experience. Will you expect the woes and know what to do
with them or will you quit?
Let’s read how Jesus prepared his team for
their inevitable discouraging moment in Luke 10:10-12. But when you enter a town and are not
welcomed, go into its streets and say, 11 'Even the dust
of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this:
The
Notice
Jesus didn’t say “But if you enter a town and are not
welcome. He said “when you enter a town and
are not welcome.” Rejection and disappointment
are not an if in our life but a when.
Now Jesus instruction to his team is a little
foreign to us. He tells them to warn the
town that rejects them that they were wiping the dust off their feet. Wiping or shaking the dust off your feet was
a Jewish protest method against people who rejected them. It was like a warning that by rejecting the
Jewish people they were rejecting God.
It was also a way of saying “I’m moving on whether you accept my God or
not.”
The
hardest thing about disappointment is getting back up and moving on. Few of us will get through life without a
“pink slip” of some kind, and none of us takes rejection very well. Whether we
hear that rejection from our top college choice or a corporation or a publisher
or a lover, it causes momentary havoc in our lives and we begin to question ourselves.
Why am I not good enough, smart enough, clever enough? Am I too old, too young,
overqualified, or under qualified? Do I need more education, more experience,
more time at bat, more time in the field? Why
that person instead of me?
After
some soul-searching, most of us find that we can accept whatever decision has brought
us down in the first place. We find ways to go on with our lives, telling
ourselves that it probably wasn’t the right job, that after while we would have
wished for something more fulfilling, more challenging, or that we wouldn’t
have been happy with that person or that move.
And,
fortunately, experience often proves us right.
Once in a while, though,
it’s more difficult to let go. The pain seems to linger, we replay the closing
scene over and over again in our minds, we wonder if we had done things
differently, would the result have been different as well. Sometimes it’s
harder to pick ourselves up and go on, and sometimes it’s easier to stay in the
pain than to let go of it. Our feelings and emotions tend to get in the way of
rational thought and decision when our ego is at stake.
That’s why Jesus says wipe the dust from your feet
and move on. If you’ve done something and
you’ve failed at it, move on. If you’ve
lost something or someone you really treasure you can’t get it back. Move on.
It’s not healthy to dwell on it.
When Jesus prepared this team of 72 people he did
it because he had an urgent job to get done.
Go. Don’t stop and cry over your
rejection. Move on. Remember that those people who reject you
because of Jesus will have the biggest rejection of all in the end. That’s what Jesus told them.
Maybe you went to someone and said “Would you like
to go to church with me this Sunday?” and they called you a hypocrite. “How can you do what you do and call yourself
a good church going Christian?” “You
hypocrite.” That hurts. But Jesus says move on. Wipe the dust off your feet and move on.
Recently I read a story about a man who was facing
some serious rejection. The story took place in
Lorenzo Dow was an itinerant Methodist
preacher of some renowned. The 43-year old was an odd character who nonetheless
had preached to the Georgia General Assembly at their request. Elsewhere in the
state, he gathered crowds as large as 5,000 people to hear him preach the
Gospel. Or perhaps they just came to see Dow himself. The tall, slightly
humpbacked preacher had long hair and a beard that caused him to stand out. He
often referred to himself as “Crazy Dow.” His chosen method of evangelism was
to go into a town, hand out handbills, gather a crowd and preach. Dow usually
stayed no more than a night or two in a town before moving on.
When the famed Methodist preacher showed up in
Jacksonborough, the rowdies in the town were pretty sure they didn’t want his
tea-totalin’ ways taking root in the town. The local
Though covered with the stink of rotten eggs, Dow
was unbowed. The evangelist followed the angry mob back to the whiskey store
where he took up a fireplace tool and broke open a barrel of whiskey, dumping
its contents across the floor.
Anger flashed through the crowd, whose next item
of business was to find an appropriate tree from which to hang Dow. That’s when
Seaborn Goodall broke in through the crowd. The Methodist church goer was a
fellow Mason with many of the men in the angry mob and he persuaded them to
hand Dow over for the night. Goodall promised that he would see that Dow left
in the morning, if the mob would leave him alone.
The rowdies stayed up drinking through the night.
By morning the unappeased and well pickled mob gathered at the Goodall home
with a supply of eggs and tomatoes. Dow walked out of town in a barrage of
produce. When Lorenzo Dow got to the edge of town at the
Jacksonborough was a thriving county seat town
that wasn’t going anywhere. However, it was Dow who got the last laugh. Within
a generation, Jacksonborough was no more. The rough and rowdy town got such a
bad reputation that the county seat was moved to
Believe this that judgment is coming one
day. Woe is he, Jesus says, who rejects
his message. It will be more tolerable
for the city of
Judgment is coming one day. The only way to avoid the coming judgment is
to claim the blood of Jesus Christ for yourself. That means turn over the reigns of your life
to our Lord, believing that only he can save you.
If you’re messing around in some kind of
sin and I don’t care what you call it or how you read it, if you’re doing
something that you know God doesn’t want you to do, then you’re rejecting Jesus
Christ and woe is you.
This instruction of Jesus today has two
parts. One is what to do when you suffer
discouragement. Shake it off and move on. Some of you need to do just that today. You need to shake off your discouragement and
move on. There are people to be
reached.
The second part of Jesus’ instruction is that the
judgment is real. That’s what gives us
the urgency to get up and invite as many people to meet Jesus Christ and avoid
the judgment of God in whatever time we have left in this life.
We don’t have a fancy evangelism model
around here with all the answers to your friends deepest questions. We simply ask “Would you like to go to church
with me this Sunday?” That’s it.
When
they’re here they’re going to hear that they’re sinners heading for a bad
judgment but in Jesus Christ they can have forgiveness of their sins.
Don’t worry about the rejection. Don’t worry about the failure. We’re not responsible for anyone other than
to invite them to come. Would you like
to come to Jesus with me today?