Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the amazing John Bytheway. Welcome, John.

John Bytheway: 00:11 Thanks, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:12 Yeah. We take apart just one question from this week’s Come Follow Me lesson and the part we’re going to take this week is the Savior in Nazareth. How does he describe himself? John, you want to take this one?

John Bytheway: 00:25 I love this because they had heard rumors, they didn’t know, they had heard about healings. We’ve got Luke 1 is what? Zacharias, Elisabeth, John the Baptist. Luke 2: the Christmas story. Luke 3: the baptism of Jesus. Luke 4: He goes back home and I love the wording, “As his custom was, he went to the synagogue and he stood up for to read,” and I guess the way they did it was you read a scripture and then you sat down and made a comment. What I love about this is of all the verses that we might think of to describe the Savior in the Old Testament, and maybe we’d even try to pick the best one, well, we don’t have to.  Jesus chose the one.

Hank Smith: 01:01 Yeah, he chose it for us.

John Bytheway: 01:03 Yeah. So it says, “The minister gave him the scroll and then he stood up and read.” This is verse 18 of Luke 4, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And He closed the book, gave it again to the minister, and sat down. The eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. Then he began to say unto them, ‘This day, is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.'” And how did they react at that, Hank?

Hank Smith: 01:42 These are his friends and neighbors, the people he had grown up with. This was back in Nazareth where he had been brought up according to verse 16. So you would think they would be so excited and just shocked that the Messiah is from their own little town, but instead he’s almost entirely rejected by these people.

John Bytheway: 02:01 Yeah. When he says, “This day” it’s like, “This is me and He hath anointed me.” Anointed one is Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek, and he’s saying this is me, and what could have been a more beautiful message, but what I love here, to answer the question, is notice his emphasis on healing. “To preach the gospel to the poor, heal broken hearts, preach deliverance to captives,” and that could be all sorts of captivity. Emotional, addiction. “Recovering sight to the blind.” Spiritual blindness, physical blindness, and so I love how positive that way of characterizing what did Jesus come to do? I came to heal broken hearts. That’s a verse that I love and I love that Jesus chose it.

Hank Smith: 02:43 Yeah. I think of the Savior’s mission and how he says, “I’m here to preach the gospel to the poor.” Poor in spirit perhaps, afflicted, those who are meek, to preach glad tidings to the poor. It’s been translated that way. The good news to the meek. Good news to those who are suffering. So I think that’s exactly what he did. He went and He preached the Good News to the meek. I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe the Lord than Isaiah got there in Isaiah 61.

John Bytheway: 03:16 Yeah. He knew exactly where to go. I don’t know if they handed him the book or if he chose the one, but I love that that’s how it’s characterized. I like to say to the teenagers, if Jesus came to your high school, who would He go see? I don’t know the answer to that, Hank, but it might be those that feel lonely and are sad. I mean, I guess that’s where He’d go and so if we want to carry His light to others, we ought to be those who lift each other up as well.

Hank Smith: 03:39 Yeah. We can look for the brokenhearted, for the poor, brokenhearted, the captives, the blind, and the pained. We can go look for them just like He would.

John Bytheway: 03:48 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 03:49 We want to thank you for joining us on followHIM Favorites. We hope you join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We’re with Dr. Jan Martin this week and she does a fantastic job. We think you’re going to love her, so come join us there and then come back next week for another followHIM Favorites.