Pastor Mike Impact Ministries

Today we want to take this chat and explain the importance of the synagogue in the days of Christ and the early church.   First, what is a synagogue? The basic definition is a synagogue is a Jewish house of worship. A synagogue is for Jews what a church is for Christians, or a mosque for Muslims, or a temple for Hindus. The word comes from the Greek roots “sun” which means "together", and “agein”...

16 So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. For the past several days we have been talking about the temptation of Jesus by the devil in the wilderness. Before we move on to the next verses where Jesus goes home to His hometown of Nazareth, I want to mention one more thing about dealing with temptations.   Verse 13, tells us that the devil “ended every temptation and departed…” and wa...

Luke records three specific temptations that the Lord Jesus was faced with by the devil in the wilderness just before He begins His three and half years of ministry. The devil’s main focus for all his temptation is to distract us, or discourage us, or derail us, from accomplishing God’s will and His plan and purpose for our lives. God plan and will for our lives always involves the ministry of red...

We are studying the temptation of Jesus by the devil in the wilderness just after beginning His public ministry. To encourage us as we face our temptations, Hebrews 4:14-16 reminds us of this about Jesus and His temptation: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the thron...

The night before He was crucified Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray with Peter, James, and John. Jesus instructed them to watch and pray with Him: “Then He said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me." He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; neverthele...

I will never forget as a nineteen-year-old teenager struggling under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and making the excuse that why should I become a Christian if I can’t live the life that God demands that I should live in the Bible. The devil was deceiving me into thinking that the temptations for me as a teenager would be more than I could handle. For sure, shortly after I trusted Christ as m...

Today we are going to talk about how temptations prepare us for service and ministry. Jesus was prepared for His temptation in the wilderness. In chapter 3, He was obedient in baptism, He was praying, He was anointed by the Spirit, and now in Luke 4:1, He was filled with the Holy Spirit. There is no way that we can avoid temptation! Whenever we become a follower of Jesus Christ we become an enemy...

For the next several days we will be studying Luke 4 and the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. As we approach this chapter, we need to remember that Luke is presenting Jesus to the world as the person Son of Man and at the same time proclaiming that He is indeed the Son of God and Luke is presenting several witnesses to attest to His deity. Already in Luke 2, John the Baptist has declared Jes...

Luke 3:23-38 ends this exciting chapter with a list of names! I can remember as a brand-new Christian reading through my Bible for the first few times and starting in the New Testament Book of Matthew, the first thing I had to read was a long list names that I didn’t recognize. I thought, “This is the Bible? How boring is this.” And during my first year as a believer, I also attempted to read thro...

I started my chat today thinking we would finish Luke 3, but as you will see I won’t get past verse 22. Several things have caught my attention in verses 21-22 that I would like to highlight today.   When Jesus came to be baptized by His cousin John in the Jordan River, no doubt there was a great crowd of hundreds of people from all over Israel there listening to John preach his message of repenta...

You can imagine the excitement that must have been in the air in Israel during this time. God has been silent for four-hundred years after speaking to the nation and rebuking them through Malachi the prophet. Sure, they were back in the Promise Land but they were under the thumb of the Romans. The promise of a Messiah only seemed to be a dream. But then Herod the Great rebuilt the temple in Jerusa...

Jesus and His cousin John the Baptist came on the public scene at about the same time. John showed up first with a spectacular ministry of preaching down by the Jordan River in a wilderness area not far from the north end of the Dead Sea. Thousands of people came to see him and upon hearing him they repented of their sins and were baptized by him. It was there that Jesus came from Galilee to be ba...

John the Baptist came preaching a message of judgement and repentance. It appears that there was a movement of the Spirit of God across the land of Israel and when people heard about this wilderness preacher, they started coming by the thousands to hear him and many were willing to repent and be baptized. As we said yesterday, John first addressed the religious crowd that came to hear him, trying...

Remember we are told in Luke 3:23 that Jesus begin His ministry when He was about thirty years of age. This means that John the Baptist, who was born six months before the birth of Jesus, would have also been about thirty years old. Matthew’s Gospel tells us in Matthew 3; “In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea!” And what a preacher he was! He didn’t come explaini...

Luke tells us that John is the fulfilment the “voice” found in Isaiah 40:3-5. It was there that Isaiah prophesied some seven-hundred years before the events in the Gospels these words: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: "Prepare the way of the LORD; Make straight in the desert A highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted And every mountain and hill brought low; The crooked pl...

Exactly what was the meaning of “baptism of repentance” and the importance of it? Though today the word baptism generally evokes thoughts of identifying with Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, baptism did not begin with Christians. You do not find baptism mentioned in the Old Testament. For years before Christ, the Jews had used baptism in ritual cleansing ceremonies of Gentile proselytes....

After the birth of John the Baptist, in Luke 1:76-80, Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, had prophesied about his son’s future with these words: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest; For you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, To give knowledge of salvation to His people By the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God, With whi...

Luke 3:1-6 1 Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, 2 while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. 3 And he went into all the region aro...

47 And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. 48 So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, "Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously." 49 And He said to them, "Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business ?"   Throughout his Gospel, Luke is r...

42 And when He was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. 43 When they had finished the days, as they returned, the Boy Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem. And Joseph and His mother did not know it; Luke, in these verses, now informs us that after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, His presentation to Simeon and Anna in the Temple, and a short time in Egypt...

Luke is giving us a detailed description of the circumstances and people involved in the birth of Jesus that we do not find in the other Gospels. Luke first introduces us to Jesus the Baby in a stable lying in a manger. Then we read about Joseph and Mary taking Jesus to the temple about forty days after his birth to fulfill the Law of Moses concerning the purification of Mary after giving birth to...

When we come to these verses today, Luke has already shared with us the story of the angels telling the shepherds about the birth of the Messiah. But after this heavenly witness, Luke proceeds to tell us of the public witness of three humans who met Jesus and shared their story with others. Verses 17-18 tells us about the shepherd’s public witness: “Now when they had seen Him, they made widely kno...

In Luke 2:33-35, Simeon goes from being a worshiper and preacher who has just experienced the very first appearance of Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem as a baby to being a prophet who speaks directly to Mary about the future of Jesus and His ministry to Israel. In verse 33, it is interesting that Luke in writing about this encounter does not say, “the father and mother”, but is careful to write,...

The more I study and meditate on this particular passage of Scripture in Luke’s account of the “Christmas Story”, the more I am intrigued about the work of the Holy Spirit as Simeon meets the baby Jesus in the temple some forty days after his birth in the stable. Three times in this passage we read of the Holy Spirit and His ministry to Simeon. In verse 25, “And the Holy Spirit was upon him” . In...

Here in chapter 2, Luke introduces us to a man name Simeon with “there was a man in Jerusalem”. Scripture does not tell us much about this man. We don’t know how old he was, even though most of the time when he is mentioned by Bible teachers, he is pictured as an old man. We don’t know what his occupation was, or if he was priest living near the temple. Luke’s information about Simeon most likely...