“The Kinds of People the Son of Man Saves and Uses”
Luke 8:1-3
September 28, 2025
One of my favorite sections in the Bible is Deuteronomy 7:7-8 —
“The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”
Those two verses remind us that God loves and loves to use ordinary people. Scripture is filled with examples of using the ordinary: when Jesus chose the 12, he chose a group of uneducated and overlooked and even ostracized people (Acts 4:13). One of the reasons the many genealogies of the Bible are hard to read is that the names mean nothing to us — the stories of the great men are filled with ordinary and non-influential people. Read the story of the early church in Rome (Rom. 16); it’s ordinary people. Even when God used powerful people like Isaiah and Jeremiah, their ministries were fruitless in their day, or like the Apostle Paul, they suffered greatly to make them depend on the Lord (2 Cor. 11-12).
God uses ordinary and weak and broken people so that they will learn to trust in Him — “Some boast in chariots and some in horses, But we will boast in the name of the LORD, our God” (Ps. 20:7).
And He uses ordinary and weak and broken people so that when others observe their work they will know that the power and authority for their work is from the Lord — “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves” (2 Cor. 4:7).
In a passage that is easy to overlook only as a transition, Luke points us to the greatness of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, as he observes the message and messengers of Jesus —
God uses a simple message and simple servants so that the Son of Man is exalted.
In chapters 8-9, Luke concludes the story of Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee. In the introduction to that section, Luke reveals two primary components of the ministry of the Son of Man —
- The Message of Jesus (v. 1)
- The Messengers of Jesus (vv. 2-3)
Download the rest of this sermon on Luke 8:1-3.
The audio will be posted on the GBC website by Tuesday.
Bet Netofa Valley in lower Galilee.
Words of Grace 