Luke 11 Round 02: Jesus is Controversial

Have you ever wondered if your prayers are truly effective, or if there's a "right way" to approach God? Luke chapter 11 offers profound insights that transform our understanding of prayer, spiritual authority, and authentic faith.

Jesus begins by teaching His disciples a revolutionary prayer framework that emphasizes relationship over ritual. When they ask Him how to pray, He doesn't offer complicated formulas but starts with the intimate address of "Father." This simple beginning reframes prayer entirely – not as religious performance but as family conversation. Jesus then follows with a parable about persistence that's widely misunderstood. Rather than suggesting we must badger God until He relents, Jesus is making a powerful contrast: if imperfect humans eventually respond to persistent requests, how much more eagerly does our perfect Father desire to give good gifts to His children?

The chapter takes a dramatic turn when Jesus confronts spiritual opposition after casting out a demon. When accused of operating through demonic power, Jesus responds with perfect logic: "A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand." This confrontation unveils crucial truths about spiritual warfare – that while evil spirits have power, they have no authority compared to Christ. For anyone navigating spiritual battles, this distinction changes everything about how we face opposition.

Perhaps most striking is Jesus' unflinching confrontation with religious leaders who maintained spotless external appearances while harboring internal corruption. "You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness," He tells them. These aren't angry outbursts but perfect truth spoken in love – challenging us to examine whether our own spiritual practices flow from genuine connection with God or merely religious performance.

Through Luke's careful documentation of eyewitness accounts, we receive these teachings that remain startlingly relevant. Whether you're seeking to deepen your prayer life, understand spiritual authority, or move beyond superficial faith, this chapter offers transformative wisdom for authentic kingdom living. Join us as we continue exploring God's Word together – where the more we dig, the more we find.

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The More We Dig. The More We Find.

Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Jesus Teaches Prayer Fundamentals
• 7:14 The Persistence of Prayer Explained
• 14:46 Confronting Spiritual Opposition
• 21:16 The Sign of Jonah and Light

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. Every day, we take one chapter of the Bible, dig deeper, and discover that the more we dig, the more we find. You can find out more at the Biblebreakdown.com. Now let's grow in God's word together. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to your tour through the Gospel of Luke. Today, Luke chapter 11. So excited about walking through this with you. And this idea of Luke, who was trained as a physician, has now been commissioned by a guy named Theopolis. And what's even more amazing is that he wasn't really commissioned by Theopolis as much as he was commissioned through Theopolis. This was really designed by the Holy Spirit, who has inspired him to write all of this down. And I love that idea that God doesn't use us despite our gifts, but he uses us with the gifts he's given us to make a difference in our world. And who knows, when Luke was training to be a physician and he was learning how to just think critically and all this kind of stuff and just the things that he is now using by the Holy Spirit to write all this down, he had no idea what God was going to do with this. But God is now using him to write down all of these things that we have today. So he went throughout the Judean countryside, interviewed people, talked to people, and now he writes it down. And I'm so curious as we go through this, where did he get this from? Like who did he interview to get this? So what we're going to see today is we're going to see as we read through this that he is talking through some of the different pieces that we find in other gospels. You know, in the book of Matthew, verses chapters 5 through 7, we call it the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus kind of sets the manifesto for the kingdom of heaven. We're going to see some of this today. And I wonder if maybe some of the people that Luke interviewed were people who were sitting in the crowd who was hearing Jesus say all of this. And I don't know, maybe they were saying, hey, I remember when Jesus said this, and he ended up writing it down as being inspired by the Holy Spirit. So we're going to read through this. We're going to talk about how Jesus teaches on prayer, how he gets some critics who call him, you know, the prince of demons, which is hilarious. And then Jesus is going to talk about some of the signs of Jonah receiving the light, and then he's going to end up having some pretty harsh words to say for the religious leaders of the time. That's one of the things I think is so interesting about Jesus is we have this concept of Jesus being super like passive and not really having much to say. Jesus has a lot to say. He has no problem speaking truth. It's just he speaks truth perfectly with love. So we're going to jump into this and we'll stop along the way as your friendly Bible tour guide and just talk through God's word. So if you have your NLT Bible open, I'm going to read, want you to read along with me. Verse 1 of chapter 11 says this. Once Jesus was in a certain place praying. As he finished, one of his disciples came to him and said, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. So Jesus said, This is how you should pray. Father, may your name be kept holy, may your kingdom come. Give us today the food we need, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. And do not lead us or let us yield into temptation. Then, teaching them more about prayer, he used this story. Suppose you went to a friend's house at midnight, wanting to borrow three loaves of bread. You say to him, A friend of mine has just arrived for a visit, and I have nothing more to feed him. And he's supposed, and suppose he calls us out from his bedroom, Don't bother me. The door is locked for the night, and my family and I are all in bed. I can't help you. But I tell you this, though he won't do it for friendship's sake, if you keep knocking long enough, he will get up and give you whatever you need because of your shameless persistence. And so I tell you, keep on asking and you'll receive just as you ask for. Keep on seeking and you will find. Keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, everyone who seeks finds, and to everyone who knocks, the door will be open. Your father, uh your f you fathers, if you ask your children for or if your children ask you for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not. So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? So pause. Some interesting dynamics here, where Jesus, first of all, teaches about prayer, but then he says something that almost seems like we're supposed to have this beggar mentality. He tells a story of imagine for a moment that you have some friends of yours who are passing through town, and as they're passing through, they say, Hey, we're we want to stop off the interstate, we want to go eat with you. Do you mind going and eating? Well, I would love to, but when you get ready to go eat, you find that the restaurant you want to go eat at is about to close. So you go in there and you say, Hey, listen, I I've got a friend coming into town. I would love to feed them. Do you mind staying open? Well, imagine they say, Well, I'm so glad you've got a friend, but no, no, no, I'm gonna go home. Oh, I'm gonna go home. And then you say, you know what? Please help me. Please help me. Please just stop begging, please help me. And then the way the illustration goes, it says, though they would not help you because they are kind, they will help you because of your persistence. And then he tells another story which gives further clarity. He says, if you fathers, if your children ask you for help, would you hurt them instead? No, of course not. You're gonna help them. So you have to put both of these stories together to understand what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying that people will help you sometimes. But sometimes they will help you not because they want to help you, but because they want to kind of just help solve your problem, kind of get you to go away a little bit. Well, if that's how people are, how much more does your heavenly father want to help you? But not because he wants you to go away, but because he understands what you're doing. So he's he's he's actually speaking more about having confidence in God because he's saying if us who are people have our own motives, our own ideas, think of it from the point of view of a heavenly father who loves you completely. And he's got nothing better to do with this time than to be active in your life. So this mentality of the reason why we're persistent in our prayer is to somehow convince God to do something for us, it doesn't really fit in the overall context. I do get how if you took those two or three verses and you read them, it would seem like that that God is almost like dangling a carrot in front of you. And it's if you beg enough, he'll help you. But that does not fit the overall narrative. The overall narrative is saying we keep asking because we trust God, we keep on knocking because we trust God, we keep on persevering because we trust the Lord that at the right time he's gonna do the right thing for the right reasons. So I want to give you that, hopefully that confidence in prayer. We don't pray and ask for the same thing over and over again because we don't trust God, or almost like we have to fill up a bank of requests, and once we fill up the bank and it overflows, now God's required to do that. Not at all. It's the idea of if human people who are frail and who are, you know, we have our own motives, if we're willing to help people, how much more does your heavenly father want to help those whom he is in covenant relationship with? So I want to give you that confidence with that. All right, here we go. Verse 14. Jesus is gonna kind of go back and forth with some people who don't support his ministry. Verse 14 says, One day Jesus cast out a demon from a man who couldn't speak, and when the demon was gone, the man began to speak, and the crowds were amazed. But some of them said, Well, no wonder he can cast out demons. He gets his power from Satan, the prince of demons. Others, trying to test Jesus, demanded that he show them a miraculous sign from heaven to prove his authority. He knew their thoughts, so he said, Any kingdom divided by civil war is doomed. A family splintered by feuding will fall apart. You say I am empowered by Satan, but if Satan is divided and fighting against himself, how can his kingdom survive? And if I am empowered by Satan, what about your own exorcists? They cast out demons too, so they will condemn you for what you have just said. But I but if I am casting out demons by the power of God, then the kingdom of God has arrived among you. For when a strong man is fully armed and guards his palace, his possessions are safe, until someone even stronger attacks and overpowers him, strips him of his weapons, and carries off his belongings. Anyone who isn't with me opposes me, and anyone who isn't working with me is actually working against me. When the evil spirit leaves a person, it goes through the desert searching for rest. And if it finds none, it says, I will return to the person I came from. So it returns and finds its former home and all swept and in order. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter into the person and live there. And so the person is worse off than before. As he was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out, God bless your mother, the womb that you came from, and the breast that nursed you. And Jesus replied, Even more blessed are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice. So pause. He just said a whole lot about the spirit world that can bring many of us a lot of different kinds of just different things we we kind of grapple to understand. The first thing he said was is he talked about how the spirit world mirrors the physical world in that there's order, there's allegiance, there's you know everybody's not playing on the same team, to put it that way. So he was saying, if I'm casting out evil spirits, then that is an immediate sign that I am not on their team, of course. And honestly, the real reason why they were struggling with him casting out evil spirits had to do with his messiahship. There was a long-held tradition within the Jewish culture that when the Messiah came, not only was he going to have political power and physical power, but he was also going to have spiritual power to not just deliver people from physical oppression, but deliver people from spiritual oppression. So one of the reasons why Jesus did so many deliverances, spiritual deliverances, was number one, because we needed it, people needed it, but also it was every time he would do that, he was pointing back to who he really was. And so they wanted to try to disprove that as much as possible because they knew what the people were thinking. The next thing is Jesus says that there is this situation where the evil spirit will leave because he's cast out, but then he can come back again if it's swept in an order, but it is not occupied. It's one of the reasons why when someone has a spiritual problem, one of the things that we recommend that they do, and they insist if we can they do, is they have to receive Jesus into their life. They need their spiritual temple occupied. Because if the Holy Spirit is there, then the evil spirit can't come in. And that's important that we realize that it's not just about deliverance, but then it's to reoccupy your spirit with the Spirit of God. And I also love the idea that Jesus says when a powerful man has his house in order and he is guarding his house, he's fine. Unless someone more powerful than him comes in and takes everything away. And that's an important spiritual point because what he says is, is he's saying the enemy has power, but if you're a Christ follower, he has no authority. Someone who is much greater than the enemy, which is Jesus, is now here. And so, yes, we should always respect the enemy, because he has power, but because of Jesus, he has no authority. And so we say, hey man, you've got power, but you have nothing compared to my King, Jesus. And that's why it's so important that we understand that we're all in a spiritual war, but we should be standing in the spiritual authority that Christ has won for all of us. Okay, verse 29. Jesus said, as the crowds pressed in on Jesus, he said, This evil generation keeps asking me for a miraculous sign. But the only sign I will give them is the sign of Jonah. What happened to him was a sign to the people of Nineveh that God had sent him. He this happened, the Son of Man will be a sign to these people that he has been sent by God. The queen of Sheba will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it. For she came from a distant land to hear the wisdom of Solomon. Now someone greater than Solomon is here, but you refuse to listen. The people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it. They will repent of their sin, because they repented of their sin at the preaching of Jonah. Now someone greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent. Pause again. One of the most amazing things about this is likely during that time, especially among the Sadducees, they tried to say that Jonah was not a literal story about what happened and being swallowed by a large fish, and all but it was all allegory and not really a thing. And then now, currently today, a lot of more liberal Christians who try to explain away the hard parts of the Bible will say, ah, you know, Jonah was just an allegory and all this kind of stuff. But notice that Jesus doesn't call it an allegory. He doesn't say that it will be like that wonderful, you know, just idea of a story, but he uses the story of Jonah as a literal thing that happened to talk about the literal thing that was going to happen to him. And I think that's important to realize that over and over and over again, Jesus ratifies the authenticity and truth of the Old Testament, especially one of the more hard ones. Because let's just be honest, it's it's difficult to get our minds around how someone named Jonah was swallowed by a large fish and lived to tell about it. Well, that's because it was a miracle and it was only happened to one person that we know of. And that's what a miracle is, is something outside the created order that God had made. But it happened, and Jesus ratifies the authenticity that it happened by saying, just like what happened to Jonah, it's just like what's going to happen to me. Which is also one more interesting tidbit there, and that is that many scholars believe that Jonah probably died. Like he wasn't just in some kind of a water bubble under there, and then we don't know for certain, but because of some of the way it reads, many scholars think that Jonah actually died and then God brought him back to life and then spat him out, you know, on that seashore. But that's a whole nother conversation for a whole nother day. Here we go, verse 33. No one lights a lamp and then hides it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand where its light can be seen by all who enter the house. Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when it is unhealthy, your body is filled with darkness. Make sure that the light that you think you have is not actually darkness. If you are filled with light, with no dark corners, then your whole life will be radiant, as though a floodlight were filling you with light. Now let's finish this up. Verse 37, Jesus criticizes religious leaders, and then we'll kind of land this plane together. As Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went in and took a place at his table, and his host was amazed to see that he sat down to eat, without first performing the hand washing ceremony required by Jewish customs. Then the Lord said to him, Man, you Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy, full of greed and wickedness. Fools. God didn't God make you make the inside as well as the outside? So clean the inside by giving gifts to the poor, and then you will be clean all over. What sorrow awaits you, Pharisees? For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore justice and the love of God. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things. What sorrow awaits you, Pharisees? For you love to sit in the seats of honor in the synagogues and receive respect, respectful greetings as you walk in the marketplaces. Yes, what sorrow awaits you, for you are like hidden graves in the field. People walk over them without knowing the corruption that they are stepping on. Teacher, said the expert of religious law, you have insulted us too, in what you have just said. Yeah, Jesus said, What sorrow awaits you, you experts from religious law. So, in other words, it's like Jesus saying, Okay, yeah, you may get on you guys for a second. Here we go. For you crush people with unbearable religious demands, and you never lift a finger to ease the burden. And what sorrow awaits you? For you build monuments for the prophets that your own ancestors killed long ago. But in fact, you stand as witnesses who agree with your ancestors that your ancestors did. You killed the prophets and you join in their crime by building the monuments. This is what God in his wisdom said about you. I will send prophets and apostles to them, but they will kill some of them and persecute the others. As a result, this generation will be held accountable for the murder of all God's prophets from all the creation of the world, from the murder of Abel to the murder of Zachariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, it will certainly be charged against this generation. Why sorrow awaits you, experts in religious law, for you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You do not enter the kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering. As Jesus was leaving, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees became hostile. Imagine why, and tried to provoke him with many questions. They wanted to trap him to say something so that they could use against him. So Jesus finishes by lowering the hammer. And then I love how Lucas, oh, and by the way, they were like extremely offended and they tried to try to kill him. Well, yeah, yeah, I can imagine why. I mean, imagine this. I mean, Jesus walks in and he just insults you. It's like, uh wow, that's that's awesome. But can I tell you as we finish this chapter up, it's passages like that that keep pastors up at night. Because one of the things that Jesus is saying is he's saying, guys, you know what the kingdom of God is about. You have studied this stuff, you you studied the law, you know what the kingdom of God is supposed to be like. But you know what you do? You just keep trivializing all this other stuff. You keep on adding people, uh, you know, talking to people about this and talking to people about that, rather than showing them life and what the kingdom of God is supposed to be. So, yes, you're messing it up. You're doing horrible, and a horrible judgment awaits you. I'll tell you that it was in reading this kind of thing that as a pastor, I committed to spend the rest of my life to doing what I'm doing right now. Because the honest truth is, is there are hard things in God's word. There's difficult passages in God's word, but you can't know and understand the difficult things until you understand the simple things and the the most basic of things. And so as a pastor, I don't want to stand before God one day and say, God, I was really excited to teach them all this other stuff and all these other things. So I just skipped over all the, you know, the team, the kingdom of God is life, and the kingdom of God is wholeness, and the kingdom of God is, you know, and I wonder if Jesus would say, Well, guess what? There's sorrow awaiting you because you taught people what to do, but you didn't teach people why to do it that way. And that's a lot of what Jesus is saying. And so this is a a big, big warning, not just for the religious leaders of the time, but even now. It's what are you teaching people? Are you teaching people what to do? Make sure you also teach them why they do it that way. And that's honestly, as we finish this up, that is the whole reason why I am so excited to walk through a book of the Bible like the Gospel of Luke. Because there's so many great takeaways from this. And to be honest with you, there are hard things in the Bible. There's hard ways to understand how to apply the Bible, but it becomes infinitely more complex if you don't know the Bible. I get questions all the time as a pastor about complex spiritual things going on in our world and how should we see it? And when I listen to how they're framing the question, I know that as a pastor, I've got more work to do because yes, there are hard questions, but they're nowhere near as hard as they have to be if we simply understand God's word and what God's word says. When we understand what God's word says, he teaches us how to have a biblical point of view and framework so that we know which way to go. And that's what my number one takeaway is from this entire chapter is Jesus is teaching us how to pray, but then as he's teaching people how to pray, there he has to go on a whole other subject because people want to talk about evil spirits, and then people want to talk about the signs of the end time, and they want to talk about all this other stuff. And Jesus is like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Let's get back to the simplicity of what God's word says. So I want to pray for you, and I hope you get something out of this, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Let me pray for you real quick. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you that your word reveals areas that you want to heal. Thank you that the more we know and understand your word, the more we're able to walk in freedom every day. And I pray that this chapter will continue to teach us, Lord, what you're wanting to do in our lives. That you'll teach us why we do things as we do the things so that we can walk in increasingly more freedom every day. Thank you that you are for us more than we can imagine. And we celebrate that right now. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right. Well, I love you. Hope you have a great day. I can't wait to see you next time for Luke chapter 12.