Well, good morning. Welcome to
our continuing Bible study in the book of Luke. We're beginning
chapter 21. And of course, that chapter is
just for our benefit so we can find stuff easily. And the circumstances
that we find ourselves in today is the same. that we've been
in for quite some time, and we're in Luke chapter 21 today, beginning
of chapter 21. And just as by way of context,
it's the Passover week. It's the week before Passover,
and our scripture in Luke chapter, the very first verse in Luke
chapter 20 was, and Jesus was in the temple teaching and preaching
the gospel. And that's where he's at as we
find him here in the beginning of chapter 21 and after he dealt
with all those issues that we took a look at through chapter
20. So we're going to have... Luke 21, verse 1 through 4 here,
the widow's mites or the widow's offerings is kind of the setting
here. So in Luke 21, verse 1, He looked
up and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury,
and He saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two
mites. And He said of a truth, I say
unto you that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all. For all these have of their abundance
cast into the offerings of God, but she of her penury hath cast
in all the living that she had." So this particular record is
brought to us in Luke and also in the Gospel of Mark in chapter
12. And he adds pretty much the same
record. He adds one word there that's
not in this one. In verse 2, it says, he saw a
poor widow casting in thither two mites. And in Mark's gospel,
he says, she cast in two mites, which equals one farthing. And so mites and farthing, interestingly,
they're old English words. In the Greek, they're something
different. So we'll look at that this morning. So we have our Lord observing
what's going on in there in this outer area of the temple where
the offering boxes are, and one commentator, and I mentioned
this in some of the other lessons, where there were thirteen boxes
where they could put their offerings, and they had kind of a brass
funnel thing on them so that that people could put their coins
in there, and it would kind of make a racket when they dumped
them in. And you can imagine this poor
widow throwing in her two mites, rattling around and dropping
into the box, and these rich guys going up and dumping in
a whole lot of coins and having it make a lot of racket and draw
attention. Oh, listen to how much he threw
in. So, once again, we have a situation
where the Lord and His disciples are there for a specific purpose,
and the Lord makes an observation and calls it to the attention
of the disciples as something worthy of note, and it amplifies
because we see it here and also in the book of Mark, and He says,
of a truth. He brings our attention. He says,
I have a truth. I'm going to tell you something of a truth.
And so he saw this certain poor widow. And whenever we see that
word certain, it always draws our attention to that person,
even though they may not be named. In the Lord's view, it's a certain
person, a certain person with whom he is acquainted. And he
knew all about this. as we read that, he knew a lot
about her because he's the Lord. She was a widow and she was poor
and he knew her condition, he knew her circumstances, he knew
that the two mites was all she had. How could he know that unless
he's the Lord God Almighty? And he knew it was no coincidence
that she was there at that very moment in time for his purposes
and according to his will. And again, it's the Passover
week and people were coming from all over. the Jewish world there,
they were commanded to attend these three feasts in a year,
and they came, and at the Passover week, it was customary that they
pay the annual temple tax. And it's kind of a side note,
interestingly, though, when the Lord was up in the Capernaum
area, the religious folks had sent
out the the pass the platers and they were putting the arm
on everybody to pay their temple tax and not waiting for them
to come to Jerusalem to do it. They sent envoys out to do that
and they said, does not your master pay the offering?" And
so he told one of the disciples to go down to the water and pick
up this fish, and the fish had a coin in its mouth, and he says,
there's your offering for you and for me. And so it's kind
of an interesting side note there. So many were there to because it
was a requirement that they came. It was a Jewish law that they
should attend. And others were there because
the Spirit had revealed Christ in them, and they knew what the
Passover meant. And they knew the Lamb was slain
in their stead and taking the wrath that they deserved, but
through merciful grace were saved from. And the Lord had just previously
in chapter 20 described the motives of many of the ultra-religious
that were at the temple And they were trying to trick him into
saying something that he could be arrested for, and trick him
into making him not be popular with the people by saying something
that they would disagree with. And in kind of the closing end of
chapter 20 that we were just in, in verse 45, it says, Then
in the audience of all the people, He says this loud enough for
everybody to hear him. He said unto his disciples, beware
of those scribes which desire to walk in the long robes and
love greetings in the markets and the highest seats in the
synagogues and the chief rooms at the feasts. And then he says,
which devour widows' houses and for a show make long prayers
The same shall receive greater damnation." So they were pretending
to be religious, and they were extorting these widows in various
methods. They were just fodder to them.
Oh, I can get something out of her. I can raise the rent on
her place until she can't afford it again, and then she'll have
to move out, and then I'll rent it to somebody else. The list
goes on and on. but they devour widows' houses
with no concern for them. And so in our text today we have
an example of the rich who appeared on the outside to be religious
and pious and devout, and yet some of these had accumulated
their wealth by devouring widows' houses. And through whatever
means, the religious folks are always very good at manipulation
and guilt and appealing to pride. And physically, they use their
position and power to extract this money from whoever they
could and with little or no consequence or thought for how it was going
to turn out. And into this mix, then we're
introduced to one of these widows. Coincidence, we call that in
the Bible. Coincidentally. And the Lord causes this to be
recorded in intending to teach His disciples and the church
throughout time. And so we find it in our scripture. And I read one religious organization
interpretation of this. Well, this is a warning to the
congregation that Jesus is watching every contribution you make. And so you should act accordingly
as if he was looking over your shoulder at how much you're putting
in when the plate passes by. Let that be a warning to you
that Jesus is looking. It's so far off from the spiritual
meaning of this block of scripture, but it's utilized by many churches
to put the arm on folks. And what a blessing we don't
have that here. You know, a couple of words that
are here translated in our Bibles that I mentioned earlier, they're
very interesting as giving us a more visual representation
of some spiritual thing. The mites here in our text describes
a very thin, a very small coin that was of just little value.
And a mite is actually an old English term. When the King James
Version was translated in 1611, they used this term mite because
it was an old English word that meant a crumb, a little tiny
amount. And so they thought, well, that
would give people the sense of what this Greek term lepton is. And in the Greek, that's what
mite is translated from. And mite is translated for us
from this Greek word lepton, the root word of which is leptis,
which means a flake, a tiny thing. When we lived up
in Alaska, they did a lot of gold mining up there. And one
time I had to go pick up a load of gold for somebody. And they
had this gallon or quart jar, plastic jar, full of gold flakes. It was about the size of a little
pickle container. It weighed 45 pounds. It was just full of these little
thin flakes of gold that had been run through a sluice box
and had been pounded over the ages. They were little thin flakes,
but added all together they were pretty dense. So this leptis,
meaning a flake, a very tiny thing. And monetarily, the Gospel
of Mark says that two of these mites, these leptons, equal to
farthing, which is another Old English word, which means a fourth. It's from a Latin word meaning
quadrans, quad, four. So basically what this means
is two of these mites were the equivalent of a farthing, which
was only worth a fourth of a larger denomination, which was small. So it was a small part of a smaller
part of another small thing. So monetarily, it was kind of
like a peso. I don't know what you could buy
with two mites, but probably not much. And to give you an
idea of the... graphic idea of the smallness
of it. In today's world of physics,
I was talking to Norm about, you know, when we were kids and
growing up taking science, we had molecules and we found out
that molecules were made up of atoms and atoms were made up
of electrons and neutrons and protons and Then we find out
that that was as small as they could go back then and now they've
got electron microscopes and they can look smaller and smaller
and smaller. We find out that the protons
are made up of quarks and the quarks are made up of what they
call leptons. They named them leptons because
they were the smallest thing that they could name them after. Maybe when our children are all
grown up, they'll be able to look at a smaller thing and they'll
have to come up with some new name to call the tiny part, the
smaller part. This lepton is an elementary
particle that exists on its own, if you want to look that up and
see what it says about it. But anyway, it's named mostly
for size. But spiritually, as we look at
this, much more is represented here. She threw in this word. She's thrown in her living. Another
interesting word here that we find, and in the Greek, that
word is bios, and it means life. she threw her life in, and not
monetarily. It's just a spiritual representation
that she threw all of her, everything, all of her trust, all of her
faith, all of her care, it represents her trusting to Christ for that. And if a name had been recorded
for her, we might have found her in Hebrews 11. By faith,
the widow threw in all of her living, all of her life, all
of her bios. That's what that Greek word is.
She threw all of her bios. And that's the root word for
much of biology, and those kind of things that we have today. So it's always interesting how
those words are incorporated into our vocabulary, and we don't
really understand it very much. But spiritually, she threw all of
her trust in Christ. And it brings to mind a couple
of verses He said, if you had faith as a grain of a mustard
seed, oh, ye of little faith. She threw all she had in, and
what she had in was, you know, the Scriptures, what does a man
have that he didn't receive? And this woman, her circumstances
may have been poor in this world, but maybe rich in spiritual things. because faith is the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, and for it
by the elders obtained a good report. And through faith we
understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so
the things which are seen were not made of the things which
do appear. Remember Hebrews 11, 1 through
3 there. And so we learned from our previous
lessons that the definition of faith and a wonderful substitute
for that word, if you look up in your Strong's dictionary, your Greek Hebrew
dictionary, it says, total reliance on Christ for salvation. And
if you take that and apply it every time you see that word
faith, it just makes so much sense. By total reliance on Christ
for salvation, Abraham believed God and it was countered to him
for righteousness. By faith, by faith, and by faith
Abel, by faith Enoch, by faith Noah, by faith a certain widow. had total trust for her salvation
in God. And contrarily, we've observed
experientially that it's the broad custom of religion to not
totally rely on Christ for salvation. They just say, I'm not seeing
any action here, so we need to move things along. because we're
not trusting in the Lord to do His work. We're not trusting
in the Holy Spirit to do what it's written in Thessalonians,
where He said, boy, knowing your election of God, because the
gospel came to you not in word only, but in power and in the
Holy Spirit. That's what has to happen. And
if we don't see that action happening, we say, well, Maybe we ought
to sing a thousand verses of Just As I Am at the end of the
service until somebody gets guilted into coming forward, or we need
to... the Holy Spirit's taking the
day off, so we need to help out a little bit. We need to rely
on emotionalism and psychology to assist God in an area where
assistance is not only not needed, but it's actually rebellion against
the actual cause of salvation. And the same thing goes on with
the offering thing. We formally went to it years
and years and years ago. In the 80s, we went to this place.
And the treasurer of the church was wringing his hands all the
time. We just don't have enough money. I don't know what we're going
to do. I don't know how we're going to pay the bills. He was just worried
all the time. He was just sick because he didn't
trust God to take care of that issue any more than they trusted
Him to take care of the salvation issue. They didn't trust Him. And they tried to accomplish
it without Him, and that was a big mistake. And so, you have
all these repeated preaching on giving needed to acquire the
desired level of funding. We want to build a bigger building,
and we need more funding for that. And so they use these same
tactics to rationalize unscriptural activities, and it just never
works out. It just doesn't. And it works
out for those religious folks that want to make a show, that
want to be looked at and admired throughout town and in the marketplaces
and stuff, but it's just certainly not scriptural. So today, later on, our pastor
is going to be preaching on kind of the same subject because it
comes up in where we're at in the book of Numbers. And exegetically,
which is the way that we go through the Bible, which means we just
go chapter by chapter, verse by verse, line by line, and we
address things as they come up. And this is coming up in this
block of Scripture that he's going to be looking at today. I don't remember the last time
it came up. It could have been 16 years ago. It just so seldom
that he talks about that. And then he always brings a scriptural
view of it, what it's about. Back then it had a different
purpose. Today, I can attest that in 20
years that we've attended here, this is, I think, the second
time that he's talked about that, 20 years. And that's just due
to that's where we are exegetically in the Bible. And he trusts the
Lord to take care of things. And man, since we've been here,
that's all we've ever observed. We never have passed a plate
or He mentions, well, so-and-so's coming. We have a jar back there.
Somebody wants to help out, fine. But we never take a time out
of our opportunity to present the gospel and use it to try
and fundraise. It just doesn't happen. And it's
such a freeing thing. We just don't get involved in
that. And so far, trusting God has
worked out pretty well. a lot better than where we were
back in the 80s. So as a practical matter, we
have on the back wall that unmarked box with a slot in it, and those
who wish to make an offering or gift or contribution can drop
it in the box or not as the Spirit moves them in. We have a treasurer
here who's the most circumspect man I've ever met. He doesn't
say, we need to have a deacon's meeting or go to the pastor and
say, well, I notice so-and-so is not ponying up here. Maybe you should talk about that.
We never know anything. He just does his job and never
says a word about it. Takes care of the bills. Everything
works out. It's just so free and we appreciate
Him the way that He handles that particular job there. So it's
the belief of this body that the Lord supplies all our needs
and then some. He's gracious, grace abounding. And without ever once having
to apply any pressure on anyone, we trust Him to do His business
in salvation and in support. And He's never failed in anything. So there's many spiritual lessons
today to be gained from our lesson regarding this poor widow. In
James 1, verse 27, He wrote, Pure religion and undefined,
undefiled, I mean, before God, the religion that God pays attention
to, that He's happy with. Pure religion, undefiled before
God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows
in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
He says, that's evidence of fruit of the Spirit when that happens. So in this block of Scripture,
we don't see any of those rich folks that were throwing in of
their wealth going over to that widow and saying, I see you've
cast in all your living. Let me help you out. Here's some
grocery money. You don't need to pay your rent
next month because you've paid the temple tax and given all
you've had to the Lord. So I know you're in a hard way.
No. Don't pay attention to her and
that clink, clink noise that went down the brass funnel. Listen
to this whoosh noise from all the coins that I threw in, and
look at me, how wonderful I am. And so we don't see them visiting
this widow in her affliction. We didn't read that they did
anything like that to visit, to go and see and relieve is
what that means. And in fact, the contrary was
expressed previously in our last closing verses of chapter 20.
They devour widows' houses. How opposite that is. And I think
that's what the Lord is trying to point out here, not so much
as here's the amount that she put in and here's the amount
they put in. It was a spiritual issue, a faith issue, an evidence
of spirit of God working issue. Religion today is so much different. You know, wealth or lack of it
is not a measure of someone's spiritual condition. And we're
taught to kind of view things. Oh, they're pretty bad off. They must have done something
that made God angry. He's not blessing them because
they're not coming to church three times a week and Friday
night Bible study and attending the luncheon meetings and doing
all this or going out and passing out pamphlets. You know, it's
not a measure of that. Religion today seems to say that
if you're poor, God isn't happy with you because you're not doing,
doing, doing, doing. And conversely, if you were wealthy,
it must surely be a sign that God is pleased with you. Well,
you know what Paul said? He said, when I was in religion,
I had a lot of money. I profited much above my brothers
in the Jewish religion. And he says, you know, that was
all done. It was worth nothing. In Luke 18, back when we were
there a long time ago, a certain ruler asked Jesus in Luke 18,
18, said, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Now, when Jesus heard these things,
he said unto him, Well, you just lack this one thing. Sell everything
you have and distribute to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure
in heaven, and come and follow me. Trust in me, not in all that
stuff that you have. And when he heard this, he was
very sorrowful because he was very rich. And Jesus saw that
he was very sorrowful and he said, how hardly that they that
have riches enter into the kingdom of God. They just depend on that
instead of trusting in me. This poor widow, She exhibited
total trust in God. She cast in all of her living.
I just can't imagine that. You know, I like to have my cushion
and all this other stuff, and I like to have my water stocked
and rent paid up and all those things. I just can't imagine
saying, well, here's the whole thing. I'm throwing all my care
on you because you care for me. So it's just one of those cases
where he says, you little face. It's a good thing I've taken
care of that for you, because if it depended on you, it would
be bad. This widow, she had displayed
her total trust in God. 1 Corinthians 4, 7 says, well,
who makes you to differ from another? And what do you have
that you didn't receive? Everything comes from God. Why
do you glory as if you didn't receive it? And another Scripture
in Romans 8, chapter 5 and 6 is, For they that are after the flesh
do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit,
the things of the Spirit, for to be carnally minded is death,
but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. And you know,
God blesses us all spiritual blessings in Christ. And in this
world, it supplies our needs according to His purpose. And
we, in some small way, acknowledging that by acknowledging that He's
the source of all things. And we give Him credit for that. We're allowed to take a portion
of what He's blessed us with and cheerfully give in support
of declaring the gospel as He has charged us. That's what our
mission is in this world, is go and preach the gospel to every
creature, every nation, every tongue. This widow gave all she had,
and Christ gave all He had on the cross for her and for all
of His sheep. So it's kind of the spiritual
lesson here. It's not a question of amount,
or it's not a question of creating a ceremony or a law out of it.
It's just a picture of faith. It's just a picture of her saying,
I trust you and not myself. I have a couple of pictures of leptons
here. If you want to look at them,
I'll pass them around. You can buy these. Religious
souvenirs from the Holy Land. You can buy reproductions. You
can buy a whole sack of reproductions for six bucks. But if you want
the real McCoy, it's like $75 for six of them. They have them available online. So I used to have some really
good pictures of them. I used to subscribe to Biblical
Archaeological Magazine, and they always had these color,
8 by 11, color glossy photos. Get your souvenir of the Holy
Land, original widow's mites. You can get two of them for whatever,
$20 or whatever. So anyway, that'll be the end
of this lesson for today on the widow's mites. But keep in mind
that it was Passover week, and the Lord was about to make the
ultimate sacrifice for His people, for His sheep. And what is He
doing? He's teaching the gospel. He's
preaching and teaching the gospel in the temple. just right up
to the minute before they take him away. So I'll be gone for,
I don't know how long, a couple weeks maybe, or maybe longer,
I don't know, but I'll go down and help Yvonne's mom out on
some things, and you might, so you have somebody else up here
for a spell, so in the meantime, thank you for your attention,
and as always, be free.