 Welcome to our two-part course on Luke, which contains 43 teaching sections covering the entire Gospel narrative. The first part of the course covers chapters 1-13, and the second part covers chapters 14-24. Luke is a first-century historian. He bases his work, so he says, on oral and written sources, eyewitnesses and what he calls stewards of the word. He is clearly using Mark as one of his sources, and he seems to have other sources which overlap with some of what we find in Matthew. There have been many competing theories about how that actually worked. Luke is taking care to tell the story of Jesus as, the story of Israel and the fulfilment of Israel's scriptures, and this he is saying is what Israel's God always intended. He focuses on mercy and grace, and also on warnings of coming judgment. Luke is concerned with the temple and both its upcoming destruction and its democratisation, how the events concerning Jesus brought heaven and earth together in a whole new way. Luke has framed his Gospel with the remarkable introductory chapters containing the scenes of Zechariah and Mary, particularly Mary's song, and Jesus' Nazareth manifesto in chapter 4, and then the wonderful closing scenes where the risen Jesus meets his followers again. And in between we have remarkable vignettes of several women, including the woman who washes Jesus' feet with her tears in Luke 7, the widow of Nain, and ultimately the women who follow Jesus all the way to the cross and the empty tomb. And throughout there are several things which Luke highlights, themes like praise and prayer and lament, including weeping. Luke's story then is about God coming to dwell with his people in the person of Jesus and the power of his spirit, and what's going to happen in consequence, not least to the temple. This is the royal agenda, the messianic agenda, of God putting things right in God's world. The parable of the sower dramatically shows how God is building a network of kingdom people, and along the way we see that Jesus is in tune with what his mother's song had been all about, so the sermon on the plane with so much on faith and prayer, and a sequence of healings, including the confrontation between Jesus and the man who calls himself Regiment or Legion, and who puts to Jesus the question which faces us all, what is there to you and me? The first part of this course concludes with the story of the woman who Jesus heals on the Sabbath day, and all these stories, as we shall see, are ways in which Luke is saying this is how God's saving sovereignty is coming into effect, already, through Jesus.