Here the Lord Jesus Christ teaches in the synagogue, and many of those who had known him all his life in that small community would have heard him. He quotes from Isaiah and establishes that he is the anointed one of God.
While you and I are pleased with ourselves, full of ourselves and we have no time for God, and we are arrogant, puffed up, we never understand these things. You cannot understand the way of salvation, the message of God with a haughty, scornful heart. It is impossible. This is one of the great principles of the gospel. He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. It is the hungry heart, the humbled heart that is ready to receive the gospel and it goes on. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted.
But this all begins with the words of verse 18: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.’ The first thing we must understand is that these are spiritual terms and it is the business of the preaching of the gospel to bring people into that condition. The point of this is that the gospel cannot be applied in all its fullness and its richness to people, until they see that they are poor. The rich he sends empty away, we read in the Magnificat, and our preaching is to bring people to be aware that they are poor. We have no business preaching all the warmth and love of Calvary to people who are not broken-hearted. That is the logic of the situation. Supposing the pews are filled with people who are a mixture of hypocrites, self-righteous, smug, self-satisfied people, people who are utterly complacent and hard-hearted; the Saviour hasn't come to them, he has come to the broken-hearted. Our task is so to preach that the Holy Spirit can break the hearts of those who are hard and make them broken-hearted, and then we can pour in the balm of the gospel and the way of salvation.