Transcription
Awesome. Matthew 21. Open up your Bibles
to Matthew 21. We've as a church we've been going through the book of Matthew. It's if you're new to the Bible, it's a biography about Jesus. Jesus lived 2,000 years ago. He was born of a Virgin Mary. He died on the cross and then he was raised from the dead. And we're interested in in looking at what he taught because he claimed uh to be the Messiah of Israel. And uh he claimed to be God. And so um we're looking at his teaching and his life. And we happen to be at a point in Jesus's life. We're in the last week leading up to the crucifixion. And there are three parables that we have been looking at. Last week we looked at the parable of the father who had two sons and told them to go do a job. And um one of the sons said, "No, I don't want to do it but then changed his heart and he went and did it. The other son uh he said sure dad but then he never went and did it. And Jesus used this to rebuke the Pharisees and to say do you see that there are uh prostitutes and tax collectors that are going into the kingdom before you guys. Well, that probably didn't go over very well with that crowd as you can imagine. That's kind of an offensive thing to say. But Jesus is speaking the truth to try to make it clear. Hey, you've got to know you. You've got to respond to God, not playing games. I mean, who likes playing games, right? Who wants to be in a relationship where you're playing games?
No. No. We don't want to be in that kind of relationship. Like, we want to run away from those types of people. And Jesus is dealing with these religious elites in his day and saying, "Stop playing games."
But just because the church started and those Pharisees died doesn't mean that the attitude and the behavior of Pharisees had died. You and I can be a Pharisee. We can start to think that spiritually we are the stuff that yeah I went to church. I you know I went to church. I got baptized. I know my Bible. And from that point like we can start to think like well our actual life doesn't matter. like that we don't need to obey. And that's what Jesus is addressing here. Jesus is going right for the jugular saying, listen, you need to be a people who are in line with what the father is doing. And so you have an invitation. You have a a personal invitation to enter in to the kingdom of God and to participate in um what God is doing in the world. Now, listen, God's going to work whether you're on his side or not. I got news for you this morning. God's going to win. You have an open invitation to be a part of what God is doing. But you also can make a choice like, you know what, I don't want to turn I want to turn my back on God. I don't want to have anything to do with him right now in my life. And the only loser in that scenario is you. You see, God's going to win. God's going to march forward. In fact, in your rebellion, think of Judas the Assarian. who betrayed Jesus, got Jesus um turned over on the night of his um on the night of his betrayal. Judas is right there in the midst of that. You can't have greater rebellion to the plan of God. And yet, does God win in the end? Yeah. God takes the greatest moment of human evil, taking the son of God and crucifying him, and he turns that into our resur our resurrection, our redemption. And so, I would plead with you as your pastor that you would the disposition of your life would be to surrender your life to God. Stop trying to put the pieces together. Stop trying to figure it out. Stop trying to have enough energy, enough strength to put it all together. I know Baltimore is hard. I know that you're taught like, "Hey, you've got to you got to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. You got to put in your effort." And and we're active in the process of God, but You just need to know that God is inviting you to surrender your life to him and to let him lead you and empower you and provide for you and guide you and to graft you in to the story that he already has planned. And so we come to this second parable. This is the parable of the tenant farmers. This is found in Matthew 20. where we're at. But it's also recorded in another biography about Jesus in the book of Mark 12 and Luke 20. In a minute, I'm going to read to you from Isaiah 5, which was a um a very common um passage known if you're Jewish, you knew that passage from Isaiah 5. But before I read from Isaiah 5, let me read to you from Matthew 21. I'll put it up there on the screen. Matthew 21 says, "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtowwer. He leased it out to tenant farmers, and then he went away. When the time came to harvest the fruit, he sent his servant to the farmers to collect his fruit. The farmers took his servants beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first group, and they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son to them, "They will respect my son," he said. But when the tenant farmer saw the son, they said to each other, "This is the heir. Come, let's kill him and his take his inheritance." So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and they killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those farmers? He will completely destroy those terrible men, they told him, and lease his vineyard to other farmers who will give him his fruit at the harvest. Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?" This is what the Lord has done and it is wonderful in our eyes. Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruit. Whoever falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but to but on whomever it falls, it will shatter him. When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew he was speaking. speaking about them. Although they were looking for a way to arrest him, they feared the crowds because the people regarded him as a prophet. Let's pray together. Father, we ask that you would teach us through your word this morning. We want to open up our hearts and take a posture where we're ready to obey. We're eager to jump up and like, yes, I want to obey you, Jesus. And so, um, speak to us personally, not not to the person next to us. You can speak to them in their hearts. We want you to speak to us individually. We want to hear what you have to say about our life. And we know that you don't just come in and you don't hammer us. Even your correction is this gentle correction. You don't beat us up. You you're loving and kind. But but you don't just correct. You also give just clear instructions and and encouragement and comfort. And so Lord, would you do that work as we are looking at this text this morning? We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Amen. I I promised you that I would show you just the passage from Isaiah that um gives this and and and I'll do that in just a second. I want you to be able to see um what this looks like for somebody who is coming from a Jewish perspective. But but again, let's look at verse 33 before we look at um Isaiah 5. Let's just look um at the context here. So this is the second parable again. We'll have a third parable next week. And he's right there probably on the temple mount. Um he has access to a crowd. He's teaching um in a very public setting. And he says he asks them to listen to another parable. And he lays out this idea of a landowner who has a vineyard and put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, built a watchtowwer, um leased it to a tenant farmers and went away. So we have somebody with means somebody who um is uh entrepreneurial. He's got this business of a of a vineyard and he and he sets the whole thing up. He doesn't just have like a blank piece of property, but he goes in and he sets up a a vineyard. In in modern days, when you go and you start a vineyard and you want to plant uh an acre of grape vines, it costs about um $20,000 to put that one acre under vine. Um but that yields um uh usually between 3 to five tons of grapes per acres. So if you're measuring they they didn't have glass bottles of wine like we do today, but um and we don't have a measurement, but we know that he puts a fence around it to to protect it and and so it's of some size. And then he goes to the next step and he he makes the wine production process where there's this ability to crush the the grapes. And so he sets it up and then he turns it over to some tenant farmers. He he signs a lease with some tenant farmers who are going to take care of the land. This whole parable is intended to be a correction aimed at the leaders who were supposed to be fill-in leaders for the nation of Israel. Let's let's just step back for a second. You you guys know the Bible. You know that in Genesis chapter 1, it gives us the account of God creating the heavens and the earth, right? All right. So, you know that part of the Bible. And and on the sixth day, what does he create? He creates the humans, right? He creates the animals and he creates the humans on the sixth day. So he populates the land. He says to the humans, he gives the humans special instructions that he doesn't give to the animals. He doesn't give special instructions to the birds. Um he gives these special instructions to the humans that they would rule over the land. So they would take a leadership role in what God has created. That they would rule that they would subdue it. So that subdue is the idea of taking something that's radically chaotic and giving it order. Like like take your your junk drawer at home. You dump it out and it's like once every five years you organize your junk drawer, right? And it's like, okay, here's the rubber bands. I'm going to put all those together. And here's all the the coinage that I've collected. And here's all those little twist ties that go on the top of the bread bags, you know, or the little plastic things. That's what's in your junk drawer, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. So you take the chaos of your junk drawer and you give it order. That's That's the idea of subduing. And so these humans, Adam and Eve, they're created. They're put here into this garden and they're told, "Hey, take the the chaos of this and give it order." They're told to be fruitful and to multiply. That phrase fruitful and multiply, it occurs more than just in the beginning of of Genesis. It occurs when we're talking about um uh Jacob. It talks about his business that he was fruitful and he multiplied. He was successful. It's a it's a term generically that that can refer to success. It can refer to having babies. You're literally um being fruitful, the fruit of the womb, and you're multiplying uh the size of your family by having kids. But the term be fruitful and multiply applies way beyond um childbearing and it's used to refer to just being a successful business person, a person who's successful in life. And so God creates these humans and then he calls tells them to do what he's been doing, right? Because God is the one who rules the universe. But he takes the humans whom he's created in his image and he says, "I want you to rule over this thing." In other words, be my representation here as kings, as priests, leaders in this space. This is a pattern that begins in Genesis 1, but it continues on. God is taking out humans. He's like, humanity rebelss and goes off and does its own thing. Doesn't want to follow God. And yet God's not content with that because he loves humans. And so he starts a redemptive process where he raises up leaders who will operate in his behalf on his behalf to try to rule, subdue, be fruitful, and multiply. He He raises up kings. He raises up prophets. He raises up generals. He raises up judges. He allows for these Pharisees to take that position. They're they have a leadership position in the nation at the time of Jesus. Do you know that the Bible says of you and I that we are kings and priests? In in fact, the nation of Israel was called a a royal um priesthood. There they were called a nation of priests. There's the idea of reigning like and and um leadership. That's the um royal terminology. But then there's the priesthood idea, the idea of um connecting and advocating for the spirituality of mankind, the closeness that others feel towards God. And so God is doing that picture over and over again. And we have a um parable that that Jesus tells that illustrates the picture. He's got a a vineyard that he plant pants and he put some tenant farmers. Adam and Eve were tenant farmers in the garden. When Saul was picked to be the king o over the nation of Israel, he's a tenant farmer. When Samuel is the priest over Israel, he's a tenant farmer. When you do life, you're a tenant farmer in God's garden and he entrusts stuff to you. That's where this idea of stewardship comes in and the question is is what's the vineyard that God has you over that's just a fun we live in a crisis of meaning in in society as AI takes off and technology emerges emerges there is this crisis of meaning what's the purpose of my life what should I be doing right well God's got a plan and he says right from the beginning this is the template you're a tenant farmer I'm putting you in my garden to steward over some stuff. You're always going to be steward stewarding over resources, relationships, and opportunities. You want to do it, do sit and just take account. What are the relationships that God's put in my life that I'm supposed to steward over? What are the resources that he's put in my life that I'm supposed to be stewarding over? What are the opportunities that he's put in front of me? You don't need to worry about the next. You don't need to worry about your spouse, your kids necessarily. You got to first deal with you. What is my garden where I'm the tenant farmer? And Jesus has some strong words for some men who did not want to handle the opportunity in the right way. And this parable is meant to correct. We talked about so we would say that a pattern or it's a motif, right? We could layer it on top. It's like a map that layers one on top of another over and over again. It's this idea of entrusting a leadership position or stewardship to a individual or a group of people. God created humans and told them to rule over and be fruitful in the creation he made. So let me show you Isaiah 5. Here is this is if you're Jewish, put your Jewish hat on for a second. Imagine before Jesus ever came along, you were going to synagogue every Saturday. You were hearing the reading of scripture and you read Isaiah 5 and you saw this story. It says this, "I'll sing a song song. I will sing about the one I love. A song about my loved ones vineyard. The one I love had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He broke up the soil, cleared the stones, he planted it with the finest vines. He built a tower in the middle of it, and even dug out a wine press there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes. So now, residents of Jerusalem, men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard than what I did? Why then why when I expected it to yield good grapes did it yield worthless grapes? Now I will tell you what I am about to do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed. I will tear down its walls and it will be trampled. I will make it a waste land. It will not be pruned or weeded. Thorns or briars will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of armies, is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant he delighted in. He expected justice, but saw injustice. He expected righteousness, but he heard the cries of despair. And so, you see, Isaiah is given the spirit of God works in Isaiah about 700 years 6 700 years before the time of Jesus to give this picture again he says you're a vineyard Israel I'm expecting of you to grow fruit but when I come and check there's no fruit where I looked for righteousness I heard cries of despair crazy picture right and So Jesus has this in mind as he tells his own parable. Let's look at this conflict that arises in the text. When the time came to harvest fruit, excuse me, he sent his servants to the farmers to collect his fruit. So evidently they're supposed to work the harvest, but then he wants the fruit from the harvest. The farmers took his servants beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. This is where all of a sudden you get the the shock value. Um there could be an aspect in this where you have um a Jewish person who owns a vineyard and is angry with the Roman government. So there may be a sense where this behavior in a Jewish mind is thought to be justified because remember For the Jews who are listening to this, you don't own your land. Rome owns your land. You're a part of the Roman government. You pay heavy taxes on the fruit of your land. And so this idea of like mistreating a representative of the leadership might have seemed appealing to some in this audience, but for us it's shocking. Like you would never go and kill your landlord's servant, right? you would not beat your landlord. Like you're going to like get in a lot of trouble for that. If you didn't know that, that's your little like that's your freebie for the day. Don't kill your landlord's servant. Okay? It doesn't go well. Again, he sent other servants more than the first group and they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son to them thinking they're going to respect my son. So Jesus here is giving this window into how the heavenly father has worked with the nation of Israel for years because what have they done to the prophets? Like they've killed the prophets. They've they've killed the messengers that God sent. What happened with John the Baptist? The guy get got beheaded. Isaiah literally it said that he was sawn in half at the end of his life. His message was rejected and he was murdered in like a horrible way. You read through the book of Hebrews and you see just some of the suffering that's mentioned at the end there. The the people of God have not always received the messenger that God sent to them. And so the father thinks, well surely if I if I move from sending, you know, Joemo, my servant, to collect on the land, instead I send my son, they've got to respect him. I It just makes so much sense. But when the tenant farmer saw the son, they think, well, this is the heir. In other words, this son when the the landowner dies, this guy who's here is next in line to get the property. So if we kill him, we can just take the inheritance. The the father like how the economy worked, it's like you would pass stuff to your kids. Like you would have a farm and land that you inherited and you'd give it to your son. So if you eliminate this done then this actually this plan kind of makes sense. You you there's there's no one even if the um the land owner is upset who he's going to pass he's got to pass this the property off to somebody. So it's like well let's just kill the son who's the heir and if we wait him out we'll get the inheritance. So they seized him threw him out of the vineyard and they killed him. Jesus is speaking through this prophetically of his own death, right? He's the son. He gets killed. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those farmers? You get to this inflection point. This is the the moment of conflict in the story. What's going to happen? Well, he's going to completely destroy those terrible men. They told him, and lease his vineyard to other forms farmers who will give him his fruit at the harvest time. So Jesus asks what's going to happen. The crowd responds back. He's going to change the management structure. He's going to get rid of these terrible men and find some actual good tenants. Well, if these were the Pharisees that are answering the question, didn't they just hang themselves? They they've indicted themselves. haven't they? They're able to look at this story, but here they are in this position. They're the guilty party. They're the ones that are about to kill the son in about 5 days from this story being told. And Jesus says to them, "Haven't you have you never read in the scripture the stone that the builders rejected has become a cornerstone?" Remember Matthew, who's compiling this story for us, Matthew's helping the Jewish reader that those were the primary initial group that he wrote to. He's like, "Wait, Jesus quoted this next this psalm. The the um the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." This is what the Lord has done. It is wonderful in our eyes. It's obscure in the Old Testament when it's in the Psalms. It becomes clear as Jesus is the cornerstone that is rejected. Therefore I tell you the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruit. So Jesus gives the application. You get a parable. Jesus takes the parable and he says the kingdom of God is taken away from you and it is now given to a fruitful people. A people producing fruit. Let's go to the end of the text and then we will just draw out some simple application for our own lives. Whoever falls in the stone, Jesus being that stone will be broken into pieces. But on whomever it falls, it will shatter him. Some of you in the last year or so, you've fallen on the stone Jesus. And you feel like, "Oh, my life my life is turned upside down. I met this Jesus guy and my life is kind of now a mess. I used used to feel so comfortable with, you know, lying to my friends or having this group of friends, but now I feel deeply convicted about almost every word that comes out of my mouth. This is so hard. I, you know, and your life is kind of shattered by Jesus. But the only other option is that the stone falls on you and you are crushed by Jesus. You're in this place of judgment. Those are the only two options. You you can either be in a place where you allow Jesus to reorient your life life and and you learn who he is and you and you begin to pattern your life after him or your life is going to look like just smooshed by doing life wrong. It it's amazing just the the the illusion that Jesus makes throughout this text to like listen, you don't want to do it God's way, you get cast out, you get put out. Jesus is about a fruitful kingdom, a fruitful people. He goes on, "When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew he was speaking about them." That's good because sometimes the parables were tricky. Remember Jesus's parables sometimes were difficult to find out. But these ones the Pharisees got. He knew these were pointed at him. Although they were looking for a way to arrest him, they feared the crowds. because the people regarded him as a prophet. So we we stop there. Next week we'll look at the pro uh the parable of the marriage feast. You're going to be invited to a wedding feast next week. But today you're invited to be a fruitful tenant. A and here's what you need to here's what you need to know. There's some responsibility that is in um this text to to be fruitful. But do you see in Isaiah that it's God that plants the vineyard? Or or go back to Genesis. Did God did the humans create themselves? No. God created them. Did did the humans plant the garden? No. God made the garden. In this parable, it's it is the owner, the land owner that is doing all this work. And he's asking these tenants to simply partic participate in the process of what naturally happens when those vines sprout their they those vines sprout their um branches out by my house. We've got we're I'm surrounded by beautiful vineyards, right? And and these vineyards, they have baby fruit on them. The little grape bunches that are green. They're not full of um of juice yet, but the the fruit is on there. the branches there. But I'll tell you from my friends that own those vineyards, they are not doing a whole lot other than making sure they keep pests away, protecting, they're trimming the branches, they're making sure like this lawn mower guy here, they're like kind of mowing the grass around it. But but God's the one that's even causing the fruit to grow. Here's what the Holy Spirit wants. for you and I. He wants you and I to let him sew into our hearts this grand vision of potential. If you look at a field and you're like, I want to have a vineyard there, you've got vision, right? The the thing that the Holy Spirit does in our life is he gives us vision for fruitfulness. But the fruitfulness, you'll notice at the end as Jesus talks about this um setting right. See if I can find it. I can't remember what verse it was in and I want to quote it exactly. So, give me a second to find it. This one. He expected justice but saw injustice. He expected righteousness but heard cries of despair. This is the fruit right in in our lives. We are primarily relational souls. We are designed to to be about other people. Now your personality you may tend towards getting your energy from aloneeness and quietness as an introvert or you may get your energy as being kind of an extrovert. But all of us, all of us are called to be in relationship here. And he's looking for justice and righteousness. This is the word sedaka and mishpot in the um in the Hebrew language. It's it's it's what a a follower of Jesus does is they they are in relationship where they are um they're fair and they're just they're handling relationships well. I've been convicted of this like I'll just give you a personal example and you can kind of analyze in your own life. I've been really feeling convicted recently about as from my perspective of leading the compassion center. Um we have an amazing team of volunteers. Many of those volunteers are undocumented immigrants who if they weren't working in the center they would go get work but probably not even get paid minimum wage. and I'm responsible for them. And there has been a sense in my own life just feeling convicted of like I've got to do a better job. I've got to be more more just in um serving them, helping them. Yeah, they get to they get fed out of that place. Their their families are cared for, but I need to like I need to raise some more money so that their volunteers are taken care of. Some of them have some medical stuff going on. Some of them are close on immigration and need to get process with their immigration papers and they just need some legal help. We could help them out with that. So, so we're each in our garden. My garden includes the compassion center, includes the church. And I'm looking, okay, how am I am I being just and righteous in my dealings with other people.
And that's for you and I, for you as well. This is where the Holy Spirit, we don't have to like, you know, squeeze our fist and quench our eyes and try to figure it out. No, the Holy Spirit just wants to talk to us. Hey, you got to make this relationship right? Make this a little bit more of a balanced relationship. Another one that came to mind, I it was um maybe it was this week or it was like late last week just all of a sudden I had all these memories of people that have worked for me, worked really hard. I started a Bible college when I was 25 in Hawaii and I had a bunch of interns that lived in tents, worked all summer to build this Bible college and it was awesome. But I was looking at the pictures of these guys who are just like sweating living in tents in Kawaii and I was just like Man, those guys worked their tail off for me. What did I give back to them? Did I Did I take care of them in the right way? Did I honor them in the way that they they came and served me? It made me think like, yeah, I don't owe them. There was no agreement that I was going to pay them anything. I I technically fulfilled like whatever agreement was there, but did I honor them? Was I righteous in that relationship? That that's how the Holy Spirit works in our life. He just wants to come along and just say, "Hey, are you doing relationships well.
Are are you treating people well?
And Jesus is looking at these leaders and saying, "You're not. You're not. You have this elite position in Israel. You're not doing it right. And I'm going to kick you out. And the kingdom is going to be given to a people that's fruitful, man. So, may we be a fruitful people." Amen.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you that the Holy Spirit comes into to our lives and that you just you do the fruitbearing in like you just ask us like abide in me have a relationship with me and then the fruit just grows out of our life it's this crazy thing that you do and so I pray Lord that we as a church people as a people that follow you that we would be in that relationship hearing your voice responding in obedience just in the moment Help us to love people. I just think of the compassion center and just the the turmoil of of people who come to get food and just the the roughness of some of those lives and how easy it is to just be like kind of hard-hearted and just stand off. Lord, give us a deep reservoir of love to care for our neighborhood, but our family and our friends, people that are hard to love. Lord, give us a deep reservoir of love that we would bear that fruit in your name. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Amen.