Matthew 7:1-6

Transcription

As a church. We're going through Matthew, the book of Matthew, and we are in the Sermon on the Mount, which is famous material. In fact, the verses we're going to hear today, you may have never been in church ever before, but you probably have heard the verse. We're going to start off with Matthew chapter seven verse one. So great material. I'm so glad that we get to go through these six verses together. But before we jump into the actual text, I just want to set this stage by saying this, that across societies people strive to occupy the moral high ground, the moral high ground. So taking a stand for what you perceive as morally right and good. Here's just a few examples. You may have the environmental activists who are advocating for regulations to combat climate change and they see their actions as a moral imperative to protect the planet. You may have a justice mindset, individuals who are championing reforms in the justice system, believing in a moral necessity for fair and just treatment for all you may have.

This would be the picture of abortion, right? So pro-life, you have those who defend the rights of unborn babies, viewing their stance as a moral commitment to the sanctity of life. You may have for another example, those who advocate for free speech. This is a picture of the intellectual dark web. All these people are championing the idea of free thought and the expression of free speech on the internet, and they view that as a moral issue. You have the group that is advocating for gender fluidity and they view that as a moral issue. You have another group of society that views people advocating for a diet that does not require the death of an animal. Here's some protestors who are against eating animal or any animal byproducts. Behind these causes is a moral judgment. A moral judgment. So for example, here with these PETA protestors, they view it as immoral to kill these animals, and I'm not making a statement on their position or the other positions.

What I just want to do is I want you to have these images in your head of people who are trying to take a moral high ground within society. They're trying to hold a position because here's the other side of it, people engage in these issues and then the temptation is to wrap oneself in a sense of self-righteousness. Once you take this position to then believe that you are a better human because you are holding one of these positions. So maybe you're with Peter, maybe you're advocating for gender fluidity or the intellectual dark web, whatever it is, it can tend to breed in our hearts a sense of moral superiority. But look at this statement. This is a little bit flamboyant, this statement. I don't really mean it, but Christians can be the worst when it comes to their moral high ground.

I agree with that

Statement. Do you? Yes, I do. They can. Sometimes I was

Born and raised in a Pentecostal situation, and if you didn't agree with them, then you would outcast

It. I'm glad you're here. I'm so glad you were judged

Harshly

Too. Yeah, I know. I've been in that setting too. Does anybody else feel like they've been in that setting before? Yeah, yeah, sometimes. And here's the thing, so we are in the middle of Jesus's teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is teaching a moral standard, but the temptation is whether you have a faith-based moral standard or you derive, you hold onto some moral high ground that's not necessarily faith-based, but it's within society. The temptation is to become self-righteous, and so that sets the stage for the teaching this morning. Here's some of the things, maybe if you're a Christian, some of the things that in the Christian camp where we have this self-righteous position is somebody might say, well, I homeschool my kids and think that they have this kind of high moral ground because of how they work with their kids. Or it could be like, look at me.

I don't listen to that kind of music over there and therefore I can wrap myself in this sense of self-righteousness. Or there can be this. Look, I listen to Dave Ramsey and I don't use credit cards, and so for some reason I think of myself as a more moral person because of my relationship with dad. Listen, this sermon this morning, I'm the most guilty of this, okay? So just want to be real transparent with you. I love the moral and just the vision, the social vision that Jesus lays out, but this temptation to flip that, to follow Jesus and to love your neighbor as yourself, the dark of that is to become proud in your performance. And Jesus has something to say to me this morning, and hopefully you'll listen as he is correcting me. Jesus talks about, and we've read this, Jesus talks about honesty within society, forgiveness, fidelity, and marriage.

All of these things are beautiful. It's this beautiful vision of life, but again, the danger is to become self-righteous, self-righteous and proud. Let's read these verses to together and then we'll kind of unpack it. Do you recognize this verse? I told you you'd recognize it. Here's what he says, do not judge so that you won't be judged for, you'll be judged by the same standard with which you judge others and you'll be measured by the same measure you use. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother's eye but don't notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, let me take the splinter out of your eye and look, there's a beam of wood in your own eye Hypocrite. First, take the beam of wood out of your eye and then you'll see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother's eye.

Don't give what is holy to the dogs or toss your pearls before the pigs or they will trample them under their feet and tear you to pieces, tear you to pieces. Lord, we would ask that you would come and teach us by your spirit, Lord, where we become self-righteous and proud. Lord, would you please forgive me? Forgive us for that self-righteous mentality, even if it's not following you, but holding one of these social issues and believing we have the moral high ground. God, if we're not walking into humility before you, then we're walking in a lie. Lord, forgive us of our sins and teach us and instruct us and give us hope. Lord, as we read through this text this morning and we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. I want to put this question before you as we look at this text in our pursuit of what we believe is right, that's a moral statement.

How do we ensure that we don't fall into the trap of judging others and overlooking our own flaws and need for growth? I think that's the question. That's the question that this text is going to ask of us. Let's look at this first two verses, okay? This is that section on judging. Do not judge so that you won't be judged for, you'll be judged by the same standard with which you judge others and you'll be measured by the same measure you use. So we're talking about judging. I'm going to give you a quote, which I think really sums this up well, it's a longer quote, multiple slides, but it gives us a good framework for understanding what Jesus is saying here. So for track with it, he says, judging because the word judging it's used a lot, right? In just these two verses, judging this is the theme.

So here's what he says. He says, judging in this context, it doesn't mean a court trial or an admonition. It can refer to discerning or evaluating what is right or wrong. How do we know that? Well, he's going to explain that here's why all of these things are valid for Christians, followers of Jesus, all of these things are valid for believers. These are all Bible references that you can look up at some other point if you want to because, and he points to these verses because these are all examples of when Christians do hold a trial in the courtroom, they use the church as if it were a courtroom or they're evaluating or admonishing that fits. So we want to know what does Jesus say when he says, don't judge. What is Jesus talking about? So what is this judgmental attitude connote? It means looking down.

Look at this. This is important. It means looking down on a person with a superior attitude. What was your name? Felicia? Is that what you that looking down is? That was your experience. My father was very looking down, right? Looking down on a person with a superior attitude, criticizing or condemning them without a loving concern. That's important, right? The loving concern. If the loving concern is not underneath, if it's not underneath, then it's Jesus is like, Hey, that shouldn't be a part of it. The opposite of the second we petition of on forgiveness. I think this keeps going the key component here it is, the key component is the absence of love. Admonition has a humility that says, I love you enough that I want to help you, and tomorrow you'll need to correct me. So Jesus is not against you holding a moral position and even as do community life together as a church, there are instances where somebody, and we've had it in here, we've had people who come into church and they are mean, and it's not our job to say, oh, I'm not going to judge you. No, because of the protection of our church, there are people that are not here this morning because they're mean and I've had to tell them the way you're behaving is wrong. And they're like, no, it's not, and I'm going to sue you before telling me that. And I've said, well, great. You're not welcome here anymore. That person was judged. Did you have a question?

Yes. Yeah. Save that because we're going to come back when we go a little bit further in chapter seven, in fact, read ahead, he's going to talk about evaluating who you spend time with and he's going to say, you see a tree, it has good fruit. Or if you see a tree that has bad fruit, and he says, your people's lives are like trees, some of 'em are bearing good fruit from their lives and some are bearing bad fruit. Well, to determine if a life has good or bad fruit, you're judging them in a sense. So Jesus is going to say that just in the few verses. So when you hear somebody, hey, when somebody comes up to you and says, Hey, judge, not lest you be judged and they're quoting this verse, you should first say, wow, you know the Bible. I know the Bible too.

I love the Bible. What are you reading in your quiet times, right? So anyway, but besides that, what you should say is, Hey, what do you think that means? What do you think it means? It means this. It means this idea of, listen, we need to work with each other with the context of love. We need to have this context of love because yes, I believe in morality and because I'm a follower of Jesus, my morality comes from scripture. I believe what is right and wrong is determined by what the Bible says. But if I'm not loving and instead I'm condemning and saying, Hey, you are going to hell, you're damned, then I'm falling short of the standard that Jesus here is teaching. And so he says, but this is, notice this as well. Jesus correlates. If we go back here, Jesus is correlating our judgment with the judgment will receive.

Do you see that? It's Jesus is saying, don't judge so that you won't be judged, and then he substantiates it. In other words, he's going to back up verse one by explaining it better. In verse two, he says, for you'll be judged by the same standard with which you judge others. That's only fair, right? If you're going to go around and judge everybody else, don't you expect that you would held to that same standard? That's only fair. Now, Jesus teaches this in other places. I got to show you this in Luke because it's similar material, but it adds a couple of other components. So we have, this is another book about Jesus' life. It's the gospel of Luke. It's the third book in your New Testament, in your Bible, and this is Jesus's teaching. Do not judge and you'll not be judged. Do not condemn. So this is kind of the new material. Do not condemn and you'll not be condemned. Forgive and you'll be forgiven, give and it'll be given to you a good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over, and it'll be poured into your lap for with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. So there's not only in this account here, Jesus is not only teaching in the negative sense, this correlation between the way you do it and what comes back at you. It's almost like a karma thing.

But the thing about karma doesn't attach it to a personal God. Here, Jesus is teaching that this is a correlating law within the universe, but God is overseeing this. Now, here's the crazy thing, right? And man, I'm so tempted to get off on a tangent with this, but the world that God made, he designed it in systems. And so when you sew a piece of a kernel of grain into the ground and it gets watered, and then the sun warms the soil and the sun, somehow that kernel of grain knows the direction of the sunlight and it sprouts, it begins to come up. What's happening is a system that God designed, and in Galatians chapter six, Galatians five or six, I think it's five, he says, you'll reap what you sow. And so there is this principle in God's universe that he's designed of systems working, and that's why science, the arena of science exists.

If you're a scientist, you love the fact that systems are predictable and you're able to replicate and see causation and effect, cause and effect in the universe. All of that stuff is because of how God made it. Now, the beautiful thing though is that God can overrule his systems and sometimes God takes the most judgmental and condemning and hypocritical person and he interrupts their cycle and he reveals himself like he did to Paul. And he shows Paul, Paul, you're totally wrong. As a pharisaical Jew who's condemning Christians and throwing him into jail, the God knocks Paul off of his horse on the way to go persecute Christians, and he says, look, I'm the one that you're persecuting. And so it's important to see that Jesus is laying out for his followers, this society where he's saying, you cannot be a person that's condemning others or it's going to be measured out to you in the same way.

It's the same laws are going to be applied to you, but yet that God also is the gracious God who interrupts these cycles sometimes and says, I'm going to give you mercy. Another place where Jesus does this is with the woman caught in adultery. The Pharisees find a woman who is caught in the middle of sleeping with another man in an adulterous relationship mid act. They pull her in front of Jesus, the law in Exodus and Leviticus condemns this woman to death. And so they say to Jesus, what are you going to do with her? And here's what Jesus said when they persisted in questioning him, Jesus stood up and he said to them, the one without sin among you should be the first to throw a stone at her. You see, Jesus is again correlating this idea of judgment saying, alright, which one of you is ready to jump into this arena and be this woman's judge?

One of the followers of Jesus was the younger brother of Jesus named James. He seemed to have been deeply impacted by what Jesus said. And so he puts it this way. He says, don't criticize one another. Brothers and sisters, anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer, defames and judges the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge, there's one law giver and judge who is able to save and destroy, but who are you to judge your neighbor? I think that's a sound system that did that. I apologize. There's like a frequency thing right now. It's so loud.

So James is, again, he's tapping into the same principle that Jesus is teaching. He's tapping into it saying, listen, when you jump over into this realm of judging, you're jumping into a realm where you don't belong. Paul, when he talks about this, he says, who are you to judge another man's slave? He answers to his own master. That's the metaphor that he used, slave and master kind of that relationship. He's like, you can't judge that other person. So Jesus, here again, he's framing up society. Here he is talking about judging and man the temptation that exists as we follow Jesus and as Jesus is changing our life, right? Because the Holy Spirit comes into us. So you find out about Jesus and you decide, okay, I'm ready to surrender my life and be a follower of him. And the Bible says at that point, God places his spirit in you.

Your body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit. What does it become? The temple. What is a temple? It's the worship center. It becomes a building where God's presence is at and what does he do? He begins to go to work on our character and our thoughts, and there's temptation that he deals with and we begin to change. He begins to transform us from the inside out. But as he's doing that, and we're excited because we look at, we're looking at somebody that we now feel comfortable with and our conscience is feeling more at ease and we're like, I have a respect for myself because what God is doing in me, I'm now a person that was honest in that situation or I was loving when I was patient, when somebody was mean to me, and there's this sense of self-worth and happiness, and you're happy about just kind of holding that higher moral ground than you once did.

But at the same time, all of a sudden, what creeps in that self-righteous pride of where you begin to start talking? Why is that person over there not growing? How come they don't hold my convictions? How come they don't care about God's law as much as I do? And all of a sudden you're no longer that beautiful, sanctified humble Christian, you're now that Who was Dennis, the men's neighbor's name Mr. Wilson. You're one of those Christians, the Mr. Wilson Christians that's kind of crabby and get off my lawn, right? That's the temptation. As you're walking with Jesus, you start to think that you made yourself good and that everybody else should make themselves good like you and play. So yeah, so at least that's what I do. I don't know about you, but that's how it works in my life. Well, this is that passage from this is what Paul says in Romans.

He says, therefore, every one of you who judges is without excuse. This is an interesting flip on it. Paul turns it around on the juice. He's like, Hey, you want to judge? You don't have any excuse anymore because you are evidencing that. Well, he continues. He says, for when you judge another, you condemn yourself. Since you the judge, you're doing the very same thing. Now we know that God's judgment on those who do such things is based on the truth. Do you think any one of you who judges those who do such things yet do the same, that you will escape God's judgment? There is this seductive thing about just being able to criticize somebody else and identify what they're doing wrong and why they're doing it and psychoanalyze them and be like, man, they're just messed up. I know that I've worked, I've been in ministry and a pastor for a long time and there've been seasons where my fellowship, fellowship with other Christians was just criticizing the wrongs of other people, and that's wicked.

Jesus is like, that is wrong. That's not what it means to be a Christian is like looking down your nose at other people. But some of you have been the victim of that attitude, that mentality. Okay, so let's summarize, summarize Matthew seven, one through two. In essence, Jesus's teaching is echoed throughout the New Testament. It calls us to a posture of humility. What does it call us to humility, humility, and love in our interactions of others? It's not merely about abstaining. It is not just abstaining from judgment, but it's about transforming our attitude from one of superiority to one of loving concern, right? If you see somebody who's overtaken in a fault, it says in Galatians, we love those people. We bring them in. It's like you don't want to be stuck in that addiction or continuing to fall or destroy your life because you have some bad character quality. No, I'm concerned for you, not looking down my nose at you.

We are reminded that the manner in which we judge others, it reflects our understanding of grace and impacts how we experience God's grace ourselves as followers of Christ. We are called to exercise discernment with compassion, remembering that we too are under the same grace we extend to others. This challenges us to live not as judges over our neighbors, but as fellow travelers in need of mercy striving together towards the truth and love embodied in Christ. A couple of weeks ago, go back like a couple months, we saw in Jesus's teaching on prayer, he said, forgive them as we forgive our debtors. Forgive us as we forgive our debtors. Again, those correlating principles of like God is working with us as we treat others in that way. That is the idea of Jesus's teaching now, a little bit of humor from Jesus. We get it in three through five, one of the times where Jesus is just funny.

Verse three, why do you look at the splinter in your brother's eye but don't notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, Hey, let me take the splinter out of your eye and look, there's a beam of wood in your own eye hypocrite. First, take the beam of wood out of your eye and then you'll see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother's eye. It's this idea of having a beam just sticking out of your eyeball as you try to help other people, you can't even get close and the absurdity of it, that's the humor. Jesus here has just come up with the most absurd image of a two by four hanging out of a person's eyeball, which is not even possible, but imagine it. You can't even can't get close to the other person's eye because there's a beam there, and he's like, what are you doing?

Just trying to kind of use the shock value of the image to just say, look, be evaluating yourself. This ties perfectly in with the sentiment of verses one and two. The text is centered around, again, the importance of humility, self-awareness, discernment in our interactions and judgments. It's about recognizing our flaws, pointing out our faults or point, yeah, understanding our faults and understanding when and how to share these truths wisely. This passage encourages a reflective and discerning approach to life and relationships grounded in self-examination and humility. We are out of time. Let me just give you this one last idea again. Here's the question and then the spiritual practice that we'll give you. Again, here's the question. In our pursuit of what we believe is right, how do we ensure that we don't fall into the trap of judging others, overlooking our own flaws and a need for growth? Here's the spiritual practice that I would encourage you to kind of implement in your own life. It's this practice of self-examination. Self-examination is a process whereby the Holy Spirit opens my heart to what is true about me. This is not the same thing as a neurotic shame inducing inventory. Instead, it is a way of opening myself to God within the safety of his love so I can authentically seek transformation. Confession, which follows self examination. Confession embraces Christ's gift of forgiveness and restoration while setting us on the path to renewal and change.

If there was ever anyone who held a moral high ground, it was Jesus. And yet the way in which Jesus dealt with humanity, the only people where he was harsh and critical was to deal with the self-righteous. Jesus was approachable. He had a rag tag group of disciples who were former fishermen. Tax collectors. In his entourage of people that followed him were people who had been freed of demon possession, people who had been prostitutes, broken lives, who were outcast from society, were the followers of Jesus. And those people were welcome in his group. And Jesus got in trouble with the Pharisees for eating with sinners and tax collectors. The Pharisees, the self-righteous religious leaders were upset with Jesus for being that merciful and that gracious Jesus sets the tone. And just like he did at the beginning of this sermon, when he says he flings open the gates of his kingdom and he says, this is the place where blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are those who are persecuted. You all are welcome here. You people that are suffering and downcast and poor and trodden down. This is my kingdom's all about you. You're welcome here. That is the attitude that is demonstrated by Jesus beyond this sermon and what made Jesus so attractive, and he's telling us as his followers, look, let the Holy Spirit author that attitude in your lives. This is oftentimes this self kind of condemning. Unfortunately, it's oftentimes expressed by Christians through social media. Sometimes Christians will be like this to your face, and that's unfortunate. But there's something that's kind of like sometimes about the anonymity of the internet or just the detachment from face-to-face interactions where people just feel freed up to use the internet and to be ornery and Mr. Wilson's and to think, I hold a higher moral ground, high moral ground and I can condemn you for, but this is the thing, we as Christians, we're no better.

What are we as Christians that's different from non-Christians? We're forgiven. That's what's different about us. We're not better. I have amazing friends that don't follow Jesus that are probably more loving. They're more humble, they're more peaceful. They're definitely smarter than me. The common ground that we have as Christians that kind of sets us apart is that we get to say, Hey, we've surrendered to Jesus and he's forgiven us of our junk, and we want more people to experience the forgiveness of Jesus. And then we get the help of the Holy Spirit, the assistance of God to bring us into the new life and this beautiful vision that Jesus is laying out here. Aren't you glad that he lays out that Jesus here is, he is criticizing and condemning the condemner?

He is saying, look, if you're the recipient of the self-righteous, religious condemner, I'm not on their side. I'm on your side and I'm advocating for your close relationship with the Father. So it's the love of God. The love of God that has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit bearing witness to his love for you and I, you're loved. You are deeply loved by God. Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for loving us. Would you forgive us of that self-righteous attitude of having the beam hanging out of our eyes? Lord, please help us to be more humble. Lord, help me to be more humble and self-aware, Lord of the sins that you have forgiven in my life. To be cognizant of how sinful I am and what you have forgiven and that you have washed me. I pray that we would be marked as a church, as people who are like that, who are humble, and that we're free to just confess our sins and it's just not boast in our sin, but say, this is what I've done wrong and I'm ready and happy to receive the forgiveness of God.

Thank you for that. Lord, I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. We're going to take communion together, which is a celebration that forgiveness. So for us as a church, we have open community. That means that if you are a follower of Jesus and you are baptized, whether you're baptized here at or another church, but you're a follower of Jesus, we want you to come take the bread in the cup, sit with those elements back in your chair as this song is playing, I'd encourage you to do this practice of self-examination, and it's just saying, God, forgive my sin. Cleanse me. Cleanse me of these things. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. And then we will take communion together. Let's sing and

Come forward and

Receive

Is crowned with glory. Name is victory or praise will rise to Christ. Your name will rise. Rise to declare, resurrecting

Declare

The two.

Amen. I want to put on the screen, Jesus is teaching about communion because I know sometimes at church, lemme see if I can turn my iPad sideways and make it a little bit bigger. Sometimes church is new or you've been in different settings. So this is Jesus's teaching on communion. So Jesus is in an upper room with his disciples and they're celebrating what was called the Passover supper. This had been a 1500 year old tradition that had given to the nation of Israel, celebrating their delivery, deliverance from Egypt, slavery in Egypt, and the fact that God caused the angel of death to pass over the houses where the Hebrews lived. And so they'd been celebrating this meal, but then, so Jesus is there with his disciples, and Jesus took the bread and he blessed it and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples and he said, take and eat.

This is my body. So he took the bread and you have bread. It was like this. It was like a matza because it was not just like a normal loaf of bread, but it was a ceremonial piece of bread for the Passover meal. It had significance. Going back to the Book of Exodus, and you can read it, but Jesus says, do you see what he does? He says, this is my body. So it's a symbol, right? It's a symbol of what he did on the cross. So let's hold it up. I'm going to pray. Lord, we thank you, thank you, Jesus for going to the cross and for your body being broken for us. We're so grateful for your sacrifice. Let's take the bread and eat it together.

And

Then you see the next verse there, 27. It says, then he took a cup and after giving thanks, he gave it to them. And he said, drink from it. All of you, for this is my blood. But it's not just his blood. You see, it's the blood of the covenant of is poured out for, for the condemnation of the wicked. No, it doesn't say that, right? What does it say? It's for the forgiveness of sins. It's for the forgiveness of sins. And then he adds onto this. I tell you, I will not drink from the fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it and new with you in my father's kingdom. So we're going to have this meal, he says, and then there's going to be a future meal. The Bible's full of eating lots of meals, right? All these meals. And so this is a meal that we're eating kind of in the meantime while we're waiting for that party with Jesus. Okay? So he says, take and drink. This is my blood. It's the blood of the covenant. Let's hold up the cup together. Thank you, Jesus, for your blood being shed for us. We're grateful for the sacrifice that you made on the cross, and we're so grateful for a new covenant that we relate to you. Let's drink together.

Amen. Amen. Let's stand together.

We close our church service with just a prayer. I'm going to pray over you and we're going to pray for the city. Lord, thank you for letting us be here. Thank you for giving us bodies that worked enough to get in the door and God up out of bed, and we made it here. Lord, we're so grateful for the freedom to worship you and God, we need you to go with us as we go into this week. We don't want to go alone, Lord, and do our week. And you've promised Lord that your spirit will be with us, that you'll never leave us or forsake us. And so Lord, we lean into that promise that God you'll guide us and that you'll deliver us from evil and that you'll speak to us, and that you'll convict us where we need conviction, and that you'll go with us this week.

Continue, God to transform our lives, continue to just provide for our needs and to teach us. And Lord, we ask for your work in Baltimore city that you would continue to set people free from darkness, from their own self-destruction, set people free from addiction, from lies of the devil. Set people free from toxic relationships, set people free, Lord, this week from poverty. Lord, we ask for you to be present in Baltimore city. We pray that you would root out corruption in the government and that you would shine a light and expose wickedness in the government. Lord, please would you come and be the good king that reigns and rules in the midst of this city, bringing deliverance and hope and healing. Lord, prepare our hearts to celebrate Easter in a couple of weeks. We pray that people would be open to you, Lord, during the season, and that there would be not just people attending church, but there would just be conversion that occurs in the lives of individuals, people turning their life over to you.

Use us this week. Use us in our families. Use us in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods and where we live at. Lord, we pray that you would work through us and that you would bring about your good work in the world where we are physically at. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you for being at church. It's good to see you. We're going to clean up in here, so if you have a minute to stay, we work kind of as a team to clean up, and then we can go over to the Compassion Center. There is some food over today, but listen, don't take food out of the center until we're done cleaning up here. Okay? We're going to do it together.

Easter Sunday

Transcript

Man, what a great thing to celebrate Jesus. In the midst of Fell's Point, we've been feeding the neighborhood. God's been providing now for four years. This morning I had a little bit of extra time when I got up this morning and something prompted me to just watch through the first virtual Covid Easter service where there was no meeting in person and so it was just recorded and there's pictures of us just starting to bring in the food into the center just the early, we were right there, right at the early stages of getting into the large volume of food from Amazon and sending it out, and God's allowed that to grow to now be something where we're distributing between 750 to 1 million worth of food every month out of that center. It's crazy. Isn't that awesome? And did I say this? Oh, I didn't say this because I wasn't here last week. I was guessing tomorrow else. Do you know that we did the math and because it's ran all by volunteers right now, we just basically pay for that truck. We, for each household that we serve, it's over a hundred dollars worth of groceries. It's about three days worth of groceries for a family of four. We pay 37 cents for that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah. Amen. 37 cents.

Yeah, it's crazy. I think it's $13 a pallet is right now our costs, so yeah, it's awesome. Now, that wasn't our plan. We just kind of accidentally, God just opened up these doors and we've been trying to steward over it, and some of you we know because you've come over and gotten food, and then a lot of us have been blessed after church by that food, so yeah, it's awesome. Marvin led us in the reading of the first half of the Resurrection story, and he got us all the way up to verse 17 and it says there where Jesus, he turns to Mary and says, don't clinging to me. Jesus told her, since I have not yet ascended to the Father, but I go to my brothers and tell them that I'm ascending. Go to my brothers and tell them that I'm ascending to my Father and your Father and my God and your God.

Then we get to verse 18 and it says this, I'm going to read from verse 18 through 32 just to get through the chapter. I want this to be in our hearts and minds as we reflect on the resurrection. This morning, Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord. I have seen the Lord, and she told them what he had said to her when it was evening. On that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews, so this is Sunday night, they're all together, the disciples are freaking out, the doors are locked, and Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, peace be with you. Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side so that the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord, Jesus said to them, again, peace be with you as the Father has sent me.

I also send you after saying this, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them, and if you retain the sins of any, they're retained. But Thomas called Twin, one of the 12. He was not with them when Jesus came that Sunday night, so the other disciples were telling him, Hey, we've seen the Lord, but he said to them, if I don't see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails and put my hand into his side. I will never believe a week later, his disciples were indoors again and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them again and he said, peace be with you. You notice he likes that whole peace be with you thing, huh?

Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don't be faithless, but believe Thomas responded to him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you so much for this scripture and as we look at it for the next few minutes this morning, we ask that you would speak to us by your spirit. Some of us can say that we know you, God, that we've had a relationship with you and we've been baptized, that we've been going to church, we've been reading the Bible and we're ready to hear from your spirit and then others of us.

We haven't ever gone to church. This is like the scariest place ever, and we don't know what these people are singing about, and Lord, no matter what we ask that you would just speak whether we know church or don't know church or know Jesus or don't know Jesus. Would you speak this morning in our midst and we ask this in your name? Amen. Amen. Let's talk a little bit about the resurrection. As people are learning about Christianity, there are a number of misconceptions that arise with the resurrection and I want to walk through them. Some of you may not normally go to church, and so when you hear about this idea that Jesus died on a cross and was raised from the dead, you may be able to relate to some of these what we would call misconceptions or these ideas. The first is doubt.

There are those that the resurrection is this thing that's kind of this magical or it's thrown into the story. Any good Disney story, of course, the hero needs to appear to have superpowers, but it didn't actually happen. There are those that kind of, that's when they hear of the resurrection. That's kind of the camp they're in. They're like, well, of course those Christians, you got to throw that in there if it's going to be a good story. There's another camp that kind of minimizes this thing, this resurrection. The resurrection thing is it's cool. I'm so glad the dead guy that I like that he didn't stay dead. It's like a cool trick that has to be kind of a part of the story, and there are Christians that kind of see it as like, well, I like Jesus's teaching, and there's that cool trick that he did at the end there where he kind of rose from the dead. There's another group that kind of symbolizes the resurrection. They emphasize symbolism over substance. Some people perceive the resurrection as purely symbolic representing concepts like Hope New beginning or the triumph of Good over evil. They see it as an inspiring myth, not as a literal event with real world consequences.

Another group is kind of moralistic in their interpretation. This group, they view the resurrection as a moral lesson that we can kind of derive some ideas from. For instance, the rising from personal challenges or coming alive in new ways of thinking. It's has this kind of inspiration that we may derive from it. That one's like, and some of these we see in that one, we see that kind of in Frozen when, what's the lady's name in frozen? Elsa? Yeah. When she experiences kind of personal transformation, that's her resurrection, her resurrection moment. Another kind of misbelief is this idea, this selective belief. There's this tendency to accept parts of Jesus's story that are comfortable and they align with personal beliefs while dismissing the miraculous elements like the resurrection or the implausible. This is if you're familiar with the Good Place, that TV series, the Good Place, it's kind of selective.

It kind of draws from different spiritual themes and different religious camps, but the miraculous, it's like, oh, no, that's spectacular and we're going to edit that out of the Bible. There's another group that's the historical revisionism. This group would say that this view suggested the resurrection story was a later edition by the early church to give more authority to Jesus's teaching or to align with existing religious beliefs. This kind of was popularized with the Vinci Code. It's kind of where we see historical revisionism, but you've probably heard that you've seen it. Maybe you've seen a National Geographic where they sit down all the scholars with all the letters behind their name, and oftentimes this is the position that is proposed by these people who are supposedly smart. And then there's the Spiritualization. This is kind of like the Star Wars idea. Some interpret the resurrection as a purely spiritual event suggesting that Jesus rose in spirit but not in body. This view tries to reconcile the miraculous nature of the resurrection with a more naturalistic worldview or a secular worldview like emphasizing the physical, but it conflicts with early Christian claims of a physical resurrection, so you'll get that idea.

I can't think of a really great example of that. Well, I guess Star Wars you kind of have, when a character dies, they're still somewhere around and you get a hologram or a ghost appearance of them. We have another one that's like exaggeration over time. The idea of the story of the resurrection was you remember Big Fish, the movie Big Fish, where it's kind of like the more he told the story, the bigger the fish got. Well, so this is kind of like some people think we hold this view of the resurrection only because it's evolved over time. And the last one, I know these are a lot, but this another one is this idea that, well, the resurrection story was really kind of served this political purpose to give the early church leaders who had political ambitions more authority. So there's a political motivation kind of saying it's not All of these things kind of deemphasized the fact that Jesus was bodily resurrected from the grave after three days.

So let me just kind of respond to this, and if you have friends that struggle with the resurrection, these are just kind of the four ways that we respond to these questions. The first is just simply the historical reliability of the resurrection accounts. We have four gospels that talk about the resurrection and their eyewitness accounts. We also have writings around this time that lend credibility to those historic accounts. The second is just the eyewitness testimony. The third is the consistency with the Old Testament prophecy. The fourth is the empty tomb. The fifth is the alternative. Explanations lack credibility, so like the swoon theory, some of the other ideas that have been proposed that the body was stolen or the swoon theory. All of those are just very difficult to kind of, the more you put 'em together, the more the idea falls apart. And the last real argument for the resurrection is that as its centrality in how cord is to the Christian faith, you have people that died for this reality of the resurrection.

So all that to say, listen, if you're just kind of here at church for the first time or you're exploring religious ideas or spiritual ideas, the idea of the teaching of the resurrection from John and from Matthew, mark and Luke, all of these accounts, it is central. It is central to the Christian faith that we believe in this bodily resurrection. And what I want to do is I want to connect it with us this morning and I hope that you'll be open if you're considering Jesus as a personal savior. I want to explain how the resurrection is seeded and it intersects with your personal life.

The Bible teaches that there is this problem of alienation. Alienation. Now, what's another word for alienation? Separation. Separation. What else? Estranged. Yeah, being estranged, being lonely, being alone, separated, yeah. All of those are is this idea of alienation. The Bible says that you and I are born alienated from the chief relationship that we were created to have. We were alienated from God that you and I are separated from being a friend of God and it's because of our moral condition. The first humans decided to run away from God's plan, and every human who has been born since then has fled from God's plan for their life. They have rebelled. And so God being perfect and holy cannot be in a relationship with unholy humans, and yet he created you because he absolutely loves you. In scripture, we see this reoccurring theme of humanity's alienation from God.

It isn't just about distance. It's not that you're physical and God's spiritual and you can't see him, but it's this deep spiritual separation that is caused by sin. Now, the symptoms of that come up in all kinds of ways, which I'm going to show you here in just a second, but it is evident on a daily basis. You may not know it. You may be facing anxiety in your life. You may be facing deaths in your life, deaths in relationship, suffering in your life, and you may not know and recognize that that's connected with your alienation from God. But the Bible teaches that God loves you, designed you to be in a friendship with God, where you can talk to him, the creator of the universe, you can talk to him about your worst days and he loves you, wants to hear about it, and he has the power to intervene in your life, in your psychology, in your physical body, in your family, in your romantic relationships, in the midst of your kids' lives, in the midst of your finances, where your vocation is at in your academic aspirations.

Jesus is able to be present in your life in those things, but yet you're born alienated from God and God didn't want you to be alienated. He wanted to be in a relationship with you, but how do you solve the problem? Some people say, well, you know what? I'm just going to be better so that I'm more lovable by God. I'm going to give about five hours a day or five hours a week. Let's just start simple five hours a week and I'm going to take care of the poor people in my neighborhood and then maybe God will like me and I can be a friend of God. Or you know what? Instead of being like all those bad people who they lie and cheat and steal, I'm going to be honest with how I deal with finances. I'm going to kind of clean up my act a bit.

And some people think that by just being better, that they can bridge that alienation gap and they can step back into what they were designed for to be a friend of God. But the Bible says that everyone has fallen short of the glory of God and that there is none righteous, no not one, and that the wages of sin is death. That you and I are born in this alienation and we cannot bridge that chasm. In fact, the harder you try, some people they're running to, they're trying to run away from their brokenness through their job or through relationships or through substances. And the harder they try to run away from their alienation and brokenness, the further they are going away from God and yet they're desperately in need of a relationship. That friendship with God. The Bible says that when we sin, when we rebel against God, that there are these five deaths that occur in our life where physically we, our life ends.

So there's physical death, but not just that. We see in Genesis chapter three, when the first humans rebelled against God, they experience relational death and conflict. So our rebellions against God, it affects our relationships with one another. Your life have. Are you in conflict with people around you? Are people upset with you? Well, that's because there's this rebellion. It might not even be you, but there's this general rebellion against God and his plan, his way of doing things, and there's death that comes into relationships, but there's also psychological death. We see in Genesis three, these first humans as they rebel against God, they experience deep shame. And some of you are here this morning and you want to be a friend of God, but yet you're haunted by a sense of shame over the things you've done in your life and you're like, I can't get over that chasm because of that shame.

God would never have me. I'm glad you're here because Jesus has a word for you this morning. But there is also this ecological death. This is this sense of that you are designed to live in this body, in this world that God made, and yet there's this broken relationship between your environment and you as a person. It doesn't always work together. And so we see storms and chaos. We see nature harming humans rather than cooperating with the flourishing of humans. And the fifth thing is a spiritual death. That's your spiritual alienation from God. You're designed to be a friend of God and yet you're spiritually alienated. So that's all a bunch of bad news, but Jesus, who is this Jesus guy? How does this tie in with the resurrection, the alienation? This alienation, it has real consequences. It leads to broken relationships, personal despair, distorted view of purpose in life.

It's like wandering in a labyrinth with no way out, and yet the resurrection is celebrated every year because it is God's answer to your alienation. From him, Jesus came and lived that moral perfect life that you and I couldn't live, and all we did was rack up a whole list of indictments in God's courtroom that we're guilty, guilty, guilty of, and yet we needed to have our record expunged. We needed to be found not guilty in order to enter into that friendship with God. And so Jesus came and he died the death that we should have died. He died on the cross to pay for our sin so that we could be forgiven, but if he just died and stayed dead, the work would not have been completed. There was a need for that sacrifice to be verified and validated by heaven, and that's what happened three days later, the resurrection into this landscape of alienation and despair. Easter speaks a powerful word, resurrection. It's not merely a miraculous event in the annals of history. It's God actively stepping into our plight in Christ resurrection. God is making a way where there was no way. Look at John 20 verse 19. We read this when it was evening on that first day of the week, that Sunday night, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Do you remember rewind the Bible? If you know the Bible and you've read even just the first three chapters, do you remember people hiding?

That's pretty important, right? In the Genesis three story, Adam and Eve, they rebel against God and they're afraid. Now, in this case, these disciples, they're not afraid because of anything they've done, but they're afraid just because of their environment. There's fear. And what happens? What happens in Genesis three? God speaks. He says, where are you here? We have Jesus. He speaks, but doesn't just speak. He shows up. He shows up. And what does he say? Peace. What does he say? Peace. Peace be with you. Listen, Jesus does this so that you can have peace in your life, but he doesn't just do it. In verse 19, look in verse 21, Jesus said to them again, what peace be with you? As the Father has sent me, I also send you, Jesus keeps speaking peace over them. Peace over your life. Peace. Peace. Look at verse 26.

A week later, his disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood amongst them and said, peace be with you. There's this breaking of the power of alienation. Do you see over and over again that the risen Jesus comes and he is present with his disciples, and as he's present, he's saying, I am calling upon you to have peace. May there be peace with you, but he doesn't just say that. Remember the verse, he says, he breathes on them. He says, receive the Holy Spirit in John 13, 14 and 15 and 16, he teaches about the spirit. You see, Jesus says, I'm going to go away 50 days, 40 days after the resurrection, Jesus ascends up to heaven. And then 10 days later is the day of Pentecost where the flame are on the top of the heads of the disciples and the Holy Spirit baptizes them.

But Jesus has taught these disciples that he's going to go away, but he is leaving his spirit with those who are his disciples. And the spirit speaks this word over your life this morning, peace be with you by raising Jesus from the dead. God wasn't just displaying his power over death. He was addressing our alienation head on, your alienation head on. God designed you to be his friend. God wants to be in your corner. He invites you into his victory. He wants you to be on his winning team. He wants to lead you in victory after victory after victory, not yours, his victory. He is like, come and be a part of my story is the invitation. Come on, come and be in the midst of my story. Come and enjoy the victory. God wasn't just displaying his power over death. He was addressing our alienation head on the resurrection bridges the chasm between humanity and God offering reconciliation and a restored relationship.

I want you to see something in two Corinthians in two Corinthians five 17. It says, if anyone is in Christ, he is what? A new creation. A new creation. And this is good news here because what the old has passed away and see a new has come the old, your old has passed away. There are things that are old that are in your past. There are things that you're embarrassed of, ashamed of, disappointed in that you regret. And this is the Bible speaking to you. If you are in Christ, then you are a new creation. The old is passed away. The God who loves you, the God who wants to be your friend, the God who has done all the work to wipe away your guilt through Jesus, he comes and he makes you new. The question though is if it's that good, how do you get into Christ?

Because he says, if anyone's in Christ well, who's in Christ? That takes us back to our story. That takes us back into our story. But before I look at the story of Thomas, before we close with his story, I want to share my own story. My testimony is that I grew up in the church. I was a 13-year-old who hated the church. My dad was a pastor. I would come just like my boys. They would come, we'd set up church, we'd be there, we'd be around these church people, and I didn't like 'em. I think the main thing I didn't like about Christians at that time was they were emotional. We had a church time where Christians would talk about, here's what happened during my week. And people would cry, and I'm not really a crier, not a lot. And I'd be like, why are you crying?

Stop crying. I don't like, you're making me feel uncomfortable. Why are we doing that? And so as a 13-year-old, I really was like, man, I want to be an actor or a baseball player. I just want to get out of here, be successful in life. And I really had a plan to not really be in the church. And at 13 years old, I went and I did a three week vacation to visit my grandpa, who wouldn't. He also is a pastor, can't get away from these guys. And he said to me when I got off the plane, he lived in Hawaii. He said, listen, Josh, I am so glad you're here for three weeks. I have all these Bible studies planned that we're going to do together and I'm going to pay you a hundred dollars if you'll memorize a hundred Bible verses. And I thought, that is not how I really planned to spend my vacation in Hawaii.

And that doesn't sound very exciting. But my grandpa was pretty intimidating. So I thought, okay, I better go along with it. And I told him, listen, I have a bad memory. I'm diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. I can't remember more than four digits, so I dunno how I'm going to memorize a hundred Bible verses, but we'll try. And he put me at a card table in his garage in the morning with three by five cards and he said, let's just start with the verses. Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. You grew up in the church. So he was like, we'll just give you credit for that. And then the Lord's Prayer, there's another five or six verses right there, and then you probably know John three 16 will give you credit for that. And the shortest verse of the Bible is Jesus wet. So you got that one down.

There's another. But pretty soon it is like I had about 40 and I needed 60 more to go every morning. I'd get up, I'd sit at that table and we did these index cards. I was pretty much about myself writing out these verses and then just repeating them, trying to take four or five a day, just repeating them and rehearsing them. And then he'd test me. And I memorized the last Bible verse. I memorized the last Bible verse as I was going to the airport, and I remember he wrote me out a check for a hundred bucks. I don't know what I did with it, a hundred dollars, but something crazy happened. All of a sudden I had these verses in my head, and even as I was there in Hawaii and I was driving around town with my grandpa and he was counseling people and he was preparing his sermons to preach, and he was raking up the leaves in the parking lot of the church.

My heart did this little change thing and it started to open up. And I was like, oh, that's weird. I kind of liked the church. And all of a sudden as I was thinking these verses would kind pop into my head and it was like, I don't have to provide the other. You ever talk to yourself and you kind have to provide both sides of the conversation. That's a little awkward. And people think you're crazy if you tell 'em that's what's going on, right? Well, these bible verses provided the other side of the conversation and I felt like, here's God speaking to me. There was a sense of God's presence with these verses that were in my head, and I just was converted. The Bible talks about being converted or being born again. It's this thing where just your heart opens up to Jesus as the Messiah, as the Lord, and you yield your life and you decide like, I'm ready.

I want to follow Jesus. Now, some of you have already made that decision because your heart is open and others of you are for the first time hearing that that's how it works, and that's what happens. And you need to make that decision this morning. You just need to kind of listen to what God's laying on your heart. You see, God actually works in us in Ephesians, he talks about the eyes of our understanding in our heart being opened and what might be even happening now this morning is just kind of like your heart's opening up, like the shutter on a camera, taking in the spiritual light, and you're realizing that Jesus didn't just die 2000 years ago, but he's raised today in heaven advocating on your behalf so that you can be a friend of God. He absolutely loves you. He did all of that on the cross so that your guilt and your shame and the death that you were bound to could be removed so that you could have life.

And as a 13-year-old, my heart opened to that and I came alive spiritually, and I began to love the Bible and try to understand what does it mean to have a relationship with Jesus? I want you to just enjoy at the end here, the work, the work that God does with Thomas Thomas. He was a twin. We don't know who the other twin was, but he was called twin. He's one of Jesus's disciples, but he wasn't there that first Sunday. He heard about the resurrection, but he didn't see Jesus that first. He had to wait a whole week.

And so the other disciples who were with him said, we've seen the Lord. He says, if I don't see these marks in his hands and put my finger into the mark the nails and put my hand into his side, I'm not going to believe he was pretty confident. So a week later, the disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and he stood amongst them and he said, peace be with you. But then he turns to Thomas and he tells Thomas, put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don't be faithless but believe. Do you see what Jesus is doing? He's calling Thomas to believe. You see this work that Jesus did by being raised from the dead did not have its effect upon Thomas until Thomas responded.

In faith, Jesus is working here to bring Thomas to a place of belief. So if you'd say to me, Josh, what do I need to do this morning? What's this whole thing about? Here's what Jesus wants of you. He wants you to believe because look what he says. So Thomas responds, my Lord and my God, that's his statement of belief. And then Jesus responds back and says, because you've seen me, you've believed, but then he puts you in the Bible. Did you know you're in the Bible? Here you are. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. Jesus is not here for you to put your hands into the wounds in his hand. You can't touch that wound in his side, but you can respond in belief. You don't see him and yet believe. And what does he say to you? You're blessed.

You're blessed. In fact, the Bible's not just about you believing there, but he keeps going. And John who has written this account, he says, Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, and they're not in this book. But John says, I have written this so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life. What do you have by believing you may have life in His name? Remember that passage out of second Corinthians, that verse in second Corinthians says that Jesus came, if you're in him, you are a new creation. You are given life. So this morning as a church, as followers of Jesus, we're celebrating the resurrection because we're in him. He's given us new life. And here's the awesome thing. If you're not a follower of Jesus yet, if you haven't been baptized, you're invited into the party.

This is an open invitation. You don't have to clean up your act. You don't have to change the way you dress. You didn't have to change anything. You just have to believe, because John says here, by believing you have life in his name. In a minute we're going to pray, and as we're praying, I'm going to ask you, do you need to have a relationship with Jesus? And what I want you to do is if that's you, I just want you to put your hand up in the air. If you have never accepted Christ as your Savior, I want you to make a decision this morning. And maybe you're not ready yet, but I want to call you. I want to call upon you just in your own heart, in the privacy of your own mind and heart. I want to call upon you to consider whether or not you're ready to be a follower of Jesus. After we do that, we're going to take communion together. Communion is for those who have made that decision and have been baptized. We celebrate this meal together to celebrate what Jesus did on the cross on our behalf. But before we do that, let's just bow our heads together.

We've talked a lot about Jesus this morning, and we love you, Jesus. We're so grateful for you. We're so grateful for what you did on the cross. We're grateful for our resurrection. And there's some of you that have been listening this morning to this, and you were brave enough to come to church, and I want to congratulate you. And if you have never decided to follow Jesus, but you're ready, I just want you to put up your hand. All your eyes are closed. But if that's you want to follow Jesus and you've never accepted Christ as your savior, just put your hand up in the air,

Alright? Amen.

Lord, I thank you for those that want to take that step of faith. And I ask, Lord, that you would respond to those that have raised their hand. Lord, I pray that you would give them new life. They've longed, they've lived some life, some of the people that put up their hand and have lived some life, and they're bearing in their body the death part. And I pray that you would come and give new life, that you would just pour your life into their lives. That work of the Holy Spirit, just giving life. Lord, we love you. We love you. I.

Matthew 6: 25-34

Transcript

We're studying through the life and the teaching of Jesus from the Book of Matthew. Now there's this section that starts in chapter five of Matthew. It's called the Sermon on the Mount and it goes chapter five, six and seven. It's one of the most famous sets of teachings from Jesus and we're past the halfway point. We're making our way through this sermon. Last week we looked at verses 22 through 24 and we talked about having a spiritual focus and a spiritual loyalty. Remember this is Jesus training, those who would be his followers. And he's describing for them a new society, not just a personal relationship with him, but literally imagine like Moses, when he got the 10 Commandments, went up on the mountain and then he taught Israel how to be a nation. This is Jesus saying, Hey, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

I'm inviting you into a new kingdom. He starts the whole thing off by saying the gates of the kingdom are flung, wide open for the poor in spirit, for the meek, those who are suffering, those who are sorrowful, those are the people that are welcomed into this kingdom and he's gone on from there to lay out and describe, here's what it looks like to be in my kingdom. So last week he talked about just this devotion, this devotion to God and having this focus and loyalty. I was reading this week, and I love this one word that this commentator used for this idea of having a single eye. Remember we talked about that and how that's a difficult metaphor to translate over and understand how the metaphor works. He was saying a modern concept of this eye, of having a single eye or a single focus is the idea of having goals.

We talk so much about it's the new year. Let's set some goals for this year. And what Jesus is teaching his followers, he's saying, listen, if your goals are not singularly focused on my kingdom, they're not lined up with my kingdom, then your whole life is going to be this confusing mess. So there needs to just be this simplicity, this loyalty, this focus in on my kingdom in order for your life to emit bright, shining pure light that's coming from it. So that's what we looked at last week and today we're going to look at Jesus's teaching about anxiety. Anxiety. Now this is one of my favorite movies. Do you know the name of this movie? What about Bob? He's holding his book there called Baby Steps. Bob was paralyzed by anxiety, but his shrink also had his own set of issues. And so it's this wonderful movie about which one is actually the one who needs the therapy the most, but poor Bob, he is paralyzed by all these phobias and fears and anxieties.

In fact, the most recent data shows that approximately 19% of US adults have experienced anxiety disorder just in the past year. That's what is that one in five? The prevalence of this is higher in females than in males. 23% females, 14% males over the lifetime, over their lifetime. About 31% of adults are estimated to experience an anxiety disorder. Almost a third of adults when considering the severity of these disorders, and a majority, 43% of adults with an anxiety disorder just in the past year experienced mild impairment while 22% had serious impairment and 33 moderate impairment. So taking that into account, this whole conversation around anxiety is more apt and appropriate than ever. And so beginning in verse 25, Jesus says this, therefore I tell you, don't worry about your life, what you'll eat or what you'll drink or about your body, what you'll wear. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Consider the birds of the sky. They don't sow or reap or gather into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you worth more than they can any of you? Add one moment to his lifespan by worrying. And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wild flowers of the field grow. They don't labor or spin thread, yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all of his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that's how God clothed the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won't he do much more for you? You of little faith. So don't worry saying, what will we eat or what will we drink or what will we wear? For the Gentiles eagerly seek all of these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be provided for you.

Therefore, don't worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Let's pray. Lord, we are going to study this verse here with hearts that are sincere. We anticipate just that whisper of your spirit in our hearts, in our minds as we're studying it. We give you full permission to dissect who we are, to convict us of sin, to teach us, to train us in righteousness. God, we are spiritually hungry for your work. We don't want to be an anxious people. We want to occupy our place in life with a non-anxious presence. Oh God, would you gift that to us? We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So let's look at this together. What I'd like to do is give you a bit of an outline of what's in these 10 verses. So it opens up with a command to not worry about your life.

And then verse 26 through 30, there are these two illustrations that are given to support that command. And then verses 31 and 32, the command again is reiterated and we have the antithesis is seeded. This idea of the antithesis is seeded in gentile living. Don't worry because that's what the Gentiles do. Verse 33 is an alternative is recommended and a promise is paired with it. Can't wait to look at that promise. And then verse 34, the command is reiterated and made applicable to the moment. So six times, six times how many times? Six times. We have the word worry in this passage. This is one of those places where if you are struggling with anxiety, you've got to go back to it because Jesus, if he's your king, Jesus says to you, stop it, stop it, stop it. And he gives you a framework, kind of some therapy that you can do in order to free yourself from anxiety.

So here is, well, this is where we're going. The concept of worry and anxiety is given handles, maybe we could say or it's made concrete because he says, not only just stop worrying, but he says, stop worrying about this. Stop worrying about that. In fact, there are three things that he says to stop worrying about. Did you see them there? What you eat, what else, what you're going to wear and what else? And drink, drink, eat includes with the food. There's a third thing at the end. Don't worry about tomorrow, don't worry about tomorrow. What's going to happen tomorrow. Let's look at this first verse in verse 25, the opening command to not worry about your life. You like my little emoji there? Yeah, that's the worry one. Thank you. Thank you. Therefore, okay, this is Jesus talking in my Bible, this is in red.

This is the middle of the sermon. This is not some just like nice your therapy appointment. Then you got to decide this is Jesus the Lord, the Christ saying to you. I tell you, don't worry. Stop it about your life. Stop worrying about your life. What you're going to eat, what you'll drink or about your body, what you'll wear isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing he has in mind. The worrier, the person that's concerned food and clothing, he's got in mind the person that's got to hoard stuff, right? You ever watch Buried Alive? Yeah. What is that? What's going on there? There's a lot of different psychological things there, but there is an underlying fear in the hoarder's life that if I don't hold onto this stuff, I will lose some of my identity.

This is a picture of somebody trying to be secure to alleviate anxiety. I've had the privilege of working with hoarders in my life for some weird reason, and I love hoarders. They're like dear to my heart, I would be a hoarder if I didn't read the Bible. Probably hoarding is fun. Stuff is fun, right? I mean, walking around your place is fun too, but there's something fun about just stuff. And so I have cleaned out hoarder's houses and it is traumatic. It is emotional, it is painful and usually it only happens and usually I've been called to the scene because it's literally a crisis in the community. On one occasion it was a renter and the guy had to sell his house and the guy went to the same church that I was at and he said, listen, I've got a renter. He's a little bit older, a guy, he's a little bit unique and he's a hoarder and I have to clean this place out.

Would you come and help? And I said, absolutely. And just in the most loving way, we had to just go in and it's always, Hey, go and distract that guy. Get him into the other side of the room and we're going to just come through with garbage bags and we're going to just start throwing stuff away. On another occasion, literally the city law code enforcement officer, Ms. Huffman, she came to me and said, listen, we are trying to clean up downtown. We are a growing city and we've got to get this place cleaned up. And we have right on Main Street, this guy who has lived there for 60 years and his entire two acres is full of stuff and the city we're going to pay to put a dumpster, not like a little dumpster, not like a 40 foot dumpster on his property. We are getting a team of volunteers and we are going to clean that property.

We are going to empty it out. The guy a week before it happened had major heart surgery, so he wasn't there. Somehow he found out about it, took himself with his chest, still freshly scarred and stapled together. He took him himself to that property. He was so upset that his stuff was being, he had plenty of warning, he was told it was going to happen. He knew what was going on. He was in really bad shape, and I sat with him and distracted him for two hours as the rest of these 40 volunteers just threw away a small portion. We didn't even touch the house. We were just working in the yard, the stacks of stuff. Literally when I wasn't with him, I found a newspaper clipping from the end of World War II out of Australia about the Japanese bombing Australia or something like that.

Yeah, a fresh newspaper clipping from the forties in the front yard in this stack. It was crazy. So hoarding is this symptom of an internal unrest of I've got to hold on to this stuff. And yet Jesus is saying, look, in my kingdom, you do not need to stop. You need to stop worrying about this stuff. And he's asked this rhetorical question. He says, isn't life more than food and body more than clothing? Let me ask you that. Is your life more than food? Is your body more than clothing? It's amazing how life can get reduced down to that level. Those who are, we talked about hoarding, but then there's also the issue of obesity and being overweight. I think my BMI right now is five. I'm technically considered overweight. I know I'd say that to people and they're like, nah, you're not overweight, and that's because they probably weigh more than I do, but that's fine.

There is like a health metric and where you're supposed to be at, and unfortunately in the US we have this unhealthy relationship with food where we don't answer this question and we say, no, my life is pretty much food. I've had this vision of making this sign that I put into my kitchen that says, this is not a temple. This is a fueling station for the mission of God. Because here's the thing, here's the, we engage food culturally as an event, as almost not just an event, but as a sacred worshipful event. We're worshiping ourselves, we're worshiping our tongues. The pleasure of, so you go in fast and all of a sudden you realize, oh my gosh, I'm a worshiper of food and pretty much I have three worship services a day called breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and if I miss one of those worship services, I am not okay in my religion, right either is a disconnect between me and my God, the body.

And then you have other people that are caught up in materialism and pretty much it's like, where's the next mirror just to make sure that my clothing is right, my outfit is right, and yet Jesus in his teaching is he's saying, stop it. Stop worrying. Stop worrying about these things. Now as we go through this text, I'm going to show you some of the objections that people have as they hear Jesus is teaching and then I'm going to try to respond to those objections. Critics argue that the passage, this passage seems to suggest that one should not plan or be responsible for their future potentially leading to an impractical or irresponsible living. If you follow this, you would be irresponsible. You need to be prepared, and they think that that's what Jesus is saying. The response to that is that Jesus is not teaching against prudent planning, but against anxious worry. In Luke 14, 28 through 30, Jesus speaks about the importance of planning using the example of someone building a tower. The emphasis in Matthew six is on trusting in God's provision and not being consumed by worry, not on abandoning responsible planning.

Let's keep going to the next section here, which are these two illustrations to support the command, the two illustrations. The first is the one about the birds. He says, think about the birds. Think about the birds for just a second. What's your favorite kind of bird? Raven. Raven, okay. Yeah, you would be, you're from Baltimore, the eagle. Yeah. You're from Philadelphia, of course, yes. What else? A car. Those are so beautiful. They're red. Yeah. Yeah. What else? What other birds wood. Oh, those are cool. They're like, right, hang on there. And they're like doing the thing with their nose and their beak. That's pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. I like peacocks. What'd you say? I said hawk hawks. Yeah, the swoop down. They can go. Incredible speeds. So Jesus says, look, consider the birds of the sky. Now here's what he wants you to think about. Okay? They don't sow. What's sowing? That's like planting the seeds, right? Like a farmer. They're not being farmers. What's reaping? Collecting the harvest. They're not going through the agricultural process like a farmer gathering into barns yet. Look at this. Your heavenly father feeds them. And then there's a question. Do you see the question? This was not a question that was condoned by peta.

It didn't make it past their comms department. When Jesus said this, he says, aren't you worthy more than they like? You are worth more than the birds and your father is feeding the birds. Can any of you add one moment to his lifespan by worrying? Do you notice all the questions here? When somebody is asking questions, what are they doing? What happens when a question is asked? There's a break, right? A question is asked. There's someone is leaving kind of a hole in the thought process and you've got to fill it in. It's a great communication tool asking questions. Jesus is asking questions and he's asking this question. In other words, what does worrying do? Is it going to add to your life's span? What's going to change about your life By worrying, what do you accomplish? The master teacher here laying it out, you look at this bird, isn't that a beautiful, that bird is eating its meal.

It has not worried at all. It's not anxious. It didn't have anything to do with that tree there growing. It didn't have to produce the red fruit, and yet God is providing for that bird, and Jesus says to you and I, you are worth more than that bird. Your life is of greater value, of greater. Why. Can I ask you a question? Why Jesus said that? Why is your life worth more than the bird? Why is he allowed to say that? Because we're created in the image of God. That's right. We're created in his image. He didn't make that bird in his image. He created it. It's beautiful because he made it, but it doesn't bear the image of God, and so it is not of equivalent worth, so let's reverse the logic. He does care for you because you bear his image. He's aware of the things you have need of because you bear his image. You're intended to be cared for by him, and yet you have this working example of this bird that he's caring for, and we get kind of wrapped up in what's going to happen? Where's my food going to come from? Where's my clothes going to come from? Alright, and then the next illustration here is the flowers. Why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wild flowers of the field grow. They don't labor or spin.

Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all of his splendor was adorn like. You know who Solomon, who's he talking about with Solomon? King Solomon, right? King Solomon was the zenith of progress for Israel. It was called the golden era, right? David did all this work to set up his son Solomon for success. Solomon is the wisest king, the wisest man of his day, and he just flourishes incredible wealth. One of the seven wonders of the world is Solomon's hanging gardens, right? Incredible. And yet Jesus comments and says, these flowers don't even compare. Solomon doesn't even compare to these flowers, these lilies of the field. And then we have another question. If that's how God closed the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won't he do much more for you? Oh, you of little faith, it's amazing.

Won't he do much more for you? That right there is something worth writing and sticking on your bathroom mirror. This is Jesus, your Messiah, the one who rescued, he died for you on the cross so that you could be reconciled to God and here's what he's saying to you about stuff, your relationship with stuff, the things you're worried about in your life. He says, won't He the Father do much more for you than the grass? Do you believe that? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Take that one to the bank and he comments. He says, what's lacking is faith. He's getting in there poking you. It's like your friend in junior high like poking you in the side. You a little faith, come on. You got to believe this. You got to believe that he's going to do much more for you. He's going to do much more for you.

Let's look at another objection to this. Some might view the passage as advocating for a passive reliance on divine provision. I am going to sit here, arms crossed until God provides for me. They're dismissing the need for human effort or initiative. It could give birth to a lazy lifestyle. That may be one of the fears that comes up, but instead, here's the response to that argument. The Bible balances trust in God with the value of work. If you don't believe me, go look at second Thessalonians three 10. It talks about, look, if you don't work, you don't eat right. Jesus's point is about the attitude of the heart, prioritizing spiritual over material concerns and not encouragement to inactivity. He's not saying sit and twiddle your thumbs. He's saying Stop worrying about it and get to work. One of the greatest gifts that God's given us is this ability to work in the world with him.

Sometimes work is considered this evil thing or this negative thing. I've heard Christian say, oh yeah, work is That's a part of the curse. We got to work. Work is horrible because Adam sin and no work happened and was commanded before sin ever came into the world. Adam and Eve were told, Hey, rule over the garden. I want you to subdue the garden. I want you to tend to the garden. Take care of this garden that I'm putting you in. There was a good work that they were called to. We are designed to work. God has created us in his image. He works. We are called to work. We're also called to rest, and so we next go into this command being reiterated and the antithesis seated in Gentile living, so here we go. So don't worry. He says again, what does he say? Don't worry, don't worry.

That's right. Yeah. Don't miss this. That's what the sermon's about, right? We could cover it in five seconds. Don't worry. That's the sermon saying, what will we eat? What will we drink or what will we wear, right? Those are the questions. Who's asking those questions? The Gentiles are eagerly seeking all, who's the Gentiles? Anybody who's not Jewish at the time. Anybody disconnected from God's kingdom? He's saying those who are genetically disconnected, they're not in his kingdom yet those outsiders who are far away from God, this is what they're worried about. They're asking these questions, what are we going to drink? What are we going to eat? What are we going to wear?

He says, you're heavenly Father knows that you need them. He knows that you need them. It is amazing just the amount of anxiety that exists because people act like Gentiles. What does it mean to be a Gentile? It just means you're a foreigner. What are you a foreigner from? You're far away from God's kingdom. I mean, that's the idea. It's not this DNA am I have this disposition towards anxiety because I don't have the DNA of the Jews. No, no, no. He's talking about, Hey, they're far away. They just don't know this stuff. We know it. We know it. We're accountable before God and we do not need to sit there and think and worry and be torn up inside over our anxiety. Another objection. Here's another objection. The directive to not worry about basic needs may seem insensitive to those in poverty or crisis.

We're a church that's blessed with people that are still trying to make it. They've got a rough past. I've always wanted to be a part of a church like this. Before I was here, I was a part of a church with a lot of wealthy people. It was very boring. Nobody thought they needed anything and it sucked, and so I moved to Baltimore so that I could be in close proximity to people who are real, where life is real and sometimes things break down and people get sick and people die and relationships break down and all that stuff, right? And so is Jesus being insensitive when he says, Hey, stop worrying. Do you think? Was he not being caring? No, of course we know Jesus is loving. Jesus is teaching, acknowledges the reality of these needs. He acknowledges the reality of these needs. The emphasis is on trusting God's care and not allowing worry to dominate our lives, recognizing that our value to God is greater than the material concerns themselves.

Your Father, he just says in that last verse, he says, your father knows the things that you have need of, and then the alternative recommended and then I promise is paired with it, and this is the contrast that exists. You're either living on one side of that but or the other. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be provided for you. You got to decide what's going to occupy your heart. You're going to be taken up with seeking after food and clothing and what's going to happen tomorrow? You're going to be worried about that or are you going to seek first God's kingdom? This is what you've got to decide. You've got to decide, are you going to let God's kingdom be the priority? I love this picture. This is from Black Friday.

Let me just say, could we just replace the boxes there with going for God's kingdom as a church where we're just knocking down the doors? God, we're going for your kingdom. We're here, we're going for you. But sometimes the setting's not very loving, right? We want to do this together. No, we're not throwing any elbows as we go for the kingdom, but there's an intensity about Black Friday. There's this beating down the doors. There's like everybody's checking their clock. It's 6 0 1. Why didn't they open up yet? Right? Let's go for it. Let's seek first the kingdom of God. One commentator says this, the whole theme of this section has been that God will take care of his people, so we should put our trust completely in him. Our father is the supreme giver. Do you hear that? He is the supreme giver and it is tragic when we whom he loves care more for ourselves than for him.

He is better at caring for us than you are for caring for yourself. He knows what you have need of. He has your best interest in mind. Your lack is not his oversight. Your low bank account is not that he just kind of forgot about you on the backside of the wilderness, God loves you and he knows what you have need of, and he's calling and inviting you into a relationship with him. The commentator goes on, he says, so Jesus says, we must not just refrain from the things of the world but actively replace concern for earthly matters with an overriding concern for the things of God.

There is one more argument that comes up about this. There is a concern somebody may say There's a concern that focusing on seeking God's kingdom could lead to neglecting earthly responsibilities. If I'm seeking first God's kingdom, what about my kids? What about my schoolwork? What about going to work? And they see it as a dichotomy, right? Is that the term for it? False dichotomy as if seeking God's kingdom is against doing the things he's made you responsible for. The idea is no, be a citizen. Occupy this land. Live with a non-anxious presence as you engage the responsibilities that he's given you. Here's the response. Jesus advocated for a balanced life of loving God and loving others. Seeking God's kingdom involves practical expressions of faith such as compassion and justice, which have tangible impacts on worldly matters. Let's keep going. This last verse, the command is reiterated and made applicable to the moment, to the moment. He gives some sense of timing. Here's the verse, therefore don't worry about tomorrow. Why? Tomorrow. That's right. Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble in its own, and so this is not against planning. It's not saying, Hey, don't plan for the future. It's saying the condition of your heart. As you look into the future, you've got to guard it. It's not a disposition of anxiety and fear.

Oftentimes, anxiety is related to the future. I think that's the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is very much in the present. Anxiety relates to worries over the future. As we reflect on the richness and the depth of Jesus's teaching out of Matthew, we're reminded that the Christian life is not one of passive resignation. You're not called to passivity but of an active ongoing trust. Jesus calls us to a radical reorientation of our priorities, urging us to place our trust not in the uncertainties of this world, but in the steadfast unfailing faithfulness of our heavenly Father. In this world where worry and anxiety often loom large, Jesus offers a different narrative. He points us to the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, not as examples of carefree living, but as reminders of God's providential care. This is not a call to abandon planning or responsibility, but an invitation to rest in the assurance that our lives are held in the hands of a loving father.

As we seek first his kingdom and is righteousness, we are promised that our needs will be met. This is not a prosperity gospel that equates faith with material blessing, but it is a promise that our deepest needs, love, security, purpose, and belonging will be met in God. We are called to live in the present, engage with the world around us with compassion and justice, reflecting very nature the character of Christ. In closing, let's remember that our worries about tomorrow cannot add a single hour to our lives. Instead, let's embrace each day with faith and trust, knowing that our future is secured in the hands of God who cares for us more deeply than we can imagine. In so doing, we find true freedom from the anxiety and worry and the freedom to live fully in the present, serving God loving others. Let's step into this week with this assurance in our hearts, living out the radical trust filled, trust filled life that Jesus calls us to.

I want you to take out your card, your index card on one side of that card, you've written out the things that cause anxiety in your life at different times. Maybe your anxiety level isn't super high right now, but these are the things that you wrote down as sources of anxiety. What I want you to write on the backside is that God's got it. God's got it. He is got it. God knows. I want you to write who God is on the back. What verses, and once you're done doing that, share a pen with somebody else. Here's an extra pen right here. God's got it. What else did our text include? What did it say about God? He knows He knows, right? What else does he say?

Provide.

He will provide. These things will be provided for you. Will else does he say? Don't worry. He says, don't worry. He straight up says it right.

He's got

This. He's got it. I'm going all the way back here.

The other thing you can write on that card, it may take some time, but I would just say, I would pray and say, God, what can I observe in creation, in nature? That just shows me, you got it. Jesus gives this example of the birds have food. He made these flowers. Maybe that's good enough of a response, but you look at the ocean, all that water, maybe you've got a concern about lack and all you need to do is you just need to think about how big the ocean is or how big the universe is

And the breath of light. We don't control how we wake

Up. Yeah. Amen. Yeah. We've got the breath that's in us, right? You think about all the functions right now going on at a cellular level in your body, breathing, circulation, digestion, all, and I'm not a medical. I know we've got medical people in here and I would slaughter it. Yeah. What else? I think

Just being grateful here,

What he's provided. That's another thing you could put on there. It's like your history. How have you seen God work already up to this point? What's he done for you? How has he proved himself to you? Yeah. Amen. Do you know what a sacrament is? A sacrament. The idea of a sacrament is the overlap between heaven and earth where you're on earth, but you experience a piece of heaven. In the Protestant church, we really have two official sacraments. One is baptism, the other is communion. If you're a Catholic, you've got the seven sacraments and they've included it, which I don't know about those seven sacraments specifically, but I think there's a lot of areas where heaven crosses over with earth, where we experience God's presence on earth, but we have one clear sacrament which is taking communion together. It's us on earth, but we are joining God in a heavenly reality when we take this meal together.

So let's pray and then I'm going to invite you to come forward, take the elements back to your seat and we'll take communion together. Father, we thank you for loving us, caring for us, and knowing on our card the things that cause anxiety, the things that we have need of, and you're bigger and better than what is on that side of the card. God, we entrust to you are worry, our anxiety, our concerns. We don't want to have a little bit of faith. We don't want to be those ou of little faith. We want to be those of like, yeah, we've got a lot of faith. We're okay because we have so much faith. Anxiety isn't racking our life because of how much we trust in you. We love you. God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for putting up with us and our anxiety. Deliver us. Let us be a church that's delivered from anxiety. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 6:22-24

Transcript

Last week we looked at treasures on earth versus treasures in heaven. And I attempted to impress upon you the fact that the timing and the location of heavenly treasures are here and now rather than not someday, after you die. In a foreign land of clouds, harps and angels storing up treasures in heaven, having eternal treasures that don't corrupt is very much something that is going on in the present. And those rewards are accessible to you in the present. Your engagement with those tragedies are something that is happening now, not after you die and go to heaven. Jesus is teaching that heaven is here and now already, but then there's aspects of it that are not yet. So that was one part that was core to what we were looking at last week. We also, the treasures that we have, they're eternal rewards that the Father gives us as we practice our faith in a genuine way before him.

So when you go and you're giving money to somebody who is poor and you're doing that just as a genuine expression of your faith between you and God, you're sitting maybe at the light and you just feel the prompting of God like, Hey, give this guy something some money, right? You roll down your window, you give him some money. As you do that, your father in heaven sees what you're doing in secret, sees that you're doing that act and you have treasures in heaven. He rewards you. It says, and those treasures are eternal treasures. So last week I tried to say there's some synonyms here. The idea of eternal fruit, fruit that lasts. Remember in John 15 it says that Jesus chose you in him, that you would bear fruit and that that fruit would remain, that's a similar idea to being rewarded by the Father for these acts, these pious acts or religious acts that are done as well as treasures.

You're accumulating these treasures from doing that. They're in heaven, but you're participating in the kingdom of heaven here and now. Now I'm still wrapping my head around that. So I would just encourage you because maybe you've gotten some good teaching and you already knew that and you're like, Josh, it's taking you too long to catch up. But for me, it's like I've, for the most part, most of my Christian life, I've thought of treasures in heaven as this future thing that someday I'm going to get access to and I'm supposed to store 'em up. And that just doesn't line up with Jesus's teaching about heaven at all. So we have treasures. The treasures we have are eternal rewards that the father gives us as we practice our faith in a genuine way before him. And I think that those things are enjoyable to us. I think that as we do these, as we're obeying God, we're participating as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven in a parallel world, a parallel society.

We're here on earth but we're obeying God. And there is these rewards. He doesn't define the rewards clearly of exactly what it is, but I think that there is this sense of being rewarded, of deep satisfaction and joy and happiness. And yes, God's defending me. Yes, God is vindicating me. Yes, God's giving me truth. I think all of that is this idea of there you're just an enriched person, a fruitful person enjoying that fruitfulness as you are participating in this economy. It's kind of like he's laying out an economy, and I used some of that language last week. The time horizons of investments, our hearts are to be aligned. This was the closing thought. Our hearts are to be aligned with these rewards or treasures as our priority pursuit. And so this is kind of how it works, is like you decide, okay, I'm ready to be a follower of Jesus and hopefully you let him know and you have a conversation with him that's called prayer, right?

You let him know, I'm ready to be a follower of you. I'm ready to accept what you've done on the cross and I want to identify myself with you. And then once you do that, you say, Hey church, whatever church you're a part of, you're like, I'm ready. And that church to say, great, your next step is to be baptized because that's an outward sign of that internal thing. So if you haven't yet been baptized, you got to let me know. We'll set up the baptism tank out here. We'll warm up the water and we'll baptize you and we'll celebrate that you are a follower of Jesus. And then you begin, you're living, you're walking, you're following Jesus, you're doing the things that He's talking about here. But internally, so much of what Jesus is talking about is internally, your heart alignment is getting shifted around a bit.

And so instead of just taking car blanche, the value system of the world and kind of popular society, things you see on entertainment or maybe the culture of your family, it doesn't matter. There's just some realignment and changes of thinking that have to occur. And so this whole sermon that Jesus is giving, the Sermon on the Mount, he's dealing with these internal deep changes that then flow out into an authentic practice of faith. So we come to this next section here verses 22 through 24. Let me read this to you. The eye of the lamp, the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy or whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness? No one can surf two masters since he will hate one and love the other, or he'll be devoted to one and he'll despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money. Let's pray. Lord, we ask that you would now teach us by your spirit based off of this text. We're so grateful, God that you know our lives, the hairs of our head, the needs, you know how we are wired. You know how we relate to life. And so would you take these instructions here and teach us personally and not so much the person next to us, but we want to hear from you. We give you permission. You may violate our pride or our self-confidence. You may need to convict us of some sin or wrong thinking in our life, and we give you permission. We want to say yes to whatever you say to us this morning. So help us to hear your voice praying. Jesus' name, amen. So there's two sections to this text. There's the first section which talks about spiritual focus and the second section.

Second principle is this idea of spiritual loyalty. So first is spiritual focus and spiritual loyalty. Again, put yourself in this broad context of Jesus's teaching his followers to live in this new kingdom, this heavenly kingdom while still on earth, that there's this internal transformation that's working itself out of these believers. So let's look at this first section, this idea of spiritual focus verses 22 and 23. The first thing that we come across is this idea that the eye is the lamp of the body. We're just look at this sentence for just a second. Okay? The body, your body, the Bible teaches your body is like a lamp in the world. And the thing that is similar about your body and a lamp is that light can shine out of it. What is dissimilar from your body and a lamp is that darkness can shine from your life. Your life can emit darkness. And so Jesus is saying that he's first establishing this idea that you as an individual have lighter darkness emanating from your body.

Jesus said something similar in Matthew chapter five. Earlier on in this very same sermon in Matthew chapter five, verses 14 and 15, he said that you are the light of the world. You're the light of the world. Then he says, a city situated on the hill, it can't be hidden. And then when it comes to a lamp, no one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather a lampstand and it gives light for all who are in the house. So Jesus, he's already talked about your body emitting light out into the world, but he's attaching to it another component, and he's saying that the eye is the lamp of the body. Okay, now things start to break down. What in the world is he talking about? Okay, we get the idea of this light flowing out of our life, but what does it mean for our eye is the lamp of the body.

The eye refers to, if you look up this word in Greek, the eye refers to either the biological object in your face, the eyeball, but it also refers to sight the function of the eyeball. Sight, seeing and focus like what your eyeball does. What are you looking at? Your focus determines what your life is emitting. That's what Jesus is saying. Your focus determines what your life is emitting. I believe I have this on a slide here. If the eye is healthy, and I'm jumping a little bit ahead here, but we're going to get to this. If the eye is healthy, meaning clear, focused, generous, the whole body will be full of light wise, pure aligned with God. If the eye is unhealthy, meaning evil, greedy, unfocused, the body will be full of darkness, foolish, impure, misaligned with God. It suggests that one's outlook or focus directly impacts your spiritual state. So your body is a lamp. That's the first crazy thing that Jesus says. You can't get away from it. You're either emitting light darkness from your body and it is corresponding with what you're focused on. So what comes from your body is based on the condition of your eye.

So he contrasts if your eye is healthy versus if your eye is bad. The idea here again is focus. If your focus, the word healthy is the word sincere. Maybe if you have the King James version, it says, if your eye is single, if your eye is focused, take out your phone for just a second turn on the camera feature. I want you to just point it at something. And if you have a phone made in the last five years, I have the ability. It's like automatically just focusing on your faces, right? Pull it out, point your phone at something, point it at something. Okay? I am going to point it over at you guys over here. Alright. Hey, there you go. Okay. Then what I want you to do is I want you to take the phone and I want you to hold it against your leg right there.

There's a very big difference between those two pictures, right? One, I'm using my camera to let it do its job and it's able to kind of focus on the room. The other is just, it's against my leg. The camera can't do its function. So Jesus is saying, Hey, your eye, your focus can either be sincere, singular, or your eye can be unhealthy. Literally, it's the word evil. You can have an evil eye, and that is what determines what comes from your life. A single eye in this context is one that has a clear, undivided focus on God.

It has an undivided focus on God and his righteousness. It represents an outlook of generosity where one's intentions and actions are aligned with God's will leading to a life full of light, understanding wisdom and spiritual clarity. So there's a lot of metaphor happening in this passage. Jesus is, it's like you go in, you kind of dive into this text and you start getting into the metaphor and you're like, whoa, this is crazy. What's going on here? We've got the bodies a lamp, and the eye determines the quality of what's coming off of the lamp and it's easy to get lost in the weeds. We give you three principles about focus here that Jesus is teaching from this metaphor. The first is a principle of focus. Your spiritual eye represents your focus or attention in life where your attention goes, your life follows. A healthy focus on God and his values leads to a life filled with spiritual light.

So Jesus's teaching his disciples saying, I want your eye to be single. I think that's probably the best way to think about that. First, the positive that Jesus is teaching a single eye just focused on God. Again, we go back to Josh kind of in his dilemma at 15 years old of like, well, if I'm focused on God, what part of the pie do I give to school? And what part of the pie do I give to work? And my teacher who said, no, the whole thing, you're focused on God, and then God authors your life through you like you are like Joshua, being instructed by Moses. What did God tell Moses? Or what did Moses tell Joshua in Joshua chapter one? What was the activity of this general? Who's supposed to go and take the promised land? What's Joshua supposed to be doing? He's supposed to take an attitude and do an action.

Do you remember that? The first action was be strong and courageous, and then he says, yeah, go and just meditate on God's word day and night. Wait, what about sharpening spears, training the troops and all that stuff? God tells Joshua, no, I just want you to meditate on God's word day and night. Now, Joshua did a lot as the new leader of Israel. The framework of Joshua's life was this idea of just be a spiritual man, be somebody that is meditating and just tapping into the fact that you're related to God and God is going to, well we'll see in a few weeks is all these things will be added to you. You know that verse, Matthew 6 33, all these things will be added to you. You're focused. The focus of your life is on these spiritual things. So spiritual eye, having a spiritual eye, the singular focus on God.

But then we also have this principle of spiritual health. Your spiritual health impacts your entire being. Just as healthy eyes lead to clear vision. A healthy spiritual life brings clarity and purpose to all aspects of your existence. Jesus is training his disciples not to play harps and sit on clouds forever. Instead, he's training them to live as robust citizens on earth to die, go to heaven and come back and reign and rule with him. Remember, the vision of God for humanity is a renewed heavens and earth where Jesus reigns and rules. So what's going on here in this training is not like death happens and existence ceases and these things of Jesus don't apply anymore. No, this is who you're designed to be for eternity. And then the third principle that's here is the principle of consequences. The condition of your spiritual eye has significant consequences.

An unhealthy focus leads to spiritual darkness, which is pervasive and affects your whole life. If we go back up to this verse, verse 2023, he says, if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. That word darkness, there is the word that's used for dusk kind of when you can no longer distinguish colors, things just kind of become silhouettes in the late evening. As the sun goes down, you've got kind of the shadows is another way for saying it kind of operating where you've ever been in a room where you're like, man, turn on the lights. I can't see what I'm trying to do in front of me. He says, if your eye is bad, the concept of your focus, your attention, if it's bad, then your body is just full of shadows. But he says, if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness?

That's like when I went to the Carlsbad caverns with my uncle when I was nine years old and we were like 1800 feet underground, or I don't know how deep you go down, but the guy turns off the light and you wave your hand in front of your face and you can't see anything. You can almost feel that darkness. It's so dark. That's the word here that Jesus is using is it goes from your body's kind of shadowy where things are kind of confusing and obscured to what's emanating from your life is an oppressive darkness because of what you are focused on. So interesting. It is fascinating to me. You'll notice, just let me just give you a drive by observation on this. Jesus is establishing some correlating logic based off of both what you look at and what you're focused on and the nature of your being.

So it would be helpful to wake up tomorrow morning and go, something's coming from my life. It's either going to be light or darkness. It also would be helpful to go, what I'm going to spend my time focused on is going to determine the light that comes from my life. Jesus. Yeah. He makes that correlation, which is to me just fascinating how it may seem minor, but there's actually, to me, there's significance in how he's explaining the human nature and how you're designed. I don't think I go around, I guess maybe it's me. I just don't go around thinking, what's the light coming from my life? Maybe if you grew up in a new agey hippie community, that's what you think about. But for me, that's not kind of how I do life. But Jesus is like, no, no. There's something coming. There's light coming from your body and it's correlated to what you're thinking about the focus, the attention of your life. Okay, let's look at this last principle here. Spiritual loyalty.

Verse 24. He says, no one can serve to masters since either he will hate one and love the other, or he'll be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. So another life principle that he throws out here, it is not possible to serve two masters. So put yourself in Jesus's time as he's teaching his disciples when he using the term masters, he's thinking of slaves and masters, right? It's not like Marvin who's got two jobs, one in the morning and one in the evening, right? This is the idea of you have a slave master who owns you, not African-American slave, masters slave. This is a societal slavery to pay off a debt shouldn't be race based, at least in the times of Rome. Jesus is just borrowing from a societal reality. It's not saying whether it's good or bad, but he is saying it is impossible to have two of those masters, and then he explains why it's impossible that you can't serve two.

It's because a human only has the capacity to love one master. If you have two masters, you're going to hate or despise one and you'll love and serve the other. There's a great Christian movie that illustrates this point. It's not really a Christian movie, but it's the same idea, right? So Andy, she's the main character. She goes to work for this fashion magazine and who is playfully called the devil, Miranda Priestly, and she becomes more and more involved. Andy becomes more and more involved in her job, and she starts neglecting her personal relationships and her own internal values, and she ultimately violates her own kind of ethical standards. The film showcases her struggle between two masters, her career ambitions under the demanding and high powered editor, Miranda Presley and her own integrity and personal life. Andy's journey reflects the impossibility of serving both of these masters effectively without one aspect of her life suffering significantly.

And you know the inflection point, or if you've seen the movie, you should. It's a fun movie that there's this inflection point or crisis moment where Andy's lost all of her friends because she has tried so hard to follow her boss Miranda. Jesus applies this principle to a contrast between serving God and serving money. If our money is our master, but God is also your master, you'll end up despising God or despising money. Neither is a good option. Did you hear that? Neither? It's not good to obviously despise God, but it's also not good to despise money, and I think that the wrong relationship that occurs with money comes from trying to serve it rather than serving God.

Jesus is teaching his followers about this idea of living in his kingdom and having realigned priorities this new society where they live. I would imagine that Jesus in this teaching was thinking somewhat about Solomon. Solomon was the third king in Israel. He surpassed all the kings in the world in his riches and his wisdom. The whole world wanted an audience. It says the whole world wanted an audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom that God had put into his heart. Every man would bring his annual tribute items and silver and gold and clothing and weapons and spices and horses and mules. So Solomon is doing really good. He's super successful, but then look at what it means for him to have a divided heart. King Solomon loved many foreign women in addition to Pharaoh's daughter, Moabite, Ammonite, mite Sian and hitite women from the nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, and so this is the narrator as it's telling Solomon's soaring, here's what God had said.

You must not excuse me. You must not intermarry with them and they must not intermarry with you because they will turn your heart away from following their gods to these women. Solomon was deeply attached in love, and here's the results of this happening in Solomon's life. He had 700 wives. That's a lot, 700 wives who were princesses and 300 who were concubines, and they turned. What did they do? They turned his heart away. It says that when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away to follow other gods. He was not. Look at that word there wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord his God as his father David had been. And then it says in verse six, Solomon did what was evil in the Lord's sight, and unlike his father David, he did not remain loyal to the Lord.

Solomon is this perfect picture of a guy who just got had an evil eye. He gave into a temptation in his life. He did not obey God's instructions externally. He has all these wives and it affects internally who he is so that he no longer can be wholehearted and loyal before God. But look at this passage out of Hebrews about Jesus. First of all, we are called to keep our eyes on Jesus, who is the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith, and what did Jesus do? It's for the joy that was laid before him. He endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. In this verse, here you have Jesus being like sticking with the plan, sticking with the program that God had given him. He endures the cross and we are called to look at Jesus as our example in life.

Unlike Solomon, Jesus never wavered in his mission or his devotion to the Father. He remains steadfast even in the face of the cross. In Jesus, we see the embodiment of perfect spiritual focus and unwavering loyalty. He is not only our savior, but he's also our example. We strive to live lives of focused faith, undivided loyalty. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus drawing inspiration and strength from his perfect example. There's a reason why Christians throughout the last 2000 years have called that morning time of reading the Bible devotions because it's a time in the day where you're saying, God, I want to start my day devoted to you. Now, whatever you do in that time of your Bible reading and prayer, the idea is just again, we're going back to the Lord saying, God, I'm devoting myself to you. I am yours. You bought me, and I want to live my life for you.

And so Jesus here is instructing his followers saying, Hey, this is what it means to live as a follower of me. This is what it means to live as a citizen in my kingdom. It means that your eye is single. There's a loyalty that you have to me. You're letting all the rest of life be downstream from that primary relationship that you have with me. Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for this text that instructs us, God in our own life of just great distraction and kind of a broken relationship with focused and clear thinking, and we just live with a lot of distractions around us. We just ask that your spirit would take this thing here that you're talking about of focus and loyalty, and we're glad that we don't have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but you Spirit wants to make us like this. You want to make this a real thing in our life more and more. You're not beating us over the head with this idea. You're just saying, Hey, let me take over. Let me give you this focus. Let me give you this loyalty. We give you that permission to go to work in our lives and accomplish that. Thank you, Lord. I.

Matthew 6:19-21

Transcript

As a church. We're going through the book of Matthew and we're in the part of Matthew where Jesus is preaching a famous sermon called the Sermon on the Mount. It's three chapters long for us and we have been looking at the part of this sermon where we just finished up these three different practices of righteousness. Some call them spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices. He is talking about living and doing a genuine spirituality rather than it being a performative spirituality. He talked about caring for the poor about praying and about fasting, and we looked at fasting last week and now we're coming to verses 19 through 24.

Jesus is teaching through this whole. The framework that is most helpful to understand is that Jesus is teaching about his kingdom and he's called it the kingdom of heaven. We know this from chapter four. It says that Jesus is traveling around the region of Galilee from synagogue to synagogue, and he's proclaiming the gospel. That's the term that we use the gospel, but it's the gospel of the kingdom. So we often talk about you need to go do evangelism as a follower of Jesus. We do evangelism and we have people, we present the gospel of that you're a sinner who needs the forgiveness of God that's brought to you through the person of Jesus, through his death on the cross. Our sins are forgiven. He's raised to show the victory over sin and that the sacrifice of the cross was acceptable and that if you'll receive the work of Jesus, you'll be accepted and forgiven and you'll experience new birth.

You'll be translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. But this is the thing that is the gospel, but the gospel is also the gospel of the kingdom and we do ourselves a disfavor if we are just preaching a point in which you pray a prayer and you just become born again. The gospel that Jesus preached, the gospel of the kingdom is what we are looking at and it entails a life, not that we are earning the favor of God, but we're putting in great effort to evidence the work of God in our life, having become a follower and adopting this kingdom ethic instead of living as Jews caught up in the Roman empire politics of the day or trying to climb a higher social standing through external religious practices like the Pharisees we're doing, Jesus is teaching his followers to adopt the framework.

A parallel framework of the kingdom here is very quickly kind of the way that I would summarize some of the ground that we've covered. The kingdom has a different lens for seeing the nobodies and the outcast of society that we call that the beatitudes, but really it's this inaugural statement where Jesus kind of throws open the gates of the kingdom and says, these are the kind of people that are welcome here in this new society. We see that the law and the prophets, which for this audience it was our Jewish core story, is meant to be fulfilled. So Jesus is like, no, no, no, I'm not here to abolish the law. There's a trajectory that you inherited by being Jewish. You inherited the law and the prophets, and I'm not here to get rid of that. I'm here to fulfill it. The trajectory of that story is continuing on and the promises are being fulfilled in me operating out of a genuine heart.

Jesus has been talking about versus pretending for a temporal audience. So in his society, he's really emphasizing this genuine heartedness, this pure heartedness, this sincerity, and then accepting the ethical standards of the kingdom at a heart level and not just a superficial level of behavior, but really being infected in our core by an ethical standard where anger is put on par with murder, lust is put on par with adultery, and it's this invasion of a society to the core of who we are. And then it's these activities in interpersonal relationships and the treating of enemies and the treating of the poor and prayer and fasting. All of that just flows out of this life that has adopted this society that runs in parallel to this earthly society where we live. One of the most important things to understand as we look at the text this morning is that the kingdom of heaven is not a future place only. So when I say heaven, what do you think of when I throw out the idea of heaven? What's your paradigm? What comes to mind?

The tradition is harps and angels and clouds.

Yeah, exactly like clouds playing your harp. And when does that happen? After you die. After you die. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the answer I was hoping that you would give. But for Jesus, when he's teaching about the kingdom of heaven, it is not a future place. It's not a future which is a reference to time and place is a reference to location, and we're going to get into that. That is one of the most important pieces of understanding our text this morning. The Kingdom of Heaven is a present invisible society running in parallel to the earthly society where you and I live. How we live reflects one of those two societies. Let's look at the text briefly.

Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in steel, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don't break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness? No one can serve two masters since either he will hate one and love the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. Let's pray together. Father, we give you the next few minutes and we give you permission to teach us.

We want to be shaped by your word and we ask that your spirit would teach us, help us to discern this passage rightly. Help us to have a proper relationship with the earth and the things that we treasure here on earth versus having treasures in heaven. Would you help us to understand this? I pray to God that you would maybe deconstruct in our lives some bad understandings of this passage. Maybe we grew up hearing about this and it's actually not what you're talking about. And so Lord, we just give you permission to teach by your spirit. We give you this time, we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

So I'm going to focus on verses 19 through 21 this week and then 22 through 24 next week. Very similar ideas but taught with a couple of different principles over the last couple weeks. Maybe in your social media feed or online or maybe in real life. You've seen the new Apple vision pro goggles that kind of look like this. And what's kind of somewhat of a breakthrough with Apple's technology is that it's augmented reality. It's not just virtual reality, but there is the ability to see the real world. But then what the technology is doing is it's layering on a piece of seeing something that is in the space, almost like putting a TV screen kind of in your space in front of you. And another version of that is kind of like when you pull open Google maps and you do satellite view and you're doing directions and it takes and sticks that blue line on top of the freeway that you're driving on, right? It's an augmented version of that satellite image. The Jesus is giving his followers an augmented reality. The kingdom of heaven is layered onto the present reality.

This passage, these first few verses, the case to be made here is that these verses 19 through 21 are concluding remarks tied in with verses one through 18. Now, I've not understood that until I studied this passage to preach this sermon. I had originally outlined my sermons for this first quarter of the year attaching verses 21 or 19 through 24 as its own teaching on materialism. But the more I studied this passage in read other commentators, I became convinced of this idea that this teaching here is Jesus concluding verses one through 18. So again, one through 18 was Jesus instructing his followers not to perform their religious practices like caring for the poor so that they can be seen in public and get a public reputation as being like, oh, you're the ones caring for the poor, good for you. And it's this only really doing a righteous act in a performative way in order to really kind of get some social standing.

And Jesus is you have your reward. And then in contrast to that, Jesus says, listen, what I want you to do is I want you to do that thing. I want you to care for the poor, but I want you to do it with God being the audience. I want it to be something that is deeply connected with your relationship with God and it's flowing just genuinely out of your life. Not so you'll get any kind of temporal reward, but God's going to reward you. And three times it says, related to caring for the poor to prayer into fasting, it says you'll have your reward. So just briefly to make the case, there's two strong reasons why verses 19 through 21 conclude this previous section. The first is that in verse 16, the person who is fasting as a hypocrite, Jesus says, that person disfigures their face so that it's really obvious in public that they're fasting.

And Jesus says, don't do that. Then you fast forward over to verse 19 and he talks about storing up earthly treasures and he says that moth and rust destroy or that word destroy is also disfigure. It's the same Greek word destroy or disfigure. It's an uncommon Greek word. It's not found hardly anywhere else. And yet Matthew is really kind of drawing our attention and saying, Hey, here's this word that's really a rare Greek word, but it's found in 16 and in 19. And so rather than there being discontinuity between fasting and then talking about materialism, I think that Matthew is or he's, he's pulling to the surface one of these teachings of Jesus and saying, Hey Jesus, this is one of his teachings that really concludes and ties in with these first three, three religious practices, but also the theme of verses one through 18 is about doing righteous deeds for earthly rewards versus doing righteous deeds for God and receiving a reward from him.

So I think it's helpful and appropriate in our minds to connect the idea of God rewarding us. And then Jesus talking about having treasures in heaven, storing up treasures in heaven. So let's look at verses 19, 19 and 20, if we can find it. Maybe we can't find it, but he says in 19, he says, don't store it for yourselves treasures on earth. And then he says, but store it for yourselves treasures in heaven. He talks about he kind of defines, gives a characteristic to treasures stored on earth, which is that they decay and they perish. They're finite, whereas treasures stored in heaven have this longevity. When I set out to understand this text, here's some of the questions or literally, these are the issues that I have with this text. And just so you know, that's not sacrilegious to say I am frustrated in studying the Bible.

Sometimes you come to a text and you're like, God, I wish you wouldn't say it like that, or I wish you'd give me more answers. And so this is a common part of my note taking. These are some of my questions in wrestling, is this text about not storing up treasures on earth? Is this opposing having earthly savings accounts or having some kind of retirement plan? And then another question I have is, what are treasures in heaven? What is that? What is a treasure in heaven? Another question is what activities on earth equate to treasures a treasure in heaven? What do you do on earth to get the treasure in heaven? What role will treasures in heaven play if heaven is all about Jesus? Why do I need treasures in heaven? If I'm only in heaven for a time leading up to the millennial reign with Christ and then there's the new heavens and the new earth and I come back with Christ to reign and rule on the earth with him, what's the point of heaven treasures up in heaven where what happens?

Are those fair questions? Yeah. Okay, so do you see some of the problems with those questions? There are two problems with the questions that I'm asking here, and it took me a little bit of wrestling to kind of identify my issue. The first issue is a problem of location and the second is an issue of timing. The problem of location. I'm seeing myself outside of heaven and thus absent from the treasure in heaven right now. So when I think you think of stor treasures in heaven, then I'm thinking I have historically thought of this text as like I don't have the treasure now because it's located in heaven. Okay? That's the first problem. The second issue that I am evidencing with my questions is that I have a problem of time. I'm seeing myself on earth now, but in heaven in the future after I die, I think I'm not just the only one that has a problem of viewing heaven in that way.

I've already alluded to the fact that to understand Jesus's teaching on the sermon on the mount, we have to be a bit, have our view of heaven dismantled a bit so that it's not clouds and harps and angels and us sitting there playing those harps, but heaven, the kingdom of heaven is a present reality on location right now. Let me kind of show you some scriptures that teach this. Just sampling, just sampling a bit from Matthew. We don't have to go outside of Matthew. We don't even have to really go beyond what we've studied so far as a church. Matthew three, two, here's what Jesus taught. Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near, the kingdom of heaven has come near. So where's it located? It's near it's close by. That's right. Look at another teaching from Jesus. When Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water.

The heavens suddenly opened for him. We could say, okay, maybe that's like the clouds parting. If we didn't read further, maybe it's like a picturesque because we talk about the heavens and the sky, but here is like the heavens opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove coming down on him. So there's this crossover between heaven and earth like Jesus is here, the heaven's part and the spirit in the form of a dove is coming down on his head. But not only that, verse 17 and then a voice from where heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. Now, where was the location of those who heard this voice? They're on earth, but they're hearing a voice from heaven. So there's this crossover between heaven and earth and Jesus is teaching his followers that the kingdom of heaven is near. He's bringing it near and he's teaching an ethic. He's teaching a very real earthy lifestyle of the kingdom. The kingdom is here. It is in your midst.

Let me give you one more from chapter four verse 17. From then on, Jesus began to preach, repent. Why? Because the kingdom of heaven has come near. So again, when you think about heaven, where is its location and is the location that you give to heaven mean that it's inaccessible to you? It shouldn't be. It's different from the earthly realm in which you live, but just like a pair of apple vision pro goggles or your Google maps, it's accessible, it's present just as much as that blue line on the map is present if you hit the right button. And so Jesus is, it's so important because here's the thing, I grew up, I had a misconstrued understanding of treasures on earth versus treasures in heaven and wrestled and didn't like this passage because it's like, well, where's heaven? Location is one aspect and then timing.

It's present. It's present. At the end of this message, we're going to finish with the idea of true, but yet more to come. And I'm going to give you that theological phrase here in just a minute. The mistake so many Christians are making is to think of heaven as a future experience that follows death. Instead, Jesus is teaching his followers to live their earthly life as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Now, so he says things like, I don't know if I have this in my text. Yeah, I don't. But he says things like, we don't foster anger and revenge because we now live as citizens of heaven.

We cherish the poor because Jesus just told me that theirs, they have the kingdom. We fast because temporal food doesn't have a grip on our soul like it once did. Oh yeah. We use honest, trustworthy, wholesome sentences to communicate because we're part of a society where words are an extension of ourselves and reflect the authority of God. So the kingdom of heaven is erupting, and I've used this, I always cringe when I say this, but sometimes like I had a kid who's sick, my wife's not here because she's taking care of one of our kids that's sick yesterday, so he's probably got strep throat or something like that, and we didn't want you all to get it, but for a moment he had a rash that broke out and the rash was raised bumps and it was this eruption of an internal illness that was being evidenced on the surface of his skin. And the kingdom of heaven is very similar in that it is this deep in working that the Holy Spirit does in our life through the word of God. But then it evidences itself in our interpersonal relationships, how we treat the poor, how we deal with our earthly possessions. It is this society that runs in parallel to the one in which we dwell. For Christians. Death is a transition of the body, but a continuation of the soul.

The soul you have and interact with every day will continue on at death. One of the things that needs to be deconstructed in our own thinking about eternity is that heaven will be dramatically different from earth. It would be more helpful for you to realize that there will be great continuity between your eternal existence and your present existence. There will be some substantial things that change. One of the most substantial will be the body that you have, but you will have a body. Your soul will be an embodied presence. And so doing life through a body and having an identity in a body will be very much contiguous with your earthly experience.

When you get into the arena of investing, we often talks about horizons, short-term horizons, medium-term horizons, long-term horizons, the choice of time horizon as an investor. It influences various factors including the investor's age, risk tolerance, investment goals and liquidity needs. Understanding your time horizon is key to crafting an investment strategy that aligns with your goals and comfort level with risk. The time horizon that we do life on as citizens of heaven is this eternal time horizon. And so all of a sudden the calculations, the risk factors that we can take as life investors, interpersonal relationships, what we spend our time on and our resources on the way that we steward over our lives, it is done differently from somebody who is not a citizen of heaven because their time horizon is different. And so we can afford to do things like a Mother Teresa who wasted her life on the poor.

If you're not a citizen of heaven, and if you think there is no eternal reality, then you would look at that person and say, what a waste of a life. Now she had some earthly praise and I believe she had great joy, but not every day was a happy day for Mother Theresa. There was a lot of pain and suffering that went with living and immense sacrifice. And there's many times where she could have just kind of said, I'm going to write my books and buy a retreat house in Vermont and live on my mountaintop and be happy. And yet she didn't. She faithfully did this life that was invested on a long-term time horizon that if you're not a citizen of heaven, you cannot engage in or it would be anybody would look at it and go, you're a fool. Why would you make that risk or take that sacrifice or forgive that person or let that wrong go.

If your time horizon is just your bodily death, if you see the kingdom of heaven as a place separate from earth and an experience that will occur after you die, then you'll find it difficult to understand what Jesus is teaching. You have a short-term horizon investment strategy. You'll not see continuity between your life in your body now and your future after you die. But Jesus's teaching is that we will when we die, when we're absent from the body, we're present with the Lord, but we are raised a new, we are given a new body and we will reign and rule with Christ on a new heavens, a renewed heavens and earth. Okay, so what does this mean? Let's go back to verses 19 through 21. Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don't break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be.

Also. What does this mean? Jesus has warned his followers against performing righteous acts before humans, before a human audience and being rewarded by society. Instead, Jesus instructed his followers to give to the poor, to pray to fast in a genuine way with a father watching. And he promises that the Father will reward these activities, these rewards are treasures. This past week, or maybe it was the week before, two weeks ago, I found out that my friend Steve passed away. He was one of the first people that came and stood in our line to get food, and he had been in decline for six months. I was angry at death when I found out that he had died because you could see him heading in that direction. He had become like a shell of himself. And I would talk to him like, what's wrong Steve? Why are you all of a sudden so quiet?

Why are you losing weight? Have you seen a doctor? And then a couple of weeks ago, Ronaldo came and said, Steve died. And as I was thinking about this idea of serving the poor and Steve was in a place where he was on disability, he took the food that we gave him and he fed. He would make meals for his parents. He was caring for his parents. And the reward in serving Steve was the friendship and the comradery. And I think that there is this not a storing up treasures that are inaccessible in heaven now, but there's an investment in a genuine investment in doing righteous things that then equate to earthly treasures, rewards that Jesus promises that we enjoy now and will enjoy in the future. I don't want to, this is the next paragraph that I'm going to read. I forget what I put on my slides.

This is a genuine right living that Jesus is calling to us a genuine right living done in the presence of God and the outcome, the reward is treasured by us as citizens. The heart is fully invested on a long-term horizon schedule where heaven is a present today and rewards from the Father have longevity. I think this is what when we go into John 15 and the whole vine in branches analogy, Jesus says, I've chosen you that you would bear fruit and that your fruit would remain that it would stay. I think it's the same idea. We are redeemed back to the image of God, that we're bearing the image of God, we're restored in our function, pre-fall function. We're being made more and more. We're being renewed in our minds. We're being transformed so we can be fruitful. That fruitfulness remains. We're enjoying it. We're treasuring it.

It's where our heart is at. I think all of that is the idea here of storing up your treasures in heaven and it's incorruptible. Nobody can take away from me the joy of serving Steve. Nobody can take that away from me. I mean the reward of just loving your neighbor and caring for somebody and being, and I don't have anything to offer him. That's the grace of God upon me. Where'd the food come from? I didn't even go and find it that got dropped in our laps. Just the joy of all of that stuff coming together and being able to participate in that. I believe that that is the idea of having a treasure and having your heart lined up with that treasure. I'm running short on time, but this is not the only place where this idea of being rewarded is spoken of. In one Corinthians three 12 through 15, the passage speaks of different materials people may use to build upon the foundation of Jesus Christ.

And it is suggested that our works will be tested by fire. So Paul's commenting on all the different pastors that have come through Corinth, and some of them were bad, they weren't great teachers, and they were kind of like just trying to get a following, and they were kind of the hypocrites that Jesus talked about. And Paul says, this stuff's going to be tested by fire and what remains is of lasting value comparable to gold, silver, and costly stones, similar concepts that the things you do in God's kingdom are the things that remain. And again, we're called to this long-term horizon where we're living a life where it's like what I do today has this longevity. Two Corinthians five 10, Paul mentions that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ where we will receive what is due for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

In Luke 14, 12 through 14, Jesus teaches about inviting the poor, crippled, lame and blind to a banquet instead of friends, relatives, and rich neighbors. He mentions that such acts of kindness will be rewarded at the resurrection of the righteous, highlighting the value of selfless, altruistic actions. So this is what we call the already, the already but not yet framework. The already but not yet framework. The kingdom of heaven is already, but there is also an aspect that is not yet the already. This aspect of the framework acknowledges that within the first coming of Jesus, key aspects of God's kingdom have already been inaugurated through Christ's life, death and resurrection, significant victories over sin, death, and the devil have been achieved. Believers experience the reality of God's kingdom now through the presence of the Holy Spirit transformation in their lives and preparation in God's mission. And then the not yet part, not yet, despite the current experience of God's kingdom, there is a future aspect that has not yet been fully realized. This includes the final defeat of evil, the complete restoration of creation, the resurrection of the body, and the full manifestation of God's glory. Believers live in hope and anticipation of this complete fulfillment, which will happen at Christ's second coming.

When I was a 15-year-old,

I was really starting my relationship with God and I was like, man, I like God was just meeting me. And I was like reading my Bible and I was like, God, I want you to have more of my life. But I had this picture of a pie chart in my head and I was trying to figure out, okay, how much of the pie chart am I supposed to give to God because he really wants to be the priority in my life, but then I know school is important and friendships with people, my family's important and I'm going to have to have a job at some point. Which part of the pie chart does God get? So I asked one of my teachers, I was at a Christian school, I said, what piece of the pie? And he said, Josh, he gets the whole pie. Oh man, my brain broke. I was like, but what do I do with all the rest of the, how do I do the rest of the time? And it took me some time. It took me some years to realize, no, no, there is this inaugurated kingdom, this kingdom reality where we're just doing normal life and this parallel kingdom is present and we are operating as just citizens in that parallel kingdom in the place where we live in our normal everyday life.

Serving God does not mean living in opposition to having an income, making a profit in a business, being dedicated and spending hours and hours on honing a skill, doing a job that is not profitable but is needed and something you're passionate about that is not an opposition to God, that's not storing up treasures on earth. It is very likely the realization of living out what God has called you to do. In closing, I think that this is partially the idea of having a legacy. When you think of Abraham, God made this promise to Abraham and said, I'm going to make you into a nation that will be a blessing.

And yet Abraham doesn't get to live to see it. He gets to participate in it being carried out by having a son named Isaac. But yet there is this, I don't think it's debatable that that's a great reward in the life of Abraham. That is like a treasure. Don't you think he treasured Isaac? He did. And then for David, you think of David being a man of God comes to him and says, I'm going to make you a royal lineage. I'm going to establish your house, and the throne will always be in your family line. Well, David doesn't get to see the full end of that, but he gets to participate. He hear that promise from God. Both of these promises are rewards from the Father. They're stored, treasure fulfilled in Christ. May we live our lives in Christ and experience the heaven and earth overlap where the Father is rewarding us with treasures that are indestructible.

Let's pray together. Lord, we ask that you would establish your kingdom in our hearts so that we treasure the rewards that come from living a righteous life in a genuine way. God, that wherever we may be distracted and storing up earthly treasures and just kind of off maybe faking it or performing it, and it's just some piece of our life that's not really lined up with your society, your kingdom, we just ask that you would work in our lives and that you would continue to transform us and bring us in further and further into your realm, the Kingdom of heaven. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 6:16-18

Transcript

Matthew chapter six, verses 16 through 18. In the nineties, my dad was starting off his ministry to parents. He was teaching parenting conferences. He decided to do a big blowout conference at Sandy Cove Christian Retreat Center up in Northeast Maryland. And he thought, okay, in order for me to really draw a crowd, maybe I can get a well-known Christian music artist that families love. And so at the time, there was this really popular singer who made Christian albums. And if you have kids either my age or you had kids at that time, you know, probably knew of this person. He would make all these kind of Bible songs for kids. And so my dad signed the contract, had the guy coming out, but people warned us, they said, listen, we did a concert with this individual and they are not very nice.

And sure enough, so my dad, on the day of this big concert, I think we had to sell 800 tickets, sold it out. My job, my dad was the kind of guy, all of us had a job, there was five of us, and all of his kids were doing something right. So I was logistics, pre-con, making sure the sound check was good, making sure everybody was happy. So I'm in there watching this person get ready, get their guitar all tuned up, and there was 15 kids that somehow had made it in before the doors were officially opened. And they were in there screaming like, yeah, what's up? And this guy was a total jerk. He was like, yo, I'm not that person yet, because he had this kind of stage name. He's like, I'm not that person yet. Get these kids out of here. And it was like, are you kidding?

You're a Christian and you work with kids and you're going to be that horrible. So anyway, what I learned as a probably 13-year-old in this setting was that man, not everybody that claims to be a Christian always acts like a Christian should. Ironic thing was I ended up at a lunch with him, just he and I sitting at a table before the concert started, we had missed the real dinner. And I actually got to tell him as a 13-year-old, maybe you should be a little bit nicer to the people, to the kids you're actually supposed to be. And he kind of listened to me, to his credit, he said, yeah, I just kind of get stressed and I act out. And you're right. I shouldn't do that. Anyway, I learned, learned in that setting that some people are performative in their spirituality. They kind of have a stage name as a Christian, they're kind of doing their thing, but they expected they can kind of turn off their Christianity like a performer steps off a stage and they have no requirement to have character any longer.

And some of us, I think all of us struggle with this to one degree or another as we're being shaped in the image of Christ where there's just a gap looking like Jesus and who we are on Sunday morning. So we may be here and it's like, oh yeah, I love Jesus. But then we get out there and we start driving around and we're like a disaster and somebody just slams their brakes on and it's like, oh yeah, I'm going to get you. I mean, I did that this week. So listen, Jesus wants to change us. So we're reading through the Sermon on the Mount and everything here in the Sermon on the Mount is like this is a new society that Jesus is forming, he's declaring, and he said, the down and out, the vulnerable, the sorrowful, the weak, they're welcomed in and they're said they're congratulated in their state because the kingdom of heaven is for them.

And then he gets into the section about righteousness and how he's not here to throw out the Hebrew scriptures, but he's here to fulfill everything that was written from Genesis all the way to Malachi and that he's going to fulfill the law and the prophets through his ministry, that he's not opposed to it, but he brings in a new layer of righteousness. And so he goes through this section of these six different ways in which you've heard it said, but I say to you, right? And he's giving depth to the ethical standards of this new society. And so for the last three, four weeks now, we've looked at chapter six and three practices that we're going to be a part of every Christian's life, every follower of life. The first was giving to the poor. If you read it in the King James version, it's giving to alms.

And then you get to the next section which is prayer. And he talks about performative prayer, performative alms giving compared to this genuine alms giving and genuine prayer. And now we get to fasting. Fasting. So Jesus is talking about his kingdom. He's saying, my kingdom is not about performance. My kingdom is about genuine people acting sincere in the presence of God. Christianity is safe as long as it doesn't cost me anything or it doesn't cost me anything. So long as I can relegate it to momentary performance or non-physical experiences that is ethereal or esoteric. It means floating out there like a cloud, whereas you live in a body which is not ethereal. And what we're going to see in this text is that we've been emphasizing genuineness and you know the idea of a genuine dollar bill versus a counterfeit dollar bill. We're going to continue with that theme of genuineness, but I want to tap in here to another aspect of these three. We call 'em spiritual practices, or maybe you grew up calling 'em spiritual disciplines.

I have here it says, I've been emphasizing Jesus' warning against performative spirituality. Performative spirituality does religious activity, so society will watch and applaud and we call that being disingenuous, but I want to draw your attention to the grittiness, earthiness, which is not a word. I made it up, and this idea of genuine spirituality. And in all three of these examples of alms giving, caring for the poor, prayer and fasting, there is a sub theme of spirituality that is ordinary, normal, typical, average, unexceptionable run of the mill, plain, same or common, right? That is this idea of it goes from being impractical, kind of floating out there as a concept to being embodied. Before we get right to that point, let's look at the text together. It says, whenever you fast, don't be gloomy. My version would say, don't be an Eeyore. Do you watch Winnie the Pooh?

Yeah. Don't be gloomy like the hypocrites for they make their faces unattractive so that their fasting is obvious to people. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you fast put oil on your head and wash your face so that your fasting isn't obvious to others, but to your father who is in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you, let's pray. Lord, we just ask that you would speak to us through this text, Lord, that you would continue to teach us about the very common normal pieces of living out our faith. We've talked about giving to the poor. We've talked about prayer, this whole idea of our relationship with food and fasting. God, we pray that you would speak to us this morning through this text and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So Jesus says this, when you fast, don't be gloomy like the hypocrites.

Let's just define fasting for a second. Do you know what fasting is? Fasting means that you are going to abstain from food for a period of time. Now it can be something broader than just food. It can be fasting from technology or it can be a practice of subtracting something else from your life. But primarily when we talk about fasting, we're talking about not eating food for a period of time. There is a holiday in the Jewish tradition where they will literally not eat food or drink water for 24 hours. It is a fast, it's a religious holy day for the Jewish people of dedicating themselves to the Lord. Now, fasting is a practice that is found in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It is not just a Christian practice, but we're going to look at it specifically through the history of Israel and then at Jesus's day.

And then I want to talk a little bit about even some of the modern findings around fasting as we head towards this very embodied practice of spirituality. So in Israel's history, there is communal and individual fasting. We go through the Old Testament. We see fasting was primarily a corporate practice, Israel fasted in response to national crisis seeking judgment, repentance or God's intervention. You can see those passages. We also though see individuals faceted such as David in grief and Esther when she was seeking deliverance. So it comes up in the Old Testament. In those settings, we also see that it is significant for mourning and repentance. Fasting expressed deep seated sorrow and humility before God, people wore sackcloth, tore garments and abstained from normal grooming as well as food and drink. That's important because Jesus has some things to say about your physical appearance and fasting.

It's also in the Old Testament connected with prayer, fasting, intensified prayer and supplication. It created a focused space for petition or lament. One of my mentors talked to me about this or explained it in this way, that we are given how many senses, five senses, right? And those senses, the idea is that those senses are signaling sending signals to your brain. If you abstain from one sense, it's almost like one receptor, one channel is now open and there is this ability to receive on a new channel. I would say this is something more experienced then taught in my own journey with fasting. One of the first significant times of fasting in my life was when I was 18 years old in Bible college and started out doing a fast called a Daniel fast, and that was where I ate one meal during the day. It was just a pile of vegetables and that was it, and it was a great experience because all of a sudden, all of the sensation of eating throughout the day and sending those signals to my brain that was turned off and I was in a bit of a weakened state, and I just had this ability.

I felt like, man, I'm like the radio turned on and I'm just hearing things spiritually that are going on. Then I decided, well, this is going so good. I'm going to just do the full on fast. I'm going to cut food out of my diet for 10 days. It was horrible, horrible. My breath stunk. I felt more of a spiritual darkness during that time than when I would normally, and I realized, wow, it's not just that the radio signal that I can receive spiritually, but I'm tuning in, everything's coming in, Satan's screaming in my ear, and I can hear just evil just as much as there is a sense of, yeah, God could speak to me in this setting. So don't think one of the things that when people ask me about fasting, one of the things I often will say is most of the time the benefit is not found.

The spiritual benefit is not found in the fasting moment. Now, if you do, if you're like, man, I'm hearing God's voice and I just love Jesus more when I'm fasting, that's awesome. Just don't lose too much weight. Consult a doctor before you do it. But for in my own experience, fasting is not fun. The benefits for some reason in my own life when I fast on the backend is when there's just this crazy benefit. I always liken it to this sense of being shot out of a cannon of like, man, the wind is at my back. I'm totally motivated. I'm excited about life. I've got vision. I literally think you put a wall in front of me, I'm going to bust through that wall. So it has this ability in it intensifies prints application. Why? So this is one thing though that is a benefit. In two Corinthians 13, Paul talks about his own condition and he says he uses this phrase, I'm weak with Christ. I'm weak with Christ. When was Christ weak?

When was Christ weak? When he was tempted that whole season, the temptation going to the cross, right? He's in this place of just incredible and yet what did God bring about out of the weakness of Christ? He showed his strength. He showed his strength, right? His power was on display through the resurrection. So within your framework of understanding God and relating to God, God is not afraid or looking for you to be superhuman in your strength. The faster you get to this place of weakness and dependency upon God, the more you're positioned for God's power to be demonstrated in your life. In two Corinthians four, Paul says, we went through a season where we were like a clay pot in your garage. He didn't use garage, but it was like you're a clay pot and some experiences like you're knocked down, you're pressed you, you're being jostled about, you're being cracked, but there's an excellency of power. He says, that's in you. That's God's spirit in you that's shining out. God totally has designed for you to be the clay pot jostled around in the garage, not glamorous because it's through your weakness that God's power is demonstrated. That is a principle. So in fasting, we are manipulating our body to be in a place of weakness.

The closest I felt to God over the past seven days was when I was weak, the closest I felt to God was in my weakness. So you go and you fast, you abstain from food and you bring yourself immediately or pretty quickly into a place of weakness. Hey, it kind of short circuits, it's like almost cheating. It brings you to that place of where God wants you to be in weakness, independence upon him. None of that's in my notes, but I do have that slide there, which is kind of cool. Now, Jesus, Jesus, let's jump over to Jesus. There's an increased let frequency of fasting when we get to the New Testament in Jesus time, fasting had become more regular, though not mandatory for devout Jews. The Pharisees prided themselves on fasting twice a week. You can look at Luke 18 verse 12. So it was very much a part of the time of Jesus.

We see Jesus addressing questions about fasting. Jesus is asked by his disciples, why or He's asked his disciples not to fast as often as the disciples of John the Baptist. He's asked why, and Jesus responded with the metaphor of the bridegroom implying that while the bridegroom is with you, when you're doing the wedding rehearsal and the wedding, you don't fast on that day, but in the absence of the bridegroom, then it's appropriate to be fasting, showing. That's his response to this question. And then in Luke 18, there is this story, this parable where Jesus contrasts the self-righteous Pharisee who proudly announces his fasting with the humble tax collector who simply pleads for God's mercy. And there he talks about how the Pharisees prided themselves on fasting twice a week, so fasting common practice at the time of Jesus, and we see that the way that verse 16 is written, Jesus expected that fasting would continue because he says, when you fast, not if you fast, but hey, when you fast as a citizen in my kingdom, here is how you need to do it.

Just a couple of medical things really quickly. There's a number of studies that have shown that fasting is good for your health as long as you are in a state that your doctor approves you to fasting. So if you struggle with your sugar levels or if you have other medical issues around eating or an abuse of food or absence of food, you really should not fast without really having the oversight, not just approval but the oversight of your doctor. But some studies have shown that there's a reduction of oxidative damage and inflammation through fasting. There's the cardiovascular benefits. Intermittent fasting shows a promise in reducing inflammation, aiding in weight loss and improving various cardiovascular risk factors such as blood pressure and your lipid profile. Another study showed the enhanced longevity and disease prevention. There is obviously weight loss and metabolic health, and last one is improved cognitive function.

Fasting can lead to an improved cognitive performance likely due to its effects on cellular and molecular protective mechanisms. There's some pretty cool documentaries on Netflix and Amazon Prime about fasting and not from any Christian perspective, but just there's even, I think the one that I watched was about these fasting clinics maybe in China where people will go for like a 10 days and it's like a hotel where they're caring for you as you fast and they give you a vegetable broth and it's kind of like this mini retreat center. It's peaceful, it's relaxing, but people there because there is this belief that fasting is so beneficial to your health, but not only is fasting good for our physical health, it is appropriate and useful in our relationship with God. Look at this quote from Scott McKnight. This guy wrote the book on fasting. He says this fasting is a response to a sacred moment, not an instrument designed to get desired results.

That's really important. I get this question kind of often about, pastor, I'm going through this, I really need God to answer this prayer. Maybe I need to fast. That's not what fasting is. You're not twisting God's arm by abstaining from food. That's not what God's looking at. He's looking at your heart. He's looking at your heart, and fasting can help your heart get to a place that is the place where God wants you to be. The focus in the Christian tradition is not if you fast, you will get, but when this happens, God's people fast fasting is a response to a very serious situation, not an act that gets us from a good level to a better level. One writer said, and if you get the church's emails, I sent out a 44 page booklet on fasting that's provided by Practicing the Way and John Mark Corner.

It's just a free resource on fasting, and if you didn't get that, talk to me after church and I'll send it to you. But one of the things that he talks about there is that fasting is our body talking to God. There is this just bringing our body along with us in our spirituality. So we've looked at fasting, but then what else does Jesus say? He first is going to command how not to fast. He says, don't be gloomy like the hypocrites for they make their faces unattractive so that their fasting is obvious to people. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. He references the hypocrites again, I say again because he talked about the hypocrites in their giving to the poor. He talked about them when they pray and now he's talking about their fasting. This is performative spirituality. It's a spirituality. A spiritual act is done for a human audience.

Remember Jesus said of the hypocrites giving to the poor, that they sound a trumpet in the synagogues and on the streets and when they pray, they stand in the synagogue on the street corners to be seen. It's all an act. It's all a show that doesn't reflect a true genuine relationship with God and says of them, they've got their reward. Their reward is that they're noted. People think that they're religious, they've got some respect from some corners of whatever religion it is, and Jesus says, look, they've got their reward, but he doesn't just say, don't do this. He also gives some instructions on how to fast. He says, when you fast put oil on your head and wash your face so that your fasting isn't obvious to others, but to your father who sees in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you, so it follows the same template as giving to the poor and prayer that you're doing it in a way that is between you and God, but here it's even you're taking proactive steps to look normal, wash your face off, put the oil on your face. I don't know why you're putting oil on your face because I don't live in that culture, but it seems like it's like put your makeup on or put whatever you need. Get to yourself looking normal rather than having your clothes rent and you've got sat soot on your face and it's like, oh man, that person's super spiritual.

Jesus is emphasizing a practice that does not draw public attention. It is a discreet and private between you and God. The primary audience is God the Father, and he says, you will be rewarded A couple of things in closing, Jesus is not saying, no one can know that you're fasting. He is simply warning his followers not to fast for the purpose of getting social praise. He says, let your active fasting flow out of your relationship with God, your fasting because you love God, because you care about your relationship with God. It serves some purpose in your relationship with him. I want to broaden out for a second, just like I said at the beginning and talk about this second aspect of being genuine in our spiritual practices, and I want to ask, do you see the physical nature of these practices? When we look at umms giving to the poor, he says, giving and caring for the poor around you.

Your left hand is not knowing the right hand. Now, that is a metaphor for privacy, but he's using your anatomy to talk about the discretion that you use. Then he talks about praying in solitude. He says, go into your private room and shut the door. Prayer. He's connecting it to a physical act. Can you pray in your car? Yes, of course you can. Can you pray in your bedroom? Yes. Do you need the private room? No, not necessarily, but he's connecting the spiritual act of talking with God. It's happening in a very earthy common space that is private, and then here's fasting. He says, abstain from food, put oil on your head and wash your face. He's saying there's these very physical acts that are going along with this spiritual practice you can't separate. Again. Many see spirituality. This is taking from this book on fasting by McKnight.

He says, many see spirituality as separate from daily life, something lofty, perhaps detached from our bodies and physical needs, but God never intended that. In all three of these examples, there is a sub theme of genuine spirituality that is embodied. McKnight continues on. He says, what strikes a reader today is how significant the body is in the Bible, the ancient Israelites and early Christians did spirituality in the body and with the body. What strikes observers of the church is how insignificant the body has become. You and I have inherited the church's problem with the body whether we like it or not, whether we are Christians or not. It's a part of our western D-N-A-D-N-A. Those of us with a Western mindset have consistently struggled to embrace the insolvable unity of humans, body and soul, spirit at the forefront of spirituality. As Westerners, we don't do a good job of integrating soul spirit with body.

There's this, now there's a move back towards this. If you're in the secular arena, there's a hunger that is expressed and fulfilled through like yoga. Yoga. What is it doing? It's taking and saying, you're more than just a mind, but you are a integrated person. I love yoga because it is both a connection between the physical body and this internal immaterial person that you are. It's a quieting of the body. It's a consideration. It gives you space to do what you're actually desperate for. All of us are desperate for as busy, loud, distracted humans, something like a yoga practice. What it does is it brings us back to, whoa, I am more than just a brain on a stick, right? I'm more than just a brain carried around by a fadi, but I'm this integrated being in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is teaching us about his kingdom right now. He welcomes us into this new society. We can participate because of what Jesus did on the cross with his body.

Do you see that Jesus accomplished your redemption with his body? It literally says in Hebrews that his body was like the veil that was rent. We enter into the presence of God because his body was broken. For us, we are going to celebrate communion, which is these physical elements that we take into our body, and it is this mysterious thing that is happening as we recall, as we recall what Jesus did. Now, if you are a Baptist or kind of grown up in that tradition, which is kind of the tradition I grew up in, there's this bending over backwards like it's just symbolic. Don't read anything into it like the Catholics. Jesus's blood is not there. That weariness that kind of reaction that it's not just Baptist, but there's a lot of kind of denominations with that reaction. It's this fear of the body, right?

And I don't hold to a position that is the blood of Jesus or the physical body of Jesus. That's not my position, but I just want to point out to you that there is, that exists within Western Christianity and Western society, this general fear of the body, and yet when we read the Bible, we see this integration, this deep integration between the body, soul, and spirit. As we follow Jesus, we find ourselves delivered from a society that prizes performance, the weight of seeking public approval falls off of our shoulders. Jesus is saying, here's my new society where you worship me through abstaining, through some food. You connect with me through fasting, through prayer for loving the poor person around you. The timing of this, I mean I didn't really plan this, but it just so happens this Wednesday is an important day. Why is Wednesday important?

That's right. This is Ash Wednesday. It's also Valentine's Day guys, but it's Ash Wednesday. It's the beginning of Lent, so depending on what church Christian tradition you're a part of, maybe you'll get the ash on your forehead, but it marks the beginning of a season. I want to read to you a couple of quotes here about this season, but some of you, I'll just say this, some of you may associate lent with Catholicism, and there's nothing wrong if that feels unfamiliar. It may be like me. I did not grow up in a Christian denomination that celebrated Lent, but consider this fasting isn't owned by any one denomination. Early Christians of all kinds practice. This discipline Lent gives us a structured season to reconnect with an ancient way of focusing our hearts on Jesus. Here's a quote

That hopefully that's a cool quote. I don't see it in my text, but here it says, to repeat what was said a moment ago, we cut ourselves up into soul and body. The soul is immortal, the body mortal. Therefore, the body doesn't ultimately or eternally matter, wired with this western mindset, our bodies and our spirits don't work together very well. Here is just an encapsulation of Lent. Lent is a call to renew our commitment grown dull perhaps by a life more marked by routine than by reflection. After a lifetime of mundane regularity or unconsidered adherence to the trappings of faith Lent requires me as a Christian to stop for a while to reflect again on what is going on in me. I am challenged again to decide whether I myself do truly believe that Jesus is the Christ, and if I believe whether I will live accordingly when I can no longer hear the song of angels in my life and the star of Bethlehem as grown dim for me.

I love that passage, that quote, and I would encourage you as you go through this week and into this season, maybe you're not going to celebrate Lent this year. That's fine. There's nothing that says it makes you a better Christian, but it is a tradition, a Christian tradition that goes back centuries according to a Christian calendar. Rather than setting a calendar based off of when kids go to school or when your work is leased busy, there is this Christian calendar and is this season that leads up to Easter and it's typically marked by this renewed devotion of like, Lord, I want to reflect and anticipate the great sacrifice that you made on the cross. So Jesus teaches on fasting. It's both an emphasis on a genuine spirituality, not a performative spirituality, but if I could just plead with you to recognize and understand that you are not just a brain, but you are a embodied soul and that body, you are not called to be disembodied, right?

You are called for this body to be put off and to be given a new body. So some reason you and I having this body is a part of our being. The image of God, you're bearing the image of God is not just your immaterial aspect. It is very much a part of it's having a body and our body participates in this act of worship. Don't be afraid of that. I know there's Eastern mysticism. I know that some of the stuff that's associated with body practice, even me saying at the beginning of service, okay, let's take a deep breath. Some of you are like, woo, is he going eastern on us here? Is he getting kind of into some, but no, they don't get to hijack your body and the breathing that you do and the relaxation that you may feel and the way that you may sense God in your physical body.

Don't please, please in your own faith, do not discount the fact that God made your body and your experience in your body is an aspect of your spirituality just as much as the immaterial prayer life that you have internally. Lord, we come before you. We pray that in our life, in the future, in the seasons of fasting, when we abstain from food, that we would find you, that it would be a part of our worship, a part of our prayer, that our body would literally be talking to you and helping us be connected to you. God, we love you and we are grateful for how you designed us, and we ask Lord for a guidance and a teaching of your spirit in this regard. As we celebrate communion together, we ask God that you would draw our attention back to that sacrifice you made on the cross, Lord, that we would connect this act with you, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 6:5-8

Transcript

We are in Matthew chapter six. We're in the story about Jesus. So we're going through Matthew Matthew's telling us eyewitness accounts about Jesus. And he happened to be in a section of Matthew where he's recounting Jesus's teaching one of his most famous teachings that goes from chapter five through chapter seven, and it's called the Sermon on the Mount. It's called the Sermon on the Mount because in the very first verse it says that Jesus called his disciples up to him and he had him sit down there kind of up on a hillside. This is near Galilee. Jesus has been teaching around the Galilee region there. It's a big body of water in Northern Israel, and he's been in these just these small towns. He's been healing people. He's gathered a group of people who are very interested in what he has to say. They're shocked with the authority that he teaches with.

And so he has this message that he gives. And we've looked at chapter five, we're now in chapter six and there's three. There are these three spiritual activities that Jesus talks about in this part of the sermon. He talks about giving to the poor prayer and fasting. And this falls within a broader context where Jesus is talking about righteousness. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean for you and for me to be a righteous person, a righteous person fits well, that's a good descriptor of a citizen in God's kingdom. See, Jesus came and he's saying there's this kingdom that's invading the kingdom of heaven. It's at hand, it's nearby. Jesus is the king of that kingdom, but it's like this invading society with an alternative set of cultural values and rules and relationships. And Jesus is teaching his followers about here's what it means to live in that kingdom, to be a righteous person.

And so last week we looked at this spiritual activity of giving to the poor, and we emphasized this idea of genuineness, that Jesus says that a righteous citizen in the kingdom of heaven is genuine in their giving. They're genuine in the way that they give to the poor. And so now we come to this section on prayer this week and next week we'll be talking about prayer. And so let's look at verse five through eight. He says this, whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by the people. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

When you pray, don't babble like the Gentiles since they imagine they'll be heard for their many words. Don't be like them because your father knows the things you need before you ask. Let's pray for a moment. Father, we ask that you would work in our hearts as a surgeon. We give you permission to deal with the issues of our heart. We're spiritually hungry. We were designed by you. We were designed to hear these things. And yet there's this internal battle. There's this war between the flesh and the spirit. There's an internal rebellion as followers of you. We don't even like that internal rebellion, and yet we've given into it attitudes, pride, ways of thinking, that they just need to be eradicated from our life. And so we give you the next 30 minutes and we ask that you would speak to us through this text.

Teach us how to pray. Take away our hypocrisy. Give us just this simplicity, this ability to speak plainly to you and to trust that you're going to answer the things that we're praying for. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. So Jesus brings us now to this point of talking about prayer. So last week we looked at giving alms or giving to the poor. And now Jesus assumes that you and I as his followers, that we will pray. And prayer is just a word for talking to God, having a conversation with God. But it's a unique kind of conversation because he's physically not there. Now, we have conversations all the time throughout the week with people who are not there. They're called phone calls or zoom calls. They're not in the space. But what's unique about prayer is that we're having a conversation, but the responsiveness of God is not like a human responsiveness.

The answer of God is not so apparent. And yet prayer spans genesis through revelation. The Bible is screaming at us that we are ought to be people who are praying. But it's funny how there's this term prayer, the Bible. I mean the Bible uses the term prayer, but it's really just this. It's a term for this special communication between you and God. And the Bible expects that you're regularly, you're regularly talking with God. So there's three things that we're going to see here in this text. First of all is that there's genuine prayer, personal prayer, simple and direct prayer. It's first put to us in a negative way in verse five, let's look at genuine prayer again. He says, whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people.

Truly, I tell you, you have your reward. So a hypocrite. This was an actor at the time of Jesus. In fact, you've often heard that Jesus was a carpenter. It's more likely that Jesus was worked with his hands, but there was not a lot of wood available to do carpentry. There was a lot of masonry. And the word that is carpenter could be also applied to the idea of being a stone worker. And near Nazareth, there was this giant amphitheater that was being constructed at Jesus's time. So it's very likely that Joseph and maybe Jesus constructed this large theater amphitheater as a stone worker. But one way or another, this term hypocrite here, that Jesus says you shouldn't be like in your prayer life. It's taken from the arena of theater where you would have somebody putting on a mask and playing a different role from who they are in real life.

Jesus says, when you're having your conversation with God, when you're praying, you should not be like the hypocrite. And then he cites something that would've been common for his audience. They would've been able to kind of recall, oh, I've seen that hypocrite. Yeah, when I was growing up in the synagogue, there was that one guy. There was that one guy who he really was kind of flashy in his prayers, and he really drew a lot of attention to himself when he was in the synagogue. And oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. I know that lady that she kind of stands on the corner. She prays really loud and she gets a lot of attention. So the crowd, Jesus's crowd would've been able to relate to this example. And Jesus says, don't pray like that. They're doing that so that they'll be seen by people. That's literally, Jesus gives the motive. They're doing their spirituality so that others will watch them. And he says what he said in the previous text, he says, they've got their reward. Sure enough, they're seen and they're esteemed, they're esteemed. Eugene Peterson, he in his message Bible, he says it this way, when you come before God, don't turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom. Do you think God sits in a box seat?

Jesus is saying this is the kind of person who's using their spirituality as a status symbol. They're doing a performance hoping for approval somehow in the last 30 or 40 years. I think it goes back before that the Western evangelical Christianity, which we're a part of, we're Protestants and we're Protestants, we're evangelicals. That's a term that's about 60, 70 years old. It just evangelical. It means that we believe that God wrote the Bible, the Bible's inspired and it's iner. Now, evangelicals kind of co-opted now to refer to a voting block, but it originally was just a description of these are the people who are Protestants, that when they look at the Bible, the 66 books of the Bible, they believe this is God's word without error. And they as a group believe that. And so that group, we've written books and then you have bookstores, and there became this kind of commercialization of that crowd, and it's kind of unique to us.

Now, Catholics, they also have their published books, but they're really strong with more of the institutions and academics that was more of that society and that tribe. But for Protestant, evangelical Christianity, we kind of got this whole production of commerce and commercialization that has occurred. When I was growing up, one of my first jobs, I volunteered in a Christian bookstore and you'd have all these new things that are published that would be coming through, and there's good books that are out there, the good stuff that was written. And both of my parents are actually writers and there's good stuff. But there's this thing about this wing of Christianity, this body of Christ, where there's really a show that's going on a little bit later. You have TBN where it's like we're going to create and make Christian tv and kind of turn spirituality into a show.

And then we kind of ended up with kind of Christian rock stars or Christian celebrities is what we call 'em. And they kind of go on the speaking route like they successfully planted a church and their church grew is big enough and they're now the stars, and we'll platform 'em and we'll go to their conferences. And then we got into Christian music and we got the Christian rockstar scene, and they're putting out their latest album. And a lot of it just runs parallel to a secular format. That's not necessarily bad, but it exposes and it creates a space where we are vulnerable to the hypocrite, particularly vulnerable, to kind of using spirituality as theater. Like Eugene Peterson says here, and I think I talked about this a couple weeks ago, but I was listening to this interview with a Greek Orthodox person, and that's another wing of the Christian, big broad Christian family.

And they don't have that. Their spiritual leaders don't go on the speaking circuit. If you're the pastor of a church or they call it a priest, you're the chief servant and you have some fancy title, but you've taken up this call because the church affirms that the Holy Spirit's called you to this role, but you're the chief servant. You're not the hero of the story. You're not going out and being platformed. It's much more of a humble role. And that seems to align more with what I see in the pages of this story of Matthew, Jesus advocating for this humility and not a showiness. Well, there is here this negative example, right? And Jesus is don't be like the hypocrite. There's an echo of Genesis three here and the fall. If we go back to Genesis three, humans have wrestled with the temptation to be disingenuous and hypocritical with their spirituality. Remember Adam and Eve, they had this relationship with God where God would just meet with them. He talked with them in the cool of the day. There was just this beautiful intimacy that humans had with Jesus.

And then the fall occurred, it says in Genesis three, seven, it says, then the eyes of both Adam and Eve were opened, and they knew that they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. It's either covering up, they're hiding, I can't be found in naked. And then verse eight, then the man and the wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Again, this idea of like I can't be seen as I am. The amazing thing about spiritual hypocrisy or doing the spiritual show is that you've come into the kingdom where you're safe, you're loved by God, and you don't have to put on a false persona any longer. You've been liberated from hypocrisy. And yet there is this form of using spirituality as a mask.

And we see it goes back to this garden scene. You go a little bit further in the Old Testament. You get to the life of Saul, the first king of Israel. There's a story in one Samuel 13 where Saul has fought a battle and he's at the end of the battle and he's impatient. His troops were deserting him. They were going back home, and he decided to take on the role of a priest and offer sacrifices to kind of boost the morale of his troops. When he offered the sacrifice, this was supposed to be the role of only the priests. It was not supposed to be something that the king would do. It was a spiritual act intended to boost the morale and had nothing to do with a genuine prayer to God. And when Samuel, who was the prophet saw he was a prophet and he was a priest, when Samuel saw what Saul had done, he said, God's done with you, the king or the line, the lineage of kings is no longer going to be with you.

Saul is one of the greatest examples of a disingenuous spirituality. He's uses spirituality to get public approval rather than a genuine expression to God. And then the last example of this, you would go over to Acts five. In Acts five, there's the story of Ananias and Sapphira. And man, the church is just banging. It's exciting. People are coming to Jesus. The church is growing, and there's not just this crowd that's gathering, but there is a real work of the spirit that is authentic and it's manifesting itself where people are just motivated to sell their stuff and to give it to the church. And then the church is redistributing it out to people who are poor. And it says in Acts four that nobody had lack that this church was a church where nobody in the church was poor because of the sharing of stuff together.

And then we get zoom in on this character, Anani and Sfi, they sell some property, they give it to the church, but they say this is the full amount that we sold the property for. When really they held back part of it, God struck both Ananias and Sfi dead on the spot. It was not because God wanted the full amount. God wanted a genuine expression of faith. Here's the principle. God does not want people doing spiritual stuff so that they are more accepted in spiritual circles and that is the kind of community you and I want to be a part of. How refreshing is it when you encounter somebody that's genuine in an age where there's so much media, so much television, when you encounter somebody who just is comfortable in their own skin and they're willing to say, you know what, I messed up, or I'm not perfect.

They're not trying to put on a show, but they're authentic. That kind of person is attractive, and Jesus is saying, look, this is what it's like being in my kingdom is you're not praying. You're not giving to the poor to put on a show. The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom where Jesus people are genuine. Now, it's not just a genuineness, but look at the personal nature of this prayer. If we go to verse six, Jesus says, here's what I want you to do. When you pray, go into your private room, shut your door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. If you're putting yourself in a private room with the door shut, talking to God, God is either real, personal and close, or the whole thing is a fraud. I mean, if you're in your closet praying, you're either talking to your clothes and your shoes or you're talking to God, it's either real or it's not real.

Think of for a second a business convention. You're stuck in a social setting with business peers. The conversations are superficial, formal, and distant. Sometimes people have a gift for being in the social setting, but the gift that a person has for that setting, which I don't have, it's this gift of actually being friendly and phony at the same time. Being able to pretend you're genuine, but not really giving away too much genuineness. There's a little bit of a script. Let me walk you through Alex's experience in this setting. It's a bustling business convention. People are milling and engaged in conversations. The main character Alex navigates through the crowd, Alex's inner monologue as he greets various people with a polite but distant demeanor, he's sang to himself another year, another convention, time to put on the professional mask again, scene one, Alex and a business pure Jordan are talking.

Alex or Jordan says, Alex, great to see you. How has the year been? And Alex says, oh, you know, business is boring or booming. Just closed a big deal last month, and you and Jordan says the same here. Lots of exciting projects. Let's catch up more over coffee sometime. And Alex's inner monologue is exciting projects. I doubt he even remembers my name. Catch up over coffee. Oh, that's code for I'll see you next year with the same small talk. Move to scene two, Alex. In a group of peers, everyone's laughing and exchanging stories, but the laughter feels forced. Alex says, absolutely. That merger was a game changer in the market. We've all seen the impact, haven't we? And a group member says, definitely. It's a whole new playing field now, and Alex is saying in his head, none of us here really care about that merger.

It's just something to talk about. Something to fill the silence. Scene three, Alex is alone. He steps away. He's looking for a quiet, quiet corner. In his head, he's saying, this is exhausting. Everyone's wearing a mask, including me. We're friendly, but it's all phony. We talk, but there's no real connection. It's like we're all playing a part in a show that no one really enjoys. And then scene four, Alex's later in a quiet hotel room, he kneels and he starts to pray. Lord, here I am. No masks, no pretense, just me as I am his inner ong. He says, this is different when I talk to God. It's real. There's no need for masks, no need to impress. It's just an honest conversation from the heart. Why can't all my interactions be this genuine? Yeah, Alex's longing for a society that Jesus is loading. Jesus is teaching the Sermon on the Mount and it's a reversal.

But here's the thing. I think people who aren't followers of Jesus long for genuineness, but if you're not a follower of Jesus, you've got to play your angles. You don't have this meta narrative where you see this arch that ends in eternity with rescue and redemption. You see, it's not safe to be genuine if you're not a follower of Jesus. Not always because you don't know the rules. There's not necessarily a sense or a framework of what's safe, am I secure? And Jesus is really trying to establish his kingdom and say, here's what it means to be this new society. Again, there's this difference between the formal acquaintance, this ritualistic surface level, often about appearance, and this idea of having a close relationship with God, this personal relationship where it's deep, honest, not concerned with outward appearances, but with genuine connection. Formal acquaintances, we've got this guarded limited sharing of personal matters, but then in close relationships and open and vulnerable, sharing our innermost thoughts and our feelings again, you have this interaction, the formal acquaintance, this interaction, it is sporadic and based on necessity where in close relationships you have regular committed communication regardless of life's circumstances.

I think we can relate to those that contrast between the formal and the distance, the distant and a close relationship. We are wired for close relationship. We're wired to have this personal relationship with God. That's why we read Psalm 43 at the opening of our service because it is an expression authored by the Holy Spirit, through a human in a desperate place who is liberated and free to tell God, God, I feel downcast. Why am I downcast? Why are you downcast? Oh my soul. Put your hope in God praying that God would remedy the situation with enemies and to take care of what's wrong.

And notice what Jesus says at the end of verse six, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. So you're in this secret place where it's just you and God, no pretense, and it says, God's there. God's there. And what does it say? It says, he will reward you. This word reward is most oftentimes translated in your Bible and mind. He will give you, he will pay back to you. It's reciprocal language, but that legalistic, Josh, that sounds mechanical. Well, it's Jesus who's saying it. Jesus is literally saying, you go and you pray in that private place, there's a reward that the Father has for you. He will reward you. Again. The Bible screams a consistent message about prayer. That prayer is effective, that prayer is important. It is a piece of the puzzle. Talking to God in a genuine, authentic way, leaning into your personal relationship with him brings about a result you will be rewarded.

But not only is prayer to be genuine and personal, it's also to be simple and direct, simple and direct. In verse seven and eight, Jesus says this, when you pray, don't babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they'll be heard for their many words. Don't be like them because your father knows the things you need before you ask him. Notice the contrasting kingdom prayer with the way the Gentiles pray. He already said, don't pray like the hypocrites. Now he says the Gentile. So a gentile is somebody who's non-Jewish at the time. When Jesus is teaching that, he's saying, look at the pagans, the people that are praying these pagan countries or these pagan people groups or those who are falling like a Greek mythology, the people of Rome, all these different groups that were unified under the Roman Empire. There's this babbling and the calculation of that pagan prayer is as if their God is a vending machine.

The more money or language you put in, the more snacks you'll get out. It's almost as if heaven is a busy customer service line, and if you call enough times, you'll get the nice representative and Jesus saying, no, that's not how it works. That might be these other pagan, gentile religions, but that's not how heaven works. That's not how prayer works. He uses the term babble as if there is a prayer that is this mindless activity of inputs saying just something rote over and over and over again. I think that's where maybe kind of our Protestant tradition moves away from the written prayer and we pray spontaneously. So when I pray on Sunday mornings, I'm praying what is on my heart? It comes from this text. Now I've become more and more of a fan of a really well written prayer, and I've begun over just the last few years to actually write out my own prayers and structure them and realize, wow, there's a way to really structure a prayer well, where it really comes from the heart, but it is meaningful.

It's theologically rich. It stirs my heart and faith. But Jesus is saying, look, no. There's this kind of praying that is totally alien for the kingdom of heaven. It's based on this works and kind of this mechanistic inputs and outputs and isn't rooted in relationship. And instead, what Jesus wants is he wants you and I to be simple and direct. This brings to our minds one Kings 18 in the story of Elijah. Elijah proposes a competition between the priests of Baal and himself because Israel has been carried off into idolatry. Baal is the primary God. That is the pagan God being worshiped. And so Elijah calls those priests up to the top of a mountain and he says, let's have a competition. Let's build an altar. You pray to your God first, and if he sends fire from heaven, we'll know that Baal is the true God.

And then when you're done, I'm going to pray and ask God to send fire from heaven. And if he sends fire from heaven, then Yahweh is the true God. Now, there's three options, right? You have the one option is that Bal sends fire and Yahweh does not, and so Baal is God, or you have a non-answer, or you have Yahweh, I guess you have four options. You have Yahweh answering, sending fire, or you have no answer at all. And so you've got a 50 50 chance here in this competition if you're the ball priests. So they took up the bowl that he gave them, Elijah, and he prepared it, and they called on the name of ball from morning until noon saying, ball, answer us. But there was no sound. No one answered, and they danced around the altar that they had made at noon. Elijah mocked them and he said, shout louder for he's a God. Maybe he's thinking it over. Maybe he was wander. He wandered away or maybe he's on the road, perhaps he's sleeping and you'll wake him up. They shouted loudly and they cut themselves with knives and spears according to their custom, until blood gushed over them all afternoon. They kept on raving until the offering of the evening sacrifice, but there was no shout. No one answered. No one paid attention. Can you believe it? Ball didn't respond back then it was Elijah's turn,

And it says, after the time of for the offering, the evening sacrifice, the prophet or the prophet Elijah approached the altar and said, Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel today, let it be known that you are God in Israel and I am your servant, and that at your word, I have done all of these things. Answer me, Lord, answer me so that this people will know that you are the Lord, that you are God, and that you have turned their hearts back. Then the Lord's fire fell, consumed the burn, offering the wood, the stones, the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench, simple and direct prayer that is what the Bible wants of us, not cutting yourself, not dancing around, trying to get God's attention. He heard this simple prayer from Elijah, and Elijah knew this. He had a long relationship with God. He did many conversations with God, and he knew that God didn't need to be woken up or tricked into answering this or cajoled. And yet sometimes in our own life, the way that we pray is this idea of, man, I've got to just convince God. I got to get God to give me attention.

Jesus came, he lived a life that you and I could not live. He died a death that we should have died so that we could live the life we don't deserve to live and be saved from the death we should have died. Jesus made it possible for us to step into the most amazing society, a place of genuine communication with God, a place of personal intimacy with God in a society where we can speak plainly to God, knowing that he hears us. That is what Jesus wants his citizens to know, and it's an invitation that is extended. It's so personal that we can take communion together, and he extends to us the image of his body. He's like, come and take of this symbol that represents my body being broken by blood being shed for you. Jesus has made a personal investment so that you and I can enjoy this genuine prayer life. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for this teaching. We pray that you would teach us by your spirit to pray in that private place. Teach us to in prayer, in faith, trusting in you. Thank you for the promise that's here, that you will reward us for that private prayer life. Thank you, God, that you know beforehand what things we have need of, and that you are this personally involved in our lives. We are so grateful, so grateful. Continue to stir us up in this regard. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 6:1-4

Transcript

Matthew chapter six. So have any of you ever been to, I think it's pronounced Defend or Dine China? Has anybody here ever been to Dine China? Do you know what they're famous for? They have an extraordinary claim to fame. This village is known as the world's factory for oil paintings walk down its streets and you'll see row upon row of artist studios each filled with canvases. But these aren't original works of art. They are copies, thousands of them replicating masterpieces by Van Gogh, DaVinci, and other renowned artists. The skill of these artists is undeniable. Their ability to mimic the strokes and the colors of other great masterpieces are impressive. Yet despite the visual similarity to the originals, something essential is missing the spirit of authenticity, the soul that only the original creator can imbue to their work. This village with its endless production of art replicas offers a metaphor for the message that Jesus delivers in Matthew chapter six, verses one through four.

Here, Christ addresses not the art of painting, but the art of living out our faith. In his time, acts of righteousness had become like those replica paintings skillfully performed outwardly perfect, yet lacking the authentic essence that comes from a genuine relationship with God. As we delve into these verses, we are invited to reflect and to ask this question, do our acts of obedience and devotion stem genuinely from a sincere heart and a true connection with God making them authentic originals? Let me read the text to you, Matthew six, starting in verse one. It says this, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others, to be seen by them otherwise, you have no reward with your father in heaven. So whenever you give to the poor, don't sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues or on the streets to be applauded by people.

Truly, I tell you, they have their reward, but when you give to the poor, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. Okay, that's our text. Let's go ahead. Let's pray together. Lord, we just give you the next 30 minutes of our time and we want to hear from you. We want to be governed. We want to be a people. Where if you look into this, and we know you do look into it where people that are submitted under the authority of scripture, we're not just trying to make up the Christian life on our own, but we are really before you placing ourselves under the authority of your word. And we ask that you to apply this text into our own individual lives.

Lord, you know where we're fake, you know where we're disingenuous, where the hypocrisy comes out. And Lord, we pray that you would come and you would be like a surgeon cutting those things out of our life and that you would author in us a genuineness and the root reason behind our inauthenticity. Lord, we pray that you deal with that, whether it's fear, whether it's pride, whatever is the root cause of us being hypocritical, Lord, we ask and we give you permission to work in us this morning. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So here we are, we in chapter six. But what I want to remind you of is that when Matthew wrote the gospel, this book he did not put in there verse numbers and chapter numbers that came along a thousand years after this was just a text that was read by the church.

It was Matthew's account of the life of Jesus. And this is the first major teaching section out of the book of Matthew. I don't know if you're going along with the Bible project or not, but in their podcast and on their website, they're just zeroed in on the sermon of the Mount. And this week the podcast was all about how does this sermon on the Mount fit in with the overall structure of Matthew? And it's excellent. It's one of the shorter episodes that they have. The whole back half of the episode is just a lengthy reading for chapter five through seven of their translation of the Sermon on the Mount by Tim and this great material, I'd encourage you to keep up with it as we're kind of covering the same material on Sundays. So we are in the book of Matthew, and we found ourself here in this first sermon called the Sermon on the Mount, which is a collection of Jesus's teachings that he gave to his disciples.

And you'll recall that before we got to this particular verse, we had Matthew 4 23, which doesn't seem, oh, there it is. Matthew 4 23, Jesus began to go all over Galilee teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people. Now here's the interesting thing. What does it mean to preach the gospel? What does it mean to preach the good news of the kingdom? Well, just a couple verses later, we get into the Sermon on the Mount. And the interesting thing about the message, the gospel here that Jesus is preaching is not this come forward, pray a prayer and then you're like in, you got fire insurance. You're not going to go to hell anymore. The gospel that Jesus, the good news that Jesus is preaching is very much about a life that's lived out, right? Have you noticed that?

It's very much this about like, Hey, if you want to be a follower of me, here's the good news about the kingdom. It welcomes in all these outcasts, the poor, the sad, those who are suffering, those who are persecuted. Congratulations. You're welcomed into the kingdom. And then he says, I didn't come to abolish the law. I didn't come to abolish the law. Rather, what I came to do was to fulfill it. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here in when we come to Matthew chapter six, Jesus opens up, he says, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Now, we have this giant number six in our Bibles, right? You have it, you have it in your Bible. It's a big chapter six, and that wasn't there. This ties in with something that goes all the way back to chapter five verse 17, where Jesus said to these disciples, don't think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets, right?

When and if you're in the Bible class with us law and prophets here, this is Jesus saying, look, I didn't come to get rid of the scriptures. I didn't come to get rid of the Hebrew scriptures. No, I came to fulfill it. I am the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures. I didn't come to abolish it. I came to fulfill. And then a couple verses later in verse 20, Jesus says to his followers, I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you'll never get into the kingdom of heaven. So he lays it out. He says, you got to be more righteous than the religious leaders of the day. Now that must have just broken their brains, right? It's like, wait, our religious leaders, how are we going to be more righteous than the righteous, professional, righteous people? Then he goes in and he elaborates on what that righteousness looks like by giving six what we called antithesis.

They were these, well, he says, this is a quote from my reading. It's in verses 20 through 48. It centers on a positive righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, a positive righteousness, which was, look, anger is equivalent to murder. Lust is equivalent to adultery. He places these strict limits on divorce, speaking truth without the need to spice it up with, I swear, an asymmetrical response of goodness when the world is harsh. I didn't fix my spelling even in the last week. I'm sorry. And then love your enemy. So those are the six ways in which Jesus is saying, okay, listen, you've come into the kingdom, right? You're coming into my kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. And this is not a kingdom that just throws out the Hebrew scriptures. No. This is a place where the Hebrew scriptures are fulfilled through me and righteousness, the idea of doing righteousness, it exceeds your concept that you see modeled in the Pharisees.

No, it's this kind of righteousness that has, it has depth, it goes to the heart. It requires sincerity. It's stricter in a sense, it's more sincere. So he goes through these six examples, and then we get to verse one of Matthew chapter six, where he says, again, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. So this theme of righteousness continues, and now he's going to talk about righteousness. Three of the most common acts of righteousness at this time, three of the most common acts. He's going to say, don't practice that righteousness like the scribes and the Pharisees. No, because your righteousness, the righteousness of my kingdom that my people do, it looks different from what you're used to. It looks different from your professional religious elites. The statement introduces Jesus is about to teach from verse one to 18.

So this statement here is not just about taking care of the poor, but this statement here, verse one is actually a statement that introduces the material about caring for the poor in a genuine way, praying in a genuine way and fasting in a genuine way. So this is the introductory statement to those three acts giving to the poor prayer and fasting. Eugene Peterson, he translates and he expresses this verse in this way, be especially careful when you're trying to be good so that you don't make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won't be applauding.

There is a very wrong way to do good and there is a very right way to do good. A reward from your heavenly Father is on the line. And so he says this in verse two. He's going to zero in on this idea of giving to the poor. So whenever you give to the poor, don't sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be applauded by people. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. First of all, do you see the assumption that Jesus is making, okay, I'm calling you to be in my kingdom where those religious leaders, they can come and be in my kingdom too, but they're no longer the elites. They've got to come and they've got to adopt my righteousness. They don't get to set some social religious agenda like, no, no, no.

If those pharisees want to come into my kingdom, they're going to have to follow my rules as the king. But in that kingdom, there's an assumption and the assumption is that you're going to be giving to the poor. He says, so whenever you give to the poor notice, it's not, Hey, if you give to the poor, no. The way that Jesus phrases this and the way that he phrases the teaching on prayer and the way that he phrases the teaching about fasting is, Hey, when you do it, it's assumed that you'll be doing it. It's assumed that you'll be giving to the poor if you're in Jesus's kingdom. But he says, don't sound a trumpet. Don't sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues. This is the righteous deeds, this idea of giving to the poor that's assumed. This goes back to Abraham in Genesis 1819.

So think we're going all the way back in Israel's history to the founder of Judaism, the forefathers, right, all the way back to Abraham. There is this statement about Abraham that God makes about him. He says, for I have chosen him Abraham, so that he'll command his children and his house after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just this is how the Lord will fulfill to Abraham. What he promised when God says this about Abraham, he's saying, look, your future generations, you're going to teach your children to do what is right and just this is the Hebrew word, sah and mishpat. Sah is righteousness to do what is right and the people of God from Abraham on, they're expected that you are going to do what is right within society. I found this beautiful quote about this word, sah meaning righteousness.

The word sah comes from the Hebrew root word, sadik, which means straight. It's used literally of objects when they do what they're supposed to do. For example, in the Bible, accurate weights and measures are measures of siddiq and safe paths. For sheep are paths of siddiq. Building on this root word, Sika refers to humans, beings who are straight or in the right order with their relationships primarily, and first with God himself and also with others. The word sah refers to a life of right relationships. And so from Abraham on, there is this expectation that you are going to live a life that is, it's a straight life, that it lines up with God and with others.

And so Jesus here as he's teaching about giving to the poor, this is familiar language like Israel got in trouble with God, and God allowed Israel as a nation to be taken captive by Assyria and by Babylon because they didn't take care of the poor. They were an established nation and part of they were idolatrous, right? So they worshiped foreign gods. But another aspect of their running away from God was they just didn't take care of the poor. They didn't take care of widows, they didn't take care of fatherless, and they didn't take care of the poor. You can go back and read Isaiah 58. You can read Isaiah chapter one. It's like a medical diagnosis of the nation. You are sick in Isaiah chapter one. It's like you've got open wounds that are like pussy and yucky. And what that refers to is you're not taking care of poor people in your midst.

This is a big deal for God, was that people who are lined up with me, they're like, they're just taking care of people who are poor and downcast. This is what is a part of my kingdom. And so you have the tradition, but the tradition has grown into this kind of act, this religious act, it it's a performance and it became inauthentic. And it was this evidently in the synagogues, it would be like, we're going to play a trumpet and we're going to make a big deal out of who's giving what. And it just took it from being this genuine act of righteousness to being an act of hypocrisy. And Jesus says in verse two, he says, well, they have their reward in the synagogue, the hypocrites action in the synagogue on the street. They're sounding a trumpet when they give to the poor with the intent that they will be applauded by people. And Jesus says, that applause, that is their reward. He goes on Matthew six verses three and four, he says, but when you give, right? So we've talked about what not to do now. He says, here's what I want you to do when you give, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. So there's this picture that he draws of, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

This week, I was thinking about when I learned to type, and it still just blows my mind that I don't have to think about the keys. Isn't that the weirdest thing? If you're a trained typist and you can just find the keys and you're not hunting and pecking, it's just weird how your fingers just do this thing. And I do it every day, and I don't even put any thought into it where the keys are. And I was trying to think back in ninth grade, I took a class and I remember the Mavis Beacon teaches you to type, and I dunno if you had, that was your class too, but I had a cover that they put over my hands and somehow it just clicked. I think that's the idea of how natural for us as followers of Jesus in his kingdom as citizens in the kingdom, it just is like this.

We're just taking care of the poor in this way where the right hand doesn't know the left hand. It's not like you're hiding it from the left hand. It's just like it just happens. It's just natural. It's become so just normal to care for the poor. There's no real mental thinking it through. And it's not this strategic playing the angle so that you have this audience. It's just inherent that flows out of this relationship with God. And there is a privacy aspect. There's this discretion where it's being done, and I don't need anybody else to know that it's happening. He says in verse four, he says, so that your giving may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

Man, there's so much here. So he's going to keep repeating this idea of do it in secret. He's going to talk about pray. Pray in secret. Your father sees he's there, he sees it right? He will reward you, he'll reward you openly. Each one of these areas of giving to the poor prayer and fasting are all done in this, just in relationship with God, not for human, not for public consumption. Now, mind you, okay, well, I put it here in my notes. Jesus is assuming, again, he's assuming that you're giving to the poor. It is done with anonymity, and the secrety is not the objective. The goal is not how secret can I be in my giving? And giving to the poor is not the objective. The underlying principle here is to live out your private devotion to God regardless of human audience. So what Jesus is doing, he's being surgical here.

He's dealing with the heart and he's saying there's a heart issue with these Pharisees, these hypocrites where they're doing their religious acts, they're giving to the poor, they're praying and they're fasting for a human audience. And that's not why the behavior is supposed to be there. So you may have, we could put on stage, we could have Sam here, and Alexis and Sam over here is like a Pharisee, and he takes care every Saturday. He's in the compassion center and he's caring for the poor, and he's spending two hours sorting the food and giving it out to people. And he's very genuine. And Alexis is doing the exact same thing, but their hearts are completely, radically different. Sam here wants to make a show out of his working at the Compassion Center and wants to be padded on the back, and that's his motivation. And Jesus says, well, he's got his reward. And you know what? There's a reward to be a good person that volunteers in the community. That's nothing. You can get a good pat on the back.

It's not, yeah, it's hypocritical. But I was thinking about this this morning. I'm like, there's really some advantages to kind of being that hypocrite. Sam can go around and tell people like, Hey, here's what I do. And Sam's a good guy. It's, I really like the fact that Sam's, and nobody's looking at Sam necessarily and like, oh, you're just a hypocrite unless he's really ostentatious. But there's a way to be hypocrite Sam and really get the reward on earth and ingratiate yourself to other people and be thought of as like, wow, he's a really good guy. And he gives up some of his weekend to do that. And then there's Alexis over here who doesn't, she's not playing any angles. She has no ulterior motive. She's there and she's feeding poor people, and then she goes home and it just is a natural part of her life. It just flows out of, I love Jesus. I spend time with Jesus. I'm in relationship with Jesus. This is just what I do. And she's not looking over her shoulder of like, Hey, who saw me do that? Who saw me do that awesome thing? It's just this natural joyful, yeah, I did it. I love Jesus.

There is such a genuineness and authenticity that exists in Alexis's relationship with God. A human audience doesn't really factor into the picture. Now, mind you, Jesus is going to do, Jesus is going to do the next three years of his life, healing people, raising people from the dead. Every day of his next three years is in public. He is a public figure doing good and proclaiming the kingdom. So Jesus can't be having an issue with public ministry. He is dealing with our hearts, his followers, hearts, and he knows how quickly the temptation can be to shift from doing the good thing. The bottom can just fall out. I know this in just working at the Compassion Center, how easy it is for me for just the kind of the bottom to fall out and for it to just become this rote routine that happens every week.

And it's not this, Josh is abiding in the vine, and there's this vibrant relationship between Josh and Jesus, and he's there involved in making sure the truck runs and picks up food from Amazon. No, it's, it's so easy for it to just kind of, the bottom falls out and it's like, this was like fun, but where's the abiding? Where's the relationship with Jesus? Jesus isn't asking his followers to do something that he himself isn't doing Public ministry, public obedience isn't in conflict with what Jesus is teaching here. He's dealing with those core motives. Are you? Am I okay with not being seen as we do good to others?

Recently in our house, there's been a conversation about real and fake Pokemon cards. Pokemon is like a, I don't even want to explain who Pokemon is because I'll slaughter it, but there are these trading cards that exist, and some of them are real and some of 'em are fake. And even a young person values what is genuine over what is fake. And even the fake ones, to me, they look pretty good. But I've learned over the last couple of weeks that man, if it's not real, ah, it's a fake. It's not genuine. God's the same way he's looking at us and he values genuineness something that is inauthentic. Hypocritical is just living out a lie. It's an attempt to do what is right, but only imitates the authentic. A few years ago, I was working with a therapist, and one of the things, the greatest things that he taught me is there is the spirituality that masks, and there's the spirituality that reveals, and you'll find this after spending any little bit of time around Christians, you'll find that some people are using their spirituality to actually play a game and to put up a mask and to make themselves look like their spiritual, when really what's going on inside is a bunch of garbage that's really toxic, and they're using Christianity to put on an outfit or an external dressing.

And then there's other people that understand what Jesus is teaching here, the whole blessed or the poor in spirit, that they finally realize that the invitation into the kingdom is an invitation to basically be naked and unashamed in the presence of God and to be known as somebody who's broken and flawed and sinful, and you're okay. And there's this great liberation that comes from being in God's kingdom because it's not like God's beating you over the head saying, you are hypocrite. He's saying, no, I am the great surgeon. Come knowing you're a hypocrite, knowing that you're hiding sometimes, knowing that you know your own nakedness, know you know your own guilt, and I'm here to say, I've come to cover your shame. And you don't have to put on this masking anymore. You don't have to play the games anymore, and you don't need to use Christianity as your mask.

This is the place where you are free to be genuine and authentic. That's one of the reasons why in our church tradition, and there's a lot of different ways to do church and worship Jesus, but in our church tradition, we do what's called low church. So my dress this morning is casual, and that's because we feel like in the presence of God, God's okay with our common apparel. I don't have to wear some fancy hat for you to feel like I have spiritual authority as I preach. Now, I understand that in a Eastern Orthodox tradition, there's other roles that those outfits play, and it's serves probably a beautiful purpose in connecting with God and in an authentic and genuine way. It has its place. But for us, we wear these kinds of clothes to church because of this idea that God's okay with us, who we are, of where we are at, that we can be authentic and genuine in his presence.

I'll close with this quote from Keller. Now, Keller wrote this beautiful book called, actually I can't even remember the name of it. It's like a self forgetfulness, I think it's a gift of self forgetfulness. It's a little tiny book, but he says this of Soren Kier guard in his book, sickness Unto Death, Soren Kier Guard says, it is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something beside God. Spiritual pride is the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth, and find a purpose big enough, give us meaning in life without God. Sorin Kiku guard says that the normal human ego is built on something besides God. It searches for something that will give it a sense of worth, a sense of specialness, a sense of purpose, and builds itself on that.

And of course, as we are often reminded, if you try to put anything in the middle of the place that was originally made for God, it's going to be too small. It's going to rattle around in there the invitation when Jesus says, Hey, come into my kingdom. Come be at home in my kingdom, should be this liberation that you don't have to create an identity that is triangulated off of other people's opinion, of your acts of righteousness. Because in his kingdom, you're loved, you're esteemed before you did any feeding of the poor. Before you ever prayed, he's going to say, I knew what you were going to ask. And then before you fast like He loves you, that's his invitation. There is a security and a liberation that comes with this beautiful kingdom ethic. And so this isn't just a stop being a hypocrite message from Jesus.

This is this invitation to be liberated from all the pressure and all the motivation to be a hypocrite and to realize that you're like, you're totally loved by God. You're freed up from that hypocrisy. You're secure, and He wants to establish you in that more and more and more. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this idea that you're okay with us just in that secret place. You're okay with us not getting the applause of other people. You just receive our genuine acts of righteousness. We get to do it, and you reward us for those things that you see us doing. Lord, we pray that you would shape us more and more into being these people that the masks come off and there's this genuineness, this transparency that we're comfortable with as we serve you. Thank you, Lord for letting us be a church that does care about the poor, and some of us are poor. Lord, thank you for letting us be that church. We want to walk in these things more and more. We want to have a heart this week that's open to just caring for those that are down and out, those that are vulnerable. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Let's take communion together. The elements are there to take back to your seat. We'll continue to worship and then we'll take communion together.

Matthew 5:43-48

Transcript

Matthew chapter five. We're going to finish chapter five this morning as a church. We've been going through the book of Matthew together as we do every week, and we have been in a section that's called the Sermon on the Mount. Some people don't like the name of that because it's not scripted enough. It's kind of like some call it the Kingdom Manifesto or the platform of when a political party comes out and they say, okay, this is going to be our political platform. In a sense Jesus is outlining, and this is a compilation of his teachings that he probably taught this not just on the hill where this is recorded. Matthew says he took his disciples up on a hill and it began to teach them. It probably didn't just happen on a hill. It probably was the same set of messages that Jesus taught over and over and over again.

So we have some of the same material is in Luke, but it rearranged differently. So what we're getting from Matthew is such a gift. You can imagine Jesus going from these different synagogues and teaching Saturday morning in Jewish school like the Hebrew school about this guy just shows up and teaches with the authority of a Rabbi, and it's just like crazy what he brings, what brings to bear. In fact, when we get past chapter seven and the message is over, what we're going to see is that the group, the people were surprised, they were shocked because it's like, here's Jesus teaching with such authority. Now we're in a part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warned his disciples, he said, listen, listen. I did not come to break the law or to abolish the law that Moses gave you. Jesus is saying, my kingdom and what I'm teaching you about my kingdom, it doesn't disregard your heritage and what Moses taught.

You know what I'm teaching and what my kingdom about fulfills the law. And then he goes on and he gives six examples, six examples of the kingdom ethic or six antithesis. And you remember that there was this formula where Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, but I tell you so when we look at these, what we have is a list of six of these individual things. Hayden, I'm going to need your help again. Our slides are not working. If you could go backwards, go backwards to the beginning. There we go. This is what I want to see. Okay, so here's our first five that we've looked at. Okay? The first is that Jesus said anger is equivalent to murder. Lust is equivalent to adultery. He puts strict limits and parameters on divorce. He says, you can't just go get divorced for whatever makes you feel good or bad.

You can't just either needs to be specific qualifications for divorce. It's a narrow qualification. Fourth is speaking truth without needing to spice it up with, I swear I tell you, I swear, spit to death, cross my heart and whatever else you add to it, you don't need to use that kind of language. If you're a follower of Jesus living in his kingdom, you just say what you mean and you don't break it. You just are a truth teller and you don't need fancy language. This is what we were talking about in the car a couple of weeks ago. And then fourth, an asymmetrical response of goodness when the world is hash. No. That's what happens when you're writing this early in the morning, harsh when the world is, well, it's hash two sometimes, but you feel like it's harsh. Thank you, yes, asymmetrical. That's what we looked at last week, an asymmetrical response.

In other words, if somebody hits you on the right cheek, your response is to turn the other one. Asymmetry is where you got three things on one side and one on the other. It just doesn't line up. It's not a deserved response or a proportional response to, and it's not a cause and effect system. Jesus is like, you're in my kingdom. We're going to now all of a sudden do things not just on a human plane, but we're going to put in here the element of God as witness, and you're going to live as a people as if I'm present in your midst. I'm your father. I'm your the judge. I am this invisible third party and I extend beyond you. So you're going to act in an asymmetrical way in my kingdom, and it's not always going to be cause and effect, and you're going to get sick. You're going to be brought in and accepted into my kingdom in an asymmetrical way. In other words, you are loved by God not because of anything in you.

Jesus is going to come and die on the cross for your sins, not because of any good that Jesus finds in you or the father finds in you, but because God loves you and there's not a symmetry to that. And so we get to this sixth, this sixth antithesis, and it is this love for enemies, definitely the most radical thing that Jesus taught. Let's go to the next slide, Hayden. This is going to be the text, so we'll go through the text and then we'll unpack it piece by piece. He says in verse 43, you have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous for if you love those who love you, what reward will you have?

Don't even the tax collectors do the same. And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what are you doing out of the ordinary? Don't even the gentiles do the same, be perfect. Therefore, as your father, as your heavenly father is perfect. Well, with that, we should pray. Lord, we do commend to you our own hearts and we pray that you would work in our lives. I pray God, for just your miraculous working in this time that you would take our lives and just how you say in two Corinthians that we are vessels and we just contain the excellency of the power. We pray, Lord, that you would cause your excellency of power to just flow out of us as these broken vessels and that you would work in our midst. And Lord, we just ask that you would be in our midst teaching us through this text in Matthew. This is a hard saying. Living it out is hard. It's not hard to read it or understand it, but it is very hard to live this out and to know what this looks like in our own lives. And so we give ourselves to you. We want to be obedient listeners this morning. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.

So let's start with verse 43 and 44. This is the contrast where he lays it out and he says, you have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. So the Jewish tradition that's spoken of in Leviticus 19, which we will look at in a minute, is this tradition, which is to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Leviticus 19, and I think I have a slide for this, it does say, love your neighbor, but it does not say to hate your enemy. Do you have that there? See if you can find that. Yeah. So Leviticus 1918 would be what Jesus is referencing. And then what became of the tradition, the 1500 tradition of Judaism was by implication to hate your enemy. So there's this command to love your neighbor, but what had been built up within Jewish tradition was you'll love your neighbor, but we hate our enemies and we see a wrestling with this throughout Jewish history.

What do you do? What do do with this idea of enemies? And so Jesus repeats what was familiar territory for his followers, love your neighbor, hate your enemy. And then Jesus does what he does in all six of these antithesis. He says, I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. So in verse 43, Jesus is addressing this common tradition in Leviticus 19, but then he's saying, you need to love your enemies. The original commandment focused on loving those within one's community, which was often interpreted as fellow Israelites. So there's a very ethnic connotation in this of, Hey, we are together. We are Israelites. We are the children of God that came through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We love one another, but beyond our community, we're going to hate our enemies. But Jesus extends this to include enemies, this love of enemies and the persecutor, challenging the limited scope of love, practiced and taught by many religious leaders.

So if we were to kind of map this onto our modern day, this idea of an enemy is somebody who takes the opposite side. The other team, it could be another nation, it could be somebody of another political persuasion, another political party. It could be a business competitor that's just playing dirty in the field where you're at. It could be a coworker that is undercutting you at work. It could be a hostile boss, it could be somebody that you're related to. It could be a family member that is just toxic in how they treat you. So when you read this idea of enemies for us, we can think of Russia or maybe North Korea. Sometimes it's China. It could be Sam who disagrees with your political view, or it could be Sarah who's a fellow employee and takes for your work. Those would be kind of our modern enemies.

And Jesus says, love your enemies. Jesus's instructions were revolutionary. It wasn't merely a passive tolerance, but then active love. It's literally the word agape. This self-sacrificing love, selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. It goes beyond mere feelings and encompasses actions. Now, I told you at the beginning that Luke also records this same teaching and it's found in Luke 6 27 and 28 Hayden. You can put that up there on the screen. It says, but I say to you who listen, love your enemies. Do what is good to those who hate you. Okay? So that's the added piece of this in Luke is do what is good to those who hate you. The second part that Luke adds is to bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you imagine being a disciple of Jesus, and a lot of Jesus's ministry is just teaching on the kingdom.

You're hearing these sermons over and over again with different pieces like this similar concept, similar principles tied in. And so here Luke's in his recording, he says, he adds this doing what is good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you. As we wrestle with this, you have to understand that the church in an attempt to understand this text, has taken this in a whole bunch of different directions. As I mentioned last week, this was inspiring material for Martin Luther King Jr. This was an inspiration for Gandhi who was not a follower of Jesus, but loved the Sermon on the Mount. There was a whole group of people called the Anabaptist that they can trace their roots back a long way back before Martin Luther. They were this kind of minority. The Anabaptist though took and they decided central to their faith would be the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount that they would create a community called just trying to live out this material.

When I was like 10 or 11, my dad heard about this community, this Anabaptist community that lived as a commune on a property, I think in New York or Pennsylvania. It's called the Bruderhof. They have German roots, so they still speak some German in their community, but it's a commune of like a hundred families that live together kind of in dorm apartments. They eat all their meals together, or I think they eat dinner together. They worship together. Their kids have a school like a private school on the property there that the kids go to, the men work in a factory. They even have their own fire department with fire trucks to go and put out fires or respond to emergencies on this massive property. And they are very similar to the Mennonite community or the community that's up in Lancaster with the Amish, similar things in their factory.

They would construct these beautiful handmade kids toys and sheds and different wood structures. So anyway, we lived amongst them and central to them, for them being a follower of Jesus meant we want to take this material in the Sermon on the Mount as real and as true as possible. And so that community, a part of their tradition is that they take this and they are pacifists. So that means that because of the whole like don't ever take an oath, they will never serve in government because you have to take an oath when you enter office. They won't serve on jury duty, but they also will not, oftentimes they won't enlist for any type of military service because they believe that followers of Jesus cannot respond in a violent way ever to harm. And there's a number of different kind of streams of pacifism and what it means to be a pacifist.

But that's like the a and a Baptist tradition. I was listening to a sermon yesterday on this text, and while he's not an Anabaptist, he himself is convinced as a follower of Jesus, we cannot ever have a violent response that's out of place for a Christian. And I've listened to that theological position and I deeply respect anyone that tries to live that out because it's very hard to implement that, and I appreciate the sincerity. I don't think that that is the idea that Jesus is teaching here. And as I wrestle with the text we looked at last week and what we're looking at this week, I think these ideas are best reconciled in David's life, Jesus's life, as well as David's life. So when you look at David, and I want to show you actually a story from David's life. We can put it up here on the screen.

David had an enemy whose name was Saul, and it says that Saul ordered his son Jonathan and all of his servants to kill David. But Saul's son, Jonathan liked David very much. So we already have history up to this point. David has loyally served Saul, one of the primary, there's two things that David has done for Saul. One, he was a musician that would soothe Saul with his music. The second thing that David was, was that he was a great warrior and he killed thousands of Israel's enemies. He was a legendary warrior that there were songs that Israel would sing about how legendary David was it caused. It says in Luke in one Samuel 18, it says that it caused Saul to feel jealous of David and Saul let that jealousy take hold in his life. And so he commands his servants to kill David, and then it says, so he told him, my father, Saul intents, this is Jonathan speaking to David.

My father intends to kill you. Be on your guard in the morning and hide in a secret place and stay there. I'll go out and stand by my father in the field where you are and talk to him about you. When I see what he says, tell you, see when he says, I will tell you. Then Jonathan spoke well of David to his father Saul. He said to him, the king should not sin against his servant David. He hasn't sinned against you. In fact, his actions have been a great advantage to you. He took his life in his hands when he struck down the Philistines and the Lord brought about great victory for all of Israel. You saw it and you rejoiced. So why would you sin against innocent blood by killing David for no reason? So Saul listened to Jonathan's advice and sworn oath, as surely as the Lord lives David, David will surely as the Lord lives, David will not be killed. So Jonathan summoned. David told him all these words, and Jonathan brought David to Saul and he served as before. So this is the beginning of the story.

We get jumped down to the keep going to the next. Okay, yeah. So this slide right here. So David ends up at a meal. He's playing his instrument at this meal. Saul is just provoked and he throws a spear at David hoping to pin him to the wall. And yet David escapes. He runs away that night. So here's David. According to even Saul's son, Jonathan, David has done everything just to benefit Saul, and yet Saul decides, this guy's my enemy. He must die. And so David continues to serve this guy on Jonathan's word that, look, my dad's changed his heart. He's not going to kill you. And so he's there playing his Saul, and now Saul's trying to kill him.

And what does David do? David runs away. Now here's this guy in this scene. He's playing a harp. Is David capable of taking on Saul, fighting against Saul? Yeah. David is this crazy good warrior that has killed. In one instance, he went and killed and circumcised 300 Philistines just to get his wife, the lady he wanted to marry. This guy is very competent in violence, and yet in this setting, he decides, I'm not going to retaliate. Keep that in mind as we go through this text as Jesus is teaching because it's the response is a David's response to Saul is a nonviolent response. Let's go to the next slide, Hayden, Matthew 5 45. We'll look at motivation that Jesus gives. He says, I want you to do this. I sow that you may be children of your father in heaven, for it causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

So the motivation here is that your actions, your actions reflect the culture of your family. Why do you love your enemy? Why do you bless him? Why do you do good for him? Why do you pray for your enemy as a citizen of the kingdom? Not because they deserve it, not because some kind of corresponding that they've earned it, but because you're a child of your father, you're in this family where this is just how we do things. Did you ever have that kind of stuff in your family where it's like you kind of have other people ask you, why does your family do that? And you're like, well, I don't know. That's what we've always done. That's just how we do life. You have these traditions, and I would love to hear some of your traditions, but one of the things that I heard last week as I was teaching some of our Filipino friends that attend, they came up to me after they said, our tradition, when we hear this principle, we have a saying that says, when someone throws a stone at you, you throw back a loaf of bread. And that was the saying that they shared with me as their colloquial version of the same principle. We all have traditions that we grew up in and Jesus says, one of our traditions as you come into my family, hey, one of our traditions is that we have a asymmetrical response to evil.

We have a weird way of handling evil in the world where it's almost like when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I used to take Bible college students to work with seniors that were end of life and in memory care where they have serious dementia, they kind of sit in their wheelchair and they're kind of pretty much gone and they can't remember who you were last week or who anybody else is around them. But we would sit there. I loved it because you could sit there and you could have a conversation with them, but you could do both sides of the conversation. So I would talk to them and then I would answer the question that I would ask them for them, and it was kind of like an asynchronous or an asymmetrical relationship. We're just going to have fun here and laugh along, which is great if you crack jokes and you can laugh at your own joke with them and just kind of bring them along and they're just sitting there like smiling.

It was, I don't know. I just got a kick out of it. And for some reason when I think of this asymmetrical response, it's like that. It's like, yeah, you're going to and me, you're going to be unprovoked. All I've done for you, David's, like all I've done for you Saul, is I've just been good. I killed the enemies. I wiped out Goliath for you. I've sat here and played my harp when my family's back there with the sheep, I gave up all that, and here I am and there's nothing I deserve to be having. So spears thrown at me, but I'm not going to retaliate. I'm not going to kill you. It's this just strange tradition in God's kingdom of I'm not going to respond tooth for a tooth, I for an eye. Instead, I'm going to be this one who's just responding with goodness to the person that's bad.

And so Jesus says, the motivation behind doing this is that this is our tradition. This is our family tradition, and if that rubs you the wrong way, you and I need to know we are in the family because that's the tradition, because we were enemies when Christ died for us. There was nothing about us that deserved the cross that before we even came along God knowing that we would come into the world as sinners earning the wages of sin, he died for us. And then he gives this illustration about how this is how God does the world. He says He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. I looked this morning at the weather report in North Korea and it's the same weather report as here, and it's sunny, it's cold. It's about as cold as it is here, but it's sunny.

It's not being wiped out, right? God is giving us the same weather as our enemies. The weather right now in Iran, it's rainy with a high of 49 and a low of 40. That's the weather report for today. The way that God works in the world is that he gives good weather to the people who hate him, who are evil, who are doing what is wrong. He causes the rain, the sun, to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If we jump back over to David's life, and there's a slide for this Hayden one, Samuel 24, 3 through seven, when Saul came to the sheep pens along the road, so Saul's chasing David, there was a set of caves and he had to go to the bathroom. So he went up into these caves to relieve himself, and David and his men happened to be hiding in the recesses of that very cave.

The friends, the men of David, they say to David, look, this is the day that the Lord told you about. I will hand your enemy over to you so that you can do with him whatever you desire. So David got up and he secretly cut off the corner of Saul's robe. Go to the next slide after he's cut off a corner, because imagine David's kind of himself or Saul's disrupted himself to go to the bathroom. David cuts off a hole out of this robe or a corner afterwards. David's conscious conscience bothered him because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe. He said to the men, as the Lord is my witness, I will never do such a thing to my Lord the Lord's anointed. I will never lift up my hand against him since he is the Lord's anointed.

There's one more slide here with these words. David persuaded his men and he did not let them rise up against Saul. Then Saul left the cave and went on his way. Saul has done everything to lose the respect of David and the affection of David and the love of David. But David isn't holding back vengeance. He isn't protecting Saul's life because of equality in Saul. David is in a relationship with God. Do you notice back in our text, could you go backwards? One slide it says, he says, as the Lord is my witness. That sounds like just kind of like Old King James language as God is my witness. But this is the principle. This is the idea with Peter. When Peter teaches this in a practical way, when Jesus calls on us, it's living as God is our witness. You can't see him. He is there.

He's present, not as only as he witness, but God's going to deal with Saul, he says, as the Lord is my witness. But what else does he say? What else does God do? What else is God present in? It says that Saul is the Lord's anointed. Is he acting like it? No. No, he's not acting like it. He's not at all acting like it, but he's still the Lord's anointed. This week I was listening to a cool interview with a guy who's kind of evangelical Christian. He's interviewing a woman who is a theologian, and she comes from the Greek Orthodox or the Eastern Orthodox tradition. And they were talking about kind of their different ways of leadership, and they were talking about the leadership in the Orthodox church and how there's a priest, we call the leadership in our church, we call 'em a pastor, but for them they call 'em a priest.

And she was talking about how they gladly submit to the priest trusting that this is the one that God, the Holy Spirit has appointed to this leadership role. And so Preston who's doing the interview, he says, well, I'm sure that your priest who you deeply respect has really earned your respect. And she said, yes, but we would still respect him even if he didn't behave in a way that was like Jesus, because we just trust that this is the priest that the Holy Spirit has appointed to lead in this setting. It was a fascinating, and they were just talking about the tradition of how they do church and how they view leadership and the kind of idea of just respecting this is who God's placed here. And if God didn't want this person to be here, God could take him out.

And that was David's view of Saul. Like this is the one that Samuel the prophet, anointed as the king. It is not my role to take him out or to avenge myself of all that he has taken from me. And Saul was horrible. Saul in his pursuit of David, he killed a bunch of priests, had a bunch of priests killed off like Saul has behaved horribly. Any one of us could have gone like, yeah, this man is a tyrant and he needs to be stopped. And yet David is leading his men to not avenge himself, but to turn over vengeance to God. So back over in Matthew, Matthew 5 46 and 47, kind of closing out Jesus's teaching. Jesus illustrates this point here, and there should be a slide Hayden that gives us verses 46 and 47. He says, for if you love those who love you, what reward will you have?

Don't even the tax collectors do the same. And if you greet only brothers and sisters, what are you doing out of the ordinary? Don't even gentiles do the same. So as Jesus illustrates this, he calls to mind two of the most hated people in society. And I don't know what that would be for us. Maybe it's like the Ku Klux Klan, and I don't know. I don't want to tell you who I most hate in society, but we all have the people that are the most hated and they deserve to be despised. So Jesus says, Hey, for us as Jews, the Gentiles and the tax collectors, these are the worst. And what do they do? What's normal for them is that they just love their neighbors. They in their own lives, they are the ones who are loving and caring and kind to the ones that are their brothers and sisters.

If you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Could you just remember that word reward? Because I know that in our Protestant evangelical Christianity that is heavily based on the foundation of Luther and Calvin's rebellion against Catholicism and a works based religion that we really shy away from any type of concept of, let's see. Well, I keep using the word, but cause and effect or that you get a reward. But Jesus doesn't teach that. Jesus teaches a lot about rewards, and we will see that more as we get into chapter six. But here he says, if you act like the tax collector or the Gentile, you're not going to get a reward. This is just normal, right? That's like reading whoever wrote how to win friends and influence people. You're just playing by the rules of how the world works and you're being shrewd.

No, in my kingdom, we have this weird thing that we do where we love enemies, and it's not going to be like the bestseller book for 50 years. It's not going to be how you win friends and influence. This is not strategic. It doesn't make sense. There's no long play in this. No, this is a family tradition for us in the kingdom and what you need to know. And Peter doesn't something where he says, he kind of gives some reasons why we love our enemies, where this may convince and compel them to come in. Paul gives some reasons where he is like, it's like putting coals on their head, which may provoke a sense of conviction and lead them to Christ. But we're not given a lot of material on how this factors in. We know that we're the recipients of the tradition and then we're kind of obedient in the tradition, and the results may vary. There's a lot like what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. Convinced acts of nonviolence, nonviolent resistance. That guy died for having that. The outcome of that was great societal change, but personally it was costly for him. So for us as followers of Jesus, these examples from Jesus tax collectors and Gentiles, they imply that kingdom citizens should be better. They love those who love them, but kingdom citizens, followers of Jesus, we love our enemies. It is a hereditary trait.

So that makes life sometimes complicated because you have people who are toxic, people who are difficult and being loving and kind would fall into the category of enabling them. So I don't have all the answers on how this works itself out. Again, for me, David has been one of the great examples because David's life doesn't prove that you always are in a nonviolent position. It seems as if David embodies this, I'm not going to repay the evil done to me, but I'm going to entrust personal vendettas to the Lord and give space. But I personally don't think that a Christian can be a person of non-violence and obey God's concern for justice in the world. I think that to carry out and defend the weak, sometimes there is a place for a violent threatening response that causes evil to be pushed back in the world.

That's my personal conviction. That's what I see in David. David finds a time to not return evil for evil, but then other times he's this great warrior that God gifts like he literally saw Metin is him praising God for gifting him to be this incredible warrior that can kill thousands of people. So what that tells me is that, hey, as citizens, there is this governing ethic, especially I think in this time where we're giving place like Romans 12. It should be, I think the guiding, the clearest principle on this where we're not repaying evil for evil. And Paul says instead, you're giving space for God's wrath because it's God that repays. And so I don't think that Jesus's text here is saying that now all of a sudden you need to just do some mind trick where the person who has made themselves your enemy, Saul, in your life, you've got to love them.

No, I think in order to fulfill this, you need to recognize you have an enemy. Jesus doesn't say they're no longer your enemy. No, they are your enemy and there is a good that can be extended to them. No. What do you do with abusive people? What do you do with people that are enabled? What do you do with them mentally Ill? I don't know. I don't know. But I know this, that the promise of the new covenant was that God's spirit would dwell in you. So you have the Holy Spirit. And what it says in one John two is that the spirit will be your teacher. So Jesus, we have the teaching of Jesus, but then we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit to know what to do surgically in our life, in that relationship, the one you're thinking of, right? So for me, in my own personal life, I served for three and a half years under a pastor who was like a cult leader.

Didn't realize it, didn't take the job knowing it. But about a few years in, I realized I am working for a man who is highly destructive. He is serially destroying the faith of people around me. And so I wrestled, what do I do? I didn't do anything. And he was treating me like that, and he was harmful. And so for me, a lot of this material, this was the first time I had to wrestle with this. What does it mean for me to love my enemy, but what does it also mean for me to be on his board and to carry out justice? And it meant that for me, the time arose after I had moved away, it meant I could go back and confront him with 15 other former board members and tell him, you're a liar. You're a cheat, and you're hurting people.

And his authority told him, you're kicked out of our denomination and you need to change the name of your church, but really what we want is you need to resign. He didn't resign. He continued to lie about all of us. And back in September of 2017, I think it was September of 2017, this guy was disturbed. He was emailing me, this is almost 10 years, almost 10 years later, he's emailing me saying, or not 10 years, it was five years later, he's saying, come on back for a celebration of the church. It's an anniversary. And I'm like, I can't do that. You're under church discipline. You've been kicked out of our church. You're like a horrible person. And he's like, well, I don't think I've done anything wrong to you. So anyway, I wrote this letter to him and I just felt like the Holy Spirit was on me as I wrote this letter because I was just surgical in laying out for him his sin and explaining it to him with clarity.

But at the end of my email to him, I said a couple of things. I said, I just want to call you to repent and to change what you're doing. It's not too late to take a break, get into counseling, listen to the people who love you the most and are speaking truth into your life. You could be restored. You don't have to be this person. And I close by saying, it's, but either way, I can't wait for this all to be behind us. We're going to be in heaven together, and I believe He's heaven. Well, I never heard from him. The very next day though, from what I understood, he rejected what I had to say. And he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died a couple years later. And so in my book, as I looked at that in my own life, this was God saying, showing me like, Hey, you gave place.

I didn't avenge him. I didn't reveal the nakedness. I could have put it all over the internet. I could have tried to turn his church against him. There's all kinds of hurtful things that go through your heart when you've been wronged, all kinds of steps you want to take where it's just like, I'm going to get back at you. I'm going to make this hurt. And I didn't. God gave me the grace to not do that, but to deal with him in a loving way and truthful way. And then God decided, this is my wrath. And that guy, I think the guy died probably 25 years early, earlier than he needed to die because of, I mean, my interpretation of the event was that God took him out because of his ongoing rebellion towards him. So

I commend that to you as a story to trust God in the midst of your persecution. I don't know what it's going to look like to love your enemy, and it's definitely not going to be easy, but you have the Spirit guiding you and also empowering you in that we do it because we're children of the Father, and we do it because He loved us. We are the recipients of this radical, radical, asymmetrical love of the Father. Alright, let's pray and then we'll take communion together. Lord, we just commend this teaching to you. Lord, our hearts have been open to you. We've listened to what you taught, and we admit that this is a hard one to obey. And there's objections that immediately jump up in our own lives where we don't want to do this. And we don't know. We're afraid of the outcomes. We're afraid of what may happen. And so, Lord, we come before you and we ask that your spirit would lead us and guide us, and that you would just make it really, really clear how we are to act and how we are to treat our enemies. We ask that you would work and use us to be just this beautiful testimony of the love of God in our midst. We thank you and we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Advent 2023: Hope

Transcript

As a Christian, we inherit a 2000 years of church history, Christian history, and part of that is this calendar and there's a season of Lent. And depending on what tradition you're from, you have this 40 days leading up to Easter and for us, we are celebrating this idea of advent. And advent has this idea, it's a season where we're anticipating the advent of Christ. There are these three pieces to it. We reenact the Jewish anticipation for a Messiah. We celebrate the arrival of that Messiah and all of its implications, and we now anticipate the second coming of Christ. And so this is week three of Advent and we are going to talk about this idea of hope, of hope. Last March when it was still cold and wintry, my wife and I went to Home Depot and we bought a seeds starting kit that looked kind of like this.

We picked out the seed packets of the vegetables that we wanted to plant and we dropped these tiny seeds into the moist soil of this seed dome. And then we waited and within a couple of days you could see these little tiny green shoots emerging from the shell of the seed. A week later, it was starting to form an inch long blade that would become the earliest branches of the leaves and for the plant. Throughout this process of purchasing the seed dome, planting the seed, watering the seed, protecting the seed bed from our dogs, there was this experience of hope. There's this anticipation. What is this plant? Is it going to grow? Right? The act of taking a dead tiny, almost like so tiny microscopic seed and laying it on most moist soil is a bizarre act because nothing happens. It's not like you put it in the microwave and it comes out hot. You're laying it there and you're wondering, will this thing come alive? It's almost mysterious. It's almost magical that something happens with this seed. It's an experience of hope. When we planted the seeds, it was an unseen potential within the seed and the quiet, persistent push toward life, waiting for the right

Moment for the Christian hope is not just a wishful thinking. Hope is this confident expectation for the future based on God's promises. Again, hope is a confident expectation for the future based off of God's promises. When you look on a map of Eastern Avenue and Broadway, there is what we call an intersection, right? The two streets intersect, and the same is the case as we read our Bibles throughout this week and our own life. The Bible intersects with our life and the more we spend time hearing God speak through his word and we're chewing on it and we're meditating on the Bible, there is this experience of the Bible coming true in our own lives. And sometimes there is this wrestling of like, Lord, which verses are true for me. Now, sometimes the work of God's spirit as we're reading the Bible is he's convicting us like, Hey, listen, this needs to get right in your life.

Sometimes it's this encouragement towards a future. Other times it's this, Hey, you need to hold onto these promises. Many times it's wisdom. It's like, Hey, this is the right way to think about systems in life. And there is this idea of our life intersecting with scripture and hope is formed. Another way of considering hope is it's something that is forged in our hearts as we experience God's faithfulness in our lives. I don't know. I was thinking as I was preparing this message, I don't know if I've ever felt more hopeful, and that is a direct result of walking with the Lord and seeing him fulfill his promises in my life and be true to his word. And so we're going to consider this idea of hope and the idea of the Messiah coming into the world and fulfilling the hopes of the nation. And our text that we're going to open up with is Micah chapter five, verse two, Micah five verse two.

It says this, Bethlehem eita, you are small among the clans of Judah. One will come from you to be ruler over Israel. For me, his origin is from antiquity, from ancient times, a unique scripture. We will unpack this a bit and look at it in its context some more, but before we do that, let's pray together. Father, we thank you for giving us your holy word. We know that this scripture is a scripture that Jesus read and was familiar with, and it speaks of his coming being born in the city of Bethlehem. And we pray that as we consider this text and this idea of being a people of hope that you would stir in our hearts by your spirit this morning, you teach us about hope. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So this passage is from Micah who is a prophet that we find in the Old Testament is just one of the messianic seeds that are planted by the prophets.

Now, if you look at your Old Testament in your Bible, you have the Old Testament, you have the New Testament. The Old Testament tells the story and tracks the spiritual journey of the nation of Israel, and God is working through the nation of Israel to bring to the fore the idea of a messiah that's going to come and save the world, who's going to bring his kingdom to earth and is going to reign as the perfect king. And so Micah is one of these Old Testament prophets in your Bible who has a specific message in a specific time, and we'll talk just for a minute about this guy Micah and his prophetic Miss message. What was the context in which it was delivered?

The prophets were contemporaries from King Solomon all the way up to about 400 years before the time of Christ, so the prophets were speaking to the nation of Israel from right after King Solomon's death through hundreds of years of the split nations. You had the northern nation of Israel and the southern nation of Judah. Micah was a prophet during the eighth century bc. He was a contemporary of Isaiah, who we've looked at over the last couple of weeks, Amos and Hosea. His ministry occurred during the reigns of Jotham and then Ahaz. That's a name that keeps coming up. It's almost like Ahaz has been a part of our advent journey as a church king Ahaz in Judah and Hezekiah and who were the kings of Judah. This period was marked by social injustice, rampant idolatry and moral decay amongst both the region in northern. This is, I'm sorry, the proportions here are bad. This is squeezed for some reason, but there's the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. This is a better map and Micah is prophesying into this area and there's a lot of judgment and rebuke throughout this book. There's political corruption. Let me just show you one of his judgments against Judah and the political corruption that existed at the time. We'll come back to that chart in just a second.

He says in these four verses, he says, now listen, leaders of Jacob, you rulers of the house of Israel, aren't you supposed to know what is just, in other words, aren't you supposed to know what's right and just you hate good and you love what is evil? You tear off people's skin and strip their flesh from their bones. In other words, the systems that you're supporting, the social systems, the systems of justice, the way that the government is set up is dehumanizing. It does not value the flesh and blood of people. You're taking away the body, the embodiment characteristics of the people that you govern.

You eat the flesh of my people. After you strip their skin from them and break their bones, you chop them up like flesh for the cooking pot like meat in a cauldron. Then they will cry out to the Lord. This is the rulers are going to cry out to the Lord, but he will not answer to them. He will hide his face from them at that time because of the crimes they have committed such a grotesque picture, a depiction of this corruption. It's beautiful to see that the God of heaven looks down. He cares about government and politics. Sometimes you've been on the raw end of a political system or a governmental system where it's just not fair.

Early on when I was working in the compassion center and I had a little bit more time on my hands, I would take people to court for different things that would come up like homeless guys that would come through. And there's two in particular that I remember and one was had this accusation that seemed like there was no way that it could have worked. The timing of it could have worked out because I knew him and knew where he was at at the time. And then there was another guy that I can't even remember what his charge was. I think it predated me knowing him. And so I would go with him to, I would go with these guys to court. I just would watch the system and it was amazing to me how if you're poor, the system is unfair. You are relying upon a public defender who's overworked and it's just a system.

The justice system is designed to favor people who can afford a good, somebody who can represent them well in court, and God caress about those kind of things. And that's what Micah is speaking to. He's not speaking necessarily politically, but he's saying, look, God's word to you as a nation is that there's a broken benness about how society is working. You're eating for dinner, these people that are corrupt, he was delivering a message on behalf of God dealing with political corruption in Judah, in Israel, and he's articulating the basis of God's judgment. He's like a lawyer. Micah's acting like a lawyer on God's behalf, giving the indictment. The spiritual leaders though were not much better. Look at how the spiritual leaders were behaving. Micah three 11 and 12, her leaders, speaking of Judah and Israel, her leaders issue rulings for a bribe. Her priests teach for a payment.

In other words, I'll teach you whatever you want to hear, just pay me and her prophets practice divination for silver, yet they lean on the Lord saying, isn't the Lord among us? No disaster will overtake us. Therefore, because of you Zion, Zion will be plowed like a field. Jerusalem will become ruins and the temple's mountain will be a high thicket. Just imagine if both the spiritual leaders and the political leaders are corrupt and they're using, we can't imagine this ever happening in Baltimore, right? But imagine them using their of authority for their own advantage and God caress about it and he raises up this prophet to speak into this setting and to say, this is God's indictment of judgment against you. I pulled this diagram kind of looks like a comic strip, but this is the Bible project's outline of the book of Micah. The black outline here is the judgment sections, so this is one and two, and then these are the sections about hope.

If you go and watch the video that's six minutes long about Micah with the Bible project, the amazing thing, and they didn't do this on purpose, the amazing thing is over and over again, they use the word hope because Micah is speaking into this dark spiritual climate, but then he comes through with the hope, these words of hope. And so the prophecy that we look at here about Bethlehem being the place where the Messiah is born is found in this section here, or is it found there? Yes. Five. Yeah. Chapter five, Bethlehem. You have a leader born in Bethlehem and he's raised up to become a ruler in Jerusalem.

So we have this pattern, indictment, judgment, and then these words of hope and the fact that God is not going to leave his people who need to be judged because he's just, he's not going to leave them in this place of, well, what's the opposite of hope de That's right. He's not going to leave them in a place of despair. We live in an age of great despair. There are many people who are feeling a sense of worthlessness for a number of reasons. Some people I talk to feel a sense of despair because they can't identify how their work connects with their personhood, and so they feel unfulfilled in the work that they're doing. Some people are feeling despaired because as much as they try to do good, they're incapable of producing change in the world and they feel overpowered by it. There's other, there's parents that despair because it's like, look, I've done this for my kids and yet their kids are just struggling in the place as they're getting into their young adult years

And trying to do life. Some people are facing despair because it's like, where did this illness come from? Other people are facing despair because they went to work, they got an education and they played the game, and yet the game is not reciprocating back to them with their career or with the monetary expectations that they had. We're heading towards more despair. Just so you know, as computers and technology advances, there is this sense of humans being replaced more and more by technology, and what that does is if you don't have a framework to think about the world, as technology gets better, it causes a overall sense of what purpose does my life have? If you don't have the Bible coming along and saying that you're created a little higher as a human, you're created a little higher than the angels and that you're designed according to Genesis one and two, to reign and rule with God over the created order, and that someday you'll judge the angels.

Then if you're left without that meta narrative, that grand arc of the story and that there is a second advent of Christ, then you're going to look at the world as it progresses technologically and with corruption and broken systems, and you're going to despair. And so Micah is speaking into this and he's calling out speaking truthfully to what is so upsetting and upsetting probably to these citizens who feel like their flesh is being stripped off to them by systems, and they're hearing Micah say, there is this hope. There's going to be somebody born in Bethlehem. Let's look at that passage again, Micah chapter five, verses two through four. Bethlehem, you are small amongst the clans of Judah. Now, remember Judah's the smaller southern nation, and he says that this city, this little town, Bethlehem, was small amongst the clans of Judah, and one will come from you to be a ruler over Israel for me.

So this is coming 800 years. This is being spoken 800 years before Jesus is born, and when Jesus grows up and he is being identified as the Messiah, one of the knocks against Jesus is his birth story, his origin story, one that he's born without an identifiable biological father, but also just the fact that he's born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth. It is like, well, who could come from that? It's like that's a small town. That's not where the leadership of Israel necessarily would come from. Oh, but it is, it's found in this very inconvenient book that if you're a, well, I guess we'll get into it in Matthew here in just a second, but it's this fascinating little verse about somebody, this future ruler coming from being born in Bethlehem, and then it says, Micah continues. He says, therefore, Israel be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor has given birth.

Then the rest of the ruler's brothers will return to the people of Israel. Very poetic, symbolic, general probably maps on really beautifully to the birth of the Messiah. It maybe maps onto the second advent of Christ. And then verse four, he this leader, this future ruler, born in Bethlehem, he will stand and shepherd them in the strength of the Lord in the majestic name of the Lord his God. They will live securely mind you, no longer having their flesh stripped off of them and being eaten by the rulers. No, they will live securely for then his greatness will extend to the ends of the earth. These are the type of prophetic messages that Micah has, that Isaiah has, that Zechariah has, that Daniel has these prophets that were raised up by God's spirit and given this message to speak into the midst of a spiritual winter. Let's fast forward. Let's go to Jesus's time. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, Wiseman from the East arrived in Jerusalem and they said, where is he who has been born king of the Jews, for we saw his star at its rising and we've come to worship him, so they're associating this star with the king of the Jews. My personal conviction is that these wise men, these magi are in the lineage of Daniel and are carrying with them some of the prophetic messages from

Daniel Daniel's time when he and his compatriots are there in Babylon, and Daniel has all these prophetic words about a future Jewish king who's going to have this amazing rule, just a guess. So it says, then King Herod heard this, and he was deeply disturbed in all of Jerusalem with him. So he assembled the chief priests. He pulls together. So here we have politician, spiritual leaders. They get together and they are asking where the Messiah would be born. That's a good discussion right there. Let's get the political leaders together with the religious leaders and talk about the Messiah. Fortunately, it's not with good intention, but these religious leaders are inconveniently aware of Micah. They say it's in Bethlehem of Judea. They told him, because this is what was written by the prophet and you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, or by no means least among the rulers of Judah, because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people, who will shepherd my people.

Israel, this is 800 years a prophetic word coming to the front of the stage being fulfilled. The people who we would say were just victims in the day of Micah who kind of held onto Micah's words, they didn't get to see it fulfilled. They got the effect of feeling encouraged, but they didn't get the ability to feel the encouragement or they didn't get to see the day of it being fulfilled. But these spiritual leaders, these political leaders, it was in their day and how did they respond? They responded. Herod responded by saying, we've got to kill him. He's a threat to my authority.

It is amazing. As you see God's work through history, take that map it onto your life and know that God has told his story in a written account so that your hope can be fed. I'm going to go a little bit off script here, a little bit off script, and I won't have a passage, but I just love this from the beginning of Romans chapter. Romans chapter 15, if you have a Bible, you can look it up there. I'm believing. It's Romans, Romans 15, four. It says, for whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction. So whatever was written in your Bible in the past, it was written for our instruction. So when you have a sow that, what does that mean?

It's causative, right? It's showing it's an instrument. It's coming forward. It's written so that you have instruction so that we may have hope the Bible is written so that for your instruction, so that you might be and have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the scriptures. You see, it's a circle there in the way that Paul writes it. You have instruction, hope, endurance, encouragement from the scriptures. I love that, and I think that that is in a verse what I'm trying to show you from the book of Micah. Alright, let's wrap this up here.

The reality is that we go through spiritual winters, personal struggles. So this may be Christmas time where you feel like I'm supposed to feel happy, but maybe you don't. It could be that maybe you're experiencing a conflict in a key relationship that you can't get resolved. Maybe you're facing an illness or chronic pain, maybe your finances are tight, you feel discouraged. Maybe you're looking for work and you're just struggling to find that work that just lands and it's the right place for you. Maybe you're lonely, maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you have questions that are not resolved. Maybe you feel like evil is winning.

And the reality is that God often speaks of hope and promises in the midst of our darkest times. Jesus born in Bethlehem as foretold by Micah, is the embodiment of hope, not just for Israel, but for all humanity. We have as we go through our own seasons that are difficult, we have a person that is named hope. Jesus is our hope, Christ's life, death and resurrection fulfill the deeper longing for redemption, justice, reconciliation that is expressed throughout the Old Testament. And so let me encourage you on this third Sunday of Advent to find hope in Jesus amidst your current situation, injustice, societal injustice, personal trials, just as Israel would've found hope in those prophetic words of Micah, cultivate hope through prayer, meditation, meditation on scripture, participation in your church family, and then anticipate that second advent. Do you see how Micah's prophecy transcends the first coming of Christ into our day and beyond?

Because he talks about the reign and the knowledge of this king being this universal reign. We need to live in a way with the reality that should develop in us as Jesus followers, is that we have this personal relationship with Jesus. Hope is being formed in us, forged in us, and it is embodied in us as we look forward to the second coming of Christ. Peter says it this way in his epistle, who then will harm you if you are devoted to what is good, who can harm you if you are devoted to what is good, but even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear them. This is Peter's remix. You know how you take music? You remix it. This is Peter's remix on the sermon of the mound. He's saying, you are blessed, you're suffering, you're blessed. Do not fear them or be intimidated. Then look at 15, but in your hearts regard, Christ, that's the word, esteem. Esteem. Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time. So you're ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for the reason of the hope that is in you. So

Peter paints a picture where you're opposed, you're suffering possibly. And he's saying, Hey, look at, you're still blessed. Not only are you hunkered down, enduring, marching forward, not getting distracted, not off your game because of that suffering, but you're ready to answer people who are like, where's the hope coming from? How come you're so hopeful? How come you are going through all this stuff and you have so much hope? Remember, he talked about it at the beginning of his book, the Alien Hope. It's this hope that just invade your life because it's birthed in you by the Holy Spirit. Literally, the hope of heaven is something where you say like, God, I just give you permission to work in my life. Take away the despair. Fill me with your hope. And that is what the spirit of God wants to do in each of us.

And so you may feel like you're living in a dark spiritual time where even the things that ought to work, government, spiritual leaders, whatever it may be, the things that ought to work maybe are not working. And yet God speaks and he says, I care about injustice and I will judge. And you need to know that there is this hope in the Messiah. You can sink your teeth into it. It's the anchor for your soul. Let's pray together. Lord, thank you for coming and fulfilling Micah's strange prophecy about you being a ruler and coming from this obscure town of Bethlehem that you fulfilled your word after 800 years and you fulfilled your word in our lives. God, I pray that as we do life and through this week, I pray that you would just encourage us with your word and that you would continue to form in us hope, and this would be a season where we can have that sense of hope in your second coming. We love you. We pray these things in Jesus name together. Amen.

Advent 2023: Peace

Transcript

This is going to be week four. In our advent series. We're talking about awaiting the king, and this morning we're going to cover the idea of peace. You may have noticed that it's almost unavoidable to sing a Christmas Carol without singing about the peace that God brings to bear through his son Jesus. One of the things that we are learning as we have gone through the book of Matthew together is that the values that compose the kingdom, things like love, peace, hope, joy, the things that compose the kingdom are associated with the presence of the king. You don't get to have peace, true peace without having the king. We live in a unique time culturally where many of the values in our culture align with values in God's kingdom. There's a desire for justice and equality. There's a desire for peace in the world. We are not living in a culture that just prizes war, at least here in the United States. We're hopefully lovers of peace.

There's these values that we have kind of as pillars within society, but the unique thing is that our culture wants the kingdom without the king. And what we're seeing as we go through the book of Matthew and what we're going to see again this morning is that you cannot have these values without having, in a true sense, in the way that our hearts long for. We cannot have these things without the presence of the king. You don't get perfect love without the king of love being present. You don't get true justice without the just judge of the whole earth being involved. So last week we talked about how there's this sense of anticipation that comes with advent for us. We have this reality where we have arrived and the first coming has arrived, but now we're waiting for the second advent. We call it the second coming of Christ.

We're living in this place of tension between a first coming that was very much historic and real, and there's realities that we inherit because of the first coming of Christ, but then there are things that we are living into hoping for with the second advent of Christ. That's very important as you live as a Christian, that you understand that you're between two way markers on a map, that there is a historic event that has happened in the past, and yet there are things that are yet in your reality that are unresolved because there is still a future coming of Christ. And so did you ever, when you were in first second grade in art class, make a fan by folding the paper back and forth? Yeah, I think as I was thinking about that this week, I think that the corrugation of those, the folded paper is the idea that I've been communicating a lot over the last couple years on Sundays in the text in that the Bible just kind of, it maps onto itself.

If you were to take that fan and to just collapse it down, you'd be able to drive a pin through it and it would touch all these different segments of that same piece of paper if you were to pierce it through. And that is in a sense how scripture is. So as we are in this place of tension, we are reenacting what the Jews lived in as they heard all these prophecies from Genesis three on through their history, there's this anticipation that a person is going to make it all better. A person is going to change reality. A kingdom is going to come through a king this morning. We're going to zero in on the promise of peace. The promise of peace. Let me set the stage for this a bit and just talk about the absence of peace on a global stage. There are currently at least 23 major armed conflicts that are occurring in the world right now.

One of the leading universities that studies global conflict is a university out of Sweden named Sula University, and they defined conflict. One of their definitions is this, an armed conflict is a contested incompatibility that concerns government and or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is a government of a state, results in at least 25 battle related deaths in one calendar year. So they have remember the covid charts tracking cases. Well, this university, they have a similar dashboard where they're tracking global conflicts. This is one of their charts. This is state-based conflict by level of intensity since the end of World War ii. And you see the rise in minor conflicts and this kind of the level degree of war.

They also have this map of current, this is at the end of 2022 current geographic areas that are experiencing conflict. It is the absence, the absence of peace. Many of these countries, people in these countries have lived with constant turmoil. It's an experience completely different from our own where the instability you live with instability, whether or not your government will be able to defend you, or maybe the government is not even the government that you chose or would have chosen to be underneath. And so there is this sense of global unrest that exists, but there is also internal turmoil. There is internal anxiety. There is again, another entity, I forget the body that tracks this, but their name will be on the next slide here. But they're looking at anxiety disorders, panic, generalized anxiety, agoraphobia specific phobias, social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, separation anxiety disorder.

You take these things, you put 'em on a chart and you match it up against GDP, and you have this interesting kind of J curve where some of the lowest experiences of anxiety are in countries with low GDP. You also have some countries with high GDP with low levels of anxiety. But it's interesting how you have this curve that goes up as GDP increases. There is this turmoil that is not resolved with money, and it is a epidemic that is the anxiety of epidemic is ever increasing. Just a few quotes from characters. Prince Harry says, I've been to the very darkest of places, but I'm here now. I'm here because I've learned that life is about finding peace within yourself and then can truly share that piece with others. Amanda Gorham, who shared a poem at the presidential inauguration, she said in 2022, there is so much noise in the world.

It can be hard to find your own inner peace, but it's there and it's worth searching for. Lynn Manuel Miranda says, I'm constantly striving for peace, but I don't always achieve it. It's a journey, not a destination. And Emma Watson, I've had times in my life where I've felt very lost and very uncertain, but I've learned that those are often the times when we grow the most we live. Our human experience is an experience of external conflict and internal conflict. Our world longs to be at peace to have its internal and internal conflicts resolved. We long to have peace within and with the rest of the world.

This morning, we're going to look at a text from Isaiah chapter nine, verses six through seven. This is a very famous text that is oftentimes quoted at Christmas time because it prophesies of his son. So if you have the book of Isaiah in front of you, we're going to be in chapter nine. Isaiah chapter nine, verses six and seven. It says this, for a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace. The dominion will be vast and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness. From now on and forever, the zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this. Let's pray.

Let's ask the Lord to speak to us through this text. Lord, this is a famous prophecy from Isaiah, and you said through Isaiah that this son who's born one of his titles would be the prince of peace and that he would reign and be present. We just thank you, God, that you came and that you are present and that your presence remains with us by the Spirit, and you want to bring about peace in our life that this is a real thing that we can experience as followers of Jesus. So teach us this morning about peace. We pray this in your name. Amen. Amen. So Isaiah chapter nine, this promise of a son. Again, just to review, there are a few names here, titles that Jesus has given. Notice, this expanse of the names that are given that we have. Wonderful counselor, your therapist, he's the wonderful therapist, but then he's also the mighty God.

He's the eternal father. So this family identity, the ongoing never ending eternal father and then a royal term, the prince of peace. And then he says a couple of things about what he's going to accomplish. He's going to have this vast domain, comprehensive authority. It says in verse seven. In verse seven, it says that he will have this endless, he will bring in endless prosperity. I know that there is a bad teaching, a heretical teaching in the church that we call it the prosperity gospel or the health and wealth gospel. It's easy in the critique of that heresy to think or to take that and think God's opposed to prosperity. But no God's Jesus's reign. When he comes in with his second coming, he's present. He's going to bring about eternal everlasting prosperity and ambition. A personal ambition to be prosperous is not something that God is opposed to.

What is he opposed to? He's opposed to greed. The misuse of money, the process of getting means in a manipulative. The means would be manipulative to gain wealth using dishonesty, unbalanced scales, but yet the presence of Jesus is going to bring endless prosperity. There's going to be a revived Davidic throne, right? Again, here's our little second grade fan that's folded up. It's like we had the throne back there of David and David's coming back, but as Jesus and Jesus is royal, just expanding all of Israel's borders to the greatest expanse that they ever had. Geographically, Jesus is going to come and embody that, but it's going to be Jesus doing it from that throne, and then there's going to be justice and righteousness. The people that have been wronged, all of the wrongs done to you will be righted. There will not be a imbalanced justice. There will be a righteousness. At the time that Isaiah wrote this, Israel's peace was fleeting. So Isaiah who writes, who's the writer of this prophecy? God spoke through him. They're under Assyrian threat. The prophecy likely arose during the reign of King Ahaz of Judah. We talked about him last week. He was the king from 7 42 to 7 27, and at this time, the powerful Assyrian empire posed a significant threat to Judah. Maybe if you're here last week, you remember that map.

And so Ahaz is terrified and God raises up this man who is filled with God's spirit speaking on God's behalf, speaking, speaking this reality about this future 700 years down the road, this sun being given, it's beautiful how you think of just the turmoil that A has was experiencing and how the promise that's matched up with that from God, even though it's not for that moment, it is this government. He's like, Isaiah's like I got to tell you about this government that's going to happen through Jesus, this reign, this prince of peace that's going to come in and he's just going to be so good when he comes. So there's this exterior threat from Assyria, but then there's also these internal divisions that Israel and Judah was experiencing. Judah itself was experiencing internal divisions with some that were advocating for submission. Hey, let's just submit to Usy and others.

Were seeking alliance with other powers. Maybe we should go down to Egypt. Maybe we should just defend ourselves and just repent and turn back to God. This division weakened Judas position and further fueled the fear and uncertainty. Isaiah comes along and he talks about the prince of peace. There would be this anticipation that the Jewish people would have if they were listening to their scriptures. But then you fast forward 750 years, Israel had been repopulated. Israel had gone captivity then been delivered and been living back in the land. They had repopulated the land, but the land was under Roman occupation. So there were still open-ended promises from God that were not yet fulfilled. It was like, God, you made these promises. You said this was going to happen, but the promises were not yet fulfilled, and yet one of the promises hanging out there is that a virgin would conceive and give birth to a baby, and then this promise of that there's going to be this reign and this rule.

So if you're a Jew at the time, you're just wondering how does this all go together? Again, setting the stage for this scene in Luke, this idea of peace, the prince of peace, it comes up on the night of Jesus's birth earth. So we have these shepherds. The shepherds are in the same region. This is Luke two in the same regions. Shepherds were staying in the fields and they're keeping a watch at night over their flock. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, don't be afraid for, look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all people. So angels talking to shepherds the night of Jesus's birth, and they say, today in the city of David, a savior was born for you. Who is the Messiah? The Lord. This will be the sign for you. You're going to find the baby wrapped tightly in cloth, laying in a manger or the feeding trough of animals. Suddenly there was a multitude of heavenly hosts with angels praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest heavens, and do you see it there? Peace on earth to people he favors.

When the angels came, angels, God's messengers, angels come to shepherds and say, this baby's born and a part of the message is peace on earth, peace on earth Again. Do you see here the thing that is long for being peace? It comes with a person. Now, I don't know your relationship with anxiety. I know I felt anxious about different things this week. It seems like it's a human condition, some more debilitating than others, and yet here is the Bible, which is God's revelation to us saying, I'm about peace. I'm about your peace. I'm invested. The thing you long for of having peace. That's what I want for you. But you need to understand that it comes through a person. Now, you can go to therapy. There's nothing wrong with therapy. You can change your circumstances. You can have your prescriptions. These things are not bad.

Those things are graces that God provides for us. But you need to at the same time understand that when the Bible talks about peace, the Bible hitches that solution to a person. You cannot have the solution without a person. You can adapt, you can cope. Medication is awesome. It oftentimes helps you get your head above water. If you're in that debilitating place of anxiety, all that stuff is great, but you need to understand that Jesus came to give you this peace that is well, it says in the Bible that it passes understanding a lot of therapy is here's what you understand here. Let's get into why is your peace disturbed? Why are you feeling anxious? And the Bible is not opposed to that, but it says that God can provide a peace that goes beyond our understanding. But you have to understand, you don't get to have it without Jesus.

Later on in Jesus's ministry, he talked to his disciples who dealt with a lot of anxiety in their life, and these guys were a panicky mess and you would be a panicky mess if you had seen John the Baptist get beheaded. He's this outsider. He's causing problems and the guy doesn't seem to want to avoid problems like he's happily turning over tables in the temple and raising Lazarus from the dead and rebuking the spiritual leaders of the day, like Jesus is not avoiding scary situations, and yet you're following him. And it's like, yeah, that would kind of be an anxious setting. And so in John 14, here's one of the things that Jesus says. He says, don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. Later on in that same chapter, he says, peace I leave with you because remember, this is the night.

This whole part of the Bible is when Jesus is his. He's the night before he's crucified, so he's giving final instructions to his disciples and he's talking to them about peace right before he's arrested and then crucified, and he's saying, peace, I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give you as the world gives, don't let your heart be troubled or fearful. A little bit later, same, same setting, Jesus is having that last supper with his disciples. Here's another thing that he says. He says, I've told you these things so that in me you may have peace. Where is the peace located in me? You may have peace in me. You'll have suffering in this world.

Be courageous. I've conquered the world. Isn't that interesting that the peace Jesus is talking about is not absent from a promised suffering? You're going to have suffering, but you're going to have peace in me, peace in me, the follower of Jesus, the citizen of the kingdom. They can experience peace because Jesus resolves the conflicts. Jesus resolves the conflicts. Jesus brings with him peace, and he accomplishes, accomplishes a reconciling work so that peace can be experienced. Can you just do a mental exercise with me for a second? Tune back in here for just a second. Genesis three, go with me back to the beginning, right? God creates the heavens in the earth. Adam and Eve, they're in perfect relationship with God. They're at peace. God loves them. They're best friends with God. They would walk together with God in the cool of the day. They're in this beautiful garden.

They're completely naked and they're stoked about it. They don't even know anything's wrong. Nothing is wrong. They're completely naked and they're happy, right? But they disobey God and all of a sudden peace gets sucked out. All of a sudden, what does it say? They see that they are naked and they start taking fig leaves. Have you ever read a fig tree? I had a fig tree in California. They're these giant, giant leaves, but they're not very strong. Can you imagine trying to sow a fig leaf together to cover up your nakedness? That is not a sustainable outfit at all. They must've been freaking out, right? It's like, oh, here's some big leaves. Let's cover up. So they're covering their nakedness, then they're hiding. It says, the humans hid from the Lord. When they hear God approaching like the normal time to walk with God, they hear God coming and they go and hide.

They're not at peace with God. The relationship that beautiful. God's okay with me. I'm okay with God, no sense of guilt, no shame. All that's gone. They're running away from God's presence. And you see a little bit later as God's talking to them, what have you done? Why have you done this? God's inviting them to confess their sins and they confess a little bit, but then they start blaming each other. Adam's like, well, this is the fault of the woman you gave me. She, she's the one that told me to take the fruit. And then she's like, well, it's the serpent. He tricked me and I ate the fruit. There's just this. It's just conflict. It's a mess. You go one chapter later, you have two. Adam and Eve, they have two boys, and they get into a conflict and one kills the other. Can you get a clearer picture of peace is gone out of the picture?

It's a mess because there's no peace, and yet there is in every human this longing, Emma Watson is saying, and Lin Manuel is saying, and like Prince Harry is saying, is like, I want inner peace. And the Bible over and over again is saying, there is peace that's available and Jesus is telling his disciples the night before he's killed, peace, my peace. I'm going to give you my peace. I'm going to leave with you. Peace. I have it for you, but you need me. I have to be your king. You have to be willing to see that the peace that you long for is hitched to me. Again, Jesus brings with him peace. He accomplishes a reconciling work so that peace can be experienced, peace can be experienced.

Jesus fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah as the prince of peace, bringing not just an absence of conflict, but a deep reconciling peace between you and God and between humanity and the people that they are around. There is this now and not yet that we live in. I spoke about this at the beginning, and again, we live in this tension between the present reality of Jesus's peace in our lives, and yet a future hope of complete peace in his second coming, the already of Christians first advent and the not yet of his return. Let me give you four pieces just of practical application and how you can experience God's peace in your life. The first is this. You need to be at peace in your relationship with God. You are designed to be a friend of God. You are designed to receive God's love. And so I would invite you to embrace the peace that from a reconciled relationship with God.

How do you do that? Well, it's through Jesus. You trust that Jesus paid for the junk that you've done, that stuff that has broken your relationship with God. Jesus paid for it. And so you're just invited into a relationship with God by leaning on Jesus, leaning into what Jesus has done for you, accepting what he has done on your behalf. It's a step of faith that God, I'm ready to trust in you. It says literally that at that point you are reconciled with God. Think of these warring nations, Russia against Ukraine, Hamas against Israel. What's lacking there is reconciliation. They are killing each other. There is animosity that exists there, and the Bible says that you are an enemy of God through your actions. You may wish that your actions didn't make you an enemy of God, but they do. And God's love overcomes your and my disobedience.

Your and my disobedience has been absolved through the work of Jesus on the cross. So be reconciled to God. Let Jesus's work. Be effective on your behalf. Don't let Jesus just hang out there on the cross and then be resurrected not to your own benefit like he did it for you. Benefit. Let it be meaningful and purposeful because you just open up your life and say, I receive that. I surrender to that awesome reality. The second thing though is having done that, cultivate this inner peace daily spiritual disciplines like prayer. Have a conversation with God through prayer, like talk to God. He loves the things you want to talk to him about. You can be so honest with him. Read the Bible, meditate on the Bible. Take a little section of the Bible. You don't have to understand the whole thing. Yeah, it's daunting, but just read a little bit of Bible and quiet time.

Cultivate that inner peace where you're letting God be present through his spirit in your life. And then the third thing is peace. In the midst of trials. Recognize there are some things in your life where there are trials. There are some people that disrupt your peace regularly, and it might be something where, and you need to step out of that relationship. But there's some stuff that's unavoidable, right? Money just causes anxiety sometimes, right? Sickness can cause anxiety. Work the future. All of these things can just disrupt peace. And in a sense that's a trial. And I want to encourage you to find peace. Walk with Jesus the midst of those personal struggles and those uncertainties draw strength from his promise. This is John 16. Three is like I give you peace. You're going to suffer, John 1633, you will suffer, but I have peace for you.

Access it. Lean into that promise that he wants to give you peace. And the final thing here is as God is authoring peace in your life. Become an agent of peace to the people around you. Help people be reconciled. Be reconciled to others. Walk in forgiveness, understanding in conflicts and situations. This isn't sloppy forgiveness where people wrong you and you're just like, oh, yeah, it's no big deal. It means that you say, just like a judge who's kind of close to a case and they say, I'm going to recuse myself from the case. I'm going to pass it off to another courtroom. We're called as Christians, to not be the courtroom for the world. We can recuse ourself from all cases and say, I'm not designed. My heart is not designed to be a good judge. I'm going to let you be judged by God.

And God. It says in Romans chapter 12 that he takes vengeance sometimes and he needs space to take vengeance. And if you're going to be the one taking vengeance, you're not leaving space for God to deal with other people. And so the call of scripture is to be a person of peace. Sometimes there's just broken relationships and you can stand in the middle there and you can just help people get along, help people see each other's perspective, help mend relationships. The Bible says that if you're a peacemaker, you're a son of God. You're just being like God by stepping into a setting. It's an art form to be a peacemaker. Sometimes. There's these ambassadors that aren't just ambassadors. They donate a lot of money to the President, but they're ambassadors because they're just gifted at making peace. They're really good at knowing all these moving pieces, these geopolitical pieces.

They're not emotionally driven. They can just kind of step into the space and they can help warring factions be at peace that's bearing out the image of God in your human space. So let me encourage you in those four ways to experience God's presence, this peace of God, the prince of peace, bearing his image or bearing upon you, his kingdom, his reign, and his experience. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for your word and thank you for sending your son Jesus into the world as the prince of peace. And God, we just bring before you our anxiety, and

We wish that we could just flip a switch and turn off those feelings. And so many times we can't even outthink the anxiety. But yet, Lord, when we read the Bible here, it seems like you're about peace and that it's a part of one of your names. It's your title. You're like the prince of peace. You don't just stop wars, but you give internal peace. And I pray for everyone here that you would do that, that you would give us peace in our life, that this would become a living experience. It's this kind of invading peace that just comes in from the outside and just takes a hold of our hearts as you're there and as we're in relationship with you, help us, God, to be peacemakers as well. We want to honor you as we do life this week. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Advent 2023: Love

Transcript

We are entering the season of Advent. Advent derived its name from a Latin word called Adventist, meaning the coming or the arrival. It's a season of anticipation and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas and the anticipation of his return at the second coming. So it's a season of anticipation. I just would encourage you have the next four weeks leading up to your Christmas time and it's going to be a crazy busy time, right? There's a lot of things that are stressful. It's a unique season. People drive fast, malls are packed. Shopping centers are miserable to go into, but one of the things that I'd encourage you to do during this time is just reflect on and have that spirit of anticipation of, Lord, what do you'd want to do in my heart? Historically, advent has been a time of spiritual reflection, penitence and renewal akin to lent that season leading up to Easter, but it has a focus on joy and hope of Christ's birth.

It's a period where believers prepare their hearts and minds for the arrival of the savior, remembering the long period of waiting and expectation before the birth of Jesus. So our theme is going to be the awaiting the King, and we will talk about love, hope, peace, and joy over the next four weeks, all embodied with this idea of just awaiting the king. This morning I want to focus our attention on the love of God and the advent of God's love. Our text is going to be Isaiah seven 14, which I'll put up here on the screen. I'll read it and then we'll pray together. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. See, the virgin will conceive, have a son and name him Emmanuel. Let's pray together. Lord, we ask that during the next four weeks that we would be able to stop the normal routine and anticipate, have that spirit of anticipation for the advent of Christ, just like those who waited eagerly year after year, hoping to see the Messiah.

We want to join in that anticipation, Lord, that as we have that spirit of anticipation, may you find in us soft and tender hearts to receive what you would say and what you'd show us. We pray that you'd speak to us this morning through this text. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen, amen. So what I want to do this morning is look at this passage from Isaiah, Isaiah chapter seven, and then two similar passages from prophets. 200 years later, I'm going to give you some historical information. My hope is that this is not for the sake of being new, but that you're going to consider the idea of this anticipation for the coming of Christ in a whole new way. Isaiah seven 14, it was delivered in the eighth century before Christ. So 800 years before the time of Jesus during the reign of King Ahaz.

Lemme give you a map of what the world looked like at the time of King Ahaz. The thing that you need to see there is that there is the northern nation of Israel, and then in the South there's that green little area that's this area of Judah. So Israel had been split into two separate nations after the death of King Solomon. And for years and generations and generations there had been idolatry and walking away from God, the kings of Israel were rebellious and did not follow the teachings of Moses. And so God raised up the Assyrian nation and the Babylonian nation about a hundred years apart from each other to come and take captive Israel. So the Assyrians came first and carried Israel off captive, and then later the Babylonians came and took sacked Jerusalem basically and took captive the people of Judah and Judea.

So Isaiah is a prophet during the time leading up to Assyria, coming and taking and invading, and Isaiah's prophesying to King Ahaz. King Ahaz is a king in the southern region there of Judah. And at this time there was a significant political and military upheaval. Judah faced threats from surrounding nations, especially from Israel. Their northern brother was a threat to them. An arum who was the leader of Syria, was pressuring Judah to join their alliance against the Assyrian Empire. So you have Assyria threatening, and then you have kind of this alliances being made in the south between Israel and Syria trying to fend off this growing nation called Assyria. The immediate backdrop for Isaiah seven is a prophecy During the mite war, Israel also known as Ephrem, an arum, they had formed a coalition to resist Assyria and they wanted Judah to join them again, the king of named When Ahaz refused those two nations, Syria and Efrim or Israel, they attempted to invade Judah and install a puppet king in Jerusalem.

So imagine Ahaz operating from a place of incredible vulnerability. Think of some of the modern wars that are taking place and the leaders of nations and the threat of a major nation coming against you. And you've got to decide, do I join this alliance with these foreign nations in Syria and Israel? What do we do? And so it's into that context, that big giant question that A has, not just a question but terror of potential harm. Isaiah prophesies to King Ahaz was in a difficult position facing a threat of invasion and overthrow. He was considering seeking help from the Assyrian Empire, basically going around the back of Israel and going to Assyria, a decision that the prophet Isaiah strongly opposed because it showed a lack of faith in God's protection. So the prophet urged king aas to trust in God rather than foreign alliances or military might the prophet urged the king to trust in God rather than foreign alliances or military might. It was during this encounter that the prophecy of Isaiah seven 14 was given God with us. This is going to be the basis. I'm going to try to make the case for you that God loves you and that he demonstrated his love for you by coming and being with you. This prophecy is given to Ahaz through Isaiah.

Imagine going to Isaiah. You're a king, and this is a spiritual Sr. And there's people, you've gone through things, moments in your own life where you're like had great questions or Let me pose that to you as a question. Can you think of a time where you had great questions and the fear of calamity in your own life? Have you ever felt anxious about something on the horizon? And you're wondering, what does the future hold? You're upset. You're afraid, and you look for somebody who's spiritual somebody, somebody give me a word from God, somebody speak to me. That's the place where Ahaz is at. And so this is the bizarre word that comes from Isaiah, not just God with us, but the Lord himself is going to give you a sign, Ahaz, a virgin will conceive and have a son and name him Emmanuel. You got to love just kind of the bizarre nature of how God works, right?

Imagine your moment of anxiety and you're like, I don't know what to do. I'm upset. And the spiritual person says, well, God's going to give you a sign, a virgin's going to conceive, which is miraculous, right? Because that's not how conception takes place. A virgin's going to conceive and his name is going to be God with us. What a crazy thing to say to somebody who's anxious right in the midst of their terror, and yet that's the word that is spoken to Ahaz. He's saying, should I join this political alliance? And the answer from God is a virgin will conceive, his name will be God is with us. Here's the point that I often make, you know that this is a theme in my teaching over and over again. It's that God works in a patterned way and that you can be a king facing calamity. You can be a mother in a tight spot. You can be a senior facing the last 10, 15 years of your life. You can be a student

Feeling out. It does not matter. The stories of the Bible can map onto our life. And God's word to ahaz can be the word 200 years later, which we'll see. And it can be the word that's given to Joseph as he's learning of the pregnancy of his wife. The God of the Bible is the God who comes along and he speaks into this king's life and he says, God's going to work. He's going to give you this sign. And in the name of this person that's conceived is Emmanuel, God is with us. There are other times where God speaks this same thing.

Haggai prophesied during a time when the Jewish people were returning from the Babylonian exile. Remember I showed you that map and Babylon's on there? Well, they got carried off. They ended up in captivity, and they were there for 70 years. This period is around five 20 BCE, nearly 70 years after the first wave of exiles and the destruction of the first temple. And Haggai is prophesying. He's speaking on God's behalf to the nation. This small group of people that had come back from Babylon and were trying to rebuild Jerusalem. His primary message, Haggai's primary message was focused on the rebuilding of the temple. The Jewish returnees had initially started rebuilding the temple, but they faced opposition. They became discouraged leaving the work incomplete. So here's another just really human experience that you probably could relate to. If we sat with this group of people in five 20 BC and asked them about just what are you guys feeling?

You got a half-built temple. You've got people that are opposed to the rebuilding of the temple. You got some political stuff, some threats against you. Their emotional experience as humans would be very similar to your emotional experience in your setting. And God has a spiritual person called a prophet who speaks on his behalf into that setting. I would encourage you to understand this is one of the reasons why we want to recognize the work of God's spirit through us, that God speaks through his words, but then he also speaks through one another. And there's never going to be a person who's going to speak into your life where that's going to disagree with the Bible, but God uses, even to this day, he uses people with this gift of prophecy, this spiritual ability to speak right into the moment. I've always told people, you need to have friends, you need to have counselors, you need to have prophets.

And I forget what the fourth thing is that I tell people, but you got to have, there's four, I'll remember it right? Get on slack. It's been a little while since I've given my four, but you ought to be, I would look around you and think about, okay, you got friends. Friends are just loyal, right? You can talk with them about anything. There's a sense of safety that those friends provide for you, and then you're going to have people that counsel you. That's where they're going to take and understand the systems of the world. Maybe it's a therapist, but maybe it's just somebody that they're not necessarily your buddy. You're not going to go bowling with them. Well, I'm not going to go bowling with anybody. I hate bowling. But okay, maybe you like bowling, right? You're not going to go bowling with your therapist, but they're really good at taking just the observed systems in the world and they're going to apply them to your life and say, here's how the observed wisdom and systems apply to your life.

And they're a counselor to you. But then there's this other group of prophets that really God provides. They have the spirit of God working through them. It's not like they're really trying to gin it up or do something magical or fancy. It's just that they have a relationship with God and they use their mouth and they communicate, and it's just like God speaks through them. We got people like that in our church where they don't know that they're operating in that gift, but they just talk like, Hey, here's what God's showing me on my heart and I'm listening. I'm going, oh, that's from God. God speaks to that person. And it happens over and over again through that person, and I know and I listen to them differently than maybe I would listen to somebody else. So this guy named Haggai is one of those people.

He's a prophet, and God's spirit is on him speaking to a bunch of discouraged construction workers, right? Don't you love the Bible? Here's a whole book of God's spirit comes on these guys to talk to construction guys, construction workers. Here's what he says. Haggai one 13 and 14, then Haggai, the Lord's messenger delivered the Lord's message to the people. What does God say to the people? I am with you? Where did we hear that before? The word Emmanuel, right? Emmanuel. God is with us. God says to these discouraged construction workers, I'm with you. This is the Lord's declaration, right? So God promises it. But look at verse 14. The Lord roused the spirit of Zabel. He's one of the leaders at the time of SheTiel, governor of Judah, the spirit of the high priest, Joshua son, Joseph Zak, and the spirit of the remnant of the people.

So these three different groups, like two individuals in a group, their spirit is roused. They began to work on the house of the Lord of armies, their God. I love that. I love that picture of where again, the spirit of God comes along and just says, Hey, I'm with you. I'm with you. There's another contemporary of Haggai named Zacharia Zacharia. He's got a whole book in the Old Testament. Zacharia is prophesying in the exact same context to the exact same group of people. He's a contemporary five 20 BC while sharing Haggai's concern for the rebuilding of the temple as Zachariah's prophecies. They had this broader scope, and he included visions that point to the future restoration of Jerusalem and the coming of the Messiah. The establishment of God's kingdom like Haggai Zacharia encouraged the people to in the task of rebuilding the temple and assuring them of God's presence and support.

I'm going to show you two verses here from Zechariah in just a second similar theme. But the reason why I am showing these verses to you, and I want to meditate on them with you this morning, is that there's this anticipation of God, we need you to be with us. We need the king. We need you to come and put on flesh and blood and be in our midst. So Zechariah says this daughter, Zion, shout for joy and be glad for I am coming to dwell among you. This is the Lord's declaration. Many nations will join themselves to the Lord on that day and become my people. I will dwell among you and you will know that the Lord of armies has sent me to you. Zacharia has a bunch of distraught, discouraged, demoralized, I can't think of any other words in front of them.

And the temple, the wall is not getting built. There's a threat from the surrounding enemies. There's this worry of there's just total instability. And yet God speaks this word to them. And the amazing thing is God's going to encourage this group to finish the work. Jerusalem does get rebuilt and this temple happens. It's the temple that Jesus does ministry from. But not only does this passage get fulfilled in the sense of God's rousing their spirit and he's in their midst as a spirit, but this speaks to Jesus coming and literally dwelling among you. Here's the point. If you're new to the Bible, if you're new to the Bible and Christmas, the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin, it's not this idea that all of a sudden this alien appeared and as Jesus like in the story of human history, there's this whole backstory of the nation of Israel anticipating and waiting for a king, a priest, king that would come and right what is wrong, bring justice, bring peace, establish the flourishing that they had longed for.

And there had been these occasions where the enemy was threatening and they were reaping the consequences of their own sin, and they just didn't know what to do. And they had questions, all experiences that you and I can relate to, yet God speaks through his spiritual people. God speaks into that setting. He says, I will be with you. That's a loving God. You think of the gods of the Greek mythology, the presence of God wasn't always the most pleasant thing, but yet the God of the Bible, when he says, I will be with you, it's there to be with his people, to strengthen them, to be what their hearts long for. And so that leads us into our New Testament text in Matthew one 18 through 23. It says that the birth of Jesus Christ came about in this way after his mother, Mary had been engaged to Joseph.

Remember she's about 13, maybe 14 years old. It was discovered before they came together, before they had sex, before they came together, it was found that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit. So her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly. But after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, I'm going to stop for there for just a second. So here again, we have this human experience relationship, right? And this relationship is a bit strained because his fiance is pregnant and he's like, this doesn't work. This isn't going to go very well. Think of ahaz, stressed out as a king. Think of the discouraged construction workers, distraught over, what do we do next? How do we build the rest of the temple? And here's Joseph, right?

God is faithful in these people's point of questioning, frustration, not knowing what to do next. God works in that context, not just to get you by the skin of your teeth, but it's like, no, this is the context for my glorious work. This is me setting the stage so that I can do something awesome in your life. Do you hear that? That's important for you to know as a follower of Jesus, because you are going to face, we all face moments where things are tight and we have questions, and life's a little bit frustrating. And you've got to see this pattern throughout the Bible that anticipates the arrival rival of God in the person of Jesus Christ where he's with us. So here is Joseph ready to get this divorce from Mary, and an angel appears in a dream and says to him, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her, it's from the Holy Spirit.

She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Now, all this took place. So we go back to the narrator being Matthew. Matthew says, he comments on Joseph's experience here and this word from the angel, he says, now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet Isaiah. See, a virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son. They will name him Emmanuel, which is translated. God is with us. So Matthew, as he's retelling for us the story of Jesus, he's deeply aware of this Jewish history all these times where God has said, I will be with you. And then he says, but let me tell you about this story of Joseph and how he's redirected right at the end, right at the end, right before he divorces Mary, and he's told about Jesus, who's going to save his people from their sins. This is Emmanuel, the God who is with us.

There is a virgin woman that becomes pregnant, engaged. Her future husband is ready to break off the relationship. And the angel says, this pregnancy is from God. And the angel's message to Joseph aligns itself with Isaiah seven 14, part of this idea of walking by faith. We talk about that a lot as Christians, that God works as we trust him. The idea of walking by faith, a big part of that is this belief that God is in control working in a patterned way, and that the pieces of your life that sometimes feel like puzzle pieces spread all out in all kinds of directions. That picture there, that God's in control of that, and that he's putting the pieces together, that is a fundamental act in our faith. Walk, trusting that God is putting the pieces together and that he is going to be with us.

So I want to encourage you this morning in closing, to identify with figures like an ahaz, like the returnees, the construction workers in Haggai, in Zacharia's time, like a Joseph who felt overwhelmed and know that as we do four weeks of advent and live in anticipation, we're awaiting the king who wants to be with us in love that you are deeply loved. And when God is like for Zacharia and for Haggai, when he said, I'm going to be with you, think of Joseph, the story of Joseph out of Genesis. Joseph was in a tight spot. His brothers betrayed him, sold him off to slavery in Egypt. It's a difficult situation, right? And the text says over and over again that God was with Joseph. That was not Jesus the Messiah incarnate as his buddy. Like Joseph couldn't touch. Joseph couldn't touch Jesus. But God's presence with Joseph, God being with Joseph, meant that Joseph succeeded in the house of Potiphar.

He succeeded when he was in the jail of Pharaoh. He succeeded when he was called upon by Pharaoh to interpret the dreams. And so that in a sense, is God with us. Same thing with Ahaz. Same thing with Zacharias and Haggai's people. But man, when we celebrate Christmas, we're celebrating God with us at a whole nother level. It's a miracle that God was like, because hey, any one of us would be like, I'll take Joseph's experience if God could just be with me in that way. Let me succeed in all those difficult settings, like yes. And in a sense, we now live with the presence

Of Holy Spirit with us. But yet there is a point, a historical act that God did in our history, human history where God took on flesh and blood and was with humans for 33 years as the loving God who was willing to die on the cross for our sins. The love of God has been demonstrated through Jesus being Emmanuel, the God who is with us. So in closing, I just commend that God, that person of Jesus Christ to you. Sometimes it is a stressful setting, a stressful season being Christmas time, and just know that God wants to reveal himself to you as the God who is with us. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word to Joseph, and to Zachariah and Haggai, to Isaiah, to Ahaz. Lord, we pray that concept of you being with us as the Messiah, that our hearts would be inclined to anticipate a greater sense of your nearness to us. Lord, help us to give space for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, Lord, to be open. Just Paul prayed that the eyes of our understanding would be enlightened to understand a bunch of spiritual stuff. Lord, give us this capacity to be tuned in to the work of your spirit, to hear your voice, to hear you speaking through the spiritual people around us. Lord, would you just turn the lights on in our life to know you? Thank you. Thank you for Jesus. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 5:33-37

Transcript

We are going to be in Matthew chapter five, Matthew chapter five. Before we read this, lemme just kind of set the stage. Set the stage for the material that's here. Good culture, whether in a country or a city or a community, is fundamentally built on the pillars of trust, honesty, integrity and reliability. These values are the bedrock, the bedrock of a healthy society and thriving relationships. Yet we often witness the erosion of these values, not only globally but also in our backyard. If you consider the corruption in government a hallmark of underdeveloped countries, this corruption undermines trust and stability and creates an environment where dishonesty and unreliability flourish. This isn't just a distant problem, it is a reality we grapple with here in our city in Baltimore where challenges of integrity, transparency within government have been a longstanding concern without spending the entire morning on the series of scandals that we've experienced.

Lemme just kind of put some names out there. For those of you that are maybe new to the city and some of you who've been around the city for a while, you go back to 2009, you have Sheila Dixon who was indicted on 13 counts of perjury and misconduct in office in 2014. You had Robert Stevenson, a former Baltimore City public school principal convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering. He was taking bribes from vendors in exchange for awarding contracts. Gary Wells, Daniel Herschel and Marcus Taylor are some of the three best known names associated with the Gun Trace Task Force. They were all convicted of racketeering, robbery and conspiracy. They were a force of plain clothes officers that were tasked with reducing gun violence in the city. However, the unit was involved in a number of corrupt activities including robbing drug dealers and stealing money and drugs.

They were sentenced to 14 to 18 years. In 2019, Catherine Pugh, who was then the mayor, was indicted on 11 federal charges related to herself dealing book scheme related to the Healthy Hawley children's books that she supposedly sold to the University of Maryland Medical System and the Baltimore City Public Schools, and she ended up pleading guilty to tax evasion. There was Antonio Taylor. Do you know what Antonio Taylor? Did you know what role he played? Antonio Taylor was the Baltimore City. He was the head or supervisor of the Baltimore City Department Public works and convicted of extortion. And then you have most recently, Marilyn Mosby in 2022, she was indicted on federal charges related to her traveling, spending, travel spending, and she was found guilty for those things as well. All that to say that our society is built around a healthy government and a healthy city needs truth tellers.

It needs integrity, it needs transparency, and when those things go out the window, you begin to have what is called corruption and the breakdown of trust, but moving beyond the political realm into culture, we see this in pop culture as well. Sometimes pop culture contradicts these values. I was looking at the Taylor Swift song Blank Space and she writes in a satirical way in 2014, she was being mocked for her series of relationships and so she wrote her song Blank Space to kind of embody this just brutal kind of crazy girlfriend mentality and at the time it was championed as the empowerment of a woman that she was willing to embrace the criticism of her ex-boyfriends and to say, I am crazy and I've got a blank space baby. But the way that she in a sense, heroic sizes, total instability and dishonesty, and she becomes kind of this embodiment of a powerful woman or the empowered woman by saying, yep, I'm going to be as crazy as possible and as hard hearted as possible, sign yourself up basically to be my next boyfriend. It breaks down and you in your own life have been the victim and sometimes maybe the perpetrator of the erosion of a relationship by being inconsistent with your speech or again, being the victim of a person who was inconsistent or not truthful in their speech. Jesus is preaching a kingdom

And he is going around the sea of Galilee and he's talking about the good news of the kingdom and he's saying, my kingdom is invading. My kingdom has come. In fact, he says, reach out your hand, reach out your arm. The kingdom is at an arm's length and he's introducing through this sermon on the mount just the values of his kingdom an ideal and in essence he's saying through these three chapters of Matthew five, six and seven, this is what it looks like when my kingdom breaks out in my followers lives in this world, this is what it looks like. And we saw that He's elevated scripture. He's said, I didn't come to abolish the law, but I've come to fulfill the law like his Bible. He said, the Bible is every jot and tittle, everything that you have inherited in terms of scripture that is going to be fulfilled in and through my life and your righteousness needs to exceed that of your spiritual leaders today, the Pharisees and the scribes.

And he begins to say like you've heard it said it's this formula, this formula of you have heard it said, but I say to you what he's doing in this. As we looked at anger being put on the same level, put in the same courtroom as the murderer, what we saw with lust being put in the same category as the adulterer, we saw that a divorce, the grounds for divorce are severely narrowed and that the marriage covenant must be honored. All of these things are going back to the root level of the law and saying, Hey, this is the righteousness of my kingdom. This is the ethical ideal that makes up my, that composes my kingdom. So it is the thing as we're reading this, consider that the spirit of God wants to take in author these things in our lives. This is not something where Jesus is like, Hey, pull up yourself by your bootstraps.

When you were a kid, did you ever go to the fire station and you got to try on the fire a man's outfit? Remember that? And it was like the whole outfit was connected to the boots. You stepped in the boots first and you had to pull yourself into it. Jesus is like, no, no, no, no. I'm going to give you my spirit and my spirit is going to author this ideal ethic in your life. It's going to make you these types of citizens and so this morning we're going to transition over to truth and language and he's going to lay out an economy around language. Let's look at chapter five verses 33 through 37. Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, you must not break your oath, but you must keep your oath to the Lord. But I tell you, don't take an oath at all either by heaven because it's God's throne or by the earth because it's his footstool or by Jerusalem because it is the city of the great king.

Do not swear by your head because you cannot make a single hair white or black, but let your yes mean yes and your no mean no anything more than this is from the evil one. Let's pray together. Lord, we ask that you would take this text and that your spirit would teach us, Lord, that you would teach us about our language. We're going to communicate this week in different settings. Some of us more than others, some of us are communicating a lot and others of us communicate very little. But Lord, we give you permission to invade our speech and that we would be a people who are truth tellers truthful. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. And so let's look at this text. Let's consider first just the Old Testament context. So again, using the formula, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, you must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord in your version that you have there.

And here on the screen it may look as if this is a quote, but really what Jesus is doing is he's summarizing the Old Testament's teaching about swearing an oath. Now there are some related words that are, or we could say there are similes, the word swearing, oath making and making a vow and the Bible does not distinguish between those three very well. They're fairly interchangeable. Making a vow and swearing and oath are related concepts and sometimes are interchangeable when a story is retold. So Jesus says, here is what you've heard from our ancestors and he's pulling this. Lemme give you some of the settings where this would be found in the Old Testament when the law is given the 10 Commandments, we have this said by God to Moses, don't misuse the name of the Lord your God because the Lord will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses his name.

This is in maybe your translation. It may say, do not take the Lord's name in vain. It's the idea of carrying his name, picking up. Don't take up God's name. Don't associate something with God's name in an abusive way where you're using God's name in an appropriate, this is not like saying, oh my God, or oh my gosh or how my grandpa said it. It's more of like a, that you're taking up and carrying the name of God and yet your life and your language are completely other than what God would approve of. He says, we see in the law in Leviticus 19 and there's a lot in Leviticus 19 about swearing your oaths and making these types of formal binding statements. He says, do not swear falsely by my name profaning the name of your God. I am the Lord. In other words, to make a promise to swear falsely and basically lie and associate God's name with that lie would be to profane the name of God.

Then if we go over to numbers 30, verse two, we see this when a man makes a vow to the Lord, do you see this? He makes a vow to the Lord or swears an oath to put himself under an obligation. He must not break his word, he must do whatever he promised. Do you see the idea here was like, look, if you swear in oath, you say you're going to do it, you need to keep your word in Proverbs. I don't have it here to put up on the screen, but there is a proverb and in my preparation I forgotten until just this moment, but there's this beautiful proverb that says, brings a blessing to the person who swears to their own hurt. It's this idea that you are willing to keep your word even to the point where you're being injured and you're getting the raw end of the deal by being a person who keeps their word.

That is the old testament of how sacred language is, how important it is to speak and to not break your word. Look at last one here out of Deuteronomy 23, 21 through 23, if you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to keep it because he will require it of you and it will be counted against you as sin, but if you refrain from making a vow, it will not be counted against you as sin. Be careful to do whatever comes from your lips because you have freely vowed what you have promised to the Lord your God. For the Hebrew mind language was sacred. There was this idea that is rooted in Genesis one because the creation account occurred through God's speaking and things coming into existence. There was a sacredness that our culture doesn't necessarily have. Well, it really doesn't have.

There was a sacredness in Hebrew culture around what you say that man you're going to speak and that just that act of speaking brings about reality and you've felt that right? There's that dumb saying, the sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me and that is an attempt to harden the heart and not be affected by words spoken over us, which there's got to be some healthy way of processing bad language, but the reality is for many of us, we bear scars from names that were supposedly supposed to never heard us. For me when I was in ninth grade for some reason, and I haven't heard this much since I was in ninth grade, but I was teased for the tone of my voice and so I was around kids my age and in a high school setting and people would walk up behind me and they would make this noise because they said that my voice sounded like a duck.

Now I was self-conscious about that so much so that fast forward 25 years later when I was invited to host a national radio program, I felt like I'm not the guy to do that because I have a voice that sounds like a duck. It's amazing how just the things that are spoken over us can bring about a sense of realness in our lives in the same way that God spoke and the world became. And so the Hebrew mind found just a, they really took language seriously and then on top of that, they had this real idea around swearing oaths. And so by the time we get to Jesus day, there were these customs where the scribes and the rabbis had found all these cute little ways to swear, but to kind of hold there to hold their fingers crossed behind their back in their oath making.

Did you ever do that when you were a kid? You say something but you got your fingers crossed behind your back or you got your toes crossed like, Hey, you can come to my birthday party and you got your fingers crossed. These were adults that were finding those kind of loopholes by swearing, not according to God's name but things that were sacred. And so Jesus says, but I tell you, don't take an oath at all either by heaven because it's God's throne or by earth because it's his footstool or by Jerusalem because it's the city of the great king did not square by your head because you cannot make a single hair white or black. Jesus is identifying their current customs around oath, making swearing by God's name was seen as invoking the divine presence as a witness making the oath highly solemn and serious.

And so the thought was we're going to make these second class oaths. This commentator says this, Jesus goes on to repudiate the use of second class oaths which avoid the name of God and therefore are not binding first. They do not in fact exclude God as heaven and earth and Jerusalem are inseparably linked with God as Jesus shows by reference to Isaiah 66, 1 in Psalm 48, 2, and even your head is God's creation and under his control it is, it's very much like that idea of cross my heart, spit to death, hope to die type language, and yet the rabbis found it. Well, yeah, it adds flare to the language, it's extra, gives seriousness to the language, but it's not binding. Jesus confronts this again as he is just railing on the Pharisees, right? So if you go further to Matthew 23, Jesus brings up this whole thing again.

This is amazing. Look in Matthew 23, he speaks to the custom. He says, woe to you blind guides who say, and he's speaking here to the Pharisees, he's calling them blind guides who takes an oath by the temple. It means nothing but whoever takes an oath by the gold of the temple is bound by his oath, right? Blind fools for which is greater the gold of the temple that sanctified or the temple that sanctified the gold. Also whoever takes an oath by the altar, it means nothing. But then whoever takes an oath by the gift that's on it is bound by his oath. Do you seeing kind of the culture there is supposedly you could say, well, I promise according to the altar that's in the temple, I promise. And that person wouldn't be bound to that oath. It sounded good. It sounded like modern day swearing, but it wasn't actually binding. But if you swear by the sacrifice on the altar, oh wow, you can't break that. You can't break your word then blind people for which is greater the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift.

Therefore, therefore the one who takes an oath by the altar, takes an oath by it and buy everything on it. Jesus, like it's inseparable. The one who takes the oath by the temple takes an oath by it and the one who dwells in it and the one who takes an oath by heaven takes an oath by God's throne and by him who sits on it. You can't do this whole game. We might say if we were to live in that culture and be able to somehow live in the culture where these goofy oaths were being made and then also being familiar with our own culture, we might liken it to political spin where you're running for office and you're saying the things that get you the votes, but it's like if we really press into that, we know that you're from the federal, you're running for the federal branch of the government or you're running for the executive branch of the government, and what you're talking about really falls to the judicial branch and you will not have power to affect it, but it sure sounds good.

You're sure spinning it well, that's the culture that Jesus is living in and interacting with where oaths are being abused. And so what's take on this whole thing, he says in verse 37, let your yes mean yes and your no mean no anything more than this is from the evil one. Now, Jesus is saying basically, you don't need the extra fluff. You don't need to go and swear by heaven that you're telling the truth. Your yes ought to mean yes and your no ought to mean no. You don't need the extra work or the effort extra language. Now, there was a stream within Christianity that took Jesus's words here very literally as a prohibition against binding yourself by an oath. The Anabaptist tradition would use to forbid you go do jury duty and you have to swear that you will abide by and follow the constitution or whatever.

Jesus is not necessarily forbidding that there are three times in the epistles where Paul calls upon God to witness his language. He calls upon God to basically bear witness to what he's saying, that it is true, which is a similar idea to saying, I swear by heaven that this is true. So he's what Jesus here is emphasizing is not the absence of swearing an oath. We're not cussing, we're talking about swearing an oath. He's not talking about the absence so much as he's saying, let us be a community of people that tell the truth. And when we say something, we mean what we say. And so sometimes that means it's like shut up, stop. Stop talking because you are not being honest. You can't proceed with this conversation and be honest without really blowing up this relationship. Just be quiet or redirect the conversation. And then other times it means you need to take a risk in the relationship and you need to tell the truth.

But the community, this kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating and welcoming people into is a community where truth is spoken and words have meaning, and they're not just this interchangeable thing that kind of play a short game and get their way. Isn't that the kind of kingdom you want to be in? How much difference does that make in relationships? How much difference does that make in business dealings? How much difference does that make in an academic atmosphere? How much difference does that make in a governance in a government where there is political speak? If you could just tell the truth and you could be known as a person that you mean what you say. Well, this teaching of Jesus really took hold. This instruction is included in the end of James. So James is the brother of Jesus and he talks about this. He literally quotes this idea from Jesus in his letter, his instruction, this instruction here falls in between a command to live your life with patient endurance and to be a people of intense fervent prayer. So he's wrapping up his letter. He's like, live where you are, just patiently enduring suffering and be a people that pray intensely between that. Here's what I want. Brothers and sisters do not swear by heaven or by earth with any other oath, but let your yes mean yes and your no mean no so that you won't fall under judgment.

One of my favorite examples of this concept, yes, meaning yes and no meaning no is in second Corinthians, I've shared this before because it's just a great story. Paul planted the church in Corinth. He left Corinth to keep doing ministry and after he left, some other leaders came along and were talking smack about Paul and they were saying that Paul was less than the legitimate apostle that he was a second class apostle. He was like a BT string quarterback. He was a bench warmer of an apostle that God happened to use with the Gentiles, but they were saying, we are the true apostles, right? Paul's not around. And so Paul is writing back into the mess that is Corinth and he is correcting them on what they've done wrong, but he's also trying to maintain what he believed to be his spiritual authority and influence in this church.

And he threads a needle through all of second Corinthians as he does this because he's not there to really push back actively against these superior apostles. He has to appeal to them. And so one of the accusations that's made against Paul is that Paul had said, Hey, I'm coming back to Corinth, and yet he wasn't there yet. And so this group of people who are against Paul was saying, look, Paul doesn't keep his word. He's not coming to see you all. He's changed his plan. So he says, because of this confidence, I planned to come to you first so that you could have a second benefit and to visit you on my way to Macedonia and then come to you again from Macedonia and be helped by you on my journey to Judea. The key thing here is that he said, I planned. Do you see that there?

Do you make plans in your life? Look at how Paul makes plans in his life. He said, I had this plan. That's the first thing. You make a plan, you have a plan. Now, when I plan this, did I have two minds or was I of two minds or what I plan, do I plan in a purely human way so that then I communicate? Yes, yes. And then I say no, no, at the same time, in other words, do I speak out of two sides of my mouth? And then he says, as God is faithful, that's not just like a quaint old saying that like a night in the dark edges would've said as God is faithful, no, as God is faithful, the character of God is that God is faithful. He's consistent with his word. As God is faithful, our message to you is not yes and no for the son of God, Jesus Christ whom we proclaim among you, savannas Timothy and I did not become yes and no. On the contrary in him it's always yes, for every one of God's promises is yes in him. Therefore, through him we also say amen to the glory of God. You see, he says, look it, our language to you was not yes and the no, it's just as consistent as the message. If you're making plans and then backing up on your plans, how can somebody trust you to communicate about God? You are the representative of God's message. Why would anybody trust you?

Why would anybody trust you about the gospel if your life is utterly inconsistent? I had this acquaintance that was foisted upon me years ago. I was working at a Bible college and somehow this guy got hired who was a friend of a friend. It was kind of like a buddy deal. We're going to put him here, he's going to work there and he's great. And so he would come and he would pop into the office after we had all been there for a couple of hours and his hair was slicked back. He had been at the beach surfing and Hey, how you doing? He would talk you up, Hey, we got to get coffee. I really want to get to know you. Super slick talker. And initially he was like, wow, this guy's really, when you first meet somebody, they're like, wow, that person is really positive.

They're like an encourager. They really got this way to really be friendly, really friendly. And I'd be like, yeah, that sounds good. Let me know when you're available. So then the next week comes by. He hasn't been at work all week and he comes back in. Wow, the surf's great out there, man. Love what you're doing, love the work you're doing. You're just amazing. I could learn so much from you. And then we got to connect. We got to get together sometime. Let's get coffee. All right? Yeah, that sounds good man. Let's do it. Let's get together. Another week goes by, the guy's not anywhere to be found. This goes on for a long time like buddies. Buddies with the president, and pretty soon there's this grumbling because he's getting paid exactly what all the rest of us are getting paid and he has the same privileges and rights that all the rest of us have. And you know what? That wouldn't be like if in New York place, if that kind of person was there. You're like, this guy is utterly inconsistent. It's amazing the cancer of somebody like that, just how it just demoralizes because it makes all the rest of us feel like, who are we? Who are we that this guy's got some sweet deal. He's totally a phony getting this suite set up from the president and he's just pulling a fast one over.

I changed departments and this was two years in like a year and a half, two years of this guy working at the Bible college and nobody liked him. And we put him in, my new boss put him in our department and he was assigned, the director was done with the guy but didn't want to fire him himself. So he basically put him with my new boss and he was required to attend the staff meeting every week, and my boss was an excellent team lead. He would take good notes in the staff meeting. He'd put names at the end of every action item, and then every week we'd do a debrief, right? You'd been in good meetings like that and we'd go through, what did you accomplish? And everybody's name would come up. We'd go through the notes and there's his name, what'd you do? Nothing. We did that for a couple of weeks. The guy went into the president's office, he fired himself. He said, I don't fit here anymore. I can see I'm not really getting the job done. I don't know where he's at now, but it's funny, just the accountability that's needed for a person like

That, that's not the kingdom of heaven. And if you've been hurt by somebody like that, I'm so sorry. I mean, there's people that maybe don't follow Jesus and they're like that, okay, alright, so maybe they're not reigned and ruled over by Christ, but we are a people that are governed by Jesus. He's our king, and so we don't get to get away with just talking however we want. We need to be a people of honesty, integrity, authenticity, simplicity, and reliability. Lemme just finish with this. In Mark 14 at the crucifixion story, Peter is there warming himself by the fire and he's being told You're a follower of this guy Jesus, and he started to curse and swear, I don't know this man that you're talking about. He's not just denying his knowing Jesus, but he's cursing and swearing. He's enhancing his speech as in the midst of being dishonest.

This is the brokenness that Jesus is calling us out of, is this enhancement of language to try to make a dishonest point. And then he's calling us to this in Hebrews 7 21, he being God or Jesus became a priest with an oath made by the one who said to him, the Lord is sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever. All throughout Hebrews 3, 4, 5, 6, and seven, the language of oath making and swearing and promising is pervasive. And it says that God can swear by no one greater, and so he swore by himself, God uses an oath and secures the eternal priesthood of Jesus. For us, that's the right place for an oath to be made. That's that covenant making. God who speaks and swears and says, this is the reliable speech. This is what you can rely upon. That's what secures for us, our priest, Jesus. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for your word.

Thank you for being a God that is reliable and trustworthy, that we can base our lives on your word, that we can stand upon your promises and know that you will never fail us. God, we confess the looseness of our lips and we ask that more and more. Your spirit would come and author in us a carefulness about our language, that we would be trustworthy people, that we would say things and we would follow through even to our own hurt. Lord, we ask that we would have that type of character, that type of integrity in our lives. We want to be the recipients of that kind of culture. We want to live off the fruit of people that talk like that. We pray that you would help us to contribute to that kind of kingdom, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 5:31-32

Transcription

We have a little bit of time this morning where we get to talk about divorce and remarriage. It's just two verses. So it works because we are going to wrap up here and then we have a Thanksgiving meal that we can share together over in the compassion center. So I will not preach as long as normal, but this is in line. This is a part of the teaching that is found in Matthew chapter five. If you're new with us, we've been in the Sermon on the Mount and we are looking in the Sermon on the Mount at this formula where Jesus would say, you've heard it said, and then Jesus intensifies the command. He gives an ethical standard. And you recall that right before this sermon is recorded, Matthew has said that Jesus is doing ministry all around the region of the Galilee. He's preaching from town to town. These are common people and he's going into synagogues and he's just proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come near.

So this is a part of that teaching, but this is a teaching that he's specifically giving to his disciples. So what we're going to read this morning presumes that the audience, the listener, has made a decision to follow Jesus and to be an apprentice of Jesus, to be dedicated to Jesus. As you're listening to these instructions, you need to understand that this is not the instructions on how to become a follower of Jesus. These are instructions for those who've decided they want to be a follower of Jesus and they want to be in the community of faith. So it's a description of the kingdom that's important. If you're here this morning and you're like, I don't know where I'm at spiritually, I don't know where I am at in terms of my relationship with God, that is a really simple matter where you have a conversation with God and you say, God, I'm ready to surrender my life to you.

Use your language and you can use all kinds of language to talk to God, to just say, God, I'm ready to turn my life over to you. I want to be a follower of you. I want to place my life in your hands and I want to be reconciled back to you through Jesus. That's the beginning. That's how you become a follower of Jesus. And then a series of decisions, a relationship plays itself out. So let's look at this together starting in Matthew chapter. Matthew chapter five, verse 31. It says this, it was also said, whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So those are our two verses. Let's go before, let's pray that God would speak to us through this text.

God, we ask that you would speak to us through this teaching of Jesus about marriage. Marriage is a very real part of our lives and our society, and we pray that God, we would hear from you what your spirit would be speaking to us this morning, whether we're married, divorce, remarried, considering a future being married. Lord, for each of us, we pray that you would speak into our lives as our Lord and Savior, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Alright, so we do. We have people from all kinds of backgrounds in here. We have people who would love to be married. We have people who grew up in a two parent family, some in a one parent family, some with a guardian or a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle. But we've got a whole mix of people in here, divorced, remarried, and what I want you and what we've been seeing is that Jesus is heralding and setting up the ethics of his kingdom.

And it's easy to hear this divorce, teaching divorce and remarriage teaching and in our culture just to take it outside of the context in which it's found, but we're going to go back, we're going to look at it in its context. And what we're going to see over and over again is that while this may, let's say you're in a bad marriage and you're like, I want a divorce. And you may read this and go, well, Jesus, I want to be a follower of Jesus too and this doesn't give me permission to get the divorce I want. And you may feel like Jesus is limiting your freedom and you may be mad at him. That's possible.

What I want you to see though is that this teaching of Jesus is protecting the vulnerable. Jesus is establishing an ethical code that not only upholds the commitment of marriage, but it protects the most vulnerable within society. So Jewish law, Jewish law on divorce in Jesus' time, divorce was governed by Jewish law primarily based on Deuteronomy 24, 1 through four. I'm going to show you that in just a second. The interpretation of what constituted valid grounds for divorce was a matter of debate among Jewish scholars, notably between the schools of Shiai and Hellel. So at the time of Jesus, there were two camps. We're not talking about. Pharisees and Sadducees we're primarily talking actually about a camp that was within the Pharisees. And they're debating over what Deuteronomy 24 meant. So let's look at Deuteronomy 24, 1 through four. It says this, if a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate handed to her and sent her away from his house.

If after leaving his house she goes and becomes another man's wife and the second man hates her, writes her a divorce certificate, hands it to her, sends her away from his house, or if he dies, the first husband who sent her away may not marry her again after she has been defiled because that would be detestable to the Lord. You must not bring guilt on the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. So within the law, only men could issue a letter of divorce. This is an interesting stipulation here about you can't get remarried after a remarriage and then go back to the first husband. The question is why? There's a few different reasons why this may have been the case. One, it could have been that the original husband was pimping out the wife, and this basically limits any form of prostitution dynamic.

There is also a culturally, there was the dowry that was offered. And so the exchange of doerries by limiting the first husband from remarrying her in a third marriage with somebody in between that limits and disincentivizes the financial gain that could come from marrying her again. The interesting thing though is that these four verses assume remarriage. Do you see that? We don't necessarily know exactly why God through Moses created the law in the way that he did here, but it assumes remarriage. And so this was the matter of debate. How do we handle this? And you have the School of Hillel and Shiai. This is recorded for us in a Jewish text that was written 150 years after the time of Christ called the Mishna. Can you say the Mishna Mishna? That's right. So a Jewish scholar came along and took the oral tradition of the Jews and codified it, put it in writing, and it became a significant text for Judaism moving forward in the century.

So we're talking about one 50 to 200 AD that this mishna was written. And in the Mishna it records this debate between the school of Shiai and the House of Hillel, which would've been the contemporary debate at the time of Jesus. Are you tracking with me? So mishna written after Jesus, but reflecting back on what would've been contemporary to the time of Jesus, the school of Shiai held to a strict interpretation of Deuteronomy 24. And the issue really was around this text where it says in verse one, if this wife becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and really the House of Hillel was focused in on, or shiia was focused in on this word indecent, and they had a strict view. It was only sexual immorality that would allow for divorce. This text could only be applied or walked out and used if the husband found the wife to have been unfaithful.

The house of Hillel, on the other hand, held a liberal view and said that, look, something indecent could have been. She doesn't cook. Well, I don't find her looking good. Yeah, there could have been a mess, right? And there's actually a third camp called the House of or the school of Uba, which was a liberal view, which was like, it was like divorce without cause. Just when you guys are done, you're done. And you don't even have to give cause to defend the divorce. So this was the debate, is it a strict view that's supposed to be applied to Deuteronomy 24 or is it this liberal view? And so Jesus engages and speaks into this debate. He supports the shiai interpretation which was not written. It was just again, an oral tradition of here's generally what that school taught. And Jesus says that there's not to be a divorce except in the case of sexual immorality.

That's it, sexual immorality. And then he has this interesting clause about if you go and get divorced without this exception, you're causing her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So it is important to know as you're reading this, that in this culture we have a male dominated society that Jesus is giving these instructions to. The society was patriarchal. Typically, only men had the right to initiate divorces, especially Jewish law, not so much Roman law. A divorced woman faced social stigma and economic hardship as she might have been dependent on her husband for sustenance and social standing. So what Jesus is doing here by restricting and limiting divorce is he's protecting all of these women. He's saying, listen, you ladies cannot have your husbands. I don't give permission for them to just drop you because you burnt their toast in the morning.

Now again, remember these were marriages that were arranged. Now there's a social dance to this. There's a really cute movie about arranged marriages in the Indian culture, I think with the Patels and how yeah, they're arranged, but the guy and the girl are kind of tipping the scales a little bit. It is a documentary that's somewhere on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I can't remember where I saw it. So there is some say that's going on in these or depending on the family you come from, but it is generally arranged. So like when Mary was betrothed to Joseph, that was her parents put that together. So we have this framework in America where we, Mary, the people that we fall in love with and emotions are factored in heavily to the marriage decision.

And then from the emotions comes in the conversation around compatibility. Are you sexually compatible? Are you socially compatible? Is this marriage going to do something for you within society? Is it going to help you have more money or increase your status within society? That's kind of the framework that our culture has. But here, Jesus is speaking into a culture where you kind of were set up this is who it is and Jesus is saying, no, no, no. Even in that setting, you don't get to just say, I don't really like you and dump the person. Now, there was no welfare program. There was no social safety net that existed. There was no government programs for these women that got married. So the husband, the men were the only ones that could issue a divorce decree. If the woman got divorced, she was stuck. She was expected that she would go and get remarried.

So it's a matter of, alright, who are you going to marry? Who's going to take you now that you've been with somebody else? It was a mess. And so Jesus is here giving this limiting to divorce and it's inherently protecting women. This not something that any man who was not a follower of Jesus would've been like, oh yeah, that's great. This was directed right at men who wanted to divorce their wives. So there's a number of questions that come up around this and we are going to actually spend more time when we get to Matthew 19 talking maybe a little bit more about the technicalities of marriage and divorce. But there are Christians who have a view of marriage that you can never get divorced if you grew up in the Catholic church. You know that the Catholic teaching based on Augustine was that marriage to your first spouse is insolvable and they make the argument that it's ontologically impossible for you to have a second marriage until that first person dies because you're married.

Once you're married, you're in it. And those views come from Luke and Mark similar material to what we're looking at. But I want to show you Luke, this is Jesus's teaching out of Luke on marriage and divorce. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery. Everyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery. So there you don't see any exception, right in Mark, you have something similar. Mark 10, 10 through 12 when they were in the house again, and there's a broader context if you want to go look this up in Mark 10, there's more teaching there. When they were in the house, again, the disciples questioned him about this matter. He said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And also if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. So there is in those two texts, it seems as if God looks at that first marriage as like, yeah, you may have gotten some legal document, but you're not in my eyes, you're not divorced.

That's how it appears. And Jesus is saying, Hey, that going out and getting a unmerited divorce or getting a divorce that doesn't have grounds and then getting remarried in God's eyes constitutes adultery. So you do have the Catholic camp, you have some Protestants that hold this view that there is no grounds ever to be divorced, but they don't like Matthew. That camp does not like this passage in Matthew because Jesus comes along and he gives an exception or he gives grounds for a divorce. He says, I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife's wife, except in the case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. So why are there exceptions to the rule here? Jesus, we're in a section where Jesus in the sermon on the Mount is laying out the law of the land. He's intensifying the command against murder, right? Saying even anger is a sin that needs to be dealt with in your own hearts.

Lust is equivalent to adultery, right? Jesus is intensifying it. And then yet here has, he's really giving a strict view of divorce. He's giving an exception. Just think about the issue with anger from a couple of weeks ago. Jesus said, look, you can't call calling your brother a fool is equivalent to murder. But then if you go over to Matthew 2317, Jesus speaking to the fairies, he says, you guys are blind fools. Matthew 2317. And what we saw when I taught two weeks ago on this is that Jesus is not saying anger is bad. He's saying that anger that is just harbored in your heart and carried out to malicious in a malicious way, that is not a part of my kingdom. What about this whole mandate against lust, right? Jesus says, Hey, you lust against somebody who's not your wife. That's adultery. What about to the engaged couple?

What happens there? Are you not supposed to sexually desire the person you're engaged to? No, there are exceptions. Jesus is giving parameters where there's obviously exceptions. And so here when he gets to divorce, he says there's an exception where the marriage covenant can be broken. It's with the case of sexual immorality. Now, this is one exception the Bible teaches. There are two other exceptions to where divorce is appropriate. Divorce is allowed, not mandated, but divorce is allowed. And those are found in one Corinthians chapter seven. The first is the case of abandonment. When a spouse abandons their partner that covenant is, Paul says, that person is free to go. You are no longer bound. That's the language you in your marriage are no longer bound. Now Paul says in those cases plural, so he says abuse. And in those cases, and so the more moderate view on divorce would look at that text and say, there are cases where the spouse has so violated the marital covenant that there are grounds similar to what abandonment would be.

So that's where we put abuse in. Abuse is equivalent to just totally violating that marital covenant. So there are grounds where divorce is allowed, and then you have a group which we'll talk about at some time in the future where remarriage is forbidden based off of like this. If she goes and she gets married, she's going to commit adultery. If you have the NIV version, it's going to say she's a victim of adultery, which is probable. It seems like God's saying, I'm going to lay to your feet this indictment to the man's feet. I'm going to lay to your feet the indictment of adultery. So there's an assumption of remarriage within the culture. There is an assumption of remarriage and Deuteronomy 24, and here Jesus is doing the same thing.

There is in this text, I think to see this text and what Jesus is trying to teach. He's teaching into a cultural debate and he's saying marriage is special marriage. The marriage covenant is special. You don't get to just go throw away your marriage because it's hard. Now our culture says something different. Our culture says, yeah, tough it out maybe for the kids, but if it's not working, get rid of that one. Move on to the next one. And it's important that we are followers of Jesus. Now, you may be listening to this as a follower of Jesus. Maybe you got some other teaching and there's grace. Jesus is calling followers to come in line with the ethics of his kingdom. We're not perfect yet. You may be at some place in this, but what you need to hear is the Lord Jesus, the king is saying, this is what lining up the marriage covenant with my kingdom looks like it is this special relationship that cannot be violated or thrown away.

There needs to be substantive ground for a divorce. So here he gives sexual immorality as a cause. So I don't know what framework you come from with marriage, but we talked last week about our sexuality and that our sexuality starts in our heart. It's not just a bodily behavior, but that God cares about the foster desires of our heart. And that lusting and giving a place for lust in our heart is a act of adultery. It violates the marriage covenant. Here Jesus is saying, listen, marriage is that thing that needs to be protected. So sexual immorality, abandonment, abuse, protection for the vulnerable.

I'm just kind of making sure I covered everything that we have here in my notes. I do want to just encourage you that marriage is a furnace, right? It brings up all this stuff in your own life. Your relationships are right. God's created relationships to surface just our weirdness in our brokenness, and it comes to the surface in our life and it's like, yeah, you know what? I really, I've got some things that need to be worked out in my own life. So rather than responding to a difficult marriage, looking and seeing, do I have grounds to get out of it, do I have grounds? I would encourage you, unless it's clear abuse or abandonment or sexual immorality, respond to the difficulty of your marriage by saying, okay, God, how can I milk this difficult moment for my own personal growth as much as possible?

I have kind of an acquaintance that I was talking to and he was calling me to try to see, he was kind of trying to see, do I have grounds to get a divorce? Can I get out of this? And I was like, I don't know. I don't have your wife here in front of me. We're just talking on the phone. I don't know whether you have grounds or not. And ultimately you need to make that decision with integrity before the Lord. But I do know this, that today you can use your difficult marriage for your own personal growth until you get to a point where the decision is made, whether you should get a divorce or not. So if you happen to be in a difficult setting, I'd encourage all of us, we want to grow, right? We are called to be followers of Jesus with a common horizon, which is to be shaped into the image of Christ, and marriage is the best setting for that.

We're helping each other reach that common horizon together. We're helping in that growth process. Sometimes we're like, I don't want that help, but it's good God has a good purpose for your difficult marriage. Now, I think what I want to close with on this is that there is, if you're in a difficult marriage, if you're in a difficult space in your marriage, there are some people who know you and those people hopefully know your marriage and you do not want to make a decision that you've milked out of people where you've been able to get people to agree with you. You want to make sure that you have friends around you. I hear a phone. Somebody's got a phone.

Does anybody have a phone?

Oh, oh, we got it. Okay.

So your marriage, both getting married and getting divorced are some of the most critical decisions you'll make. And you need to be walking with people who give you the truth. You need as much truth as possible. Your kids know you, your family hopefully knows you, and you need to make sure, man, if you're going to get a divorce, this is one of my, I used to say, Hey, work with the church. Church is, it depends on what church you're in. You really need to, oftentimes people move around from church to church, and so there's not a legacy. Some of you, I've only known for a couple years or a year, and you came to me and you're like, yeah, my marriage is broken. I might not know that. You've got some weird issues in your own life that makes you difficult to be married to, and you actually are not responding to the sanctification prompting that God wants for you in your marriage.

So have around you people who are going to bear witness and where your kids are going to support you in that decision. And it's going to be like, yeah, because at the end of the day, so I've been through a divorce and I'm remarried, crystal and I have both been through our own divorces and then remarriage and I can look at this text and I am so grateful for it. I'm grateful for our testimony. I feel like we've walked in what the Bible teaches. But I remember as I went through that process myself feeling like I don't really care about ministry or being a pastor as I was going through, I thought, I probably won't be a pastor. It's weird to be a pastor and having been divorced, but I care most about my kids looking into my life and feeling like, yeah, that's the kind of Christian I want to be.

So your personal integrity and the witness that you give to your kids, that is so, so important in the process. And your kids, my kids, as I walked through it, my kids spoke more truth to me than probably anybody else. And I think this is not just in divorce. Hopefully you have that kind of, you're working at least giving the open door for that kind of relationship with your kids where they're allowed to speak into your life. They know us, they know how screwed up we are. So this is Jesus's teaching. You may be in this place where you're like, I don't like the fact that Jesus is limiting my options on divorce. Sorry. I mean, Jesus is actually protecting a bunch of women, or he's maybe protecting you as a man.

It is like when you're in a company and you're like, it's a good policy that's made, but you end up on the bad side of the policy. It's like, well, no, it's the right decision that's made, but God's going to be faithful to you. He knows where you're at. If you're stuck and you're in a hard place, he knows exactly where you're at. He's got you. He's got a purpose for these things in your life. If you follow him, you try to obey. You're going to end up. I believe in a place where you are growing and you're at peace and have a clean conscience about where you're heading. Amen. Let's thank the Lord for his grace. God, we thank you for your grace in these things. I pray, Lord, for us as a church, I feel like divorce is so pervasive. Almost every one of us divorce is affected.

And Lord, from the brokenness of our culture and broken relationships and people that have hurt us, God, I pray that you would give us integrity and that we would honor you. We want to be those that obey and that you would see in us, that sincere desire for just obedience to you, that we would love you through our obedience. And God, I pray that you would use marriage in our lives toward your good. I pray, Lord, for each person here, if they're struggling in their marriage, that truth, your truth would just wash over them, that they would have a self-awareness, whether they're the cause of the problem or their spouse is the cause of the problem, or there's just both are heavily contributing to the issues that are there. God, I pray, let truth just wash over each person here. I pray for those who have been divorced, God and who would love to be remarried, would you give them a hope? Would you encourage them? Would you provide them with a Godly spouse? Lord, marriage seems to be really important to you. And yet, Lord, we're living in the midst of so much broken relationships in pain. Some of it we cause ourself, but a lot of it's in inflicted upon us. Lord, you are like that, doctor. You're the good shepherd. Come and be a good shepherd in our midst. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 5:27-30

Transcription

Because we're going to be in Matthew five. There's just four verses that we're going to be in, but we're continuing on in our series from the Sermon on the Mount, and I'm going to read to you from Matthew 5 27 through 30, for those of you that are just coming in and new with us. We're studying through the book of Matthew. This is telling us about Jesus's first coming when Jesus was on earth. We already read about his birth. We read about his baptism with John the Baptist, and we've seen that Jesus is teaching all around the Sea of Galilee and he's proclaiming his kingdom. He's talking about his kingdom coming on earth and he's inviting us to participate in it. And that invitation is extended to you this morning. And if you're like, yo, I want to be in that kingdom, I've had enough of the kingdoms of this earth, I want to be a part of that kingdom, then the invitation is open to you.

That's what it means to follow Jesus or become a follower of Jesus, is that you're saying, I want you, Jesus, to be the king. And so we've been looking at this teaching in chapter five. It's going to go through chapter six and chapter seven, and there's a lot of material that's here. Last week we looked at this, Jesus taking the idea of murder and saying, look, anger is just as serious. Have you ever felt angry in your heart? Isn't that everybody's always felt? Everybody's felt angry at some point? And Jesus is saying, listen, that anger, that bitterness and then kind of the language that flows from that, hey, that's synonymous in my kingdom with murder. And what Jesus is doing is he's elevating the idea of righteousness and saying there's a new ethic in town. Now, I know for me when I read that, I'm like, feel convicted.

I get angry and I've got stuff going on in my heart that I'm not happy with. And then you feel like, oh man, I don't like what's going on in my heart. And that's okay because Jesus' grace comes in. Jesus died for our sins. He gives us his spirit to establish this kingdom in our life and to grow us into his image. So none of these things are a message of beat you over the head, but it's like, Hey, this is the beautiful thing that we're working towards. This is what my kingdom looks like. The one thing I forgot to say last week that I think is the case also with this whole conversation around adultery and lust is that don't you want to be in a part of a society, a part of a kingdom, a part of a culture where these are the ethics?

Because some of us, when it comes to anger, some of us have been on the receiving side of anger and have deep wounds in our life from people who have been angry and acted upon their anger, and you know how destructive it is. And so when King Jesus comes along and is like, yeah, that is just as bad as murder, that's like, yeah, that's who I want to be the king. I want somebody who caress about that kind of society and really somebody who's powerful enough to enact that. I can hope for a society where anger is no longer going to be the wounding agent in relationships that I can anticipate a eternal experience where this thing that he's talking about with anger is like, whoop, we're going to take that away. So let's talk about this next section on adultery. We'll read these four verses.

Here's what it says. You have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. But I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away for it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, throw it away for it's better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. Lord, we pray that you would come again as just our king. And Lord, we're grateful that you make us sexual beings and we ask that you would speak into this theme of our sexuality this morning. God, we pray that just any shaping and forming around sex and what it means for us to have sex and to think about sex and to be sexual beings, that you would be the one that shapes us.

And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Yeah. So we are going to talk a lot about sex this morning. So it's a good thing we have a children's ministry. And the wonderful thing is that our sexuality is not outside of the bounds of how God has designed us. The way that I want to handle this this morning is I don't have a structure that I'm absolutely committed to for my sermon this morning. I want to go verse by verse through this. I have a biblical theology around sex, but then there's just some stuff that's on my heart that I want to share. So we'll see how this comes up. But the first thing I want to say as we go through this text is that your sexuality being you came in this morning having some form of sexuality. You're either male or female. You may have strong sexual desires or not strong sexual desires.

You may have a sexual history yourself. You may have been violated sexually in your past. And so you came in with all kinds of baggage, somewhat baggage and ideas around what it means to be a sexual human, a sexual being. And what I hope is that we can have this conversation without it being something that is too uncomfortable. It is a sacred aspect to who we are. There is a privacy around our sexuality, but then there's also, there needs to be this ability to comfortably talk about sex and our relationship with God without feeling condemned or ostracized. We want to be able to understand that Jesus wants to be king of our life and that nothing about us is outside the bounds of his authority. So he says right off the bat, you have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. Do you know he's talking what he's referencing here?

Yeah. This is the 10th Commandments, the seventh. Remember last week we looked at the sixth command, which was do not murder. And this week he's going to the seventh command. He doesn't keep this going. He's going to talk about other things. You've heard this. You've heard that there's six in total, but this one here happens to be the next command out of the 10. And it is that you have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. Now, at the time of Jesus, there's been 1500 years of history where the Jewish nation has codified these 10 commands. And what does it mean? What does it mean to commit adultery? What does that look like? And for the Jew, it primarily meant the act of having sex with somebody whom you are not married to. We would use the language of you're violating the marriage covenant and you're going outside of that marriage and your marriage partner to have sex. Jesus calls this to their remembrance, and it's a restriction against sex with anyone who is not your marriage partner. This whole ethic, before we get to his intensifying, this command, this whole ethic acknowledges a limit, right? That sex is to be done with your marriage partner.

That boundary though on sexuality comes from this idea of marriage being the place for sex, moving the sex out outside of the marriage relationship is what is forbidden. So then Jesus comes along and he says, but I tell you, and this is what he did with murder as well. He says, but I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already adultery with her in his heart. So do you see that he's intensifying the language about sexuality? He's saying, listen, if you treat an adulterer like this, then this whole idea of lust in the heart ought to be equally condemned. Wow, that's pretty intense, isn't it? And that's the point, because you remember that what Jesus had taught, what we looked at three weeks ago, he had told his followers, he says, listen, your righteousness, if you want to be in the kingdom and the righteousness of my kingdom, the ethical standard, it exceeds the righteous standard of the Pharisees and the scribes and the Pharisees and scribes.

Those were the most religious people of the day. These were the people who were revered as like, oh, those people are really righteous. And Jesus says, you got to go beyond that. And here again, Jesus, he's taking the idea of sex and he's saying, listen, what's going on in your heart is it matters before God. The standard of God applies even to your heart activities, not just your physical activities. He doesn't just affirm the limits placed on sex by the old covenant. He goes to the heart and says, lust is a form of adultery. And then he has these two mirroring statements in 29 and 30, and he says, if your right eye causes you to sin, the metaphor illustrates an important point. He's saying this forcibly cast temptation out of your life. It's better to lose a little than to lose everything. Now, this verse is the reason why the Catholic church in the 15th century, 14th, 15th century, as there was the printing press and a conversation around translating the Bible from Latin into the common language of the day, whether it be German or into English, there was a resistance from the Catholic church because they're like, oh, people are going to be cutting off their hands and gouging out their eyes.

And they were afraid that you wouldn't be able to read this and understand that it's metaphorical language and thank goodness that they didn't win. So we ended up with the Bible in our own language. But it is this strong language to illustrate a point that, Hey, these things are serious now. He says, for it's better that you lose one of the parts of your eye or your hand. It's better that you lose that one part of your body than the whole be thrown into hell. Now before you start thinking about an eternal existence separated from God, which is what we talk about with hell here as Jesus is teaching this, this is the word gehenna. There's a place right outside of Jerusalem that became the trash dump. And it was where you would go and you would just take your trash and you'd throw it over the wall and the fire would just, it was like a trash burning place and it smelled horrible. And it became a metaphor for just a place separated from society where the worst of society and the refuse of society was just dumped. And so there is an aspect where Jesus is saying, if you don't resist forcibly temptation, you're making your own health for yourself, you, you're baking it in and your existence while you may live eternally in hell, your existence on earth is going to be a hellish one as well. This metaphor pushes back on those who would minimize sin in their life.

If we go to Galatians chapter three, or you go to, you read through Paul's teaching in Romans six, it talks about this, the profound grace of God. When we celebrate communion in a few minutes, one of the things that the cup represents is a new covenant, which is this covenant of forgiveness of sins. And so there is this temptation as a follower of Jesus to not see sin as all that severe because the eternal ramifications and the spiritual ramifications are being resolved. And so the implication is to go, well, you know what? Sin isn't really that big of a deal who you have sex with, and whether you have sex with multiple people before you get married or you don't, there's grace. There's grace that exists. Or if you're angry, people get angry, right? We have all kinds of ways to justify the things that are our pet sins. And what Jesus is showing here is that, no, this is serious. These things are, your sexuality is precious and temptation to use your sexuality outside of its intended use is a serious miscalculation.

Again, forcibly cast temptation out of your life, forcibly cast it out of your life. Now, as we have explored Jesus's teaching and we see that he's taking and bringing this to a heart level, it's clear that he's calling his followers to a higher standard of purity and righteousness. But to fully grasp this idea of our sexuality, what I want to do is just spend a minute looking through the Old Testament to see why Jesus is saying, Hey, lust is on the same level as adultery. The narrative of sex in the Bible is not a tale of negativity and prohibition as much as we might assume. Instead, it's a story of divine intention, human failure, and redemptive possibilities. And so let's look kind of go back to the beginning. We'll look here first of all, at the creation account, this is really important because you were familiar with your own sexuality before you were familiar with scripture.

So it's important. So when you go to the world, the world's going to tell you first of all, that you're biological. It's not going to talk about that you are designed. It's going to say you're the result of an evolutionary process that's like a secular view of who you are and you're biological. And so the sexual desire that you have is the result of chemicals firing in your brain. Instead, what Jesus teaches or what the Bible teaches is that God designed humans from the very beginning to be sexual creatures. In Genesis one and two, sex is created as a good part of God's design for humans made in his image. So we have Genesis 1 28. God blessed them. This is the man and the woman being created. And God said to them, be fruitful. Multiply. This literally means have babies, right? Use your procreative capacity to have children fill the earth, subdue it, rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

So sex is in the Bible from the very beginning, like you and I were created with the capacity or humans were designed with the capacity to women can generate life within themselves and men can participate in the generation of life. In Genesis 2 24 and 25, it says this, this is why a man leaves his father and mother. So this is the end of chapter two, the narrative about the man and the woman, the woman being created out of the dust or the man being created out of the dust, the woman created out of the side of the man, and it says, this is why a man leaves his father and mother bonds with his wife and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked and yet felt no shame. So this is the description of God's created order before sin comes and breaks up everything naked people, right?

Naked man and wife called to be together as one flesh. Two. So it started as one. He splits 'em apart to become man and woman, and then they're called back together to become one flesh. And this leads to the fruitful and the multiplying that is there. Beautiful. It's a beautiful picture. There's nothing screwed up or messed up about the picture yet. That's the image that we have. But we get to the fall, we see in Genesis three, it shows the entrance of sin, which corrupts all aspects of creation, including human sexuality. One of the early feelings that comes from that sin full state was Adam and Eve see their nakedness and they feel ashamed. They want to go and cover themselves up. They're like, let's go and get some fig leaves and cover up our naked bodies.

This leads to shame, broken relationships and distortion of God's original design for sex. So from this point on, from Genesis three on, they're cast out of the garden and relationships are messed up and sexual relationships are messed up. The regulation of sexuality, we find that in the law, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it provides specific regulations about sexual conduct, emphasizing purity and setting boundaries. When Israel was going into the land, so the surrounding nations, they did not have a fidelity within marriage. There was some expressions of sexuality was in homosexuality. We see that in Sodom and Gamora's story. When we go to, we see these texts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we see him saying, Hey, don't go take foreign wives because of some of the practices in these pagan nations. And the interesting thing about some of these foreign pagan surrounding nations is that spirituality was paired with sexuality.

And so some of the cult practices was like, Hey, if you want to worship God, go to this temple and have sex with this prostitute, and that is your sexual expression and spiritual expression simultaneously. And so God, as he's establishing a nation, he's saying, no, we're going to maintain these boundaries around marriage and we're going to say sex is still a good thing inside. And with your marriage partner, what you need to recognize as we go along is that sex is warned about so much and it's talked about so much in scripture and given such limits because it's so fundamental to who we are and has such profound effects upon us, and marriage is so good and has such a fundamental piece of the fabric of society. So God is protecting the marriage institution by putting these parameters around sex. God is not stingy or a prude.

When he created sex, it's good because he's good, right? But he's putting these boundaries around it because he's like, I want a good society. And what do you find in these societies that are not having the law? What we find is that oftentimes women are abused. Women are horribly treated within society where there are not these parameters put on sex. So we get through the law and then we get to the narrative. The Bible tells stories about the kings and the prophets and the judges all throughout there we have David and Bathsheba. The fascinating thing, this kind of blows my mind around David, and I was talking with the boys about this. So David, how many wives did David have?

5, 4, 5, 6. He had a lot. David had a lot of wives, and David was a man after God's own heart, which is weird. He doesn't seem to get in trouble. It keeps telling stories, oh, he married this woman. He married this woman, he married this woman. He doesn't get in trouble with God for that. What does he get in trouble for? Yeah, of taking Bathsheba, taking another man's. All of a sudden, David is in deep, deep trouble because he took somebody else's wife. It's fascinating because what that tells me is that this whole idea of sex is paired with marriage. It's fundamental to the fidelity and the marriage structure. Now, as we go into the New Testament, the Bible clearly and New Testament, Christianity reigns back in the sexual ethic and says, you need to have a partner, a single partner, because that reflects Genesis chapter one.

But even to this day, when you go and you do missions, this is my family. My dad was a Bible teacher in Africa of nationals, men and women that would go back and lead churches in their tribes, and these men would be in the class and they would say, okay, when we go and we pastor in the tribe and a man comes and wants to follow Jesus, and he has three wives, what do we tell 'em? What do you do if you're prudish about sex? And sex is like the taboo thing. It's like, ah, this is what sex is really bad. If that's your understanding, rather than having an ethic that says marriage is so good and needs to be protected, then I think you're going to give bad counsel again, the conversation with those men who have the three wives, they need to hear from the Bible that marriage is this beautiful protective thing where fruitful and multiply is happening and it gets worked.

It needs to get worked out in some way. So oftentimes it would be like, Hey, you're going to have sex with one, but you're going to take care of the other two. But that's kind of not fair to the sexuality of those other two women. It's nuanced. But again, if you're hung up on sex and you're not seeing that sexual ethics is a subcategory of the marriage ethic, man, you're going to end up in trouble. And this is where I think in the nineties with the purity culture where we ended up with problems because we made sex the ethic rather than marriage, the ethic. Okay, so that's a little bit of a tangent, but we have these historical stories from the Old Testament, then we get into proves with the wisdom literature. So in Proverbs, there's these warnings about the woman who is these seductress who's in contrast to lady wisdom, who's crying out in the streets.

It's interesting that wisdom is sexualized because it's put in this pairing between the seductress prostitute who's trying to lure you in and get you to ruin your life. And then you have lady wisdom who's awesome, and she's like, come to me. But it's almost like there's this romantic going after and being attracted to lady wisdom in a good way that you want to run after her, happens to be in the same section where you have Song of Solomon, which is this beautiful poetic language all around this man and woman's sexual drive and longing to be sexually intimate and together all of that is in the Old Testament. And then we get into the prophets. The prophets use sex as a metaphor for unfaithfulness the whole picture of adultery. Jeremiah in particular as well as Jose, but Jeremiah over and over again is talking about adultery as a metaphor for spiritual unfaithfulness.

Then we get over to the New Testament. This is Jesus's teaching. Jesus reaffirms the sacredness of marriage and speaks against lust and adultery, elevating the standard to include the hearts and tensions, not just outward actions. And then Paul's teaching. Paul discusses sexual ethics extensively emphasizing sexual morality as integral to the Christian living. He also presents marriage as a profound mystery reflecting Christ's relationship with the church. So the Bible speaks of sex all the way throughout. But my wife and I, we were talking about, I was telling her one of the mysteries to me is like, what's the future of sex? This one, that one is completely mysterious, and if you understand it, let me know. I don't Usually everything you can find in Genesis one and two, you can see restored in Revelation 21 and 22, it's kind of missing. So I usually like to be transparent in my teaching. There's parts of this work, I don't don't understand that part of it, but this is kind of getting up through Paul's teachings. Okay, where does this land? Us?

Marriage is designed as a good thing by God. Do you hear that? Marriage is a good thing designed by God, and sex is a central expression of the goodness of marriage. It's interesting that sex is the act that happens in marriage. You can do all kinds of things with other people that are not your spouse, and it doesn't violate your marriage covenant. But that act of sex is this whole idea of adultery, and it's interesting. It just shows how central the sex act is to marriage. Jesus elevates the conversation from mere rules to a matter of our hearts, aligning our inner desires with God's will. I would say just practically, whether you're married or not married, whether you face great sexual temptation or that's not really an issue for you, maybe your desires are your same sex attracted wherever you're at. Here's one of the things I would pray regularly is God, thank you for making me a sexual being shape my sexuality so it aligns with your kingdom. Let God be a part of the conversation. Know that Jesus offers grace to all regardless of their past or their present. Structurals struggles with a sexual ethic and understand the role of confession, repentance, and reliance on God's strength to overcome temptation.

If you are single, and I'm assuming if you're single, you're not actively having sex, at least as a follower of Jesus. That's what Jesus is teaching. And not only is there an absence of sex in your life, but there's a loneliness that may come with that as well. And so again, this is where your faith comes out. It's a part of if you desire to be married and desire to have sex, this is where it's like, God, you created me with these desires. I offer these things to you. You have to write the rest of my story. Maybe you're still looking for that person that you can be married to and enjoy a good marriage. Some of you have been through marriage and it was incredibly difficult because you live after Genesis three. And while all these things are so beautifully designed by God, it ended up being a place of incredible hurt and pain.

Again, all of this is in bounds for God. None of this is going to freak out. God, your desire for sex, you're wrestling with porn, your desire to look and lust in the heart, none of that is freaking out. God, he's completely aware of all of it. You might as well have an open conversation with him about it and just say, God, I failed again. I messed up again. Please wash me. Shape me. And if you are a person that struggles with intense sexual desire, pray God, allow me to be, prepare me to be a good spouse, somebody that can honor the marriage well and shape me well in my sexuality for that moment. I want to encourage you to have a holistic view of relationships that both value the emotional side of sexuality, who you are spiritually, the intellectual connections, and that you would not allow the world to just tell you that sex is a physical act.

It's like the people who buy a car and they're like, yeah, I don't ever need to put oil in my car. That's just like for those people that are really into cars, right? That's not going to work out for you very well. If you treat sex as just this isolated biological chemical drive thing and don't realize that it's intrinsic to who God's designed you, then you're going to break down and you can pretend that sex is like, you can do it with whoever you want whenever you want, and it's just kind of a release, a chemical release, but that's as dumb as leaving the oil out of your car or not filing your taxes every year or some other thing that's like fundamental to who you are. I would challenge you to reflect on your attitudes and actions regarding sexuality. Ask God to align your heart with his and then know this, that Jesus loves you and has designed it this part of who you are.

And he is the one that authors in us a capacity to live as his followers in his kingdom. So if you feel like, man, I've failed, like I've had sex with people I shouldn't have sex with this morning, you need to know that today we're going to have communion together. This table represents a place of forgiveness, of newness, of God's working, active, working in your life to make you just awesome, to make you and grow you in the direction of where he wants you to be at. I love studying these things. I love looking at what Jesus, how he's blowing stuff up because what it shows me and it shows you is that he caress deeply for you. He doesn't want your spouse committing adultery in their heart or physically. He's got your back. He caress about your marriage relationship in a beautiful way, and he's saying, Hey, listen, in my kingdom, hearts and bodies are really, really important.

That's where we want to be. We want to be in that kingdom. We want a king that's saying these kinds of things, even though sometimes it's hard to obey, sometimes it's convicting. We really do want to be in this kingdom. We really want a king who stands for these kinds of things. Amen. Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for coming and speaking with such authority and giving us this text in God. We just bring before you our sexuality, and maybe it's really twisted and broken, and there's things that happen secretly behind closed door or in privacy that we have we're bearing shame about. And God, we just confess that before you, we ask that you would wash us and that you'd cleanse us, and that just the blood of Jesus would wash us. Like that Psalm we read last week and this week that you're the good God that forgives.

And Lord, I just pray for anyone here that has been abused sexually and their sexuality has been misused, and we were singing earlier about healing, and I asked God for just your healing touch on each one of us that you would just, where there's pain associated with sexuality, God, that you would heal, that you would take away that pain, and that you'd be gracious. Lord, for those that have a desire to be married and have not yet found that person, to make that covenant with God, direct their steps, guide them, God, we want to glorify you. We want to be just eating the good things in the garden of this kingdom, and we thank you for this text and we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 5:21-26

Transaction

Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says you fool will be subject to hell. Fire. So if you're offering your gift on the altar and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar first, go and be reconciled with your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift, reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him to court, or your adversary will hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you'll be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you'll never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. Lord, we just would ask that you would speak to us through this text. We recognize that some of the material here may come very close to issues of our own hearts and we want to be followers of you, Jesus. We want your kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. We want you to be the king, not just over an external set of actions or behaviors, but really in our hearts and in our minds. And so Lord, we would pray that you would speak to us this morning through your word and we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

From verses 21 through 48, Jesus uses a formula to talk about six human experiences. Here's the formula. He starts off the section by saying you have heard that it was said and then he talks, he's going to talk about murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and love of neighbor, and he's going to say, here's what that ethical standard actually looks like in my kingdom. Grant Osborne summarizes this section like this. He says six antithesis on murder, adultery, divorce, oves, retaliation, love of neighbor function in two ways. One, they exemplify the better righteousness that Jesus had just demanded. Remember Jesus had said, your righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees and the scribes, and they further explained how Jesus has fulfilled and deepened the law in the new ethics of the kingdom. Another pastor named Timothy Keller says this about this section. There's three slides here, all of which are his from a quote that he gave about this text.

He says the package, and this is a transcript of his sermon. The package is Christianity itself is actually an interconnected set of radically altered relationships. Christianity is an interconnected set of radically altered relationships. Yes, Christianity is a religion, it's a faith. It's many things, but one of the ways to understand it is to think of it as an interconnection or interconnected set of radically altered relationships. This passage shows how they are interconnected. It goes like this. A Christian is someone who has come into a radically new relationship with God because you have come into that new relationship with God. It creates a brand new and unique relationship to yourself, how you relate to yourself because you have come into a brand new relationship and attitude towards yourself. It results in a completely unique and different attitude and relationship to the world and the people around you.

What we're going to see as we go through these six human experiences and as Jesus teaches and brings his kingdom to earth through this teaching, we're going to see that there is this radical new paradigm for interconnected. There's an interconnected radical new take on relationships. So let's look at this. The structure here that I would give to this six verses is that in verse 21 and 22, there's the antithesis between the murder tradition verses Jesus's teaching on anger. In verses 23 and 24, there is this internal illustration where we have the reconciliation with a brother and then in verses 25 and 26 you have an external illustration which is this reconciliation with an adversary. So let's look at these first two verses together. Again, it says you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder and whoever murders will be subject of the judgment.

He's quoting here from Exodus 20 verse 13. This is the command, this is the sixth command, do not murder, and he references this idea that you'll be subject to the judgment. Back in our verse here he says that you have been told or you have heard that it's said, do not murder and whoever does murder will be subject to the judgment. This is a reference for those Jews at the time who were listening to this. There was due process that a murderer would go through according to Jewish law and the local Jewish court system had a supreme court that would handle capital cases. There were 23 members who would sit and they would adjudicate these serious crimes. And so Jesus is establishing the righteous standard that they were all familiar with. But then in verse 22 he says this, I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to the judgment.

Do you see the repeated phrase here is again subject to the judgment. He's saying, you're familiar with how capital crimes are adjudicated today, but I'm telling you that anger belongs in the same courtroom. That is some strong language. He pairs anger with the same penalty. Now, if you know the Bible at all or you know the life of Jesus right away, there should be some red flags that go up because you know that Jesus himself became angry at points. We know in the Old Testament that there is a term for God's anger burning against not the foreign nations. The anger of God oftentimes burned against his own people. It was literally a metaphor that was used in Hebrew about your nose, his nose getting red hot. That's how the Hebrew would refer to anger or being angry using anthropomorphic language. And so here Jesus is saying, look, anger if you're anyone who is angry belongs in the supreme Court to be judged as a murderer, but yet Jesus himself was angry.

Look at John two 13 through 16. I don't have it here. I'll get to that quote in a second. In John two 13 through 16, we have the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and it talks about Jesus justifies his act literally of turning over tables and making a court whipping these money changers. ACEs, the zeal of your house has eaten me up. We would say that Jesus in that instance that he was angry and there are other times in the New Testament where it talks about in your anger do not sin. And so the question is how do we nuance this? How do we take what Jesus is teaching about anger and understand it as an ethic that doesn't have any small print? We're not going to excuse or try to write away or write out of the sermon on the Mount what Jesus is teaching, but how do we understand it within the context, the broader context of scripture?

What we're going to see is that Jesus is saying anger used improperly, anger that is violating a relationship is what he's talking about. My dad wrote a book about anger in kids and one of the things that he was famous for saying is that anger is good at identifying problems but it's not good at solving problems and this is the idea that Jesus is talking about. We live in a culture that deals extensively with anger and there's at least eight or nine things that I wrote down here on what causes the emotion of anger in us. You have frustration when people feel blocked from achieving their goals or meeting their needs. It can lead to a frustration which can escalate into anger. There's the perceived injustice. Experiencing unfair treatment or witnessing someone else. Being treated unfairly can evoke a strong feeling of anger, a sense of threat, feeling threatened either physically or emotionally can activate the body's fight or flight response which can manifest in anger.

Pain, both physical and emotional. Pain can trigger anger. Underlying mental health conditions, certain mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression can increase a person's susceptibility to anger and irritability. Genetics and personality factors. Some people may have a genetic predisposition to experience anger more intensely or frequently than others. External stressors, this would be calling hangry when you're, or environmental factors such as traffic jams, financial problems or being hungry. Work-related stress can contribute to increased anger levels, lack of sleep or proper nutrition. Our guess that one's more hangry, right? When people are sleep deprived or not eating well, they may be more prone to irritability and anger. Substance abuse, alcohol and drug use can impair judgment, increase aggression, making it more likely for people to express anger in an unhealthy way and learned behaviors, observing anger and aggression in others. So you're as a child, you may watch a parent use anger to achieve means, and so particularly during childhood, it can increase the likelihood of adopting these behaviors for oneself.

So anger is something that we're deeply familiar with. There are a lot of contributing factors on what may cause it and what Jesus here is specifically talking about is this idea of using anger in a way where a relationship is violated. So I think even in that list of different contributing factors, it's important to differentiate between the emotion of anger and the behaviors that flow out of it, which is exactly what Jesus talks about next because he says whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says you fool will be subject of hell. Fire where it says whoever insults his brother, your translation may say, whoever says to his brother Raha, his brother or sister Raha will be subject of the court. That's literally the Aramaic word that's in your original text and it was a condescending or contemptuous or slanderous phrase that was used and it literally means nothingness.

You empty headed person is kind of how he was used, but culturally it was used kind of to say you're a dummy, you are just a nothing on earth. Sky ney who wrote a book on the sermon on the Mount says this, Jesus spoke about a different even more virulent form of anger, which is contempt. His warning about insulting off others is often passed over by modern readers as unimportant. That is a serious mistake. The insulting word he uses was racha, a dismissive term of contempt in his culture that is derived from the sound of clearing your spit from one's throat. This kind of contempt is different from mere anger, contempt sinks to diminish the inherent value of the other person.

So the language that is used, this insulting language, and then he adds to that, he says, the third thing is somebody who says, you fool, this is the Greek word that we get our word moron from you moron will be subject to hell. Fire. So again, Jesus is saying, here's what you've grown up listening to the 10 commandments that say do not murder and you know how that's handled in a judicial way in our culture, but I'm telling you when it comes to my kingdom, anger belongs in that courtroom language that's bringing contempt or slander where you're calling a person a fool that belongs in that same courtroom. The anger Jesus speaks against is that which is harbored in the heart leading to contempt and the dehumanization of others.

Now in the next section, verse 23, Jesus gives an illustration, an internal illustration about what this looks like. So he talks about a worship setting. He says, if you're offering your gift on the altar, think about these disciples they're familiar with, not the Sabbath day and going to their local gathering, but they're talking about literally the festival setting where you would come up to Jerusalem and you'd offer your gift in the temple. You're there worshiping God with your burnt offering. He says in that setting you remember that your brother or sister has something against you. There's a breach in the relationship and no doubt it's felt internally. There's either bitterness or anger that's being harbored in your heart. Leave your gift there in front of the altar first go and be reconciled with your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift. The scenario again is it's temple worship and you remember there in that place of worship that you have a broken relationship and here's the king, the one who deserves all the worship in the world saying, stop worshiping me for a second.

Go and reconcile yourself in this relationship and then come back and resume the worship. Isn't that amazing What's going on? He says, what's going on in your heart is not good. You have social open wounds, you have just brokenness in your relationship with others and that's grounds for putting a pause on your own worship and you need to go and repair that. I want to put in front of you a hypothesis. I'm happy for you to push back on this not in the middle of my preaching, but this is my hypothesis, okay? Because this is little, this statement's pretty far out there and I'm working through this one. God has designed interpersonal relationships to be the primary place for our obedience and worship. Could you chew on that this week? Could you think about that? Because here Jesus is saying, I want you to stop worshiping me and go and get this relationship that's broken from your community, your brothers and sisters.

You've got this broken relationship. I want you to go and get that reconciled. God has designed interpersonal relationships to be the primary place for our obedience and worship. Let me kind of give you a few scriptures to support this idea. Again, I'm not 100% on this. I want you to wrestle with this. Let's have a conversation about it if you want, but here's some other places where this idea is put forward. In John the apostles, he writes some epistles. Here's what he says. If anyone says I love God and yet hates his brother or sister, he's a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen, John writes with very stark, it's like a logic that's, I can't think of the word, but he's using a logic where it's just like this.

You can almost write it out as an equation. You can't say that you love God but you hate your brother. You just haven't even seen whom you haven't seen. Verse 21, and we have this command from him. The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister. It's like you don't get to say you can't break up the first and second command that Jesus has loved the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. You can't separate that the practice of your worship of God is the love for others around you. In the Old Testament, I got to show you this. This is fascinating. In the Old Testament, you have the nation of Israel, right? You have Jewish people who are worshiping God. They're abstaining from food, which you think that's very religious, right?

To literally interrupt your dietary rituals and to fast that person must be really spiritual and that's what the Jewish people are doing at the time of Isaiah and God speaks to Isaiah and this is what he says. They seek me day after day to delight to know my ways. These people are seeking God like a nation that does what is right and does not abandon the justice of their God. They ask me for righteous judgments. They delight in the nearness of God. Those sound like very religious and spiritual people. They say, why have we fasted but you have not seen. We've denied ourself, but you haven't noticed. Here's God's reply. Look, you do as you please on the day of your fast and you oppress all your workers uhoh. You're oppressing all of your workers. In other words, you're not giving due wages to your workers.

You fast with contention. So he's playing with them. He's saying, well, yeah, the way that you're fasting is actually you've got contention and strife to strike viciously with your fist. You're in these fights. You cannot fast as you do today hoping to make your voice heard on high. Will the fast I choose be like this a day for a person to deny himself, to bow his head like a reed and to spread out sackcloth and ashes, will you call this fast a day that is acceptable to the Lord? And he goes on and he says, basically stop it. Stop fasting and go and fix the social ills that exist. Stop oppressing people. Go and defend the weak and the poor. Go and fix what is unjust in society. That's the fast that I have called you to. So again, I put before you just this idea that God is designed interpersonal relationships to be a primary place for obedience and worship.

You see, if you're a scriber pharisee, it's easy to look at the 10 commandments, that sixth command and say, do not murder. And you go through seven days and you get back to church on Sunday. You check the box and you're like, well, I didn't murder anybody and I'm good to go. And he's saying, well, that's the behavior and what Jesus is going to do on these six areas, he's going to take it to a heart level where things bubble up, where things start, where the beginning of words are formulated in the heart. He's going to say, this is not just about the behavior, this is about what's going on in your heart. This idea of just being angry, of saying to somebody, you empty minded Guinea or whatever you would say, it's like you fool or you moron. All of that stuff belongs in this courtroom.

So he goes to verse 25 and 26, verse 25 and 26 is this external, this external illustration of similar ideas. He says, reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him to the court or your adversary will hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you'll be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you'll never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. There is in this case here an implicit guilt. Jesus is telling the story not as if this court case were going to happen, and it's in question who was right or wrong? You're on your way to this court case and he's already saying the outcome of the court case is that you are going to be thrown in prison. You're not going to get out until you pay the last penny.

Why not settle? Why doesn't this person in this scenario settle the court case? Why don't people around us? Why don't we settle the case early? Why don't we humble out anger in our hearts, pride, resentment. Luke tells the same parable, the same teaching in Luke 12. Here's what it says. Why don't you judge for yourself what is right as you are going with your adversary to the ruler, make an effort to settle with him on the way. Then he won't drag you before the judge, the judge hand you over to the bailiff and the bailiff throw you into prison. I tell you, you will never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. The part that is added here by Luke is this question at the top. Why don't you judge for yourself? It's this appeal to self-awareness. Why don't you judge yourself?

There is with this whole idea of anger. There are occasions where people go through this foolish exercise and are guilty. They don't settle the case. Even if you apply this into more a social setting where there's just a conflict, they don't humble out and settle the case because of a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion. You remember in the psalm that Marvin read, it's a psalm that David wrote after he had Uriah murdered because he had already slept with Uriah's wife and impregnated her. And then David goes on for a year without repenting to God. He justifies himself, he shut down and God sends to David a prophet and that prophet tells David a parable. And the parable is about a man who has one little lonely lamb who is stolen by a rich man. And the prophet asks David, what should be done to that rich man who steals the poor man's lamb?

And you remember David's expression. David is like, kill the guy, take off his head severe judgment. And the fascinating thing is that the law, the law, the law did not even require that form of judgment to occur. David's judgment, the man was even more severe. It's almost as if there's a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion where David's feeling the weight of his own guilt, but he's projecting it onto this parable that's told to him and he just goes off. In 2022, there was a study, or lemme just before I go to the study in 2022, he prays this prayer. So the prophet comes to David and says, here's this story and David's response, David's response is, or the prophet's response to David is you are the guy, you are the rich man who stole the little lamb from the poor guy. And David responds in the right way to that sense of conviction.

And he writes Psalm 51 where he just repents. If you ever feel convicted by God of something that you've done wrong, Psalm 51 is there for you as a gift on how to verbalize your repentance. And it's a beautiful psalm. It expresses this just statement of just God, I'm sorry, cleanse me. Make me clean all the way inside you value a broken and a contrite spirit. But one thing it says in there, I think it's verse six, but I am not entirely sure. It says You desire truth in the inward parts. You want a self-awareness. You want me to have a conversation with my self based on truth, not given over to a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion. The study in 2022 on anger and aggression found that anger is associated with a number of cognitive biases such as attentional biases and hostile attribution biases.

I love these because I can relate to them. Attentional bias is a tendency to automatically focus on certain types of information such as threats or negative stimuli. This can be helpful in some situations such as when we need to be aware of danger. However, attentional bias also can be problematic. It leads us to focus on negative information at the expense of positive information, just how our brain is interacting with reality. And this can lead us to a place of anger and harboring anger because we're not processing life in a healthy way. A hostile attribution bias is a tendency to interpret ambiguous situations. That's a key word there. Ambiguous situations as hostile, even when there is no evidence to support this interpretation. This can lead to anger, aggression, and conflict.

Jesus is appealing to the people in his kingdom to not be factories of anger, not just to stay away from physically murdering people, but to be a people that at the depths of their soul are not holding onto anger and not trying to be the judge that then executes and solves the problem from the place of anger. This week as I was preparing this sermon, I was listening to to another sermon about this text and I had just come from the Compassion Center and as is the case of the Compassion Center, we get all kinds of people that are there and I was working, I had been working with a woman who was being rude and picky about the food she had just received.

This woman was not an intimidating figure, but instead of being direct with my correction of her and giving her boundaries, I had instead treated her with contempt. I had fun. And this is what I was realizing as I was listening to this teaching. I had had fun using my authority to belittle her and not just shut her down. And again, it's like where's my heart in my dealing with a person who was in the wrong, who is behaving poorly? My something not good was going on in my heart. As I was listening to this pastor teach in the text, I felt so convicted because I knew that my heart was messed up. I was not operating from the right framework even though what she was doing was inappropriate. Culturally, we give a pass to anger. We take and we turn anger into forms of entertainment.

If you watched, there's a documentary that I actually haven't watched. I've just heard the summary of it, but it's about the algorithms of social media that they're dialed in to elevate posts that cause feelings of anger and animosity rather than happy feeling. Now, whether that's the case or not, I don't fully know, probably should go, should watch the documentary, but it is the case that those posts that cause anger are the ones that get shared and they get the responses and they get the engagement. And that is beneficial to the company because people stick around and they brew and they get more angry and they stay there on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or wherever it is. And then the Facebook gets to show that person more ads and they make more dollars. So it is advantageous to stir up those feelings of entertainment. We are a culture that gives anger a pass.

We make movies about vengeance. We expect good patriots to be enraged at particular social ills. We have as a culture, we decide which ones of these ethics to give a pass to and which ones were like, yeah, Jesus, preach it. And this is not one that we like a whole lot. Chronic anger can have significant impacts on our physical and mental health. Here are some of the potential long-term effects of being angry. There is a study done in 2017. The study was called The Relationship Between Anger and cardiovascular Health. A meta-analysis of long-term studies found that anger was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart, coronary heart disease, stroke in sudden cardiac death, a weakened immune system. This is a study in 2009, the effects of anger on immune function found that anger can suppress the immune system, making people more susceptible to illness and infection, digestive problems. This is a study from 2005, found that anger can exacerbate digestive problems such as heartburn, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, and headaches. This is a 2018 study found that anger and hostility were associated with increased risk of chronic headaches.

Anger is not human flourishing. You and I were not designed to live as angry people. Jesus is bringing his kingdom standard not to condemn, but to give us life. We're not condemned. This teaching collides with our life and taken properly exposes our need for grace. The grace of God is poured into our deficiency. This is where God goes to work on us. Jesus wants for us to enjoy his kingdom benefits and it is a kingdom where anger is not harbored. In closing, this is the question I want you to consider. Are you willing to let God deal with your anger? Are you willing to let God's kingdom come on earth in your heart as it is in heaven? Us pray. Lord, we thank you for your word and for Jesus's teaching, we confess to you our own anger and just how our hearts can respond improperly to life. And Lord, we know that we cannot control our emotions, but we can control the way in which we respond to

These registering emotions. And we ask for your help in our hearts that we would not harbor or hold on to these things that are not even healthy for us physically. God, we pray that you would work through us and that this idea of your kingdom coming on earth would be a reality in our hearts. Lord, would you find in us this growth, this spiritual growth that leads us to look more and more like Jesus? Thank you for not being angry with us. Thank you for demonstrating mercy upon us when you looked at us, when you looked at us this morning. We're grateful for that. We ask that you would help and go with us this week. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 5:13-16

Transcription

Again, we are going to be in Matthew chapter five, verses 13 through 16. To set the stage this morning, I just want to call to your mind the statement that was made about Jesus at the end of chapter four. At the end of chapter four. It was this, the good news, the good news of the kingdom. Jesus was traveling around a region. I put up a map a few weeks ago. Jesus was traveling around an area called Galilee. That's a body of water in Israel and there's a bunch of fishing villages and just common people, towns all around that body of water. And Jesus was teaching from synagogue to synagogue where these were little Jewish kind of worship services or times for the community to gather together, and Jesus was teaching this message, the good news of the kingdom. And then starting in chapter five, we see that Jesus went up on a hillside.

He sat down, he called his disciples to him and he began to teach them. And then we have in Matthew all of chapter five, all of chapter six and all of chapter seven. That's all the teaching of Jesus to his disciples. But what we had said a couple weeks ago was that this is likely the material, the same material that Jesus was teaching as he moved around the Galilee. We also see this material over in Luke six. Some of it's in other places in Luke as well, but it's this message of the kingdom. So a second ago we sang a song where we want to crown him with many crowns, and the idea that I want us to have as a church as we're going through Matthew five, six and seven is that this is the king Jesus. King Jesus is giving instructions about his kingdom, what it looks like for us to be followers of him in his kingdom, and there are some radical things that Jesus teaches in this text. Now we're going to go back a little bit. We're actually going to start in verse 11 and read up through verse 16, and I'm going to borrow some of the context. There's an overlap between what we studied two weeks ago and what we're going to look at today because verses 11 and 12 provide us with the context for verses 13, 14, 15, and 16. It says this, you are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely

Every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven. Let's pray together. Lord, we do thank you for the text that we get to look at together and we pray that you would instruct us that it wouldn't just be me teaching, but there would be a moment that we have this moment, this morning with your spirit and that your spirit would illuminate this text for us each personally.

Not that we would be here gaining facts and figures, but God you would take and apply this into our setting the normal life that we live out. Be our teacher, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. There are three things that I want to draw your attention to in this text. The first is this idea of an alternative kingdom and alternative kingdom. I'll give you a couple of examples of this from the text. In verses 12 or 11 and 12, Jesus tells his disciples that they're blessed. This this. It's this declaration of congratulations. You are in a great place when you're insulted and persecuted and they say false things or falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. That is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. And then he also says this, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. I just want to meditate on these texts just for a second. One of the things that we see here is that there are others

That not everybody is a follower of Jesus. Now, that may seem simple, but one of the things that we're going to encounter as we are reading through the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus is communicating about a kingdom, an alternative kingdom that runs parallel and exists at the same time as the earthy kingdom that we live in. Being a follower of Jesus means living with loyalty to a hidden kingdom while being the resident in an earthy kingdom. One of the things that happens as you study the sermon on the Mount is that a model for cultural engagement is formed. Here's what I mean by that. We oftentimes talk about Christianity in terms of a response to the gospel message. Maybe somebody, your parents or a friend or a neighbor or a coworker tells you about Jesus and his death on the cross and his resurrection, and to be a Christian means to respond to that, to repent and to turn to Jesus.

That's the beginning. But then what do you do once you are a Christian? What do you do and what kind of relationship do you have with the world that you live in? When you decide to be a follower of Jesus? It isn't one of these beam me up, Scotty, star Trek moments. You're not evacuated out of the world, and it's not like that just missed Jesus's thinking because in John 17, as Jesus is praying for the disciples, he says, I pray that you wouldn't take them out of the world but that you would keep them because God could. There's even accounts with Elijah and with Enoch where God could just take people out of the world if he wanted to after they became his follower. It's like you got it right, whoop where he disappeared, but that's not how, God, excuse me. That's not how life works.

Instead, we remain in our bodies and we have this allegiance to an unseen God. We are reading the Bible, but then we're all doing normal life. And so there is a model that is formed. We're prompted to have a model formed around cultural engagement. Again, culture is what's valuable systems, financial systems, political systems, societal stratosphere of who's important, who's not important, who has influence, who doesn't have influence, what is art, what's valuable art, all of those things are cultural pieces, entertainment, all of that is kind of the air that we breathe broadly. And so we want to know how do we engage with culture? Once you become a follower of Jesus, what kind of relationship do you have with financial systems, work, education, entertainment, political systems, relationships and friendships? Again, I'm talking about this because Jesus is alluding to an experience that his followers will have where they're doing life in Jesus' name and they're being persecuted or they're being spoken, they're being slandered.

And then there's other times where they're doing life in Jesus' name and it's good and it's causing the people who are observing to glorify their father in heaven. And so there's an engagement that Jesus is referring to with his followers. He's saying, here's the symptoms. Here's kind of the fallout of your engagement. And as we go through the Sermon on the mount, we're going to see some ideas thrown at us about how do we have a relationship with culture? What's that model? How do you engage cultural systems? How much are you influenced and how much influence do you attempt to exert on those systems? Okay, so I'm setting the stage because in a second here I'm going to show you different ways that Christians have thought about cultural engagement, different models for cultural engagement that have existed over the last 2000 years, and I want this to be on your radar because as Jesus is teaching some things that are overt, there's also some subversive things or some presuppositions that come along with the teachings of Jesus.

In the Sermon on the Mount, there's a few different writers. Richard Neber wrote Christ in Culture, James Davis and Hunter wrote a book called To Change the World. I highly recommend both of these books. Tim Keller writes from these books extensively and he actually comes along and he gives a chart with four quadrants that represent different models for cultural engagement. Again, you've got to decide when you go to work tomorrow and you look at people who are not followers of Jesus, are they your enemy? Do you have something to gain from them? Can you redeem the good things that they're doing? Are you just trying to get away from them as fast as possible? When you turn on your tv, what kind of relationship do you have with the things that you watch on tv when you're listening to music? There's all these different models that exist about how if you're a follower of Jesus, how do you engage with culture?

So the way that this chart works is on the left you have, I know this is small print, so I'll read it for you, passive in influencing culture. So everybody on the left is very passive, does not want to shape culture, doesn't want to influence how culture looks. On the right, we have two quadrants that's active in trying to influence culture. On the lower two quadrants, you have the idea of little common grace, and on the top you have the idea of full of common grace. In other words, the world, I believe what he's saying is that the world is full of common grace that everywhere the people on the top are saying, everywhere you look, you see just so much of God just subtly creeping through. And then on the bottom you have Christians who look at the culture and they go, man, this is so far, this is so alien from anything that we see in Genesis one and two, anything from the garden.

So based off of those two axes and four quadrants, you have the two kingdom model, the relevance model, the Transformationist model, and the counterculture is, so down here we have the Amish. The Amish, when they look at the world or the Anabaptist or the Neo Anabaptist and the new monastics, they're looking at culture and saying there's very little evidence of the presence of God in the world. And they are not trying to change that, right? They're like, we're going to run away. We're going to create our own commune far away from we're going to get our own farm and we're not going to try to look like the world at all. Right? So that's the counter Culturalists, the two kingdoms model. This is Martin Luther and it's kind of an enigma. I'm going to probably read about it here in just a second. But the counterculture, it's a synthetic model that says, listen, we live in both a secular kingdom where God is sovereign and we see the sovereignty of God.

That's the idea full of common grace, but it's radically different from a spiritual kingdom of Jesus. And the two are just different places, and we occupy both kingdoms. That's the Lutherans and the reform, two kingdoms people. Then on the right we have the relevance model. You have liberation theology. So if you come from more of a progressive black church background, you may have been around a liberation theology. You also have mainline liberal churches, the emerging church, and then down on the bottom a seeker sensitive model. So that's the relevance model. Again, they're saying, look, when we look at culture, we see a lot of grace and we want to influence even more. We want to engage culture and we believe that God's called us to impact culture and engage it fully and use the good pieces that we see in culture. And then on the bottom you have the transformationist model and that is that, look, there's very little evidence of God's grace, but we want to change it.

So this is pre-Christian nationalism, but that's where Christian nationalism would go. This is like, Hey, we want to take our Christian ethic and want to advance it through politics and set up like a Christian nation. So Christian nationalists would be down in this right-hand corner. Those are your four models. There are good things and bad things in each one thing I appreciate. This is from Tim Keller's Center church book. There are good aspects in each, and he writes a big section out of the middle of his book and goes through these sections each in depth, and he explains why these different camps believe what they believe and he does a great job of commending them and saying, here's the dangers that are involved in having that position.

He got this material from reading Richard Neer and kind of summarizing it in his own way. Neer gives five, five positions Christ against culture, a withdrawal model of removing oneself from the culture into the community of the church. That's kind of like the Amish idea, Christ of culture and accommodationist model that recognizes God at work in culture and looks for ways to affirm it. That's remember that more upper right hand quadrant, Christ above culture, the synthetic model. This is the two kingdoms, upper left hand quadrant, Christ in culture in paradox. Also another take on the two kingdoms model and then Christ transforming culture. A conversion is model that seeks to transform every part of the culture. This is lower right hand corner, Christian nationalism, neo Calvinism and the like. All that to say you can't just take for granted that you follow Jesus and then you just know, here's the relationship that I should have With culture, you've got to make a decision.

Are you called to disengage, engage? Do you have this high optimism that as you engage your workplace, right? Let's say that you're there as a Christian and you're like, I can bring Jesus into the workplace, not just so that people get saved, but that Jesus is going to give me wisdom on how to do my job and the kingdom is going to just burst out in the workplace because common grace is so readily available. That's kind of more the camp that I fall into, but I appreciate there's the aspect of the neo monastics like Shane Claiborne who's decided to live in Philadelphia amongst the poor and to take guns and turn 'em into jewelry. And it's this idea of like we're just going to live as this community of peace amongst the poor. You can see how somebody may read the teachings of Jesus and come to that conclusion of like, this is what it looks like to live out his faith.

That's a radical way of interpreting Jesus, but I appreciate his sincerity in that. And then there's other things, other models that exist that I think you can definitely learn from those groups, even if that's not your model per se. In fact, when Tim Keller goes through this section in his book, his entire book is called Center Church, this idea of, Hey, let's find the center of these models and pull out what is good. All that to say, being a follower of Jesus means living with loyalty to a hidden kingdom while being a resident in an earthy kingdom. And as we're going through the Sermon on the mount, we're going to see that Jesus expects for us to live in a very hands-on way with the world. Sometimes it means you're persecuted, sometimes it means you're doing good and it's leading other people to go, wow, God is awesome.

How do we make this work? That's our question. We go into this next section, salt and light. Salt and light. He says in our text that we're looking at, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. There is a temptation when you read this to fill in a gap. Do you know what gap is missing? He's obviously using a metaphor here saying your salt and your light, but the question is what does it mean to be salty? What does it mean to be luminescent, to be full of light? Now in verse 16, he does talk about letting people see and observe your good works, but before he gets to that, and when he's talking about salt, he really doesn't say, here's what it means to be salty. So when you go and you read the commentaries on this, there's all kinds of different ideas depending on what your model is of what it means to be a salty Christian, what that looks like.

And it's funny to see how many people fill in the gaps with their kind of preconceived idea. And I would just say, let's hold back from that a little bit other than verse 16 and where it talks about good works because Jesus doesn't fill the gap. He just says, your salt, your light. Jesus doesn't offer a specific definition of what it means to be salty. He makes it as he takes it as a given. He says, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. The emphasis then is not on becoming something you are not. Again, it's not an emphasis on trying to be more salty, but on fully embodying what you already are in Christ. The principle is that Jesus expects his followers to be distinct and efficacious in the world, to have an effect in the world. And if anything that we can take from this text, whether we know exactly what it means to be salty or full of light or not, this is one thing we do know.

Jesus is definitely saying that his followers need to stand out because some of us like me are like, we would love to blend in. We would love to blend in. I went to a thank you. You're welcome. I went to a meetup networking thing on Friday that I was invited to and was not my normal crowd. In fact, I was invited and I was early before the guy that invited me. If you've ever been in that setting, it's like the most awkward social environment unless you're a gifted salesperson and you just love to meet people randomly and just walk into the middle of a group of people, which is not me. So I'm off on the side pretending to look at my phone and I'm thinking about this sermon and I'm thinking about this idea that Jesus, who I am naturally in my personality, and then what Jesus is teaching as followers that there is is just this aspect of if you're a follower of Jesus, there's a taste about you and there is a luminescence about you.

Jesus expects, Jesus expects his followers to be distinct and efficacious in the world. And so one of the ways that we engage that principle is that if you are me, that's where being a follower of Jesus becomes real because you've got to say, Lord, I don't really want to be having the taste. I don't want to stand out in a crowd. I'd really like to just kind of go through life and not be noticed at all and just kind of be camouflaged and blend in and not be noticed. And yet here as Jesus is teaching his disciples, he's saying, no, no, I expect for my followers in the world to be salty and to not lose their taste. I expect for them to be full of light or to be the light of the world and to not be hidden in that sense. And so what does it mean?

I think I love the vagueness of it because when you become a follower of Jesus, what's promised is that God puts his spirit in you. Are you a follower of Jesus this morning? Yes. If you're a follower of him, God's spirit is in you, and what that means is that he is now designing your life. If you're cooperating with him, he is leading you and guiding you and the influence of God's spirit is in line with what Jesus is teaching, right? Because of the Trinity, the spirit of God is the spirit of Jesus that's in you, and really all we need to say is, okay, God, I give you permission to make me tasty in the world, to make my life a light. I give you permission to author that, design it, to make it whatever it's, but I'm done resisting your spirit. I'm not going to resist you anymore.

Just show me. Don't go out and try to make it up. Let the spirit of God lead you into this idea of being salty, but then Jesus does lay out. This is the third simple principle that's in our text, the loss of a primary function, the cautionary tale that's in this text. You'll notice that it says here, but if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It's no longer good for anything? And then you go down a little bit further, it says, A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket. There is a sense of tragic waste, tragic waste in these examples, a loss of potential, a failure to be what they were designed to be. We live in a cultural moment where there is a bankruptcy around purpose and there's a emptiness that cultural participants express around, I do not feel fulfilled in my job.

I do not feel fulfilled in this relationship. I do not feel fulfilled or that I'm living out a purposeful life for X, y, and Z. What Jesus here is saying is that your life has this purpose and there is this possibility of tragic waste, a loss of potential, a failure of to be what you're designed to be. Again, if you're a follower of Jesus, the spirit of God comes in and makes you a custom, a disciple, not a cookie cutter disciple, not like we're going to stamp 'em out, but no, the spirit of God is taking your personality and your backstory and your moment that you live in and the resources that you have in the spirit of God is authoring for you a purposeful life where you're going to be salt and you're going to be light. We've already encountered this idea an earlier point in the book of Matthew.

In Matthew chapter three, verse 10, John the Baptist is teaching in this context by the Jordan. He's doing these baptisms and the Pharisees come to him and John says, of these Pharisees, listen, the acts is already at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that look, do you see what it says there? Every tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. A tree has the potential to bear fruit, and John is looking at these Pharisees as walking trees with the potential for fruit, and he says, listen, the way that God's kingdom works is that the people that are not bearing fruit, there's something that's happening where they're just set off to the side. Here he is talking about an ax cutting them down. In John 15, the branches that are not bearing fruit are thrown into the fire and they're burned.

There's a continuity of this concept throughout the teaching of Jesus. So when you look at yourself in the mirror every day, you are looking at a vessel that God has redeemed. He's purchased you by the work on the cross, and now he wants to author in your life fruitfulness and listen, listen, saints, he's been talking about this from the beginning because when God made people, he put Adam and eve there into the garden, and what did he say? Listen, he said, listen, Adam and Eve, I want you to be fruitful and multiply. I want to rule subdue in the garden here. I want you to take responsibility for this place. Name the animals steward over the ground. There was nothing growing up. It says in chapter two, there was nothing growing out of the ground yet because one God hadn't made it rain and two man hadn't tilled the ground yet. That's a fascinating little phrase there. It hadn't been tilled yet by man. God created humans not to just work so that they can make money, but to fulfill his purpose on the earth, and he's over and over again using metaphors and imagery that talks about potential. The implication for the listener is to examine whether we are truly living out our own God-given design and purpose, our own God-given design and purpose.

This whole text that we're going through of the Sermon on the Mount is going to jar you. It's going to push on you. Just think of how a potter is working, a piece of clay. There's going to be things in here where it's like, man, I don't feel comfortable with that, or even more so. I don't know how that works itself out in my life. I've got those things from the Sermon on the Mount where it's like I see that this is how the kingdom works. I don't know how obedience fully works in that way, but I just want to warn you. I just want to just say when you're looking at this sermon, taking the whole thing, taking the whole thing, I had this interaction I think two weeks ago, and some of you saw that I posted this on my Facebook page. I had shared a picture of us doing the compassion center feeding and this guy who had been a friend of mine on Facebook, I really had never met him in real life, but he left me this really nice comment of Matthew six one, which Matthew six, one says, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.

So he's taking this text from the Sermon on the Mount trying to rebuke me for sharing pictures about us feeding people at the compassion center. Now, the funny thing is in the same sermon that Jesus preaches is verse 16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Listen, I don't know Joshua or what his deal is or why he tried, why he decided it was his moment to troll me, but I do know having lived in the Christian bubble long enough that it is easy to take of a very challenging text and be like, well, Jesus said this one thing, you got to hide your good works well, but he said something different earlier. We got to take it all in. We got to take it all in and let it shape us. In verse 16, he says this, let your light shine right, let your light shine. And then he says, so that they may see your good works. One of the people sitting listening to Jesus teach this was a man named Peter. Peter was a fisherman, and he goes on to become this great apostle, one of the early apostles and leaders of the church.

Peter was deeply impacted by this teaching of Jesus. Again, I think that Jesus taught this material more than once, but it seems to have deeply impacted Peter's life. This whole idea just generally of just do good comes up as he's writing his own letter. Years later in two Jews spread out around the area of Turkey. He says this, to those Jewish followers of Jesus, conduct yourselves honorably amongst the Gentiles so that when they slander you as evil doers, they may observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits. Do you see how similar that statement is from what Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that they may see your good works? For Peter, he took a hold of Jesus's teaching and his cultural model when we studied this as a church together was take the position of weakness, do good from a position of disadvantage.

In other words, consider yourself perpetually the underdog in culture and do radical acts of good. Turn the other cheek, be radically generous, submit to the authority, do these things that are good, and then let God be the invisible third party in the room and let God just convict and transform nonbelievers lives, people that are still yet far from God. Let the spirit of God work on them through your good works and bring about His kingdom in their life. I want to put that in front of you because as a church, about a year ago, we were looking at that material, and I just love thinking about Peter there on the side of the mountain listening to Jesus teach these specific things. So I don't have a cultural model for

You,

But

We're going to read together the teachings of Jesus over the coming months from the Sermon on the Mount, and what I want you to be thinking about is how do you engage culture? When you look at the world around you, do you see a total absence of the grace of God in general like that the world is bankrupt, or do you see God working powerfully through non-Christians in amazing ways? That's one of two questions. That's one question you need to ask. What side or where do you kind of land on that axis? And then do you believe that you are called to transform culture or do you believe that you're called to run away and isolate yourself from culture? Think through those things as we are going through the Sermon on the Mount. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for this text and we want to surrender to the work of your spirit in our life.

Thank you for choosing us, for redeeming us, for giving us the down payment, the seal of the Holy Spirit in our life, the promise that you will lead us into what is true and good and right. We pray that you would find in us obedience to the things that are written here, wisdom that you would teach us, Lord, how to occupy this moment in time. And so Lord, we give ourselves to you afresh this morning. We're here as worshipers of you students, followers, but also worshipers of you. We declare that you are our king and we are the subjects of your kingdom, and we want to follow you. Bless us this week, we pray in Jesus name. Amen.

Matthew 5:1-12

Transcript

Matthew chapter five is where we're at. So turn on your Bibles or open your Bibles, however you're going to engage with scripture. We're going to be in chapter five verses one through 12 as a church. We're going through the book of Matthew. We go verse by verse, section by section as each week unfolds. So if you're new with us, that's what you can expect. If you know that we end in verse 12, you can expect that we've going to pick up in verse 13 next week. So we're very methodical in terms of going through the Bible. I want to put in front of you before we actually read the text together, just where we left off last week. In the story of Jesus, it says that Jesus began to go all over Galilee teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

I put up on the screen last week, a map that shows this Galilee region. It's north in Israel, significantly north of Jerusalem, and Jesus is kind of camped out there doing most of his teaching. A lot of Jesus's ministry happens in this Galilee region, and you'll notice that he's teaching and preaching in the synagogues. Now, I don't want to just take for granted that you kind of understand the synagogue, so let me just explain that for one minute. For the Jews, they had a temple where they would worship and offer sacrifices that was located in Jerusalem. The priests would serve there in the temple. But if you didn't live in Jerusalem, you lived far away. You still wanted to practice your faith and gather with other devout Jewish individuals and so on Sabbath. On the Sabbath, there would be a gathering at the synagogue on Saturday morning.

You'd go to synagogue and there would be a teaching that would go on. A synagogue was like a church. It was just a space where there would be a rabbi teaching from the Bible. There'd be some reading from the text. There may be some worship that's going on, and that was not where sacrifices were happening. So the stuff you read about in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, the temple worship isn't happening at a synagogue that's happening in Jerusalem. The space where Jesus is at is just the little gathering. So maybe you're familiar with an AA gathering or maybe you're familiar with a church gathering. It didn't really need to be a big group of people. It was like six or more basically constituted a gathering and there'd be a space. So Jesus is going in and he's teaching. We'll see other times that this happens, but this is a summary statement from Matthew 4 23.

When we get to chapter five, we get an introduction and then we're going to get a sermon that's going to go from chapter five through chapter six and chapter seven. If you have a Bible that puts Jesus words in red letters, what you see there is that the color. What's the color of those words? Red. That's right. So this is a long sermon that Jesus gives. It's probably a gathering of, it's a collection of the teachings that Jesus was giving at these various sites. It's probably not just a sermon that he gave one time, but it's very likely that this is the material, the common material that was in Jesus's teaching. So let me read this to you and then we'll go back and unpack it just a bit. Starting in verse one, when he saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

Then he began to teach them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the humble for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Let's pray together.

Lord, we do just. We commit ourselves to you and we ask for the help of your spirit. God, the Holy Spirit that you would teach us through this text, that you would open up our eyes to see wonderful things from your word. Apply this scripture to our life. Would you help us to practice what we read here and assimilate it into our own spiritual life? And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. What do you think we should call these three chapters? Sermon on the Mount? It's definitely happening on the mountain. You see, it says there in verse one, he saw the crowds and he went up on the mountain is probably the slope near the Sea of Galilee. There's these inclines around the Sea of Galilee where Jesus could have easily gone up, sat down and began to teach his disciples, the crowds that were there.

So we could call it the Sermon on the Mount, but that's just the location where it occurred. I would suggest to you that this is the manifesto of the king or the platform of the king. Do you know when a political party is preparing for a political season, they'll put together a platform. This is what we are about. This is what we're about. In fact, I'm going to show you at the end as we're making an application of this text, I'm going to give you the manifesto as if there was a sermon on the Mount, both of Black Lives Matter and of the Republican Party. If they wrote a sermon on the Mount, wait till you hear it. It's going to be hilarious. Well, not hilarious, but it is fitting. It'll help me illustrate the point. But imagine that idea of a platform. What Jesus is doing is he's going into these synagogues around the Galilee, common people, and he's talking about the kingdom.

And one of the things that we see in our day and age is that there are parts of this sermon that people love, right? Hey, take care of the poor, that God is one who's merciful, right? And that the kingdom's about just mercy. But then it says, turn the other cheek and we're like, I don't know if I like that kingdom so much. This is the platform of the kingdom that Jesus is talking about. And my conclusion after we go through this text is basically, this is who's welcome. This is all about these first 12 verses is here's who is welcome in this kingdom. The doors are flung wide open for these people. This is setting out the value system of this is what's important for this kingdom that Jesus is heralding. So it says that he went up on the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

Then he began to teach them. Now I got to mention this as we go through here, because I've been doing this all the way along. Who else do we know of that went up on a mountain, got a word from God, brought the message of God from that mountain down to the people. Moses. Moses. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. So here we have again, maybe Matthew, as he is writing this account of Jesus, he's drawing out, he's connecting the dots because we've already seen this image of baptism, right? The idea of being taken through the water. Then we saw the testing in the wilderness, and now we have a mountain scene where God's man, Jesus, the son of God is delivering the message of God. So maybe there is a bit of a parallel. Many believe this section continues the Moses typology from the birth and temptation narratives.

Now this material is also found in the gospel of Luke. If you know the Bible that Matthew, mark, Luke, and John are all telling the story of Jesus's ministry, the three years of Jesus's ministry, we get a little bit of birth narrative on some of 'em in Matthew and Luke, and then we get ministry narrative in all four. And so if you look at Luke six, you'll see a condensed version of similar material in a different order. That's why I was saying that this is probably the material in general that Jesus is preaching as he's going and healing people and sharing these messages. Now, before we get into this sermon specifically, I just want you to recall the prayer that you know so well. I mean, I think you know this prayer, right? This is the Lord's prayer. That's oftentimes the name that comes from it. This is a piece of it. He teaches his disciples. Jesus says, this is how you should pray. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We'll get to this text, we'll look at it more in depth, but I put this in front of you and I this morning because what Jesus is teaching his followers to do is to be asking the Father to have the kingdom of God that he's talking about to come on earth in the same way that the kingdom is operating in heaven.

So just think about for a second, what is a kingdom? What does it take to have a kingdom? Go ahead. What does it take? A king. A king? Okay, good. We need a king. What else do we need? Subjects. Subjects. We need some subjects. So what else? A queen. Okay, what else? Some people, some what subjects, yes, we need some rules. We need a monetary system of how things are exchanged. We need a value system. We've got a culture. So when we talk about kingdom, don't just think king, don't just think place, think culture, think space where Jesus is in charge and it's just designed well. The rules are just and perfect. There is structure, there is order, there's flourishing. That's when we talk about, look, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. This needs to be this something we chew on and we let it just flourish and open up in our imagination and think about what do you think?

What is a kingdom? What does it take? If you are going to establish your own kingdom, what would be all of the pieces? It's likely that those parallels are that those things are similar to this idea of Jesus having a kingdom in heaven where everything is ordered around him. And Jesus says, I want you to pray. I want you to pray that the kingdom that is in heaven would come on earth. So here we're going to go through a sermon that Jesus is going to just open up. He's going to pull back the curtain. He's going to say, look, here's what my kingdom looks like. Here's what my kingdom is all about. Excuse me.

So verse three, he says this, blessed are the poor in spirit for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Now if you're familiar with this text, this is called the Beatitudes, and we're going to have a repeat repetition of the word blessed. Maybe your translation has the word a little bit different. It could be, oh, how happy is, or something like that. But blessed, blessed, blessed. Then we're going to have the character or the experience or the station in life here. It's poor in spirit. The experience and then why they are blessed. It's because in God's reality, in God's economy, the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Okay? But we've got to do something because do you know what the New Testament, what language was the New Testament written in Greek? And so it wasn't written with the word blessed, it was written with the word does not have a good English version. It doesn't have a good English translation. So that's why we have this term blessed. Or maybe, oh, how happy is it carries this idea of being happy or fortunate, happy or fortunate.

But even that, it's not asking you to to change your thinking. So there's a bunch of things that this text is not, it's not saying, Hey, look at the fact that you're impoverished in spirit. You're totally spiritually bankrupt, and so you just need to change your thinking and see yourself as so happy. That's not what's saying here. Instead, probably the equivalent of blessed is what we would say is congratulations. I was going to put on my slides and I forgot to this morning, that little party popper emoji, right? Where it's like, congratulations. I think there's some kind of automation that happens when you do that on Facebook. If you break, congratulations, like balloons start going up across your page. That's the idea. Congratulations. Now again, that's still challenging because why is he saying congratulations, you're poor in spirit. So there's some commentators that come and look at these beatitudes, the first few, and they say, these are ethical qualities that you need to go and try to achieve.

You need to try and be poor in spirit, but this literally poor in spirit, really literally it means in a bankrupt, bankrupt and spiritually bankrupt. I don't know why anybody would want, it doesn't seem, in fact, instead what Jesus wants is enriched. He wants us to have this spiritual wealth. So we've got to wrestle with the text a bit. We've got to figure out what's going on here because this is not the only one where it just seems to be confusing. What does it mean to be congratulations are the poor in spirit, and I'll give you the framework and then we'll work it through. I think that what Jesus is saying as he's going around the Galilee, he's just declaring these are the kinds of people that are welcome in the kingdom. The gates of the kingdom are flung wide open to these types of people.

Not that you'll stay in this state, but there are people like this here around Galilee who are just, they feel like they've totally, they've just totally bankrupt. It just reminds me of sometimes we're out serving people in the line and somebody will come along and you can just see from their appearance that they're just had a life wrecked by addiction and their bodies wasted away by addiction and yet having a conversation with them, a spiritual conversation, there's an understanding about Jesus and there's a longing for the Lord. But there's this impoverished state of like, I don't have anything going for me spiritually, but I wish I did. There's just this spiritual poverty. I bring nothing to the table spiritually. And Jesus is saying, congratulations, the kingdom of heaven is for you. I've come for you. I haven't come for the one who's like the religious leader who thinks they have everything together. Remember, later on, Jesus responds back to a challenge to why are you hanging out with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus partially responds by saying, look, I have come for the sick. The sick are the ones that need the physician, not those who are healthy. And that is this reality of the kingdom. And so right at the beginning of this sermon, there is this list of 10 quality states or experiences that are describe those that are just welcome into the kingdom. This is familiar territory. It shouldn't be off-putting.

Then he says, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. This mourning is this idea of grief, the state of being in the state of grieving. These are the people that the gates are flung wide open. You can imagine Jesus throwing up his arms is saying, congratulations. The kingdom message has come to you, your mourning. You are in your place of grieving. You have experienced loss in your life and the kingdom is for you. You will be comforted in all of these things that Jesus is going to say the kingdom of heaven. He just promised the kingdom of heaven here. He's promising comfort. He's not saying, I don't think he's saying your mourning, but all of a sudden your grief is just going to go away. You had your morning cup of coffee. I think that there is a present fulfillment and a future anticipation.

This is how the whole New Testament works because there's two comings of Christ, right? There's the first coming and second coming, so there's a aspect, but there's a greater fullness that's yet to come. So there's a comfort that's available to those of us that grieve. It says in Second Corinthians seven that we grieve, no, that's not Second Corinthians seven. Maybe it is that we are not like those who grieve without hope. You know those of you that know the Bible, you know that verse, right? We have a different way of grieving because we have a meta narrative that tells us the end. So there is a comfort that we receive from the presence of the Holy Spirit and of the truths that we live out. But there is a hope of comfort as well that he says in verse five, blessed are the humble. Your version may say, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.

I grew up hearing that meekness was strength under control or something like that. Did you hear that when you were growing up? Yeah. Restrained strength, it's really not. That's not really what it means. It really means to be powerless, lowly and operating from a position of you are not a mover and shaker, you're have a disadvantage. You're the underdog. It really doesn't have much of this idea of strength under control. And Jesus is coming in and he's saying, congratulations, you are totally powerless and lowly in society, but God's kingdom welcomes you. It's come to you and if you enter that kingdom, you'll inherit the earth. You'll inherit the earth. It's a fascinating picture. Again, there's this upside down. You notice how upside down some of these things are culture shifts. Some of these are prized values in our culture today, but in the past we're not.

And again, things will shift. It's like the sexual ethics in the late sixties, it was like free love and then all of a sudden you have the me too movement. It's like you can't make eye contact with the opposite sex for more than three seconds or you've had a microaggression. So ethics, culturally weave back and forth and sometimes they overlap with sermon on the mount material and then other times it's like 180 degrees. The reality though is that the ethics of the kingdom have never changed and they don't weave back and forth. But here we have this welcoming, this congratulations to the meek or the humble in verse six. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Again, this is that person that's operating from the position of just, I'm hungry for the Lord, I'm hungry for the Lord.

You may not have much to show for it, but there's this longing and intense desire for what is right in the world, and this doesn't say anything about your ability to carry out the righteousness. It's just Jesus is saying, look, if you're one of these people that's longing for the rightness in the world, things to be done orderly, just in a just way, then you need to know in my kingdom you will be filled. These people will be filled. The next one is merciful. Verse seven. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. This is sympathy compassion. In the midst of a culture where vengeance and retribution and an eye for an eye are prized in God's kingdom, he's saying congratulations to the merciful. They're going to be the ones who are shown mercy. So there are times where in these beatitudes it's a desirable quality and it's like, yes, we want to be merciful people. There's other times where it's like we don't want to be impoverished in spirit. I don't have the reference here in front of me, but there's a time where Jesus is like, nah, this is not where we want to be at. We don't want to be impoverished in spirit. We want to be wealthy in spirit.

And there is a shift, I can't remember if it's with the fourth or the fifth beatitude, but we shift from current state over to more future tenses in the language here. So we're moving in. We are kind of now with the beatitudes moving into territory where we could say, yeah, this is not just an entry quality, but this should be a continuing value in Jesus's kingdom mercy. Now, verse eight, blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. This is this singleness or single-mindedness, a single commitment to God, a sincere loyalty to God. Think of somebody who is undistracted in their commitment to God. There's just a purity of heart, and he's saying this in the midst of a culture, their culture, our culture where an impurity of heart can be prized. Sometimes there is in our culture a celebration of being vulgar or impure, but it's not just because we have taken the idea of purity of heart and we connect it with vulgarity or profanity, but there's also an aspect, a positive aspect of just focus, of simplicity, of I'm simply committed to the Lord.

I'm keeping my heart loving the Lord with all my heart, my soul and strength. And he says to those they're going to be the ones they'll see. God. It reminds me of how we were talking about fasting a couple of weeks ago and how as you fast, you're taking away one or two of your senses and it gives you this ability of like, oh, there's clarity. It opens up this ability to sense, to sense God even with greater clarity. So he says in verse nine, you'll see God, and then in verse 10 he said, blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God. Super simple, just the maker of peace, the people who desire to make peace, not the ones that are stirring the pot, not the ones that are causing conflict, but the people who are trying to make peace.

They're the ones who are called the sons of God. And then verse 10, notice we have the kingdom of heaven. So we have bookends here, but then we're going to add one more after this. He says, blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for the kingdom of heaven is theirs, and he adds to this a similar idea. You're blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. And so he closes out with this idea of just in his kingdom, the persecuted are the ones who are to be congratulated. So again, if you can just as you go back for the rest of your life, as you reflect on this text, think of when you post to Facebook or say to somebody, congratulations for their special moment.

That is the closest English concept we have to what's going on in the beatitudes, and it can only happen if you embrace the value system of the kingdom. If you've embraced what Jesus is all about, then you're able to look at these different scenarios, settings, and events and say, congratulations. Welcome in. There is something for you in this kingdom. You'll notice throughout this whole text that there's something for the participants. We happily in our western Protestant Christianity, we talk about being born again and being saved, but you'll notice here in Jesus's teaching to his disciples that he's not using that language here. He's talking about something that you'll have, whether it's you'll have the kingdom or you'll inherit the earth or you'll be a son of God or you'll receive mercy. There are different experiences that you are receiving as a participant in this kingdom. As you step in, this is what he has for you. As we look at this passage, we should start to see who the kingdom is for. There is this forming. What we're going to see through this text is a forming of a value system that is different from other systems in the world. It may be a helpful exercise to just go and consider what is your value system? What's important to you?

What are the underlying motivations for you? As we travel through the next three chapters, we're going to see Jesus lay out the value system of his kingdom. One of the things we will see as we move through these three chapters is the crossover with society's values and sometimes those stark differences. We're going to see an overlap and then we're going to see with our culture, and then we're going to see stuff where it's just like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's not for me. I don't that part of this sermon, and that's where the alignment has to happen.

Sometimes we're going to say, yes, let's give to the poor. I love it, and then we're going to say, no, no, no. Don't give your other cheek to the person who just smacked you. We're not going to like that part. I'm guessing that's not how our culture works, right? So it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun to go through this. One of the things though that you will see and that I will continue to point out is that in our culture, in our culture, there are things where there's this overlap between our culture, whether you're a Christian or not, whether you're secular or you're religious, there's a shared value system, and then there's other areas where it's different. I feel like I've said that now five times. I apologize. I am a little bit under the weather. One of the things though that is not accepted is that people don't want the king.

They don't want a person being Jesus to oversee what is the shared value. They want to be the king. Even if it's like, Hey, I agree that caring for the poor is good. It's like I like the value of the kingdom. I just don't want the king, and it doesn't work like that. You don't get to pick and choose from the Sermon on the mount. It's all about that. A kingdom has a king and he's inviting you and I through this text. He's like, congratulations. This is a place where you're welcome. Now, there is on the internet, the Beatitudes of the Black Lives Matter and also the beatitudes of the Republican Party. I give this to you because I just want you to see that these groups, whether you associate closely with them or don't associate with them, you're going to see that there's a value system there.

You're going to hear, it's going to ring true, like, oh, yeah, that's pretty good. That does sound right. I know them. I know that perspective, and not all of them are bad, but again, I want you to see a sample that we're more closely aligned with as we are wrestling and as we're saying to the Lord, Lord, I want your kingdom to come in my life. Okay, beatitudes of the Black Lives Matter movement, blessed are those number one, blessed are those who mourn the lives lost the systemic racism, for they shall be comforted in community and justice. Number two, blessed are the activists for they shall inherit a world more equitable. Number three, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the

Merciful who reach across divisions for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in purpose who work for the good of all, for they shall see change. Blessed are the peacemakers who deescalate and mediate for they shall be called the children of a new world. Blessed are those who are persecuted for standing against injustice, for theirs is the moral high ground. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you, falsely on account of your fight for equity. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is in the impact you make and in the same way they persecute the prophets who were before you. So some similarities, right? Some things where we're like, yes, we agree, we want justice, but then some other things where it's like, yeah, that's kind of like your pat thing, right? Wait till you get to the Republican party. Okay, here we go. The beatitudes of the Republican Party. Number one, blessed are the financially responsible for they shall steward the nation's wealth. Number two, blessed are those who honor, tradition and family for they shall inherit a stable society. Number three, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for limited government, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who risk for the betterment of all, for they shall see prosperity. Blessed are the defenders of the constitution for they shall uphold liberty. Blessed are the peacemakers through strength, sorry, sorry. Blessed are the peacemakers through strength, the peacemakers through strength for they shall secure a free world that one died a decade ago. Blessed are those who are persecuted for their conservative beliefs, for theirs is a historical backbone of America. Blessed are you and people mock you and cancel you and utter all kinds of falsehood against you because of your principles. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is the enduring legacy. You leave just as they challenge the founding fathers before you. So look, it is whatever you identify as politically, you might have your own. It would be worth it to see what would be your beatitudes if you were to give some to your family. Jesus comes in. He has a upside down kingdom that is just this beautiful, he's not in the center of power. He's around a bunch of fishermen. He calls a bunch of fishermen to be his core to team. He's going from synagogue to synagogue, and he's declaring this congratulatory message saying, the gates are open to the kingdom, and there's all these benefits for these

People that are kind of societal outcasts or the worthless ones to you and I. It's this beautiful sermon that is sometimes going to be upsetting, and it's sometimes going to be this invigorating, inspiring message no matter what. We have to remember that Jesus is the king of that kingdom, and we're here to learn from him and to place ourselves in a position where he is authoring our lives. Amen. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you that we're going to get to read through the Sermon on the Mount together. We thank you, God for being so kind and gracious and for designing a kingdom that welcomes in the outcast. You don't shy away from sin and you don't shy away from loving sinners, and you bring us in and you just start changing our lives, building us up and giving us a kingdom. Lord, would you do some awesome thing in our lives? Continue your work, your kingdom work, make yourself known. Make yourself known through our lives. Help us to treat other people in the way that you've treated us, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 4:12-25

Transcript

Let's read together Matthew four, verses 12 through 25. Matthew four 12 through 25. It says this, when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea in the region of Zein and Naftali. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah, land of Zein and land of Naftali along the road by the sea beyond the Jordan Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who live in darkness have seen a great light, and for those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. From then on, Jesus began to preach, repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near. As he was walking along the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who's called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting an net into the sea for they were fishermen.

Follow me, he told them, and I will make you fisher, I'll make you fish for people. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zey and his brother John. They were in a boat with Zey, their father preparing their nets, and he called them immediately. They left their boat and their father and followed him. Now, Jesus began to go all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. Then the news about him spread throughout Syria, so they brought to him all those who were afflicted and those suffering from various diseases and intense pains. The demon possessed the epileptics, the paralytics, and he healed them. Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

Let's pray together. Father, we give you our time this morning and we ask that you would speak to us through this text. God, we're so grateful that we get to bring our life before you and God, you know the pieces, the puzzle pieces and the dots that we wish so desperately would connect. And Lord, we just would ask that you would speak to us by your spirit, that you give us a sense of direction. Correct us where we're off. Lord, comfort us with your word. Give us instruction on how to do life in a way that is righteous. Lord, we're so grateful that we get to have the Bible in our own language to get to read it together with a church family. We are a wealthy, we're spiritually wealthy, and we pray that you would find in us just a responsiveness and an obedience this morning, and we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Amen. Well, here we are, Matthew chapter four. If you're new with us, we go through the Bible verse by verse. So we're right now studying the book of Matthew, and this is one of the books of the Bible that talks about the life of Jesus. There are actually four books in the New Testament that talk about Jesus's life, Matthew, mark, and Luke. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And then John also writes a gospel, but it is very different. Its source material is different. It doesn't conflict with Matthew, mark or Luke, but just the perspective is very much John. So Matthew, as we've seen, is written very much to a global Jewish audience. And last week we looked at the beginning of chapter four, which was the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. You remember Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, which in itself was kind of shocking.

And as soon as he came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit came down on Jesus's head in the shape of a dove, and there was a voice that came from heaven. God the Father, saying, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. And then right on the heels of Jesus's baptism, the Holy Spirit guided and directed Jesus out to the wilderness. And Jesus fasted for 40 days and at the end of 40 days he was hungry and Satan came to tempt him in the wilderness, three different temptations, and Jesus resists that temptation based off scripture from Deuteronomy six through eight. And we looked at that last week and now we get to this story, this account, and we see right away that Jesus is beginning his ministry and we've got a little bit of geography that we're going to get to.

The outline for the text this morning is this, verses 12 through 17 is Jesus's move to the Galilee, and what was going on there verses 18 through 22 is the formation of the apostles or the call of four apostles. And then verses 23 through 25 is this preaching and healing ministry that Jesus is involved in. Let's look at those first, that first section verses 12 through 17. It says that he moved to Galilee when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. Now this would be if you have what's called a parallel gospel parallel, you would be able to see inserted into here is some text from John that gives us a little bit more detail about John's ministry after Jesus's baptism and before he is arrested, but in Matthew's account, he skips over that material and he jumps right into this account of John being arrested and Jesus withdrawing and heading to Galilee.

Now the next verse is going to say that he moves from Nazareth to Galilee. This is zoomed in on the nation of Israel. This map, this is the northern body of water for Israel as a nation. It's called the Sea of Galilee, and there's a number of significant coastal towns around Galilee. You see here it's called tan chia, and then there's Capernaum on the, what we would say would be the eastern shore is more of a gentile region. Capernaum is a major shipping or fishing village, and this becomes Jesus's new hometown. So he moves from Nazareth where he grew up over to this region of Galilee, and a lot of Jesus's ministry takes place in this region. In fact, if you look through Matthew from chapter four, all the way up through chapter 18, all of that material, all of the accounts that are going on there are predominantly happening in this region.

Now, if you have a map of Israel, you zoom out. What you'll see is that there's another southern body of water called the dead Sea and close to the Dead Sea is the capital of Israel, Jerusalem. And so Jesus makes appearances in Jerusalem, which is where all the religious leaders are gathered. Jesus goes there, but he's predominantly doing his teaching in this region, this northern region which is significantly north of Jerusalem. There's a big geographic difference north of this area we see alluded to at the end of chapter four, the area of Syria by and large called Syria Damascus, and that's a gentile space at Jesus's time. And so this account says that Jesus moves from Nazareth and he went to live in Capernaum by the sea in the region of Zein and Naftaly. And then Matthew always faithful to help his reader understand how Jesus is just fulfilling what the Old Testament said.

The Jewish scriptures are fulfilled in Jesus. He says, Hey, let me quote to you Isaiah chapter nine, and this is it. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah, land of zein and land of Naftali along the road by the sea beyond the Jordan Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who live in darkness have seen a great light. And for those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. So again, this is Isaiah chapter nine verses one and two. Here it is in Isaiah. Nevertheless, the gloom and the distress distressed land will not be like that of the former times when he humbled the land of Zein and the land of NAFTA lease. So take in your mind, think back 750 years, 750 years, how long has the United States been around for? Right? 270 years? Is that where we're at?

Something like that? Is that close to right? I think so. So double that and more than double that, and that's when Isaiah, the prophet, this Jewish prophet is overseeing, has this spiritual work over the nation prophesying to Israel and Judea. They're now two different kingdoms. And you have the northern nation of Israel, the southern nation of Judah and Isaiah prophesies in the midst of Israel being taken by Assyria, right? So God allows a nation called Assyria to come and carry off the northern nation, carry Israel off to Assyria, and so they're displaced from the promised land. Imagine being the people of God and having this Jewish heritage where Abraham is your forefather and you've had the stories of David as this glorious king that brings about victories and Moses leading people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land and Solomon and all this rich heritage.

But your experience as a Jew is that you're a minority under threat of Assyria and then you're captive taken off to a foreign land never to return again. So Isaiah has a spiritual ministry to those people and God's allowing that to happen because of their disobedience, because of the idolatry of Israel following pagan gods and not being faithful, loyal to Yahweh. God allows us Syria to take 'em and they have these kind of messages spoken. The gloom and the distress of the land will not be like that of the former times when he humbled the land of Zebulon. This is that humbling the land of naturally. But in the future, he will bring honor to the way of the sea to the land east of the Jordan to the Galilee. Here it's the Galilee of the nations. This water region is not just the Jewish place, but it's Galilee of the nations.

The Gentiles is how it's found in Matthew Galilee of the nations. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. A light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness. So Isaiah 750 years before Jesus has this beautiful poetic language about this geographic region, them being in darkness and it not being like this former times of humbling, but there's the light dawns people walking in darkness have seen a great light. The light is dawned and those living in the land of darkness. So it takes 750 years for God to allow this to play out. It's just so interesting how God works, right? That he's, and if you're the contemporary of Isaiah, what you're hearing from this is that God's not done working. Your experience may be one where it seems as if God's abandoned you. It may seem as if God's far away from you because of the point at which you're living in history, but God is not done and he's going to bring about them.

So we have this ability to look backwards, but just imagine how much time God allows to span between this prophetic word and Jesus and how does it take place? Well, John gets thrown into prison. Jesus who's been a carpenter for 30 years, who is the Messiah but's living a very normal life. He puts his pants on just the same way you put your pants on or, well, he probably had a tunic, but it's kind of that idea, very normal life. He doesn't have a halo when he's walking from Nazareth to the Galilee. So he goes to Capernaum and Matthew says, listen, I'm going to give you this spiritual interpretation of this very normal move. This is what's so fun about being a follower of Jesus is that something significant is playing out in our very mundane normal lives. Our culture. We live at a time that is just so disenchanted and heartbroken and upset by the changes in society.

We live in what's called a post-modernity where people have, there is a large part of humanity that's kind of given up on putting the pieces together or finding unity. Post-modernity is marked by this just life is broken, the pieces don't fit together. It's difficult to find unity, and it's even reflected in some of entertainment where most recently when I watched the latest Spider-Man that came out, the creators of that Spider-Man, the artists felt completely free to use discontinuous art to portray the story. We can use what looks like comic art we can use, but we're going to jump over and we're going to throw a collage in here and then we're going to show, Hey Marco, we're going to show this over here. We're going to show this piece over there. So just a fascinating time that we live in. And it would be easy to kind of say, I don't, don't know.

I don't know how to make sense out of, but yet, if you are a follower of Jesus, we have this hope that we're living in this grand narrative and that our life is woven into God's grand story. So your experience, your human experience may be one of suffering and it's just like, I don't understand. Why am I Israel being carried off? Well, it might be because you're worshiping idols, but I don't know. But there is this sense of that timing that came to Israel of suffering and being carried off. And even if those who had followed idols, they had been like, okay, I repent. I'm sorry. It wouldn't have changed the history. At that point, God had determined you as a nation have been rebellious and now is time you're going to go through 70 years. Well, for the Northern tribe was longer than 70 years, but you're going to go through this season of suffering Anyway, that is how the Old Testament is interacting with our texts.

Jesus moves to this new region, and I say all that because we're going to keep going through Matthew, and what we're going to see is that Matthew doesn't say, listen, Jesus is on the scene, so forget everything in Israel's history. Instead, Matthew's bending over backwards to help you. And I understand that Jesus is the Messiah that the Old Testament talked about. I used to see the Old Testament as this kind of foggy depiction of God's plan. Every once in a while the fog would part and there would be a passage like this where it's like, oh yeah, it's talking about Jesus, and then the clouds would kind of come and cover up God's plan again. But the more I've studied the Old Testament, the more that I've seen that it is this beautiful intricate explanation of God's value system and his kingdom and Jesus is so appropriate and beautiful and on the spot when he comes in.

And it's not that Jesus is like the thing that is. Jesus uses this parable about new wineskins in old wineskins, and it would be easy to look at the Old Testament and say that that's the old not Jesus is talking about the old form of Judaism and legalism and saying, no, I'm here. I'm here with the new wine. It's time to let go of your traditionalism. All the traditions that have been, the edifices that have been built up, and it's time to take Jesus in. Remember that. Don't forget that. So if your experience with the Old Testament is one where you feel like it's foggy, difficult to understand, I have two recommendations for you. One, there's an awesome YouTube channel called the Bible Project. There's also an app by the Bible project that does just explainer 10 minute explainer videos on every book of the Old Testament.

It'll explain to you Exodus, and you're like, wait, I don't know how to make sense out of Exodus. Go and watch the explainer video on their YouTube channel. Also Blue Letter Bible website. That is a free Bible commentary website. It's going to give you sermons and just an easy to understand explanations of every book of the Bible. So don't give up on the Old Testament. Know that it's beautiful. Matthew's going to keep pointing us back to it and it's worth the time of studying it. Okay, at the end of this section, we're still in this first section of our outline. Jesus is now in Capernaum, and he began to preach repent because the kingdom of heaven has come. We've heard that before, haven't we? If you've been with us for a few weeks, we've seen this very sermon preached already back in chapter three at the beginning of chapter three.

It says, in those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea saying, repent because the kingdom of heaven has come near in that interesting. The same exact message as John, who is John John's, the final Old Testament prophet on the scene before Jesus. Now we have John in the New Testament, but he's really significantly representing the Old Testament in his ministry. He's prophesying and saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is coming. Now, hold onto this because in the last, there's three sections. First section, second, second, third section, third section, we are going to see Jesus preaching again. So here's the first little blurb summary of Jesus's sermons. Repent. The kingdom of heaven has come near. We'll see Jesus preaching again, but let's move forward just a little bit to the second part where we have the calling of the four apostles, the calling of the four apostles. It says this as he was walking along the sea of Galilee, remember our map, we've got that sea there. Fishing is what's going on there in the sea. He saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen.

And Jesus says to them, follow me. He told them, and I will make you fish for people. C sees these two brothers and he just calls 'em, Hey, follow me. I will make you fishers of men. Now, if we could harmonize this account with John and with Mark and Luke, we would see that both Peter and Andrew have already been exposed to this preaching that we just read about. But this is an interaction, a very personal interaction that Jesus has with these two brothers saying, follow me. And he takes, and he borrows the metaphor of their job and he says, I'm going to turn you into what you're doing, but I'm going to make you a spiritual version of it. My grandpa, who is a pastor for 49 years, one of his favorite ways to share the gospel with people was he would ask people, Hey, what do you do? What's your vocation? And they would say, oh, I'm a doctor. And he would say, oh, really? I am too. And they'd go, really? He goes, yeah, but I work with people spiritually to help them heal. And he would always kind of bridge this gap. People would say, I'm a plumber. He'd go, oh, that's what I do too. I help people with their spiritual plumbing get it all figured out and cleaned out and unplugged.

He

Would have

The most bizarre things that he would connect his calling to. He was a goofball and he's in

Heaven now. So I can say that, but Jesus says to Peter and his brother, Andrew, I will make you fish for people. And then it says, immediately they left their nets and followed him. So they obey. They listened to this call and they're responsive. And then we have two more brothers going on from there. He saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee and his brother John, and they were in a boat with Zey, their father preparing their nets and he called them. So these guys are not casting their nets, they're sitting in their nets fixing or mending. That's what prepare means. Or in Greek is that's the idea of making nets functional, putting their nets back together, and he calls them and immediately they left the boat and their father and they followed him. So we see this response of these first four apostles.

What I want to do for just a second is I want to not assume that we understand the words that are being used. I don't want to take for granted some of the Christian lingo that comes up, and I know some of you are just new to the Bible and understanding the Bible for the first time, and so you'll hear words like apostle or you'll hear the word disciple. And so I just want to give you a definition for that. Those words don't come up here yet, but I've used them. A disciple is the word mathes in the Greek, and it's found 261 times in the New Testament. Sometimes John the Baptist has disciples. Sometimes the Pharisees have disciples, and then other times Jesus has disciples. So this is not just the 12, these are people. It's one who engages in learning through instruction from another.

We could call 'em a pupil or an apprentice, so kind of like a student, but the word apprentice is probably the best word that we have. If someone's an apprentice. I had some guys a couple years ago put in a wire in my basement, an electrical wire, and what showed up at my door was the electrician and the apprentice who did all the work and the apprentice. He's learning about the gauge of wire that's supposed to be used, and he's a young guy, a grunt, and he's following around the licensed electrician in the process, and that's what a disciple is. It's somebody that's learning specific, not just the subject, but somebody who's following after the teacher. Then we have another word apostle in the Greek, and that word is found 75 times in the New Testament, and it's the word a delegate, an envoy or a messenger.

It's the idea of going out and being a messenger on behalf of somebody else, kind of like an ambassador or we would, yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to look at the idea of an apostle, but really think in your mind of going out. In fact, I have a visual of this. So a disciple is somebody that follows Jesus and is learning from Jesus. An apostle is somebody commissioned to go and do a mission. Now, we have a bunch of different church cultures that are represented here, and you'll get these titles that this is a bishop apostle, and it seems like a term of significance, but in its original sense, apostle is a commissioned person, somebody who is commissioned to go and do God's work. That's how it's used with Jesus before Jesus uses that term. It's used just kind of in a political sense or somebody sent to go and carry a political message on behalf of someone else.

So you have Jesus's apostles. Now, there are 12 apostles, but there are more than 12 disciples. Did you hear that? There's more than 12 disciples. When Jesus is done with his ministry and goes back up to heaven, and people begin to hear about Jesus and they want to follow him, the title that they're most often given is disciple. So all the way through the first 10 verses of Acts, 10, chapters of Acts, the followers of Jesus, the new converts, they're not called Christians, they're called disciples or people of the way. Those of the followers of Jesus are called disciples. So if you're a person where you've made that decision, where you identify yourself as a follower of Jesus, you could say of yourself, I'm a disciple, right? But then you should ask yourself, do I actually, am I an apprentice? Am I follow him around?

Am I really an adherent or am I just kind of hanging around on the periphery and not a great representation of Jesus? That's a fair question to ask. So we have disciples and we have apostles. Is that clear? Does that make sense? I think we have the lingo that we use in America for different church leadership. This guy's an apostle, and that maybe means he has multiple churches that he leads or he functions in a particular way in a church, and that's fine, but just know, don't necessarily import that into the Bible. Instead, let the Bible speak for itself. So we have disciples and apostles.

Let's see, why am I pulling this up? Let me look back into my notes. It isn't until Matthew 10, this is why in Matthew 10 we have the names of the 12 apostles. So this is where, now imagine we're in chapter four. We got to get all the way over to chapter 10 until we see the formation of these 12. So at this point in Jesus's ministry, he's teaching. There's tons of people that are gathering around in crowds. He's beginning to gather people to him and saying, Hey, I want you to follow me. But then we finally get to the formation of the 12. Once we get to Matthew chapter 10 in Luke, it's in a different, it's different chronological place, but for us, we're looking at Matthew and he says, the names of the 12, do you see it? They're apostles. The names of the 12 apostles is Simon called Peter, Andrew, his brother James, John Philip Bartholomew Thomas, Matthew, the tax collector who wrote this book that we're studying right now, James, the son of Alpheus, Thaddeus Simon, the zealot, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. So that's your 12. Some of them get mentioned more often than others, some of them, this is all you see, right? We just get their names on a list and we have no idea. Like Thaddeus, what did Thaddeus do? I don't know. I have no idea. But he was there amongst the 12 apostles. Jesus picked him out. Remember, and I think it's in John where Jesus goes, he prays, and these are the ones that God says these are to be the 12.

Let's talk though about one word here that comes up. It's this word follow in our text that we looked at. We see that Jesus says to Peter, Andrew, James, and John, he says, Hey, follow me. This word alu and another Greek word dte are found at least. Well, ACA Theo is 90 times found in the New Testament, and there are five meanings for this word. And the reason why I want to emphasize this is because again, if you've been around the church, if you've lived kind of in Western Christianity, the term disciple or discipleship comes up a lot evangelism. And what I'm hoping for us is that we're able to kind of strip away what we've heard and just kind of engage the text and what does it say about Jesus and the response to Jesus. Does that make sense? So here in our text, it says, Jesus calls them, Hey, I want you to follow me.

And then it says, of both of these sets of brothers, they immediately followed him. So this literally moves means move behind someone in the same direction, come after him to follow or accompany someone who takes lead. A company go along with the crowd was following Jesus in a figurative way. It means to follow someone as a disciple or to be a disciple, to comply with, to follow obey, to come after someone something else in a sequence. This term is used over and over again. As we look at Jesus, and I just want to put this up in front of you because this is our mission statement. As a church, we use this word, we're together because of the gospel following Jesus in his mission to redeem Baltimore city. There is this mark in our lives where we want to be those that follow Jesus.

If you've grown up in Christianity, maybe you've seen like altar calls or like a Billy Graham crusade, and it's like, come forward and pray this prayer and receive Christ, and there's this moment of conversion that comes from John chapter three when Jesus works with Nicodemus and talks about being born again, and there's very much a moment at which conversion when you're translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, and it's contingent upon a particular response to Jesus. But again, could you just in your mind, just use your imagination to think about Jesus, think about Jesus and the fact that he's traveling around these regions of Capernaum saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is near, and he's just talking about the kingdom of heaven. When we go and we look starting next week at the Sermon on the Mount, we're going to just see that Jesus is taking and riffing on Old Testament themes.

He's giving it qualitative depth. He's expanding on concepts, and what we assume from the Sermon on the Mount is that this is just a compilation of the material Jesus was sharing across the Galilee region. When it says that, he said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is near, and he's delivering the message about the kingdom. What he's doing is he's talking about everything we've got in the Sermon on the Mount, which is going to be awesome, and we're going to look at next week the call, the response, the response of people who are engaging Jesus. It's not to fill out a contact card or go to a small group. Jesus is traveling around these different villages. He's just teaching about the kingdom, and he's picking up like a snowball. He's picking up followers who are interested, but people have lives and people are doing their lives and they're engaging Jesus's message, but they're doing life. There are a handful of people, there are 12 that we know of who do this thing that we're talking about where they abandon their vocation and they become the apostles of Jesus. But there are many disciples who even as they're hearing Jesus, they are engaged in normal living. I did this search.

Here we have again. Here's the following that happened by James and John. They followed, they followed, and then in verse 25, which were coming to large crowds, followed him. What I did was a search of terms that are action words, verbs related to Jesus, where just the most common verbs in the gospels. I did this in chat, E B T I asked it then what were the verbs in which Jesus was the object of the sentence? So you have on the far right hand side, the general occurrences in the gospels of verbs. These are the most common ones to follow, to believe, to inherit, to repent, to come, to seek, and to receive. This is what it meant to engage the ministry of Jesus. Then a second to the right is the column of where the verb is associated with Jesus as the object. Obviously, repent is more associated with kingdom and heaven and not necessarily Jesus.

It's not this repentance to Jesus, but it's repentance to receive the kingdom. It's just an interesting study. Yeah, take a picture if you want of the screen. You can go back and look it up, but again, what I want to do is I kind of want to break your assumptions about Christianity a little bit, and I want you to see what was the activity of Christians who were engaging Jesus? It's following, believing, inheriting, repenting, coming to him, seeking and receiving. Those are the most common verbs, the actions of the people engaging Jesus. Now, if I had time, I would go and we could go deep down this rabbit hole, but it was just a fascinating thing.

Well, let's look here for just a second at this next section, 23 through 25, 23 through 25, it says, now Jesus began to go all over Galilee teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness amongst the people. Then the news about him spread throughout Syria, so do you Here again, he's preaching the good news about the kingdom. It was not an altar call. Do you see that? Not that an altar call is bad, but if you're going to summarize the teaching of Jesus, he's talking about a kingdom, and these people are familiar with a kingdom living under the Roman Empire, so kingdom concept, we use the term government and politics. He's using terminology that relates to their framework of thinking about government, but he's proclaiming a king a good news of the kingdom, and then he's healing every disease sickness amongst the people and the news about him spread throughout Syria, so they bring all these different people afflicted like crazy, crazy, the people that are brought to Jesus.

Do you see that? It's the news about him spread throughout Syria. Now, fast forward in your head, okay, Jesus goes up to heaven, he ascends to heaven, and then we have, so we have the ascension. Then we have the followers of Jesus gathering together, the disciples. How many are in the upper room? 120 are in the upper room when the Holy Spirit comes down on the day of Pentecost. Here's what's fascinating to me. Jesus does this ministry all throughout a region. He's healing all these people. They're coming to him, but then on the day of Pentecost, the gathering there is 120 people.

As you interact with the sovereignty of God and the idea of Jesus healing people, can I just ask you, what do you think? Why did Jesus heal people? For probably 35 years of my life, I thought that Jesus kind of had a horse and pony show or a dog and pony show, is that kind of the phrase, right? He had a dog and pony show that would lead and be the hook to get people to listen to the gospel message. It's kind of like is how some outreaches go? We're going to bring in these awesome dirt bikers that are going to do three flips in the air, so we get a crowd and then we're going to share the gospel, right? That's kind of how I always thought about the miracles, but I don't think about it like that anymore. I think that Jesus is coming on the scene as the king.

These humans are the humans that he created from the foundation of the world. That's what it says in John chapter one, that the logos was in the beginning and that this is his creation. These are the people he made, and the Father has given him dominion, and Jesus is actually going to give dominion to his disciples later on, and Jesus is just healing because he's good. He's the king, and this world that he's engaging is disordered, and what did God do in the very beginning? He gave order to chaos, right? He puts pieces back together, and so yes, I think Jesus wants people to be his followers. I think he wants people to accept the message of the kingdom and live with him eternally in heaven, but the God of the Bible that Jesus is here, he is literally going to heal people of their sicknesses and their paralysis and their demon possession and their epilepsy, and they're not going to follow him.

They're not going to become disciples. They will die. They will live eternally separated from God, but their present life will have been transformed. Their present earthly experience will have been radically transformed because let me ask you this. Do you think that every person here became a Christian? No. Was this a wasted effort? This was not a wasted effort. Here's why this is important to me. Is it because every Tuesday and Friday we feed people who are hungry that stand in line. There's 200 families that are represented, and the question that people put to me is, well, how many of those people come to your church? There ain't 200 people in here, and sometimes there is this Christian idea. There's this Christian idea of like, well, you're just wasting your effort, but look at when I look at Jesus, Jesus, I don't want to use it.

Indiscriminately healed, but Jesus was not like, I'm going to heal you if you follow me. Is that in there? We read this together. Is that in there? No, no. He's preaching. He's not leaving off the gospel, right? He's not saying like, Hey, you have to listen to me, and if you accept me, then I'll heal you. No, Jesus is just deciding like, Hey, these people here are going to get healed. Now, when we get to acts, we see that the apostles also start healing people, people that were in Jerusalem, people that had been sick their whole life. There's people that are around during Jesus's time that don't get healed by him. What's up with that? That's not fair. They must have felt gypped. But here's the thing is Jesus is healing. People that don't necessarily believe in don't follow him, don't believe in him. It doesn't even say anything about faith.

Now, other places, it says stuff about faith, but here it's just like Jesus is healing. Anyway, I think I'm getting a little bit on my soapbox a little bit up on my soapbox just because sometimes, not anybody here, nobody in our church, but sometimes there's this scrutiny from the outside of why do you spend so much time caring about people's physical bodies and feeding people and using church money to pay for a truck to feed people? It's like, well, when I look at Jesus, Jesus is doing that kind of thing here, so the response, let's kind of land the plane because here it's, there is this tradition that we've inherited as Christians about Christianity. I've been hurt by churches in the past where I worked in a church that was all about disciples. You got to make disciples. You got to have the person. You're discipling, the person that's discipling you, and it was this thing that was kind of kooky.

It was kind of cultish of like, who are you discipling? And the more I wrestled in that church with that setting, the more I realized like, yeah, there's like Jesus has disciples, but the great disciple maker is Jesus. Jesus. Jesus has discipled me in a variety of ways, one through scripture, but I can go on the internet and listen to a sermon. I can read a biography about Christians in the past. If I didn't have somebody like disciple me in this one-on-one way with this particular formula, I'm not a deficient Christian. Jesus is the great disciple maker. He's wants to disciple you. He wants to teach you about himself through his word. So anyway, let's go and land the plane. We see this beautiful ministry to the Gentiles. We passed by it really fast, but did you see it? When Jesus goes to Galilee, he's not just preaching to a Jewish audience, but there's gentiles that are hearing the message of the kingdom.

But one really important thing for you to understand is that there's these apostles that are called to leave their jobs and to follow Jesus. They leave their nets and they follow Jesus, but I want you to see another passage out one Corinthians seven. This is really important because we're going to engage Jesus and we're going to see Jesus calling people to do radical stuff, and you may be like, well, look, I've got a career. I've got a family. I can't just leave my kids, and what am I supposed to do? Leave my kids and go to Africa? What's going to make Jesus happy? I want to balance out some of those misconceptions. Paul teaches the church. He says, let each one live his life in the situation. The Lord assigned when God called him, this is what I command all the churches. Were you already?

In other words, were you Jewish? Were he called you? You should not go and undo your circumcision. I don't even know how you'd do that, like plastic surgery or something. Was anyone called well, uncircumcised? He shouldn't get circumcised. Circumcision doesn't matter. Uncircumcision does not matter. Keeping God's commands is what matters. Jesus comes with a kingdom, message, a kingdom. We're going to study it for a couple months starting next week, keeping the commands. That's the idea. Jesus calls you to himself and you need to be ready for a radical reorientation, but it may be that you stay in the place where you're at. Let each of you remain in the situation in which he was called, were you called? While you are a slave, don't let it concern you, but if you can become free, by all means, take the opportunity for he who is called by the Lord as a slave is the Lord's Freeman.

Likewise, you is called as a free man is Christ's slave. You are bought at a price to not become slaves of people, brothers and sisters. Each person is to remain with God in the situation in which he was called. You and I are called to be followers of Jesus, to be obedient to him, but to understand that it is not necessarily a leave your nets to follow me. It may be for some of you, but for 95, 90 8% of Jesus's audience, it is internal changes that are going on that you may not see a vocational change, but it is. I'm now an adherent to the king of this kingdom. I'm ready to adopt the kingdom value system, the rules of the kingdom, and I want Jesus to be my king. Lord, we thank you for your word and we pray that you would find in us a devotion. We want to be apprentices of you. We want to be those that are just following close, close behind you, Jesus learning of you.

Lord, we pray that you would continue to be our teacher this week on how to do life. Well, Lord, would there be supernatural things that happen in our life, but also just a wisdom where we align ourselves with you as the king, and then you just infect our life with this wisdom on how to do life. Well, Lord, be honored and glorified as we do our jobs this week. Our vocations, Lord, just would we be Jesus followers, right where we are called Lord, we offer ourselves to you afresh, and we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 4:1-11

Transcript

Alright, if you have your Bibles, you can turn in your Bibles to the book of Matthew. Matthew chapter what? Four. That's right. We made it to Matthew chapter four. We're moving along quickly. We're moving along quickly. When we get to Matthew five, I just want to give you a heads up. We will slow down in the Sermon on the Mount. When we go through five, six, and seven, we're going to go a lot slower, so we're moving through the early life of Jesus, the early ministry of Jesus, and then we're getting to Matthew five. We're going to slow down because the Sermon on the Mount in and of itself is just epic in proportions. So that's where we're heading. But this morning we are in Matthew chapter four. Before I read Matthew four, one through 11, though, I do want to put in front of you a different passage and it's going to be up here on the screen.

This is Genesis 12, one through three. The Lord said to Abram, go from your land, your relatives, your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. I'll curse anyone who treats you with contempt and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. I want to put that in front of you this morning in preparation for this text because the nation of Israel has been waiting for these types of promises to be fulfilled. God certainly gave Abraham a son and that son had descendants and there were more descendants and God was faithful in developing this nation out of Abraham. But this was not just to be a large people group, but it was a large people group with a purpose and it was this purpose that they would bring a blessing. And what did happen with Abraham later on in chapter 12, you remember there,

Ishmael?

Not yet. Not yet. He did in 17 and 18 he had Ishmael, but before we get there, he's got to go find the woman that he has Ishmael with and he goes to Egypt because he runs away from a famine, right? There's a famine there and he lies about his wife and he says, no, no, no, this is my sister. Sister. That's right. Abraham lies. So if you go and then you lie about your sister and then the king takes Sarah as if, Hey, I'm going to bring you into my harem. Doesn't have relations with her yet, but brings her in. Is that a blessing or a curse to that nation? A curse. It's a curse man. This is how the story of Israel plays out. While God wants to use this, he wants to use humans to bring about this blessing. Humans keep failing.

Now, do we want a blessing? How many of us want to be blessed? How many of you pray? Lord bless me, right? We want the blessing, right? And God's like, I want to give you a nation. I want you as a nation to be a blessing, but it keeps failing and so the history plays out to this person, Jesus and Jesus comes, Jesus is the seed of the woman. He is the blessing that was promised to Abraham. Jesus is the way in which humanity is blessed. I've said as we've covered these first three chapters and now into chapter four, that there are echoes and repeated themes, and I want those to be in front of you this morning. Again, you have here Israel and Jesus, you have in the story of Israel, you have this miraculous conception of Isaac when Sarah is 90 in her nineties, right?

And we have the virgin birth of Jesus, a miraculous birth. We have Israel moving his family or Jacob moving his family to Egypt. We see Jesus taken to Egypt by Joseph. We have the babies killed in Egypt, and then we have the babies killed at the time of the Egypt flight. Then we have the baptized, we have Israel baptized into Moses. That's one Corinthians 10, eight via the Red Sea, and then we have the baptism of John. Jesus is baptized by John, and then we have the testing in the wilderness of Israel, and this morning we're going to look at the testing of Jesus in the wilderness. Do you see the parallel that exists between Israel's story and Jesus?

It's close, right? There are these parallel themes. Jesus triumphs and shows himself to be the true Israel, the son of God through whom God's redemptive purposes for his people is now at last reaches its fulfillment. Last week we saw John's ministry, or two weeks ago we saw John's ministry in his baptism, he introduces Jesus. And then last week we saw the baptism of Jesus and we closed with this verse. There was a voice after Jesus's baptism, a voice from heaven that said, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. And now we go into chapter four and it says this. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After he had fasted 40 days and 40 nights he was hungry. Then the tempter approached him and said, if you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bread.

He answered, it is written, man must not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city, had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple and said unto him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, he will give his angels orders concerning you and they will support you with their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. Jesus told him, it is also written, do not test the Lord your God. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and he said to him, I will give you all these things if you'll fall down and worship me. Then Jesus told him, go away Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve only him.

Then the devil left him and the angels came and began to serve him. Let's pray together. Lord, we pray and ask that you would teach us through this text and that you would speak into our lives through the things that we are reading here. We ask that you by your spirit would just cause this text to intersect with our own lives. We believe that your word is a light to our path and it's capable of correcting us and teaching us and comforting us and giving us the instructions that we need. We ask that you would do that. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. There are three temptations that the devil brings to Jesus in this setting. Before we get to these three temptations though, Matthew sets the stage by telling us some of the basic how questions answers to those questions. It says that Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. So we see here that the spirit, the last time we saw the spirit was that Jesus was baptized and as he came out of the water, the spirit of God descends on him in the form of a dove, and then we have this voice from heaven. It's that same spirit that now leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted.

Isn't it fascinating that the spirit of God is guiding the son of God, the one who is beloved into a place of temptation? This week I'm going to email you a video that I want you to watch is going to be five minutes long and it's about this theme of God's testing throughout scripture because you may be looking at this and you are like, wait, I've heard this story before, but it was a woman and there was a snake and it was early on in the Bible. Does it ring true of another scene where there's a temptation that happens where Eve is tempted by the devil to disobey God and in that setting the woman there does not pass the test. Adam does not pass the test. They both take the fruit disobey God and that's called the fall. Death comes into the world through that act of disobedience.

And so here, Jesus in a similar setting, but there's this reversal, there's parallelism, but then there's also contrast. So instead of a garden, we have wilderness, right? But is this the last time that Jesus is in a or no? This is not the last time that Jesus faces a test. There is another garden test, but it's late in his ministry. So we have a test at the beginning and we have a test at the end. The test at the end is in the garden. The test at the beginning is in the wilderness and the spirit of God directs Jesus into this place. It says in verse two that he is fasted for 40 days and 40 nights and he was hungry.

Let's talk about a few of these pieces here. First of all, the devil is introduced to us here in this text. The devil is going to play an important role throughout the ministry of Jesus. I'm very glad that the devil is here in the text because it brings to the surface a hidden theme or a kind of a subdermal theme. Throughout the Old Testament, we see the serpent in the garden tempting, but then we really don't have this predominant act or role or much of a sense of what Satan is doing throughout the Old Testament. The writers, the Hebrew writers take this theme of serpent and they weave it all throughout the Old Testament, but you have to be a really kind of a studied writer. I have a book this thick on just the motif of the serpent in Samuel and Kings, just the repeated themes of how this idea, how Goliath is a type of the serpent, how the snake and just the language that's used in Genesis three, how that language is used by the writer of Samuel and kings over and over again to show that wow, the serpent is at work, he's messing, he's taking on the form of leaders and lying and tempting and being a deceiver.

So the devil is there, but not in this named way as we have in the gospels and it's going to be significant. We're going to see not just the devil at work, but demons at work. And so as we travel through the gospels, one of the pieces of our understanding about God's world is that there is this invisible enemy that exists, has existed from the beginning and has an agenda. One of my seminary professors has suggested that there was God's creation of the angels before Genesis one, and for some reason God created angels and this is what existed before humans and there's this rebellion of Satan and he leads this rebellion. A third of the angels rebel with him, and there is this galactic battle that exists and a part of God's purpose for creating humans is to bring about his victory in a glorious way.

So humans are created into the middle of an open battle between God and this rebellious angel, Satan and the demons, and he allows, God allows this battle to play itself out and yet the role of humans are strategic in the victory that God plays out. He wants to accomplish some, not just a win, but a glorious victory. And so the story of humanity plays out in the midst of a cosmic battle. So Satan is an important character as we see Jesus doing the work that he's doing. Remember the message was repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, so Jesus is bringing his kingdom to bear on the earth. Remember that as we go forward now. So here's the devil. You'll notice in our text already that the devil has three names in just the text we're looking at here. He's called the devil. What else? What are the other two names that he has?

Lucifer? Not in this text, but yes, he is called Lucifer. In just our text, these verse 11 verses we have somebody said the tempter, right, Satan, we have the tempter and we have Satan on Jesus. When Jesus talks to Satan, he calls him Satan. So we have the devil. We also have this name Lucifer that's given to him in Revelation. He's the dragon. There's all kinds of names that are given to the devil throughout scripture, one in the same person, and then there are his fallen angels that are called demons also in Ephesians that are called powers and principalities hosts. Maybe if we have time I'll turn to that text later on, but so we have the devil and here we have Jesus in this wilderness setting, fasting. So this means that Jesus is abstaining from food. He's probably drinking water only as he does this fast and he comes to the end of 40 days, which is about as far as the human body can go, abstaining from food and being only on water. He gets to the end of 40 days and he begins to feel hunger. Fasting is an expected religious activity for the followers of Jesus. When we get to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about giving to the poor prayer and fasting as normative. When you do it, he doesn't say, Hey, if you choose to do it, he talks about, Hey, when you do it, do it in this way. And we see in Jesus's life that it is a regular activity.

And so just for a second, let's talk about fasting. One of the guys that taught me about fasting early on when I was in my late teens, he gave this teaching and it was hypothetical, but it's been my experience is that where we've got these five senses and when you decide to fast and abstain from tasting food, you're really shutting down one of your five senses. You could say almost two of the senses because depending on your proximity to food, you're not smelling it as much and you're definitely not tasting it as much. And what that does is it opens you up your capacity, you've got less noise, you've got less sensory activity going on, and so it's like a radio. You're open to more frequencies coming through. And in my own experience with fasting, it is not great. It's not like the greatest experience ever because those open wavelengths, there's a lot of demonic stuff that goes on and it's not like, oh, the channels of heaven are open and I can hear God, no, I can hear Satan screaming in my ear and it's horrible, right?

It's not the funnest experience, but there's a lot of great reasons to fast one, so there's, there's also a lot of different ways to fast, and I'll say right up at the top, if you have medical concerns, you should not enter a fast without consulting with your doctor, but if you get your doctor's permission and you feel like you're up to it, you ought to build it in to as just a regular routine where you skip a day and you're like, Hey, I'm not going to eat today or I'm not going to eat this weekend. Even now medicine is catching up with these practices that are not just Christian, like Muslims fast and Jews will fast and different and Hindus will fast, but it has some interesting biological effects in our system kind of cleaning out our cells from how I understand it. But it does have just interesting carryover into the spiritual realm.

One of the things that just top of the top of mind that I think is good, and one of the reasons why it's helpful to fast is it just sends a signal to your body and when you do it saying, Hey, body, you're not in charge. If I decide I'm not going to eat, I'm in charge. I'm not dictated by my hunger pains. It also familiarizes us with suffering. We as Christians should be acquainted with suffering so that we're prepared when we hit a moment of suffering, we already have done selfs suffering in a sense so that we can, we're familiar with that experience. There's a whole range of reasons. God, it seems that the economy of prayer, that God is acting upon the faith that God is able to work in the context of faith. And when you're fasting, you're in a weakened state which should cause you to be relying and depending upon God, which is a healthy attitude in prayer. And so prayer and fasting is oftentimes associated with each other, so it is quick, it's easy. I know for me, if I'm in a place where I'm fasting, it's easy to just kind of just go, Lord, I need you. There's not much of a fight that I want to put up. I'm just weak and I'm hungry.

Jesus is in this place. And of course, Satan comes to him in that place. Let's look at this first temptation. It says this, it's this temptation to use your power to meet your own need. Verse three, then the tempter approached him and said, if you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bred. He answered, it is written, man must not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. The heart of this temptation is for Jesus to use his power to meet his own needs. Notice Jesus, he isn't like, Hey, here's a crack pipe, take a hit. That's not the temptation here for Jesus. It's this, you're hungry. Why don't you just prove that you're the Son of God and do this miracle? Now, could Jesus do this? Yeah, he could have, right? He had the power to do it.

And yet Jesus resists this temptation from the devil and he uses a passage from Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy six. And by the way, all of the verses that Jesus quotes are from Deuteronomy six through eight, and your homework this week is just go read that passage. It's this beautiful. You can see here's Moses speaking to the children of Israel who are in the wilderness getting ready to go into the promised land. All of these instructions about here's what it's going to look like for you to be a righteous nation as you occupy the land. And man, we don't have time to go through all three chapters there, but you read Deuteronomy six through eight and it is just like it's worth memorizing. It's so good. And so Jesus uses that text to respond to this temptation. Isn't it interesting that it's a temptation around food? What was the temptation in the garden?

Food, right? Eat this food. And here again we have now, what's so wrong with eating the fruit from this tree in the garden? Well, what's wrong with it is God said, don't do it right. What's wrong with taking this bread here is a very similar temptation to stop being dependent upon God. Just take up your own independence, your own authority, your own autonomy, use your power and turn this stone into bread. And Jesus says, no, this is not what's going to happen. Instead, he quotes Deuteronomy six. He says, man must not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God. Yes, Jesus is the son of God. That does not mean he ought to use his position to meet his own needs. I was going to take this for granted, and I thought maybe some of you haven't read John recently, so I just want to put these verses in front of you.

Here's Jesus's teaching. John, who was another apostle, he recorded a number of these statements from Jesus. Just help us see the relationship that Jesus had with his father. Jesus replied, he said, truly, I tell you, the son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing for whatever the father does, the son does likewise, does these things for the Father, loves the son and shows him everything he is doing, and he will show him greater works than these so that you will be amazed. And then also the same thing is in John eight. Jesus said to them, when you lift up the son of man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own. But just as the Father taught me, I say these things, Jesus acted and spoke what the Father told him to do and say He had this interdependent relationship and John really picks up on this theme, not so much in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, mark, and Luke, but John really makes this clear that Jesus did what he did because he was in constant communication.

He was being led by his father. So to just take up these stones and turn 'em into bread would've violated this dynamic. It would've been this step of independence and it was have violated the picture. The interesting thing is this is how God, this is the way that God wants us to be in relationship with him. God wants us to be those that are dependent. This is dependent on him. He wanted this from Adam and Eve. You may have asked, well, what was so wrong with a tree of good and bad?

Why did God not want them to just take from this tree? And again, this is a bit of speculation, but it would seem as if that God wanted Adam and Eve to know good and bad, but he wanted to be the source of it. He didn't want them to go and take it from a tree. He wanted to teach them because isn't that the whole message of the Bible, that God is a source of wisdom? You get to Proverbs eight, seven, and eight, right? Lady wisdom is crying out in the streets. There's this cry of like, I want you to know what is right and good and what is wrong and what to avoid. God wants his people to mature and know what is good and bad, but in relationship to him, not independent from him. And so here, the temptation of Satan was, Hey, just be independent.

Use your position. Turn this bread, the stones into bread. The second temptation is this, use your position to test God. Let's see. Let's use your position. Then the devil took him to the holy city being Jerusalem. It had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, he will give his angels orders concerning you and they'll support you with their hands so that you'll not strike your foot against the stone. Jesus told him, it is written, do not test the Lord your God. So again, important to note here in passing, who is the devil and how is he doing the temptation? The devil here is quoting Bible to Jesus. He's quoting Psalm 91 saying, Hey, do this because the Bible says this and that fascinating that the devil can use the Bible to tempt the Son of God. Does that mean that that's what Satan may do for us? It's not just good enough to know the Bible. It's important to know how to use the Bible, right? That's why we go to church, that that's why we have a heaven and Earth Bible class. That's why we are trying to be students of God's Word is so that we know how to read it and understand it and apply it in the right context.

The offer is, look, you could do this and we'll just prove through this act of throwing yourself down that the angels are going to protect you, that they're not going to let you even dash your foot against a stone. And Jesus quotes again from Deuteronomy six, do not test the Lord your God. Let's look at the third temptation to get good results with Satan's methods, good results, but using Satan's methods. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and he said to him, I will give you all these things if you'll fall down and worship me. Then Jesus told him, go away, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only.

Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of world. The question is, was this Satans to give? Was this Satans to give? I would say that it was because when we look over at the same story of Jesus, Jesus's temptation in Luke four, six, the devil said to him, I will give you their splendor and all this authority because it has been given over to me and I can give it to anyone I want. This is another piece of the story. You see that when God kicked Satan out of heaven and he lost his place in heaven, Satan was cast down to the earth. So the realm of Satan is the earth. Satan has a kingdom. In fact, it says over in John 1231 that he is the ruler of this world. This is Jesus speaking, calls Satan, the ruler of this world will be cast out.

I don't have it here, but there's multiple times where Jesus calls Satan, the ruler of this world. So again, was it Satan's to give? Yes for a time being the world belongs to Satan. Satan has he literally. The way that it's portrayed here is fascinating. There's the splendor, the authority, it's been given to him. So Jesus here has this. Either he's physically carried there or it's this vision. He's showing him the different kingdoms. Imagine there's Saudi Arabia and there's the African nations. Here's the different kingdoms, and he's like, I'll give you these if you'll just bow down and worship me. Now, will there come a time where Jesus is the king over the earth? Yeah, yeah. This is where we're going, right? So here Satan's saying, Hey, let's just speed up the agenda so we will get you the nations, all the nations of the earth so that you can rule over them, the kingdoms of the world, but you just have to worship me.

And Jesus tells him, Hey, go away. It's written, worship the Lord your God, and serve only him. It's not good enough. God is not looking for you to come up with the answer. We tried that with Abraham, right? Abraham's like, okay, great. You want to have a nation? I got Ishmael right here. I'll just take my handmade and we will start the nation. God is not looking us to come up with the means or the method. Again. God wants us to be dependent on him for not just the results but how to get there. And there are people who have this idea of like, well, this seems like a good thing. I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil to get to this thing that surely God wants, right? And that is not the way to do it. That is exactly what Satan is looking for, and that's the temptation that Jesus rejects here.

This text contains a few different things. First of all, it shows us that Satan is real. It affirms that Satan is a spiritual being, a real spiritual being that is opposed to the son of God. Satan has been trying to move humans away from dependence on God over to independence. We go through scripture, the history of humanity. You look at Israel over and over again, why did there end up being a divided nation when after Solomon's reign? Because Solomon stopped depending and walking in God's wisdom. He's like, you know what? I'm going to take 700 wives. And those wives, some of those wives pulled his heart away. His heart was divided between Yahweh and these pagan religions that these wives brought to him, foreign wives brought to him, and he stopped being dependent upon God, and the nation was divided as a consequence. That was God's punishment for Israel.

And so he went from being this glorious king where he is just like, oh my gosh. This is the zenith of Israel's history, the golden moment of Israel's history, and then it becomes their downfall because their king, his heart's divided. He's no longer dependent on God. That's what Satan does. All throughout the story of Israel, Satan is allowed to use the Bible when he tempts. That's the third thing that we see. Satan is allowed to use the Bible. He knows the Bible better than you. And so again, you need to study the Bible, be led by the Holy Spirit in your use of the Bible. It's not just good to know bits and pieces. Have you ever listened to the podcast and the sermon or the man on the street interviews that I do before the sermon audio comes on? You're going to hear some this week.

I can't remember who it is, but I do the interviews on Friday in preparation for the sermon. So you should hear probably Tuesday afternoon when the sermon goes live. But one of the things that you'll hear is that people on the street are pretty familiar with scripture, but not how to use it. Well. It's like, oh yeah, I know that piece over there, and yeah, I know this piece over here, but it's that comprehensive. How do we put it all together? That's what you need in order to be able to fight like Jesus fought in the midst of temptation.

Lastly, there is also this good example to follow from the text. We learn, we observe this warning about Satan. We see this good example of Jesus. Jesus responds to temptation with scripture, so know your Bible, but I want to close with this. There is in this narrative of God to worship. This isn't in. Matthew isn't putting this in the text so that you know how to fight spiritual battles. Only. Now, there's some good lessons and principles to learn, but Matthew's putting this in here because this man who resists the temptation, he's your redeemer. He's our rescuer. He's the one who fought against Satan on our behalf. He's the one that stands between us and the wiles of the devil. He is our good shepherd that is protecting us. And when Jesus goes to the cross, it says that he puts to open shame the devil and his demons.

Look at Colossians chapter one and what it says about the work of the cross and how Satan is just humiliated through what Jesus does in the resurrection. This Jesus who faces this moment and is obedient to his father in the face of temptation, he is the good true Israelite who becomes the king that we had hoped for. If we read this story, he is the one who stands in the gap and makes it through these moments of temptation, and now he goes on to do ministry. We're going to see after this story that he begins his public ministry and he has had his victory over Satan, and he continues to just be victorious. Time and time again. Satan leaves him. It says in another text, he leaves him and looks for an opportune moment. Here in our text, Satan leaves him and they see that the angels come and they minister to Jesus. They care for him, and Jesus has a time of recovery before he goes and into verse two and the activities that are carried out there.

Our church is composed of people who are going very difficult things. Some of you, I know your stories. There's loneliness, there's physical suffering, there's fear of relapse or of addiction. There's broken relationships. There's job hunting that's going on. There's change in location. There's all kinds of things, and I want to encourage you that the Jesus who can stand in the face of Satan's attacks, that's your Jesus this morning. That's the one that we worship. That's the one we love, and we get to stand in his victory. So let's go before him and let's say thank you, Lord. We thank you that in the face of these three moments of temptation that you didn't take up the rage that you probably felt and you didn't act in anger, but you are patient and obedient to your father. You are the good Israelite that endured suffering, the suffering of this moment. You proved your loyalty to the Father. You proved that you're the beloved son, the good son, and we are so grateful that we get to have you as our redeemer. We worship you, we say thank you, and we ask that you would lead us, champion our victory this week. Go before us, Lord, we bring to you the pain and the suffering that our church represents, and we ask for your help. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.