Lust and Shame

Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 30, 2021 - Alec Seekins

We’re just going to dive right into things. I’m kind of hoping that you guys will be willing to follow me to a place that will be pretty uncomfortable but ends someplace pretty awesome. I’m kind of hoping that, at some point of time during the service or during the course of your day, that each of us will allow ourselves and our heart to kind of sink into a place where we’re willing to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame, whether present or past.

Please don’t be confused. What I don’t mean is that we would camp out there. I don’t think that Jesus wants us to live in a place where we’re rolling around in our sin and shame. I absolutely don’t mean that I think Jesus wants us to go back to something that he’s already set us free from. But I suspect that there is probably quite a few of us that think we’ve really dealt with our sin, but all we’ve done is managed our shame effectively.

Jesus doesn’t want us to just manage our shame. He wants us to actually move past that. He wants us to end up in a place of transformation. I think that, in order to end up in a place of transformation, we have to experience it at his feet, by his blood. I think in order to do that, we have to be moved to repentance. I think in order to be moved to repentance, for many of us it can be really helpful to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame. To allow ourselves to be re-sensitized to that, so that again we would repent and let the Lord actually deal with the root of the shame, which is our sin. Because he is absolutely able to do that.

Without Jesus, I don’t think we have hope in this area. But with Jesus wee have hope to get through this on our knees, by his blood. I’m not asking you to follow me into this difficult and painful place to find hopelessness. I’m asking you to follow me there so we can follow Jesus out of there for good. 

A lot of you guys know, because I got to share this a few months ago, that last year my wife and I spent the year in southeast Asia, working with an anti-trafficking ministry. When we had been there for a little while, I was asked if I could teach English for these two women who not too long ago had left their lives as prostitutes. They had subsequently come to Jesus and now they were engaged in this year-long discipleship program. So me and a woman from our team would teach that class twice a week for a couple of hours each class and we would just go over English stuff. 

Before too long, we decided, you know, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone, because these women are brand new in their faith, they’ve never really been exposed to very much of the Bible, let’s kill two birds with one stone and start reading through stories in the book of Genesis.

What I was thinking of when we made that decision was like how the book of Genesis is all these cute, fun little children’s stories that are so great for learning English, right? Like Noah and the fluffy animals and Joseph and his really cool coat and all that kind of stuff. But if you’ve ever read that book as an adult —I don’t know why this didn’t click for me because I’ve read it many times as an adult — you realize really quickly this is not fluffy animals and cool, colorful coat. This book is full of scandal and sexual brokenness. It’s rated TV-MA if it was going to be on Netflix, for sure. It’s not PG, I promise you. 

So we started reading these stories. And every time we would read one of these stories that had to do with sexual brokenness and depravity and this wickedness, I would start to feel super awkward. I’m the only guy in the room. Two of the women in the room, not too long ago were prostitutes. I am profoundly and acutely aware of the fact that my very presence might make them feel threatened. And now we’re reading stories like, you know, Noah passed out naked and drunk. Abraham’s got tons of them, right? Multiple occasions Abraham takes his wife and passes her on to another man and says, “Nah, she’s not my wife. Go for it.”

Then some years down the road in his relationship with Sarah, his wife, they’re having a hard time getting pregnant, so Sarah comes up with a brilliant idea and says, “Why don’t you take my servant, Hagar, and why don’t you sleep with her and she’ll get pregnant and she’ll have a kid and the kid will kind of be our kid a little bit.” 

And then they do that. Then, surprise, surprise. Sarah ends up really angry and frustrated and bitter and jealous of Hagar. So she goes to her husband and says, “Why don’t you take the servant, the slave woman and her son and dump them in the desert?”

And he does that. Father Abraham had many sons, and one of them he left in the desert. It’s kind of messed up. And it continues from there. It doesn’t stop. It goes on and on and on. We look at Lot and his daughters and Judah and his daughter-in-law. And it just continues from there. And it’s usually at the hands of the protagonists, or the man characters or the heroes of the faith that this wickedness is being done.

I had these moments when we would read these stories. It kind of felt like, if you remember being a teenager and you’d watch a raunchy comedy with your friends, and you think it’s so  funny because you’re all teenagers. And, gosh, it’s so funny how gross that is. Then a few months later you go to Blockbuster if you’re old enough, or whatever, and you rent the DVD and then you bring it home. And what you don’t think about is how raunchy that comedy was. It was so funny, but now you’re watching the movie and Mom or Grandma are in the room. And Will Ferrell’s not so funny anymore, is he?

And we have these experiences where we’re reading these children’s stories and they don’t really feel like children’s stories. And I’m acutely aware of that. And as we would read these, I started to get concerned that my friends, who were so new in their faith, that they might hear the stories of the depravity of the heroes of the faith and it might confuse them. And they might think, Do I really want to follow a God whose holy book is full of these broken people?

So every time we would get to the end of one of these stories, I would start explaining it away. I’d say, “Before we move on to talk about grammar, let me just talk about this a little bit. Just because the main characters are doing this, doesn’t mean that God or the Bible wants us to emulate what they’re doing. They’re not the cartoons that we grew up watching, where the main character, the protagonist ends up in a moral quandary and they wrestle with it a little bit, but ultimately they end up deciding to the right thing and if we emulate their behavior then we’re doing pretty good too. That’s not how the Old Testament is written. It’s very different from that. 

So I would explain this away out of fear that my friends would see themselves in the shoes of the victims of the heroes of the faith. And one of these times, maybe the fourth or fifth time I had done this, I think we were talking about how Abraham had abandoned Hagar and her son in the desert place at the tail end of tons of wickedness. And I’m explaining it away, one of my friends stops me and says, “Alec, I don’t think you understand what the story means to us.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, it’s really good news for me that Abraham did this.” I said, “What?” She said, “Yeah, because God still used him, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “So, he’ll still use me, won’t he?” And I said, “Yeah, he will. He absolutely will.”

That was the beginning for her of realizing how far Jesus was going to take her. That Abraham was so messed up and God still used him. Because, for her, the shame of the things that she had done and the shame of the things that had been done to her, in her heart they were inextricably interwoven. You couldn’t pull them apart. It didn’t really  matter to her if Jesus was going to pull the things apart and define them  and put them in their own nice, neat, tidy little boxes before he took her sin along with her shame and cast it as far from her as the east is from the west. For her, all that mattered is that Jesus was going to get her clean, and that Jesus used horrible people like Abraham, and that we look back and call them righteous. And that God was going to use a person who had done the things that she had done and that we could look back and certainly God could, and call her righteous.

A few weeks later this same woman came to me and said, “I’ve been going on this treasure hunt through the Old Testament to find all the stories of the women who have been sexually broken and have done some sexual breaking of their own. And it’s a pretty good treasure hunt.”

The moment she said that, I don’t think I was able to see the Bible the same way and I don’t think I ever will be, after realizing all of a sudden that, yeah, this thing is full of these stories. The tip of the iceberg is pointing out the fact that there are at least two women in the line of King David, and ultimately Jesus, who played the prostitute. That holy lineage that we trace painstakingly throughout the Bible. There’s even an entire book that’s all about a man pursuing a woman who was a prostitute and setting her free. And then her coming and finding some freedom and then abandoning him and leaving, and then him going back and chasing after her again. And God wants us to know that we are that woman. 

I started to wonder. Man, was this book written primarily for an audience of prostitutes? That’s confusing for me. Because I know so many people who have never been prostitutes who have experienced so much freedom in these words, who have encountered the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit through the words of the Bible. And they weren’t prostitutes. So how could that be? 

And as I’ve chewed on this question for about a year now, where I’m starting to land is I think perhaps the Bible was really not necessarily exclusively written for prostitutes, but the Bible was written for people who are willing to sit in the same seat that prostitutes do when they look at themselves. For people who are willing to look at themselves from the same perspective that a prostitute was when they compared themselves to everyone else in the room.

See, for my friends the gospel was so obvious and so powerful and so clear, that they saw it in the story of Abraham abandoning the woman that he had abused. Because, for them, the story of the gospel was, “I am filthy. Jesus makes me clean. Then he sets me free. Then we move forward from there, as he makes me holy.” It was that simple and that powerful, that they can see it in the most broken stories of the Bible. 

But for you and me, I think we lack this advantage of a prostitute when it comes to looking at the gospel. I think we lack perhaps what Jesus was pointing to a few verses before the ones we’ll read today, where he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Because for you and me, we get so stuck on step one. We start to complicate and convolute the gospel when we say, not “I’m filthy.” But we say, “I’m okay and I’m not the worst person in the room. I’m a pretty decent human being. Yeah, there are people that are better than me, but I’m not the worst.”

So we have to do all these weird aerobics and gymnastics and strange things as we contort ourselves to fit into the gospel. Why? Because we’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that we are somewhere where we’re not. We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that God is grading holiness on a curve. And that’s not how it works. And Jesus wants to make it clear to us, “No, actually, if you want the gospel to come alive, you’re going to have to realize that you don’t live up here in this better space than everyone else, than anyone else.” Jesus is saying, “I want you to come down here.” Because the people who are going to get this message understand that they cannot look around the room and say, “I’m any better than anyone else.”

My friends didn’t need to hear this message. When Jesus clarifies to a group of people that they’re probably guilty of adultery even if they don’t think so. Why? Because there were mornings when my friends would wake up and they would eat breakfast with the money they had made committing adultery the night before. You and I have these useless veils that enable us to pretend that we’re not guilty and full of sin and shame without Jesus. 

So Jesus wants to make that point clear and so in Matthew chapter 5:27-28, he says this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” 

And then he’ll go on to talk about how, if your eye is causing you to sin, cut it out. If your hand is causing you to sin, chop it off. It’s better that you would do that than that you would be cast into hell. There’s something more serious that you don’t understand about the depths and the weight of your sin and of your shame. And you may be able to tell yourself, “I have never cheated on my spouse, therefore I’m not an adulterer.” And Jesus is saying, “No, you missed it. If there’s lust in your heart, it’s that serious.”

Righteousness is not graded on the curve. It’s pass/fail and chances are most of us, if not all of us in the room, have failed. Why does Jesus want me to feel so bad? I think because he wants us to understand the good news. 

For me, the place in my life that I can look back to and say, “Yeah, that was complete and total failure,” that’s the place in my life where I began to be able to sit down next to my friends that I didn’t know yet, that I wouldn’t know for years to come, where I could sit down with them and say, “I’m absolutely the same as you. It’s good news to me that Abraham would do those things.”

That time of life for me was when I was nine years old. I started looking at pornography and I entered into a season of four or five years of my life where my heart and my mind were completely wrapped up and intertwined with lust and brokenness. Where I couldn’t even look at my friends without being ashamed of the things that were happening in my mind and in my heart. 

In that season of life I began to become really acquainted with some of the different strategies that we can employ to manage our shame. I want to walk you through three of those today. Then there’s a fourth one that’s very different from the first three.

The first of those strategies that I started to encounter, what I would consider the most base of those strategies, the most primitive of them. It’s what I would call self-pity. Or a better way to put it maybe is just wallowing in your shame. And that’s the most base because it’s just what you do. You feel shame and what are you going to do? You’re going to feel the shame so you roll around in it and you stick with it and you carry it with you in the back of your mind and the back of your heart and you don’t know what to do with it. And you try to figure out What can I do with this shame? Then, all of a sudden, you slip back into the same sin that precipitated the shame in the first place. And you find a little bit of relief from the shame. It changes your mood and you feel better for just a little bit.

For me, in that season of life, it was pornography. But I think that’s probably a good example, because it’s really good at conjuring up shame for us. But you could probably plug in any different sin that you want to. Right? So you go back to the sin and you find some relief from your shame and it feels good for a little bit, for a few seconds, a few moments, or at best until the next morning. But then the shame snaps back stronger than it ever was before. So you carry it again until the next private moment when you fall into this sin again and find some momentary relief. But every time you do this, the relief you get is not as strong, and the shame becomes stronger. 

Those of us who use this as our primary strategy of shame management, the same thing happens by two different avenues. We continue to walk deeper and deeper into more and more and darker and darker sins, because lust will fill any space you give it. And once it’s filled that space it will begin to fill the next spaces. We find ourselves needing to do more sin, more frequent and more dark sin, just to find the same amount of relief that we got int he beginning, like any other addiction. 

At the same time that’s happening, we’re starting to actually grow an addiction, not just to the sin, but to the shame itself. We start to like that feeling. We start to love what we do. We start to love that we hate ourselves. Eventually, people who stick with this long enough, they’ll need to hop into a whole different kind of sin that’s probably more public. Because they need the thoughts and words and condemnations of other people to magnify their own shame, because they love to hate themselves. Because we love to hate ourselves when we’re wrapped up in this self-pity strategy of shame management.

For me, this wasn’t good enough. I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t want to revel in my shame very long. So, before too long, I had to move on to another strategy. Had to move on to what I’m going to call self-justification. Convincing myself that what I was doing wasn’t wrong. I think for most of us this strategy begins with the very same question that greased the wheels to for sin to enter the world in the first place. “Did God really say? Did he really say that that was wrong?” And I would start to ask myself, “Could this really be wrong? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone. It doesn’t seem to be unhealthy. Everything seems to be find. What could be wrong with this?”

For those of us who stick in this strategy, we start to convince ourselves of that, and eventually maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe we need to move past, “Did God really say” and we start saying, “Does God really even have the authority to say…” Right? “Does God even have any moral authority or claim over my life?” Or “Does God even exist at all?” 

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re doing this why? Because we’re managing our shame. We’re tired of feeling ashamed and feeling like someone gets to tell that what we’re doing is wrong. So we start to convince ourselves that it’s not. This is very dangerous because this is perhaps the most effective of these strategies of shame management. Because with this strategy you can turn down the volume on your shame. And I think you can effectively mute it. Once you figure out you can mute it with one sin and the following shame, you realize you can do that to any sin and the shame that comes.

Then, at some point in time in the process, you’ll start to buttress up your opinions and your beliefs that, no, this isn’t wrong, by gathering other people around you that you can convince no, that’s not wrong. And help you convince yourself that, no, this isn’t wrong. And eventually you’ll have a little community, a little bubble of men and women who are just yes men and yes women. Eventually that can grow into a philosophy, a theology, into an ideology, even into a religion of people who are simply saying, “You do you. Do whatever makes you happy, as long as it feels good.”

I would ask you to pause just for a second right there, because I think there are some people here who are like me, who are already hearing this and starting to take it and use it to do strategy number three, self-righteousness. I think we’re hearing this and thinking, “Yeah, that’s what that person does. I don’t do that. Yeah, that’s what that group of people, that’s where that ideology, that’s where that thought process came from. And I don’t do that.” And I don’t think that’s the most fruitful use of this classification. I think the most fruitful us of this information is for us to look and say, “Am I doing this? Have I been convincing myself that, no, this isn’t wrong because it helps me dampen the volume on my shame.”

Again, for me, this strategy didn’t work for too long because I couldn’t convince myself that God was saying that what I was falling into was okay. It was clear to me in verses like the one we just read that God was saying, “No, this is wrong.” Then I wasn’t willing to abandon Jesus, to walk away from him, to throw out his word in my journey to mute my shame. So I had to move on to a new strategy that I will call self-righteousness. Really self-righteousness is just a sub-strategy under hiding.

There are so many different ways to hide, but some of us literally will go into this little corner and we’ll hide in that corner where “No one can see me, where no one can find me. I stopped going to church because I feel so bad about what I’m doing and I don’t want to talk to anybody and I don’t want anybody to know what I’m doing.” 

Some people stop having friends, they stop engaging. Some people just really stay very quiet so that no one can see their shame. I couldn’t do that for very long, because I’m way too extroverted for that. So I needed to find another strategy, another way of getting out into the open where I could hide. I realized that I had these very convenient personality traits that were true of me, that I could hide behind in front of everybody else. Yeah, I was someone who really usually does follow the rules. I was someone who really did have a relationship with Jesus. I was someone who really was plugging into church and into   youth group. I could hide behind those things and a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of transparency, and no one would ever know. No one would ever suspect. No one would ever ask me if there was anything below the surface. 

Growing up I was a really bad liar. So I knew that if I was going to get away with anything with my parents, I had to hide any suspicion from them. Because the moment they asked me a question, I was either going to accidentally straight up just going to tell them truth before I had the opportunity to decide to lie; or I was going to muster up the courage to lie and they were going to see right through it immediately. 

So, the result of that, of me revelling in really what was my favorite, probably still is my favorite strategy of shame management, is that I hid my shame and my sin so much that, even though it started at nine years old, I was fourteen years old and almost on the other side of it before either of my parents — who are good parents, who cared about these things, who talked about these things with me — before either of them ever asked me directly, “Have you ever looked at pornography?” And the answer that I was honestly able to give my mom when she asked me that question was, “Yes, I have. But I’m not really doing it anymore.” I hid it so well. I even hid it when I was finding freedom from it.

This is the strategy that is so deadly because it grows and festers when we keep it in the darkness. Right? This is the strategy that leads to headlines: Pastor. Clergyman. Politician. Celebrity. Secret affair. Secret substance abuse. Money laundering. Insert the blank. Right?

As I’ve been prepping for this message I’ve been thinking, I doubt that those men and women start off thinking My life is going to be a scam. That’s where I’m going. I think they start off as kids who have something they really want to hide and they can just never figure out how to bring it out. And in that process, you begin to kind of split into two different people. There’s this public person, this person that everyone else sees that is righteous, that is better, that is successful, that is honest. And then there’s this other person that carries all the shame in private. This person grows and grows and grows the more this person looks better and better and better. 

At some point in time, I just couldn’t deal with the fact that I felt so two-faced. I felt there were two different human beings growing inside of me. And one of them was so disgusting and the other one just felt like such a lie, even there was some truth to him. So I started going to my youth pastors, to David Stockton, to Mike Phifer, and I said, “This is what’s happening in secret.” And they gave me a lot of really good, practical advise. We could give a whole message on practical advice, trying to get over this, trying to conquer it, trying to access the freedom that Jesus is offering you. 

But the best advice that they both gave me was “Repent. Go from this place of feeling the weight of your sin and shame to Jesus and lay it down at his feet and acknowledge how wrong this is, and repent and let him restore you and make you clean. Begin the years long process of allowing him to renew your mind, to transform you by the renewal of your mind, rather than being conformed to the patterns of the world.”

That’s what I did and that’s where I landed. That Jesus really transformed me to the place where I felt comfortable with my own mind and heart. Where Jesus didn’t just manage my shame. The moment I stopped managing my shame, I let him manage my sin and cast it away from me, and slowly heal and renew me to the point where none of that baggage that I was so terrified was going to follow me the rest of my life, none of that baggage really followed me into my marriage.

One of my primary love languages is words of affirmation. My wife knows this about me. Her primary love language is gifts. This last Valentine’s Day, we were kind of between jobs and spaces and really between life, and we didn’t know what to do. She wanted to give me a good gift. So she sat down to make a gift and she ended up making the best gift she’s ever given me. She sat down for an hour or two and wrote down like a hundred and one or even more really kind things to me on little pieces of paper that she hole-punched and tied together with a ribbon and gave it to me. It looked like something your kids might take home from Sunday school today. 

She thought I was going to open it up and tear through it read everything she wrote. But instead, I decided that I was going to savor it and just flip it every so often to the next page and read it. Last week, when I was starting to get ready to prep for this message, I flipped the page on my nightstand and I saw a page that said, “I trust you fully.” There’s no one in this world who knows my heart better than my wife, outside of the Lord. 

And this is words written from a woman who’s had her own struggle with insecurity. Words written to a husband who, at nine years old, couldn’t walk in public without feeling the shame of his brokenness and the weight of adultery in my heart. And this is on the tail end of a year spending time in brothels and red light districts and befriending prostitutes, when all the work that the Lord had done was really put to the est. And she looks at me and she says, “I trust you fully.” And she writes it down. 

Because the hope that Jesus has for you this morning — as you stop managing your shame and you let him manage your sin — it’s not just hope. I mean, hope is a beautiful and a great thing. But it’s not just  hope it’s tangible. Right? It’s a real thing that you actually have access to. 

I don’t just hope that I’m going to have a bowl of ice cream tonight. I know that there’s ice cream in my freezer. And I’m going to go home and I’m going to eat the ice cream. And I expect it, and I’m excited for it, and I have evidence of it. 

In the same way, we don’t just hope for what the Lord can do with us. Expect it. Know that it’s there, sitting in the fridge, waiting for you. Jesus can take you and heal you. It comes through repentance. 

David’s going to come up and wrap us up as we just do some business with the Lord along these lines.

DAVID:

Thanks, Alec. One of the things we wanted to make sure we did as we were going through this stuff, and especially the intensity of it, is we figure out how to move from a classroom to a hospital as a church. So we wanted to make sure there wasn’t just like a message that kind of had some good thoughts and we could all think a little better, but that we’d leave room for the Spirit of God to do the next part. Let this stuff work into our heart and actually maybe bring some transformation. 

So that’s what we’re going to do now. I didn’t do a lot of sermon prep this Sunday, obviously. But I did a lot of prayer prep. I’m going to read some things that I feel like the Spirit was saying about today. Some of these might connect with you. If they do, then you can trust it’s for you, and you and the Lord can talk about that and figure out where to go from there.

We have this number that we’ll put up and we’ll put it up at the end of the service, too. If you want to text anonymously, or you can put your name, whatever, and get in contact with a pastor that can help you navigate some of what you might be going through. A safe space for all of that, so that will pop up at the end of the service and you can text that number. We’ll also close and have some people up here that would love to pray for you. If you can muster the courage to come and do that, it would be wonderful. You’ll leave feeling lighter, I’ll tell you that much. 

But we also know that some of those things are hard. So I just want to share some things that the Lord was saying and see if these land.

I really felt as I was praying that the Lord was saying that, because of this message and because of some of the people hearing this message today, they were going to understand the dangers of lust and they were not ever going to fall prey to addiction to porn or anything else because of this message. I was very excited about that. Because by God’s grace that’s been my story. 

Early on, for whatever reason, I felt like the Lord helped me build the walls. So anytime something was like, Woosh, I’ve just good wall reflex. Walls up. I feel like the Lord’s wanting to do that for some people here. So, young people, please hear this message and trust the Lord. Trust the Lord. 

Then I felt like there was a message for some people who are overcome with lust. You don’t think you could ever get free. Maybe you’ve even tried and you’re still stuck. I felt like there were some people that the Lord was actually wanting to give one of those miracles, one of those supernatural manifestations of his Spirit, that come from time to time and completely set you free instantaneously. 

If you feel some of that stirring in your heart, whether you’re online or here, he really does want to set you free. He really can set you free. Brand new neuro-pathways and everything, the whole package. And if you feel the Lord stirring that in you, I would respond. If he’s knocking in that way, I would open the door and let him come in. Get some prayer.

Then there’s some who have gotten really good at all of those shame management strategies, sin management strategies, and today, though, you’ve been found out. Pride would keep you from doing this. Deception would keep you from doing this. Some of you, the intensity of it is very different than a nine to fourteen year old and the ramifications that that would bring. Because you are married. You do have a family. You are older and the stakes seem too big. And though that might be true, Jesus is telling you, he’s telling you he can set you free. That’s why you’re here hearing this message. It’s not so you can go further away, or feel more condemned or ashamed. It’s because he really does have a plan purchased by his blood and empowered by his Spirit to get you to a place of wholeness and freedom. 

I didn’t say this last service, but I felt like the Lord told me while I was sitting there. Some of you need to do this because, if you can do this now, your kids won’t have to deal with this like you’ve had to deal with it. You can break this in your family. But you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it with hiding. You’ve got to tell somebody.

Then, the last one is the person whose heart is bitterly, bitterly broken, not because of their own lust, but because of a loved one or maybe a spouse’s lust. And even hearing this today is like drinking a whole glass of bitterness. You have your own shame, not because of your lust, but because of the person you’re connected to’s lust. I fell like what Jesus wanted me to tell you was it’s not always going to be this way. That he really is going to come back and he’s going to do away with the sinful nature forevermore. It might seem very far away, but it’s not. 

Also, he wants you to know that you’re not supposed to carry this alone either. You kind of feel like you carrying it is honoring the person or something like that, but actually you’re hiding your shame too. It’s super-scary but he wants you tell someone. Now tell someone that you can trust, and even try and tell someone that you think the loved one can trust. But you’re not supposed to carry this alone. It’s too heavy. But it is time for you to invite someone in to walk with you, because you need to be able to discern. 

I’m going to say this and please, please be very careful with this. Please email me before you do anything crazy. Because, in the Scriptures, there are caveats in the marriage relationship that can help in times of real, real pain and agony. I mean, the Bible says at times there is an okay reality of divorce with sexual immorality. Now, again, I’m saying don’t unpack that on your own. We have people that would really love to help you, that have been through this, that can help you with that discernment. But you have some really good options that you might not be aware of that are totally in line with the scriptures. 

Now, again, nobody get divorced between now and next Sunday. Next Sunday that’s what we’re talking about. Please come back next Sunday, because we’re going to have some ladies speak to us in a way that’s going to be really, really powerful and beautiful. And it’s going to allow the Spirit of God to come in way more fully than right now because of the work that will be done next week. 

That’s ultimately what all this is. Jesus is trying to get some of the junk out so more fullness of the Spirit can come in.

And so we’re going to have a little time of prayer. I’ve said these things. If one of those lands or one of those struck your heart, this is your time to be silent before the Lord or confess to the Lord or cry out to the Lord. But we do want to make sure we don’t move on too fast from this. 

They’re going to start playing a song and all of that a, and that’s fine, but this is for you and the Lord. 

Father, we do just ask that you’ll be with us in this moment, that your Spirit would be so close and so present and so powerful that it would overcome our fears, our pride, our confusion and we’d receive what you have for us this morning.  

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Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 9, 2021 - David Stockton

We’re going to be in Matthew chapter 5 if you want to grab a Bible and turn there. We’re also going to be in Galatians chapter 3 if you want to make a mark there as well. 

It’s Mother’s Day. My mom is not around anymore these days. She was awesome, though, in a lot of ways. She had an interesting experience of becoming a mother. She was 17 when she got married and 18 when my brother showed up, and then had another one of my brothers at 19-1/2 and had me by the time she was 23. So three boys by the time she was 23.

And my dad was actually 27 when I was born, but he was probably going on about 20 as far as his maturity level. So my mom really had her hands full with a bunch of boys in the house. And yet, my mom, she was strong. She was small but she was strong. And she did set us in line and taught us a lot of things. 

I was thinking, you know, we’ve been talking about the law as far as when Jesus was saying in Matthew 5:17 that he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. So we’ve actually spent a couple of weeks talking about the law of God as brought to us through the Mosaic covenant. And we’re going to be talking about the law again today.

I was thinking about my first interaction with any concept of law was my mom. She was the one who laid down the law in our house. And like that little film was joking, I mean, all those are rules, right? Those are laws that moms come up with that kids violate continually, that’s why they never say those things. 

One of the things that came to mind real strong was my mom got a couch one day. I don’t know if it was a nice couch and she had always wanted a nice couch and finally got a couch. I have no idea what the couch was, I just remember the law was we weren’t allowed to sit in it. So I thought, okay, there’s a nice couch coming. We destroy everything. She doesn’t want us to sit in the couch. But the couch was right in the middle of our house in our living room. So it wasn’t like a couch in her bedroom, it was a couch in a room where people sit a lot. And we weren’t allowed to sit on that couch. 

I can still picture that couch and how pristine it was, in my mind, just wondering what it would have been like to sit on it and to feel that couch underneath me. But that wasn’t enough. I don’t know exactly what took place, but that rule of not sitting on the couch quickly became we weren’t allowed to go into the room that couch was in. So the entire living room, we were not allowed in, me and my three boys. There weren’t a lot of other people living in the house besides my mom and dad. But we weren’t allowed in it. We were allowed in this tv room, but I actually can picture the difference of those two rooms. This room the carpet was clean and still was sticking up, you know. Then the tv room where we were allowed to go was rough. It was a rough space in the house.

Those are some rules. We used to get a nickel for every pair of socks we could put together. Anybody else have something like that? And you’d think, “Wow, that seems like a lot of money.” We’d get like four pairs is all we could ever find each. It sounded like this really big deal but it never worked out that great for us. We had some interesting things. 

Then I remember my mom came up with this real clever, like legal system for us as far as chores goes. Every time we’d do a chore we’d get a thumbtack on this little tack board she put up there. So clever and trying to get us responsible and all those things. We’d get a certain amount of money for every thumb tack that we got when we completed a chore. Sounds very normal. I just remember, because I was the youngest, it didn’t matter how hard I worked or how many chores I did, I couldn’t get more thumbtacks on the board. It would always stay the same few numbers. But my brothers, who never seemed to do any chores, just kept growing thumbtacks all the time. It took me a while. I was a little dense as a kid. They’d just walk up and it would be like bam, bam. They were just stealing them. 

It didn’t matter what rules my mom made, we violated them and made a mess of them. But somehow we got through.

Talking about the law. Matthew 5:17. Let’s read Matthew 5:17-20. This is super, super important passage of scripture, passage of the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus is trying to help the people he gathered understand what it’s going to be like if they follow him. Understand what’s it’s going to be like to walk in his ways. Understand what he was on earth to do was to bring in something new, something different. So this is what he says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; 

Which is a past thing. He’s speaking to Jews primarily. He’s speaking about this covenant that God made with Moses. That the people had basically been participating in for thousands of years.

I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 

So again, he’s just saying this is so important. All of those commands, all of the stuff you learned in the Law and the Prophets. The Torah, the Prophets, all of those things. So important they are from God. They are good. And they will not pass away.

Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

So the law is good. It’s not going to be abolished. It’s super important and yet, you need to have a righteousness that’s better than the Pharisees or you’re not even going to make it. So this is what we’ve been talking about.

It’s funny. I’v been finding a lot of help for this sermon series from a guy named Jonathan Pennington, super-cleverly on the Sermon on the Mount and it’s called The Sermon on the Mount. You can check it if you want. But he wrote in there about this passage of scripture, which just kind of confirms so much of why I just felt we needed to camp out here. He said this: 

The compactness of Matthew 5:17-20 is at once its power and its difficulty. By virtue of its pithy, contrastive statements we get a large-scale snapshot of the issue; but its brevity and super-concentrated collection of weighty terms and ideas mean that every sentence is a spark that sets off a fire in a different direction. Like good poetry, this short passage is thick with meaning and in need of deep reflection.

So we’ve camped out here and you might be sick of these verses. You might be saying, “Why are we talking so much about the Law? I thought we were Christians living under grace.” And all of that is true. But I’m really trying to make sure that we hear from Jesus in this time as best we can before we go forward.

So we have been doing a lot of affirming of the Law, because that’s in here. Jesus is doing that. Affirming of the commands that God had given us. Now again, that’s a tricky, complicated thing. Because what is Jesus really referring to when he says the Law and the Prophets. There’s a lot of debate. There was a lot of debate at that time. 

There were four main sects at that time: Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes. They all had different worldviews, different philosophies on how to do that. Kind of like what we have today with Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, progressives, whatever you want to talk about. They even had these Zealots. And the Zealots were basically like, “We just want to fight. We just want to find the Romans and get rid of them because they are oppressors.” It’s kind of like the social justice warriors of this time.

They were all trying to unpack this in a different way. And then you had schools of thought. You had the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. One of these was taking a little looser understanding of the scriptures and kind of giving a little more room to wiggle. And others were tightening it up and making it really, really strict. 

So there was this constant challenge of, well, what is the Law? In the Mitzvot was the 613 confirmed commandments that came through the Torah. Torah is the first five books of the Bible, which another name for it is Pentateuch. But then it gets even a little deeper because those 613 Mitzvot commandments that came from the written Law of the Torah needed interpretation and commentary to figure out how they really applied to life. 

So they came up with something called the Oral Law. The Oral Law eventually gave way and became something called the Talmud. The Talmud was basically the most general adopted orthodox traditions and teachings and commentaries on the Mitzvot which came out of the Pentateuch and the Torah. Then the Talmud was broken up into two main kind of documents. One was a little bit prior and one was a bit little after that. That was the Mishnah. Then the Gemara. 

You see the complexities? This is the stuff we’re trying to do. We’re trying to gain a vision of the righteousness of God for our time. God, what do you want us to do with the issues that we are facing today? And last year, 2020, a lot of these issues came to the surface because a lot of us were feeling real insecure. And what happened was a lot of people started shouting and preaching about what righteousness and justice really were. And they were coming up with their own backing of those type of things, their own reasoning for those things. But not a lot of them were coming from a scriptural point of view, a Judeo-Christian ethic. In fact, I would even call them anti-Biblical. 

So we really did have to kind of all of a sudden say, “Okay, God. I’m being pulled in so many different directions. These are some powerful ideologies being passed out. Some of them sound so good. I don’t know what to do.” So we dove into the scriptures, the safety that’s there. And we affirmed the goodness of the Law of God. And we unpacked it and tried to understand. We went back to 1 Kings and really looked at what was the idolatry of that day. Where did they go astray so that we won’t fall into the same traps. And we really affirmed the Law. 

We’ve been doing that the last two weeks. Two weeks ago, remember Kenny? He was here preaching about those who relax on the Law of God are the least in the kingdom. We don’t want that. We don’t want to be the least in the kingdom so we’ve got to be careful we don’t relax on the Law of God or teach others that they can relax on the Law of God. We talked last week about how we don’t want to mess with the truth because the truth is what sets us free. Then if we mess with the truth we’re really messing with our freedom. And if we diminish or water down the truth, we’re really diminishing or watering down our ability to be free as the Lord as prescribes it.

All of that is good and right and wonderful. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have done that. But I’m saying that is partial. And you’ve got to track with me here. And I don’t even know if I’m going to do a good job of explaining this, but I’m trying. I’m trying and I will keep trying until we can understand it. Because the New Testament is full of this relationship. What is the role of the Law in the life of the believer? Where does it stop being a good thing and become a bad thing? Because that happens. 

And that’s where Jesus brings in the example of the Pharisees. Because the Pharisees knew the Law. They loved the Law. They searched the Scriptures constantly. They put them in little boxes on their head and wore them around. They put them on their doorposts. They were trying to really unpack and understand how to live righteously according to God’s standards. They committed themselves to it. 

But Jesus said their righteousness wouldn’t even get them into heaven. So something was missing. In some ways the picture in mind as I’ve been trying to understand this for myself, is picture a bunch of logs on a fireplace. There’s no fire, but the logs are in there. For me, I love bonfires in a little bit of a too much way. At least that’s what my mother-in-law says to me all the time. But the kids that I have and the cousins that are around a lot, they don’t think so at all. They think it’s awesome.

But I love to build these bonfires, build them, and you can build a box one. You can lean things together and make little teepee. It’s really fun to build these things. Basically, that’s what it seems like these Pharisees were doing. They were building all these things and in some ways it seems like they were building their own Tower of Babel trying to reach to the righteousness of God. 

And was Jesus was saying was, “I haven’t come to get rid of all that but I’ve come to set fire to it. I’ve come to bring the fire that will actually make this thing come alive, make this thing good, make this thing bring warmth to the people who need warmth; and healing to the people who need healing.” But the Pharisees had no fire. They had none of the Spirit of God or the Spirit of the Law. They just had the substance and their righteousness was completely empty, according to Jesus.

So we’ve talked about that. Now we’re trying to shift into this understanding of what Jesus was moving into. “I’ve not come to abolish the Law, but I’ve come to fulfill it.” That word fulfill means complete or satisfy. And that’s what I like. It’s like, “I haven’t come to get rid of this bonfire, but I’ve come to actually bring fire that will now ignite this thing in such a beautiful, world-healing, individual healing way.” That’s the righteousness that he’s really after. Not these empty towers of righteousness that often religiosity brings about; but a true relationship with Jesus that causes justice to flow into the world out of each one of us. So that’s what we’re trying to move into.

So let’s go to Galatians chapter 3, because here is where Paul — who is just such a perfect example of what was happening here — Paul was writing to the Galatians about the Law of God and what its purpose is and what it was supposed to be about. He’s trying to help them shift from this understanding of walking in the Law to now walking in the Spirit. This kind of thing that Jesus ushered in, moving us from an old covenant to a new covenant reality.

Paul is coming, not just from a person who’s understanding this from revelation from God, but he’s coming because he’s actually experienced all of this in his own personal life. We first meet Paul as someone who is so filled with anger and murderous threats in his pursuit of righteousness. He was someone who was zealous for the Law. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, he says of himself. He said, “According to the Law, I was blameless.” Yet what he had inside his heart was anger and frustration and murderous threats. Literally, he was trying to go kill people who were following the way of Jesus. That’s what all of that religiosity, that’s what the Law brought him until Jesus came and said, “Hey, what are you doing? What you’re doing is not righteousness.” And Jesus began to interact with him and teach him the way of Jesus.

It’s kind of interesting. We did mention last week, remember, how Jesus was trying to help people understand that murder, according to the Pharisees and according to the law is if you don’t kill somebody. But Jesus is saying that’s not the righteousness that God’s after so you won’t kill somebody. God’s actually wanting to see that the anger in your heart, you call people Raca, you call people fool, something in your heart turns from anger to love. He’s wanting to get at these divisions and bring unity and peace.

And Paul experienced that firsthand in his own heart. When he met Jesus, Jesus stole his anger. And the very people that he was trying to kill, literally, he now became a champion for, someone who served them and cared for them and built the Church of God. Which is so fascinating that that shift happened because the Spirit came. He went from old covenant to new covenant in a beautiful way.

Let’s read what he says in Chapter 3 about the Law. Now verse 2 is where we’re going to start:

I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain? So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?

So, first of all, we’ve got to understand that the Law is actually a covenant. So when these people were hearing Jesus talk about the Law, I mean, when we talk about the law, we think cops and robbers, right? We think of courtrooms and all of those things. We think of governments trying to pass laws, which they’re doing right now. That’s where our mind goes.

But when these people were hearing about Law, they were hearing a lot more the word covenant. Because that’s what the Law was. The Law was where God, who had set the Israelite’s free from slavery in Egypt, had sustained them in the wilderness, had led them to the Promised Land, had been so kind and good to them, had been so close and faithful to them, was now saying, “As you go into this new place, here’s the relationship I want to have with you. I will be your God and I will give you blessing and I will watch over you and I will prosper you. And here’s what I want you to do in return. I want you to love me, have no other gods before me. Don’t take my name in vain. And I don’t want you to kill each other. I don’t want you to commit adultery.”

He gives them the Ten Commandments. This is basically the relationship. It’s almost as if you’re at a wedding. What happens at a wedding? You have a guy standing up there. You have a girl standing up there. They look at each other before the authority, the priest or whatever, and they give vows. “I promise that this is what I’m going to do. I promise that this is how I’m going to be. I promise that I’ll never leave you, til death do us part.” We make all these promises. That’s a lot more, when they hear the Law, they think more of vows, of covenant, of relationship.

That’s ultimately what God was trying to do with the laws he was giving to Israel. He was trying to draw them in close to say, “Hey, this is how we’re going to have the best relationship.” But what happened in Israel was they began to make the laws all about the laws. They began to just focus so much on the laws, they forgot to even focus on the Lord. They started focusing on doing all the things God was asking them to do, and really gave no attention or care to God at all.

We have to remember that all of the laws that we’ve been given, all the commandments are ultimately to cultivate a relationship with Jesus, which produces righteousness. Not a righteousness that, someday if we get it all right, God will bless us. It’s such a challenging thing for us to not fall back into those things. 

The Galatians, when Paul came there, the Galatians didn’t know the Law. They didn’t know what God was up to. And Paul preached to them and he shared with them about who Jesus is. and he basically told them that the world has all been set up and your life is just going to be empty until the Spirit comes. The Spirit’s going to bring fire to all of this and then your life can be shining bright. 

And they were like, “Yeah, we believe. We know we need forgiveness. We’re stuck in our sins. We can’t stop doing that. We have hatred. We have all these things you’re talking about. We need forgiveness. We need the Spirit.” They received it. They received what Jesus did on the cross. They received his Spirit in their lives. And signs and wonders broke out in Galatia. People were being healed. People were being set free. Beautiful things were happening. And it was wonderful.

Then, shortly after that, the people started to just kind of be all about rules. And they started to create just religion. And they really forgot to just kind of be walking in the Spirit in relationship with Jesus. And Paul was saying that you’ve got to remember that the Law is a covenant with a person, the person of Jesus Christ. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not to make you righteous. It’s to make you closer to Jesus, because Jesus is the one who makes you righteous.

The second thing he says here is the Law is a measure for us. 3:10 through 11:

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because “the righteous will live by faith.”

So here, what he’s saying is basically the Law given to us, the Ten Commandments — all of these things — one of their purposes in our lives is to help us know what righteousness is and, therefore, to know that we’re not righteous. That’s literally one of the reasons God gave the Law to the people, so that they would know what righteousness is, but then in the very next breath they would remember that they are not righteous, because they’re not fulfilling those things. They have the hatred in their heart. They can’t get free from the lust. When somebody does something to them they lash back. They don’t love their enemies. They don’t stay faithful to their contracts and vows, including marriage. 

These are the things that Jesus was describing and unpacking. When we measure ourselves against all that God desires, all that God asks of us, if we’re honest, we fall short. And he’s saying here, if you even do one, you could nine out of ten and your righteousness is still not enough to get into heaven. That’s the way he finishes up this little part of it. He says, “Be perfect, even as my Father in heaven is perfect.” That’s the kind of righteousness that he’s requiring.

So when we’re face to face with the Law, it’s totally appropriate for us to affirm the goodness that is described there, but then we also have to acknowledge that we are sinners. That’s bad news for just a second, right? Everybody’s feeling a little heavy right now. Everybody’s like, “Why is he saying this? Is he trying to be mean?”

It’s important. This is one of the reasons the Law is there, to help us know we can’t make it, which then makes us then go, “God, I need you.” And he’s like, “Cool. I just sent my Son. Bam. All your sins are forgiven. Righteousness just like me. Bam. We won.” It’s all there. But we have to understand our insufficiency if we’re ever really going to be able to receive the sufficiency that Christ is.

If we keep falling back to just saying, “Well, maybe I’ll get it right this time,” and not rely on his strength, not fall into his grace, not live out of grace, we’re going to be brutal to ourselves and we’re going to be brutal to those the Lord has around us. We need to be full of his grace in the face of his Law.

So the Law is covenant. The Law is a measure for us. Then this one is interesting. The Law is a tutor. I’m going to read from The Message translation (MSG), but it’s the same chapter 3 verse 23 through 27. This is what Paul says about the Law:

Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for.

But now you have arrived at your destination: By faith in Christ you are in direct relationship with God. Your baptism in Christ was not just washing you up for a fresh start. It also involved dressing you in an adult faith wardrobe—Christ’s life, the fulfillment of God’s original promise.

Basically, what he says is the Law is kind of like a tutor. The Law was given to us to hold us there, to keep us safe until the day something else kicked in. When I think about my mom’s laws, that’s exactly what they were. My mom was basically trying to provide a little structure, a little shelter to these three boys that were insane, until the day — and she prayed a lot — that maybe a little maturity would show up, maybe a little common sense would kick in, the tiniest bit of self-control might be there. She had to war with us. She had to fight with us. She had to try to get my dad on the page, because she would make the laws and he would enforce the laws, but he would also break a lot of the laws. It was like the enforcer/breaker. We were just the breaker/receivers of the enforcement. Anyway. 

All those laws were put there to try to protect, until the day she was just hoping and praying, one day we would be able to make a good decision all by ourselves. That’s what that was. Basically, that’s what Paul was saying the Law was. God gave the Law to his people to kind of hold them together, to teach them the way, to keep them from falling off the cliff until the day that something much better showed up. That “something much better” is the Spirit of Go, who wants to not just teach us about what God’s ways are, but he wants to write them as desires on our heart. He wants to come inside of us and navigate us. Not only that, but the best part of it is to empower us to walk in those things.

Jesus was, they said of him, that John came to baptize with water, but Jesus came to baptize with the Spirit and with fire. He was saying, “I’ve not come to abolish that whole Law, but I’ve come to fulfill it. I’ve come to put the fire in it. I’ve come to release my Spirit into you so that you can now walk in this righteousness.”

It’s a major, major thing. I know it’s so hard for us to grasp totally what he’s saying. I’m not saying you. I’m saying me, too. The intensity of what he’s saying. But the rest of the epistles in the New Testament are all unpacking this new covenant, this new thing that God created in Christ Jesus, where we can be made just as righteous as God the Father. Justified. Just as if we never sinned — by the life of Jesus, by the death of Jesus, and by the resurrection of Jesus. All the work that he did applied to us gets us into the fulness of righteousness.

Now the Law of God, for the life of a believer, is now we’re going from righteousness to the Law to be guided. Not trying to use the Law to gain some sort of righteousness. So now we have to figure out what it means to walk in the Spirit, that there is a much more important Law, a greater Law over our lives than the Law of Moses or the Law of the old covenant.

So we’re now living into what does it mean to live in this new covenant life? This new relationship with God. Walking by the Spirit. This is what we’re trying to unpack. I’m saying this because I know it’s hard to understand what that’s like, to walk in the Spirit. Paul is continually trying to help people understand what it means to walk in the Spirit. So I’m going to give you a couple of examples to finish up here. But more importantly than anything, I want you to start figuring it out on your own, what it means to walk by the Spirit.

Like I said, for Paul, what it meant when the Spirit came in was he no longer living according to the works of the Law, but now he was trying to follow what God was asking him to do. He just started doing what God asked him to do in this relational way. He wouldn’t go to the Law, necessarily, to figure out what God would want. He would go to prayer. He would go to his relationship with the Spirit to figure out what God wanted. And yes, more often than not, what God wanted him to do was totally in line with the scriptures. Absolutely. This is God’s favorite tool. But don’t ever make this God. Don’t seek this God where you think you have eternal life by doing this or you’ll fall way, way short like the Pharisees. This is just trying to help us know about Jesus and the relationship we’re supposed to have with him by the Spirit. 

But going back to my mom, my mom had to really figure out what it meant to walk in the Spirit. She had to figure out how to live by the Spirit because her dad took off on her when she was really young and left her to try to figure out some things on her own. Then her mom kind of went super cold because she was trying to figure out how to raise some kids and pay the bills. So my mom was really kind of left alone to figure out a lot of things on her own.

Then, when she was seventeen, she met my dad. Through my grandmother, my dad’s mom, she ended up meeting Jesus. And she invited Jesus into her life and she began to learn of his ways. She began to navigate this exact thing that we’re talking about, not falling back into the antinomism of no law, but not falling into the legalism of too much law. Trying to learn how to walk in the Spirit. She loved the scriptures. She loved to teach them. 

I remember the day when my dad took his life and her having to navigate that situation. Yes, the scriptures were helpful, but what she really needed was something a lot more powerful than just the scriptures. She needed God to show up. She needed the Spirit of God to be enough for her at that time. I watched her lean into Jesus and cry out to Jesus. And I watched Jesus be enough and give her peace and comfort and strength to keep going. 

Then, shortly after that, she ended up getting cancer. That cancer was going to be something that was easily taken care of, but then it metastisized to her brain. And real quickly, her life was leaving her. I remember staying with her on her death bed and I knew she had a relationship with Jesus. I knew what the scriptures taught and I knew God could work all things out to good, but that wasn’t doing anything for me. So I asked her a question. I said, “Mom, what’s Jesus saying to you?” And she just smiled and looked at me and said, “Jesus told me that his power is over me to heal me.” And she had so much peace as she said it. That’s not a bible verse, by the way. I mean there are Bible verses that affirm that, for sure. That’s why the Bible is so important. But she was just having a conversation with Jesus in this place. And the Spirit of God made it clear to her that God’s intention was to have his power all over her to heal her.

I was like, “Does that mean he’s going to heal you?” And she said, “No. He just wanted me to know how close he was. That he could do it if he felt it was the right thing, but he has a better plan.” 

That message to her right there gave her so much peace in the face of death, in the face of leaving this world, in the face of leaving us, her sons, who still needed a lot more common sense and self-control and maturity. But the Spirit of God was enough. It was more than enough. If all she had was just a tower of wood and structure and religiosity, it would have been dead and insufficient. But what she had was, she had a living, real relationship with the living, real Spirit of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead.

So Jesus didn’t come to abolish the old covenant, the old Law. He came to fulfill it, giving way to something new. And you and I, today, we have a decision to make. Are we going to completely forsake all that God teaches and says and come up with our own way? Because the world around us is dong that like crazy. Or, are we going to really dig into this and try to earn some sort of righteousness by following the works of this law? Because there have been Christians like you and I who have wasted so much time and energy and left themselves raw and exhausted trying to do that. Or are we going to receive the Spirit of God that is a gift of this new covenant that Jesus purchased by his blood and begin to learn to walk in the Spirit, day in and day out? Begin to hear what he has to say each day, and trust that and go.

Yes, look to the scriptures and community to confirm that we’re not just hearing whatever weird pizza put in us last night. This is still an important thing. It’s still a tutor for us. But this is not what you really, really need. What you need is a relationship with Jesus. You need the Spirit of God to come in with his fire and consume your disordered desires, and speak to you and teach you and sustain you and empower you to walk in righteousness, so that those around you can really know what it means to be in Christ Jesus, so that the fruits of the Spirit, the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the meekness, the gentleness, the self-control can show up in our lives, not because of our effort, but because of our connection with Jesus.

Lets pray:

Jesus, I’m sorry that I so often just fall back into religiosity and rule following and I leave you. But, Lord, I really do pray that you would help me to learn to walk in your Spirit every single day, not only so that I will have the guidance and power that I need for my life, but so that I could actually help the people around me with true guidance and power that comes from you. 

And I pray for the people who are facing really tough decisions or really struggling with some disordered desires or addictions, or maybe they had someone that they really love come to them and say something that was really hard and they don’t know how to handle it. Lord, I pray you would visit them by your Spirit. I pray that they would be still and they would seek you and your Spirit would speak to them. That they wouldn’t just live off past scriptures or past experiences, but, Lord, they would seek you new and fresh every day. 

Let this be a church that, yes, is full of your word, but Lord, more so, way more so, let us be filled with your Spirit. I pray that your Spirit would really break out in this place, that you’d come with your baptism of fire and of Spirit and baptize us anew, Lord.

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Unless otherwise marked, scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

Scripture marked MSG is from The Message (MSG). Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H Peterson

You Have Heard It Said

Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 2, 2021 - David Stockton

How’s everybody? Yeah? We doing okay? We’ve got the month of May now, which is fun. You heard new service times for the summer. Woo? You don’t have to woo it. It’s just business. Yeah, for the summer we’re going to do 9 and 10:30, so you right here will have to split. Somehow figure out what you’re going to do. The 8 am is easy, they’ll just come at 9 am. The 11 am it’s easy, 10:30. But you guys have the big decision. Which way you gonna go? 

But, we’re doing that not next week. We’re doing it the week after because next week is Mother’s Day. And Mother’s Day is the day we’re expecting the mothers to use all the power of Mother’s Day to bring their families together for church next week. And I mean that jokingly, but I also mean that sincerely because I know there’s a lot of division within families, there are a lot of people who have decided different things over topics last year. I know the heart of a mother is to see everybody join together. I really do encourage you to have them join together and come to church, whether they like it or not. You’ve got power. Be bold. Be courageous and use that power wisely to bring your family together and we’ll have a good time next Sunday. Then the following Sunday we’ll get down to two services for the summer and see how that goes.

Thanks for everybody tuning in online. You do whatever you want to do. You can go to both services, you can do one service. You can just watch it later, too. No problem there.

We’re going to be in the Sermon on the Mount again today. This is our fourth message on the Sermon on the Most. If you want to grab a Bible and turn to Matthew chapter 5. You’ve got Bibles in the pew in front of you or you could use your phone app Bible if you want, as well. Matthew chapter 5. We’re going to be talking about murder and adultery today. Woohoo! Yeah!

This has been a real fun message for me to get all prepared for. Yeah. So let me read the words of Jesus. Don’t get mad at me. If you’re going to get mad, get mad at Jesus, it’s his words. Just sharing his words. But yeah, here we go. Jesus is teaching on murder and adultery. Ready for it?

"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago…

Think Moses’ day, bringing the Ten Commandments…

 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’
But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother [or sister] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca, ' 

Anybody done that recently? It means ‘idiot’ or ‘moron.’ “You idiot!” “Oh, they’re just such idiots!” They didn’t have cars back then. “Idiot!” You know? Yeah.

is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part 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 and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

And continuing about adultery…

"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Yeah. How’s everybody doing? Yeah? Are we done? Are we done already? 

So, a couple of things before we start to unpack this a little bit, that I think it’s important for us to remember. First of all, that Jesus just said prior to this section, “I have not come to abolish the law.” Now, if you spent time with Jesus, if you listened to the teachings of Jesus, you probably would start to think because he’s not like the Pharisees, because he doesn’t teach like the Pharisees and teachers of the law at that time, that he doesn’t even care about the law of God.

But Jesus is saying, “Hold on a minute. I have not come to abolish the law. I’ve come to fulfill it.” Because Jesus’ understanding about the law of God given through Moses was that it was good and it was right and it was true and it was helpful. And he’s later on said this little passage that many of us have heard, that it’s the truth that sets us free. So Jesus is making sure that his disciples understood, “I am not messing with the truth. I am not diluting the truth. I am not changing the truth. I’m not giving you a new truth. It is the truth that sets you free and I don’t want to give you anything but the truth because I really want to see you free.”

In our world today, we’ve talked about this much, we are wanting to minimize the truth or dilute the truth, or because the truth that comes through God’s word is hard, we want to decrease it a little bit. But what we need to understand is, if you mess with the truth, you mess with your freedom. If you decrease the truth, you decrease your freedom. 

And what Jesus says is that those who want to relax on God’s law and teach others to do that, they are the least in the kingdom of heaven. But those who hold on tight and teach exactly what Jesus taught, they’ll be the greatest in the kingdom. 

And then you have the Pharisees, who are teaching about God’s law in a way that’s going to keep them out of God’s kingdom. Some big time words, where Jesus is really trying to teach that the righteousness of God, the righteousness that is taught in the Law, the way of God taught by the Law is good and right and helpful for us learning about righteousness and living in righteousness. 

So that’s the first point. The truth is important. So even though emotionally or culturally we want to shrink the truth a little bit, or be a little bit sheepish about the truth, then we’re really just shrinking people’s freedom and being sheepish about the freedom. If you want someone to get healed of a disease, you give them the full medicine and treatment. And you tell them to take that treatment even after they feel better, right? Finish that antibiotic round. You don’t lighten it up, because you really to see them whole.

So that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s trying to really help people understand the truth and get the truth in them. That’s the first thing we need to understand.

The second thing we need to understand is that Matthew 7:28 is the verse that comes after the Sermon on the Mount. Don’t ever forget this. If you don’t get anything out of this whole series, just remember this, Matthew 7:28 says that, after the people heard the words of Jesus, they heard the sermon, it says they were amazed at his words, that he didn’t sound like the Pharisees who always made them feel bad and far away from God. Instead, his words were substantial and actually gave them hope that maybe, just maybe they could be close to God. 

So we have to remember that. After we read through some of these things, we’re going to be like, “Ugh, that’s heavy. Whoa. I don’t know if I should be here anymore. I think it’s time to leave or check out, because he’s describing me right now, but it’s not the good way, it’s the bad way.”

But that’s not the way these people heard the words of Jesus because of the smile on his face and the tone of voice that he talked with. They heard Jesus teach these things and they thought, I think he’s teaching us because he thinks we can actually get it right. Which, for these people, no one had ever done before.

Now think about this: Jesus is on the side of a mountain and he’s talking about the Law of God. He’s teaching those who are gathered to him as disciples. Matthew’s made a really big deal of talking about the genealogy of Jesus and how he’s a king. He’s talked about Jesus actually going to Egypt and coming out of Egypt into his ministry. So Matthew is really trying to connect Jesus to Moses. And Moses, if you remember, when he was talking about the Law and he was interpreting God’s Law for the people and sat in judgment, he continued to tell the people about this One that would come and help them know fully what God was talking about when he gave us the Law. 

It’s called that prophet. There’s kind of this theology of that prophet. There’s this prophecy, this promise given way back when that there would come One who would be that prophet. And he would come and he would make clear what are the ways of God.

So Jesus, on the side of this mountain, who has come out of Egypt, is teaching his disciples in a very Mosaic type way. Jesus is stepping into his role as the Master Rabbi, the actual authority on the way of God, who’s now coming as that prophet, fulfilling that scripture, to help make it clear what is the way of God for people.

And in that moment, Jesus is doing something really special. And the people he’s talking to are — I was trying to figure out the best way to describe these people. Anybody here ever been to Gila Bend? Why are you laughing? There are people who live in Gila Bend and you’re laughing because I said Gila Bend. No, I get it. They’ve got the Space Age Lodge there. Right? Which has been there forever. And the Space Age Lodge, believe it or not, I know a guy who took his wife there honeymoon night and they’re still married. The Space Age Lodge. Too much? 

Gila Bend is about — we’re starting to get to a little bit of who Jesus is talking to. These are not people from the big city of Jerusalem. These are people kind of from the outskirts, back woods, hillbillies, who, all their life under Roman oppression have had nothing but extensive taxation and poverty. Their souls have been beaten down. Any time they do anything good it’s ripped right from them by Roman oppression. And, not only that, but any kind of hope they’ve had to be right in God’s eyes have been completely stripped away from them by  a Pharisaical hierarchy of religious system. And they’re just out there, completely impoverished.

And remember, Jesus was talking about “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? These people were poor in every way imaginable, including spirit. And Jesus talked about those who are hungry for justice. These are the people who have experienced nonstop injustice for generations. And he comes to them and he teaches them about the Beatitudes, basically saying, “Hey, just so you know. God’s really paying attention to you. And you’re a lot closer to the kingdom of heaven than you think.”

And then he starts to teach them and give them time, give them attention. The way he’s teaching them is making them think, He’s telling us to come closer. He’s calling disciples to follow him and if they follow him then he’s going to lead them into God’s kingdom. Us? Gila Benders, Bendites, Gila Bendonians, I don’t know what you call them. 

Again, when they heard this they were amazed. “No one has ever talked to us like this before. Every time the Pharisees come out we just feel like we get a whooping. But when Jesus talks to us, it’s still truth, and actually even more intense, but it makes me believe. It fills me with hope that maybe, just maybe no matter how broken or messed up I am, if I stay close to Jesus, I might end up in the right spot.”

That’s the way we have to hear this. Even the intensity of what’s being said today. Really, Jesus is trying to give us the difference between the true righteousness that God desires, the lesser righteousness, and then the actual fake righteousness of the Pharisees. So he kind of gives us that little teaching in verse 17 through 21, Kenny talked about that last week, and now we’re going to get examples of what he’s talking about.

The fake righteousness, or the lesser righteousness is that which is external. You’ve heard it said if you don’t murder, you’re righteous. That’s great. But I want to talk to you about something much more. So I’m going to tell us a few things about the true righteousness. Five things, actually.

True righteousness, first of all, if you’re taking notes, is internal over external. It’s the inside out kingdom, remember? 

The second thing is true righteousness doesn’t delay. There’s an urgency to it. 

The third thing is true righteousness seeks rewards in the next life over the now life, which is really hard for us, especially living in America and the prosperity that we have. 

Someone texted me after first service. I’m saying it because I should have said it in the first service, but I didn’t think of it. He said it. So now I’m saying it to you and maybe you’ll think, Wow, that guy is so smart. But it actually came from somebody else who texted me because my message didn’t have it in it. It’s the concept that we, as Americans, in right desire we seek for our children that they’ll be successful, they’ll be powerful, they’ll be safe. But really, what God is interested in is making us holy and righteous. And there’s a reason for all of that. But seek rewards in the next life over this life.

Then true righteousness brings peace. We’re going to see that in a really special way.

And true righteousness comes from staying close to Jesus. 

1: True righteousness is internal over external. We have Jesus’  examples here. It’s very simple. He says, “You’ve heard it said that if you don’t kill someone, if you don’t murder someone, then you’re righteous.” And Jesus is like, “Well, that’s a lesser kind of righteousness.” He’s not saying that it’s okay to kill people. He’s saying that’s not the whole deal. The true righteousness, the kind of righteousness that God is wanting to produce from our lives and see from our lives is an internal righteousness.

And so he goes on to say, “Hey, if you have anger in your heart toward a brother or sister, in God’s eyes, you’re committing murder. If you’ve lashed out at someone and called them an idiot, in God’s eyes, you’re guilty of murder. If you in your anger have lashed out and called someone a fool, you now have the judgment of God on you as a murderer.”

I’m just saying what Jesus is saying here. And there’s a reason for this intensity, because God really does want us to be holy. In just a bit, Jesus is going to say, “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” So we can’t go lightly on this stuff. We can’t say, “Well, it’s not that big a deal that I have this,” or whatever. No. Jesus is going after your heart because he wants you free.

Right now in our culture of virtue signaling, where if I wear the shirt or if I post the post, or something like that, I’m somehow accomplishing the righteousness of God or justice. The Pharisees were the best at that. And Jesus is saying it’s a real empty righteousness. God’s coming for your heart.

2: True righteousness doesn’t delay. Here he says, “Don’t wait.” When he talks about if you’ve found yourself with some of that trouble with the neighbor, an adversary that wants to take you to court. “Do it while you’re still with them on the way.” Don’t wait. Don’t delay until you get to the court. Don’t wait for the judge to tell you what’s righteous. You know what’s righteous. Go ahead and do that right now. And if you wait, it’s not going to go good. It’s not going to be right. You need to do it now.

When I think of this kind of urgency to this, I think a little bit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I don’t know if you know his story. He grew up as a contemporary of Adolf Hitler in a lot of ways. And he grew up and kind of was watching what Adolf Hitler was teaching and he was watching the church and their response to it and realizing that none of that was good. He came over to America because he was brilliant and he was teaching ethics here in America, and really talking about the right way and what is good and what is pleasing to the Lord, and all these different things. The whole time he was hearing reports about what was happening to the Jews and what Hitler was up to and what the church was not doing in Germany. He eventually decided, “I can’t stay here. I can’t stay here in this place. I need to go back.” 

So he left and went back to Germany. And it ended up costing him his life. But he came back and was trying to wake up the church to the urgency of the matter at hand, that evil had come and they needed to rise up and stand against it. 

I think also Martin Luther King, Jr., if you ever read the letters from the Birmingham prison, they are so incredible, not only what he does with words and the literary excellence of it; but, basically what was happening was the pastors around him were saying, “Just chill out, Martin. Chill out. You’re in too much of a hurry.”

His response was so beautiful. “How long are we supposed to wait? Don’t you know that the righteousness of God has an urgency to it? It demands that we act. We don’t wait until it’s convenient. We don’t wait until it’s comfortable. We don’t wait until we can figure out how to make it come out to our good. We do it and we do it now to see that justice come.” There’s an urgency to it. That was true of Jesus, as well.

3: True righteousness seeks rewards in the next life over the now life. This is where we go to the part that’s so fun about it’s better for you to lose part of your body now than for your whole body to miss out on what’s next. Even gouging your eyes out or cutting your hand off. Whoa. I see everybody’s got two eyes in here today, so you haven’t really taken this verse literally Everybody got their hands, you know? Maybe not everybody. I have both of mine, just so you know. I have both eyes, both hands. 

But what Jesus is getting at here is just really trying to help us shift our priorities. There are things in this life that you should go without because it will affect your next life. And you should have an intensity to this. I mean, obviously — I have to be very careful here — the Holy Spirit will make you understand what it is he’s wanting you to rid yourself of. But obviously you could think of things like Netflix. Maybe Netflix is something that does cause you to stumble. It causes you to kind of have some thoughts or some feelings that you don’t want or shouldn’t have. Just cancel it. I don’t have stock in Netflix. Just kidding. Just cancel it. It might be your phone. Maybe your phone. It’s like it’s so convenient to have your phone and all these things, and to put all those different blocks and all those things are so inconvenient. A little inconvenience in this life could have great impact in the next life. 

Jesus is saying you need to be serious enough about this stuff, intense enough, that it would almost be like you would cut out your own eye to try and help out; so that you don’t stand before God every day as an adulterer.

There are things that we need to cut out of our lives to help us in our pursuit of righteousness. No doubt about it. Jesus is teaching that. We don’t hear the story of his disciples going and cutting out their eyes or cutting off their hands. So, obviously there’s more to it than just that. But there needs to be an intensity to this. There needs to be an evaluation of what’s in the next life over this life. Because that life is more real than this life. Remember we talked about the rope? This seventy years is just a blip on the radar compared to everlasting life. So we do lose things in this life to gain things in that life. That’s true of the righteousness of God.

4: True righteousness brings peace. Here again, Jesus is talking about the anger in your heart. He says that if you have this anger in your heart toward your brother or sister, you need to make it right. If you’ve been calling people idiots, if you’ve been calling people fools, you need to deal with that. Even if you’re not killing them. Even if they don’t know about it. God does. The true righteousness that he wants to see in the world and produce in your own soul is something that really does resist and fight against those things so that you can be free of those things. 

When I think about this, I think about how easy it has been this last year to foster contempt for “the other.” Whatever the other might be. The other could be the other side of the aisle. You continue to watch certain news or listen to certain podcasts and it just breeds more and more “Raca!” You fool! They’re so stupid! They’re idiots!

I’m not saying there isn’t right and wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be passionate about those things. I think there is. But we just can never do it motivated from anger. Paul the Apostle was a guy who was very zealous for the Law, zealous for the Lord. And Jesus came and slapped him in the face one day and said, “Your zeal is driven by your murderous anger in your heart, not from the Spirit of God.” And we’ve got to watch that.

Now, again, there is right and wrong. So when you’re persecuted for righteousness’ sake and that stirs up anger and frustration, that’s different than if you’re doing something wrong to somebody and it’s causing you the frustration. So the Beatitudes give us that little caveat. Blessed are you when you’re persecuted for righteousness. So if someone has something against you, but it’s not because you’ve done anything, and you have no anger in your heart, that doesn’t mean you have to go make it right. Instead, you can rejoice with a quiet confidence that God is with you in that moment. Then you have to keep watching out that your heart doesn’t pick up anger, contempt or bitterness or pride in that.

Here’s what the scriptures say about the righteousness of God. In Isaiah 48, it says:

Thus says the Lord,

    your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:

“I am the Lord your God,

    who teaches you to profit,

    who leads you in the way you should go.

Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments!

    Then your peace would have been like a river,

    and your righteousness like the waves of the sea”

The righteousness of God produces peace in our lives and through our lives like a river. 

Isaiah 32:17

And the effect of righteousness will be peace,
   and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.

And then, lastly, from Hebrews 1:9 (ESV):

You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.

The true righteousness of God produces peace in the face of anger and adversaries, and joyful, quiet confidence in the face of lust and unwanted desires. That’s the righteousness of God.

As I’ve said things, I think all of us are feeling a little more unrighteous maybe than we came in with. That’s okay. We’re face to face with Jesus. And everybody in the Bible who comes face to face with Jesus, you know what they do? They fall on the ground and they say, “I’m an unclean person with unclean lips.” And it’s not a bad thing for us to have that. Our hearts get pricked and feel the need for repentance, when face to face with the true righteousness. How far we are from it. 

But remember, these people, after Jesus was done, did not feel like they had no options. Did not feel like they were stuck in their unrighteousness. Did not feel like Jesus was telling them, “There’s no shot for you.” Instead, somehow what they heard from Jesus was, “Okay. He sees me. He knows me. He’s not playing games. I can’t trick him. He knows what’s really going on in my heart. He knows that I have anger and lust there that I’ve been trying to get rid of on my own and haven’t been able to do it. He knows that stuff is there, and yet, he’s still spending the time with me. He’s still talking to me. He still has that look in his eyes and that tone in his voice that makes me think if I stick around him long enough, maybe I’ll be able to see myself the way he sees me.”

The reason that Jesus was able to feel that was because Jesus knew what was going on. Jesus knew he had to teach them about the true righteousness. But Jesus also knew that he was going to make a way for them to become true righteousness. 

Now, remember, we’re on this side of Jesus. We’re looking back to the life of Jesus, so we have the New Testament perspective. We have the cross. We have the resurrection perspective. So Jesus is teaching this message. It’s heavy, but Jesus had this hope in his voice that caused these people, especially the twelve, maybe seventy, maybe one hundred and twenty, that were disciples gathered around him that were saying, “Hey, we’re going to try and follow him and spend time with him.” 

Because Jesus knew that he was going to do something to make righteousness possible for them. He knew that he wasn’t going to be dependent on them getting it right. He wasn’t dependent on their energy, or effort, or wisdom, or smarts, or skill, or self-control to produce that righteousness. He said, “I haven’t come to abolish the law. I’ve come to fulfill it.” And here’s how Jesus makes you and I accomplish the righteousness of God. You ready for it?

First of all, we are made righteous by the work Jesus did in his daily life of fulfilling the Law. So first of all he came and walked it out so we could know what it looks like. So we could know and understand the righteousness of God. It’s important for us to learn the Law of God, the commands of God, the decrees of God. It’s important for us to rejoice in all of those things so we can better fully understand the righteousness of God, especially when everyone is telling us what the righteousness is, what the high moral ground is these days. We really need to see Jesus and walk with Jesus so we can know the righteousness of God.

But secondly — please don’t miss this — we are made righteous by his death on the cross where he paid for all of our unrighteousness. This is a really big deal. Jesus was talking to these people, teaching them the way of God, teaching them about righteousness, not so they would never get there. But he knew there was coming a day where he will have fulfilled all righteousness and was going to lay down his life as a payment for all of their unrighteousness and ours as well.

The way the New Testament says it is, He who knew no sin became sin, dying on that cross so that you and I could become the righteousness of God. So, somehow, because of what Jesus did on the cross, all of our unrighteousness is forgiven, it’s washed away, it’s cleansed, it’s gone, it’s removed forevermore. Actually, “Your sin and iniquity I will remember no more,” God says. He doesn’t even remember it. This is the good news of the cross. This is why Jesus could share with these people in a way that invited them in closer. Because he was going to pay the price for all their unrighteousness past, present and future.

So, first we’ve got to learn and understand the righteousness of Jesus. And when we do, we all fall short and we all go, “Oh, no.” But then we’ve got to understand that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, which gives us a fresh start every single day, to walk out in his righteousness. But he didn’t stop there. He rose from the dead.  He rose from the dead and he poured out his Spirit on anyone that would come to him.

What his Spirit does is his Spirit comes into our lives and continues to teach us the way, continues to remind us of our forgiveness and then gives us the power to get it right sometimes. He gives us the power to overcome our sinful nature and disordered desires. 

So, ultimately, Jesus has done everything we need. So here’s the really complicated thing for you and me. How do we walk in this? How do we navigate this? How is it hopeful for us? If you’ll just stay close to Jesus, he’ll make something beautiful out of your life. That’s what these people heard. 

“I don’t get exactly all he’s talking about. Am I supposed to cut my hand off now?” They didn’t get all the intricacies of all Jesus was saying bout the Law. These were unlearned and ignorant people in some ways. But what they got from the Sermon on the Mount was, “This guy knows what he’s talking about. If I stay close to him, maybe, just maybe I’m going to find the kingdom of God.”

And, sure enough, at least twelve of them did. Eleven of them. Sorry. And those eleven “Gila Benders”, they literally turned the world upside down. You and I are in this church building today talking about Jesus, seeking Jesus because of those “Gila Benders.” Not because they mustered their own strength, not because they finally figured it out. No. It’s because they stayed close to Jesus and for them it got a little weird. Right? They stayed close to Jesus in person, in the flesh. But then Jesus died, rose again, showed up in this new form. And they received the Spirit of God, Acts 2. And they stayed close to Jesus by walking in the Spirit.

Walking in the Spirit, which is what we are trying to learn how to do. We don’t get the opportunity to be with Jesus in the flesh like they did, but we get to walk with Jesus in the Spirit, which Jesus and the disciples all attested to that it was better. It’s better what we have because God is with us everywhere we go. And he can produce in us a heart of righteousness. And our world so desperately needs people who are living out true righteousness. Not the fake or the lesser kind. We got a lot of that last year and it didn’t bring any peace. Stay close to Jesus and you’ll find the true righteousness.

Let’s pray. Again, just a reminder that, when we say “let’s pray,” it doesn’t always mean “Let’s talk.” A lot of times it’s a lot more listening than it is talk. Right now it’s important for us to listen, to listen to see what the Spirit might say. Those of you who know Christ and have the Spirit living inside of you, maybe he’ll bring up the name of someone, a brother or a sister, or maybe even an adversary that you’ve got some anger or contempt or bitterness for. He’s wanting to meet you there, wanting to give you his righteousness and help you walk in it to overcome the unrighteousness. 

Maybe you’ve got a lot of lust in your heart and you’re losing the battle in your mind. Please hear what Jesus says. He’s not saying therefore you’re an adulterer and there’s no hope for you. He’s saying, yes, it’s true, and it’s going to lead you to less freedom, less flourishing and destruction. But if you take his hand, you’ll find his wisdom, you’ll find his forgiveness, and you’ll find his power to live a different way when you stay close to him.

Maybe some of you don’t even have the Spirit of God in you. You’re kind of new to this thing. Well, today would be a great day for you to say: Jesus, come into my life. I need your help. You can whisper that prayer even now and know that he hears and loves to take that which is unrighteous and make it righteous, that which is broken and make it beautiful.

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The King Who Conquered Sin

Series: A Kingdom Divided
March 28, 2021 - David Stockton

1 Kings is where we are at. Today we celebrate the day Jesus announced to the world that he was a peaceful King who had conquered a foe. The event is called The Triumphal Entry. The Sunday that commemorates it is called Palm Sunday. Jesus is thirty-three years old. He knows he’s in his final days, so he sets his face toward the big city and enters Jerusalem the same way a king would after conquering a foe. 

So what was the conquered foe Jesus was declaring victory over? He had not conquered the oppressive Rome. He had not overthrown the evil King Herod. He had not really done much damage or changed much of the arrogant structure that the Pharisees and the Sadducees had set up in the religious system and caste system of that day.

So what did he conquer? What was he declaring as he rode into Jerusalem and basically sent people out ahead of him to announce that he was coming, and to have this parade of disciples cheering, “Hosanna! The Savior has come. He’s saved us. He’s the King. Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the King who comes in the name of David.” 

What had he conquered that made him want to go public with being a King for the first time in his life? Well, I think the answer is he had conquered sin. 

What’s interesting here is that on the cross we know Jesus conquered a lot. He paid the price for our sin. The resurrection was proof that he had conquered death once and forever. He had become the sacrifice that could take away the sins of the world. But Jesus conquered sin every moment of every day as temptation would come and he would not succumb. He is the only one who has been tempted like humanity is tempted, yet without sin. There was one other who came on the sin who was not sinful, but was tempted, and that was Adam. Yet Adam succumbed and brought great devastation to the world that we’re still living under today.

But Jesus Christ, as he was going around healing people and performing miracles, he was demonstrating to everyone that he had authority to undo all the damage that sin had done. And then, as he was transfigured on the mount of transfiguration, he was glorified. And he was there with Moses and Elijah before the presence of God. Basically that was symbolizing that Jesus had passed the test. He had, at that point, been tempted in every way that you and I are ever tempted, yet without sin. 

And in that moment he had a decision to make. He had fulfilled the law of God. He had done what God had asked him to do. And was that enough? Or would he go down that mount of transfiguration and go to the cross? And the only reason that he would go down the mount of transfiguration to the cross is because he had not yet paid the price for you and I. He had fulfilled the law. He had become the sinless King. But we were still guilty of our sin. And because of his great love for us, he walked down that mount of transfiguration and he resolutely set his face toward Jerusalem.

Now he comes into Jerusalem announcing as a King, as a peaceful King — because he rode a donkey, not a horse — as a peaceful King, he was coming to declare that he had conquered sin and was now the King above all kings. The sinless King who was able to provide a sinless sacrifice for the sin debt of humanity. 

It’s a day worth celebrating. This Triumphal Entry. That’s why it’s called Triumphal Entry, because he triumphed over the thing that you and I could never and have never been able to triumph over, the foe of sin.

So we spend a moment thinking about that, because, in our series in 1 Kings, we’ve been looking at king after king after king after king after king who, when tempted with sin, succumbed. Not only succumbed, but subtly and in small ways made these little compromises that ultimately led Israel further and further into idolatry and ultimately ruin. 

So we look at 1 Kings and we see that, in this time in history, God’s people were becoming numb and blind to idolatry and sin. And we’re doing this because we do not want to become God’s people in our day and age who are becoming blind and numb to idolatry and sin. So we’re taking the word of God and we’re allowing it, like a magnifying glass, to look into our lives. No matter how pretty or how ugly we come out. But we do not want to fall prey to the same things they fell prey to.

It was just a few hundred years between King Saul, King David and King Solomon until Israel was completely destroyed. I do think in our society as Americans — and I don’t say this lightly and I don’t say this judgtngly — but I do think our society is progressing away from the things of God and more into the things of this world, or the things that are incongruent with the lines of God, that he has drawn for our own freedom and flourishing.

Though that is something I see taking place — and I’m praying for a great awakening, because we’ve had awakenings in America before that swept across from sea to shining sea, that turned hearts back to God and his ways. And it’s been beautiful and wonderful. I’m praying for some more of that. Anybody with me? Yeah? I’m not like, Oh, all hope is lost. Down with America. No! Not at all. I’m just trying to say I think I’m seeing these things so I’m praying that I’ll be able to see the opposite happen. And I think we all should be doing that. We should have hope. We should pray. Because God can do it. 

At the same time, I’m also trying to give warning to my own soul and to my own household and to us as a church that these things are creeping their way into the household of faith. I’m having conversations with people who are brothers and sisters in Christ and people who have walked with us for a while who are now saying that they don’t think sin is sin, according to what the Bible teaches. It’s creating moments where there’s pressure and it’s causing some divisions. 

It’s so important for us to look at God’s word again and say, “Okay, Lord. You get to speak. We’re putting you on the throne to decide what is good and right and wrong. And we’re not going to let our culture be on the throne. We’re not going to let our own desires be on the throne. We’re not going to let our sinful flesh be on the throne. We’re going to watch out for selfishness and we’re going to watch out for the idols of comfort, security and convenience. And we’re going to make sure you are the one on the throne deciding what is right and what is not right.” And it’s been challenging. It’s been tricky. It’s been unpopular. But it’s okay. It’s okay.

We’re looking at 1 Kings because they were going through a lot of similar things. We have Jeremiah, who wrote this book — according to tradition — and he’s writing this to help people wake up from their stupor, wake up to the reality of the decline that’s taking place all around them.  And we really did make sure that, even though he’s kind of a weeping prophet and he’s moaning and groaning, he’s not a bullfrog. Jeremiah is not a bullfrog. He was a weeping prophet. We had to clear that u p earlier on in this series. 

But he’s basically speaking about how the people of God slowly but surely kind of give in to these things. He’s talking to us about a lot of different things. Just to sum up, I’m going to read some real quick summarizations from Jeremiah about these kings and what they did. 

Under Rehoboam, in 1 Kings 14:22-24

Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done. They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.

Israel was a consecrated people, set apart as God’s people. They continued to want to more and more be like the nations around them. It was more and more bringing in their idolatry, more and more bringing in their thoughts, more and more bringing all these things in, until, eventually they were a people that God was angry at. His jealous anger was enraged. It’s true that God is slow to anger, but God is angry at sin and those who are walking in it. That’s the most loving thing he can do at that point, to be angry against the those who were leading people into idolatry and sinfulness and ruin. 

And God was angry at them. Right there, this is talking about God’s people. “There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land.” Solomon had set up worship to all these other gods and some of those gods required you to have sex to worship them. And so you would go and it just so happened to have male prostitutes, so if you were male or female, you would go have sex with these people to worship these gods. It was a way that you would honor them. It wasn’t just stupid, but it was that you would get the reward. You would get the blessing of fertility of your land or your family by doing this. This was going on in the nation of God, that God had blessed and led out of captivity, giving them their land.

1 Kings 15:30

Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him.

So he was setting up Baal worship. Baal worship, at this point in Israel, it was like worship of Yahweh. They never really stopped worshipping Yahweh, but at this point in Israel’s history, definitely Baal was the main god of the Israelites, and Yahweh was the “side God,” which was very upsetting to the Lord. 

And under Ahaz (2 Kings 16:3-

…he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord his God. He followed the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in the fire, engaging in the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. He offered sacrifices and burned incense at the high places, on the hilltops and under every spreading tree. 

Now, I don’t know what a spreading tree in this regard, but I’m sure you can look in commentaries and they’ll talk about it for a long, long time — which is fun about commentaries and also so boring sometimes. But anyway…

He’s offering his own son as a sacrifice in the fire, which was a practice of the god Molek, again to get fertility and prosperity. And we look at these things and we think these people are crazy, for them to be so bizarre in their sexual immorality and to be so bizarre in what they’re willing to sacrifice and kill — even of their own families — for these gods. And yet, I think if we’re honest, in our society we see some very similar type things.

That’s the scary thing about sin. The sin that we commit, we don’t get to decide what the consequence is or who suffers the consequence. As we see it in the story of Solomon, Solomon was very sexually immoral. Yet he didn’t suffer the consequence. His son did, and all of the people of Israel, ultimately. 

When we choose the idolatry of greed, of money, or we choose the idolatry of sex, power, position, so oftentimes it’s our kids that get sacrificed at those altars. In some ways I bet every one in this room or listening online could tell a story of something that they experienced because of the idolatry of their parents, or maybe something their kids have experienced because of their idolatry and sin. It’s very heavy stuff. These kings were people just like you and me. 

But then, just before we get too bummed out, we keep going. There are some other kings. Now I read about three kings who did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord. And then I’m going to read three kings that did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Don’t for a second think that it was kind of an even spread. Basically, you’ve got about three, maybe five, if you really want to stretch you’ve got about eight out of fifty kings did any good at all. The rest were horrible.

Here’s some good news. Asa. 1 Kings 15:11-14

Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, as his father David had done. He expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made. He even deposed his grandmother Maakah from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah. Asa cut it down and burned it in the Kidron Valley. Although he did not remove the high places, Asa’s heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life.

So here’s good news. It is funny to read in the Bible about a guy getting rid of his grandmother in this way. But it’s not funny what many of us are going through in our own families, as we navigate the differences and the challenges that are presented there when loved ones make decisions that are not in line with the scriptures or the lines that God has given us and we’re trying to uphold those lines, and at the same time love them. It’s tricky. This is where the love of God is so much deeper than the love that we have and the Hallmark channel teaches us about.

Love is patient, love is kind, but it rejoices in the truth at the same time. It is deep and it is rich and it is challenging for people like us . Sometimes we have to draw those lines. Jesus taught us that there are times in our following of him where we’re going to have to hate our brother and hate our sister. He’s not actually saying we should hate them. He’s saying that they’re going to perceive what you’re doing as hate, when really, all you’re doing is try to follow them and love them. And those become very difficult times, good times to pray and good times to sing about a God who chases down people on their prodigal roads. A good time to think about a God who wants to come into our lives and restore our broken lives. A good time to sing about a God who, there’s no mountain he won’t climb, right? There’s no wall he won’t break down. It’s good to think about God in those times and to pray.

The next king. Hezekiah. 2 Kings 18:3-

He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. 

Here’s the story of even something that was done in memory of God and what God had done, they had made an idol of that and were worshiping that instead of the Creator. And then we get on to Josiah. And we’re going to spend a little more time talking about Josiah. I’ve chopped up the full portion of the story about Josiah. You can read it later, if you want, but I’m giving us some little highlights. I’ve been watching a a lot of March Madness highlights and it’s just all highlights. I love highlights. It’s like I don’t have to watch freethrows and all the boring stuff. Jus watching the highlights and Baylor’s still in it, so my bracket’s still alive. Yeah!

2 Kings 22  Josiah…

2…did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left..

11 When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes. 12 He gave these orders to Hilkiah the priest,…   13 “Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.

It’s a fascinating moment in the history of Israel, because we’re in 2 Kings now when we get to Josiah. We’ve gone through a lot of kings asa we’re toward the end of the time of the kings before they actually go into exile in Babylon and Judah, before they get taken over by the Assyrians in Israel up north. 

Here Josiah becomes king and wants to do what’s right int he eyes of the Lord. So he starts to try and figure out what that is. He knows the high places are evil, so he starts working on those things. But one of the things he wants to do is get the temple of Yahweh back in action. And he starts cleaning it out and doing all these things, and in the process of doing that, a guy finds a scroll and he doesn’t know what the scroll is. So then he takes it to some different people. They finally get to a priest and they’re like, “What is this thing?” And the priest is like, “That’s the Torah! That’s the law of God. That’s the thing that God gave Moses as they were on that Mount Sinai in Egypt. That’s the thing that teaches us God’s ways.”

So he brought it to the king and he says, “King, I want to show you something we found.” They didn’t know where it was. It had been buried. It had been forgotten. It had been totally rendered unimportant for long enough to where now they didn’t even know where it was. And he starts to read it to King Josiah. And Josiah… the reason I’m having trouble is because I’ve been praying for Josiahs to show up in our day.

Josiah gets hit in the face with this stuff.  He gets his heart chopped up by the word of God and he repents. He falls on his knees. He tears his clothes and he says, “God, I’m sorry. But thank you so much for your word. Thank you so much for letting it come to the surface. Thank you so much for helping us awake to the reality of what’s going on.”

And he tells his guys, “Go and figure out every single thing in this book that we’re doing wrong, and let’s make it right.” It was such a beautiful, beautiful response. So he finds some things that they’re doing wrong. 

2 Kings 23:
4 The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. 5 He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem.… 6 He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord…

We’re talking about this stuff in the temple of the Lord.

… to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. 

Again, common people? What? Where did that come from? He’s fired up.

7 He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord… 

Did you hear what I just said? In the temple of the Lord that Solomon built for Yahweh, there was a portion that was used to house the male shrine prostitutes. Josiah kicked some booty that day. And that was also…

…the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.

I don’t know what that’s about.

12 He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. 13 The king also desecrated the high places that were east of Jerusalem on the south of the Hill of Corruption—the ones Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the people of Ammon. 14 Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones.

It’s serious. Very serious.

24 Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord. 25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.

Hallelujah. And just in case you think he was a big jerk and didn’t know how to have fun…

21 The king gave this order to all the people: “Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.” 22 Neither in the days of the judges who led Israel nor in the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah had any such Passover been observed. 

He threw a huge party across the whole land to celebrate what God had done for the Passover. And there was great rejoicing in God’s heart. His anger was stayed as he looked down and he saw Josiah whose heart was a fully his. 

But Josiah did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and he did all of these other things. He was proactive in that. He knew that, as the word of God came to him, he was supposed to respond by doing that boundary maintenance we talked about early on, for not only his own soul, but his household and the institutions that he was a part of. Just so happens he was the king of the whole nation. 

The zeal of the Lord consumed him. He was hungry and thirsty for righteousness. And as he walked that out, he was filled. He chose to seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness above everything else. This is what it looked like for him in his time. And it pleased the Lord. It was a beautiful thing in his eyes.

So what does it look like for us to do this in our day with our own souls and households and institutions? I don’t know. That’s why you’ve got the Spirit of God living inside of you. 

But what I love about this is, when the line of God came and basically dissected Josiah and his people, when the line of God came and cut his heart in half, helping him to realize that he was outside the lines of God, he was outside where God needed to be, they were so far off. He did not respond thinking that God doesn’t love him or want him. He actually, by the grace of God, was able to respond to say, “Actually God has helped me see the lines because he loves me that much and doesn’t want me to head off into decay and depravity and destruction. He actually has drawn these lines to help me know, like a roadmap, how to get back in. Also, he’s drawn these lines to help me become aware of how badly I need him.”

Each and every time we’ve been in one of these messes, and each and every time you hear the word of God taught, or you read it for yourselves, and one of those lines that God has drawn is coming to you and making you feel like you are not right, you are incongruent, there is something in your life that is outside the boundaries of God, the devil wants to come in that moment and say, “See? You don’t belong. See? They don’t love you or want you. See? God doesn’t love you or want you.” And that is the devil talking and he is very faithful to do that. 

At the same time, when that line hits you, when your heart is pricked as the Bible describes it, like Josiah was, what God wants you to hear is that he loves you and he wants to see you get into the fullness of what he has for you and that he can rescue you and he can heal you and he can make you whole. 

That’s the message that Jesus came to bring. That’s the message that Jesus was declaring as he rode that donkey into Jerusalem all those years later. That’s the message that he cried on the cross as he gave up his last breath and said, “It is finished.” And as his blood flowed, basically, what he was saying to you and me was, when you find yourself outside the lines that God has drawn, when you find yourself with your heart pricked, when you find yourself in trouble, outside, alone, apart from God, you’re supposed to look up at that cross and see his arms stretched wide, ready to receive you. You’re supposed to see his blood and know that blood was a sacrifice that can wash you clean. No matter what heinous sin you’ve committed or you’re in right now, his blood is way more powerful. Always has been and always will be. 

Then you’re also supposed to see him as that resurrected Lord offering freely his Spirit to empower us, to win our battles against sin. To find victory from time to time over the sin that’s inside of us, that’s lying at the door waiting to devour us. That’s what Jesus came to declare to each one of us. 

I’m praying, whether you’re online or in person, if these messages, if the word of God has come and has hit you, or it has cut you, that you would realize that that is what the word is supposed to do. Actually, the New Testament says that the law of God is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ; basically like that angry, mean teacher that was always telling you when you were doing something wrong, so that you would know you need a rescuer, you need a savior, so that you would come to Christ and you would find out that he’s been there all along, only one step away. 

What’s cool is that the Lord has been raising up some Josiahs in our fellowship. We have a guy that I know told me the story of him basically just hearing these words recently and saying, “That’s it.” And he put away all of his sexually immoral paraphernalia that he’d been practicing and playing with and he’s distancing himself — not because of Covid — he’s distancing himself from people that he knows were leading him in the wrong way. What he told me was the result was he’s never been able to hear from the Lord so often. 

That’s why Jesus wants us to get in these lines because he wants to talk to us, wants to love us. Out there we can’t hear him. 

We had a guy just show up on the lawn out here about a month ago. He just dumped a bunch of cocaine and other drugs on the lawn and said, “I’m sick of it.” And we were like, “Should we call the police?” And the guys who handled him said, “No.” They said, “Let’s go flush this down the toilet.” And they actually got some other people to make sure nobody thought they snuck it out the back door. They flushed it down the toilet. Then we connected that guy with Kurt to try to help him figure out what Jesus is doing. Because he was walking around out there in the darkness and he just got so sick of it. And he looked over and he thought, “Maybe they have some light.” 

We’ve got some people that have decided that they weren’t going to worship at the altar of convenience, comfort and security. But instead, they have aging parents and they’ve decided to bring those aging parents back home with them to give them honor and dignity as they finish their days — at great inconvenience to them, for sure. 

And another guy actually, he and his wife just moved away from us and everything that they loved and all the goodness they were experiencing to go do the same thing, to make sure his parents were getting loved and cared for.

I’ll tell you what, that’s something that God is really pleased with. I could go on and on. It might just seem little to you, but it’s not little to the Lord. Actually, my wife went to a birthday party yesterday for a kid who’s been quarantined his whole life because of autoimmune diseases. Instead of birthdays, he asked if everybody could donate to the food pantry here. He’s like ten years old! He’s a little Josiah.

So it falls to us. We have a great, great history. Ever since Jesus rode that donkey into Jerusalem declaring that victory over sin, there’s been a long line of parade, a great cloud of witnesses that have been following his lead and gaining victory over sin and doing away with high places and idolatry in their lives and in their families and in the institutions they’re a part of, many different ways. What are we going to do? What is the Lord asking you to do? 

I know someone in our fellowship that they have been together for along time as boyfriend and girlfriend and they’ve got kids and all of that. They’re saying, “We’re ready to get married before the Lord.” 

There are a lot of things that we can do to follow him. Some people built an underground railroad. Some people built a hiding place. Some missionaries have gone and it’s cost them their life, but then their family went to the same people and saw them get saved. 

Lots of ways that we can serve the Lord. 

Let’s pray:

Wow, Lord. You just keep it coming. Lord, I pray that you really would help us to not fall prey to our desires for sex, money, self, individualism, convenience, security, comfort or even idealogical popular or significance. Instead, Lord, we would just have your word hidden in our hearts, that we might not sin against you. That your word would be a light unto our path and we would walk in it, Lord. I pray that we, as a church, Lord, I pray for the whole church, but I really pray for us, Living Streams, right now in Phoenix in 2021, I pray that we would be the salt and light that you want us to be. Lord, where we’ve lost any salt in this, please forgive us and heal us. We know, Lord, you want us to stand against the decay in our society, but at the same time bring healing. We know. You want us to be a city set on a hill so that those who are walking in darkness and finally get sick of it can look and find someplace to run. Please help us, Lord, to not be like the older brother who rejects people who come home, but instead to be just like you, Father, and receive them and robe them. We thank you, Jesus, that you found us, that we were once lost and blind, but now we’re found and we see. Thank you, Lord. 

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©2021 Living Streams Christian Church, Phoenix, AZ

Scripture is taken from Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Sin and Deception

Series: John

John 19 - David Stockton

John chapter 19. It’s going to be interesting. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you had so much joy and felt great about the world and your family and your relationship with the Lord, and turkey and pie and all of that. Because today we’re really going to talk a lot about sin and humanity’s propensity to it. And the great evil that’s in humanity’s hearts. So gear up. It’s going to be jolly. It’s not Christmas yet. It’s time to talk about sin.

What we have, basically, is we have a lot of problems in our world. Last week we talked about truth, we talked bout lies, we talked about deception. It’s not just words. It’s not just confusion that it creates, but as we know, lies and and deception, when they really begin to take root in someone’s heart, can lead to all kinds of horrible atrocities, including stealing, killing, destroying, abuse. Lots of different things that have caused a lot of pain in this world.

So the question for people who aren’t Christians, and for people who are Christians, as well, is why is there all this evil in the world? Why is there all this pain? One of the things people think is, is it because God is powerless? That, actually, God can’t really do anything about it? That’s one consideration. Another one is, well, maybe God is mean. Maybe he is mean or doesn’t care about all of those things. Maybe he’s just kind of hands off. Leave us to our own devices. That’s another option. 

But then another option to consider is maybe it’s because mankind really does have evil inside their hearts. That’s not a fun thing to think about because it means you and I. But the Bible is pretty clear about that. We’re going to get to see, basically, John the apostle answering that very question, as we read the story that he experienced in real life, in real time two thousand years ago. 

John was writing so that we would believe that Jesus is the Creator God who created the world and came to rescue it from sin and death. He wrote his evangelistic letter about thirty years after the other three gospels, the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. So he’s writing with a completely different perspective. Those three books have already been in circulation. He’s read them. He knows what they’re about. So he’s adding something to it. He doesn’t necessarily use the same stories. He uses some other stories and he uses his own version of those stories.

John wants to make sure no one misses that Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time. John’s not playing around. He really believes that these stories about Jesus can change a person’s life, as well as change their destiny after your life runs out. He talks about being born again. He talks about drinking living water. He talks about resurrection life. He’s emphatic about those things.

We’ve seen in the book of John Jesus rise to popularity to where, at one point, he basically had five thousand men come out to him and say, “Hey, we’re ready to do whatever you want to do. Let’s march on Jerusalem. Let’s take out Herod. Whatever you want to do.”

And from that point on, he kind of plateaued in popularity and then as quickly begin to decline in popularity. Then, last week we left off with Pilate, who was the Roman authority in Jerusalem at that time, presenting to all of the Jews that used to want to make Jesus king, but now aren’t so sure, and he’s presenting to them Barabbas, “the son of the father,” a guy who was known to lead a rebellion and to do some damage to people and things. And then you’ve got Jesus who’s claiming to be the Son of the Father, actually the Son of God, and Pilate’s presenting them to the people, and the people are saying, “We want Barabbas. We don’t want Jesus.”

So that’s where we’re at. We get to see the confusion and deception that has taken root in the human heart when they’re face to face with their Maker. They’re saying, “We don’t want him. He’s too true. He’s too real. We want the counterfeit.”

Then in John 19, it says this:

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 

Basically had his back ripped and torn to shreds, hoping that he might confess something.

2 The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe 3 and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.

4 Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.” 5 When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

6 As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”

But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.”

7 The Jewish leaders insisted, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”

8 When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, 9 and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. 10 “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”

11 Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

12 From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”

13 When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement (which in Aramaic is Gabbatha). 14 It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon.

“Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews.

15 But they shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!”

“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.

“We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.

16 Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.

So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. 17 Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). 18 There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle.

19 Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: jesus of nazareth, the king of the jews. 20 Many of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek. 21 The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, “Do not write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.”

22 Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.”

23 When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom.

24 “Let’s not tear it,” they said to one another. “Let’s decide by lot who will get it.”

This happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said,

“They divided my clothes among them

    and cast lots for my garment.”

So this is what the soldiers did.

25 Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” 27 and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

28 Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32 The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. 33 But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,” 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”

38 Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. 39 He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. 40 Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. 41 At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. 42 Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

So this is John’s eyewitness account. He was there in person. He is the disciple that Jesus loved. He’s the one who actually witnessed the spear going into Jesus’ side and blood and water flowing out. He’s telling us all of these details about this moment so that we really would believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, the Creator of the world, and also the Rescuer of the world. 

And he goes person by person. He begins to talk about the different people there. We know Judas, who had betrayed Jesus over to the Pharisees, who then took him before Pilate. 

We now know Pilate has been wrestling with this in chapter 18 and 19. He’s wrestling with the reality of who Jesus is and what to do with Jesus. He’s very conflicted. He can’t find anything wrong with him. He’s trying to set him free. Yet, ultimately he decides to hand him over to their wishes. 

And then you’ve got these soldiers who are putting crowns of thorns on Jesus and putting this robe on him and slapping him and mocking him, who shipped his back, tore it to shreds, trying to get him to confess something. Then, there as he’s hanging on the cross, they’re not really paying attention to what’s going on. Instead they’re trying to just figure out how to get his clothes. 

Then you’ve got Mary, Jesus’ mom, and his aunt, and another Mary, and another Mary. A lot of Marys. And John’s there with them. And they’re watching all of this take place. Hearing about it two thousand years later, they’re sitting there and they’re watching Jesus as blood is dripping from his hands and his feet, knowing that his back is ripped to shreds and is up on that tree. And the only way that he can take a breath is to actually pull himself up to get his chest high enough to take a breath. Because crucifixion was actually something that caused suffocation. Asphixiation is the way people died. That’s why they would break the legs, so they couldn’t push up anymore to take a breath.

And Jesus’ mom is standing there watching this happen to her son, who she knows is a lot more than just her son. Virgin birth. All the times talking with him. All the things that he’s done. And she’s watching him be crucified. Her heart’s broken in many different ways. One because her son’s being killed. But two because she really hoped that he would be able to save his people from the pain of sin and death. She really believed he might have been stronger than the wickedness of humanity. But she’s watching the breath leave him. With one of those painful breaths, he actually speaks out words and says, “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mom,” as he tries to ask John if he would take care of her. And John does that. 

Then you have these other couple of characters. After Jesus is now dead, he’s breathed his last, he’s said, “It is finished.” You have Joseph of Arimathea, who risks a lot, who’s a disciple, yet very afraid, and he goes and asks Pilate if he can take care of the body of Jesus. 

And Nicodemus finds out about this and he joins in, because he also wants to take care of the body of Jesus, as he’s been watching Jesus, as he’s been trying to figure out who Jesus is. And they go and put Jesus’ body in a tomb. They honor Jesus’ body, they care for it in a secretive way. 

When I think about what John is trying to get across here in this chapter, I think about these different people he’s introduced. We see Judas who actually knew the truth about Jesus. If anybody knew the truth about Jesus, it would be Judas. He was there with him for three years, seeing all the things that Jesus did and hearing all the things that Jesus said. Yet Judas, having a front row seat to the Creator of the universe, knew the truth, but loved money more. He knew the truth.  He was face to face with the truth. But there was something in his heart that caused him to be willing to betray Jesus over to the Jews who he knew wanted to kill him, even though he knew the truth. He suppressed the truth because he wanted something else more than the truth. 

Then you have Pilate. Pilate basically is saying, “I find no fault in this person.” The interactions with Pilate, based on what John is telling us has kind of got Pilate going, “I don’t know if I want to miss with this guy.” And we know from another of the gospels that Pilate’s wife actually said, “Have nothing to do with this man. Don’t mess around. I just had a dream.” And there’s all this stuff coming to Pilate to where he now knows the truth about who this person is, or at least knows there is a lot more going on than what he understands, and yet he loved his position more. The sin in his heart caused him to suppress the truth that could have set him free. Ultimately he surrendered and said, “I don’t really want to risk my position.” And he handed Jesus over. 

Then the soldiers. Their response when they were face to face with truth, is they just ignored it. They just cared about themselves. 

And then we have these two at the end, who had been compelled to believe that Jesus was the truth. One became a disciple, but secretly. And though they were believing in Jesus, they continued to kind of stand back and be afraid. 

And so, the story in the scriptures, the story with evidence in human history is that the God of the universe, the Maker and Creator of everything, as John said in the very beginning, “He came into the world, and the world did not receive him.” The sin in the hearts of humanity was so grotesque, so evil, so despicable, so deceived, that we, when face to face with the God, the Maker and Lover of our souls, we shouted, “Crucify him. Crucify him. We don’t want anything to do with him.”

Whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, this is what is still alive in each one of us. The reason that there is all of the pain in the world is because evil has entered into the heart of mankind. Whether the evil shows up as something super grostesque as a crucifixion or just loving your position a little bit more than the truth, or loving money more than the truth. It’s hard for us to weigh out and say one’s bad, one’s not as bad. But it’s all sin. And it all leads to the same thing. 

In the Bible there are four different words in Hebrew for sin, for basically doing wrong:

Khaw-taw is missing the mark. It’s basically this is what you’re supposed to do and you end up going that way or falling short. 

Pesha is transgression, which is a breaking of trust.

Avon is iniquity, which is basically just crookedness. Instead of going in a straight line, you’re going in a crooked line and you’re calling the crooked straight.

Sin is missing the mark and worse. One of the things I was doing the other day, I just got this pellet gun and so we’ve been shooting this pellet gun at these cans. It’s a really powerful pellet gun and we were shooting at these cans and none of us are that good. It’s me and my kids and my nephews and stuff. So we’re shooting at these cans. We’ve got these cans all lined up and we’re trying to make sure the site is right. If the site’s not right you can’t shoot straight. The site’s lined up and we’re still not good at hitting the cans. Even if we were good at hitting the cans, we could line that site up and we could hit the can every time. That would be not missing the mark. That’s righteousness. But what sin is, basically, there’s different layers to this in the word in Hebrew. It’s not only just missing the mark to where your aim is off. You are missing the mark because you’re aiming the wrong way. But it also has this idea of your site is off. So even if you in yourself tried to aim it the right way, your site is off, so you still wouldn’t be able to hit it. It’s the next layer, right? So I’m off. My site is off. This is the condition of the human heart apart from Jesus. I’m off. The site is off. 

But then it gets even worse. Because what happens is, when I’m off long enough, then I start to blame the site. And then if the site’s off long enough, then what happens is I just start to adjust and, this is going to get a little sad here. It didn’t actually happen, but if this did happen, we have these little pigmy goat now. They’re awesome. We have two of them. And we were shooting these cans and then all of a sudden these goats came around the back side of where we were shooting. And so we stopped shooting because we’re not totally horrible. We’ve got Jesus, you know? But the way the Bible tries to help us understand sin is, I’m off. My site is off. Then all of a sudden I start to hit other things and saying that that is what I’m really supposed to hit. That is the true mark of what I’m going after. As if shooting the goat is what you’re supposed to do.

So you see, there are these different layers of sin. There are different depths of depravity that are inside all of us. This is what it is like apart from Christ, whether you acknowledge it or not. You might say, “Well, I’m not that bad.” That’s fine. Maybe you’re holding all of that inside some  sort of manageable to where it doesn’t look that bad. But we know that sin is rampant in our society. 

What the Bible says is it’s a diagnosis of the human heart, that when Adam sinned and then we’re born of the seed of Adam, we’re born with our hearts being off. We can’t even get the aim right. And we actually have our sites off, so even if we did one time get our aim right, we would still miss. But we’ve also twisted things to now say, “Whatever I hit, I will now justify as the thing I was supposed to hit.” It’s a great deception.

Not only is that the reality of what’s going on inside our own bodies missing the mark because we’re off, missing the mark because our sites are off, missing the mark because we start to justify whatever we do hit as the right thing, but our world is full of deceptive ideas that love to play to our disordered desires, and then they’re normalized and celebrated in a sinful society. 

So it’s not just a problem from within, but our whole society is saturated in this same deception, where the devil and the world and the flesh, there are all these deceptive ideas being thrown around. These deceptive ideas sound good to our disordered desires. And then, instead of those things being checked by our society, instead they are celebrated and encouraged, saying, “Yeah. You should do that. You deserve that. Yeah, that won’t be a bad thing. Everybody’s doing it.” And the deception gets a whole other level deep. And a whole other level of disgust.

This guy, Ray Pritchard, says this:

 “First sin deceives us by promising what it can never deliver. Second, sin deceives us by convincing us what happens to others will never happen to us. Third, sin deceives us by creating in us a desire for that which we know can only hurt us.”

We think that we’re getting away with little sins all the time, but what we’re not realizing is those little sins are actually changing our heart a little each time, a little each time. And, again, how do I know this? Not just because the Bible says so. Because you can look at the sociological ramifications and statistics in our society. There is something deeply, deeply wrong. 

No one gets married and says, “I’m probably going to get divorced.” But little by little by little by little that becomes the only way out. 

No one as a little kid gets up and says, “I’m excited about killing someone some day.” But little by little by little by little they find themselves murdering someone.

No one grows up and says, “I’m going to abuse my children some day.” But little by little by little by little the deception takes root. The deception grows and next thing we know, we have humanity shouting, “Crucify him. Crucify him. Crucify him” to their only real hope. 

We have a very serious problem and to say that sin is not a big deal, to say that sin is not rampant in our world, to just kind of minimize it, is to minimize the cross, but it’s also to minimize the problem. 

So first of all, how do we escape the deception of sin? I mean, the Bible says that the devil shows up as an angel of light. How are you supposed to know it’s the devil when it’s an angel of light? There’s pleasure in sin, the Bible says. The Bible’s not foolish about it. There is pleasure in sin. How is it supposed to be wrong when there’s pleasure in it? But that pleasure, there’s pleasure in sin for a season but then comes destruction. It’s very deceptive. It’s very challenging.

So how can we escape deception and sin? First of all, the cross. Jesus died on the cross to set us free from sin. His death on the cross breaks the power of sin. It gives us the chance of being able to get free from the bondage of sin. His blood can wash us and cleanse us. 

The second thing: Jesus died on the cross so we could be forgiven of our sin. Even though sometimes we get the power of sin broken over us as believers who receive the cross, we sometimes fall into the same deceptions. But then Jesus gives us forgiveness. So the cross really is the answer. The cross is the most important thing. If you have not really come to terms with the cross, if you have not received the work that Jesus has done for you on the cross, you are still in bondage to sin, you are not free from it and your sins are not forgiven.

But when you say, “Jesus, I’m sorry for my sin. I need you as my Savior,” you are now free from the power of sin over your life and you are now forgiven for every sin that you have done, you are doing, or you will do. That’s what the cross can do. That’s what the cross is all about. That’s why the cross is such good news. Because Jesus didn’t stay in that tomb. He rose again and he wants to give us new life.

But then, as we’re walking in this newness from the cross, as we’ve stepped from death to life, as we’ve stepped from darkness to light because of receiving what Jesus did on the cross, there are four things I just want to bring up real quick as we close that will help us with our battle with deception, with our battle with sin.

First of all, the first thing we can do is rest assured. I loved what we sang today, But I’ll rest in the promises of God. Matthew 24:24 says this:

For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.

So here, what Jesus is saying is there is going to be so much deception, so much powerful deception that will rise in the world, false Christs, false prophets that will come, that they’re going to be very deceptive, but they will not be able to deceive the elect. Who are the elect? The elect are those who have received what Jesus did on the cross and have been filled with his Spirit as they’re going forward in life.

So there’s a promise that Jesus is like, “You’re not alone in this. I’m going to hold you. I’m going to make sure that you will not be deceived. I’m going to be whispering in your ear. I’m going to be showing the deception for what it was. I’m going to be guiding you, if you’ll receive me.”

The second thing we can do is remain in the truth. 2 Thessalonians 2:9 says this:

the coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie 12 and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

So here he says we need to love the truth. We need to believe the truth. As Jesus said in John 15, we need to remain in the truth. How do you do that? You just spend every day taking in the word of God, both in silence as you listen to what his voice might be speaking to you, but also in the scriptures that have been given to us. You just allow that stuff to wash over you, wash over your mind, cleanse you, be stronger than the voices outside. You remain in the truth.

The third thing, we can encourage one another. This is interesting that this is important in our dealing with deception. Absolutely. 

13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

We’ve got to encourage one another. We’ve got to get into each other’s lives. So that one of us begins to swerve off, “What are you doing over there, man? Come back over here. Why you shooting at those goats? Come on man, it’s the cans. We’re going for the cans. Let me adjust your site a little bit. It looks like you’re shooting off a little bit.”

That’s what church is supposed to be. That’s what life groups are for. Take advantage of this opportunity. That’s what friendships are. You’ve got to reach out. You say, “It’s hard.” Who cares? Get over the obstacles. Press in. Press through. If they’re being a jerk, tell me. I’ll go yell at them. 

We’ve got to get into each other’s lives. Especially as our world, even right now, is so much more distanced. It is harder. Yes. I understand that. But it’s all the more important. Otherwise we’re going to find ourselves, and this is so creepy,” you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Your heart will be hardened little by little until all of a sudden you don’t even realize what you’re doing. You don’t even realize what you’re doing. That’s what’s so dangerous about sin.

The fourth thing, we need to rejoice when we feel conviction. What? Yes. Yes. Because conviction is a sign that the Spirit lives inside you. That the filtering has begun. We talked about it a few weeks ago. 

In 2 Corinthians 7:9, Paul says:

9 yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us.

So it’s kind of fostering that sensitivity. It’s being so in tune with, “Oh, Lord. That’s not right. Something’s not right in what they’re saying. Something’s not right in what I’m saying. Something’s not right about this place that I’m in.”

There’s a sensitivity that is fostered. You can rejoice whenever that happens instead of hating that. Instead of fighting against that, rejoice when you feel that conviction and go with it. Respond to it. Be quick to respond to it. 

Pilate was getting that conviction. He was having that thing, “Something’s not right about all of this.” But at the end of the day he said, “Oh, well.” And he handed Jesus over to be crucified.

And for us, as we continue to navigate our crazy time, I really want us to be people that are aware of the dangers and the deception of sin. Don’t think you’re above it. Don’t think you’re past it. But then, also be so aware of the power of the cross, that it can actually set us free. We are no longer in bondage. That’s what happens. Eventually, as you continue to go in sin, you become in bondage to it. It owns you. It’s on your back. What Jesus did on the cross is he allowed his blood to flow and so he breaks the power of sin over us. So that we can actually go a different way. But then he also gives us the forgiveness that we need to wash us clean as we make mistakes going forward. 

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7000 N Central Avenue ∙ Phoenix AZ 85020 ∙ 602-957-7500 ∙ https://www.livingstreams.org

Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

The Practice of Hospitality

David Stockton
Series: Church Around the Table

We’ve been trying to unpack this concept of Church Around the Table. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about Jesus, which is a good thing. We talked about Jesus’ Last Supper and what was really going on in that moment. We are trying to get into us as Jesus’ followers 2,000 years later what Jesus was trying to get into his disciples in that last culmination meal with them, those last few hours he had with them.

We’ve been taking it really seriously and diving in. And we are going to continue doing that a little bit today. But today will be a little different. I’m trying to just make sure we don’t get all this stuff in our heads, but we’re going to have some pauses in our time together. I’m hoping that stuff will get distilled down into our hearts a little more today. So this might be a little bit slower. If you fall asleep, that’s okay, we’ll just go straight to your heart. We don’t need your brain anyway.

We’ve shared some concepts in this regard. We’ve shared some inspiring stories. But what I’ve been praying is that God will help you understand how this applies to you in your daily routine. There’s this phrase: What would Jesus do? It’s a good phrase; but one of my friends says it’s totally insufficient and actually a really heavy burden if we just leave the question like that. He says the true questions is: What would Jesus do if he were me, and he lived in the context that I live in today? It’s a little longer thought process, but it’s more valid. Because you are you and you are facing the things you face. You have the job you have and the calendar you have. 

I want us to figure out what it could mean for you. At the end of this thing, I’m going to pray that Jesus would just show us what the next step is, because we are following him. He is leading us from being one thing to something much greater. It’s just one step at a time. So we’re going to try to do a little bit of that in our message today.

Luke 4 is where Jesus comes on the scene and he sits in the synagogue with all the other believers at that time. At one point he is called to the front and he’s given a passage from Isaiah and he reads it:

18 
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And then he sits down and says, 

21 …“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

He’s basically saying, “From now on you can judge everything in my life based on this criteria. This is what the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to do. Proclaim good news to the poor. Set the oppressed free, to heal people, to help people, and to let them know how much God loves them, that his favor rests on them.”

That’s what he said. And then, a little later on, John the Baptist—who was Jesus’ cousin—was trying to figure out, “Jesus, are you really the whole thing? Or are you just part of it?” 

And Jesus said to him, “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who doesn’t stumble on account of me.”

Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim good news to the poor and to heal people.” And then, later on, John the Baptist was saying, “Jesus, is it really you?”

And Jesus said—same test—“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim good news to the poor and to help and heal people. And if you’re seeing these happen you know the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”

Then, as we get to that Last Supper, Jesus is basically saying to his disciples—in John 13; he washes their feet, John 14, 15, 16, is the discussion they had in that time, recorded for us. Jesus is saying, “The same Spirit that is on me is going to be on you. Therefore, the same measurements are going to be applied to you.” 

The Spirit that is upon Jesus caused Jesus to walk in the way that he did. And the same Spirit now rests on us, thanks to the resurrection. And so the Spirit of the Lord is upon you and me to do what? To proclaim good news to the poor, and to help and heal people. That’s the transfer that was taking place in that moment. We’ve talked about that, leading up to this.

As we’ve gone through, we’ve talked a lot about the life of Jesus showing up. We’ve talked about a lot of giving body and blood and washing people. But this one phrase is constantly jumping out at me, saying, “Don’t forget me.” And I go on to the next one and, “Don’t forget me.” Because when we talk about Jesus, we have to remember that, one of the main things that he was about was proclaiming good news to the poor. Proclaiming good news to the poor. So, if you want to follow Jesus, then one of the things that should show up in your life, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis—however you measure your life: proclaiming good news to the poor. That’s what it means to have Church Around a Table. To proclaim good news to the poor.

So we’re going to unpack that a little bit; because, obviously, good news is kind of a funny word, and poor can be defined in a lot of different ways. First of all, let’s define the word poor. Matthew 25:31-40 in the Message translation (MSG):

31-33 “When he finally arrives, blazing in beauty and all his angels with him, the Son of Man will take his place on his glorious throne. Then all the nations will be arranged before him and he will sort the people out, much as a shepherd sorts out sheep and goats, putting sheep to his right and goats to his left.

34-36 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Enter, you who are blessed by my Father! Take what’s coming to you in this kingdom. It’s been ready for you since the world’s foundation. And here’s why:

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.’

37-40 “Then those ‘sheep’ are going to say, ‘Master, what are you talking about? When did we ever see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and give you a drink? And when did we ever see you sick or in prison and come to you?’ Then the King… 

The Lord, as Allan Meyer talked about last week. The Lord of all.

…will say, ‘I’m telling the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.’”

So, in this definition, the poor would be those who are overlooked and ignored. I married a lady fifteen years ago, in Brittany, she’s my wife. I live with her still today after fifteen years, which I guess is progress, something to celebrate in our world. But I live with her and I link my life with her. Prior to marrying her, I was not married to her for twenty-seven years. Seventeen of those years, I really, really loved myself. I thought a lot about myself and I considered myself more highly than I ought. I was just absorbed with myself. I really was. I thought I was great and if everything was going my way then everyone should be happy. And if they weren’t, I didn’t even know, because I didn’t think about them at all. It’s true. Just very arrogant, prideful, selfish, self-absorbed. 

Then, at seventeen, Jesus started messing with my life. He started to say that he wanted to do a work in my life. I thought, Cool. You want to care about me? Well, I care about me, you care about me, this is going to be great. I’ve got God now thinking about me, and what I want, and how important it is. 

But it didn’t happen that way. He actually saved me. When I talk about the salvation that Jesus brought into my life, yes, it’s true, he saved me forevermore. Yes, it’s true, he saved me from living a life not knowing my Maker, knowing my Father. He saved me from so many things that I didn’t know about; but, in that moment, he saved me from my selfishness and pride. And he started to all of a sudden make me care about other people. It was a radical thing for me. I really did, I started to care more about other people and the stuff they were going through than even the stuff I was going through. 

I don’t get it right all of the time. But that was really important because then I got married. And I married someone who also cared about herself and not me. We kind of had this tug-o-war, where all of a sudden I had to care about her all of the time. She had feelings about everything all of the time. I didn’t have much space in my life for all of her feelings about what she was going through; because I had all my feelings about what I was going through. 

So that was a big trip, and in some ways I would say she saved me again. God was saying, “Okay, David, it’s not working just me and you. I’m going to bring Brittany.”  And Brittany is strong and powerful and she won’t put up with crap. I remember her just sticking up to it, and me having to adjust. It’s been an awesome thing.

All of that is to say that Brittany is someone who cares for the overlooked and ignored. She has taught me this in such amazing ways. And it’s funny because, sometimes it comes out where she doesn’t really care that much for people who aren’t overlooked and ignored. If you’re someone who’s not overlooked and ignored, sometimes you’ll be like, “I don’t know how she feels about me.” Just keep it there. Who knows? She doesn’t hate you or anything. Her life is just so driven towards the overlooked and ignored. She loves them and cares for them. I always describe my wife as, she’s like the real Peter Pan. She’s just looking for lost boys so she can teach them how to fly. It is absolutely true. I’ve seen it over and over and over again. 

I feel like God has been constantly trying to teach me these lessons. What I’m sharing with you today is just from the deepest parts of me. I’m wrestling with this all of the time because I’m so prone against it, but I’m so in love with what Jesus is trying to teach me. And Jesus has been teaching me for years. He’s a great teacher, and I’m going to try to jam it all in and I’m not that great. So just bear with me on this. I’m going to try to give us some pictures, trying to distill this for how this can be expressed in your life.

I married Brittany, and we ended up building this house together. We moved in about 30 months ago, so we were building it before then. I remember her praying that this house would not just be used for us, but that it would also be used for others. I didn’t really know what she was talking about and didn’t care that much about it at that time. I just thought, “Whatever, as long as we get to live there it will be better than living in this master bedroom with all five of us.” 

Just last week I woke up to lots of barking dogs, because we have a lot of them. And I was thinking about our situation. I remembered her prayer. Because, right now we live in this house with our three daughters, which is a lot of her fault, some of my fault but a lot of her fault. So there’s all of us living in the house now. We also live with two foster boys, which was a dream and a prayer of hers all of her life (and it became one for me, too). We also live with her mom. Her mom’s cool, so there’s no problem there. And then we also live with her sister, and she has a husband and they have five kids. Okay. You know? They have two dogs, the mom has two dogs, and we have two dogs. That’s not that abnormal, but that’s six dogs when you bring them all together.

And this guy, he’s working with the kids upstairs. I could understand if you don’t feel comfortable with this, but this kid is nineteen years old. He lived in California. And for some reason, he wanted to move in with us. He’s been with us a few months now. I’m trying to find something wrong with his brain. But he wanted to move in with us. So he lives in this little garage side room thing at the kibbutz that we call home. He’s loving it.

We have a chicken. We used to have eight, but we have coyotes that come around, so we’re down to one. It’s not funny. We also had a goat at one point. And to describe my wife even more—somewhere in Phoenix there was a goat that was born to a mama goat and the mama goat rejected the baby goat. Which is sad, right? And the person who was there to witness that, for some reason in her mind thought, “I should call Brittany.” I still have no idea how that happened; but all I know is this goat was overlooked and ignored, literally, and this person said, “I’m going to call Brittany.” 

And I came home one time and there’s a little baby pigmy goat. For the next two weeks, every two hours, the goat needed to be fed. So all throughout the night, “Here you go, baby goat.” So God is just laughing at how self-centered, self-absorbed and prideful I am, and here I am, years later, at 3:00 a.m, feeding a baby goat a bottle inside my house. And loving every minute of it. Not true. Loving when I’m in the right mind, ever minute of it.

I’m not saying that this is what the Lord’s calling us to. Please. Do you hear me? Do not do this! Do not do this. But God has led me step by step on a journey to where now I can check off some these. Somehow I’m learning and I have to rely on the grace of the Lord. We have to take breaks from time to time.

We were sitting with our daughters last Sunday night and they’re saying, “Hey, you know. Whenever this works out this way, can we just take a break for a little bit?” I was telling them, in thirty months of living in this house, twenty-six months we’ve had someone living with us. That’s only four months of building this house and getting to enjoy it just ourselves. And then I told my wife to stop praying. No, I didn’t. I didn’t say that. Thought it. But didn’t say it. 

Caring for the overlooked and ignored, even baby goats sometimes. 

Isaiah 58 (MSG) is the Old Testament perspective, but it’s kind of saying the same thing:

6-9 
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:

So the people were fasting with no food and thinking that God was so pleased with them because they weren’t eating. And God was saying, “Look, if you want to know what really is important to me, it’s not that you don’t eat food, it’s this:

    …to break the chains of injustice,
    get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
    free the oppressed,
    cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
    sharing your food with the hungry,
    inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
   putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
    being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on,
    and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
    The God of glory will secure your passage.
Then when you pray, God will answer.
    You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

So in this passage, “care for the poor,” is care for the exploited, the oppressed, the hungry, the homeless, the cold, the in-debt, and also those maybe in your household that are overlooked or ignored or neglected, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. 

So what we’re going to do right now is to be quiet for about forty seconds. And I just want to see if God might be able to bring to mind someone in your life that could be described as overlooked, neglected, or any of these other things; and for you to take a mental note of what God might be speaking to you. Maybe someone’s already come to mind. That’s fine. Just begin to pray for the person and begin to ask God, “What can I do?”

I pray Lord, that we really would hear from you. Amen.

So now that we’ve described who the poor might be, I want to talk about how do we present good news to those people? Is there some way we can learn what might be a first step or a simple step—or start the creative process between the Spirit of God and you, and maybe your wife, or your roommates, or whatever, how we can begin to walk this out. 

Hebrews 12:18-24 (TPT) is going to be the beginning of diving into this. We’re going to take some more distilling moments as we go through this, as well. This is good stuff right here. You should read this every day, or at least every time you’re sad. 

18 For we are not coming, as Moses did, to a physical mountain with its burning fire, thick clouds of darkness and gloom, and with a raging whirlwind. 19 We are not those who are being warned by the jarring blast of a trumpet and the thundering voice; the fearful voice that they begged to be silenced… 

This is the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament harkening back to the library of Scripture where we learn that Moses was out at this mountain called Sinai one time, and God came near to the people of Israel. He came as this big fiery cloud that sat on the mountain, and he spoke in this powerful, thunderous voice out of the cloud and spoke to the people. And all the people were like, “Ahhhh! This is freaky!” 

And God was saying, “Come up to me. Come up here.” And the people were like, “No! Moses, why don’t you go up there, because it’s scary up there.” And then Moses went up there, and we learn in Exodus 33 and 34 that Moses had this deep, intimate, powerful moment with God. For forty days he was with God experiencing the love, compassion and kindness of God, in the midst of all the power and wonder that was taking place.

So he’s saying “We’re not this, where we need to be afraid. What we have come to is this:

22 …we have already come near to God in a totally different realm, the Zion-realm, for we have entered the city of the Living God, which is the New Jerusalem in heaven! We have joined the festal gathering of myriads of angels in their joyous celebration!

This is what heaven is like. God is not super concerned about the election cycle that is happening. Heaven is not going, “Oh, yi yi yi.” I know we are. But right now, in heaven, the holiness of God is being celebrated because nothing on earth could never change that.

23 And as members of the church of the Firstborn [Jesus] all our names have been legally registered as citizens of heaven! And we have come before God who judges all, and who lives among the spirits of the righteous who have been made perfect in his eyes!

We are being made perfect in his eyes. Yes! And then this:

24 And we have come to Jesus… 

Not to that scary mountain. We’ve come to Jesus.

…who established a new covenant with his blood sprinkled upon the mercy seat; blood that continues to speak from heaven, “forgiveness,” a better message than Abel’s blood that cries from the earth, “justice.”

So how do we preach good news to the poor? We’re able to come to them and speak out a message of forgiveness. Forgiveness instead of justice. Contrasting that Mount Sinai mountain with all that power, we have the babe of Bethlehem, that was born into this world soft and kind. And then he walked among us, not with heaviness. Full power though, but the power was not to condemn. The power was not to provoke. The power was not to hurt or punish. The power was to heal and to forgive. 

In Isaiah, it speaks of Jesus. It says “as a smoldering wick he would never put out and a bruised reed he would never break. He came with a softness and lightness and a kindness to the poor—whether they were poor in their relationship with God, poor financially, poor physically, poor in their righteousness. Whatever they were poor in, he would come around them with kindness and a message of forgiveness. It wasn’t a forgiveness that forsook justice. It was a forgiveness that was born out of him laying down his life to produce justice.

In that moment when he took on all the sins of all humanity—the most disgusting, horrific, murderous, raping sins—he took them on his body. Out of that came a message of “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Preaching good news to the poor is coming around the poor. They already know that they’ve failed. They are already wallowing in their own shame and guilt. They don’t need us to point it out. They need us to come and show them a path of forgiveness. 

There are these two books that have taught me a lot along these lines. One is called Tattoos on the Heart. It’s a Jesuit priest. If you want to check it out later, the story is amazing, the writing is beautiful. In it, he says, 

“Here is what we seek: A compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”

I would add just one little phrase:

And then we should lend our own shoulder to carry the burden for a while.

Because, as we go to approach the poor, which we know Jesus wants us to do, the Spirit of God is upon us to that end. We shouldn’t look at the poor and see them in their sinfulness, see them in their poverty, see the bad decisions they made, the way that they’re carrying themselves, the way that they are speaking out. We have to come to them and not judge them. God’s the judge.

We come to them and we provide forgiveness. We come to them and we stand with them in their poverty. Instead of saying, “Wow. Look at all that heaviness all over you. You’re not carrying it right, you should carry it like this;” we just say, “Hey. Do you want me to carry a little of that on my shoulder for a while? Let’s walk together.” This is what it means to preach good news to the poor.

There’s this phrase I’ve been chewing on: “Empathy must be stronger than condescension.” 

I’m a master at condescension. I am. I’m awesome at it. Always have been. I have to fight it all the time. I’m so good at it. I can just see it coming. It’s something the Lord is constantly having to work on in my life. It’s something that I basically have a limp that I’ve had to learn to limp with, and make sure I don’t live into it. The opposite of condescension is empathy. Empathy is foreign to me. Empathy in the sense of being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes to feel what they feel from their point of view. 

Just last night one of my kids was having a real pathetic moment. And I was just like, “I don’t want to feel what you’re feeling, because you’re crying and moaning and groaning and whining. I want you to feel what I’m feeling.” But that wasn’t true because I was actually starting to get stressed because I was like, “I’ve got to preach tomorrow and I’ve got to get my message together and you’re over here moaning and groaning.”

And I just felt like the Lord was saying, “Go there!” I was like, “Argh!” And I did a horrible job of it. But I tried. I just sat on the bed and said, “All right. Tell me what’s going on.”

“You don’t care.”

Already? I haven’t even started! “I want to hear what’s going on.” It’s crazy. 

Here’s a few more things to finish. This comes from a different book called The Gospel Comes With a House Key. That’s pretty good. In this book, this former lesbian, now follower of Christ, Rosaria Butterfield, is describing some of her experiences with something she calls radically ordinary hospitality. This is good stuff. These are meaty, so you’ve got to buck up. Everybody sit up straighter a little bit—if you need to stretch a little bit. We’ve got some long phrases here, but it’s the distilling process.

“Living out radically ordinary Christian hospitality means knowing that your relationship with others must be as strong as your words. The balance cannot tip here. Having strong words and a weak relationship with your neighbor is violent. It captures the violent carelessness of our social media-infused age. That is not how neighbors talk with each other. That is not how image bearers of the same God relate to one another. Radically ordinary hospitality values the time it takes to invest in relationships, build bridges, repent of sins of the past, to reconcile. Bridge building and remaking friendships cannot be rushed.”

“Just get better.” “Stop feeling what you’re feeling.” No! But taking the time. Here’s another one:

She’s describing the first moment she encountered what she called radically ordinary Christian hospitality: 

“I breathed hard and hoisted myself out of my truck, nursing a tender hamstring from my morning run. I waded through the unusually thick July humidity to the front door of these Christians and I knocked. The threshold to their life was like none other. The threshold to their life brought me to the foot of the cross.”

Hallelujah, right?

“Nothing about that night unfolded according to my confident script. Nothing happened in the way I expected. Not that night or the years after, or the hundreds of meals we had together, or the long nights of Psalm singing and prayer, as other believers from he church and university walked through the doors of this house as if there was no door. Nothing prepared me for this openness and truth. Nothing prepared me for the unstoppable gospel and for the love of Jesus made manifest by the daily practices of hospitality undertaken in this one simple Christian home. Long before I ever walked to the doors of the church, the Smith home was the place where I wrestled with the Bible, with the reality that Jesus is who he says he is and eventually came face-to-face with him on the glittering knife’s edge of my choice sexual sin.”

Way to go, Smiths! Way to go, Smiths! Way to go, Smiths! And the last one:

Radically ordinary hospitality describes those who see strangers as family and neighbors as the family of God. They recoil at reducing a person to a category or label. They see God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth. They know that they are like meth addicts and sex trade workers, they take their own sins seriously, especially the sins of selfishness and pride.

They take God’s holiness and goodness seriously. They use the Bible as a lifeline with no exceptions. They practice radically ordinary hospitality. Those who practice radically ordinary hospitality do not see their homes as their own, but as God’s gift for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. They open doors. They seek out the underpriveleged. They know that the Gospel comes with a house key.

And one last thing from Acts 28 (MSG) as we close:

30-31 Paul lived for two years in his rented house. He welcomed everyone who came to visit. He urgently presented all matters of the kingdom of God. He explained everything about Jesus Christ. His door was always open.

Again, I’m not telling you to do something specific here. I’m just saying that we’ve got to begin to understand what this means to live out radically ordinary hospitality. To live out the love of Christ in this world. To proclaim good news to the poor.

Let’s pray:

Jesus, I do pray in this moment that you would continue to distill some of this. Not only would you bring to mind the people that you have given to us, that you are putting on our radar, that you are assigning to us, just like you assign people to Jesus. But Lord, I pray that you would also stir in us some creativity of how we could begin to be hospitable, be empathetic, be compassionate—not just concerned, but compassionate. And you’d help us know that it’s going to take time. There’s no quick, easy way to do this. 

I wrote this during the music time during first service. I just want to share it, in case it applies to some of you. Not only are we called to do this, but the beauty is that Jesus has done this for us. He left glory to come and enter into our pathetic state, and to feel our pain.

“The blood of Abel and all the others cut off by the knife of sin or burned by the fires of injustice cries out because the guilty are left unpunished and wrongs are not made right. But in Christ crucified, forgiveness and justice happen. All the wrongs are made right by the forgiveness and healing released by Jesus’ sacrificial love. You might think today that no one cares about you or loves you or whatever sacrifice for you, but the scars in Jesus’ hands and feet speak a different word. 

There will come a day when you and I will see those scars. The Bible teaches we will see Jesus as a Lamb who has been slain. But you can feel his love today and forgiveness and healing can start right now.”

Jesus, please come close to those who don’t know you. Lord, please, for those who are willing to admit that they are poor in their relationship with you, they are poor in righteousness, they are poor in so many ways, I pray that right now they would cry out to you and you would answer with the full weight of your love and salvation would come. And they would become new creations, robed in your righteousness, and they would really know what forgiveness is. I pray this in your name. Amen.

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture marked MSG is taken from The Message (MSG) Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson

Scripture marked TPT is taken from The Passion Translation®. Copyright © 2017 by BroadStreet Publishing® Group, LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved. thePassionTranslation.com