Transcript
Well, we're going to be in Matthew chapter nine, verse 35 through chapter 10, verse 15. This is a bigger section, and so we're going to spend the next two weeks, maybe even three weeks in this section because there's a lot of really important principles that we can apply to our own lives as we're talking and thinking about what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus. So this morning, we'll probably just make it through the end of chapter nine. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about 10, but it's really a unit that belongs together. If you're new to the Bible and new with us, this is kind of the material that we've covered because we're in the book of Matthew, and Matthew tells the story of Jesus when Jesus was born, Jesus and both John the Baptist birth, and then we looked at John's ministry where he's baptizing all of Israel.
The Jews are coming to John to be baptized, and the role that he plays is to prepare the nation's heart for Jesus. The anointed one, the Messiah. Messiah is like the concept of both Royal King and priest and Superman all wrapped together. And if you were Jewish at the time of Jesus, you were anticipating this Messiah. Moses had talked about it. It was there even in Genesis chapter three, there's David talked about his son, one of his offspring being this Messiah. So if you're Jewish, you're like prime. You're waiting for the Messiah. And God sent John as a prophet to prepare the way. And it was cool because there was this act that you would do to really say, okay, I'm on board with God's plan. I'm going to get baptized by John to just say to God, God, here I am. I'm ready for a new fresh start in my life.
And maybe some of you are at that point where you're not ready with Jesus yet, but you're ready for a new spiritual work where you're like, man, I know what it's like to do life my way and I'm ready to turn my life over to Jesus. So John's baptizing and then John baptizes Jesus. And there's this really cool scene at the end of Jesus's baptism where there's this dove that comes down and lands on Jesus. It's the form of a dove, but this is the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. And then there's this voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. So we have there, God, the Father speaking from heaven. We have the spirit coming upon Jesus, the Son, right? So Father, son and the Holy Spirit in that scene. But Jesus doesn't just become the king of the world at that point.
What happens? Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he's fasting. He doesn't eat for 40 days and the devil tempts him in the wilderness. Now again, if you're a Bible scholar, 40 days, and there's another group that was for 40 years in the wilderness who was in the wilderness for 40 years, Moses and the children of Israel, the Jews, how did they do when they faced temptation and they were tested in the wilderness 10 times they failed. Now, mind you, God poured 10 plagues on Egypt through Moses onto Pharaoh. All of those people witnessed those plagues, went out into the wilderness, were tested by God, they failed 10 times, and yet God still kept him as his people, a loving God, a gracious God who's got a plan. So Jesus comes as a better Jew. He goes into the wilderness, tempted for 40 days, doesn't eat, and he does not give in to temptation.
Isn't that crazy? So we saw that scene. So after Jesus comes out of the wilderness, he does this ministry. We're in, this is chapter four of Matthew. Jesus is all around this northern area of Israel called Galilee. There's fishing villages up there. There's like common folk, right? Kind of like us. Nobody, not many of you came rolling in some fancy car, right? We're kind of common people, right? Blue collar, that's what Galilee is. There's all these little places up there and Jesus is doing this ministry of healing and preaching. And then we got to the Sermon on the Mount, and the sermon on the mount was chapter five, six and seven, and it's Jesus talking about the kingdom, the kingdom. And that's what's important for you to understand as we kind of progress through Matthew, that the good news, the gospel is about Jesus's kingdom.
Jesus is the king and he's inviting you into this kingdom, not just it's to say that you're invited into a personal relationship with Jesus is true, but that's not it. That's not the only thing. There's so much more you're actually invited into a new society where Jesus explains, here's what righteousness looks like. Here's how you do spirituality. Here's who's welcome in my kingdom. And it's an upside down kingdom where the last or first and the first or last, and God's looking at the hearts of people and he's saying the blessed ones are the ones who are the downcast and the down and out and those who mourn. So that's the sermon on the mountain. Now after the sermon on the mountain ends, we have chapters eight and nine. We're in nine today, chapters eight and nine is nine different miracle scenes where Jesus is healing people or he is calming the waters and he's demonstrating his power.
But it's not just sequential, nine miracles. There's these other vignettes, these other scenes where Jesus is teaching about, okay, you want to be in the kingdom and follow me. Here's what that looks like. Here's what it means to be a follower of me. Yes, David. Number 10 next week, but a little bit today, we're actually going to read 10 in just a second here. Yeah, so you have these nine miracle scenes. We have these teachings on discipleship and we are now coming into a new section. The important thing for you to understand this morning is that we've spent probably a month and a half kind of just amazed at the power of Jesus that here's a man, a common man, not a king, not a powerful religious leader. What looked like a common man named Jesus, grew up in Nazareth, a no man's land, town was a carpenter, and he's raising the dead and he's healing people of leprosy and he's calming the storms and he's casting out demons.
It's mind blowing that he has this kind of authority. So let's read starting in verse 35 together. He says this, Jesus continued going around to all the towns and the villages teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he felt compassion for them because they were distressed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest, summoning his 12 disciples. He gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to heal every disease and sickness. These are the names of the 12 apostles, one Simon, who is called Peter and Andrew, his brother James, the son of Zeb and John, his brother, Philip and Bartholomew Thomas and Matthew, the tax collector James, the son of Alpheus and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
Jesus sent these 12 after giving them instructions. Don't take the road that leaves to the Gentiles and don't enter any Samaritan town. Instead, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel as you go. Proclaim the kingdom of heaven has come near. Heal the sick, raise the dead. Cleanse those with leprosy. Drive out demons freely you received, freely give. Don't acquire gold, silver, or copper for your money belts. I think that's a fanny pack. Don't take a traveling bag for the road or an extra shirt, sandals, or a staff for the worker is worthy of his food. When you enter any town or village, find out who is worthy and stay there until you leave. Greet a house when you enter it, and if the household is worthy, let your peace be on it. But if it is unworthy, let your peace return to you.
If anyone does not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that house or town, truly, I tell you, it will be more tolerable in the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. Let's pray together. Lord, thank you for your word. We ask that you would teach us through the Bible this morning. You've made us to be spiritual. You've designed us to have a relationship, not just a relationship, but a friendship with you. You designed us to be filled with your spirit. And Lord, we pray that you would unite us with yourself this morning that you would overrule our distraction, overrule the things going on in our hearts. Allow us to just receive from you. We want to be followers of you. We want to learn from this text this morning, so we give you our ears.
We want to hear and we want to say yes as soon as you speak to us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So let's look at this text together. We're going to start in verse 35. He says, it says, Jesus continued going around to all the towns and the villages. Now remember, he's still in the region of Galilee. Maybe your Bible has a map in the back, or you could pop open your maps app and it'll show you see if Galilee, it's still there. There's still little villages all around that area. You could go to 'em today. And so Jesus is going around to these Townsend villages and he's teaching in their synagogues. A synagogue is like a community center for Jewish people in these little towns. This is where on the Sabbath day you would go and you would get some teaching. Your kids would be taught in the law. It was a gathering place for worship. It's not the temple. It's different from the temple. It's kind of like a church or a community center for Jewish people in each of these little villages. And what Jesus is doing there is that he's preaching the good news that you could put in there. This is evangelian. It's kind of like your name, right? It's, it's literally the same root word. He's doing evangelism, but it's the word that we get gospel from. He's telling them the good news. He's not singing like he's in a choir.
He is telling the good news of the kingdom and he's healing every disease and sickness. Now, for all of you Bible scholars that have been with us since chapter four, I want to show you something cool. And if you've been here, you know that I'm trying to teach you to be able to study your Bible on your own and get stuff from it. And so here's one of the things that I noticed as soon as I jumped into this text was, wait a second. I actually thought I printed out the wrong Bible verse when I was reading this because I'm like, I taught this already is no, actually, when you go back to Matthew four, it's actually almost the exact same statement. So chapter four is right after the wilderness, Jesus comes out of the wilderness temptation and Jesus is in Galilee and he is doing this very thing.
So Matthew, as he's telling the story of Jesus, he's doing what we would call bracketing or this is a literary technique to really kind of grab your attention. So you would say, oh, I heard that already. I heard that already. And what happened in Matthew 4 23 was the Sermon on the Mount and there was some significant teaching that unfolded. And so if you think from going from Matthew 4 23 all the way up to 9 35, what we've seen is teaching, and then Jesus operating with his power and talking about his authority. Now, what's going to happen after 9 35 in chapter 10 is you're going to see, and we read it a second ago, Jesus takes these followers that have been going around with them. There's 12 of them, and he is going to give them authority to go and do this very thing. So the reason why Matthew is he doesn't have the ability to give you a bookmark or do something like we would do maybe digitally.
He's a literary technique, so that you go, wait, I read that already. Because he wants you to kind of all of a sudden snap to attention and go, oh, what's going to happen next? Are you ready to see what's going to happen next? Let's just look at this before we actually read what's going to happen next. Let's just see the activities for a second that Jesus is doing here. We see that he is moving around these different villages, and he is teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news and healing every disease in sickness. I said this when we looked at 4 23. I'll say it again, how many, just guess for me, just throw out a number. How many people do you think if it's said in eight, one large crowds followed him, and here it says that he's going from village to village? How many people do you think are hearing this message? 10. You think 10 I think more because there's multiple how many? Hundreds, right? Thousands. Probably thousands. Yeah. I would think probably thousands of people are witnessing Jesus healing people, casting out demons. This is quite a scene that's happening now.
Miracles got to crucify.
Yeah. Yeah, they did. And we're going to get into that. This chapter 10, we go 10 and 11, it's going to get these religious leaders more and more upset. But the common people who are not the religious leaders, they're soaking it up. They're taking it in. They're like, whoa, this is crazy. This guy, Jesus who's healing people. So Jesus is about to give authority and power to his followers, but before we get that, we see
Power authority. What do you mean by authorities?
Yeah.
I could touch Matthew's road to be healed like
Jesus. Yeah, yeah. That's what it's a miracle
Worker. He was like, Jesus, then all strong does.
Yes, but we're going to get interior
For him to pick them. Why these people? All people.
Yes. Next week. You got to save that one. Until next week. I'm not going to get to that one next week. But there is a criteria that's really important because one fails, and so the early church has to decide what's the criteria? How do we find that next guy? Right? So can you save that question? Because in Luke, he talks a little bit about it too. I don't have time. I only have 16 minutes left this morning from according to my timer. But that is an important question. And what, because you have apostles and then you have disciples. We often call these 12 disciples, but actually they're the apostles. Why
Wasn't there a woman picked?
Thank you. Yes. There were a
Lot of women followers too.
Why wasn't one? Do I have to cover that next week? Please do. Okay. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I know. Now you're, you're going to double the ons. You're a man. That's right. Yes.
Talk about men all the time in the Bible, but not women.
I know, I will. Loretta wants to hear that sermon too. It's coming. Those are fair questions. Can you keep those written down? Yeah. Where are the women apostles?
Mary Magdalene should have been one picked definitely. She followed into the very end and got no reward for
That. Oh, she did. She did. I got this. I got you. I got you. Keep that angst for one more week. Hold on to that. Hold that angst. Okay, take you. Let me hold on a second. Lemme take you back into verse 35, so we see what he's doing. We're going to go to 36. Okay. Verse 36, when he saw the crowds, he felt compassion for them because they were distressed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. What psalm did we read? Psalm 23. We read Psalm 23. Here it is. I told you it was coming. Right? Jesus sees the crowds. Now in chapter eight, verse one, it tells us that large crowds were following Jesus. Jesus sees these crowds and what does he feel? He feels compassion. He feels compassion. There's two words in the Greek. Now, what we're reading here was originally written in Greek, and it's been translated for us over to English by some Bible scholars in the Greek.
When you read the New Testament, there are two different words for compassion. This one here is Splunk. It's like it little sounds kind of German, right? Splunk. What it means is guts. S, it's guts. You have guts. You ever had indigestion stuff going on in your guts? You ever had emotion that you kind of feel right in here? This is the idea of having pity or sympathy right here. Right here. Yeah. David, take that pink, right? You got to take the pink medicine, right? But not for compassion. This is a good, well, maybe you do have to take the pink medicine for that. I don't know. But Jesus, it says that when he sees the crowds, he has this almost this physical feeling of pity for the crowds pity. Why did he feel this verse is written as a substantiation? Again, I want you, when you're reading the Bible, I want you to see how the logic of the verse is written out.
Matthew has written here a substantiation. The reason we know is because there is a flag word in the middle of the verse. It's the flag word. Because what this means is that the effect is at the beginning, the effect is Jesus feels compassion, right? Jesus feels compassion. Then he's going to give us the cause. Why Jesus, do you feel compassion? Well, he's like, thank you for asking me, because when he looks at them, he says, he sees that they're distressed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. Let me just give you, I don't know if I have a slide for this or not, but this word distressed. Well, here's the substantiation. Distressed. This word means to be troubled or to be bothered. Jesus looked at this crowd and they're troubled, they're bothered. The other word that is used there is that the, they're dejected. This word literally means to be thrown down, dropped like you would drop an anchor or you toss something. When Judas took those 30 pieces of silver that he used, he got paid off to betray Jesus. He took that. He did. He threw those coins down. That's this word, dejected. He threw it down. Have you ever felt like you're thrown down by life? That's what Jesus saw. He looked at this crowd and he says, you are troubled and you've been tossed down by life. But then he uses a comparison and he says, you're like sheep with no shepherd. You're like sheep with no shepherd.
We'll see in chapter 10 that he calls them the lost sheep of the house of Israel. When we looked at Psalm 23 at the beginning of the service and Marvin was reading it, God says, the Lord is your shepherd. God uses this picture all the time to just demonstrate his care. In fact, the word pastor is another word for shepherd. Pastor is not really the term for a church leader in the New Testament. Usually the term is elder in America and in the West we call the guy that does what I do. Sometimes we call him pastor, but really the New Testament uses that word as a verb. So when I pray for you or I preach to you, or I call you and say, how are you doing? That's Josh pastoring you. And so here, when Jesus looks at this crowd, he's like, you don't have a pastor.
And so he has compassion upon them. He literally, he feels it another time when Jesus felt compassion. Yes, where he got a hug. I bet he gave people hugs. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. Another time where he probably gave some people some hugs is when Lazarus died and Jesus already told his disciples, Lazarus is going to be raised back, but when Jesus gets to Bethany and he sees Mary and Martha sad about their brother having died, and they're like, Jesus, why didn't you get here earlier? And they're kind of upset with Jesus even knowing the future. Jesus had compassion and he wept In that moment, he had compassion on these women. He had this ability even knowing the future, knowing the facts of what was going to happen, he felt in his guts, this sense of compassion. They a song about passion song, they, can you show it to me afterwards?
You're going to sing it for us. Listen, I'm going to preach to you for just a second. Okay? Our culture is moving away from the idea of compassion. We turn off this inward response of care. We're tempted to, we don't let our guts be moved with sympathetic pain. There's different reasons for this. One of the reasons is sensory overload With global news, you can turn on your phone and you can see something horrible that happened in China or India or Texas or The Bahamas, and to summon the compassion for that many different tragic events is not humanly possible, and yet, if you turn on the tv, we have this ability to have instant feed, an instant feed of tragic events, and so it's like, man, since I can't show compassion on all these things, maybe I might as well just take the position of stoic and show no internal sympathy, no compassion, no pity.
Yeah, and then there is pain that happens in our own life where we've kind of opened up our hearts to this sense of sympathy, and we've gotten hurt by people, and so it's just this decision. You know what? I'm going to not show compassion because I've been hurt when I've been open-hearted enough to show pity. Other times, we can be selfish and lost in our own world. It's just too inconvenient to care about other people's needs, and so that's one of the realities why people are just like, man, I don't want, I was talking to somebody this week about just doing ministry in Baltimore, and I think that Baltimore is inconvenient to people who don't live in B people. It is more convenient just to ignore Baltimore and its problems than to actually engage it, because once you take that step and engage it and you realize what's going on, it's like how can you be a good person and just turn a blind eye to the immense need all over this city?
It's crazy. The last reason is political. We feel like our political allegiance may be compromised by caring for a character that our party told us not to care about. So maybe you see somebody, let's say you're a Democrat and you see somebody who's got a Trump shirt on and that person is down and out and hurting, and you feel like, man, if I show compassion towards that Trump mega supporter, I'm going to violate my political party and so I can't do it. Or maybe you're a Republican and you see somebody who's pro-choice or L-G-B-T-Q or some position like that, and they are hurting and they're suffering, but you may feel like, man, my allegiance is to my political party. I can't afford to have compassion on that other person that's in that other party or represents a difficult view, but Christians, as Christians, we're supposed to be different.
We can afford to respond with compassion because we believe that God cares. Jesus modeled it, and we are recipients of compassion, so we can do something because we know the broader story and we know the compassion that we ourselves have received. We can afford to show compassion. Let's go to verse 37, the abundant harvest. Then Jesus said to his disciples, the harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Isn't it interesting that, did you see we just covered this material? He's looking at the crowd. He's likening them to sheep, and now all of a sudden he jumps over to agriculture and he says, this is a booming crop. Imagine with yourselves that a farmer goes and he stands on the edge of his field and he's seen the perfect timing of the rain, and he knows what a normal yield is, and then he's looking out at his field.
He's like, this is a bumper crop. This is going to be a good year. There is an abundant harvest. When Jesus looks at this crowd, he's like, this is a harvest waiting to come in. So they're distressed, they're troubled, they're dejected. They feel tossed away by life. They're like sheep without a shepherd, and Jesus is like, this is an abundant harvest. Isn't that an interesting perspective? This is why we follow. This is why we say, God, give us your heart. Give us your eyes to see what's going on because I don't know for you, but when I look at a crowd that's distressed and dejected and upset, I'm like, man, I hope the police are close by because I don't want to have some riot breakout. Or I'm like, how am I going to feed all these people on a Friday? But no, Jesus is like, whoa, this is a bumper crop.
This is amazing. But then he has something else to say while the harvest is abundant. What else? The workers, the workers to work this field are few. Oh, man, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate those of you that have come and helped us with the crowd on Friday and on Tuesday and just been a part of caring. You've been a worker in the field in this abundance that we have. There's this crazy opportunity to just love people. We had a missions team here on Friday. Kathy helped us put together and coordinate with this church, Trinity life up in the county. They came down and just to go out and be a worker caring for people that are in a bad place. Did any of you guys get prayed for? Did you come through? You got prayed for? Wasn't that sweet that they came through?
They were willing to. Some of those people took off the day from work. They sat, we got you into air conditioning. We didn't have prayer outside, and it was just awesome. I think we had 75, maybe 75, maybe about 70 people, maybe a little bit like what? 72 people. Thank you. That came through, received prayer that we were asked how they're doing. It was awesome. So Jesus looks and he says, here's the reality with this crowd. Think of like Lemko, like Felicia. You've been talking with me about lemko and just when Jesus looks at lemko, when Jesus looks at the crowd of people that are being fed, people that we don't even speak their language because they speak Spanish. Jesus sees their sheep that need a shepherd. He sees the distressed. He sees those tossed away by life, the dejected, and he sees an opportunity where it's like, where's the workers? What does he say? What does he say in 38? Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest. He calls. Jesus tells his disciples, listen. Listen guys, we need to pray that the Lord of the harvest, the ones who's in charge of the harvest, that he would commission workers to go out into the harvest to go participate in the work.
What are we called to do to pray? Who are you praying to? The Lord of the harvest? What are we supposed to ask Lord? Send out workers, send out workers. In closing this text, these few verses, it asks us to take our eyes off of ourselves. It asks us to join Jesus in his compassion for the crowds. This crowd, some of this crowd was fickle because how many in this crowd were followers of Jesus after he died and was raised from the dead? How many people were gathered together in the upper room? Do you know how many?
120, 120. Now the disciples, the apostles, preached the gospel and thousands got baptized and became followers of Jesus. But here's the reality. Jesus is doing this ministry to thousands of people. He asks. He asks for his disciples to just engage this whole thing. He's going to teach 'em. He's going to send them out, and the results initially are meager. They're meager, and yet being a follower of Jesus means that you're willing to let your gut turn as you look at the crowd, this text that we have read, it asks us to see the crowd as an abundant harvest. That means there's opportunity for Jesus to do redemption. It's not a crisis for Jesus. It's an opportunity. It's the bumper crop. This text asks us to pray in this regard, and this text asks us to pray for workers who will engage the dejected and the distressed rest, and so just the simple obedience for us as a church this week.
It means that you and I do a heart check. Am I willing? Am I willing right here to feel the call to Jesus? Am I willing to let, thank you, David? Yes. Yeah. Am I willing to feel it right? Am I willing to go there with him? Now, remember his spirit when we talk about this type of obedience, this is not like muster up the energy, come on, beat you over the head. You got to feel compassion. No, this is like, God, I give you permission to have your way in my soul. I give you permission to cause me to feel like that towards the hurting, and I know you do. I have so honored to watch so many of you in so many different ways. Filipinos, Mia, you would just have a heart for people that are older and just caring for people. Some of you're caring for your family.
Felicia, you got a heart for people in Lemko. Let's feed 'em. Let's take care of 'em. You've got, we're caring for people over the compassion center. I look around this room and some of you like your full-time jobs are just caring in this way for other people. It's beautiful. Let's keep letting God work in our lives in that way. Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for Jesus being the forerunner, the example, the good example. And you didn't just, Jesus, you didn't just have that pity for us, but you literally took your body and you were crucified for us. You are crucified on our behalf. You are pierced for us. Lord, thank you for being willing to give your body up so that we could be reconciled back with you. Lord, would you find in us a willingness, an obedience, a surrender to you, surrendering to your work in our life in this way? We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.