Transcript
Alright, Matthew chapter 12, Matthew chapter 12, one through 14. You can turn there in your Bibles. We're going to cover 14 verses, which is a little bit much for us on a Sunday morning. So we're going to get a good chunk of Bible this morning and we'll break it into two parts. It's great to see you if you're visiting with us. Hey Reggie, good to see you. Good to see you. So
We do have extra Bibles. If you need a Bible, raise your hand. Ms. Kathy has a couple. Here we are in the book of Matthew. So Matthew chapter 12 is where we're at. We're getting close to the halfway point going through the gospel of Matthew, and it's been a great journey for us together as a church. A couple of things before we get into Matthew chapter 12. Next week is going to be the last week to sign up for the class that we're going to do, which is a Old Testament survey. We're going to spend 12 weeks going through an online class together with a guy named Daniel Block. He's a famous Old Testament scholar. An Old Testament survey is this idea of, Hey, we're just going to survey it from a high level, so by the time we're going to go through the entire Old Testament in just 12 weeks.
So when you look at your Bible and it's this big intimidating piece of your Bible, it's a bigger section than the New Testament. You're like, what's all that about? Well, we're going to cover it all in 12 weeks. So if you take the class, you're going to come away from that time with a sense of the history that's there, what God's trying to communicate. That part, while it's big like that part of your Bible is Jesus's Bible, right? Jesus didn't have a New Testament. It was written after him. So Jesus's Bible is the Old Testament, so it's worth knowing and understanding. And Daniel blocks. Great. So the way that it's going to work is that you're taking the classes on your own. We'll give you a schedule and then we meet on Zoom for 30 minutes every Tuesday night, just for a few minutes just to check in to make sure you're doing your homework, see if there's any questions. Usually we pray for each other. So it's a great opportunity and we did it last fall. We did another class last fall, and we're going to do one this fall. So I just want to encourage you, it's going to go out by email. There's going to be a to RSVP if you want to participate. Yes.
Are we going to do a forum study group where people can study together?
You can line
Together in a free space where they can ask questions of
Other people that are doing it. There'll be some questions on Tuesday, but yeah, that'd be a good idea. Yeah, we can create a space.
Everybody else is stupid before
You do. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Did you have a question? Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think that would be good. It's going to be a great opportunity to just grow in your understanding of the Old Testament. So I want to, but you have to understand it's being taught at a graduate level, which shouldn't be that. I know all of you. I know all of you could handle it, but it's going to be able to challenge you, right? It's going to challenge you. It's going to challenge you. All right. So listen, next week, next Sunday is going to be the last chance to sign up for it because we're going to start, I don't even have a link for you to sign up for it yet. So it's going to start next week now. And then also before we wrap up, we're going to pray for Beverly.
She's having a surgery this week, so we're not going to see Beverly for at least four, maybe six weeks. She's got a knee replacement surgery, which is a huge answer to prayer for her. She's to be commended, she had to lose weight to be able to get it. She worked hard and she got the approval for it. So we're excited for her to be able to get a new knee. Yep. But she's done it. She's done this before on the other knee and the recovery is brutal. So we want to pray for her. And then also Angels getting into surgery this week or on the 13th in a couple of weeks. So we will pray for her as well. Alright, let's jump into Matthew, and we're looking at Matthew chapter 12 this morning. Here's my opening question for you. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by rules?
Rules that seem to miss the point entirely that forget the very people they are supposed to protect and help. For example, sometimes in the healthcare system, you ever go and you try to address some kind of healthcare need and you get just bogged down in the bureaucracy where there's policies, paperwork, regulations that seem to overshadow the patient care. Or another example is that a patient might be denied necessary treatment or medication because of a technicality or a bureaucratic rule, even when their doctor believe it's believes it's in their best interest. Another example is during Covid, we had lockdowns of outdoor activities that were heavily restricted in some areas despite being low risk because it's outside or businesses were forced to close while other similar businesses remained open. These inconsistencies sometimes made people feel like the rules were more about control than actually keeping people safe.
We know kind of in our own world about this idea of rules where you sit there and you're just like, what's the purpose even behind those rules? And that's exactly what was going on in Jesus day with the Sabbath. There had been this loss. The whole idea of a purpose was long gone, and there was just these really strict rules around the Sabbath. It's the tension that we're going to see in the passage this morning where Jesus challenges the rigid legalism of the Pharisees with a powerful display of compassion and authority. Now, this is part two. Now in your bibles, when you look at your Bibles, you have a chapter 11 and chapter 12. But when that book of Matthew was written, there was no verses and there was no chapters. It was just a long document that a thousand years, 1500 years later, there was these chapter verse markers that was put in there so that it was easier for a pastor to say, okay, turn in your Bible too.
And there was this ability to reference the specific pieces so can communicate, here's where we're at. So the references are helpful, but you need to know that it's not how is originally written. So this is actually continuing the theme from last week. Last week, Jesus invited those who were weary and burdened to come to him and find rest. Do you remember that part? Those of you that are weary and heavy laden, come to me and I will give you rest. So with that invitation, we go into this section in chapter 12 where there's this conversation about the Sabbath day. The whole idea of the Sabbath is it is a day dedicated to rest. So think in your mind that this is part two of something we started last week. The Sabbath day, a day meant for rest had become a burden due to the Pharisees interpretations.
Today, when we look at Matthew 12, one through 14, Jesus redefines what it means to truly observe the Sabbath. He shifts the focus from legalism. You know what I mean by legalism? Legalism is like just focus in on the rules, trying to do the rules and to kind of prove your worth. Just follow the rules and it gives you earn some either an identity or you earn some kind of favor. And Jesus is saying, let's get off legalism and let's go to compassion. Let's move over to mercy. Let's move over to a goodness of humanity. That comes from the principle of the Sabbath. So he moves from strict rules over to the heart of God. So the big idea here is going to be, well, I don't have a slide for it. We'll get there though. A big idea is what does it mean to honor God with our actions? I think that's, yeah. What does it mean to honor God with our actions? Is it by following the rules to the letter or is it by understanding the heart behind those rules? In this passage, we will see that Jesus is not just a teacher of the law, but he is the Lord of the Sabbath. He calls us to prioritize mercy and goodness over rigid legalism.
So let's look at this first section verses one through eight before we do this. So normally I'll read the text and then pray. But because the text is longer, let me pray and then we'll read the text together. This first section, Lord, we pray that you would teach us, Lord, we don't want to be a people that are just following rules to try to be better than everyone else, to look down our nose or be condescending. We want to have structure and parameters and limits in our life to honor you. And so we pray that you would guide us this morning through the text. It may not be an issue of Sabbath, but it may be some other just warping the rules, having a bad relationship with rules where we just need your correction. We do pray that as we talk about the Sabbath and your purpose for the Sabbath, that you would lead us again into that place of rest.
Give us rest, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's look at the text here. It says this. At that time, Jesus passed through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and as disciples were hungry and began to pick and eat some of the heads of grain, when the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, see, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. Let's stop there. So this sets up a response that Jesus is going to give to the Pharisees about the Sabbath and the legalism that had developed. But in order for us to get there, we need to kind of go back a little bit and just explain some of the pieces that are included in this text. So first of all, this idea of the grain fields. Do you think that these disciples were stealing grain from somebody else's property?
The fascinating thing is you go back to the book of Leviticus and you go back to the book of Deuteronomy. There is literally a provision in God's law for the nation of Israel that you can do this. You can't go in with a sickle to your neighbor's property. You can't be cutting down big chunks of grain out of your neighbor's property, but you are allowed to take a little bit like a handful of grain as you're passing through somebody else's field. And so God laid out this law for Israel. So what they're doing is allowed, but the question is, is can they do this on the Sabbath? What's the Sabbath? Well, God had given specific parameters to the nation of Israel all about the Sabbath day, and it was to the seventh day of the week. So you'd have Sunday would be the first day, Saturday would be the seventh day of the week, and that would be a day where you would stop working.
Everybody in society, the Jewish society was to shut down, stop working, and it was a day of rest. When God explained this to the nation through Moses, it was a sign of the covenant. Remember when God made a covenant with Abraham? The covenant with Abraham was, I'm going to make you a great nation. This is the Abrahamic covenant and the sign of the Abrahamic covenant. What was it? Does anybody know what the, what was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant? It was male circumcision. So that was the evidence that it's like you are supposed to do this. What? You're supposed to do this. This is a sign. What was the sign of the noic? God made a covenant to Noah. I'm never going to destroy the earth with a flood. What was the sign of the noic covenant? The rainbow. That's right. So the sign of the mosaic covenant was this sabbath day.
The Sabbath day was to be this ongoing reminder of the old covenant or the mosaic covenant that God made with Israel, but there was already a Sabbath in place. The concept of the Sabbath goes back to Genesis chapters one and two, because God created the heavens and the earth in six days. On the seventh day it says that he rested, and that was the framework for when God spoke to Moses, said, this is what you're supposed to do. It was like, yeah, you're supposed to rest on the seventh day because that's what God did on the seventh day, six days he labored. On the seventh day he rested. And so this was central to society and it was key to their religious practice. And anybody who violated the Sabbath day, it was so important that if you were found violating the Sabbath day, it was a capital crime.
You could be killed for working on the Sabbath day. That's how central it was. Now, Israel failed in their history to keep the Sabbath day as you go deeper into their history. Those of you in the Old Testament survey class, we're going to see one of the problems that Israel had was they were disobedient when it came to the Sabbath day. They violated the Sabbath day and God was upset with them as a nation. And so by the time we get to Jesus's day, 1500 years of history has passed, and you have all of these traditions related to the Sabbath, the Pharisees who were one of the religious elites, one of the religious elite groups during the day, they saw these disciples taking the grain from the field and eating it. And they say, your disciples are doing what is against the law or not lawful to do on the Sabbath. They're referencing now. They're not referencing Bible. They're referencing another layer on top of the Bible that interpret it. So some authoritative figures had given definition of like, here's what it means to not work. You can go this many paces from your home on the Sabbath day, and then you need to stop. You can do this with your hands, but you can't do that. Well, all of those traditions had been built up and they confront Jesus with it. Sabbath days
That what it was,
No fasting, but no cooking. There was no cooking. So you prepare your food.
They were only eating, they weren't working. They were walking
By. You prepare your food Friday night, and then when the sun goes down Friday night, you basically have your provisions all Friday night through Saturday until Saturday dinner. But yeah, it was not a day of fasting, but you were not allowed to cook. You were not allowed to make a fire. So if you go back into Leviticus, you can see some of the, you can't go and collect sticks, and one guy does get in trouble for that.
They weren't obedient.
That was so strict. It was strict. It was strict. So this is where you get into the interpretation. They're trying to figure out, well, what does it mean to not work? So Jesus is bringing in correction to their concept of being so strict that there is only just a set of rules and parameters, but the heart of it had fallen out. So the Pharisees are there going, look at your disciples are breaking our rules, our traditions by taking, there's no verse that says you can't take grain on the Sabbath. That was the Pharisees tradition and the tradition of the day. So here's what Jesus says. He said to them, haven't you read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry and how he entered the house of God and they ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for him or for those with him to eat, but only the priests.
Okay? Do you know what story he's referencing? Some of you do, many of you don't. Right? This is Jewish tradition. This is back in one Samuel one, Samuel 26. One Samuel 21 is where this story comes up. So let's go back. I know not everybody here is deeply embedded in Old Testament history. He's talking about David. David was a patriarch for Israel. He was the second king of the nation, but before he became king, he was on the run from the current king named Saul. So David has been anointed. He's been promised you are going to be become king. But in the meantime, Saul's king and Saul is trying to murder David. So David's running away all over Israel from Saul early on in his fleeing from Saul, he goes to the tabernacle and there's a priest there who takes him in. And what he does is, so he entered the house of God.
That's a reference to the tabernacle. And the tabernacle was in Bethel. So it was during Solomon's day. So David makes Jerusalem the capital of worship and the national capital, but that happens when David is king. So before David becomes king, when he's still on the run, the tabernacle is still in Bethel, and that's where worship is taking place. So David runs there, he interacts with the priests, he says, do you guys have any food? And the priest says, I don't have any food, but I do have this bread. That was a part of the offering to God. If you go back to Leviticus, the Levites were to take this bread. This is a part of the bread that would be offered to God as a sacrifice. And at the end of the day, it was able to be eaten only by the priests, not by anybody who is not a Levite.
David's not a Levite. He's from the house of Judah, right? Well, he gets to the house, he's fleeing for his life from Saul. He interacts with the priest. He says, it's me and my guys here. I'm on the run and do you have any food? He says, all we have is the bread of the presence. That's the name of this offering. And Jesus says, look, it was not lawful for him. The Old Testament law did not give him permission to eat that, but it was only for the priest. That was the clear instructions out of the Levitical law. What happens? Well, Jesus doesn't fill in, he just asks the question, here's what happens. The priests give him the bread, David eats it. He gets the sword that had been stored there from, or no, that's dag takes the sword. So he takes the bread and then he continues on his way and he continues to flee.
David does not get in trouble for eating the bread. Are you tracking kind of with the story here? David does not get in trouble for eating the bread. And so Jesus is using that as an example to show what's more important here in this story following the structure of the Levitical law with the bread of the presence or the preservation of David's life in nourishing David. Obviously what Jesus is saying is there's this higher order, there's this priority of like, yeah, it's okay for David to take that bread. In that particular instance, are you tracking? Because we've got a law here about the Sabbath. We've got all this legalism with the Pharisees kind of looking down their nose, condemning people about what they're doing on the Sabbath, and Jesus is going, wait a second. There's a different way to relate to the law. There's a different concept that's going on.
So that's the first example. The second example that Jesus gives is in verse five, he says, or haven't you read in the law that on the Sabbath days, the priests in the temple violate the Sabbath and are innocent? So here's what he's talking about. If you're coming to worship God on the Sabbath day and you bring your goat, who's going to kill the goat or who's going to kill the lamb or the turtle doves or it's the priests. The priests are actively working, doing their job on the Sabbath day. Jesus uses the term here, violating the Sabbath, and yet they're innocent. So Jesus here is He's pushing back against this framework that the Pharisees had established because here's the thinking of the pH, and this is what you got to understand. The Pharisees were following the rules thinking that God was happy with them.
They're following the rules thinking that that is what makes them acceptable in God's eyes. That is the problem with legalism. God is happy with you. Why? What makes God happy when you're, yes, he does delight when you're happy. There is an aspect of that, yes, what delights God? Obedience. Obedience, but who led the way in obedience? Yes, repentance is huge. That factors into it, and we're going to go a little bit deeper to see some more, but how many people do you talk to? We go and just do a survey on the street and we say, if you were to die right now, why are you going to be led into heaven? How many people out there are going to say followers? Yeah, believers are the ones that are going to be accepted. But how many people in their mind, they think it's like scales that they have more good than they've done bad, right?
Have you heard that? How many people think, well, more of my life is composed of good things that I've done. I've followed the rules here. Or have you ever heard sin? Well, I'm not killing, I'm not out killing people, right? Have you ever heard that one? God's of course going to let me in heaven. I'm not Hitler, right? Have you heard that one? People have this relationship with rules where they think that God is just about following the rules, and that's not what it's about at all. Jesus is saying, or when God gave the nation of Israel these parameters, they were supposed to be for the good of the people, but instead they became this burden, this heavy burden to follow that weighed people down where it was just like this, trying to navigate life without screwing up and messing up, violating one law or another.
So the Pharisees were the ones that were preaching legalism. And this continues even after Jesus dies. There's people who are just like, they start saying, yeah, follow Jesus, but you also need to make sure you go get circumcised. You're not a real true follower of Jesus unless the men are getting circumcised. You have all these different kinds of legalism that came in. That's what the whole book of Galatians is about, is there's this bad group of Christian leaders that come into the church after Paul leaves and they're like, look, yeah, it's about Jesus. You have to have faith in him, but you also got to follow all of Moses' law if you really want the blessing. And so Paul writes his letter and he says, where'd the blessing come to you from? It came because you had the hearing of faith. You listened, and Jesus is the one who obeyed the law perfectly.
And when you go and place your faith in Jesus, you're like a Russian doll embedded in Jesus's life. And his obedience to the law is what is granted to you as a, it is put to your account, right? So here's the thing. Some of us have a deep sense of shame in our life because we don't follow the rules perfectly, and we think I need to make God happy so that I can have blessing in my life. So I need to obey the rules better. That is the embedded concept of legalism in our life. Sometimes it happens with professionals in the workplace where they think, I've got to just work harder and earn favor, and then other times it happens in our, it's like, well, I'm having a bad day. I must have done something to take off God and he's against me. Nope. That's not how following Jesus works.
God is absolutely happy with what Jesus did, and you're embedded in his life. When you placed your faith in him, the favor of God, the love of God is towards you. Bad things aren't happening in your life because you ticked him off at some point. He is working in your life. He's working around your life. You can pray. We're called when we do the wrong thing. We're told, Hey, confess your sins and he's faithful and just to forgive your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Okay, so here we have Jesus giving two examples. This is the second one. And he's saying, look at the priests. They are violating Levitical law by working on the Sabbath day, and yet they are innocent. So all that Jesus is doing, he's kind of throwing bombs into the Pharisees world. He's blowing up their legalism and their religious framework.
He says this in verse six, I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. So he's going to lay down principles here. He's referring to himself and the kingdom something at greater than the temple is here. If you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would've not condemned the innocent. So here he's saying, go back to Hosea six, which is this where it says, our English here says it's mercy there, it's hasad, this faithful love. God desires, mercy, faithful love and not sacrifice. If you understood that, you would've not condemned the innocent. Here's what Jesus is saying. Do you understand who God is? Do you understand that God cares about people not rules? God creates rules because he loves people. Those rules are meant to serve the flourishing of people and society. So think of parenting, right? We set up rules in our houses so that society functions and we can love one another, but we're not following those rules just for the sake of following rules.
And when a rule is dumb, we get rid of it. We get rid of it. So here Jesus is saying, I desire mercy, faithful love and not sacrifice. Felicia, a second ago mentioned repentance. What does God say to David in Psalm 51? He says, I desire repentance and a broken and a contrite heart. I will not despise. And the verse after that, which I cannot quote from memory, but it is that idea that he desires this broken and contrite heart, a repentant heart more than just go and kill a goat at the tabernacle. Okay? Alright, let's keep going here. For the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. Who's the son of man? Jesus. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. Okay? So he's the boss. He's the one who is, when we get to Hebrews, he takes us in. He becomes our Sabbath.
He becomes really the fulfillment of the entire concept. So that's the first part. Okay? So we have the grain that is being eaten. This is the first interaction with the Sabbath. The second, well, here's the passage out of Hosea where he says, I desire faithful love and not sacrifice. That's what Jesus is quoting back to the Pharisees. Let's go into the second section verses nine through 13, because it's another debate over the Sabbath. Moving on from there. So he goes from the fields into the synagogue. He entered their synagogue, and there he saw a man who had a shriveled hand. And in order to accuse Jesus, they ask him, this is probably the Pharisees or the followers of the Pharisees. They ask him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? What do you think? Are you allowed to heal on the Sabbath? That's work, isn't it? Maybe it is. This is the question of the day. So he says, who among you, if you have a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn't take hold of it and lift it out, right? Good question. You're going along. You got a sheep, your little sheep gets lost, you're going to pull it out of the pit
Maybe. Well, you might've break there. Well, I don't think it was against the rule. I think he's giving them an example of something that wouldn't have been against the rules. A person he says is far more than a sheep. So it is lawful to do what is good on the Sabbath.
Why have a Sabbath?
You're getting ahead. You're getting ahead. That's right. That is the question. Why have a Sabbath? Right? Exactly. That's what he wants you to ask. Why have a Sabbath if you can do all this other stuff on the Sabbath, the Sabbath
Don't
Save people lives. Here, let's finish and I'm going to give you the principle. Then he told the man, stretch out your hand. So he stretched it out and it was restored as good as the other. So he heals the guy, but the Pharisees went out and plotted against him how they might kill him. Crazy. Okay, so this is the second section. We have, again, this conflict over what can you do on the Sabbath? We are 2000 years removed from these stories. We don't know what it was like to be in Jesus's day and to have these intricate interpretations of the Sabbath, but this is what we do have. We can go to Israel today, or you can go up to Reers Town Road to a Jewish community, and you can see all of the provision that exists that have you ever been in a Jewish building on a Saturday and seen the elevator?
They make it so that you don't push the buttons on a Jewish elevator. Did you know that? I don't remember what the provision is in that setting, but there's a way to work the elevator without pushing the buttons, would it? Oh, it stops on all floors. That's right. I knew it worked somehow. That's right. It stops on all floors on a Saturday. That would be rough if you have a hundred floors, right? You got to be really patient. All that to say, the question is, is what's the purpose of the Sabbath? Okay, so I grew up, lemme give you a little bit of just my own personal story about the Sabbath. So many Protestants, we read about Jesus being the Lord of the Sabbath, that Jesus fulfilled the law, and we are, I'm not Jewish, and so my family did not have a Sabbath day. There are certain Protestant groups, like the Seventh Day Adventists, they will celebrate a Sabbath day. They worship on a Saturday and not on a Sunday. So they're a Protestant group that observes a literal Sabbath day. So
Chantel stay on Sunday?
No, that's a good question. That's a good, so the Puritans did that. The Puritans saw their Sabbath on Sunday because it was the day of the resurrection. They weren't Jews. They weren't Jews. And so if you go into church history, the people that found, or the religious, a lot of the religious groups that kind of came over to the Americas, they would call Sunday a Sabbath. So that's one way that it's been interpreted in church history. Day of Pentecost. Say again? Pentecost. Pentecost. Yeah, that's a part of the church. Church history. The church like calendar is the day of Pentecost.
But in my own personal story, we didn't have a special day to rest and it was because we don't want to be legalistic. But the more I've gone along and some of the people that have influenced me, there's been kind of a recovery of saying, no, the Sabbath isn't just a Jewish thing. There's an underlying principle that Jesus is teaching here. Is Jesus saying the Sabbath is bad? No, what he's saying is the legalism of the Pharisees is what's bad, right? Because the law was getting in the way of his disciples being able to eat and he was getting in the way of a guy being able to have his hand healed. And so Jesus is throwing these bombs into the traditions. Yeah, he's throwing bombs into their thinking and saying, wait, you're not seeing the Sabbath as something that serves humanity to give humanity a rest day.
Instead, you're seeing it as just a set of rules to do to kind of be puffed up and proud. So we go back to the Old Testament, go back to Genesis one and two. God, does God need to rest? No. And yet he still is the one who rests on the seventh day. So when you think about your own relationship with rest, which is the theme we are continuing from last week, the question is, is God formed the nation of Israel and he said the Sabbath is super important. My question for you is how important is it for you? We in America, we are this working crazy group of people. Our work ethic in America is often this work, work, work, work, work. And yet there seems to be this principle that God is teaching his people that there is a important role for rest.
One of the things that would happen when the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they were fed by manna. Do you remember the story of manna? It was this miracle bread that would appear on the ground every morning when you would get to Friday, you supposed, so you were only supposed to collect enough bread for each day. You couldn't go and hoard the manna or it would rot on the second day. You couldn't. You had to get it each day except for Friday. On Friday you could collect two days worth of manna so that you could Sabbath. You could take a rest day on Saturday. And the miracle that God did was it wouldn't rot on that second day. If you took two portions on a Thursday, your Friday amount would ride. But if you took two days worth on Friday, God made it.
So it miraculously lasted all the way until your Sunday morning you would have this provision. That was the principle. That was the idea is like, look, don't collect, trust God. Now how much faith does it take when you're in the compassion center to just take enough for this week? That's hard, huh? It's hard for you. It's hard for me when I see all that food there, it's like, oh man, this is an opportunity. I got to take this out of here. I got to because who knows when this is going to be here again? Right? Can you relate? So if you could relate to that feeling, that's how the Jews felt on Monday morning. They were like, oh my gosh, look at all this, man. We should collect it. And yet God wanted them to have this principle of faith. So you reverse that also.
And you realize like, wait a second. When you take a break, when you take a break and you force yourself to stop, you're always afraid of what something's not going to get done. Part of the job, some of the work isn't going to get if I take a day off. And yet what God is trying to teach his people is this idea of you trust me with your schedule. You've got to trust me in your schedule. So the only piece I want to add to this is Hebrews chapter four. When you go over to Hebrews chapter four, it says that Jesus is our rest. He's the one that leads us into this place of rest. That does not mean that we get rid of the actual scheduling rest for ourselves, but we get to, unlike the Jews, we get to enter into this principle of rest, unlike any other generation before Jesus.
Because we not only get a physical rest, but we get this spiritual rest where Jesus leads us in. It says in Genesis or Hebrews three, it talks about how Jesus is like our Joshua who led his children into the land, the promised land of rest. Jesus is the one that leads us into the promised land, our own promised land, and he gives us rest. That's what he's inviting you into. That's what he's calling us to. So a lot of different themes kind of woven together in the text. The thing that I want you to think about this week, the primary thing I want you to consider is, is there in your heart or in my heart a sense of rule following to try to earn God's favor If that is there, you just need to know you're not going to earn God's favor through following the rules. That's not how it works. The favor of God is on your life. Only if you've placed your faith in Christ and you're hid in him. He is the one. Jesus is the one who fulfilled the law perfectly, and then he welcomes us into his family and he says, I now you inherit from me the favor of God. So that's the beautiful principle that underlies this crazy text. Do you see how upsetting it is to the legalistic heart?
There is murderous animosity towards grace, the human heart. The human heart cannot handle grace very well. There is just this, why would somebody be so in love with law keeping and traditionalism that somebody comes along and says, there's grace. That's what Jesus is saying. There's grace and you want to kill him. And before we are too harsh on the Pharisees, we got to check ourselves. Are we legalistic? Are we so in love? Rich, the Pharisees rich, they were rich. Yeah. Then they were elite and their power
Was Joe want to train and they
Didn't want it. And their power was challenged, right? But he was inviting them in. He was inviting them in, right? He was saying, come on in, come in. But you got to let go of this legalism. Anyway, we have this awesome covenant of grace that we've been given, and that's what we're going to celebrate with the Lord's Supper. So let's pray and we will take communion together. Lord, we thank you for the war that you go to against legalism, just the battle that you put up to fight against just that legalistic pride. Lord, would you usher us into just a life of grace where structures the aath, where those structures are for human good and human flourishing, and not just some law to keep. Lord, teach us about your rest. Teach us about entering into your rest. We want to be a people that take full advantage of what you have purchased for us. I pray that you bless each person here with that sense of peace and rest over their life this week, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.