Dying Moments Meet Living Faith
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We're going to continue on in Matthew chapter nine, titled this week, Dying Moments Meet Living Faith. So last week we looked at Jesus interaction with John's disciples over fasting. It was one of the few times where the Pharisees and John's disciples in Matthew chapter nine were actually in agreement on what the practice looked like. We also saw that they had mourned while God was celebrating. So John's disciples and the Pharisees had mourned in a time of fasting when there should have been a time of celebration.
And this was just another way that good old Brentwood juxtaposition where God is doing something different than what they had expected him to do. Jesus had pointed to the reality that the kingdom of heaven was breaking in and that the bridegroom was with them. We talked about how that terminology of the bridegroom is found multiple times throughout Scripture and how that was also once again, Jesus staying on mission to fulfill the Torah and the prophets. By using this terminology, he fulfilled the Torah prophecy. He spoke of his coming death through the foreshadow of the cross when he said that there's a time coming where you will mourn, and that's when the bridegroom is taken from you.
So he prophesied about the cross, his coming death, and confronted us with a hard question. Why fast for morning when the kingdom is here to feast? We talked a little bit about coming into the Fall feast. Some of you don't know what that is, and that's okay. We have a liturgical calendar, just like every other ministry has a liturgical calendar and church has a liturgical calendar.
Ours traditionally follows after the Jewish Hebrew calendar. So there is. If you search Jewish calendar, that's the safe way. If you search Hebrew calendar, you find a whole bunch of nonsense that doesn't exist and is made up. And so we follow the Jewish calendar, and that helps us see these rhythms and these cycles through Jesus.
Now, not all of us are Jewish, and we approach these feasts not because we're Jewish. They were the feast of the Lord. They were the family gatherings. They were the time by which God invited his people to the table. And I don't know about you, but if Jesus invites me to his table, I want to show up and I will show up and I'll have a happy heart.
Even if he's decided to have it catered from Chick Fil A and not from Dave's Hot Chicken, Nash Bird or Popeyes. It's okay. I'll be happy. I'll be happy. Brian will be there.
We're eating some chicken together. We're dining with Jesus. And it's going to be a good time this week. We're going to pick up every in Matthew where Jesus once again takes the Sermon on the Mount and he puts it into action. There's nothing in the Torah and the prophets of the Gospel that is given to you just so that you can have some sort of head knowledge.
It's so that you can have your heart and your life transformed by the power of God through the word of God to do kingdom with God. There's not a single obligation. I saw a funny little thing on. I don't think it was funny. I thought it was heretical.
But there is this thing going around Facebook this week where it's talking about how God demands. And I asked the question, what scripture did God demand? Because I don't see God demanding. I see God giving an invitation. He's giving you an invitation to do life with him.
He's giving you an invitation to walk with him. He's giving you an invitation to find salvation in him. He's giving you an invitation to live with him. A lot of times we want.
We want that masculine God who's super mean and super judgmental, yet God is always the perfect balance of a loving father and, as the prophets say, a nurturing mother. So this week we're going to pick up in verse 18 in Matthew chapter 9 and see the interactions that Jesus has after his engagement over fasting. While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and he knelt before him and he said, my daughter has just died. Come and put your hand on her and she will live. And Jesus got up and went with him and so did his disciples.
Here we see a synagogue leader who is most likely a Pharisee. Once again, Pharisees get a lot of bad raps. And unfortunately, there is a lot of engagement that Jesus has throughout the Scripture where he's taking issues with the Pharisees. It's true, it's what we have. But here we see a synagogue leader who was most likely under the leadership of the Pharisees, most likely trained in the school of the Pharisees, who comes to Jesus and finds value in what Jesus is doing.
His peers, who were other Pharisees, were suspicious of Jesus. Some had even accused him of speaking from the devil or operating in the power of the devil. Yet this Pharisee was at the end of his rope. This person who was in desperate grief for the death of his daughter and the life of his daughter found himself on his knees Before Jesus, in desperation, despite his circles of doubt, his faith had clinged to one thing. If Jesus touches her, then she will live.
All of the training he had, all of the, you know, Pharisees were well learned. They were not uneducated. So all of this training, all this education they had, and yet he clung to this one truth, this one hope. If I could just touch this, if this guy could just touch this Mashiach could just touch her, she would be raised to life. And Jesus goes, just as he had gone to Matthew's table, just as he had gone and driven out the demons, just as he had left, just as they asked him, when he had cast the demons out into the herd of pigs, Jesus goes like he was requested.
He sets out not to just go for the sake of going. It wasn't just like he had airline miles or donkey miles. He went because he was intentionally on mission all the time to manifest the kingdom of heaven here and now. And yet, while he's on this mission, this mission to go and to heal, raised from the dead, he's interrupted. And it shifts scenes in verse 20 and 22.
Just then, a woman who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years came up from behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, if I only touch his cloak, I will be healed. And Jesus turned and he saw her. Take heart, daughter, he said, your faith has healed you. And the woman was healed in that moment.
The limit isn't Jesus presence. It's in your pursuit.
That's where we find ourselves most of the time in our lives. It isn't Jesus presence isn't enough. It's that our pursuit is limited. It's not limited by God. It's limited by us.
How many of us would be willing to, as we're bleeding out, as we're tired, as we're 12 years a long time? I think it's probably common for us to kind of gloss over that and be like, oh, well, she crawled over to Jesus. It probably took absolutely everything in her power to crawl over to Jesus. It took everything in her power on that one hope that if I touch him, we say, some of my Jewish loving friends, my messianic loving friends, like, oh, they touched the tzitzit of his garment. Every culture had zitzit.
So the tzitzit, in and of itself, the tzitzit, as some like to call it. Did somebody just correct my pronunciation?
I understand it, tzitzit, but unfortunately, I'm not a Messianic rabbi, so I need to Cover all the languages. So, Father, we lift your name up today for the pronunciations of all words. I pray that in my hesh, in my English, in my Okie, that you will understand what I'm saying. And just like in Pentecost, Lord, that when I speak of tongues, of men, all would hear it in their own dialect. Lord, I ask all these things in your name.
Amen. All right, now that we've covered that, boom.
I was trying to be serious this week, too. Like, this is a serious topic.
Oh, gosh. Normally, I'm the one trying to get you guys loosened up, and I did something last week. I broke you all. Like, you all came ready to laugh this week. Awesome.
So a lot of times we'll talk about from where we come from, we'll talk about the fact that she reached out and got the tzitzit. The fringes of the garment. The fringes of the garment. Just because they were on Jesus or just because they were on any Hebrew doesn't mean anything. The fringes, the garments that were there were no different.
Every culture wore that. Every culture did. Just like when you kind of similar. Like if you go to a church and a church has a grand opening, they buy all the same shirts, and everybody wears the same shirts for that Sunday that they opened the church. The Saturday they opened the church, everybody's wearing a shirt.
There's no power in the shirt. There's no power in it. Where the power comes from, the fringes is who they were connected to. I can't see you today, but Michael Stallsworth is in the electric business. Mother, you are in the electric business.
You can put an outlet wherever you want. You can go to Lowe's. You can buy it. You can buy the cheap knockoff ones on Amazon that most likely will set your house on fire as well. And I can lay an outlet right here, and it's going to look just like the outlets that are on those walls over there.
But after service, when all the kids come up and they start to try to plug the vacuum cleaner into the outlet and nothing happens, they're going to say, oh, I'm plugging it into the outlet. Yeah. Because the outlet means nothing. The outlet is not connected to the source.
I learned this the hard way when I remodeled our office and I put a bathroom in and I cut the wrong wire, and whole front of the house lost power.
I cut the source, the tzitzit, the cross. The cross means nothing has no power unless they're connected to a source. Romans crucified many, many people. On crosses, we don't look to those crosses and say that they have power. The reason why we look to the cross for power is because we know what happened by one person out of all that were crucified on a cross, that when he came down, he went into the tomb.
On the third day, he rose again, and he ascended to the right hand of the Father. Now back to the woman with the issue of blood. This woman had suffered for 12 years. She was physically weak. And because of this suffering she had, she would have been socially isolated.
See, It's America. It's 20, 25, you know, I can tell you right now that my daughter is talking in the middle of my sermon. I can tell you that because I can see that. You know how I can see that? Because I look this way for the first time, and my daughter was talking during the middle of my sermon.
I can physically see that. But there's somebody in here who might have. You might have hives. Right now, I may not be able to see that. Not as clearly as I was able to see my daughter talking during my sermon.
Somebody in this room might be suffering with eczema. You might be suffering with sores or spots. Some of you. It's not a physical situation. You're struggling with a mental, emotional situation that I can't see.
I can't see it. Definitely not as clearly as I saw my daughter talking during the middle of my sermon. I can't see it.
So we don't socially isolate people quite the same way as they would have in those days.
It was a part of their culture, clean and unclean. And you didn't come in if you were unclean. You didn't fellowship if you were unclean. There was a process by which you had to go through from clean to unclean. So socially isolated, spiritually branded as unclean, yet somehow she summoned enough strength to reach for Jesus.
Her faith wasn't simply that God could heal. We've seen that before. There was many who believed God could heal. It was if I he will see. There's many people in this room that believes God can heal, but there's fewer who believe God will heal.
And this is where she presses into that level of faith. She didn't question whether or not he could. She knew if she could muster just enough faith and strength to touch, that he would. And she pressed into a deeper conviction. Her healing wasn't because of the fringes.
Just the same way that we understand that our healing doesn't just come by an outward appearance.
I wear a lot Of Jesus T shirts, a lot of Jesus sweatshirts. All the place we go out to lunch, Indian buffet, hot chicken, whatever. I'm wearing Jesus stuff all the time. Nobody walked in and was like, oh, I got healed because I looked at HFFs Jesus. Jesus saves T shirts or hoodies.
It's no different here with the zitzit. The zitzit, the fringes, the corner fringes, whatever you call them, tassels, whatever it is. And it is a myth to think that somehow the longer you wear them, the more healing power and the more holy they are. No, it's just they're all going to laugh at you.
Her faith was quiet. There was no fanfare, there was no announcement. Just a trembling hand reaching out. Can you imagine if she would have put all the faith into trying to get past the crowd and just reach out and she would have fallen one inch short.
Some of the things that my brain thinks about when I'm studying and I'm writing sermon prep is, what if she had came up 1. In short, what would happen? We don't have to worry about it because we have. We have the testimony that she was able to reach out and touch. But can you imagine if she was just short and she reached out in secret?
See, we talk a lot about this one, this healing. But think about it like, look around the room. Look at how many people are in this room. There's a lot of people in this room today. If we all stood up.
And Elias, you just saw Elias come up here. He is not talking during my preaching like my daughter, who is.
I know she has a lot of faith, a lot of faith that I'm going to be gracious and merciful, to forgive her sins and to ask Jesus to cleanse her of all unrighteousness. So you just saw Elias come up here. So if we were all standing up in this place, and let's just say the lighting was the same as all this and Elias was to just crawl to touch this stage, Most of you would not have been able to see that because somebody would have been blocking you. You would have been too far away. Your point of view.
I get to see a lot of things because I'm already the size of a giant and I'm standing on a stage. But the reality is this was pretty secret. They were just going about. Jesus is going about his mission. He's on route to the other places.
Other people are talking and they're looking and this woman is crawling. Probably the only people who saw her crawling in this pursuit are the Ones that had to kind of, like, get out of their way. The ones who kind of had to move while she was crawling. So this wasn't some public display. Jesus wasn't up on a mountain, and everybody could see her crawling up the mountain.
Most likely, this was fairly secretive, that she was crawling and trembling just to touch. But what began in secret had turned into a powerful public sermon. And it had turned into one of the greatest testimonies we have of healing in the Bible. 12 years of bleeding ended in one moment of believing.
Once again, all commandments of the Bible are run through a concept. Talked about that before in other sermons. It's called the pekuach. Nephesh is my Hebrew. Good on that.
Did anybody want to check me on that? You can ask ChatGPT for me if you want.
Which means the preservation of life. So the preservation of life trumps all categories of clean or unclean. This is why as a church, a lot of times people will come in and are like, oh, well, we eat, you know, clean food, and that's kind of what we do. And it's like, well, in the end, if somebody walks through the door and they're starving, they haven't eaten. The last thing I'm worried about is whether it's clean or it's unclean.
Because the preservation of life trumps that. This is, would you allow your spouse to die because they needed a transplant, but you wouldn't take a valve from a pit to save a life? Well, get into marriage counseling. Let's talk. Because that's the problem.
Oh, my wife can die. She doesn't need a pig valve. And it's like, no. The pekuach nephew is a Hebrew concept that trumps all of the other commandments. All commandments run through that.
How do the commandments provide life? God didn't come so that you could die. That is the adversary. Jesus came so that you could have life. You could have life abundantly.
I've heard people say, you know, if we were trapped on an island, I would have to starve, and that's how I would die. And then I'll ask them, why would you starve? It's like, because there probably wouldn't be enough clean animals for me to eat. It's like, oh, my gosh. Preservation of life here, people.
Life matters. I know we live in a day and age where we are desensitized to human beings as having value. I get that. I get that. That's what the propaganda of the world wants you to understand.
But Jesus always knew, always Will know and lived out your value by giving his life, the preservation of life. The crowd saw an untouchable woman, and yet Jesus elevates this. He doesn't just say, woman, you are healed. Go. No.
He makes a change in intimacy. He says, take heart, daughter.
He gave her not only healing, but he gave her an identity.
This is something that we talked about a couple years ago in the Orphan Spirit series.
The creation of the nation of Israel was important. It was perfect. It was what God had planned for the time. But the ultimate goal for the rhythms and the cycles of the Bible is not so that we can become a nation of people separated from nations of people. It's so that we can become sons and daughters of God.
We're adopted into a family, and then what? We go out and we look for other sons and daughters. This is why the orphan spirit is so, so detrimental to families, because you. You feel like you're orphaned from your earthly father, your earthly mother. You feel like you're orphaned from your brother or sister.
And then when you get into the familial aspect of what go trying to do, it's like Cam's like, I only like John Donovan, you know, because Donovan's here to play bass. Jason didn't come up again this week. He only comes up when I preach. We do that as family members all the time. We have those types of conversations, and we do negative things to our significant others or to our brothers or sisters.
Except Josiah. He's never done that to Jeremiah. And so, me not you, brother. Me, not you. And so we're in a situation where we have lost sight that the healing was not just a physical healing.
We read a couple of weeks ago in Matthew chapter eight that they said the Pharisees were questioning Jesus. And Jesus says, well, what is easier to heal the physical body or to forgive sins? And so here is another position where we put so much emphasis on the physical healing that we also sometimes miss the spiritual cleansing, too. She's no longer an outcast. She's no longer socially isolated.
Yeshua Hamashiach, this Jewish messiah, who none of the Jewish leadership would have been locking arms with her or the others in similar positions. He not only heals her through the touch of his garment, but he calls her a daughter.
It's huge for those of us who grew up in a relationship with our parents that we didn't think was healthy or whatever. We struggle to accept Jesus calling to us as sons and daughters because of what our earthly parents did. And we project on. We get terms like church Hurt and family. Hurt and hurt.
Hurt and I can't. The elders said, I'm not allowed to say the other one, but rear hurt. I'm probably going to get some letters on that one. Oh, well, you could. She knew exactly what I was saying.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
But this is where we allow ourselves to take the insufficiencies of human beings and we project them onto God. God is holy. God has always been holy. God doesn't make the same mistakes that we do. God's not being conformed into our image.
We are to be conformed into his.
You can have as much Jesus as you want. The crowds were content with watching and listening. The ones who passed by didn't care. Think of that for a second. Jesus is walking and you have crowds everywhere.
There's marketplaces, there's street vendors, there's stuff like that. Some of them don't even know who he is or what's happening. So these are people who are players in this scene. Then you have the people who have some sort of an idea or have seen or have heard who are one degree of separation in the crowd. They're like, oh, hey, is that Jesus?
Is that Jesus? Is that the one they're talking about? They're one degree separated from that. So there's a little bit of engagement here, but not completely. Then you have the apprentices, the disciples who have been traveling with Jesus, who are a little bit closer.
They're a little bit more engaged in this. You had people who were groupies for a season.
They followed Jesus for one miracle, and then something happened that they didn't like and they pulled themselves away from that. You know, we see a lot of that happening in the church of America. We see people who come in and they sow for one season. Then they're kind of like, ah, I'm done. I don't want another season.
I'm going to take a season off the groupies for one season. And then you have the lady who believed that Jesus power was the only thing that could heal her and had the faith to go in intimately to touch him. All those groups of people are in that atmosphere right there.
You can have as much Jesus as you want, but never more than you pursue.
A lot of people say, I don't feel the power of Jesus in my life, or Jesus hasn't healed me, or Jesus isn't moving. And you're correct. Sometimes we don't get the physical healing. I had this conversation with an individual who said, hey, can you pray for healing? For my family member who's got stage four cancer, they're in their 80s, their life expectancy was not great, and they were towards the end of their life anyways.
And when I prayed for their healing in that moment, I prayed knowing that the healing might mean that this life ended. But I still stood by the fact that if God took them from this life, that they got the healing that was prayed for because they would be no longer in the pain they were experiencing in this life, and now they would be resurrected into life with Jesus. And that's a healing from my perspective, for that individual.
But we want the healing. We want Jesus to manifest in our life.
But we only show up to church on Saturdays. If we show up every week for Saturday, it's like, well, it's hard.
Okay? I don't want to be rude. This woman was bleeding for 12 years.
I am almost promising you that she had more. I mean, like, you know, she had more fight in her. If I was bleeding for 12 years, I'm probably throwing a Jonah sized pity party in my house. I'm not crawling around in the dirt to try to grab ahold of Jesus. And so we live in a day and age where you can have the sniffles and nobody's telling you to stay away from church.
You can maybe not agree with something completely and there's churches you can go through and you can worship God and you can experience the power and presence of God all over the place. But soccer is more important, or baseball's more important, or softball is more important, or, you know, ou is more important.
When we look at how much faith in action this woman had to have. I'm not trying to guilt, shame and put condemnation down on you, but we should not be like, well, I want more Jesus, but I'm unwilling to pursue more Jesus. You get the Jesus you pursue. Just like we saw when they were upset that the pigs had run themselves over the cliff in Matthew 8 and they chose their financial element of their herd over Jesus. Casting out of the demons.
And they said, you need to leave. He did not argue. He did not give fanfare. He left. You get as much Jesus as you want.
We will never attempt to be, we never have and we never will attempt to be a church that meets all your spiritual needs because it's not possible. Any church who tells you to. You should also wonder why that's not true. It's not possible because you were never created to not pursue God on your own. You were never created to not try to touch the hem of his garment to sit at his table with him, to read his word.
You were, you were never created to not do that on a daily basis. And I love you guys, but there's a lot of people in this church and I don't have enough hours in the day to be able to try to do that with you every single day.
This is how cults form. They all move to the middle of nowhere and they talk about all these things. We don't do that here. We create a thriving atmosphere where you can go before the Lord. And then we come together and we support you.
To press into the garment of Jesus Christ, to press into the words of Jesus Christ, to press into the spirit of Jesus Christ, to press in daily. And when you come in and you're beat up and you're like, oh, I don't know, probably not in the word enough, probably not in prayer enough, you're probably expecting God to do something in your life that you're not willing to pursue him with the same passion throughout the week. But this story isn't finished. As we wrestle with whether or not we have the same faith as this woman to go and press into God, Jesus continues, right on. I don't even know who sings the song, but it's like miracle after miracle, open door, open.
Like that's what the Gospel of Matthew is. It's like miracle after miracle, open door after open door. Jesus continues on mission he could have hung it up. He could have been like, the argument is over whether LeBron or Michael are the greatest of all time. I am like, he could have hung it up, but he doesn't.
He continues on mission he was intentional about that mission so that we could have it recorded to understand. In verse 23 to 26 it says, When Jesus arrived at the officials home, he saw the noisy crowd and he heard the funeral music.
Jesus got feisty. Get out. Go. Also the same thing he told the demons when he came into the men who were possessed with the demons. He said, go, get out.
It was that simple. He says, go, get out. He told them, the girl isn't dead, she's only asleep. But the crowd laughed at him after the crowd was put outside. So the crowd's reaction to Jesus asking them to go was to laugh at him, to mock him.
And then Jesus puts him outside. Jesus went in and took the girl by the hand and she stood up. The report of this miracle had swept through the entire countryside.
Notice the contrast of the two stories that are happening in these verses. The woman with the issue of blood had faith to push through the crowd.
Yet the mourners had laughed in disbelief when Jesus had told them that she wasn't dead. She was only asleep. Where faith drew power, unbelief was driven out. And just as the demons have been commanded to go here, he commands the mockers, the scoffers, those who lack in belief of him. He tells them to go in the same way that he told the demons to leave the people who were possessed earlier in Matthew, chapter 8.
The kingdom does not make room for faithless mockery.
And then with a simple touch, in an intimate moment, Jesus lifts up another daughter, who is a Pharisee's daughter, a synagogue leader's daughter. He lifts her up. He could have spoken a word, but he chose to take her hand.
And the power of the kingdom flows through the presence of Jesus Christ to come, rise and live.
And just as before, the testimony spreads, the one Isaiah had foretold about the one who would raise the dead, you know, everything he says, I have not come to abolish the Torah and the prophets. And some take that the far way. And they say, oh, so, you know, all women need to have their head covers. And, you know, everybody needs to, you know, abstain from being in church, you know, those times of months, and, you know, you need to do those types of things. No, no, no, he didn't abolish.
He came to fulfill. And he continues to fulfill. When we look at the prophecies of Isaiah, the one who would raise the dead, Isaiah 26 is one of the prophecies that's written. He's here. Jesus the Christ, Yeshua Hamashiach.
He's here. The one everybody told you about. The Dead sea Scrolls in 4Q521, since they've become a little bit more popular recently, also echoed that the expectation of Judaism. And remember, the Essenes were considered the pagans of the day. They had taken their stuff, they had gone out into the wilderness.
John has some interaction with them in the wilderness as well. I think probably the Pharisees did too, because the Pharisees had gone out with John when John was baptizing, and they're questioning John, why are you baptizing this way? So they had had some interaction, but when the Essenes didn't have control over the priesthood, you know, Hanukkah, you know, that thing we talk about, like, I don't celebrate Hanukkah, I'm not Jewish. Okay? It's Israel's heritage.
I get it, I get it. Like, okay, cool, it's foreign to you, but so is a Fat guy in a red suit. So it is what it is. We can make some extremes on both sides. So it is what it is.
So either way, the scenes where probably the most conservatively based from the Torah standpoint. And we live in a culture right now that's very political with conservatives and liberal ideas. This was probably as conservative as it gets. Out in the middle of the desert. They had created their own little cult, you know, it is what it is.
And yet their scrolls, their writings on the anticipation of this moshiach, this Jewish rabbi, this messianic king, the only messianic rabbi that's out there, Jesus, the Messiah. One of the expectations was he will give life to the dead.
He's fulfilling this in plain sight. And yet they didn't see it. Worship team, you can come back. I only have two pages of notes.
We talked about how hard it is to play a three chord progression when the pastor talks for another 25 minutes. So we are a discipleship church. And so I'm even disciplin Tanya's fingers into being able to hold down that fort right there, you know, hold it down. I don't apologize for going long last week. I was definitely passionate, felt like it needed to be said.
But I also respect the fact that it's table fellowship this week and you guys all came to celebrate all of the kiddos and all the things and you want to eat at some point. And so I'm going to continue to talk about nonsense as long as possible so I can hit the 25 minute mark on the sermon. Many of us in this room believe that God can. But how many of you in this room believe God actually will?
We look sometimes for the physical, but many of us need mental, spiritual, emotional healing. I was talking with Brent yesterday.
It's a busy season. Brent's getting all the funerals and I'm getting all the weddings. So I came out on the right side of that one. But we're talking as he's coming back from a funeral and I'm coming back from a wedding and we're talking about this and we're talking about things that are happening in our life and things that are happening in other people's lives and you know, pastoral. He's one of our elders and in the conversation I had mentioned to him, I think sometimes in life, sometimes in life the hardest thing for me to actually heal from is actually the non physical hurt.
It's not when I'm weeding in a baseball field and a rock comes up and puts a big old shiner on my shin. It's when Cam says something mean about my sermons. It's when there's some spiritual, emotional, mental connection that's there. Those are the things that hurt the most. And so sometimes we believe God can do things, but we don't believe that God can take away the hurt that somebody who abused you put on you.
You did nothing to deserve it. God can and God will. Matthew records miracle after miracle, not as some ancient stories for us to admire, but as a pattern of the kingdom that is breaking into the present.
A lot of us live our life as if somehow we're in some just apathetic life. Oh, Jesus is never gonna come back. He's not gonna do this. You know, we don't have to save souls. We got all the time in the world and we kind of just live.
Some of us go full on Rambo over here, and we feel like the only way that we're ever gonna, like, fulfill the Bible is if we take up arms in a militia for Jesus. Yeah, don't do that. That's. That's not in the Bible. That's not what he's asking you to do.
You got off the track. Come back.
They sang I'm in the Lord's army in Sunday school way too many times. And then you grow up and you're like, oh, no, I'm in the Lord's army for real. No, don't. No. Weird.
Stop. Both sides of the guardrail are unhealthy. Being apathetic and taking it too far. God is trying to get you positioned down the middle of the road. The road of the kingdom, the road that he constantly walked on.
It's a pattern of the kingdom breaking into the present. Why? Because Jesus was the fulfillment of all prophecies, even the ones that may have not happened yet. He is the fulfillment of all of those things. The priesthood, he's the fulfillment.
The temple, he's the fulfillment. In the end. All things were made through him and by him so that we could have life and life abundant.
There's nothing you could have done and there's nothing you can do that can earn that. It's not possible. It is a free gift of salvation.
But we have to model being in the kingdom and the King it is at hand. Your faith cannot be reduced to some sort of vague possibility. Otherwise, this is as good as it gets.
The power sustains us when the culture mocks us. The power of God lives in us like a new wine and fills us and makes us whole. It is a power that calls us not to live as spectators, but to be engaged in the actions of the kingdom at hand.
The shadows have always given way to light, and the light is the only thing that can drive out darkness.
So today, as we respond, I want to ask you, if you took a rock earlier and you put it in your bag, that's stealing.
If you took a rock and you held on to it, you're like, ah, this is stupid.
What do you think it would have looked like in the middle of the marketplace when this woman, who is weak, probably malnourished, looking in some, some ways, was busting through one scrape and claw at a time just to touch the hem of that garment? We think that would have looked like. Would you have thought that was stupid too? Would you have thought that that was just, that was just some show?
Everything we do in the physical has some sort of connection to the spiritual. And the power in the spiritual comes from one of two places. It comes from the adversary or it comes from Jesus.
Jesus has the power to do anything he wants in the physical because everything that's happening is for his character and his namesake. This is why we know that there is a finite moment in time that the evil of this world will be bound up and will be cast away. And then we won't have to question whether or not the person who's crawling in front or laying a rock down as being serious and genuine or not. We won't have to question it anymore. Because the evil intentions of the heart, the evil intentions of this life, that nature that wants to wrestle against God in your heart, won't exist anymore.
But until then, we're given the very next example. Are we the people who are playing the funeral music, who are mourning what God is getting ready to celebrate? Are we the people who are mocking in disbelief when Jesus says he wants to do something in their life and we're like, ah, he can't do that or she's dead or this is over.
I'd like to tell you that it's just some far off things that I've read in the Bible, but it's not. Because in three years of this church, we have seen people healed, we have seen people delivered, we have seen people set free, we've seen marriages be restored. We've seen people grant forgiveness for people who never in a million years you would have thought they would be able to grant them forgiveness. We've seen the power of God move and manifest as if it was alive and tangible. It's not just something we read in the Bible.
There are people in this room. Who science gave a small chance that they would be in this room. They're here. Even RFK couldn't have predicted that Jesus did. So today, as we do this response song, as we sing this time, as we we position our hearts before we go and fill our bellies.
If you held onto the rock, let me ask you the question.
What if today is the day that Jesus wanted you to lay it down and give it to him and he was going to take it away from you, but you thought it was stupid? Maybe you weren't brave enough.
I don't know.
Jesus was the one who called people out of the boat on the water. Pretty crazy, right? You call me out expecting to swim, not to walk. Jesus was the one who raised from the dead, right? Touch the hand.
Jesus was the one who healed leprosy, right?
So today, as we respond, I ask if you hold on to that rock, that you absolutely make sure that God wants you to walk out of here with that rock, whatever it is. Maybe you would say, I, I know God wants me to continue to battle this and to hold on to this. It's not my time to lay it down yet. And I'm not going to question you. That's between you and the Lord.
But if he's telling you to release it today and to lay it down, then I ask you to bring the rocks and set them over here. Stand and respond with me, please.
