Greater Than Jonah, Greater Than Solomon

To watch the sermon Greater than Jonah, Greater than Solomon | Matthew 12: 38-42

Download the Discussion Guide: Download

Download the 5 Day Devotional: Download

So a couple of housekeeping announcements. Last week, I created the cardinal sin, Delilah, will you forgive me? Yes. So you're like, I don't know. Why am I forgiving you?

Because last week I talked about amazing key lime pie. But there's two people who make key lime pie together. And I only gave Monica the street cred for that and left Delilah out. And so Monica and Delilah actually cooked, like, a special cake for us yesterday and some cookies for something that we were doing. And I tried.

I tried both of them because they are 100% in my macro count. Nothing like sugar and frosting to keep you in line. They were phenomenal. And so both of you are amazing. And my apologies for giving all the love to your sister.

So there. See? Even the pastor can repent from the stage, which is good, because we're going to talk about repentance again. There's a lot of talk about repentance in Matthew, so probably should set the example. The 31st.

So next weekend, we have a special service. Pastor Erica Bronze is going to be here from our Dallas campus. She's gonna be teaching about sitting at the feet of Jesus and what that means. She's gonna look at the story of Martha and of Mary and Miriam. And I'm pretty excited for that, even though I'm gonna have to watch it after the elders retreat.

But she'll be doing the preaching next week, so super excited for that. The 31st, which is in two weeks.

Cause I know not everybody's listening to Anna on the announcements. We're having a family meeting. People are always asking, what's going on in the church? What's the finances of the church? What's this?

What's that? How long are you gonna keep the man bun? All those types of things. All of those answers are at the family meeting. We will answer everything.

We will hand out the finances at the church. We will tell you the building update. By that point in time, hopefully we'll have, like, a solidified building update date. Vicki's been working basically around the clock to help us with that. Super exciting, right?

The family meeting. No. Everybody's like, oh, church business. Maybe this will make you come to the family meeting. We're going to do it at the new property.

Oh, nobody? Okay. So, all right. I utterly failed.

I'm going to the new property. The property that a lot of people call me and say, where is this property? Can we visit this property? Yes, you can. On this day, only on the 31st.

And if you act now, we'll throw in another building. Tour for free. I'm joking. Not ShamWow, but we're going to do the family meeting at the new property. We're going to take a turn to tour around, kind of view what it's like, talk a little bit about the vision, not only about what happened in 2025, but what the vision of the church is for this space.

A lot of you, you've never gone through buying a church property or you've never gone through even building a church property. And so this is our way of trying to be able to invite you into that process before you show up. And I've Chip and Joanna Gaines the entire property. So I want you to see what a 1968 church looks like so that when we're done with the 1968 church, we can all take ownership of that property and what the Lord's doing and has done already. So that is the 31st.

We'll have service here. As soon as service is over, we will all get in our car, we will make the long trek about 1.1 miles up Western Avenue. We'll do our family meeting there. And then the following week. I know, like, you're like, can it get any better?

But wait, but wait, there's more. As seen on YouTube, there's more. The very next week, we're doing our 10th anniversary service on February 7th here at 5pm to all of you who are like, man, Pastor Chris, can we change the time of service on Saturday morning so that we can sleep in, watch the Smurfs, Fraggle Rock, all those really cool cartoons that are on Saturday morning? Yes, you can. One time only, on February 7th.

You're like, that's what you think. That's why I wasn't here last week.

February 7th, we'll be meeting here for our 10th anniversary service in the evening at 5pm we will also be doing table fellowship after that. And so super excited for all that very, very busy time over the last couple of months and the upcoming couple of months. And so Brent is going to be kicking off a new sermon series called the Secrets of the Kingdom on that very February 7th where we're going to look at all of the parables of Matthew, chapter 13. I'm super excited about that. I also, you know, says the Bible says we should confess our sins.

I am being a little bit selfish because I preached a lot over the last couple of months. I'm just looking for a month off just to hang out with y'. All. So, you know, I'm excited to let Brent get back into the pulpit. And me just take a chance to chill out a little bit on Saturdays with you.

Well, chill out a tiny bit with you on Saturdays. I have very little chill. So if you have your Bible in your laps or in your app, turn with me to Matthew chapter 12. We're going to pick up in verse 38. So little recap for we've got some new people here.

We've been in Matthew since the Sermon on the Mount, which is basically the entire last year. And so we called it the Tour of the Kingdom. Jesus goes up a mountain, sits down. They absolutely would have known that this was like Moses and he begins to give his Torah. He says, you've heard it said.

He does the Beatitudes. He goes through all these things and he absolutely raises the standard. Why does he raise the standard? Because what was coming in the future was greater than what was there already. When God in the flesh resurrects, ascends the right hand of the Father and sends the spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, to dwell inside each and every one of us, it's easier for us to say, I'm not going to kill Michael.

I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to bring a stone in here, I'm not going to stone him. I'm not going to bring a weapon in here. I'm not going to do it. That's super easy.

But if Michael and I ever get crossways with each other in my brain, if I ever thought anything evil of him, Jesus raises the standard. He says, I don't care if you threw a stone at Michael. If you thought about throwing a stone at Michael, it's the equivalent of doing so. Moses set a standard for the nation of Israel. Yeshua comes and he says, it's elevated, and what's coming to help you get there is going to be greater than what you've had before.

So all of Matthew is engaged in this narrative of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Torah and the prophets. So last week we continued walking through Jesus confrontation with the Pharisees. The Pharisees get a bad rap. I don't believe every Pharisee was bad. I believe that their intentions and some of them were good.

But I also know that Jesus is constantly engaged in a kind of back and forth with the Pharisees. You don't hear about the Sadducees quite as much. And we definitely don't hear about the Essenes because they took their ball and went home out in the desert. So. But the Pharisees are confronting Jesus again, where he had warned them, he had healed a person.

He had warned them not to attribute the power of the Holy Spirit to the devil, the adversary, which is what they did. And he says that every sin and blasphemy in this life can be forgiven except for the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. When you attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to, to the adversary or the enemy, it reveals that your heart is growing hardened and unrepentant. The Holy Spirit cannot impact what's happening in your heart. What we store up in our hearts eventually will bear fruit.

It will bear good fruit, it'll bear bad fruit. We'll see it in how we engage with our spouse, how we engage with each other, how we engage with our kids. What we store up in the treasury of our heart either comes out in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control, all these things, or it comes out as what Paul basically calls wickedness. You're angry all the time. You're always yelling.

You know, you don't want to see your spouse, you don't want to see your kids, you don't want to see your friends. Nobody's ever good enough for you. Everything's a bigger problem than it needs to be. What we store up in our heart matters. And this is what Jesus is trying to get through to the religious leadership of that day.

Your words, your habits, your thoughts all matter in what you do with the Lord. And the fruit that you will bear will either testify that the Lord is living in you, or it will bear as the witness against you on the day of judgment. Matthew writes in his Gospel with very careful instructions. You know, Matthew is interesting. The Chosen, I've said this before, the Chosen, I think, has an amazing representation of Matthew.

He was a money counter. He was a left brain. He was somewhat autistic in the Chosen. And honestly, I think probably would have had some of those mannerisms because of his specialty of what he had. And so Matthew writes his gospel with careful structure and intentional themes.

It's not necessarily a chronological order, and we see this very much today. He doesn't write every single engagement as a chronological moment. He writes them as a theological confrontation. Matthew wants us to see the theological confrontation that Yeshua is having with the Pharisees. He wants us to see the difference of the Israelites, the Pharisees, condemned, mocked, accused, the average Joe just trying to get along in the Israel occupied area that Rome's taking control over.

They're just trying to get along, but yet they act in awe and amazement at what they see. Jesus Do. There's a difference in how these people interact. So today we're gonna pick up in verse 38. But this is not a chronological event.

It's a theological confrontation that says, and it happened. Not like we're just moving on to the next story, like, okay, after church, we walked outside and XYZ happened. No, there's some implication that there's a time frame that goes by from what happened last week and what we're reading this week. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees came to Jesus with a request. Teacher, we want you to show us miraculous signs to prove your authority.

Matthew skips forward to another engagement where time has passed. How much we don't know. But their request was loaded in irony. We've been going through the Gospel of Matthew for how many weeks? Like, well over 20.

Every week, God does something huge. We're not talking about God's attendance at Church is 100% or 99%. We're talking about every time we're reading a passage in Matthew, God is doing something miraculous. He's healing a person. He's raising somebody from the dead.

He's leaving the synagogue to go in private because Peter's mother has a fever. He's going, and he's doing the work of the kingdom with the kingdom gifts and the kingdom righteousness in almost every verse we're reading. And yet here we are after all these testimonies of miraculous power. We're not talking about one little miracle here or one little miracle there. Like, literally, Jesus is walking around and he's like, you get a miracle, you get a miracle.

You get a miracle, you get a miracle. Everybody gets a miracle. And the Pharisees say, teacher, show us a sign.

And jesus, He doesn't punch them just one way. Jesus is better than me. There's many, many. But Jesus doesn't punch them. He's given this adulterous and evil generation all kinds of signs.

He's fulfilling the prophecies in Isaiah 42. He's fulfilling the prophecies in Daniel 7. He's doing all these things, and yet it's not good enough. Let me ask you a question. How many times has God done stuff in your life and you're still over there?

Like God, I'm still waiting for my miracle. And he's like, what more do I have to do for you? You know that day that you were speeding? 80 in a 50 and you didn't die when the car pulled out in front of you? Can I get some street cred for that?

One, we live in a day and age where two main thought processes exist. Either the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the works of the Holy Spirit have ceased and they no longer exist for today, which is a very common, common doctrine in theology, in Christianity, or. Or we live in a place where we don't give credit to the Holy Spirit for even the small things that the Holy Spirit is doing, like another day of life. I mean, the Bible says we're not even promised that. So if you have another day of life, which you do, because you're here, you can see me and I can see you, then why didn't we thank God and the Holy Spirit for that gift today?

That's a miracle.

How we live our life matters. We're either washed by the blood or we're not. Teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign to prove your authority.

Man. I love compassionate Jesus because Southside Brent would not have handled that well. Just would not have handled that well. Jesus testimony had already been spreading the last couple of weeks. We saw that Jesus was actually having to manage the testimony of all the healings so that the time wasn't yet for them to be exposed.

He had not fulfilled all things yet. He had to manage when, how, why, to heal, so that it didn't spiral out of control too quickly. And yet the Pharisees obviously witnessed those things and they are asking Jesus for another sign. Lives have been restored. The authority of the kingdom of heaven had already been demonstrated in a way that the kingdom of earth, it doesn't matter which king had never done before.

And yet here they are challenging him again. It's possible going to give them the benefit of the doubt. It's possible that they had heard the reports, but they wanted to establish with their own eyes under the Torah. They wanted to establish the verification. Sounds somewhat reasonable, but their hearts had already dismissed his works because Pharisees had engaged with him last week and they attributed what they saw to the devil, not to the power of heaven.

And they were the gatekeepers, the guardians of the testimony of heaven for the first century.

I don't believe, and this is my opinion, I don't believe that the Pharisees were operating in honest curiosity. I believe that they were operating in spiritual resistance. And you don't need another sign. We've had enough. We need to surrender our heart, which is what the Pharisees were unwilling to do.

We have it even worse now because we have the testimony from the moment we were born that Jesus walked on this earth. Jesus taught on this earth a Little manger baby in a stone trough for the lambs who came. He lived, he died, he resurrected, he ascended to the Father and he sent the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to us. We have that testimony from the day we were born.

And yet less than half of the world's population claims to be a believer in Jesus Christ.

It's easy for us to look backwards and say that evil and adulterous generation while we're evil and adulterous. I don't go through the Gospel of Matthew because I want us to look at how much better we are than them. Oh wait, there's a scripture passage about that. Thank you Lord for not making us like them. We do so that we can be reminded of what our ancestors did before, so that we don't fall into the same trappings that they did then.

We as 21st century Hebrew loving individuals in the Western culture, we don't need any more signs.

We need to surrender our heart.

Repentance is the cure, not God proving something again to us. He owes no more proving no more signs. He doesn't need to do any of those if he chooses to do it. Thank you, gracious Heavenly Father.

Jesus responds sharply to the pharisees in verse 39 and 40. Only an evil and adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign. But the only sign I will give him is them is a sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

Jesus exposes their spiritual unfaithfulness by calling them evil and adulterous. This isn't about a marriage infidelity in the physical. This is about a covenant betrayal in the spiritual. Jesus is setting up right in front of their very eyes the need for a new covenant. They were entrusted with God's word, yet they have replaced their obedience with their self righteousness and their control rather than their surrendered heart and their humility.

If Jonah could move a nation to repent, then what's our excuse with the risen Christ?

If Jonah could move an entire nation of Nineveh to repent for us who have the testimony of Jesus Christ and the power of Christ living in us, what's our excuse? What's our excuse for not doing life with people outside of here who don't look or act like us and bring them to a place of repentance and do life and build a relationship with them? What's our excuse? Jonah was able to cause an entire nation to repent.

And that was prior to Christ walking on this earth. That was prior to the Holy Spirit being poured out to help us. Jesus points to Jonah. Yes, I understand the three days and the three nights. They foreshadow the grave, death, burial and resurrection of Christ.

How he went down into the gates of hell and he fought and conquered for us. I understand that. But Jonah's story carries more weight than just a timeline. Jonah's descent led to the repentance of Nineveh. And in the same way, Jesus, death and resurrection would spark a global call to repentance for the salvation of sins.

Jesus also calls himself the title Son of Man. Again in there, before it was others saying, is this the Son of Man? Here he references the Son of Man. He's being a little bit more authoritative, a little bit more direct. A title loaded with the meaning that those people in that room who he was talking with, they would absolutely understand.

They would understand Daniel 7. They would be looking for the fulfillment of Daniel 7, if anything, in that day and age. They were the interpreters of Daniel 7. And yet most of them missed him. That prophecy comes with his divine authority, dominion, judgment, and the power to forgive sins.

Jesus using this title was not some sort of subtle play on words. It was an unmistakable challenge to the Pharisees.

It's not that the Pharisees didn't see enough. It's that they didn't want to change. Not their life, not their heart, not the power structure. It's not much different today, right? We don't like change.

I mean, I remember the family uproar when we took the plastic off Grandma's couch.

Never truly used the couch until the plastic came off.

We don't like change.

They didn't like change. They saw the possibility of their power and their influence being stripped away from them. Nineveh repented without a miracle. Think about that for a second. Nineveh repented without a miracle.

Yet the Pharisees had rejected Jesus after thousands of miracles.

I know repentance is not something people like to talk about, but if Nineveh repented at the call of a prophet, and the Pharisees refused to repent at the prophet of all prophets, the one who gave life to every prophet, the one who gave the calling and the mission and the words to every prophet, we should be very, very cautious on how we live our lives from a standpoint of repentance. If we believe that repentance doesn't need to be in the foreground of our relationship with Jesus, we should be very cautious at the example that was set before us.

Our heart posture and our need for repentance is one of the greatest gifts that Jesus could ever offer to us. He didn't need you to be perfect. He didn't ask you to be perfect, but he asked you to be humble and realize when you make a mistake.

And he said he would do his part. He would wash it away. I don't know about you, but I need that. I've always needed that.

Pretty scary if you can look yourself in the mirror and you can say, this is as good as it gets.

You must do that a lot. Isaac. Wow.

It's pretty humbling when you look in the mirror and you realize that God loved you enough. That in everything you see, whether it's the external or it's the things you're wrestling with on the internal, that he sees the perfection of him through you even when you're not there yet. That even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us so that we could be restored to Him. We can argue over the nuances of how we should do this or how we should do that or. Or we could kind of strip that away right now and we could just go sit at the feet of Jesus and we could say, lord, I'm sorry I haven't repented of this thing that I've been wrestling with for 20 years.

I'm sorry that you've been with me every single day and I've acted like I couldn't just give it to you.

Jesus continues on in verse 41 and 42, and he says, the people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on Judgment Day and they will condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah. Now someone greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent. The Queen of Sheba will also stand up against the generation on Judgment Day and condemn it. For she came from a distant land to hear the wisdom of Solomon. Now someone greater than Solomon is here, but you refuse to listen.

The kingdom does not advance through arguments. The kingdom of Heaven advances through broken and yielded hearts.

Jesus raises the stakes. Nineveh was considered to be a superpower greatest ever of that time. They were violent. They were completely entrenched in idolatry. And yet when Jonah came preaching about repentance, they repented.

The Queen of Sheba. Not everybody knows the story of the Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba was extremely wise and intelligent. She was very, very powerful, wealthy. She traveled a great distance because she heard about Solomon.

Solomon had prayed for wisdom. He didn't pray for a Bentley, he prayed for wisdom. She traveled to go see Solomon. Now, again, I believe my opinion probably multifaceted one. She had heard the testimony of Solomon and about his wisdom.

The news had spread and so she wanted to go see for herself. Probably a little prideful. She's very powerful. Probably wanted to say, is this guy really wise? We'll see.

Can you imagine in that day and age if Queen Sheba would have been found to be wiser than Solomon? Oh, man. Women weren't allowed to do anything at that point. Like that had been like super crazy. But she goes and what she sees, she wasn't a believer.

She was a pagan. She wasn't a believer. And what she. She goes and she does is she sees the wisdom of Solomon and the Lord working through Solomon and she professes that she ends up praising God, that he gave Solomon this wisdom. And it is said that later on she converted to become a believer in Jesus.

In God, Yahweh. Sorry, not in Jesus. I believe Yahweh is Jesus and vice versa. But we only have time for a building blocks class on the theology there. But both of them responded with humility.

Nineveh was powerful. Queen of Sheba was very powerful. They didn't theoretically need anything in this life. And yet they found value in the Lord and they started praising the Lord for what he had done. If pagans turn to God with their crumbs, how dare we reject God now that we have the fullness of the feast?

Sorry, Lord, you can call me on Wednesday at 3 o'. Clock. I got an opening there. I'll help you out then.

He doesn't want the crumbs of your life. He wants all of your life. He doesn't want a 400 square foot apartment or office in your heart. He wants all of your heart. And this was what the Pharisees were wrestling with, is that they weren't willing to give up anything.

They weren't even willing to give him a studio apartment. They weren't even willing to Airbnb this on a lease to own option.

They had closed off their hearts from repentance, and yet Jesus still attempted to show them with the modeling of the kingdom of Heaven in front of them. They studied the Scripture, they taught the law, they claimed to know God. But even when he said someone greater than Jonah and Solomon, Jesus keeps pulling out all of their hierarchy. Before, when Brent was teaching, at the start of Matthew chapter 12, he says, Someone greater than the Temple, he continuously is upping the ante, trying to get them to see who he is. And they keep hardening their heart.

Oh, wait, Pharaoh did that too.

Who would have thought the Pharisees and Pharaoh would have been likened in the heart posture? That was a plot twist I didn't see coming. Worldly nations responded to partial revelation that God's own leaders rejected the fullness of the revelation.

Greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon. Yet somehow it was not greater than their own comfort. Worship team, you can come back. Jesus exposes the tragedy. And you cannot claim ignorance.

You can't pretend that you haven't seen or heard. The Pharisees saw, the Pharisees heard. And they're like, oh, teacher, show us. Oh, teacher, if. Oh, teacher, like, come on, all of us.

If some person was lame, if somebody came in here and they were lame and they could not walk and they were basically crawling on the ground, if somebody walked up and said, get up, and they got up and they held their mat, we're all going to be like.

They had witnessed multiple of those. I can't claim ignorance. The power of God had been manifested repeatedly. The evidence was undeniable. The issue was not about the information.

It was about the lack of repentance.

Jesus wasn't interested in performing miracles to satisfy hardened hearts. He was calling for them to surrender. God doesn't owe signs to hearts that have already made up their mind in unbelief. The standard has never changed. When Yeshua set the standard, the standard doesn't change.

If anything, it has intensified for us as callers in the 21st century. We live on the other side of the resurrection and the ascension. It's a higher calling for us. So the question remains, what have you in your life, in your heart that is not repented? What in your heart and your mind have you remained unrepentive of?

Because that's at least one spot that the Holy Spirit is not at work in your life. And that one spot is the open doorway for the adversary to come into your heart and into your life and to grow things that are not of God.

Whatever you claim to be off limits in your heart. Jesus, you can't go there. He's already walked through the wall and sat down there waiting for you to come join him. Oh, Jesus, you can't be in that part of my heart. You know, that heart is.

It's hurt or it's bitter, it's angry. He's already sitting next to it. He's waiting for you to come join him.

Are there areas that you've invited Jesus to visit. But you have not invited him to be the Lord over. See, even the demons know who Jesus is.

But the demons do not clock. They do not call him their Lord.

Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is God. Doesn't matter what you believe. You can believe that, you can profess that. But is Jesus your Lord?

Is he the Lord over your life? Is he the leader of your household? Is he the leader of what you do? Is he the Lord over. Over all that you are?

Some of you are desperate for the breath of the Lord in certain areas of your life.

Scripture shows us that the breath of the Lord, the flowing of the spirit of the Lord, comes through repentance. When we lay down our crowns, we unlock those doors of those hidden spaces. We allow the Holy Spirit to come fully in our life. Some of us are still asking God to prove himself.

I don't think we need to ask God to prove himself anymore. I think he's done his part, and he's continuing to do his part. I think some of us got to show up to the dance. I think some of us got to show up at the dance table. Some of us got to do our part.

He says if you repent of your sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness. And we're like, hey, Lord, can we go ahead and amend that? Like, to, like, if. Can we just take out the. If I confess my sins, we just take that part out.

You're faithful and just. To forgive me my sins and cleanse me of unrighteousness. And he's like, you evil, adulterous people. I keep doing things and doing things and doing things and doing things. And I'm asking you to do small things here.

Join me in the work of the kingdom. Join me, profess me. And we're like, hey, paragraph 3B. Can we change. Can we change the verbiage there?

Please Surrender. That's what he wants. He wants you to surrender your will, find his. Surrender your heart, find his. Surrender your list, find his.

Greater than the temple, greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon?

But is he greater than your love of football? Is he greater than your love of chocolate cake? Is he great? Thank you, Shepherd. That's a great answer.

It would have been really awkward if he would have said no.

That was a softball, too. Is he greater than your love of self? Is he greater than your love of money? Is he greater than whatever that is? Because we're not living in a culture in a day and age where we're thinking about Noah, and we're thinking about Jonah, and we're thinking about the temple, and we're thinking about all those things.

So ask yourself a question. What consumes most of your thought processes? Is Jesus actually greater than that?

Is Jesus greater than your fear? Is Jesus greater than your anxiety? Is Jesus greater than what, your love of McDonald's?

You have to look in your heart, in your mind, and be honest with yourself. If Jesus isn't greater than something in your heart, in your mind, because that's an area of your life that's going to lead you to death, it's going to lead you to chaos, going to lead you away from eternal life.

You don't have to be strong enough to overcome it, but you do have to enjoy and engage in the free gift of repentance. Oh, Lord, please don't forgive me of that. Everybody wants to be forgiven and washed clean. If you knew the sins of my youth. Everybody wants to be washed clean.

Everybody wants to say, that doesn't define me. We don't do that anymore. Not now, not again. But it starts with you taking a different heart posture change in front of the Lord.

Can't do that. If you don't think he's greater because you don't believe, you don't trust that he can do it. That's the equivalent of saying, teacher, give me a sign.

It's like you're here, right?

You're here right now, right? Remember the times where you didn't go to church? Remember the times when you filled your time with what you wanted to do?

He's in the little stuff. If you would stand with me. Let's respond.