Rejoice in Silence
To watch the sermon Rejoicing in Silence | Matthew 9 27-31
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Today, right after service, we have what's called our family meeting. We started this about three years ago, and we open up the finances of the church, we open up the leadership structure of the church, we open up all of that kind of stuff, and then we open it up to your questions. No question is a bad question.
So we invite you. We don't have a membership. It's not like a membership class. It's not like you have to hang out and you get enough gold stars. And then after you get enough gold stars, then you're like, okay, yes, I'm a part of the church.
And we don't do any blood covenants or any of that weird stuff that's here. Like, we break bread, not fellowship. So, Cam, I know. It's a good shirt. It is.
It's a good shirt. So I invite you guys to stay with us. Afterwards, we'll wait till the broadcast, which has a couple minute delay is over. We'll put up an image up on the screen and then there's a QR code. It is not the Mark of the Beast, even though Brent might think so.
It is something that you take a photo with. And when you take a photo of it, then it pops up a PDF, and in that PDF we'll have a bunch of the information that we'll go over information on our church. And so I invite you guys to stay after for that join with us. It should be less than an hour. And so if you want to know about what are the finances, what are the leadership structure, what do we do with this church?
What have we been doing the last three or four months? We do one about every quarter. This is your way to understand what's happening. Bless you, Corey. This is your way of understanding what's happening in the church.
And I invite you to do that because a lot of times people are like, oh, well, I don't really know what's going on in the church. And it's like, yeah, because you don't come. And so, like, this is my invitation to you to not run out of here before Michael is done with Great Are youe Lord? As the response song today. So we are starting to set up hidden cameras around the lobby so that you can become part of our Instagram and our TikTok and that, you know, the ones of you who are immediately run out during the response song.
Because apparently you got to get to your car before I do. Don't worry, you're going to way beat me to my car. So I appreciate you all being here. I appreciate you thinking about depending upon how good the sermon is or not good if you will stay for the family meeting afterwards. But if the sermon is good today, that's because the Holy Spirit inspires the words, not because I'm an eloquent speaker, because I am definitely not.
I spent the majority of my ministerial time in being number two, being in operations and logistics. And so preaching is very new to me in the grand scheme of things. And so it is an honor that you would take time out of your Saturday and that you would join us as we continue to go through the book of Matthew. This week was kind of hell on earth for a lot of people. And so as I looked at what we were titling this sermon a couple of weeks ago, you know, we get it to the admin at least two weeks in advance for trying just scheduling sake, that kind of stuff.
And I saw that I had titled this Rejoice in Silence. I was like, oh, okay, interesting. You know, with the things that have happened in this world this week, it doesn't really matter whether what side of the aisle you might be on. The loss of a life and the taking of a life is horrific in the eyes of God. And in the end, I stand on the Bible as being the word of God.
I stand on Jesus as being the king of the kingdom of God. And they say don't take lives. Doesn't really matter whether you're male or female. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, value life because the gospels show us that Jesus valued every single life. Jesus came.
Jesus dined with the people who some of us probably would have been like, not sure I want to go eat McDonald's with those people. And yet each and every one of those people who are outcast, who were popular, didn't matter where they were at on the spectrum. Jesus cared enough about each and every one of them that he knew the hairs on their head and he invited them to sit with him. If we want to overcome the darkness that is taking over this world and has been taking over this world for a long time, we try to act like it's ramped up. Now it's cycling back.
Light, light, light. When you shine your light before men, they will see your good works and not give you a plaque, not give you an award. They will glorify your Father in heaven.
That's what this world is about. You're either glorifying yourself in the ways of this world or you're glorifying your Father in heaven. This week we're going to be in Matthew, chapter 9, verses 27 through 31. I've titled this Rejoice in Silence. Last week we had saw and talked about the woman who is physically weak but used everything in her power.
12 years is a long time to be bleeding out and yet she used everything in her power to just scratch and claw to Jesus that if she could just nick, just touch the hem of the garment that he was wearing, that somehow her infirmities could be healed. It was that perseverance of faith that she was healed. We talked about how many people in the church believe that God can do something, but it's a different level of faith that God will do something. God can heal. I believe God can heal.
But do you believe God will heal? And this is part of the testimony of the deeper level of faith that the woman had. As she crawled towards Jesus. We saw that the Pharisee who was leading the synagogue had broken with the rank of the greater Pharisaical party. And he had saw a beauty in Jesus and, and he had asked Jesus to come and to raise his daughter from the dead.
And he did so.
We saw Jesus testify that she was alive to those who were already in the midst of the funeral. We saw Jesus transition a woman who was considered unclean, somewhat outcast by society, into not just being, hey, we're friends and you're clean now. You're my daughter.
There's a lot of people in this room. I care a lot about the people in this room, but you were not my daughter. You were not my son. There's a different level of that intimacy that comes and Jesus reaches down to her and says, daughter, you're no longer unclean. You're my daughter.
This wasn't a transactional healing. This was a familial healing. And this is why our church does a lot of things the way we do it. We're a family. When you come to the salvation in Jesus Christ, you are adopted into a family, not like the broken ones that a lot of us have come from or that we're experiencing now.
The only brokenness that is in God's family is when Jesus broke this body so that he could give you life outside of that. He is perfection and always was perfection.
I got news for you. He always will be perfection.
The kingdom of heaven is here, guys. And everything we continue to read in Matthew isn't some far off historical documentation. This is about Jesus coming to people who knew. They knew the prophecies of Messiah. They knew about the Messianic age, they knew about the Messianic king.
And rather than making the Messianic age and the Messianic king about the Jewish people. He was making it about the Kingdom of Heaven, because you can't have a Messianic king without the Kingdom of Heaven.
You can't have a Messianic age without the Torah of the Kingdom. And as Brent went through for 13 to 15 weeks on the Sermon on the Mount, and we've gone through what feels like a lifetime in Matthew, chapter seven through nine, we're going to stay seated right in the Book of Matthew for a long period of time. Why? Because don't we want to be like our king? Don't we want to model our king?
Well, we should learn about what our King said and what our King did so that we could try to model that in our daily life. This week, I want to continue as Jesus manifests the Torah of the Kingdom and the Kingdom righteousness. Remember, one of the things that was said against Jesus is that he was here to abolish the Torah. He. He could not be the Messianic king.
He could not be this Messianic Mashiach because he would abolish the Torah and the prophets. And he says, think not that I have come to abolish the Torah and prophets. I've come to fulfill. And so one of the missions that he is doing in the Kingdom of action is he is fulfilling the Torah and the prophets. There's just a problem.
What they expected him to do to fulfill the Torah and the prophets is not what the King is doing. So we are blessed because we live after the testimony of this time. We've got English versions, hundreds and thousands of translations, and we know that Jesus went to the cross, resurrected and ascended to the right hand of the Father. So we don't have to guess whether or not he was actually fulfilling the Torah of the prophets or if he was a blasphemer, the same wrestle that the first century Jews were going through. We don't have to wrestle with that.
We know that the evidence tells us that Jesus resurrected from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. So as we look back into the Gospels, as we look back into the Torah and the prophets, we now look through the lens of Jesus Christ, the one that all of them foreshadowed. And we realized he was never a blasphemer. He never healed people or cast out demons through the power of the devil. They just did not recognize that perfection and that power.
And that should be a wake up call to all of us in the 21st century United States of America.
I'm not sure that we would recognize the power and the perfection of Jesus Christ if he were walking in our midst today. And that should scare all of us, because if the people who were Jewish, who were culturally engaged in that area missed him the first time, how much harder for the people who are arguing over whether OU is going to have a winning record or not? Now, Jesus wasn't worried about ou. He wasn't. He wasn't bent out of shape on the, you know, pokem.
Is that what the OSU is? I don't know. I'm not a cowboy. I'm from Ohio. Like, I wear Nikes with a man bun.
He wasn't worried about any of those things. Those things weren't culturally relevant to him. Those were not his issues. So today we're going to pick up in verse 27, and after Jesus had left the girl's home, remember, he had gone to the synagogue leader's home. He had raised the girl from the dead.
Two blind men followed along behind him, shouting, son of David, have mercy on us. There's another title. Son of David, have mercy on us. David was and still is to this day, the greatest king over Israel. I would venture in most sects, David is considered to be higher than even Moses is in some regards.
David is one of the elect. He is one of the ones that, like, when we think back and we talk with America, we have presidents. That's kind of what we talk about. Or as sports figures, when we talk back home, we're like, man, Abraham Lincoln was an amazing president, or George Washington was an amazing president or whoever. It was like, they're not talking about that in Israel.
They're talking about David, that guy who started off his resume overshadowing a lot of us by picking up a rock and slewing a guy about my height. I'm not David in the story. I'm always Goliath. They're like, oh, what would it look like if you fell? I'll pray for you.
But David was one of the greatest kings in Israel's history. Remember that. There was multiple Old Covenants. Sometimes we talk about the Old Testament versus the New Testament, and our English Bibles have broken it up that way. But there was multiple old Covenants.
There was the covenant with Noah. There was the covenant with Adam. There was the covenant with Moses. That's the one that's most common. We like to say the Mosaic from Sinai.
But there was also a covenant with King David, the Davidic Covenant.
The Davidic Covenant is written about in 2nd Samuel, chapter 7 it was fulfilled initially through Solomon, but it has an eternal nature that is shown in Matthew chapter one, when Jesus will fulfill this. We also see in Psalm 110 a significant prophecy where God the Father says to David's Lord, sit at my right hand and I will make your enemies a footstool at your feet. This is a prophecy about when God gives dominion to the Messianic king. A lot of people in this Bible love the Bible. We've got some Hebrew influence, We've got some Greek influence.
We go like, we go down a rabbit hole and we study everything we want to know, all the context, the ancient near east, everything. Why can't we just let the most simplistic things of the Bible speak for the most simplistic things of the Bible? Psalm 110 is a significant prophecy where God the Father says to David's Lord, sit at my right hand, and I will make your enemies a footstool at your feet. And it is a prophecy of God the Father giving dominion to this messianic king.
God does things on purpose, for a purpose.
I mean, like, we might get lucky with a couple of series of books, but God the Father has woven into levels that I don't even understand now, the beauty and the nature of who Jesus is, even before Jesus is ever on this earth.
I look at GLOW games and the games that Cam puts together for the kids to play, and I'm like, man, I couldn't even got one or two levels of, like, influence in those interactive games. God is playing chess while everybody else is playing Go Fish. Yeah, not even checkers. We're playing Go Fish.
The messianic prophecies in the Old Testament were there to identify who the Messiah was. And they identified that the Messiah would be one from the lineage of the King of David.
This was not only an earthly lineage. We see that this was linking the heavens and the earth together.
This is not just an earthly lineage. This isn't like us tracing our lineage back and saying, oh, by the way, you know, Chris Franke is, you know, four generations removed from the Hershey family who runs the Hershey chocolate factory. That's not just what this is. And think of how cool it is when you look back and you're like, oh, I'm related to somebody who is popular. I'm related to somebody who did something good.
You bury the ones who are bad people, but it's like they were a distant cousin. We claim the distant cousins who were, like, rich and famous, but the bad distant cousins were like generational curses. Stop with them. But this was not only the earthly kingship. This was the earthly kingship tying into the divine kingship of the heavenly realm with the earth.
That is an apocalypse. This week there was a lot of people talking about the end of the world. The end of the world. The apocalypse is coming. I heard there's another date on the rapture.
Trust me. I worked for a ministry for many, many years that had dates and dates and lots of dates. We're still here.
Break bread, not fellowship.
Anytime the heavens and the earth come together, this is an apocalyptic moment. It is a moment that should shatter the paradigm of what we know. And when Jesus comes into this world, it is an apocalyptic moment. First and foremost, because this triumphant king is in a stone trough.
And rather than overthrow the Greeks and overthrow the Assyrians and overthrow the Romans, he gives us life.
Why? So that we can learn to turn our cheeks.
We can learn what it means to live by the sword and die by the sword, or to have peace that passes all understanding by uniting the heavens and the earth. This would usher in what we call the Messianic age. All Messianic prophecies are about Jesus. If anybody tells you some gematria or something that points you to some other random thing that's away from Jesus, yeah, you might as well go to the store, you know, five below and get one of those little magic eight balls and say, when is Jesus coming back? Not likely.
All prophecies in the Bible are messianic prophecies. What are messianic prophecies? The There are prophecies of Jesus and Jesus kingdom.
That is important for us to understand in context. The term Messianic has become more recently tied to Jesus plus Jesus plus the Torah. Jesus plus the feast days, Jesus plus the Sabbath. Jesus plus the Sabbath always pointed to Jesus. The feast always pointed to Jesus.
The Torah always pointed to Jesus. And when we get off kilter, we're looking for other kings like David, leaders like Moses, people like Noah. Rather than understanding that Jesus came, he died, he resurrected, and he sent what Paul calls his spirit to dwell in the temples of flesh bones. Why? So that we can be different.
Not by my power, not my. By my strength, but by the Lord. The term Messianic is Jesus Christ.
Not Christ and Popeyes, not Christ and Isaiah, Christ Christ.
And all the prophecies of the Messianic king, the messianic lifestyle, the messianic age, all pointed to the kingdom of heaven at hand. It was his Torah. It was his kingdom. It was his way. Remember a couple weeks ago when we Were in Matthew, chapter 8, Jesus had an interaction with the Pharisees, one of many, and he left them with this statement, now go and learn that I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
Here a blind man calls upon Jesus in verse 27. Son of David, he calls him by a title acknowledging Jesus kingship. This man couldn't see, these men couldn't see. And they call him son of David.
Think of that for a second. We can see what happens around us if we're observant. We can see you love your wife. You have your arm around her or your girlfriend. You love your children because you're playing with your children in a service.
You brought your children to church. You can see things. A lot of the things that Jesus was doing, they could not see. They could not see that somebody was dead came back to life. They could not see that the leprous spots on their skin were no longer there and they were healed.
They couldn't see those things. All they could do is hear the testimony of the people of what was happening. And yet they don't come and say, hey, one who they say, hey, heard some things. Are you him, Son of David? They understood his kingship and they couldn't even see.
That's pretty crazy to me.
They cry out for mercy. King, Messianic king from the lineage of David, the one that's been prophesied, have mercy.
And Jesus continues to show the Pharisees what it means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Jesus wasn't too busy taking his bull or his goat or his lamb or his turtle dove to the, to the temple. He wasn't. I'm sorry.
If I don't make my lamb here by the, by the afternoon slain, I won't be in line with the law of Moses. No, he says, I'm going to deal with the people who are brought to me and I'm going to be merciful and compassionate and graceful to them in those moments.
Sometimes the greatest problem in our modern Christianity is that the gospel in the Bible is not always the gospel we preach with our daily lives.
We make the gospel political.
We make the gospel American.
We make the gospel self centered, narcissistic.
The gospel is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yeshua ha Mashiach. It isn't political to the United States of America. It isn't political to all the other countries. It isn't about that.
And sometimes we become the greatest hindrance to the testimony of Jesus Christ through what we say and do with our daily lives.
And this is why earlier in this year, before we started into these series, I did a teaching on judging by observance. And we went through all the scriptures that talk about, are you really observant? You should see fruit. You can tell me the tree in your yard is a fruit tree, but if it never produces fruit, how am I going to know?
Man, that's an apple tree, but it never produces apples. Then it's kind of just a tree. It's a pear tree, and I'm a partridge.
You wouldn't know if it doesn't produce fruit. How will they know that you are his? Because you produce fruit that either says you are with him or you were not. And these blind men couldn't see the miracles, but they could hear. And they went right into the house where he was staying.
And Jesus asked them, do you believe that I can make you see? Yes, Lord, they told him, we do. Then he touched their eyes and he said, because of your faith, it will happen. Then their eyes were opened. They could see.
After calling out with Jesus, son of David, have mercy. They immediately pursued in an act of faith, Jesus. Jesus asked them whether they believe that he could be healed or not through him.
They didn't ask for healing, they asked for mercy. And Jesus gets right to the point, do you believe in Me or not?
Some of us need to get to the point with Jesus in our life.
Some of you need to get to the point of whether you believe or not.
The messianic king didn't need all the other things that were there. All the other things provided the evidence he was the messianic.
Do you believe Jesus is who he says he is or not? Last week, many believe that he can heal, he can redeem, he can save. But fewer believe that he actually will.
And right now, our country, if not every person in the world, they need healing for something. And the ones who say they don't really need healing.
We are more fractured as a nation over the last couple of presidential cycles than I remember in my lifetime. And I get it. I'm young, very young, got a lot of years left before me.
But the political climate, at least in my day, seems like it's been astronomical. I remember the days of going with my parents and watching Bill Clinton speak, even though we were Republicans. I remember the days of going and listening to Ross Perot, who laughed.
And I know there's a lot of different political beliefs in here, and that's fine. In the end, Christ died for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Atheists. How ironic. I don't believe in a God that God believed in you.
Break bread, not Fellowship. Oh, man, do we believe? Are we going to get straight to the point? The point is, is that we can find a million ways in this world to divide. It's not new.
Cain and Abel, duh.
God was merciful in the flood, to Noah. They're like, how could an angry God. They were killing themselves. They were doing all kinds of atrocious things, and God was merciful. To say, like, let's start over.
And yet anything that takes the distraction away from the one who heals, who gives sight to the blind is a distraction. And I need you to understand that. If it isn't promoting Jesus and the kingdom of Jesus, it's a distraction to. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, and I'm not throwing stones.
I like to think about where I'm going to eat, too.
First world problems.
I like to think about which English version of that verse I like the most. First world problems. These people could not see the son of David, but they knew who he was, and they stepped out on faith, even though they could not see that he was the one who could provide sight to the blind. Some of us gloss over these times. It's like, well, I could see, I could see.
I can hear, I can move my fingers.
But you're spiritually blind or you're emotionally dead. It's like, I don't need to be raised from the dead, dad. Some of you are apathetic husbands. Some of you are apathetic. You're dead, just going through the motions.
Do you believe Jesus can heal you, set you free and thrive or not? You cannot thrive in this world apart from Jesus because it's not real thriving. I made all kinds of money. I have all kinds of influence. It's not real thriving.
That's not the kingdom of God, and that's not the kingdom of hand. The kingdom of God is righteousness. It is giving.
And now we'll pass the plate.
It is giving. Giving life through speaking to somebody. Giving life through giving a hug to somebody. One of the coolest things on the Internet I've ever seen is the people who go, there's a gentleman who I'm friends with. I forget his name off the top of my head, but I can see his face.
I'm a bad with names, really good with face.
He made a different change in his life when he found Jesus.
He converted back to what he was born as, found Jesus, and he randomly goes to places with people who struggled with the same sin he did. And he holds up a sign that just says free hugs. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they're dressed in. It doesn't matter if they're a male who thinks they're a female.
Whatever. It doesn't matter whatever they're wrestling with. And he just gives them hugs because of the love he has found through Jesus Christ and being set free from the things he was blind to.
One of the coolest things I've seen. That guy believes in Jesus. He believes in the restoration power of healing and life because he's experienced it.
But do you believe or do you believe that that cross you came in here with today, you know, Erica did this last week where we had the stones and we laid the stones down. Did you carry the cross out? Did you carry that stone with you? Did you go through the motions during worship to lay down that thing that the Lord wanted you to lay down and then went home and picked it back up?
Preach, Elijah, preach out of the tongues of men. I do have an interpretation. He said, can you wrap this up?
Jesus shows intimacy and compassion here by reaching out and touching the eyes. There's multiple times in Matthew 7 through Matthew 8 where he heals by speaking a word, but here he shows compassion. He touches the eyes.
And the prophet Isaiah wrote multiple times that the Messiah would be the one who would open the blind's eyes through Jesus. He was bringing light into the temples of flesh that were shrouded in darkness.
I keep reading Matthew over and over and over again every week as I go into sermon prep. And I keep kicking myself for all the years that I read the Torah and the prophets through the lens of this will happen in the future, or this will happen in the future, or this. Like, everything was some, like, not yet, but soon.
And then every time I go through a verse or two verses just in the Gospel of Matthews. And again, we know how Matthew writes, and we know the style by which he writes. It's amazing to me to see the amount of things that I just glossed over in the words of the Gospel that were foretold in the Old Testament.
And Jesus, because his ways are not our ways, after he heals those men and he gives sight to the blind, he says, go rejoice in silence.
Jesus sternly warned them. It doesn't say that this was a fleeting thought of Jesus. He was stern. So everybody who's got that hippie Jesus idea, like, huh, Wasn't just the tables he turned, he was stern. He had the mom voice, don't tell anybody about this.
But instead, what did they do? They went out and they Spread his fame all over the region. Verses 30B through 31.
I get it. Multiple times as we've gone through the Gospel of Matthew. I get it. How can you keep it inside when God does something miraculous? How can you keep that testimony to yourself?
How can you do that? We have no problem in verbalizing the testimonies of negativity.
I don't go to that church anymore. Because you know or did you know, we don't need a church. Since we're the temples of the Holy Spirit. We can just dwell with one another. Yeah.
How's that working out for you? 20 years.
Most of the time when you say you don't need other believers, it's just because you don't want to be held accountable is because you don't want anybody cleaning out your closet and you don't want to have to clean out your closet yourself.
But what happened if we adopted a kingdom of heaven lifestyle? Pastor Chris, what are you talking about? Like there's a lot. Every week there's a lot. You just spent 40 minutes talking about three verses.
You're welcome.
What if we adopted a lifestyle that went and gave the testimony of the things that Jesus did more than the things that we didn't look like Jesus?
What if we spent less time on social media arguing about the intentions of the slip ups of words of individuals or what were they intending or what were they trying to do and we just started speaking about Jesus.
What if the fame of Jesus was more important than the fame of any human being?
Negativity and division seems to break out. A lot goes viral. Somebody's got a hot take.
I don't know about you, but we've spent a lot of time in Matthew. We have not covered a lot of chapters.
Jesus was going viral before the Internet. Blind people knew who he was and were coming to him. People who could barely move were crawling to him.
And we choose sometimes to make Jesus optional.
Well, it would be easier to come to church if you didn't do it on a Saturday morning. It's my one day sleep in. No. Okay. When you see Jesus face to face and you're like, hey, Jesus, I love you so much.
Thank you for saving my life. I'm sorry I could only come once a month. I was tired.
Well, I didn't really want to come for a night of prayer because, you know, I pray in tongues and they don't necessarily do it there.
So I didn't come. We can all find excuses in life. You don't even have to go looking for. They're right in front of you to not be intimate with Jesus, to not be intimate with people who are trying to become more like Jesus. It's very easy.
But don't tell anybody that I healed you.
And what do they do? They go out and tell everybody of what Jesus just did for them.
Why Jesus? Why can't I tell anybody? In the earlier portions of Matthew, we actually see the power of the testimony. We see Jesus tell in the very first portion of the healing of the leper, we actually see him to tell you need to go do exactly what Moses has commanded you to do. So the leper had an obligation to.
To leave that spot, to go back and bring an offering. And the priesthood had an obligation to inspect and testify. And they did not. They have no recording that they testified. So in earlier portions of Matthew, we have the obligation to testify and the requirement to go and do something that would require them to testify.
But here, Jesus flips the script and he says, tell no one. Sternly, Jesus tells the blind men who were healed. See that word? The irony. I always love it when Brent and I are talking about something in the scripture.
And Brent has one of those Greek moments because he kind of giggles like a little kid. He's like, oh, the irony that God tells men who he just made to see. See. See to it that you tell no one. This is like the jokes Michael Stallsworth was telling in the green room this morning.
See to it. Jesus is on mission all the time. The men who couldn't see and who healed Jesus tells to see that you tell no one.
Like they were so happy they could see, like us today. We'd be like, really Jesus? Hmm, dad jokes.
So why, why does Jesus tell them not to say anything?
I don't really know. All I can do is purely speculate at this time. Looking at the cultural context, one, potentially, to avoid misunderstandings of his identity seem to have worked. We still argue over what Jesus has the right to do or not do. Or during the ancient Near Eastern context or whatever, God is smarter than we are.
We still have a question about his identity. Two, to help fulfill his agenda of spiritual healing and redemption, not just as a physical healer, not as a soothsayer who's just here to be able to fix physical ailments, but one who is able to restore and redeem spiritual things inside people.
Three, potentially, to avoid conflict early in his ministry, Jesus is operating. He's not operating really in the Roman guard at that place. He's operating in another national element. And so the word is going very Very quickly that he's healing people, he's raising people from the dead. And so yet it wasn't his time.
He actually says that later on. He says it isn't my time. So potentially to avoid the conflict early on in his ministry. And that also leads us to the possibility that he was trying to control the pace so that things didn't spiral out of control. How different?
How different than today? You know, if we, like, have a revival service and we're like, oh, we're gonna have a rival. Like, we want it to spiral out of control real quick. Like, we want to buy a Honda, and we want, like, jackets, and we want, like, people to feel it all over the place. We want to feel it quick.
And then people will question, well, is it of the Lord or is it not of the Lord? And whatever happens there. But we want that emotional high. Jesus is so calculated. Jesus doesn't have to question whether it's emotional highs or it's real or it's not.
This guy is literally raising from the dead, healing every. Every time he walks out the door to go on mission to one place, there's two or three other things that happen while he's there. And every time, he restores and he heals and he restores and he heals and he restores and he heals.
Yet he was not about having some sort of amphitheater blow up. He wasn't trying to go viral. He was absolutely controlling the time and the narrative for the completion of all things. A lot of times we get ourselves caught up in situations where we want something really, really big now, but we haven't thought through what will happen with that. Two to three steps down the road, and we're like, oh, Jesus will take care of it.
Jesus will take care of it. Jesus did take care of it by modeling it to us. Be on mission for his mission all the time, and don't sway one way or the other just because it seems right. Don't have disdain for somebody just because it seems popular. It's the popular Christian modern view.
Both guardrails lead you to wreck the car. Don't swing, be stable. Jesus uses the geopolitical landscape to control the narrative because it wasn't his time yet. How many of us can be patient?
That's a fruit of the spirit. Nobody goes and asks for, lord, give me patience. It's like, man, I've been talking to the Lord for a year. He hasn't given me an answer. Yeah, he did.
He said, he's not ready to give you an answer yet. So you need to learn and grow. There's something for you to learn and grow, to be patient in Worship team. You can come back. Jesus was strategic.
They called him Son of David. What do you think would have happened if the Son of David moniker had been labeled with him? And he would have immediately embraced the Son of David moniker, the title of that right now, in a political Israel, oh, my gosh, they'd have been coming after him with pitchforks and fire.
Jesus let his actions speak for himself. He didn't run around giving himself the title for his purpose and for his time.
But when Jesus does something, they don't have the ability to even obey him. They don't even have the ability to obey and keep it inside. They are overwhelmed by how amazing this thing is.
The touch of Jesus turns belief into breakthroughs.
We're in the month of Elul, the Hebrew month of Elul. The king is in the field. We love to have that statement.
What good is it if the king is in the field and we're running towards the house?
What good is it if the Lord is trying to revive souls and spirits and nations and people and we're wanting their death?
What good is it when Jesus is on a mission and we've decided that that mission isn't good enough for us? We're going to be on a different mission. Even worse, what good is it when we become apathetic to the mission? I'm just trying to survive.
Everybody in this room and everybody in this world has some sort of spiral.
It's built off trauma. It's built off the cultural upbringing. It's built off of echo chambers, built off a lot of different things nowadays, even more so algorithms, they actually feed you stuff now. Like, it's pretty crazy watching a lot of used lawnmowers. You wouldn't believe how much I've learned about landscaping spirals.
The entire Torah and the Prophet was about people who were caught in spirals in cycles. Get close to God. Get far away from God. Get close to God. Get far away from God.
Get close to God. Get far away from God. And Jesus steps in and he breaks the cycle. And he gives you the opportunity to no longer spiral and cycle in this, but to go and to thrive with all the energy and the time that you had in those cycles.
As we enter into the fall feast, the month of Elul that comes before the fall feast, this is an opportunity for you to look at the rhythms and the cycles of a holy God, the God in Genesis who created these rhythms and these cycles for us. He's never wavered from his liturgical calendar.
This is a time for you to look inwardly and ask yourself, do you need to be healed? Is Jesus the King of David, the Son of David in your life? And how are you going to approach this season?
Because right now, cnn, msnbc, Fox News, espn, they are all champion for your attendance, for your attention, and for your cycle.
And Jesus isn't like them. He's not running Facebook ads. He's not running YouTube ads. He's not running click bait. He's standing right wherever you left him.
He's saying, I miss spending time with you.
I miss seeing you, miss hearing from you. You know that hug that you so desperately want? I'd like to give it to you. You know, that peace that you really need? I would love to give it to you.
You know, that breakthrough you really need in that addictive area of your life? I'd love to help you with it. You know those math problems on your homeschool paper? I'd love to help you with those, too.
The time for us to separate the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world in our daily lives. It's been long gone for a long time.
And we can talk about, what does that look like? What should we do?
I think it starts with us first turning back to the one that we first loved and allowing Jesus to be the center of everything we do in our heart and our mind. Every person in this room has an area that Jesus is not the center, and that includes me. The Bible kind of tells us that otherwise we wouldn't have to die daily to ourselves.
So what are you going to do over the next couple of weeks as we head into this season? As the fall comes, as you get your pumpkin spice latte, as you get your pumpkin beers, as you get your pumpkins, as everybody all of a sudden becomes Bengals fans and starts wearing orange all the time. By the way, you also become Texans. So what are you going to do? Is Jesus the center of your life or not?
Do you believe that Jesus can heal you in the areas that you cannot see or not? Do you believe that Jesus is the king or not?
It's that simple. And when we come to the realization that there's an area of our life that we have held away from him, the question is, are you going to call out to him, son of David, have mercy on me and allow him to restore that or not?
And I would ask that the next couple of weeks, as we continue to go through Matthew, before we break for the feast, you would press in harder than ever before. That you would ask the Lord, even in your prayer time, for him to reveal something to you, maybe someone to you. That he would manifest his power and his spirit and his might in each and every one of you in ways that he's never done before.
That you would ask, that you would seek, that you would knock for the kingdom of heaven to be manifest in your life. If you will stand with me and let's respond.
