The Big Idea: Disciples of Jesus can serve only one Master.

Matthew 6:24
Luke 10:25-37

A Kingdom Concepts review:
● The Messenger is the Message

Philippians 2:3-11

● Paradoxical Power: Jesus accomplishes things in His own time and His own way:
power of suffering love vs command and control.

● No Condemnation
John 3:17

● Every natural idea you have about dealing with enemies is wrong.

● The King grows His Kingdom.

● God’s Kingdom is like a secret treasure worth more than the sum of everything you own.

● A Disciple is an “OIKODESPOTAI” /O-EE-kō des pah tye/ A master of the inexhaustible
storehouse of treasures, both old and new, bringing them out to share.

RESPONSE:
● Trust God with everything
● Love God with everything
● Love people like you love yourself

Matthew 13:44-46; 51-52

The Big Idea: God’s Kingdom is like a secret treasure worth more than the sum of everything you own.

Three Parables:
1. The treasure in the field
2. The pearl of great price
3. The storeroom of treasures

The Treasure in the Field:

Two Powerful Secrets of Joyful Disciples: buying the farm and hiding the treasure.
Colossians 3:2-4
Colossians 2:12-15

You must DIE to buy the farm with the treasure, BUT what you are killing is a life that is already DEAD IN SIN.

The Pearl of Great Price:
The pearl merchant = Every man: searching and shopping for fulfillment, actualization, and
purpose.

Selling all you have is the MOST SNEAKY and SHREWD business deal of a lifetime.

The Storeroom of Treasures:
Matthew 13:52

In the New Testament:
● The word “DISCIPLE” is used 269 times.
● The word “CHRISTIAN” is used only 3 times.

A Disciple:
● Has found the treasure that produces joyful transformation
● Spends huge amounts of time exploring and enjoying the storehouse of hidden
treasures
● Is an “OIKODESPOTAI” /O-EE-kō des pah tye/ A master of the inexhaustible
storehouse

Response:
● Seek the HIDDEN and INVALUABLE TREASURE over possessions that cannot satisfy.
● Buy the farm: Sell all you have to purchase this treasure.
● Enjoy the role of OIKODESPOTAI - master with treasures to enjoy and share.

Matthew 13:31-35

Big Idea: There is nothing that can stop the eternal power of the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom’s COMING and GROWING has almost nothing to do with us.

“Therefore, for every second of the time the world has been a world, it has also been the
kingdom. Its progress through history is not a transition from non-kingdom to kingdom; rather, it
is a progress from kingdom-in-a-mystery to kingdom-made-manifest.” - Robert Farrar Capon

The Kingdom didn’t just appear with Jesus.
Jesus REVEALED the mystery of the Kingdom!

God’s Kingdom is ruled by Jesus Christ and grows by His Word and The Holy Spirit.

Colossians 2:9-10

“All we need to do, and all we can do, is simply trust that the leaven is, was, and always will be
entirely mixed into the lump of our existence — and that it will infallibly lighten every last one of
us. The job is already, if mysteriously, done: by the power of the Word who breathed out his life
for us on the cross — by the might of him who, in the glory of his resurrection, forever whispers
our reconciled names into his Father’s ear — we are as good as baked to perfection right now.” - Robert Farrar Capon

RESPONSE:
1. Trust Jesus as THE SOWER and THE BAKER.
2. Let go of CONTROL.
3. BE LED by The Holy Spirit.

The Big Idea: Every natural idea you have about dealing with enemies is wrong.

Matthew 13:24-30
Matthew 13:36-43

The Problem of Weeds:
The world contains good and evil - good seed and bad.
Often it takes an expert to tell the difference.
Both sowers are counting on us to do our thing.

The Wisdom of Doing Nothing:
Judgment hurts the wheat.
Judgment declares an unreliable verdict on the weeds.
Judgment reveals a lack of trust in the Sovereignty of God.
The way of Jesus is also the way of wheat.

The Wisdom of Doing Something
Acts 2:42-47
1 Corinthians 5:12-13

The Certainty of the Harvest
Matthew 13:40-43
John 3:16
John 3:36
John 3:17
John 12:47-48

Response:
Leave every verdict to God.
Commit to being the people of God, together.
Suffer weeds like Jesus, for Jesus.

The Big Idea: God is both hidden in Jesus and revealed in Jesus. Therefore, Jesus is the guiding light in every existential question.

Mark 4:21-25
John 1:9-13
1 John 1:5-10

God wants me to LIVE IN THE LIGHT.
Amos 3:7

My three enemies PREFER DARKNESS.
Mark 4:24-25

God wants me to CARRY THE LIGHT TO OTHERS.

With the measure that you use in your relationship with God and others, God will use that measurement to apportion to you – and even more!

What jar or bowl are we hiding the light of the Word under, that is keeping others from seeing the light? What is snuffing out God’s Lamp?

RESPONSE:
Three Calls Forward:
1. HEAR and ACCEPT God’s Love.
Mark 4:20

2. Get off the PERFORMANCE TREADMILL.
Colossians 2:23

3. LOVE OTHERS like you love yourself.
Matthew 22:37-40
John 13:34-35

The Big Idea: Your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for.

Mark 4:1-20

Two Difficult Realities
One Powerful Truth
Three Constant Enemies
One Simple Job

Two Difficult Realities
1. Some people get it and some people don’t
2. To them that have, even more will be given but to them that have not, even what they do have will be taken away.

One Powerful Truth:
The forgiveness of God is extended to EVERYONE.

Isaiah 6:6-7

Ephesians 3:2-6

Three Constant Enemies:
1. The DEVIL
2. The FLESH
3. The WORLD

We Have One Job:
Remain in Jesus.

Life is not about accomplishing work but about bearing fruit

RESPONSE:
Ask the Father to reveal the mystery of Jesus to your heart
Fight the three enemies for the work of the seed
Practice the GO lifestyle this week

The Big Idea: The Messenger IS the message.

Hebrews 1:1-4
John 1:1-5, 9-14

The Privileges of the King
Philippians 2:5-11

The Power of the King
Paradoxical power: Power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems
indistinguishable from nonintervention. More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined
evildoers whatsoever.

“The New Testament proclaims an unlikely Savior. The work of Jesus in his incarnation, life,
passion, death, resurrection, and ascension makes no worldly sense at all. The portrait the
Gospels paint is that of a lifeguard who leaps into the surf, swims to the drowning girl, and then,
instead of doing a cross-chest carry, drowns with her, revives three days later, and walks off the
beach with assurances that everything, including the apparently still dead girl, is hunky-dory.”

“God doesn’t force people to behave. God doesn’t stop sinners from sinning—he doesn’t stop
murderers from murdering. Of course, he does make exceptions, but those are exceptions, not
the rule. And at the end of all the doing, he simply disappeared, leaving as far as anybody has
been able to see in 2,000 years or so: no apparent city, no effective Kingdom able to make the
world straighten up and fly right. The whole operation began as a mystery, continued as a
mystery, came to fruition as a mystery, and to this day continues to function as a mystery. Since
Noah, God has evidently had almost no interest in using direct line power to fix up the world.
Why? You ask. Well, the first answer is, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. God’s
reasons are even more hidden than His methods.” - Robert Farrar Capon

The Priorities of the King
Matthew 4:1-11

Jesus accomplishes things in HIS OWN TIME and HIS OWN WAY:
● He turns 5 loaves and 2 fish into an all-time eat out for 5,000 men, plus women and
children.
● Instead of circumventing death, he rises from the dead.
● He does take rulership of this world, but through resurrection, not political power.

RESPONSE:
● I Make Three Confessions:
1. I want to understand the ways of God.
2. I want to know and trust King Jesus .
3. I will follow King Jesus in spite of my discomfort with His methods.
● I will share my experience today with someone in my Oikos.

The Big Idea: The Father’s blessing satisfies the deepest cry of the human heart.

Matthew 3:16-17
Matthew 17:1-5

Fatherlessness is the most destructive pandemic in our world.

The enormous impact of fatherlessness in the world:
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are fatherless
• 71% of all adolescent substance abusers are fatherless
• 80% of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes
• 2X more likely to commit suicide
• 9X more likely to drop out of school
• 20X more likely to be incarcerated

The cry in our hearts is greater than any human father can satisfy because we were made to know and be known by THE Father

John 1:9-15

In Jesus, we are included in the Father’s Blessing:
• The pride of RELATIONAL OWNERSHIP
• The boast of UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
• The declaration of UNALTERABLE VALUE

We are authorized to give blessing to others, prophetically

Matthew 16:17-19

Response:
• Receive Jesus
• Receive the Father’s Blessing
• BLESS your Oikos in Jesus’ Name:
- Body
- Labor (work of their hands)
- Emotions
- Social Connections
- Spiritual connection to God

Romans 15:1-13


Big Idea: The Body of Christ is defined by the overflow of hope and love.


Acts 10:11-15

We are called to be like-minded, with Christ because the world needs a united Body of Christ. 

Philippians 2:3-11 


Be Like Christ:

1. Unconditional Love

1 John 3:16
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.


2. Acceptance

Acceptance: To grant one access to another’s heart.


3. Self Sacrifice

John 15:13  Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

John 13:34-35


How will the world know that we are Christ’s ambassadors?
Nonsensical, audacious, impractical, and unconditional love.

Through mutual trust in Jesus, we will collectively overflow in hope and love.


RESPONSE:
1. Trust in Jesus completely.
2. Live for the good of the “Other.” 
3. Pursue unity of the Body.

Big Idea: The unity experienced through the Gospel triumphs any disagreements of human conviction.

Romans 14:1-23

So what are disputable matters?
Matters of conviction - things that your conscience has deemed right or wrong for you.

FOOD
Romans 14:2

DAYS
Romans 14:5
Romans 14:6

The importance to God lies in our UNITY, not our like mindedness on non-essential matters.

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
― St. Augustine

Weak vs. Strong
Romans 14:14

“The conscience can make clean things unclean, but it can NEVER make unclean things clean.”

Romans 14:20-21
Romans 14:22
Romans 14:10-12

We are accountable to God, not man.
Don’t try to be the mediator between others and Christ.
We don’t get to decide what other’s convictions should be.

“For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

Response:
Focus on the unity and edification of believers who have varying convictions.

Romans 14:19

Prayer:
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”
– Francis of Assisi