Forward Church Brant

Jesus will not let us limit the word neighbour. He does not answer who qualifies for our love instead he calls us to go and be a neighbour to all.

Snapshot: A lawyer wants to justify himself, so he tries to draw a line. Who is my neighbour? He’s asking Jesus to mark the edge of his obligation. Jesus tells a story that erases the line completely. A man is beaten and left in a ditch. A priest sees him and crosses to the other side. A Levite sees him and crosses over too. Then the last person anyone expected, a Samaritan, the very kind of outsider a village turned Jesus away over back in week 1, stops and pays for everything. Jesus flips the lawyer’s question. Not who counts as my neighbour, but which one acted like a neighbour. Then he closes with the three words that give this sermon its name. Go and do likewise. This story is both a command and a reminder. See there was a day when all of us were the man in the ditch who could not save ourselves. The true Neighbour crossed every boundary to reach us and it cost him everything. That’s the gospel, and it is the only thing that can empower the command. Mercy was shown to you, so go and show it.

The only way to the Father is through the son. The childlike receive this truth, and the self-sufficient walk right past it.

Snapshot: Now Jesus himself rejoices. Luke tells us he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and he thanks the Father for hiding these things from the wise and revealing them to little children. Then comes verse 22, one of the highest things Jesus ever says about himself. No one knows the Father except the Son, and the ones the Son chooses to show him to. There is no side door to God. No back way in through cleverness, or effort, or religion. The Son alone opens the Father to us, and he loves to do it for people who come with empty hands. That’s the invitation, and it’s wide open. Come like a child. Take what only the Son can give. Trade your self-sufficiency, the spiritual kind and the intellectual kind, for a child’s open hands, and let plain gratitude for knowing God reorder your life.

Fix Your Joy (Andrew Nunn) | Set Your Sights

Jesus lifts our eyes to a field that’s ready and sends ordinary followers into it as his representatives.

Snapshot: Jesus lifts the disciples’ eyes and points them at a field. The harvest is plentiful, he says, but the workers are few, so beg the Lord of the harvest to send out workers. Then he makes them the answer to their own prayer. He sends out seventy two of his follower, two by two, ahead of him into every town he is about to enter. Travelling light. Lambs among wolves. Eyes on the harvest, not on their own comfort or safety. The mission we’ve been given isn’t a mission that’s best left for the professionals. It’s ordinary disciples carrying his peace and his kingdom onto a real street. Don’t skip the woes in verses 13 to 16. The same gospel that brings peace to one house hardens the next, and to hear these messengers is to hear Christ himself. The Sender is the Lord of the harvest, and the message is his own presence drawing near. The gospel is the peace he holds out to every house that will receive him.

In this passage we encounter three would-be followers of Jesus, and every one of them wants a detour before he follows. One word keeps surfacing. First. Let me first bury my father. Let me first say farewell. Each request sounds reasonable, but each is a detour. Jesus refuses the detour every single time. Here’s the thing though, all of us get detoured sometimes. Jesus alone is the only person who ever walked the whole road with no detours at all. He fixed his sights and never once looked back, all the way to death, and he did it so that failures like us could belong to him. He had nowhere to lay his head so that we could have a home with him forever. This week let's call people to name their own detours: comfort, family expectation, keeping their options open, and lay them down for the sake of Jesus and his mission. This is Seek First lived out.

Rejection turns Jesus away from a village, but not back from his mission, and not against the people who refused him.

Snapshot: We start where Luke starts the journey. Jesus fixes his sights on Jerusalem. In Luke’s own words he set his face to go there, and almost at once he gets turned away. A Samaritan village will not receive him. James and John are ready to torch the place, like Elijah calling down fire in 2 Kings 1 and Jesus rebukes them. And then verse 56 tells the whole story in a handful of quiet words. They went on to another village. Turned away but not turned back and not turned bitter. When the culture turns us away, and it will, we don’t turn back and we don’t call down fire. We keep our sights set, and we keep loving.

When you seek first the Kingdom, God takes care of the rest.

In week 4 we circle back to where we started and preach the half of the verse we left unpreached in week one.

Week 1 was seek first the kingdom. Week 4 is and all these things will be added to you. This answers the question that three weeks of pushing outward will have quietly raised in every honest heart. If I really put the kingdom first, ahead of my security and my plans, what happens to me, my job, my mortgage, my kids? Jesus answers the way he always does, with a Father who feeds the birds and clothes the grass and knows what we need before we ask. Paul calls us to take all these concerns to our Father in prayer. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God will guard your heart. When we’ve started with a posture of putting the King and his Kingdom first, we can be assured that when we turn to him in prayer he hears, he answers and he offers us his supernatural peace.

When the church prays, God makes ordinary people brave.

Kingdom prayer does not stay indoors. In Acts 4 the church has just been threatened and ordered to stop speaking about Jesus. Notice what they do not pray for. They do not ask for safety or relief. They ask for boldness. And God shakes the room, fills them with the Spirit, and sends them back out speaking the word.

This is the outward turn of the series and it builds off of where we finished last week. God’s will is for his people to take the good news of the king and his kingdom to the world around them. Praying the kingdom come becomes asking God for the courage to carry the gospel into a world that may push back. This week speak honestly about the real fears people have of our own moment, the cultural pressure, the cost of being openly Christian at work and in the neighbourhood.

This week ties directly into the culture of evangelism and invitation that we long to see God increase in our church. It also teaches us that boldness does not require a certain type of personality. When the God’s people pray and the Holy Spirit fills us we have all that we need to face our fears and fulfill our mission.

We do not build the kingdom. We pray it down.

Once our seeking has been reordered around the kingdom, Jesus teaches us how to ask for it. The Lord’s Prayer is the pattern, and the petition at its center is the one that carries this week. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This reframes prayer for people who think of it as getting God to bless their own agenda. Kingdom prayer is surrender before it is request. It is asking God to have his way before it is asking God for our way. We make it concrete by naming what your kingdom come would actually mean across Forward. In struggling marriages and fractured families. In the way we order and prioritize our time and our money. In our workplaces, schools, and cities. What would it look like for God’s Kingdom to come, his will to be done? What would it look like for us to cry out to God for this, not only individually, but as his church?

Everyone is living for something. Only one thing is worth seeking first.We open the series being confronted by the question of what we are really living for? What are we truly seeking? In this passage Jesus talks about treasure, about masters, about a divided heart, and he lets us know that ultimately every person must choose which kingdom they are going to live for, which king they are going to live under. The call to “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” is not about adding God on top of the life we already have. It’s about dethroning what has been sitting where he belongs. The week closes by turning that reordering into a posture. If the kingdom is what we seek first, then prayer is where the seeking begins, and this is where we launch the call to pray as a church.