“Jesus Shakes Up the Holy City”

(Matthew 21:12-22)

Series: God’s Fulfilled Promise [on screen]

Rev. Matthew C. McCraw, EdD

First Baptist Church, Bartow, Florida

June 21, 2020

The Passage

Matthew 21:12-22

12 Jesus went into the temple and threw out all those buying and selling. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves!”

14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. 15 When the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonders that he did and the children shouting in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant 16 and said to him, “Do you hear what these children are saying?” Jesus replied, “Yes, have you never read: You have preparedpraisefrom the mouths of infants and nursing babies?” 17 Then he left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

18 Early in the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry. 19 Seeing a lone fig tree by the road, he went up to it and found nothing on it except leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” At once the fig tree withered.

20 When the disciples saw it, they were amazed and said, “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?”

21 Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. 22 And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

Introductory Comments:

It’s such a joy to be back in worship with you all in person and with those who are worshiping online. We want to continue to pray for God’s mercy on our church family, our extended families, our community, our country, and our world. 

Today, we’re going to see how Jesus shook things up when He was in Jerusalem, the Holy City. This is a famous story of which many of us are familiar. 

In today’s sermon, we will witness the priority that Jesus places upon proper worship of and proper faith in God.

Before we get into this passage, let’s go to God in prayer and ask Him to speak to us. 

(prayer)

One thing we know for sure right now is that a lot of people have differing opinions about what’s going on in our culture. Indeed, people have shared with me what I am doing, right or wrong, when it comes to leading our church and what our church is doing, right or wrong, when it comes to handling COVID-19. Let’s set all that aside for a moment. Think back with me to the pre-COVID days (it seems like it was a year ago, but it was almost exactly three months ago that we last met in person). Imagine that someone came into our church and shared their opinion by us that everything we were doing was wrong. Imagine that they told us that our worship and the exercising of our faith were just not being carried out properly. We wouldn’t like that very much, would we?

Well, in today’s passage, we’re going to see that Jesus brought correction and instruction to the people of Jerusalem and we can imagine that they weren’t very happy about it. In fact, we’ll find out later that we know they weren’t very happy about it.I’ve entitled this sermon, “Jesus Shakes up the Holy City.” Indeed, today we’ll see that He starts to shake things up. As He does so, He provides for us three spiritual aspirations to which we can set our direction as individuals and as a church. 

Let’s start with this first spiritual aspiration to which Jesus points us:

I. Proper worship (vv. 12-13) [on screen]

So, we know that Jesus has come into Jerusalem during the week of Passover. As many people are doing during the time of the Passover, Jesus goes into the temple. 

As Jesus goes into the temple He sees something happening that He doesn’t like very much. Let’s check it out. Look at verse