Luke’s Gospel, chapter 19. And if you’re using one of the church Bibles, it’s page 1,053. Luke 19, and we’re going to read the first 10 verses.

(0:22 – 0:35)

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.

(0:36 – 1:03)

He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short, he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree to see him since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus, come down immediately.

(1:03 – 1:19)

I must stay at your house today. So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, he has gone to be the guest of a sinner.

(1:21 – 1:48)

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, look Lord, here and now, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount. Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a son of Abraham.

(1:49 – 2:12)

For the son of man came to seek and to save the lost. The bell has rung for lunchtime. The young people shuffle in, they arrive in little clusters into the high school cafeteria.

(2:13 – 2:43)

And you wouldn’t notice it if you were there one day, but if you were there on multiple days, you would observe that they sit at the same tables or at least they sit in the same groups. There is an unwritten seating chart in the high school cafeteria. And as well as the little groups and the little cliques, you may also notice that there is a child sitting all alone.

(2:45 – 2:53)

No one ever wants to sit with them. No one ever wants to eat with them. No one ever wants to associate with them.

(2:56 – 3:21)

Now, what I am describing, I imagine is something we all can relate to. It may be some of our experiences if we’re that age, but it certainly was some of our experiences back in the day. And yet the reality is actually that as we even enter adulthood, not a lot changes in some of these social dynamics.

(3:22 – 3:53)

If you go into any large group of people, you will discover that there are subgroups. And in the dynamics of those groups, there are those who are included and those who are excluded. Now, as we continue our series in hospitality with the help of Luke chapter 19, we’re going to see that Jesus is about to socialise with a man who was pretty much excluded by everyone.

(3:55 – 4:34)

Yet Jesus came into this man’s home, sat down at his table and entered this man’s life. And as Jesus does this, we learn something not only about the nature of salvation itself, but we also secondarily, I think, learn something about how hospitality works and the fact that grace needs to sit at the very heart of a hospitable culture. So if you have a Bible before you, keep it open there at Luke 19.

(4:34 – 4:46)

We’re going to go through the story in three parts this morning. And we’re going to start in verses one to four. The story begins with an unpopular wee man.

(4:48 – 5:02)

I’ve always wanted to include the phrase wee man in a sermon, and I finally achieved it. An unpopular wee man. Glasgow, as you will know, is full of wee men, wee men doing this and that.

(5:03 – 5:14)

And in Jericho, there was a wee man. Now, it’s unusual in the Bible actually for Scripture to point out someone’s physical appearance. It only ever does it if there’s a significance to it.

(5:15 – 5:40)

And it’s going to play a key part in this story. But before we get to the height of this man, we need to, first of all, think about the lowness of his character, the lowness of his personality, because he was an unpopular wee man for very good reason. He was, verse two, a chief tax collector, and he was wealthy.

(5:42 – 5:57)

Tax collectors in the first century were a hated group of people. They were Jews by birth, but they were traitors by profession. They collected taxes for the Roman occupiers.

(5:58 – 6:19)

And so they were seen not only as collaborators with the Romans, but they were also known as cheats into the bargain. They were notorious for overcharging people as they took their taxes. So Zacchaeus is one of them, but even worse, he is the chief of them.

(6:21 – 6:37)

Zacchaeus is the godfather kingpin of Jericho’s tax industry. And it was clearly a lucrative business. I’ll not get into the strategic location of Jericho, but it was a strategic location, a very wealthy place.

(6:38 – 6:50)

But Zacchaeus, because of this, was wealthy. He was hated, yes, but he was loaded. And yet something draws this man to the Lord Jesus.

(6:52 – 6:59)

I’m reading a book at the moment. The title of the book is called Something-ism. Something-ism.

(7:00 – 7:36)

It’s all about a kind of well-known sociological trend that’s been written about and studied. It’s a trend that basically observes that many people, not only people who are religious, but just all sorts of people, including atheists and agnostics as well, many people, even who give religion a hard time, have a lurking, persistent sense that there is something more, something more to the universe, something more than this. Something-ism is what the sociologists have called it.

(7:38 – 8:13)

The author speaks in the book of a friend of his who’s an atheist, and the friend who’s the atheist admitted to him that he lies in bed every night looking up at the ceiling and asking the question, is this it? Here is a man who has lots of material possessions, but something is drawing him. Something is nagging at him. Jesus was passing through Jericho and he wanted to see who Jesus was.

(8:14 – 8:45)

Now, it doesn’t say that he was expecting to have his soul saved that day, just that he was curious for whatever reason to see Jesus. Salvation often begins with curiosity. As you’re searching for something more, you get curious about a Christian friend of yours whose life seems to be dramatically different and more deeply contented.

(8:46 – 9:00)

You get curious about a church that’s local to you and something just draws you in one day. Or you get curious enough perhaps to pick up a Bible and just start reading it. That’s where it starts for this man.

(9:01 – 9:15)

But his problem initially is practical. As he seeks Jesus, he was a wee man. He suffered from vertical limitations and a thronging crowd of people who were blocking his view.

(9:16 – 9:47)

He will not be able to see unless he finds a way, I was gonna say around this, but as it turns out, over this. And so he spots in the distance a sycamore tree, which was a fairly low, the branches were fairly low in this tree and fairly wide, and it was an ideal climbing spot. He runs to the tree, he climbs the tree, which in this culture completely lacked decorum for an adult man.

(9:48 – 10:06)

An adult man would not run and he certainly wouldn’t climb a tree. But there’s an eagerness to this. There’s a, I don’t care what anyone else thinks to this, such is his desire to see Jesus that all of the, what people think, all of the shame becomes irrelevant.

(10:09 – 10:24)

I have an acquaintance down in Liverpool who is a Liverpool fan. And when they won the league last season, he went to the victory parade, the bus parade. You know, hundreds of thousands of people, this bus snaking through Liverpool.

(10:24 – 10:35)

And he showed me pictures on his phone of the parade. And he said, see if you can spot me in this picture. Well, I’m looking at this picture.

(10:35 – 10:44)

There’s hundreds of people in the shot. I couldn’t see him. And then he says, look at the person hanging from the top of that traffic light.

(10:46 – 11:01)

And here’s this 40-something-year-old pastor in a church who’s hanging from the top of the traffic light to get the optimal view of the Liverpool team bus. I said, you’re in your 40s. He said, I wanted the best view.

(11:02 – 11:13)

Well, that was Zacchaeus. And so everything is set for the drama that now unfolds. The unpopular wee man is perched on his branch.

(11:14 – 11:35)

And from the unpopular wee man, we secondly come to an unlikely stop and stay, an unlikely stop and stay, verses five to seven. So Zacchaeus has coordinated things so that Jesus will pass His way. His expectation, I’m assuming, is that Jesus will simply pass by.

(11:36 – 11:59)

Because if you look at verse one, you will see that Jesus was passing through Jericho. It doesn’t seem as if He’s gonna stop anywhere. If Jesus were going to stop in Jericho, it surely would have been at the home of the great or the good, right? Like the mayor of the town or maybe at the house of some religious Pharisee.

(12:00 – 12:31)

But as Jesus reaches this sycamore tree, He stops and He looks up. And I’m sure to the surprise of the man who was perched there, Jesus says, Zacchaeus, we were just singing together, weren’t we? He’s calling us all by name, Zacchaeus. I imagine Zacchaeus was surprised when Jesus knew His name and called Him by name.

(12:33 – 12:46)

Do you know, incidentally, the irony of Zacchaeus’ name? I didn’t. His name, His Hebrew name means righteous or pure. Righteous or pure, that’s what Zacchaeus means.

(12:47 – 13:06)

So when His mum and dad, when they took Him up to name Him at the temple, they said, He’s going to be named little Righteous. He’s going to be named little Purity. May He grow up to be a pure and righteous man.

(13:06 – 13:18)

Well, he had fallen short of his name, hadn’t he? And yet Jesus knows His name. And He calls him by name. And He calls him down.

(13:20 – 13:55)

And then Jesus invites Himself on the spot to Zacchaeus’ house. How forward, I mean, we’re talking about hospitality this series, this is breaking all the decorum, isn’t it? Even today, nevermind in that culture. Jesus doesn’t say, can I come to your house today? Or might I have a meal at your home today? He says, I must stay at your house today.

(13:56 – 14:16)

There’s a divine necessity to this. God has made an appointment with Zacchaeus. One of the dynamics in this story that we mustn’t miss is that not only is Zacchaeus seeking Jesus, but Jesus is seeking Zacchaeus.

(14:18 – 14:37)

It’s an interesting question to ponder, isn’t it? Who is seeking who in this story? Who is seeking who? We might be tempted to say, well, Zacchaeus is seeking Jesus. He’s the one clambering up the tree to see Jesus. But it’s Jesus who then slows and stops.

(14:38 – 14:47)

And it’s Jesus who then calls him down. And it’s then Jesus who invites Himself in. Well, Zacchaeus was looking for Jesus.

(14:47 – 15:13)

He then discovered that Jesus was looking for Zacchaeus. It’s a remarkable realisation, isn’t it? That a seeker of Jesus can come to when they awaken to the fact, maybe slowly or maybe suddenly, that the Jesus they are looking for is already on the hunt for them. Jesus stopped and Jesus said, I’m coming to stay.

(15:15 – 15:27)

To my knowledge, this is the only occasion in the Gospels where Jesus invites Himself to anyone’s home. The only occasion. People invited Him.

(15:27 – 15:50)

This is the only occasion He says, I’m coming to your home. And of all the people to do it to, this unpopular, wee collaborator and cheater. I mean, the reaction of verse seven, when all the people saw this, they began to mutter, He’s gone to be the guest of a sinner.

(15:51 – 16:13)

It’s not all that surprising, is it? This is how people normally react to folk who are perceived to be the lowest of the low. How timely some things are. Over the course of this week, as I’ve had my Bible, if you like, in the one hand, I’ve also had the news app in the other.

(16:14 – 16:47)

And I’m reading, like the rest of you, the news of an ex-party chief who is embezzled over 400,000 pounds. Now, even if I hadn’t read that story, I would have known about it because about seven different people during the week brought it up in conversation. Usually starting with the words, isn’t it terrible that? As collectively, every single person expressed their outrage at this sort of unrighteous behaviour.

(16:49 – 17:13)

I’ve not met a single person who has anything good to say about that particular man that we’ve been hearing of in the news. And yet, as I reflected on it, what I realised was that that guy in the news is this guy in the Bible. Zacchaeus is exactly that guy when you think about it.

(17:14 – 17:35)

A known cheat, universally condemned, utterly written off. And out of all the decent folk in Jericho, Jesus goes for lunch to that guy’s house. You can imagine Jesus’ disciples whispering in his ear, you know, the PR team.

(17:36 – 17:47)

Jesus, this might not be so good for your public image. There’s a scandal to this, you see. There’s an unlikeliness to this stop and stay.

(17:48 – 18:05)

The forgiveness that God extends goes beyond what we think is reasonable. See, here’s the reality. Many of us think that forgiveness is good and well so long as the person receiving forgiveness isn’t too bad.

(18:07 – 18:15)

A little bad is fine. We’re all a little bad. But there’s a line when it comes to some things.

(18:16 – 18:34)

And some people cross over the line and they never deserve to be welcomed back across the line. Yet while all the people were muttering, Jesus went. When all the crowd were angry, Zacchaeus was joyful.

(18:35 – 18:51)

And he welcomed Jesus gladly. And so we go with Jesus and Zacchaeus into the home of Zacchaeus, which is where we’re going to end the incident. And in this home, we’re gonna see a third and final thing.

(18:51 – 19:13)

Really two things together. We’re gonna see an unmistakable change on Zacchaeus’ part and also an unmistakable mission, a mission that Jesus is on. Now, the change is undeniable, isn’t it? The change is signalled in the words of Zacchaeus.

(19:15 – 19:32)

Jesus is now the guest in this sinful man’s home. And we’re actually really not told much about what happened. Were they sitting around a meal? I mean, he must have been sitting or maybe lying at this point, because the text says, verse eight, that at some point, Zacchaeus stood up.

(19:32 – 19:49)

He stands up to make a little speech. And the essence of this little speech Zacchaeus makes is spiritual and personal. How important it is that we notice this.

(19:50 – 20:03)

You know, we’re currently doing this series on hospitality. And we’ve seen so far that God is hospitable. We’ve seen so far that we as his people are given the instruction to be hospitable.

(20:04 – 20:20)

And we’ve seen, haven’t we, that in a sense, hospitality is a good thing in itself. It is a reflection of the hospitable provision of God. This was a good and nice occasion for Zacchaeus to be hosting Jesus.

(20:20 – 20:47)

But what we must learn from this incident is that there are more important matters at play than what did they have for the first course, right? None of that’s mentioned here, even though presumably they had a full day of meals and whatever else they had. None of the hospitality details are mentioned. What is mentioned is the spiritual conversation that took place.

(20:49 – 21:12)

Having presumably been further impressed by Jesus, Zacchaeus stands up and acknowledges Jesus as his Lord. The man who was in charge of the Jericho tax cartel now has a new boss. Zacchaeus is under new management.

(21:13 – 21:39)

And this is demonstrated both inwardly and outwardly. And you say, well, how can you identify an inward change? Well, you can see it, can’t you, in his attitude here, his willingness of heart when he says, I will give away half of my possessions to the poor. Half of his possessions to the poor.

(21:40 – 21:59)

Half of your house, half of whatever’s in your bank account to the poor. There’s a change of heart, a change from greed to generosity. And in addition, the cheating man now puts things right.

(22:01 – 22:27)

All the folk that Zacchaeus had defrauded will be paid back four times the amount. In Jewish law, if you defrauded somebody, depending what kind of stealing it was, you either had to pay back the amount plus a fifth or double the amount or an absolute maximum. Only in one particular case, you had to pay back four times the amount.

(22:28 – 22:41)

Zacchaeus chooses the maximum repayment plan under the Jewish law. So wait a minute, do the numbers here. He’s already giving away half of his money.

(22:42 – 23:02)

And now in addition to that, he is repaying the people he’s defrauded four times over. Now, I don’t know how rich he was, but you wonder how much he had left once he’d given all of this away. But such was the change that God had worked in his heart.

(23:04 – 23:16)

We need to understand what’s happening here. Zacchaeus is not paying for his own forgiveness. He is not buying his way back into God’s good graces.

(23:17 – 23:35)

And the reason we know that is because of verse nine. Jesus doesn’t say, today, Zacchaeus has managed to set up a payment plan. And, you know, in a few months time, he’ll have paid off all the debt and then salvation might come his way.

(23:36 – 23:57)

He says, no, today. Today, before Zacchaeus has actually actioned any of this, salvation has come right now to this house. And verse 10, where Jesus’ unmistakable mission is revealed for the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.

(23:58 – 24:19)

You see, this is the core of the, this is why he saved. Jesus has sought him and Jesus has saved him because that’s what Jesus does. Jesus seeks sinners, he saves sinners, and then he shapes them and he sanctifies them into new kinds of people.

(24:21 – 24:29)

Zacchaeus turns from greedy to generous. He turns from deceitful to honest. And all because Jesus has brought salvation to his door.

(24:29 – 24:41)

And look at the other changes as well. Verse nine, Zacchaeus moves from being an outsider to an insider. Jesus says, this man too is a son of Abraham.

(24:42 – 24:51)

That was the way of speaking of someone who was a Jew. A Jew was a son of Abraham. Newsflash, nobody thought Zacchaeus was a son of Abraham.

(24:52 – 25:17)

Even though he was born Jewish, they thought that by his behaviour he had made himself an outcast. He needs to forever sit at the wee table in the corner and wallow in how excluded he is. Yet Jesus says, by virtue of encountering me, you can now sit at the table of the children of Abraham.

(25:19 – 25:29)

This is what Jesus does. And this is the pattern of how Jesus operates. Do you see there, that’s what verse 10 is doing.

(25:29 – 26:09)

Verse 10 is going from the particular case of Zacchaeus and it’s saying, this is part of a general concept. The reason salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house is because the son of man, Jesus, is operating in this way and doing this sort of stuff. You know, if you look up Jesus’ public figure Facebook page or if there was a LinkedIn in his day, that people have always got a thing that they do, there’s a summary of kind of who they are and the job of Jesus, the skill of Jesus, his thing is seeker and saviour of the lost.

(26:10 – 26:22)

That’s Jesus’ thing. If we don’t understand that about Jesus, we’ve not understood Jesus. He is seeking and finding countless lost people.

(26:23 – 26:33)

And of course, we’re all lost without Jesus. We’re all lost. And yet that lostness can look very different depending on who we are.

(26:34 – 26:48)

There’s religious people who are lost and there’s people with no faith who are lost. And there’s people who have nothing who are lost, humanly speaking, and there’s people who have everything. And yet they’re lost.

(26:50 – 27:11)

There’s a film out just now in the cinema about the pop idol, Michael Jackson. And there seems to be a resurgence of documentaries about him. I happened to see a clip of one of his bodyguards towards the end of his life who saw him from the inside.

(27:12 – 27:32)

And he spoke of how in the last years of his life, he lived entirely alone. He said even his own father and brothers had to make an appointment to see him and he didn’t really want to see anybody. The bodyguard said he was one of the most rich and famous people in the world and yet he was lonely and lost.

(27:35 – 27:51)

Being lost is not just the guy down and out on the street or living in prison, going to the Bible study. Being lost can be the person in the nicest house in Newton, Mearns. And yet they know that something is wrong and badly missing.

(27:52 – 28:08)

God sent his son to take our wrongs, our sins upon his shoulders. Jesus traded places with us to endure the consequences that we deserve from a perfectly righteous God. Because here’s the thing about God.

(28:08 – 28:14)

God lives up to his name. God is righteous and good. God does bring his justice.

(28:14 – 28:47)

He will bring his justice one day to a world full of sin. But because Jesus paid it all on the cross, if you acknowledge Jesus as your Lord, if you trust in Jesus as your Saviour, then he will come into your life and he will save you if you welcome him in. It used to be said, maybe somewhat simplistically, you become a Christian by inviting Jesus into your heart.

(28:47 – 29:03)

That was how my cousin said it to me when I was five. Said, how do you become a Christian? Invite Jesus into your heart. We’ve seen this morning, haven’t we, that it is also true that Jesus invites himself into our lives, actually.

(29:05 – 29:44)

But it is also true that Zacchaeus must joyfully welcome Jesus into his life. The most important act of hospitality is opening your heart to Christ so that what Paul later can say becomes true of you, that Christ dwells in your heart through faith. Your curiosity may have brought you here, but Jesus now stops, as it were, by your seat or wherever you are, and he says, I must come into your life.

(29:45 – 30:05)

Have you welcomed him? Have you joyfully brought him behind the front door of who you are? He sorts out your sins. He shapes your behaviours going forward. And then he sets an example, doesn’t he, for his church to follow.

(30:06 – 30:21)

And so just something briefly for the church as we finish. Here’s the problem for us. If by grace you’re sitting at the table already, too often the church has the same attitude as the muttering crowd.

(30:22 – 30:43)

Too often the church grumbles in the same way as the crowd do in verse seven. Too often when everyone else is piling in and damning people to hell, we’re right there with them. Back to that story I mentioned earlier.

(30:43 – 30:57)

I use it because I think it is particularly pointed about that chief of that particular party. Everyone is rightly angry about that. There is a rightful anger about sin, isn’t there? People should be held accountable.

(30:59 – 31:23)

But I wonder if it occurred to us as we were having those chats with people that while sharing a rightful sense of the wrong that we as Christians could bring another angle to that story. We could have said in that conversation, yes, it was awful and corrupt. And it reminded me of a story in the Bible where there was a guy just like that.

(31:25 – 31:48)

And everyone thought he was beyond the pale except Jesus. And yes, he did need to repent and he did need to be shaped to change, but he wasn’t saved by how he changed, but he was saved by Jesus and then he started changing. The one note that the world is often playing in these scenarios is one of judgement.

(31:49 – 32:20)

But we can also strike another note of grace. Christians always have another angle to bring to the story of the lost. And the question is, are we bringing that attitude to people and in our conversations about people? Christians should sound a bit different, shouldn’t we? As those who’ve experienced the grace of God.

(32:22 – 32:34)

We should be full of grace and truth. And that should affect then our assumptions about people. I was chatting, I asked Lucy if I could use this.

(32:35 – 33:03)

I was asking for her help to sort out the mess of my sermon this week. And she was explaining that when she worked with Christian students, they would give out leaflets on campus. And one of the temptations for the Christian students was to avoid certain people, avoid giving the leaflets to certain people because it looked like they wouldn’t be interested because they had piercings and tattoos or maybe they were wearing a certain kind of religious clothing.

(33:04 – 33:22)

And so the students were self-selecting who they thought might receive the leaflet. And they encouraged them not to do that because here’s the thing, the appearances were often very deceptive. And often it was the person with the tattoos and the piercings or the whatever it was who actually was very glad to have a conversation.

(33:25 – 34:19)

This is actually a phenomenally challenging series because it’s not just about the depth of your fridge, it’s about the depth of your love and the extent of your grace and my grace. I guess I’ve barely mentioned this morning really how this works out in practicality, but I think it’s almost self-evident, isn’t it? Because if this is where it starts in our hearts and our attitudes, then it actually starts to play out in practical ways somehow, somewhere. It will surely play out in who we actually spend time with, who we might ask out for a cup of coffee, whose invitation into their home we might accept, not make an excuse to get out of, and who we might invite into our home.

(34:23 – 34:44)

Gospel transformation often comes out of an act of gospel hospitality. If we really get the grace of Jesus, it will start changing the tables we sit at and the people we will invite and say, come and sit down. Let’s pray.

(34:47 – 35:33)

Father, thank you for your Son’s astonishing mercy, His almost scandalous grace that He should stop at the tree of the worst guy in the whole town and say, I’m coming for lunch. Father, help us to have hearts that reflect His, draw us to Him, draw us to fellowship with Him, to faith in Him, if that’s not been our experience yet. And if it has, Lord, then may we reflect Him more and more in our attitudes and in the ways that we live.

(35:34 – 35:36)

And we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.

The post Table of Disruptive Grace – Luke 19v1–10 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Thanks, Colin. Evening, folks. If you’ve got your Bible to hand, let’s turn to 1 Chronicles chapter 11, and you’ll find that in the Church Bible on page 414.

Let’s hear God’s words. All Israel came together to David at Hebron and said, We are your own flesh and blood. In the past, even while Saul was king, you were the one who led Israel on their military campaigns.

(0:37 – 1:03)

And the Lord your God said to you, You will shepherd my people Israel, and you will become their ruler. When all the elders of Israel had come to King David at Hebron, he made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord and they anointed David king over Israel, as the Lord had promised through Samuel. David and all the Israelites marched to Jerusalem, that is, Jebus.

(1:03 – 1:19)

The Jebusites who lived there said to David, You will not get in here. Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion, which is the city of David. David had said, Whoever leads the attack on the Jebusites will become commander-in-chief.

(1:20 – 1:38)

Joab, son of Zeuriah, went up first, and so he received the command. David then took up residence in the fortress, and so it was called the city of David. He built up the city around it, from the terraces to the surrounding wall, while Joab restored the rest of the city.

(1:39 – 1:57)

And David became more and more powerful, because the Lord Almighty was with him. These were the chiefs of David’s mighty warriors. They, together with all Israel, gave his kingship strong support to extend over the whole land, as the Lord has promised.

(1:57 – 2:10)

This is a list of David’s mighty warriors. Jehoshabim, the Hachmanite, was chief of the officers. He raised his spear against 300 men whom he killed in one encounter.

(2:11 – 2:32)

Next to him was Eleazar, son of Dodai, the Ahohite, one of three mighty warriors. He was with David at Pasdamon, when the Philistines gathered there for battle. At a place where there was a field full of barley, the troops fled from the Philistines, but they took their stand in the middle of the field.

(2:33 – 2:55)

They defended it and struck the Philistines down, and the Lord brought about a great victory. Three of the thirty chiefs came down to David to the rock at the cave of Adullam, while a band of Philistines was encamped in the valley of Rephium. At that time, David was in the stronghold, and the Philistine garrison was at Bethlehem.

(2:56 – 3:28)

David longed for water, and said, O that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem. So the three broke through the Philistine lines, drew water from the well near the gates of Bethlehem, and carried it back to David. But he refused to drink it.

Instead, he poured it out to the Lord. God forbid that I should do this, he said. Should I drink the blood of these men who went at the risk of their lives? Because they risked their lives to bring it back, David would not drink it.

(3:29 – 3:43)

Such were the exploits of the three mighty warriors. Abishai, the brother of Joab, was chief of the three. He raised his spear against three hundred men whom he killed, and so he became as famous as the three.

(3:44 – 4:01)

He was doubly honoured above the three, and became their commander, even though he was not included among them. Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, a valiant fighter from Kabzil, performed great exploits. He struck down Moab’s two mightiest warriors.

(4:02 – 4:16)

He went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion. And he struck down an Egyptian who was five cubits tall. Though the Egyptian had a spear like a weaver’s rod in his hand, Benaiah went against him with a club.

(4:16 – 4:28)

He snatched the spear from the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear. Such were the exploits of Benaiah, son of Jehoiada. He too was as famous as the three mighty warriors.

(4:29 – 4:46)

He was held in greater honour than any of the thirty, but he was not included among the three, and David put him in charge of his bodyguard. This is the word of God. Let me start with a question.

(4:47 – 5:15)

Is there something missing in your life? Is there a void, a nagging gap, an empty space leaving you feeling a bit incomplete? It’s a big searching question, and of course it’s not just one that preachers ask. It’s a staple point in books and movies, the restless soul. In rom-coms, the missing thing is usually finding Mr. or Mrs. Right.

(5:16 – 5:47)

If you’re old enough, you might remember the 1990s film City Slickers. Billy Crystal plays a man who, on the face of it, has a very successful and full life. He’s got a loving family, a good job, he’s got friends, but he feels dissatisfied, so he goes off on a kind of wild west adventure to find, as one of the characters puts it, that one thing, the missing piece of the jigsaw in his life.

(5:48 – 6:21)

Well, coming back to the context of 1st and 2nd Chronicles, for 3rd century B.C. Israelites or thereabouts, roughly about the time where this book was probably written, people living in very humbled circumstances, they might well have asked themselves that same question. What’s missing? The glory days when Israel stood tall were very much a distant memory at this point. This is a people who’d been thoroughly routed and humiliated by foreign powers.

(6:22 – 6:42)

The survivors, many years before, shipped off to Babylon, then after a few decades, that little trickle of refugees made their way back to the land. But Israel now, at this point, was very much a provincial backwater, a spent force. Surely there must be more than this.

(6:43 – 7:21)

And as Colin introduced us to the book last week, under God’s hand, a writer, a chronicler, is sitting down and bringing together lots of bits of Israel’s history in order to help answer that question. And we’re going to see, as he reminds them of their history, that among other things, the big hole in their lives, in the nation, in their hopes, was king-shaped. There was a big king-shaped hole in the nation.

(7:22 – 7:47)

And I say that because the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, remember, originally this is just one book. It’s been divided in our English Bible into two, but originally in the Hebrew, this would just be one book. So the 65 chapters in our English Bibles that make up 1 and 2 Chronicles, of those 65 chapters, 28 of them are going to be centred on David and Solomon.

(7:48 – 8:06)

Because they were, of course, the two kings, above all the kings of Judah and Israel, who stood at the very apex of their history. Israel was never greater. It was never more blessed, never more united, never more glorious than when David and Solomon ruled.

(8:07 – 8:29)

And never mind the slow decline after David and Solomon where it all started to fall apart and you had all those ropey kings that led to disaster. Now they didn’t even have any king to put their name to. No, they just had provincial governors and foreign viceroys.

(8:29 – 9:01)

Oh, to have a king again like David, someone anointed by God, devoted to God, to rule the people. Last week as we came into these chapters, we looked at Israel’s first king, Saul, and a king who proved himself to be unfaithful to the Lord. That was the great kind of judgement on Saul that we read at the end of chapter 10, verse 13.

(9:01 – 9:22)

Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He did not keep the word of the Lord and even consulted a medium for guidance. As Matthew Henry very chillingly puts it, a man who even went as far as knocking on the door of hell for guidance rather than being faithful to God.

(9:22 – 9:55)

And, of course, the result of that was a nation that was defeated, that was disunited, and that was torn apart. But God in his mercy had a better king to take Saul’s place, a king, a man even after his own heart. And in chapter 11 and over the next 18 chapters, although we’re not going to cover them all in detail, the chronicler wants to take us back and to take his first readers back to David.

(9:56 – 10:13)

And what we’re going to see is what made David a great king. That’s also going to be true when we get to Solomon. We’re going to see the blessings that a king devoted to God brings to his people.

(10:14 – 10:26)

And so let me just be very clear. You’ll know this if you’ve read ahead in the book. This account of David and Solomon is not a warts and all account of those two kings.

(10:26 – 10:52)

You need to go back to 1 and 2 Samuel for that. In fact, so positive will chronicles be about David and Solomon that you might be tempted to think as you read it, isn’t this a bit of a whitewash? Isn’t this the spin doctor’s version of their history? Well, I think there are two answers to that. Firstly, David’s sins are very well documented in scripture.

(10:53 – 11:28)

If anything, the author of Samuel kind of goes to town in the amount of time that he gives to David’s failures and his shortcomings and the consequences of that, his adultery, his disobedient census taking, his weak parenting. So there’s no cover up going on in the Bible. But secondly, what we have to appreciate about chronicles is that chronicles wants to show us the best of David because the best of David is a model of kingship at its best.

(11:29 – 12:00)

Key to that being that David, unlike Saul, was a man whose heart and disposition was fundamentally orientated towards God. So that his life, when you take it as a whole, was a life that was rooted in God and for God. And that’s just a reminder by way of application that lives are usually best measured in the rounds over years, indeed over a lifetime.

(12:01 – 12:24)

We’ve been advertising, you might have seen the slide when you came in, a pastoral seminar in Edinburgh next week, the author and speaker, Kelly Cappock. And in his book, that’s going to be, I think, the theme of that day, ‘You’re Only Human’, he touches on this danger of judging life’s too hastily. One of the quotes from the book will be on the screen.

(12:24 – 12:58)

He says this, might one of our great challenges be that when we judge how we’re doing, we try to assess the whole by only looking at a part. What I mean is this, we imagine what a faithful and rich life looks like and then any given morning, we dislike the person we see staring back at us from the mirror. His point is that we often rush to judge life by their immediate circumstances.

(12:58 – 13:38)

I think we have a particular tendency to do this about ourselves, don’t we? I mean, never mind all the decades that you have lived, never mind your family life, education, work, Christian service, we feel useless and rubbish and we write ourselves off because this particular bit that I’m in at the moment isn’t going well. Well, thank God that he sees the bigger picture and not even just of this life, but he sees what we will be in eternity to come. It wasn’t that David’s failures didn’t matter, but they weren’t the whole story.

(13:39 – 13:58)

He was, by God’s grace, when all was said and done, still a good king. And that’s an important point. You’re still a good mother, you’re still a good friend, you’re still a good servant despite the mess that you might be in at this point in your life.

(13:59 – 14:35)

If, like David, your hearts and your hopes are anchored fundamentally in Jesus. But back to chapter 11. It begins with two words, ‘all Israel’, verse 1. That’s a phrase which is going to be repeated a lot by the chronicler in future chapters, this idea of Israel being united and together, because remember, though it’s not recorded in the Chronicles, between the end of chapter 10 and the beginning of chapter 11, there had been a civil war in Israel.

(14:36 – 15:12)

But David is the king who unites God’s people. A shepherd and a ruler, verse 2. Somebody who’s been promised and appointed by God, verse 3. Recognised by God’s people, a king and his people binding themselves together in covenant, verse 3. We’ll see much more about covenant in future weeks, particularly God’s covenant with the people through his king, David. Then united, we read on under the king, the city of the king, the city of David, verse 5, is established.

(15:13 – 15:51)

Jerusalem becomes the capital, it’s restored and built up there in verse 8. This is a king who is growing in strength, his kingdom extending over the whole land, verse 10, and crucially, verse 9, because the Lord Almighty was with him. And again, let’s just note here a very important lesson about the unity of God’s people. This once divided people are united, not because they have the same views on taxation or farming policy, not even because they’re all best friends.

(15:51 – 16:04)

There’s just been a civil war, for goodness sake. But they are united by the king. They’re united by giving the king their allegiance and their loyalty.

(16:05 – 16:16)

And that’s true for Christians today. That’s true for us who are part of Christ’s family. We’re not united because we agree about everything.

(16:17 – 16:27)

We’re not united because we’re all best buddies. Rather, we are bound together by our allegiance to the king. To King Jesus.

(16:30 – 16:52)

John Calvin, the church theologian, put it like this, he said, the only true bond of church unity is Christ the Lord. It’s Christ the king. And that means, of course, that even when we disagree, even at those times where we don’t get on brilliantly with each other, we still recognise each other as brothers and sisters.

(16:53 – 17:38)

We still strive to love and to forgive and to support and to hold on to each other because that is what the king has commanded. And not to do that isn’t to break with fellow Christians, it’s to break from the king. Well, all this, these reminders of David, of David unifying the people, of David extending the borders of Israel, of David restoring the glory of that tattered nation, for those Israelites in the third century living in the ruins of Jerusalem being bossed about by pagans, was just a big reminder that there was a big king-shaped hole in their midst.

(17:39 – 18:46)

No one now to unite them, no one to shepherd them, no one to rule them, no one to build God’s kingdom. And that question, “What’s missing in your life?”, is still one that begs an answer today, isn’t it? As we look around society, what’s missing? Could it be that in the 21st century the basic needs of people aren’t so very different from those intertestamental Jews? Could it be that the restlessness, the purposelessness, the division that so many feel is because they don’t have someone in their lives who is worthy for them to give themselves to, to get behind, to follow? Because there’s no one to shepherd and to care for them? Because there’s no one with authority and they can’t even govern themselves? Because there’s no great cause, there’s no great hope, there’s no great future, there’s no kingdom worth building. There’s no one who can unite and heal them from all their divisions.

(18:47 – 19:24)

Could it be that there is still a massive king-shaped hole in the lives of people today? But the chronicler goes on, because this is a king who builds his kingdom through his people. Verse 10, the mighty warriors who gave David’s kingdom his kingship’s strong support. And then we’re given this roll of honour of those who served the king wholeheartedly, bravely, skilfully.

(19:24 – 19:39)

We have Jehoshabim, verse 11 there, defeating 300 men single-handedly with his spear. Eleazar standing his ground while others fled from the battlefield. Verses 12-13.

(19:40 – 19:55)

And then the three in some kind of like special forces operation breaking into Bethlehem in order to get David a glass of water. Verses 15-19. Abishai, armed with a spear, striking down another 300.

(19:56 – 20:12)

And then Benaiah, who, as one of our members, Nicky Mackison, so memorably put it, took a club to a spear fight and won. A man who wrestled lions in the snow. Verses 22-25.

(20:13 – 20:21)

Not to count all the others that we didn’t read there. Verse 27, down to the end of the chapter. The people who served the king.

(20:23 – 20:38)

Now, of course, David couldn’t single-handedly have built his kingdom on his own. But he could have tried to take all the glory for it, I guess. That wouldn’t have been unusual in the ancient world.

(20:39 – 21:13)

Think back to Nebuchadnezzar there in Daniel chapter 4. It will be on the screen. As the king, Nebuchadnezzar, was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, he said, Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty? And yet the graciousness, one of the glories of God’s king, is that he honours his servants. He honours those who build the kingdom with him.

(21:14 – 21:21)

John chapter 12. My father will honour the one who serves me. John 17.

(21:21 – 21:34)

Jesus says, I have given them the glory that you gave me that they may be one as we are one. This is our king’s desire. This is why David is such a great model of kingship.

(21:34 – 21:53)

That’s why he points us in these ways to the great King Jesus. The one whose desire, whose heart is to share glory with his people. Who honours their endeavours and their sacrifices and their exploits for the kingdom.

(21:54 – 22:11)

Now, of course, as we look at a list like this, we just need to remind ourselves, if it’s not obvious, that our battles in God’s kingdom are not against flesh and blood. Our weapons are not clubs and spears. They’re not of this world.

(22:11 – 22:23)

But there are still spiritual battles to be fought. There are still spiritual strongholds to capture. The call of the king is still to join the fight.

(22:24 – 22:43)

To stand firm like Eleazar when others are scarpering off, when the opposition is coming at you like a flood. To, like the three, take some risks for the honour of the king. To use our skills and abilities like Benaiah to defend and advance the kingdom.

(22:44 – 23:09)

2 Corinthians chapter 10, we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Because the life of faith, life in the kingdom, should have a quality of an adventure to it.

(23:09 – 23:15)

It is a battle. It is a call to be involved and to make a difference. To get stuck in.

(23:16 – 23:32)

To do something for God. Not just to play it safe. Along with some of my FIEC colleagues recently, we were looking at those famous verses at the start of Ecclesiastes chapter 11.

(23:32 – 23:40)

Put them on the screen there. We know them well. Modern versions, maybe more accurately, say, ship your grain across the sea.

(23:40 – 23:52)

You might remember that more as cast your bread upon the water. But it goes on to say, after many days, you may receive a return. Invest in seven ventures, yes, and eight.

(23:52 – 24:04)

You do not know what disaster might come upon the land. In other words, this is biblical wisdom and it’s kind of saying to us, have a go. Yes, there’s a degree of uncertainty in these things.

(24:04 – 24:16)

It might not work. But probably the bigger failure, the bigger rebuke, would be to have just done nothing. To have buried your talents.

(24:17 – 24:48)

That’s the surefire way to guarantee that you’ll have nothing to show at the end of it all. I think as we get older, or those of us who are getting older, maybe speak for myself, I think we often can start to lose a bit of that sense of adventure, can’t we? I don’t mean by that that we all have to kind of sell up and move to Africa or to the East End, although clearly don’t rule that out. But just being ready to get involved in a new thing.

(24:49 – 25:05)

To push out again, to embrace a challenge, a bit of discomfort. To push forward rather than kind of give up and retire. Last year, I was preaching on Jonah here on Sunday mornings in Greenview.

(25:06 – 25:41)

And I spoke on chapter 3 that famous chapter where Jonah hears God’s call come to him a second time to go back to Nineveh. And I noted that while none of us are likely to have an experience as dramatic as Jonah, we might in a lesser way identify a little bit with that sense of God calling us back to service a second time. Maybe a bad experience or we just got jaded or life pulled us away and we’ve kind of gone off the ministry saddle a little bit.

(25:43 – 26:07)

And perhaps there’s a sense that God is calling us back to re-engage with ministry, to go again, to have a go again. And I mentioned we could take heart from Jonah that it’s never too late to get back in the saddle and to start afresh. And by way of application at that point I said the Café needs helpers.

(26:08 – 26:27)

And somebody laughed because that was a kind of muffled guffaw. And I kind of understood why at the time because it sounded like such a lame comparison. I mean, making tea is hardly in the same league as taking God’s word to a pagan city.

(26:29 – 26:41)

But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. Do you know what most people who have gone to be missionaries in pagan lands are doing? They’re making tea.

(26:42 – 27:03)

They’re running kids clubs and sewing classes and Christianity explored courses and manning bookshops. The gospel adventure isn’t primarily that you are serving God in Pakistan rather than Pollock Shaws or that you’re speaking Eritrean rather than English. It’s that you’re on the pitch.

(27:04 – 27:08)

You’re involved. You’re serving the king. You’re giving it a go.

(27:12 – 27:33)

And so as we read this list that seems very distant and very strange to us, let it inspire us. Let these mighty warriors inspire us to serve our greater king. For some of us that might just be to offer up our five loaves and our two fish.

(27:33 – 27:45)

Or our widow’s mite. The Bible and church history are full of great stories of small deeds leading to amazing outcomes. Maybe it will be something more dramatic, more adventurous.

(27:47 – 28:02)

But what makes any of it special is that we’re doing it for the king. Giving his kingship strong support. The king who unites us,

(28:03 – 28:09)

who shepherds us, who rules us. The king who is with us throughout our whole life.

(28:09 – 28:24)

The ups and downs. The king who includes us in building the kingdom and honours us as we step forward to do so. The king who fills that big king-shaped hole that we all have in our lives.

(28:25 – 28:27)

May God bless these thoughts from his word.

The post The Chosen King – 1 Chronicles Ch11 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Last week, Colin asked what we think of when we say the word hospitality. He challenged us that though our views were technically correct, it was perhaps a little small. He helped us really to consider that hospitality is a much bigger idea in the Bible than we might ordinarily think. Maybe it was new to us last week that the Bible shows us that God himself is hospitable.

(0:22 – 0:44)

But there’s another word that we also may not associate with this word hospitality, and that is the word stranger. And this week we want to think about who receives our hospitality and why. In the New Testament, there’s a Greek word that’s used for hospitality, philoxenia.

(0:45 – 0:59)

It literally means love of stranger. It’s the opposite of xenophobia, which is the fear of strangers. And here’s the issue.

(1:01 – 1:35)

We might feel okay with a certain kind of hospitality that’s maybe comfortable to us, with those we like, or with those who are like us, but the Bible shows us a different way. To see how deep this idea goes, then flick back to Leviticus, and that book that we looked at, the chapter 19 that we read, and those verses, verse 33 and 34. I’ll read it again.

(1:36 – 1:48)

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you are foreigners in Egypt.

(1:49 – 2:06)

I am the Lord your God. I think it’s helpful to set these verses in their context, in the context of Israel’s story. Remember, God brought the people of Israel into relationship with himself, not because they were great or amazing, but he set his love upon them.

(2:07 – 2:28)

And God had promised that through Abraham’s descendants, blessings would reach every corner of the world, every nation, and every people group. The welcome Israel received would be open to all peoples everywhere else. Everyone else could belong to God, be his people, and enjoy a home with him forever.

(2:30 – 2:55)

But as the story unfolds in scripture, we come to see that Abraham’s descendants became slaves in Egypt. Yet God rescued them from plagues, the Red Sea, the wilderness, eventually bringing them into the land he promised to be their home. And having saved them, God brought them to the Mount Sinai, and he gave them various instructions or laws.

(2:56 – 3:19)

And there were laws on how to live in ways that would help them flourish, help them prosper, know peace, be blessed, and in turn, be a blessing upon all the others around them. And Leviticus is one of the key books that contains these instructions. And in this chapter 19, the people of Israel they’re addressed as a holy congregation.

(3:20 – 3:39)

And they’re called to imitate the holy character of God. Be holy because I am holy, God said. And holiness meant that God’s people were to live with certain characteristics and attributes, certain behaviours, honesty, integrity, righteousness.

(3:39 – 3:58)

They were to show justice, have mercy, show love for the good of the whole community. It included family, like loving and honouring your parents, but it also included a wider circle. Felow citizens are mentioned, and neighbours are mentioned.

(3:59 – 4:12)

And they were instructed to not to steal, not to lie, not to defraud each other. They weren’t to show favouritism to each other either. They were to ensure wages were paid on time.

(4:13 – 4:26)

They weren’t to show favouritism, but treat each other fairly. They were to respect elderly among them. In fact, they were told, don’t hate your neighbour in your heart.

(4:27 – 4:41)

Don’t harbour grudges. But it goes further. It focusses on the vulnerable and the marginalised because for God’s purposes, holiness meant generosity.

(4:42 – 5:03)

So they were to leave parts of their harvest untouched so that those who didn’t have land could come and glean at the edges and so not starve. It meant protection too for those who were unable to defend themselves. It talks about being good and wise to those who are blind and those who are deaf.

(5:04 – 5:16)

And in summary, God puts over it all. He says, love your neighbour as yourself. Why? Because their God is the Lord who had a covenant love with them.

(5:17 – 5:40)

But it doesn’t stop there either for another group is spoken of. The verses we read in the NIV that we read, it says the Hebrew word is translated as foreigner who resides. If you picked up another translation, maybe the ESV or some others, it speaks of the stranger who sojourns.

(5:42 – 6:04)

What these terms speak of though is the non-native born staying in Israel who had obtained legal right and status to live there and to work there and to prosper. They were given right to glean the fields so they too would not be poor or starving. They had right to equal pay.

(6:05 – 6:16)

They would be given the same legal justice. They would be able to participate in the religious life of Israel. They received much.

(6:17 – 6:43)

And apart from some specific exceptions, God intended for any foreigner or stranger who’s residing or sojourning in Israel to follow God’s laws just like the rest of Israel. If they were going to live in Israel, they had to abide by the same laws as an Israelite. They weren’t allowed to come and set up different cultures or have and practise different religions.

(6:45 – 6:59)

And the instructions to the native born Israelites was this, and it was very clear. They were to love them like their neighbour. Love the foreigner, love the stranger as yourself.

(7:01 – 7:24)

But why were God’s people to be like this? Well, the end of verse 34 tells us. For once you were strangers, once you were foreigners in Egypt, I am the Lord your God. And what God is doing is He’s using a memory of vulnerability that He is their God and He loves them with a covenant love.

(7:24 – 7:53)

And He’s using that to motivate them to treat everyone else with honour, justice, mercy, and love. Though these Israelites were now insiders who belong to God, they’re not to weaponise it, not withhold privilege or have some power over, but instead wield it for the stranger’s good. And all of this is part of Israel’s holiness practise.

(7:54 – 8:21)

Israel’s holiness was to be measured by how they view and treat those who were around them. Yes, parents, elderly, fellow citizens, neighbours, the poor, the marginalised, the vulnerable, but also the others, the strangers, the foreigners, the outsiders. Well, that’s all good and well for the people of Israel back then.

(8:22 – 8:45)

What does this have to do with us and hospitality today? Well, we need to take another direction to help us. Let’s flick over into the Luke chapter 10 that Chris read too, into the story of Jesus. It’s a passage where Jesus spoke of God’s laws given to Israel and He applies them in a very provocative way.

(8:46 – 9:05)

So from the previous chapters, we didn’t read them, but we know Jesus is on a journey. He’s a sojourner and He’s travelling with His disciples to Jerusalem. In fact, chapter nine, verse 51 says, when the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, He set His face to go towards Jerusalem.

(9:06 – 9:31)

And Jesus is using this journey with His disciples to teach them about kingdom hospitality. So when a Samaritan village rejects Jesus and His disciples, James and John, two of the disciples, they wanted to call fire down from heaven on them. But Jesus said, no, that’s not how you treat.

(9:33 – 9:50)

He then warned potential disciples, potential followers of Jesus, because there were many hanging around Him. He talks to them about the cost of following Jesus, the cost of discipleship. And He also sent out 72 of them to go ahead.

(9:51 – 10:07)

And He said, you’re gonna be like lambs among wolves. That’s in verse three of chapter 10. And what Jesus was telling them is that as they went out into these various villages, they were to be dependent upon God and the hospitality of the strangers to them.

(10:08 – 10:21)

They were to travel lightly, receive food and shelter, and they were to be grateful. They were to announce the kingdom of God has come near to you. That’s in verse nine of chapter 10.

(10:21 – 10:50)

And it’s in this context, this journey, this kingdom hospitality that Jesus is teaching, that Jesus tells this parable of the good Samaritan. And it’s of special interest, I think, because the disciples were fresh from these experiences of either hostility or welcome that they journeyed, as they journeyed through Samaria and Galilee. Because they knew themselves what it was like to be outsiders.

(10:52 – 11:13)

Just like the Jews actually viewed Samaritans. And when this Jewish lawyer comes to Jesus asking about receiving eternal life, Jesus answers that, yes, you’re to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And you’re to love your neighbour as yourself.

(11:13 – 11:30)

The lawyer gets a big lesson. He knew that loving his neighbour meant more than the man next door. But the question was, well, how wide does this really go? Surely it didn’t go beyond the people of Israel.

(11:33 – 11:54)

But Jesus defines the neighbour way more widely through this story. And he gives a surprising twist. Because Jesus chose a Samaritan, an outsider to these Jews, to illustrate what it looks like to show mercy and love and justice to even an enemy.

(11:56 – 12:13)

It was the Samaritan who showed compassion for his fellow human being. He disinfected and bandaged the wounds of the stranger. He was the one who took him to the inn, paid for care to be given to the wounded man, to nurse him back to health.

(12:14 – 12:32)

It was literally hospitality, philoxenia, love of stranger. Not xenophobia, fear of stranger. If the Jews were making up this story, they might identify the neighbour in need as the Samaritan.

(12:34 – 12:51)

Instead, it’s the Samaritan as the one who sees the half-dead stranger as the person worthy of compassion and care and mercy and love. But this all sets a scene for another lesson on hospitality. Dinner at Martha’s.

(12:53 – 13:03)

It’s quite a famous story in the New Testament too. There are many books written about Martha and Mary. They’re the sisters of Lazarus, the man who Jesus raised from the dead.

(13:05 – 13:44)

And at the beginning of this incident, verse 38, as Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he comes to a village and a woman named Martha opened her home to him. It’s reasonable to assume that they hadn’t known each other, but they’d likely heard of him and his message. Maybe they’d heard him say earlier, which we read in chapter nine, that the foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man, that’s Jesus himself, has nowhere to lay his head.

(13:46 – 14:07)

But whatever, Martha opens the door to this stranger, offers Jesus hospitality to this sojourner Jesus. The text, verse 39, tells us Jesus was teaching and Mary is listening. It’s like there are many more people in this home than just Mary and Martha, who are named.

(14:08 – 14:20)

Because it tells us Martha was distracted with much serving. There’s a whole lot of cooking going on. There’s a whole lot of preparations going on.

(14:21 – 14:49)

You could imagine how frenzied, perhaps, things were for her, wanting everything to be just right because this important teacher was in their home. And Mary just wanted to sit and listen to Jesus talk, even though we understand at this time that rabbis, of which Jesus was, he was a teacher, they didn’t usually teach women. But we see that Jesus welcomed Mary.

(14:50 – 15:05)

And Mary was so caught up in what Jesus is saying, she didn’t really notice Martha bustling about. But Martha notices Mary, and Martha is frustrated, and annoyed, with Mary.

(15:06 – 15:29)

So it’s with a sense of indignation that she says to Jesus, Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all this work by myself? Tell her to help me. But Jesus speaks into this. He gently tells Martha that actually the most important thing was Jesus and his words of truth and life.

(15:30 – 15:43)

And we might think that’s somewhat arrogant of Jesus. To make himself centre of attention like this. We might think Martha was quite bold to speak to Jesus in this way.

(15:44 – 16:04)

How long had she known him? She seems confident that Jesus would side with her in her busy service, because perhaps that was the culture and norm of the day. But he didn’t. He acknowledges her cares and concerns, but he says, one thing’s necessary.

(16:04 – 16:22)

Mary’s chosen a good portion, which is not to be taken from her. It’s as if Jesus is saying to Martha, your company means more to me than your cooking or your tidy home. You’re more important to me than you can do for me.

(16:22 – 16:34)

He’s saying, your soul means more to me. Your trust and your dependence on me is more important than a good meal in a comfortable home. And the point Jesus is making is this.

(16:36 – 16:52)

Spiritual is most important when it comes to hospitality. Jesus makes this point again and again through his sojourn, his journey to the cross. We saw this clearly in our studies in John’s Gospel over the last months.

(16:52 – 17:13)

He calls us to be born again. We’re to be most concerned with what’s going on in the inside, for it’s our souls that last forever. And the good news of the Gospel is that our souls can be saved from just punishment of sin, because Jesus quite rightly points out to us that our sin is our greatest problem.

(17:14 – 17:29)

Not hunger, not clothing, not shelter, not friendships, not care. There’s always a bigger spiritual purpose. Yet we are embodied souls.

(17:30 – 17:55)

We do have material needs. And the Good Samaritan story reminds us that loving our neighbour is practical, because we live in physical bodies and we live in a physical material world with physical material needs. But the dinner at Martha’s reminds us that people are not given eternal life by running a soup kitchen.

(17:55 – 18:17)

But by listening to the words of Jesus and trusting and following Him. Salvation is not by works, not even hospitable works of justice and mercy and care. Yet it’s often the means by which the words of Jesus are heard and taken aboard.

(18:21 – 18:30)

Also, you know, this hospitality was not a once-only offer. It was something that was built on. A relationship started here and it grew.

(18:32 – 18:52)

In John’s Gospel, we read that Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus. Jesus has spoken of often coming to and from Bethany, and it’s likely he visited with these siblings many, many times. A real love and care was built up over many times.

(18:53 – 19:14)

And it may be that our giving of hospitality is a once-only event, and there’s good in that. But there are also opportunities for giving hospitality again and again and again. Building a deepening relationship of love and care just like Martha and Mary and Lazarus.

(19:16 – 19:36)

You know, if you belong to God’s family in Christ, we are to welcome fellow strangers, our brothers and sisters in Christ. Did you know the church is referred to as that? We sung about it in our second hymn. We sung about it in our third song.

(19:38 – 19:54)

The church is often referred to as foreigners, strangers, outsiders, too. 1 Peter 2 says this, and I paraphrase. Talking to the people of God in this particular church, he says, once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.

(19:55 – 20:15)

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. I urge you then as foreigners and exiles, strangers and sojourners, to abstain from sinful desires which wage against your soul. It is a physical and spiritual work, this hospitality.

(20:16 – 20:46)

We can be helped and encouraged as we receive physical sustenance, shelter, comfort, but as we do, we don’t forget or ignore the priority of providing spiritual nourishment, too. And that’s so that as believers in Christ, we stand firm and endure and persevere. We minister to one another what is most important.

(20:48 – 21:08)

We live and do ministry alongside each other so that we welcome and accept and honour and are concerned with the spiritual lives of each other that we share with. The people of God are to have a particular focus and attention on Jesus. Although Jesus is not with us, by his spirit he is.

(21:10 – 21:52)

He’s the unseen guest at every meal, when others are in our homes, when we provide that hospitality. But Peter goes on, he says, I urge you as foreigners and exiles, as strangers and sojourners, live such good lives among pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see good deeds and glorify God. You see, welcoming the stranger fits the gospel message, which calls people from every tribe, every nation, every language, every background, to come and worship the one true God, the hospitality God.

(21:53 – 22:04)

And it includes those who don’t yet belong to Jesus, too. We do this because we were once strangers to God. We, too, receive mercy.

(22:06 – 22:29)

I wonder if we view ourselves like this. Do we realise that we are outsiders who have been brought in? Strangers made friends, foreigners who belong to a new family, the family of God. And we are sojourning, too, on our way to our final home.

(22:31 – 22:51)

This is not what it’s all about, here and now. and we’re to invite others to join us along the way. I reckon if we don’t see ourselves this way, we will struggle to be generous with others who sojourn with us and with those who are still on the outside needing to be welcomed like we were.

(22:54 – 23:17)

Well, what does it look like? Our eldest son was home recently with a couple of his flatmates. And over a meal we were having, we were asking them about a recent holiday they’d had in Lisbon together. One of the friends said they had bumped into one of her work colleagues, a younger guy, he was in need of company.

(23:18 – 23:29)

So the friend invited him to join them for a meal. He agreed, and at the end of the night, the flatmates paid for the meal. He was flabbergasted.

(23:30 – 23:43)

Nobody had ever paid for a meal for him. He went back and told the people in his office back home in Scotland. So amazed that this group of people would do this for him.

(23:45 – 24:09)

Yet as the friends told the story around the table, it was really quite normal and ordinary. Why wouldn’t they? For him, it was so counter-cultural, and it had a significant impression on him. And I tell that story because the girl who shared the story followed it up by saying this, “Who knows where that might lead to in terms of future gospel conversation”.

(24:13 – 24:24)

The second example, in one sense, is more extraordinary. Yet in another sense, it’s something we can be encouraged in and step into. And it comes from a book on hospitality by a woman called Rosaria Butterfield.

(24:25 – 24:34)

It might be one of the books that we recommend in this subject to you. But it’s called, The Gospel Comes with a House Key. And in there, she tells her story.

(24:35 – 24:58)

Butterfield was a professor of literature at a university in the US. Her speciality was post-modern critical theory. She was writing a book, and along the way, wrote various articles about how, in particular, Bible-believing Christians are the worst and the source of all patriarchy and a range of other things.

(24:59 – 25:16)

And she wrote a particular scathing piece against Christian men, and a local pastor, Christian pastor, read it, reached out, and emailed. He wrote, I read your article. Thank you so much for your thoughts.

(25:17 – 25:32)

We’d love to have you around for dinner. Well, Rosaria knew that in order to write her book, she would actually have to do some proper research. And that actually meant she would have to spend time with these hate-filled Christians that she wrote against.

(25:32 – 25:49)

And so she said, yes. And she began to go to this house on a regular basis. Because over time, she found that their life and family and Christian faith was way more compelling

(25:49 – 26:08)

than anything she had ever experienced. And over time, through that process of hospitality and spiritual engagement, with the words of Jesus central, she became a follower of Jesus. Yes, amen.

(26:10 – 26:19)

You can read about it in our book. And I tell that story because that pastor and his wife loved this stranger. The outsider.

(26:21 – 26:38)

To some might even say an enemy. Who was against them. But in and through giving that hospitality, through sharing life, through sharing the words of Jesus, well, God is a God of hospitality.

(26:39 – 26:50)

And he causes people to do the same. And as Colin said last week, it’s way deeper, broader, harder than we might think. So here’s the challenge.

(26:52 – 27:24)

Widen your circle. Are we a believer and follower of Jesus? Well, have a look at our own practise and assess it. Can we ask ourselves, how might we widen our circle just a little bit further to bless others? Can we identify any barriers or constraints that we face and consider what the next step might be? And if you’re not a believer or follower of Jesus yet, maybe you are on the outsiders.

(27:26 – 27:35)

And someone invites you in. You know, it might just be the route by which you meet Jesus. The greatest outsider who ever lived.

(27:36 – 27:52)

Who gave his life to bring you in. Because Jesus was that stranger and sojourner who experienced rejection. Yes, he was on the outside and yet he met with outsiders every day.

(27:53 – 28:23)

And he ate with them, not to be entertained or fed, but to show them true satisfaction found in him. To point them to salvation in him as the living bread and the living water. And we too can enjoy that same hospitality from Jesus and we can join in and offer the same hospitality to others as we seek to follow Jesus as strangers and sojourners in this world on our way home.

The post Welcome the Stranger – Leviticus 19v33–34 appeared first on Greenview Church.

I met a man some time ago who works for a Christian ministry in London, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s called Christian Heritage, and this guy, his name is Ben, and he spends his time leading walking tours around London. And he takes people round London and he explains the city from the perspective of the Christian history of London. And he said that in recent years, he’s seen several people come to faith in Jesus, not only from going on his tours, but partly from that.

These people had begun to research the history of the UK, and some of them had then been led to Christianity and explored deeper questions about Jesus. And when I heard that story I thought, wow, history can really be so powerful, history can be pretty life-changing. Last Sunday we started a new series in First Chronicles.

And this book is a number of things, but one of the things it is, it is a book of history. A guy named Jerome, who lived in the 300s or so, he was the first person to call it a chronicle of sacred history. That’s where the word chronicles comes from.

He didn’t say it was a chronicle of boring history. He said it was a chronicle of sacred history, a history of what God had done in the past. And as we go through the book, we see that this is especially a history of the reigns of King David and King Solomon, and then a few other kings at the end.

Now, just a little fact about chronicles, it’s really important, I think, to realise that the Book of Chronicles was written 500 years after the events it records, or most of the events, David and Solomon’s reign. Most of the events in chronicles happen around about 1000 BC, but the Book of Chronicles is being written somewhere in the 500s BC, probably. So this would be like someone today writing about the Reformation, someone in 2026 writing about the 1500s, right? The chronicler is digging up ancient history, and he is using that history to build faith and build hope in the present people of God.

(2:45 – 3:29)

You see, a small group of Jews had returned to the land. They’ve come back to Jerusalem, but there is no king on the throne. They’ve rebuilt the temple, but the temple is a pale shadow of its former glory.

And the danger for the returnees in their present is that they would lose heart, lose hope, and lose a vital sense of their identity as God’s people, that they would just end up blending in with everyone else. And so the Book of Chronicles is written to arrest that possible decline. The book begins with a message of reminder.

(3:29 – 3:51)

It begins with the names of tribes and historical Israelites to say, this is who you are, and this is where you come from. The book started with hope for the world in the kingly tribe of Judah. And you remember that it very clearly emphasised the importance of the temple.

(3:51 – 4:04)

Devote yourself to the temple because there you devote yourself to the Lord. So that’s how Chronicles began. And the story now continues in chapter 10.

(4:05 – 9:08)

Let’s open our Bibles to 1 Chronicles 10. And if you’re using the Red Bible, it’s page 413. And now we start the narrative section of Chronicles.

Genealogies are history too, but this is a kind of a story form of history. And remember last time I said that chapter nine gives us the genealogy of the tribe of Benjamin. It then gives the line of King Saul.

And all of that’s leading to this first story, which is about Saul. Let’s read it together. Now the Philistines fought against Israel.

The Israelites fled before them and many fell dead on Mount Gilboa. The Philistines were in hot pursuit of Saul and his sons, and they killed his sons, Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malkishua. The fighting grew fierce around Saul.

And when the archers overtook him, they wounded him. Saul said to his armour bearer, draw your sword and run me through or these uncircumcised fellows will come and abuse me. But his armour bearer was terrified and would not do it.

So Saul took his own sword and fell on it. When the armour bearer saw that Saul was dead, he too fell on his sword and died. So Saul and his three sons died and all his house died together.

When all the Israelites in the valley saw that the army had fled and that Saul and his sons had died, they abandoned their towns and fled. And the Philistines came and occupied them. The next day when the Philistines came to strip the dead, they found Saul and his sons fallen on Mount Gilboa.

They stripped him and took his head and his armour and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to proclaim the news among their idols and their people. They put his armour in the temple of their gods and hung up his head in the temple of Dagon. When all the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, all their valiant men went and took the bodies of Saul and his sons and brought them to Jabesh.

Then they buried their bones under the great tree in Jabesh and they fasted for seven days. Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He did not keep the word of the Lord and even consulted a medium for guidance and did not enquire of the Lord.

So the Lord put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David, son of Jesse. This is the word of God and you might be thinking what a grim way to start the narrative of Chronicles. We start with King Saul on the day of his death and in this all sorts of previous background is skipped over.

As we fade into the first story of Chronicles, we’re just here on the killing fields where Saul and his sons die. I think this raises an issue that’s really worth us pausing to think about. I said last week that the book of Chronicles is often neglected.

I think there’s two main reasons for that. The first one is because of the genealogies at the beginning, but I think the second reason is that many people see Chronicles as repetitive. People point out that Chronicles covers much of the same history as the books of Samuel and Kings.

And so if you’ve trudged through Samuel and Kings in your Bible reading plan and you then get to Chronicles, you might be tempted to think this is just more of the same. It can be seen as a sort of redundant history that we don’t really need to read. But I want you just to think about this for a moment.

How many accounts of the life of Jesus do we possess? We possess four accounts of the life of Jesus and these Gospels cover many of the same incidents, but we don’t see any of these Gospels as unneeded or as redundant. They’re telling the same core story, but from a different angle and with different emphases and for different reasons. And so it’s wonderful we’ve got four of them.

(9:09 – 10:10)

Well, if you can have four Gospels of the life of Jesus, then why can’t you have two goes at this vital period of the history of Israel, the high point of the Kings, David and Solomon. Chronicles is telling the same story, but from a very different angle as we’re going to see in weeks to come. And so therefore we notice here that the chronicler, even at the very beginning, he just skips over a whole bunch of things that Samuel and Kings talk about.

Think of some of the things the chronicler ignores. He says nothing about the rise of King Saul. He says nothing about the details of the reign of Saul.

He skips over the anointing of David, David’s defeat of Goliath. He avoids the tussles between David and Saul, just ignores all of it. And he presses the skip button straight to the day of King Saul’s death.

(10:11 – 10:31)

This shows us that the chronicler isn’t very interested in King Saul. He only appears briefly as a foil for someone else. And so the narrative fades in and we’re shown a battlefield scene.

(10:33 – 11:09)

Two armies are fighting, the Israelites and the Philistines. The Philistines, we’ve seen this kind of thing many times before. They’re the perennial enemy of Israel.

I guess in the theology of the Bible, we would say that they’re the latest manifestation of the seed of the serpent, the latest group of people who are attacking the line of promise. And Saul, as he’d done many times before, he’s leading out his army to defend Israelite territory. But this time, not so good.

(11:11 – 11:31)

Twice over, in verses one and seven, we’re told that the Israelites fled from the Philistines. And many of them fell dead on Mount Gilboa. This is incidentally up towards the north of the country in a flat plane called the Valley of Jezreel.

(11:33 – 12:18)

And not only that, but notice that as the camera zooms in, it focusses in on Saul and his sons in particular. It’s very common in these battles for kings and their sons to fight, to go to war. And it was also common for the enemy to target the enemy king and the sons of the king.

Their archers would aim for the other sets of leaders. And this time it goes very tragically when three of Saul’s sons are killed. Jonathan, the loyal friend of David, Abinadab, and Malik Shua, all dead.

(12:19 – 14:08)

And Saul’s demise is next. The fighting grows fierce around him. Enemy archers wound him, but he’s hanging on to life.

And seeing what is coming, Saul commands his armour bearer to take his sword and to run him through, because he doesn’t want these carnal Philistines doing horrible things to him. The armour bearer is too afraid to kill the Lord’s anointed. He has a fear of God and he won’t do it.

And so Saul himself decides to take his own life. And then the armour bearer follows suit. It’s a horrible scene and it provokes all sorts of questions.

And indeed, when I was first reading it, I thought, I wonder what on earth am I meant to comment on this very sensitive, few verses? But then it dawned on me that verse six is very helpful. Verse six helps us to keep the right focus here, because we could go off in various directions about the rights and wrongs of whether, you know, should the armour bearer have killed Saul or not? Or should Saul have taken his own life or not? We could go down all of that route, but that’s not where the focus of the chronicler is.

Look where his focus is, verse six. So Saul and his three sons died and all his sons died together. The big point of emphasis is that King Saul and his house are all dead.

(14:10 – 15:31)

Now, sometimes people point out that it is not strictly true, if we were being pedantic, that all of Saul’s descendants were dead. And we know this because in the book of Samuel, we learned that there’s actually a grandson, one of Jonathan’s sons that survives. His name is Mephibosheth.

He’s unable to walk and David treats him very kindly. It’s a beautiful example of David’s grace. But the point the chronicler is making is that the house of Saul, the house of Saul as a dynasty was now effectively over.

Saul and all his possible successors are now dead. That’s the point. And repercussions follow, verse seven.

All the Israelites in the valley, this great valley with lots of Israelite towns, all of them now are abandoned, because the Philistines are coming next to your town and there’s no army to protect you, so they have to leave the area. And so at the end of Saul’s reign, Israel loses lots of territory. And we’re going to see as we move on that in Chronicles that David wins it all back.

(15:33 – 19:59)

But if this is not bad enough, something even worse follows for Saul, even though he’s dead. It was common in those days when you defeated an enemy to humiliate the body of the conquered king. And so they come the next day, they find Saul’s body, they strip his body, verse nine, and apologies if you’re squeamish, his head is severed.

I want you to notice the religious element to this. The Philistines send messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to proclaim the news among their idols and their people. See, in the minds of the Philistines, in their heads, this is not just a military victory.

In their head, their god, gods have defeated Israel’s God. And to prove this, Saul’s proud armour is displayed in their temple as like a trophy. Like when you kill an animal and people put it up on the wall, the head or something, his armours put up there.

And then maybe on the other wall, the head of Saul is hung in the temple of Dagon, one of the Philistine gods. Now the precise details here are very interesting. If you know some of the rest of the Bible, because earlier when David struck down Goliath, you remember when he beat the great Philistine champion, what did he do? He cut off Goliath’s head.

But now it is the head of Saul that’s removed, the Israelite king. And there’s another incident in 2 Samuel chapter 5, where the Ark of the Covenant of God is captured by the Philistines. And they take the… It’s the same kind of idea.

They take the Ark of the Covenant and in order to humiliate it, they put it in the temple of their god, as if to say, our god owns your God. And if you remember the story, the statue of Dagon topples down and falls on its face before the Ark of the Lord. And so the guys come in and they say, this isn’t good.

And so they lift the thing up, put it back up where it belonged. And then overnight it falls off again. And this time it shatters to bits.

And they think we better get this thing out of here. On that occasion, God humiliated Dagon. But on this occasion, the head of the Israelite king is hung up in their temple.

The only reason God would have allowed that to happen is if God allowed that to happen. Now, to put it another way, this desecration of the body of Saul shows God’s verdict on Saul. He belonged in a temple of idols.

That was a good place for him to finish, actually, if you understood his life the way that God understood it. And yes, verse 11, some Israelites try to restore some honour. The inhabitants of a town called Jabesh-Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul.

And so they send their brave men to sneak into the now captured territory of the Philistines and they retrieve the remains of Saul’s body and the remains of his sons. And there’s actually an interesting reason why the men of Jabesh do this. Because earlier in history, Saul had rescued the town of Jabesh when they were under attack from enemies.

It was just before he became king and the town never forgot it. And so it was the men of Jabesh who came and brought the bodies back. And they mourn the death for seven days and then they bury the remains under the great tree of Jabesh.

(20:01 – 20:49)

The human verdict of this town, at least, was that Saul should be honoured in his death. But the verdict of the Lord is seen not only in Saul’s humiliation in the temple of Dagon, but now in the verdict that follows, verses 13 and 14, which makes God’s opinion explicit. And again, let me just say this again, differences between Chronicles and these other books, these two verses, verses 13 and 14, do not appear in Samuel or in Kings.

This is unique to Chronicles. It is not just a repeat. This is God’s definitive explanation for why Saul died.

(20:51 – 21:46)

Think about this. If you were at the funeral and you were chatting to one of the rough guys of Jabesh and you said, why do you think Saul died? What do you think they would have said? I think it would have been something along the lines of, well, he was really unfortunate. You know, he fought bravely.

You know, we all can be unlucky with a stray arrow sometimes. Maybe some might have said maybe the strategy was wrong, but I doubt any of them would have given the verdict of verses 13 and 14. Saul died at the Lord’s hand.

Look at verse 14. The Lord, not the Philistines, the Lord put him to death. Why would the Lord put his own King to death? Ask that question of yourself.

(21:47 – 22:17)

The answer is given in these verses. God does not want a King like this. Here’s the reasons.

The top one is he was unfaithful to the Lord. Just chatting about this with Douglas, a kind of very interesting thing we were noticing as we were reading through Chronicles that Saul, you know, he’s not outwardly an idolater. It’s not like some of the Kings he’s actually worshipping at shrines of other gods.

(22:18 – 23:14)

And yet, inwardly, in his heart, he is an unfaithful man. He’s unfaithful in his heart to the Lord. We thought about this maybe a little this morning.

You know, when God is addressing the exiles, as he does in that passage in Isaiah 55, it’s unlikely that too many of them are actually walking into the Babylonian temples and worshipping there. It’s much more likely that what God is really challenging there is the drifting away of their hearts from the Lord to worship other things besides God. How do you know if that is happening in your life? How do you know if heart idolatry is a reality? One of the biggest evidences is your attitude towards the word of the Lord.

(23:16 – 24:34)

What evidence is when you flat out don’t care about what God’s word says? And there’s several big examples of this in Saul’s life, that he didn’t keep the word of the Lord. In 1 Samuel 13, there was an occasion when he was told to wait for the prophet Samuel. He was about to fight against the Philistines in an earlier battle, and someone said, you need to wait for Samuel.

Samuel’s going to come. He’s going to make a sacrifice to the Lord, and then that will guarantee that the Lord will be with us. And Saul was impatient, and he decided to make the sacrifice himself.

And when Samuel arrives, he says to Saul that his house, the house of Saul, will not endure because he did not obey the word of the Lord. 1 Samuel 15 is another example. Again, Saul flat out ignores something God tells him to do, and it’s in that passage in chapter 15 that Samuel famously says to obey is better than sacrifice.

(24:34 – 26:04)

Because again, Saul was doing all the outward religious Israelite stuff. He was making the sacrifices. But Samuel says that’s no good if actually you are an idolatrous heart and a disobedient man.

And this is picked up in letters like 1 John and also in letters like James. There’s a very strong evidence, strong connection rather between obedience and the evidence of you having a genuine spiritual life. Of course, we’re not saved because of our obedience, but there is a kind of persistent, uncaring, completely unbothered disobedience to God that is actually an evidence of not belonging to him at all, which is very different from I want to do the right thing, and I sometimes do the wrong thing, and I deeply regret it when I do the wrong thing.

This here is complete indifference to the word of the Lord. And that also becomes clear in what follows. The kind of third aspect of this is the sort of idolatry of his heart.

There’s the ignoring of God’s word. But then relating to that, there’s the other sources that Saul then consults. And we’re told here that he even consulted a medium for guidance.

(26:06 – 26:22)

This was something forbidden in God’s law. It was actually said that if the Israelites consulted mediums, it would be one of the main reasons God would expel them. They’d be sent into exile for listening to this sort of dark source.

(26:24 – 26:58)

And so you have this really twisted situation. A man and a king who pretended on the outside to be God’s king, but in secret, he’s listening to the devil’s wisdom rather than God’s truth. Scary, isn’t it? It’s a real challenge, isn’t it, to think on that? Not to be kidding ourselves, not to be living with that kind of hypocrisy that’s one thing on the outside, even to others in church, when in the inside, we’re really something else.

(27:01 – 27:41)

In some ways, this dovetails with this morning, doesn’t it? That fundamental choice, are we going to feast at the Lord’s table, or are we going to invest in the marketplace of Babylon? Will we listen to the devil’s voice or God’s voice? Will we truly seek the Lord, or will we just pretend to do so? At one level, King Saul is an image of what all of us are like, of course, without God’s grace. We’re unfaithful to God, aren’t we? We’re frequently indifferent to his word. We often go to the wrong sources for wisdom.

(27:43 – 28:03)

And like Saul, we deserve death at the hands of the Lord. We deserve the humiliation of Dagon’s temple rather than the honour of Jabesh’s tree. And we would die surrounded by our idols if it weren’t for an obedient king.

(28:05 – 28:33)

As we come to the Lord’s table shortly, let’s remember that Jesus was utterly faithful, that he kept the word of the Lord even unto death. He defied the devil’s advice, and he followed his father’s wisdom. Yet in the gracious wonder of God’s plan, the Lord put him to death and

(28:33 – 28:58)

caused him to suffer in order that we might live in honour and dignity. And it’s this greater king that the end of the passage previews, isn’t it? Notice the very end as we finish. So the Lord put him to death and turned his kingdom over to David, son of Jesse.

(28:59 – 29:26)

God didn’t just remove Saul, he turned his kingdom over to David, the king he wants. And for the rest of 1 Chronicles, the king that God wants, David, will be doing the things that God wants to be done. David, at least in 1 Chronicles, is presented incredibly positively.

(29:27 – 29:43)

He is a picture of the king that God desires. In the context of the book, Saul is just the set up man or the set up king. He’s a foil, he’s a contrast, he’s what we don’t want the king to look like.

(29:43 – 29:55)

But here is a king who is going to be so different. And what will that look like? Well, we’ll need to come back on next Sundays to find out more.

The post The King God Rejected – 1 Chronicles ch10 appeared first on Greenview Church.

I’m going to say a word and I want you to think about the first thing that comes to mind. Hospitality. What image, what idea is the first thing that pops into your head when someone says hospitality? I would be surprised if some of you weren’t thinking about food or things related to food.

Kitchens, aprons, things like that. Connected to that, if you Google the word hospitality, what first of all pops up of course is the hospitality industry. Say hospitality to most people and they’ll think you’re talking of folk working in restaurants or hotels providing food, accommodation, entertainment.

(0:53 – 1:31)

Maybe that’s what you thought of when you heard the word hospitality. Receiving a service that you pay for. Or maybe some of you actually had a different idea in your mind, maybe something more personal.

Hospitality for you is being invited into someone’s home, having someone cook you a meal, which is quite nice, and then having some conversation. And depending on whether you like conversation, that thought either fills you with fear or with a thrill. The idea of having to sit for a few hours and make up some chat.

(1:33 – 4:07)

Well, this morning we are starting a new series on the topic of hospitality and we’re looking at what the Bible teaches on this subject. And you might be thinking from the title that over the next six weeks, it’s basically going to be a very narrow study about the importance of food. Basically that the outbox of the series is going to be entirely that you need to be in the kitchen a bit more and invite a few more people over for tea.

That might be one of the outboxes of this series. I’d be surprised if this doesn’t encourage that. But as we study the Bible’s teaching about hospitality, it’s going to cause us to think more deeply and broadly about what hospitality really is.

We’re going to see that it’s more than something about plates of food and what you rustle up in the kitchen. If you want to visually illustrate that, often what we view of as hospitality is correct, but it’s like a small circle inside an even bigger circle of what hospitality truly is. When we dig into scripture, we find that hospitality is even bigger than we think, even deeper than we think, and even more central than we think.

So in this series, we’re hopefully going to be expanding our idea of hospitality and seeing that it is utterly central to the gospel. So let me just give you one instance of how our hospitality view might be a bit limited. When I did that word association thing at the beginning and I said hospitality, how many of us immediately thought God is hospitable? I don’t know how you would visualise that in the images because God’s invisible, but I wonder how many of you, when you heard hospitality, you thought, ah, God is a hospitable God.

We tend to think of hospitality as a human convention, but actually God practises it. And that’s what we’re going to see in Isaiah chapter 55. So reopen your Bible if you’ve closed it to Isaiah 55.

(4:08 – 4:30)

And as we get started, just before we come to the actual verses, we need to get a little bit of background in place. Isaiah 55 is obviously part of Isaiah’s prophecy, but it’s also part of a section of Isaiah. So Isaiah, this big book of 66 chapters, it actually has three sections.

(4:31 – 5:25)

And chapters 40 to 55 is section number two. It’s the middle chunk of Isaiah. And this second section of which chapter 55 is the last chapter is a section of messages or sermons spoken to the exiles in Babylon.

So it’s basically messages preached to the Jewish exile community. And these people, the people that are being spoken to here, they’re living in the land of Babylon. What kind of land is Babylon? It’s a land that is comfortable.

It’s a very wealthy affluent place. In many ways, it was actually an easier place to live from a kind of economic perspective than where they had been taken from. But the trouble was this was not their land.

(5:26 – 6:40)

And even more to the point, it was an idolatrous land. It was a land full of false worship and false gods. Very soon, these exiles would have a choice to make about whether they would return to their homeland or stay in the comfort and the temptation of Babylon.

That is the key context to understanding chapter 55. In the final chapter of messages to exiles 55, this is kind of like an altar call, a kind of last great appeal to the exiles before they return home. The Lord is calling them back.

He is calling them home and he is calling them to himself. So you see that in verse six, seek the Lord while he may be found. That’s a kind of central appeal here.

And the way that God frames this invitation is in terms of hospitality. God uses hospitality imagery here. So let’s now work our way through the passage.

(6:41 – 7:54)

This begins with an unbeatable offer of hospitality. The unbeatable offer of hospitality in verses one and two. And if you look at these verses, the first couple, they are full of repeated invitation.

Notice the repetition of the word come, come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters. You have no money, come buy and eat, come buy wine and milk. Over and over, God is inviting.

He is saying, come to me. But what is God inviting the people to? It’s a kind of important question here. God is inviting them to his hospitality.

If this people will come to him, they will be given what they need and all that they could ever want. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that debate about, what’s the difference between needs and wants? Always causes a good argument, that discussion. Sometimes it’s hard to untangle, isn’t it? What you need and what you want.

(7:55 – 8:37)

But at the table of God’s provision, both of those are covered. Notice here, the mention of basic necessities like water, grain and milk, verse one. These are the basics of life and the staples of growth.

And yet God isn’t just offering the basics, he goes beyond that into what we might deem as, or what the people at the time might have deemed as luxuries. So verse one, there’s wine. And in verse two, the richest of foods.

(8:38 – 10:06)

So God isn’t just inviting Israel to a soup kitchen, although he does provide the basic necessities of life. He does provide the soup kitchen, but he’s also inviting them to the five-star restaurant. God’s offering life essentials and life abundance.

Now, if God was just speaking here of physical food and physical provision, I am sure his people would have come running to this offer. I mean, if you go down Argyll Street today and set up a stall with free food and drink, there’ll be a queue that will form pretty quickly for such a thing. But it becomes clear as we move through the passage, that God is not offering bottled water or a juicy piece of steak.

While God does look after our physical needs, what God is addressing in this appeal is our spiritual consumption. When God asked the questions of verse two, why spend money on what is not bread and your labour on what does not satisfy, God isn’t questioning what they have in their fridge. He’s not saying, you know, you earn your money, you go down to Tesco and you buy a bunch of literal junk food.

(10:07 – 11:07)

To these Jews living in Babylon, God is questioning their spiritual investments, their spiritual purposes, and their investment in the spiritual market of Babylon and its gods. God is saying, at great cost to yourself, you are investing in a nourishment that is not even real food. It’s the equivalent of spiritual junk food.

You’re investing your energies in the world’s nourishment, and it leaves you unsatisfied. When I was reading this this week, it reminded me of Augustine, the famous Christian from the fourth century. He was the one who famously said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.

(11:08 – 11:26)

And Augustine himself experienced that in his life before he was a Christian. He became a Christian when he was 31 years of age. He had lived the life of sleeping around and relationships.

He tried everything. He tried alcohol. He tried the whole gambit, career, all of that.

(11:27 – 12:51)

And at the end of it all, he discovered that these beliefs and pursuits that the world offers is actually just junk food. He was unsatisfied until the moment he came to believe in Christ. God says, come to me.

I have a different kind of fare. Come and buy food and drink from me. But here’s the wonderful thing.

The price is free, even, verse one, without money and without cost. This is why I’ve called this point an unbeatable offer. Because what’s truly free nowadays, even the free app has in-app purchases.

I just think that’s outrageous, that it’s listed under free apps when you’re going to be expecting some payment pretty soon. But God says, my hospitality is free. You can, notice the language here, you can invest in it.

You can buy it. I think that’s showing us that there needs to be a personal investment, a personal stake buy-in that we make individually. And yet it is free at the point of purchase.

(12:53 – 13:21)

A few years ago, Nikki and I went out to a restaurant for a meal, probably above the level of restaurant we would typically go to. And it was a lovely meal. The food was a little bit expensive for my taste, but it was great.

And then at the end, they gave us the bill and we went up to pay. And the most wonderful thing happened because the meal was free. They gave us the meal for nothing.

(13:23 – 13:46)

Actually, someone had paid for the meal and they’d given us very kindly a voucher that covered the cost in the restaurant, but we didn’t pay a thing. And that’s how the unbeatable offer of the gospel works. A price is paid by someone else and you get the banquet for free.

(13:48 – 16:19)

It’s just wonderful. I’d never seen this. In the sequence of chapters, chapter 55 comes after 53 and 54.

What happens in 53 and 54? God sends a servant who bears the sins of the people, pays the price that their sins deserve and dies in their place. This is what the cross achieves, right? The servant lays down his life, 53, 54, and then 55, the offer is made to you and it is free at the point of receipt but Jesus paid for it. And we’re given all that we need.

We’re given that, you know, Jesus describes himself later, doesn’t he, in John’s gospel as the bread of life. He’s the essential that you need for eternal life. But it’s even more than that.

God invites you to a five-star spiritual banquet that has things like wine, which is a symbol of joy. The Christian life’s not just kind of saving you from hell. It is doing that, but it’s also bringing you into an abundance.

I could imagine some of Isaiah’s hearers saying, “This is amazing, but it all sounds a bit too good to be true. I mean, here we are, exiles in Babylon, and it kind of looks like we’re being abandoned. It looks like we’re a poor, impoverished people.

How can we ever believe that this feast is really for us?” Well, God now addresses that concern. And God says, the reason you can be sure of this is because I’ve promised it to you. You can trust in the offer because of the promise that underpins it.

This is verses three to five. Listen, God says. Notice how often in the passage, God says over and over, listen.

The people were being tempted not to listen to God’s promise. They were being tempted to listen to other voices who were saying, don’t believe all that nonsense about the promises that Yahweh has made to you as a people. God says, no, no, no, don’t listen to them.

Listen to me, ears here, because verse three, here’s the deal. I will make a covenant with you. There’s the emphasis with you that will last forever.

(16:19 – 17:25)

I will give you my faithful love, the same love I promised to David. King David was Israel’s most important king, significant king, because it was to David that God made a very special promise that he would give David an eternal kingdom, that one of his sons would reign over the whole world forever and ever. But God is now saying to these exiles, as I made a pledge to David, I am now making a pledge to you with the same strength and the same faithfulness.

You can get in on the promises I made to David. You can receive the same faithful love that even King David received. In David’s day, verse four, he was a ruler among the nations, not just over Israel, he had a kind of international influence, and he was a witness to the nations.

(17:25 – 17:44)

David was a witness of who God was and what he was like. But look at verse five. In the same way, God says, you’re going to have power and influence, and you’re going to be a witness to the nations.

(17:45 – 19:18)

I know you think you’re an insignificant people in exile, barely noticeable on the map. But if you come to feast at my table, you’re going to be an influencer of the nations, a magnet that attracts them, a people, notice the phraseology there, that the nations come running to. It’s essentially an Old Testament picture of evangelism, fruitful evangelism.

That’s what’s being described here in a Jewish sense, as the nations are flocking to Israel and saying, what is this that you’ve got? It looks amazing. The church of every age needs to hang on to the promises of God. And we need to understand that the promises made to Abram and the promises made to the likes of David are not defunct promises.

They continue to be promises that we can get in on today. The church may look fairly insignificant in the context of a largely secular nation, but the promises of God are still true. If we will believe them, if we will keep going on in the mission God has given us and the promise he has made that we, not that we might be the light of the world, but that we are the light of the world and that that light will draw many others from the darkness.

(19:20 – 19:43)

We will only be that witness if we make the prior choice to feast at the Lord’s table, continuing to choose his bounty over the spiritual junk food that’s on offer. All their trust needed to be in the promise of the Lord. Verse five, this is what I will do.

(19:44 – 20:29)

I am the Lord, your God. I am the holy one of Israel. I have honoured you.

I’m promising this. I will do this says God. I find that really encouraging.

And I also find it encouraging that the people that God addresses in the Bible are just kind of like me. You know, in our fallibility, in our struggle to believe these promises, God says, I can satisfy your soul if you stop seeking the world’s junk food. And I say, Lord, are you really going to do that in my life? Because I’m a big sinner and I’m a bit of a nobody.

(20:30 – 22:32)

And this all sounds like something for the super spiritual people, people like David. And God says, no, it’s for you too. I’m going to set my love on you like I set my love on David himself and corporately as well.

I’m going to promise little, little churches, little insignificant churches like Greenview, little outposts of the kingdom. I’m going to promise that those sorts of places can be places of invitation and attraction where people actually come and say, what is this you’ve got? God speaks right to our level and into our doubts. And so having brought that assurance that the offer is based on the promise, God in verses six to nine finishes by coming back to the offer.

He comes back to the offer. But now we see finally, notice here, the urgency of the offer and the mind-blowing result if we receive it. So notice in verse six how the appeals return, but now with an increasing urgency, Seek the Lord while he may be found.

Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. These people are being wicked and unrighteous in their choices and they need to forsake those ways.

It’s a repeat of the earlier invitation, but now all the hospitality imagery is stripped away and it’s just plain speech. Seek the Lord. Call on him.

That’s the bottom line. That is, devote yourself to God entirely and depend on the Lord only. And do this ASAP.

(22:34 – 23:24)

See, there’s kind of a balance here, isn’t there? Like on the one hand, this is kind of a great opportunity. The Lord is near. He’s nearby.

He’s near enough for you to call on him. But on the other hand, the opportunity is time-limited. Seek the Lord while he may be found.

He won’t always be findable. He won’t always be callable. Sometimes we need a time limit to help us, don’t we? How many of us only do things when it’s at the last possible moment? One of the most basic and important spiritual principles is that tomorrow is never the right time to do business with God.

(23:25 – 24:39)

Never the right time to do business with God. Today is always the moment you should do it, whatever that thing is. Scripture is utterly consistent on this.

If we have never sought the Lord for salvation, the Bible says today is the day to do it. If we’ve been eating at the world’s table, today is the day to abandon those plates of nothingness and those foods that will never satisfy our soul. The unbeatable offer is an urgent offer.

And the result, if we will come to God, is utterly mind-blowing. Now, why do I use that word mind-blowing? I use it kind of quite deliberately. I use it not only because of the end of verse 7, where it says that if the people do this and call on the Lord and turn from their wickedness and so on, God will have mercy on them.

Not he might, but he will. And he will freely pardon. So that’s kind of, in my mind, pretty mind-blowing in itself.

(24:41 – 26:45)

But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that that immediately leads on to verses 8 and 9. Verses 8 and 9 are very likely linked to the forgiveness that comes just before 8 and 9. Yes, it’s true that in many different ways, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. You know, his ways are not our ways. In lots of respects, that’s true.

But in the context of what comes before, the end of verse 7, where God pardons without cost and shows mercy to the undeserving, I think what this is saying is this is a mind-blowing truth that we as human beings will forever struggle to get our heads around. But God can get his head around it. His ways of forgiveness are far above our ways.

We would never forgive sinners like this. God lets people who have dabbled in other spiritual delicacies, he lets those spiritual adulterous people have a seat at his bountiful table. And that is really the story of the whole Bible.

Next week, Zach’s going to take us back a little bit into Israel’s roots and some of what God taught the Israelites about showing hospitality. But actually, we could go back even further than that if we like. We could go all the way back to the very beginning of things.

Because from the very beginning, God’s been showing mind-blowing hospitality, putting human beings into a garden, giving them every provision imaginable, spiritual and physical. And those humans turned away from God’s provision. And the very first sin was an act of eating from the wrong source of nourishment, not from what God provided, from another source.

(26:47 – 29:44)

And through that wrong choice, feasting on the wrong thing, death entered the world. And yet God continued to show hospitality. Even as Adam and Eve leave the garden, God clothes them in a wonderful act of hospitality.

And even east of Eden, in a world that was often then marked by scarcity and hunger, God provided for his people, bringing them out of slavery, sustaining them through a wilderness, bringing them into a land of plenty, and even sustaining them through an exile. And here we are, almost at the end of the Old Testament, and God’s still offering provision for his people. And all of that is pointing forward, isn’t it, to ultimately the time when Jesus himself comes.

And summing up all of that imagery and promise of the Old Testament, Jesus says, I am the bread of life. And I am the living water. Jesus is God’s finest fare.

He offers himself as our spiritual nourishment. And then, of course, as we shoot forward to the very end of the Bible, all of this climaxes, doesn’t it, in another invitation of hospitality. Revelation 22, the spirit and the bride say, come, there’s that word again, and let the one who is thirsty come.

And let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. From cover to cover, the God of the Bible is hospitable, which means, and this is a really, really important principle that we need to keep with us through the whole series. It means this, we are guests before we are hosts.

We are guests before we are hosts, before we set the table for anyone else, God sets the table for us. And that changes the way even we do something like showing care and provision to other people and why we do it. Some of us might be at the point where, for the first time, we recognise that the ideas and pursuits we’ve indulged in, in this world, just aren’t delivering what they promise.

Why not seek? Why not call? Why not come today to the God who will never disappoint you? He never has. He never can. And if you’re already present at God’s table, let me remind you that there is no better offer, there is no better table, and there is no greater offer of hospitality than at the table of the Lord.

(29:47 – 30:13)

Father, help us, would you please open up our eyes, however long we’ve heard the gospel, to see the wonder of the feast that you’ve offered to us. Bread without cost, wine, the finest fare, and we don’t pay a stitch. Lord, may we be amazed at your grace.

(30:15 – 30:34)

Forgive us for the times when we go back to the world’s table and we think that the latest idea or philosophy can somehow satisfy and satiate our soul. Bring us to Christ this morning. May we feed upon him by faith in him today.

(30:36 – 30:51)

And may we be those then that reflect something of that witness that Israel were to display. May others see in us something of the feast that we’re enjoying. We want to pray this in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

The post Free Food and Drink – Isaiah 55v1–9 appeared first on Greenview Church.

I was chatting the other week to a pastor from another church and he asked me what we were preaching on at Greenview and I said, we’re about to start the book of First Chronicles. His eyebrow rose pretty quickly. He said, First Chronicles, the book where Bible reading plans go to die.

It wasn’t the most encouraging comment, but I guess pretty accurate. Many a Bible reader has run aground on the book of First Chronicles. I say book of Chronicles, you might say, isn’t there two books? Originally Chronicles was a single book and then at a certain point in history, they thought it was quite long and so they divided it up into one and two Chronicles.

But it’s viewed, Chronicles, as a very hard read. And one of the reasons, quite frankly, is because of how it starts. Chronicles famously opens with nine detailed chapters of genealogies.

(1:09 – 1:38)

Not a chapter of genealogies, not 18 verses of genealogies, as we have in Matthew 1, but nine straight chapters of nothing but Jewish names and tribal lines. It’s an extremely gutsy opening from the author of Chronicles. In our time and in our culture, we wonder how this ever was an engaging read for anybody.

(1:39 – 3:50)

And it’s tempting to either just skip these chapters or even to give up on Chronicles completely. And I wonder if you sometimes, like me, come to Chronicles chapter one and then just on the leap to the narrative in chapter 10. Well, if we do that, we do really miss an awful lot.

And I want to help you see this evening with a little bit of study of these chapters that actually these chapters, far from being dull and boring, they’re actually like a key that help you unlock the meaning of the whole book. Because all the big themes of Chronicles begin to emerge here in these historical lists. And to the first readers, I want to suggest to you, this opening would have been life-giving, identity-affirming, and hope-restoring.

And we’ll see how that is as we go through. Now, for blatantly obvious reasons, this is going to be an overview, a bit like a helicopter tour of chapters one to nine. So we’re going to see some of the main features, just kind of glance down, see the main structures of the passage of the chapters, and we’ll make the odd landing here and there.

And then at the end, I want to draw a few applications to start applying this book to us. Now, the best way I think to come at this is actually to start at the end. So turn with me to chapter nine of 1 Chronicles, almost at the end of the genealogies.

Here we learn something of how these chapters were written and when these chapters were written. So chapter nine, verse one, all Israel was listed in the genealogies in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah. Let’s stop there for a second.

(3:51 – 6:38)

What was the book of the kings of Israel and Judah? I have absolutely no idea. It’s some lost historical source. But the point here is that the author of Chronicles, we’ll call him the chronicler, is a historian.

And he’s using this now lost book to us as a historical source for the genealogical records. He’s got it out of this source. That’s something of how he’s putting the book together.

But look at how verse one continues. They were taken captive to Babylon because of their unfaithfulness. Now, the first to resettle on their own property in their towns were some Israelites, etc.

Now, what does this tell us? It tells us that Chronicles must have been written after the exile and after the Israelites had resettled in the land. The Chronicles speaks of the exile and resettlement in past tense. So God’s people have been taken away into captivity, but now some of them have returned.

And again, back to that verse, they’ve been led firstly by some Israelites, priests, Levites, and temple servants. Now, do take note of that, that little bit of information. We’ll come onto this later, that the temple is a huge theme in Chronicles, 1 and 2 Chronicles.

Who are the very first people to return to the land? Mostly servants of the temple, priests, Levites, temple servants. And as well as them, verse three, people from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, and Manasseh. If you count those tribes plus the Levites in the verse before, there are only five tribes who are said to have returned to the land.

That’s a little less than half, five out of 12. We’ve got six community groups in our church. If we were taken off by a foreign power into exile and less than half of us returned, there’d be two community groups would come back and the other four would be somewhere else.

It’s a depleted and diminished number. And that is the key context to understanding the book of Chronicles. Chronicles is written to a people who have returned home, but they appear to be half a people.

(6:39 – 8:57)

They are a shadow of their former selves. And if you were living among them, just imagine some of the questions you might be asking. Questions like, who are we now? What is our identity? Are the best days of our nation behind us? Do we have any hope for the future? Are the promises still true? This genealogy is written to begin to answer those sorts of questions.

What the genealogies do among other things is they root Israel into their history and they remind them of their identity. Now let’s go back to chapter one, chapter one, verse one. So let’s now go, let’s now go back from the present where the exiles are, the returning exiles are, and let’s go back in time.

Let’s go and find their roots. But chapter one, verse one, look how far back we go. Not just to David, not just to Abraham, but all the way back to the very beginning.

Super cool fact about Chronicles. Are you ready for this? In the Jewish Bible, they have a different order of books, right? We’ve got our own kind of Western version, but they have a different order. And in the Jewish Bible, Chronicles comes as the last book in the whole of the Old Testament, right? So in the Jewish Bible, Genesis is the first book, Chronicles is the last book.

How does Genesis begin? Genesis begins with creation and with the story of Adam. And now we come to the far end of the Jewish Testament. And how does it end? We go back again to Adam.

And what chapter one basically gives us is the lineage of Adam all the way down to Abraham. Yes, the returning exiles were part of Israel’s story. We’re going to see some of that in a minute, that they could trace their history back to Abraham.

(8:58 – 10:03)

But Israel itself was part of an even bigger story. It’s been popular in recent years for people to speak of the better story that Christians have. Having a more beautiful, a more rational, a more aesthetically pleasing story than all the other stories and ideologies.

And that’s true. But the story we have isn’t just better, it’s also bigger. To these Israelites feeling pathetic and somewhat rootless, Chronicles are saying, your roots are in the biggest story of all.

You’re part of the restoration story that God has been working out since the downfall of Adam. And Israel are at the heart of this, however small they may seem. Because out of Israel and the tribe of Judah in particular, hope will come for humanity.

(10:04 – 10:49)

And so we now look at Judah and that section in chapters 2 to 4. Now, I should just point out something at this point. The Chronicler isn’t following the birth order of the sons of Jacob and the tribes of Israel. You remember you get Abram, his son Isaac, you have Jacob or Israel, and then Jacob has 12 sons and these become eventually the 12 tribes.

And obviously in history they come in a certain birth order. Chronicles isn’t following that order. Judah was the fourth born son and yet Judah comes first in these lists of genealogies.

(10:51 – 13:04)

The placement of these tribes is telling us something. After a chapter from Adam to Abraham, humanity’s hope is now linked to the tribe of Judah. Judah is given the first place and the primary position.

And not only that, it’s not just that it’s first, but notice how much space Judah is given in the text. Later on we’re going to find that some tribes don’t get much space at all. Poor little tribe of Naphtali gets a single verse of text.

How much text does Judah get? Three whole chapters. One third of all of the genealogies. Judah is massively significant because Judah is the tribe of the king.

And here’s the irony of that. When the exiles returned to land they were allowed an awful lot of freedoms, but they weren’t allowed a king. At least not their own king.

The Israelites were governed by a foreign power and yet three chapters are given to Judah and the royal line of David is traced out in detail. In chapter three we get the whole line of David’s sons all the way down through the period of the exile and even all the way down after the exile to the day the chronicler is writing. The throne is vacant, but the line of David lives.

I think this is saying something extraordinary. That even without a king on the throne, Israel’s future hopes are bound up in a king, a great son of David. It would be around 400 years till that king arrived, but they were to put all their eggs in the basket of that coming king.

(13:06 – 16:30)

So Judah is the first tribe, the primary hope of the people. But if Judah is first then I want you to notice who is central. If you turn to chapter six, chapter six, you will see that at the heart of the genealogies is the tribe of Levi.

Most scholars today think that Levi is structurally central to these chapters. It’s kind of like the heartbeat of the genealogies. And this tribe, the tribe of Levi, was all to do with the temple.

We’ve already noticed that the priests and the Levites and those sorts of folk were among the first to return in chapter nine. And now we see that they are central to God’s promises, not only in position in the structure of chapters one to nine, but again in the amount of text that they’re given. Not quite as long as Judah, but much longer than many others.

We have 81 verses about the tribe of Levi. The chronicler is slowing down and saying, this tribe is important and what it does is important. What does this tribe do? Well, I look at verse 31.

Some Levites are put in charge of the music in the house of the Lord. And then down in verse 48, some other Levites were assigned some other duties in the tabernacle, the house of God. And at chapter nine, if you were to flick over, you would see this as well.

About half of chapter nine, in the returnee section, about half of the chapter is all about the duties of Levites. People doing different jobs, priests, gatekeepers, custodians, musicians, all to do with the temple. There’s an extraordinary focus on this tribe because it is devoted to the temple, which of course is not about being devoted to just a building or rituals.

Being devoted to the temple means being devoted to Yahweh. It means being devoted to God. And for these returning exiles, that really matters.

In a time when they are discouraged by what is going on in the nation and internationally, they are to devote themselves to the Lord and to express that in the worship at his temple. You see, Israel’s identity and Israel’s future is bound up with a king and bound up with a temple, a priesthood. So in this flyover, we’ve seen, I think, probably the two main features, Judah at the front and then Levi at the centre.

Now more briefly, let’s fill in some of the other bits. Flanking Levi on either side, we have a number of other tribes. Just before Levi in chapter five, we have what are sometimes called the Transjordan tribes.

(16:31 – 18:03)

That is the ones for which you had to cross the river Jordan to get to on the east side. So this is Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh. And then in the other side of Levi in chapter seven, you have the tribes on the west side of the Jordan, mostly in the north.

So these are tribes like Issachar, Naphtali, Ephraim, and Asher. Now just a little aside here, some people have noticed that two of the 12 tribes are actually missing from these lists altogether. Zebulun and Dan are missing entirely from chapters one to nine.

And this would have been the place to put them among the kind of northern tribes. Now it could simply be that there were no genealogical records for these particular tribes. Remember, this guy’s a historian.

He’s using records. Perhaps for some reason, the records were lost. Maybe the book of the kings of Israel and Judah didn’t have them listed.

Whatever the reason is that they’re missing, the final exclusion of Dan in particular is telling. Because in the book of Revelation, some of you will know this, Dan is an omitted tribe. There’s also a list of tribes in the book of Revelation, and Dan’s not there.

(18:04 – 18:34)

Why is that? The tribe of Dan was an example of abandonment of the Lord and of complete apostasy. Basically, it wasn’t just like syncretism where they were half for the Lord and half for, they completely abandoned the Lord in utter idolatry. And Dan is forever a warning not to choose to exclude ourselves from the saving promises of God and the saving people of God.

(18:34 – 22:13)

It’s a warning even today. But despite these omissions, most of the tribes are listed. Even despite the fact that only five tribes had returned to the land, even still, all the tribes of Israel are invited to put their hope in Judah and to devote themselves to the worship of the Lord.

One of the most common phrases found in Chronicles is, all Israel. When you study through one and two Chronicles, just look for that phrase and highlight it, mark it. All Israel did this, all Israel did that.

Why? Because after the exile, God is healing old differences and he is reuniting a fractured people, bringing them back together. One of the things you’ll notice as you read through the tribal lists, this happens quite a number of times, you’ll notice that wherever possible, the chronicler makes a positive comment about a tribe. You see this over and over.

Let me give you one example. Reuben in chapter five, after listing Reuben’s descendants, we’re told in verse 10 that during Saul’s reign, they waged war against the Hagrites who were defeated at their hands. So this tribe, basically, they trusted the Lord on a particular occasion and they pummeled the enemies of God.

And as he’s listing things out, he just notes this wonderful high point in their history. I’m sure some negative things could have been said about the tribe of Reuben, but the author makes a side comment about a moment when they trusted the Lord. And you’ll find that it’s like that about all the tribes.

It’s kind of pointing out their faith and their devotion to the Lord, which the present generation are to emulate. So we’ve got Judah in the prime place, Levi in the centre place, a number of tribes flanking Levi, and we’ve got a couple more to fill in. Now, you’ll notice, you’ll see that in the same box as Judah, I’ve also added the tribe of Simeon.

I suppose that Simeon could also go with the tribes east of the Jordan. Part of the reason I’ve not done that is they’re not east of the Jordan, right? They’re west of the Jordan in a different location. But also because it seems to me that Simeon is being given a very prominent position, so immediately after Judah.

And if you look at the other end of the genealogies, you will see that a similar emphasis is given to the tribe of Benjamin. So Benjamin’s included among the northern tribes in chapter seven, very briefly. But then there’s an entire chapter, chapter eight, a huge big chapter where the author traces the line of Benjamin all the way down to King Saul.

What’s going on here? People sometimes wonder, why is such prominence being given to Simeon? And then why at the end is it being given to Benjamin? Unfortunately, because of our Wi-Fi issue, the map that I added last minute isn’t here. But if you, what I would suggest is for you to Google it, not now, but later. But if you look, if you look this up on a map, look at the 12 tribes, it really helps you understand something of what’s happening here.

(22:14 – 25:05)

Because the tribe of Simeon was actually a tribe within the boundaries of Judah. It was kind of like a little subsection, you know, like you get in some of these big countries where you get these tiny little islands that are countries. It was, it was that kind of set up.

So it was immediately adjacent to Judah. And then similarly, Benjamin, Benjamin was just a stone’s throw away from Judah. In fact, Jerusalem, I don’t know if you know this, Jerusalem is in a disputed territory on the border between Judah and Benjamin.

That’s how close they are. And historically, Simeon and Benjamin, these tribes tended to be supporters of the monarchy in Israel. I mean, obviously Benjamin were the tribe from which the first king came, right? So these guys were monarchists.

They really believed in the king and the kingdom. And later, although Saul and David had, of course, that initial spat, as the history develops, you see that Benjamin is actually incredibly loyal to Judah. In the period of division, they side with Judah and the king in the line of David.

If you look at chapter four, verse 41, you’ll see that something similar is said of Simeon, chapter four, verse 41, that they had come to the support of the king of Judah in the reign of King Hezekiah. And so there’s something here being said, I think, about these tribes, not only because they’re geographically close to Judah, but because they’ve allied themselves with Judah. Again, we’re coming back to this theme of the king, I think.

This is going to be an important message in the book of Chronicles. Align yourself with this house and this king. So I hope you’re still just about with me.

That’s the overview complete, you’ll be glad to know. There’s a lot more I could say, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a sense of what’s going on. And this is not dull and uninteresting, is it, when you actually start to dig into it.

This would have been, these chapters, life-giving, identity-affirming, and hope-restoring to a people who felt a bit lifeless, a bit hopeless, and a little bit rootless without a sense of who they were. As we come to finish, what might this be saying to us, though? Let me give you three applications. One application is that our story is part of the biggest story.

(25:06 – 26:09)

Our story is part of the biggest story. That’s a good thing to be reminded of on a week such as this. On a week where elections have possibly reminded us how relatively powerless and insignificant we seem to be as the church of Christ.

Other stories, other ideologies, they seem to be very powerful. But this passage reminds us that our story is no small story. We may not be Jewish, we may not come from a particular tribe, but our names, the New Testament says, are written in heaven.

And we have been grafted into the vine of Israel through faith in Christ. Our story is part of Israel’s story, and that in turn is part of the world’s restoration story. Abraham is our father in the faith when we believe like him.

(26:10 – 26:34)

And we are a chosen people, a holy nation with a spiritual inheritance. Our society is searching for identity in their roots. It’s clawing to find roots, whether it’s in nationalism or in gender identity or in a whole number of other common causes.

(26:35 – 29:46)

But our identity is rooted in God and in the gospel of God. And that is true on a personal level too. Maybe there are things in your background that you feel colour who you are and define who you are.

Part of what we learn from these genealogies is that even the messy bits of your heritage cannot unravel the plans of God. However messy or complicated your background has been, God can still work in that and through that as he did in these complicated tribes. I think it was referenced this morning in what Michael said that sometimes actually we just kind of feel it’s not even so much that, it’s just that we feel pretty insignificant and pretty ordinary and that we’re not just achieving very much in life.

I guess most of us feel like that, don’t we? We’re just an ordinary person in an ordinary family doing an ordinary job. But our significance doesn’t lie in our own personal greatness. Our story is caught up in the biggest story.

Second lesson, second thing is that the kingdom of God is radically inclusive. The kingdom of God is radically inclusive. Now I don’t mean that in some sense that there is no idea of judgement.

I’m not suggesting that the Dan and Zebulun bit is not relevant. But what I am saying is that very often people have a view of God where they see God as narrow and they see his people as narrow minded as well. We have a narrow God and we ourselves are a narrow minded people.

That is often the accusation, isn’t it? And often when people think about things like identity and heritage, the thinking does very quickly become quite exclusive, doesn’t it? There are those who have the heritage and there are those who haven’t. But part of what these genealogies show is that there are many different tribes and all sorts of variety within the kingdom of God. All coming together under the one hope of the one king.

All coming together at the one temple. One of the greatest glories of the gospel is that it somehow takes the word tribe and puts it in the context of unity. Isn’t that extraordinary? You know every other time people speak of tribes and tribal, it’s always meaning disunity and fragmentation.

It is only in the gospel that the word tribal can actually be caught up in a unity of oneness. I don’t know how that applies to you. As I’m getting older I know it certainly applies to me in lots of ways.

(29:47 – 30:00)

And I’m trying to become in the best sense less tribal. Now we need to come together of course around common beliefs in the non-negotiable gospel. That’s just an absolute given.

(30:01 – 32:23)

But we also need to see, and I’ve fallen foul of this in many ways over my life, that the only tribe is not the brethren where I grew up, or the baptists where I went to for a while, or FIEC or independency or whatever other label we happen to think might be a good thing. These are good things to be part of. But Chronicles recognises not only tribes but the importance of unity between these tribes.

I think there’s a message in this for us as we move forward. Because at the end of the day we share a common hope. And the hope we have is still centred on a king and on a priesthood.

In the Hebrew Bible as I’ve said the Old Testament ends not with Malachi but with Chronicles. Chronicles is the setup book for the coming of Jesus. How does the New Testament begin? Again you might think it’s not exactly the most exciting opening but it is.

It opens with a genealogy. Out of all the things God could have chosen to do this is what he chose. It’s a shorter genealogy but it leaps across the pages of history.

It takes us from Abram to David through the exile and all the way down the line to King Jesus the Messiah. The same Jesus who will later say that his body is the temple of God. Who will act in the manner of a priest and who will give his life as a lamb who was slain.

You see the prominence of the king the kingdom and the priesthood isn’t just something stuck in Chronicles. It’s what flowers and blooms in the New Testament in the gospel. Chronicles is telling you albeit in a shadowy way that Jesus is prominent and that the hope you and I have is ultimately found in a king and in a priest.

Let’s now celebrate that as we come to the Lord’s table.

The post Hope’s Heritage – 1 Chronicles ch1–9 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Father, we pray that you would speak, O Lord, in your Word today, that you would give us minds and hearts that are ready to understand and engage, that you would open us up to hear what you have to say, Lord, and that you would speak so clearly through your Word to our lives. We pray this in your name. Amen.

(0:21 – 0:43)

Well, it’s good to be back. It’s a slightly odd feeling, but it’s a privilege nonetheless to be here amongst you. One thing that I must warn you of before I go any further is that I’ve been told when it comes to doing something like this, speaking, being up the front, that in terms of voice, posture, mannerisms, the whole lot, I am the spitting image of my father.

(0:45 – 2:42)

I’ll leave you to decide whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing, a blessing or a curse. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about it, even if I wanted to. Whilst we’re on the topic of my father and things that I’ve not been able to move past, when we were younger as a family, there was a year in which my parents bought a Historic Scotland membership.

Historic Scotland is like the National Trust. They manage a whole bunch of historical tourist attractions, castles, country houses, that sort of thing. You have the membership, you get free access to the year.

You get to skip the usual fees and parking charges and whatnot. And so my dad being my dad was absolutely determined to get his money’s worth out of this membership, and we really, really milked that membership. We were pleasantly surprised I think at the end of 12 months to find Historic Scotland still financially viable.

We spent many Saturdays visiting increasingly obscure castles, many day trips to country houses and gardens, probably a lot of complaining about the price of sandwiches in the cafes. As you can imagine, over those 12 months, some of those attractions were more interesting than others. Some of them were really good.

They were good days out. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot to see, very much worth going to, even if you’re paying the fee.

Some not so great. Some that are probably better to skip. One particular low light was Kilwinning Abbey.

I don’t know if anyone here has ever had the pleasure of visiting Kilwinning Abbey. We made what, at the time, for a young family felt like a fairly long drive. We arrived at some pretty modest ruins, a little graveyard, and after looking about very briefly, discovered that rather than some sort of local tourist hotspot, this was in fact a local drinking hotspot.

After about 90 seconds, we were back in the car and we were heading home to Glasgow. I’m sure you’ve got a few similar stories, probably some more exciting stories than that one. We’ve all travelled somewhere only to be incredibly underwhelmed when we arrived.

(2:42 – 5:25)

Maybe you’d built up some excitement, you’d heard some good things, you’d remembered this place being quite good when you were younger, and after that long car journey or hike or bus journey, you arrive and are sorely, sorely disappointed with what you find. I assume you’ve all had that feeling of looking around, of increasing concern and hoping that this isn’t it. Thinking maybe we made a wrong turn back there somewhere, or perhaps if we walk on a little bit further, we’ll find the actual good bit, the actual attraction that we’re supposed to be at.

We all know that sinking feeling when you ask yourself, is this it? Is this actually all there is to it? Is there nothing else here? And tourist attractions aside, I wonder if you’ve ever felt that way about the Christian life. I wonder if you’ve ever had seasons, or if you’re having a season right now, where you just can’t shift the feeling of being underwhelmed. When there’s a nagging question at the back of your mind, is this it? Is this all there is to being a Christian? Is this really the Christian life? It might occur in difficult seasons of life when you face challenges and trials of various kinds, and you’re left feeling like this wasn’t really what you’d signed up for.

You can’t shake that feeling of thinking, I thought it would be a bit nicer than this. I’d hoped that the Christian life might be a bit more joyous than this, a little bit more victorious. Or it could just be in the ordinary seasons of life, when things are normal, they’re plain, when everything’s okay.

You’re not experiencing any great lows, but you’re not really experiencing any great highs either. When church is fine, it’s okay. When your walk with God maybe feels a little flat, a little bit same old, same old, and you’re left feeling a little weak, a little underwhelmed, is this it? Am I doing it properly? Is there something else that I’ve missed? Should I be feeling something more than this? Well, as we turn to the letter to the Ephesians this morning, the believers in Ephesus have every reason to have the same sort of nagging questions in the back of their mind.

Things haven’t been all trumpet sound and shouts of hallelujah for the Ephesians. We know from reading around in the New Testament that they face various significant opponents in the city of Ephesus, the Jews and the cult of Artemis in particular. What’s more, Paul had previously warned the Ephesian elders in a farewell meeting in Acts 20 that false teachers were going to arise, rear their heads, and lead people astray, and worse still, that some of these false teachers would arise from within their own number, their own leadership.

(5:26 – 15:20)

And one more significant burden on the minds of the Ephesians is introduced by Paul just before today’s passage. Have a look down to chapter 3 and verse 1. I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus, their founding father, if you like, the apostle to the Gentiles, the mighty Paul who came to Ephesus teaching powerfully, establishing the church, performing extraordinary miracles in Acts 19, well, he’s not here anymore. He’s in chains.

Enemies without, enemies within, the mighty Paul in prison. And surely the question would be there in the minds of the Ephesians, is this it? Is this what it was supposed to be? Where’s all the power and the glory of the gospel? This doesn’t feel very exciting. This doesn’t feel very triumphant.

Is this really all there is to it? Perhaps like that moment when you look out of the train window and for a minute you think, I’m not sure I recognise this. They might have asked themselves, are we on the right track? Did we maybe make a wrong turn somewhere along the way? Is there something else we’re supposed to be doing instead? And I think these sorts of question marks, these sorts of doubts and discouragements are on Paul’s mind as we turn to today’s verses. Just before the verses we’re reading today, Paul’s been speaking about his imprisonment for the gospel.

And in chapter three, verse 13, he writes, I ask you therefore not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. How would Paul pray for the Ephesians in light of all this? How might you pray for yourself, for others, for your church, in those inevitable seasons of the Christian life, when you feel a little bit weak, a little bit weary, a little bit underwhelmed, when you’re asking yourself, is this it? Well, I think Ephesians 3, 14 to 21 provides some glorious prayer points for us. And so firstly, we’ll see in today’s passage a prayer for the power of the Spirit, a prayer for the power of the Spirit.

In our verses today, Paul is continuing in much the same way that he started the letter to the Ephesians, with language that is rich in praise and worship. Have a look down at verse 14. For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you of power through his spirit in your inner being. It’s two wonderful truths captured about God in those first verses. This is the sovereign God of the universe, the one over all things in heaven and on earth, and yet he is the father of us all.

We are his family on earth, the ones who bear his name. And if you’re about to pray the prayer that Paul is about to pray, you could not ask for a better sort of God to pray it to. In fact, there is no other sort of God that you could pray this prayer to.

And the first part of it is this, I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. In light of their circumstances, in light of how they must have been feeling, Paul prays that the church would have strength, that they would have power. And power comes up again and again in the letter of Ephesians and three times in our passage today, verse 16, verse 18, verse 20.

So it’s important to understand what this power is. When we think of power, there’s probably a few things we would tend to think of, perhaps physical strength and endurance, a weightlifter is powerful, maybe wealth and resources, a big company can be powerful, maybe position and influence, a political leader might wield great power. But this is not a prayer for any of those things.

Maybe that’s obvious to the spiritually minded among us. Of course, this isn’t going to be a prayer for core strength, for cash or kudos. But when we consider what it would be like for us to experience the power of God more in our lives than in our churches, I think there’s still a very real risk that we go off in the wrong sort of directions.

For the deflated, weak, and world-weary Ephesian Christians, it’s not hard to imagine, though I’m speculating a little bit, that when they thought about being strengthened with power, they might well have yearned for the extraordinary miracles that God did through Paul in their presence. The glory days of Acts 19, when we read that the sick were cured by touching Paul’s handkerchief, when many came to faith, when Jews and Gentiles alike recognised and feared the power of Jesus, when even evil spirits knew the name of Paul. Surely, they might have reminisced, surely that was a bit more like it.

Surely that’s what the Christian life is supposed to feel a bit more like. Surely that’s the power and the glory of the gospel at work. What about us today? What sort of power would we like to see more of? What sort of power do we think we’re maybe missing out on at times? I think often if we’re feeling underwhelmed with the Christian life, the power we hope to experience looks like more impressive ministries, impressive people doing impressive acts of faith in the church, bigger numbers coming through the doors for high-octane church services, more excitement, more buzz around the place.

Isn’t that what we’d like a bit more of? But Paul here doesn’t return for, pray for a return rather, to the glory days of outward power to reassure the believers that they’re on the right track. He prays for an inner power that comes through the Holy Spirit, verse 16. What does this inner power look like though? What does it achieve? It’s all well and good to say, let’s pray for some sort of inner power.

To what end? I think verse 17 gives us the answer. This power from the Holy Spirit is so that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith. I don’t think that’s a separate prayer point from Paul.

I don’t think he’s tacking another prayer point onto the end of this. That’s precisely what any sort of inner strengthening as Christians is going to look like. Christ’s presence in our lives.

And this is the important message to those believers asking themselves, is this it? Have we got it all wrong? Should we be looking elsewhere? The true glorious riches of the Christian life do not ultimately lie in some sort of outwardly impressive experiences or accomplishments, but rather in the wonderful gospel truth that the Son of God lives in your heart. But still, what is Paul’s prayer point exactly? How does this actually help us? After all, isn’t that already true if we’re Christians? And yes, wonderfully, if you are a Christian here today, that is true of you. Christ absolutely does dwell in your heart.

So I think one element of Paul’s prayer is that we would realise this, that the powerful work of the Spirit would help us to realise and to know that. So much of the letter of Ephesians is about pulling back the curtain, reminding us of glorious, often unseen realities, that the God of the universe is powerfully working out his purposes in his church through his people. In chapter one, as Colin read earlier, Paul prays in words which are quite parallel to this passage.

You can flick over the page and look at chapter one, verse 17. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people and his incomparably great power for us who believe.

We need the power of the Spirit to help us know, to know better, the powerful work that God is doing for us. And there aren’t many more stunning things to be reminded of, to know, than the truth that Christ lives in your heart. And that idea, that phrase, Christ lives in your heart, let’s be clear, that’s not some sort of woolly sentimentality fit for the end of a Disney film.

It is a real and rich blessing of the gospel, that through believing in Christ, through his death on the cross for you, you are united to him in a new and transformed life. Galatians 2.20 says, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

We regularly experience the difficulties and demands of everyday life, work, the world, even church and ministry, and that can fill our hearts and our minds and lead us to feel wearied, dissatisfied. Is this all there is to it? We regularly face the disappointments and despairs of sins and sufferings, and they can cause us to feel frustrated. Is this really the Christian life? So we need a power that does not come from us to draw our eyes back to God, to Jesus, to the powerful work happening within his people, happening within you.

(15:22 – 16:16)

And perhaps a second dimension to this prayer is that Christ would increasingly occupy our hearts so that what is already true of us would be increasingly true of us. At its core, you could say that this prayer for power is a prayer for Christian maturity. If you’re going to be strengthened by the indwelling of Christ, it means having him rule over our hearts and our minds instead of all the other things that can preoccupy us.

It means having him shape our thoughts and our outlooks and our desires instead of our sinful and self-serving impulses. It looks like him powerfully working to make us more Christ-centred, shaping us to be more like him. There is powerful work being done in you as individuals and as his church, despite all of the ordinariness, the feebleness, the frustrations.

(16:17 – 16:32)

And so pray that God would continue to do it and that we would realise it all the more. So there’s a prayer here for the power of the Spirit. And secondly, we’ll see a prayer for the love of Christ, a prayer for the love of Christ.

(16:33 – 17:05)

Paul continues in the second half of verse 17, and I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the Lord’s holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Well, one thing to notice here briefly is that this is a corporate prayer, one that should be prayed, verse 18, together with all the Lord’s holy people.

(17:06 – 17:31)

All this stuff about inner power, Christ dwelling in our hearts, it can feel very individualistic, seems to be all about me and God. And there’s of course a personal dimension to this, but it is bigger than that. This is a prayer for the church together.

This is a prayer that collectively you would know these things. And so it’s a prayer that we should pray together. It’s a prayer that we should pray for one another and strive after together.

(17:33 – 18:57)

And a second thing to notice in those verses that we’ve just read is love, love, which just like power appears again and again in the letter of Ephesians and three times in these verses. And the two are evidently linked, intertwined here. What does it look like for God to work powerfully within his people? Well, you could say it looks like love.

If Christ is dwelling in our hearts, then inwardly and outwardly we will be rooted and established in love as his church, verse 17. But notice that the central thrust of this prayer as we look to verse 18 is that this inner power comes from the Spirit will help us to grasp the width, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ for us. That’s a wonderful, though maybe I think a little bit surprising prayer, isn’t it? I think it’s surprising firstly because when we are feeling a little low, when our faith feels a bit flat, I think it’s much more natural for us to think maybe we need to love God more.

Maybe if we just had the sort of power, the inner strength to love him more, do a bit more for him, then maybe we’d experience a Christian life in a slightly better way than this, a slightly higher way. Or we wonder if maybe we just need him to love us more. Perhaps that’s why we don’t feel like we’re experiencing lots of blessing.

(18:58 – 21:24)

And if we had some sort of power to be a better Christian and then he loved us more as a result, well then maybe we’d experience something more than this. But not so here. This is a far greater and I think far more comforting prayer that you would know the unchanging, unfailing love that Christ has for you.

I think it’s a surprising prayer secondly because when we look at it, the prayer says that we need the power of God through the Holy Spirit, as we’ve seen in verse 16 and 17, to help us grasp the love of Christ. Verse 18, so great is this love and so meagre are we that we need some sort of divine power to help us get our heads around it. What sort of love is this? Well look at how it’s described, how wide and long and high and deep.

I’ve sometimes seen people do a thing where they say, you know, that the length is how long he’s loved us for, the depth is how deep his love goes for us. I’m not sure we need to do that. I think get for now that there are no suitable measurements for the love of Christ for us.

There is no limit that can be placed on it. There’s no boundary markers that mark its end point. We will never plumb its depths, we’ll never reach its heights, we’ll never run its length.

This is love in which you were chosen before the foundation of the world to be his sons and daughters, as we see in chapter one. This is love for which Jesus left behind his heavenly throne and was born into this world as a child, lived as a suffering servant. This is love which led him to bear your sin on the cross and die in your place.

This is love which led him to take upon himself the wrath of God that you deserved. This is love that means that though we were lost, wretched sinners, we can live eternally with God in perfect relationship. And that is a love which surpasses all knowledge.

That’s why you need to pray for divine power just to be able to grasp some more of it. And as we’ve already touched upon a little bit, there are so many things in life which can draw our eyes away from Christ and away from his love. We might look at our own lives and see repeated failures, sins, lack of progress, weakness, and think that we’re maybe just not very loved or we’re just not very lovable at all.

(21:25 – 22:22)

We get that he loves us on paper but we don’t seem to see a huge amount of evidence for that. Is there something I’m missing? We might look around and see a lack of obvious growth or fruit or excitement in our churches and think maybe his blessing isn’t there. Maybe his love just isn’t really there.

Did we go wrong somewhere along the way? And we don’t overcome those sorts of doubts and discouragements on our own. So we all need to pray for power to understand his love for us all the more, to recognise his love at work, to build our lives upon his love. So is this it? Is there more to the Christian life than this? Well there is more of him to know.

There’s always more of his love to understand, to dwell upon, to dive deeper into. There’s always more of his love which upholds us and sustains us and keeps us to the end. And we will never grasp it all in this life.

(22:22 – 23:46)

We’ll never stop grasping more of it in the next. So pray that he would grant us his power to keep growing in the knowledge of his love. And if as you sit here today you do not know this love, you’re not really sure what I’m talking about, or maybe you’ve heard about it many times but you’ve never experienced this love for yourself, well then know that the wonderful message of the Christian gospel is that you can.

By coming to Jesus, by bringing your sins before him, by trusting in his sacrifice for you, you can experience this love which surpasses all knowledge. And surely that’s too big a claim just to ignore and walk away from. Surely that’s too divine a prospect not just to pursue a little bit further.

So come to Jesus today, come and see and know the love that he has for you. Well we see the final outcome if you like of this prayer at the end of verse 19. That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

That’s also quite a prayer. Matthew Henry describes it as a prayer that we would not dare pray if Paul hadn’t prayed it here first. I don’t think it’s easy to precisely define and put a nice pithy phrase on the fullness of God.

(23:47 – 27:24)

I’m not sure we need to put too fine a definition on it for now. But in essence see that in this context at least to be filled with the fullness of God involves being filled with Christ and filled with his love. And what better prayer could there be for the disappointed and the dissatisfied among us, for the weak and the weary, the discouraged and the doubtful, than to be filled with the fullness of God.

To know the indwelling of Christ and to know the unfathomable love that Christ has for us. Maybe that all just feels a little bit far-fetched for you today. Maybe that feels just too big a prayer to be practical and worth praying.

Well thirdly and very very briefly we’ll see that this is a prayer for the glory of God. A prayer for the glory of God. Why should we have confidence in this prayer? Well let me again very briefly suggest two reasons from verses 20 and 21.

Firstly because it’s a prayer for God to be glorified through his church. Verse 21. This is not ultimately a prayer for you to experience some sort of fuzzy feelings.

This is not simply a prayer that you would have a warm glow when you read your Bible in the morning. This is a prayer that God would work powerfully in his church for his glory. That he would continue the work that he is already doing within us.

Verse 20. Forming us into the people that he has saved us to be. Making us more like Christ.

Filling us with his fullness so that his name would be glorified in his church. This is not some prayer that God is reluctant to answer. It’s a work that he’s already doing for you for his glory.

And secondly we can have confidence in this prayer because he is a glorious God. Whose verse 20 tells us can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. And we could rightly spend a whole lot of time just on that phrase.

It’s a great phrase. But get for now that this prayer is just not too big. It’s not too lofty for our glorious God.

So in those inevitable seasons of life when you look at yourself, when you look at others, when you look at your church and you think is this it? We’ll come before our glorious God in confidence and pray that Christ would fill our hearts and that we would know all the more the love of Christ for us. Let’s pray. Father thank you for your love Lord and thank you for the love that Christ has for us as individuals and as his church.

And Lord we pray that in all seasons of the Christian life at all points along our walk that we would be constantly growing in the love and the knowledge of the love of Christ for us. And that that love would work itself out in our lives and in our churches that we would be rooted and established in love, that we would be marked by love, that we would mirror the love of Christ. And father we pray that in those moments when we are feeling underwhelmed and dissatisfied and disappointed that we would turn our eyes away from the world and turn our eyes towards you, towards your son.

Father we pray that we would pray this prayer collectively as your church here on earth and that Lord that you would continue to do the powerful work that you are doing within us. Amen.

The post Knowing the Love of Christ – Ephesians 3V14–21 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Open with me to John’s Gospel and chapter 21. John 21, reading from verse 15. When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Yes, Lord, he said, you know that I love you.

(0:26 – 0:41)

Jesus said, feed my lambs. Again, Jesus said, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He answered, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Jesus said, take care of my sheep.

(0:43 – 1:11)

The third time he said to him, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, do you love me? He said, Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you. Jesus said, feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted.

(1:12 – 1:29)

But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, follow me.

(1:30 – 2:03)

Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. This was the one who would lean back against Jesus at the supper and had said, Lord, who is going to betray you? When Peter saw him, he asked, Lord, what about him? Jesus answered, if I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me. Because of this, the rumour spread among the believers that this disciple would not die.

(2:04 – 2:22)

But Jesus did not say that he would not die. He only said, if I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.

(2:24 – 2:39)

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. This is God’s word.

(2:43 – 2:59)

I don’t know if any of you watch Race Around the World. It’s a, well, it’s just what it sounds like. So it’s a race where pairs of people travel around countries and continents in a dash towards a finish line.

(3:00 – 3:16)

And usually the finish line is something quite dramatic and spectacular. It might be something like a hillside with a really spectacular view. They always make the ending a high point to finish on.

(3:17 – 3:26)

Well, here we are in John’s gospel. We’ve come to the end. I don’t think we’ve been racing through it.

(3:26 – 3:40)

I would say we’ve been going fairly slowly over these 16 months. But we’ve certainly been travelling through these 21 chapters of John. And we’ve come an awfully long way in this time.

(3:41 – 3:58)

We started with a magnificent opening, a disclosure of who Jesus is. And John, he’s been our travel companion. John has then guided us through many miracles and teaching and all sorts of incidents.

(3:59 – 4:21)

He’s even guided us past a cruel cross and an empty tomb. And now finally, we come to the finish line of John. And where does it finish? How does it finish? It finishes on a beach with a breakfast.

(4:23 – 4:49)

It finishes with a few disciples then walking up the beach with Jesus. It doesn’t look like a spectacular ending, does it? Not to a gospel that started with a cosmic opening. And yet, if we take the time to examine it more closely, we will see that it’s the absolutely perfect ending to this gospel.

(4:50 – 5:17)

It sums up the message of John and it shows us where things should go from here. And it’s full of deep challenge and it’s full of enormous encouragement. Whether you are a longtime follower of Jesus, whether you’ve been stumbling along and you feel as if you’ve been failing and like Peter, you’ve been messing it up.

(5:18 – 5:41)

Or whether you’re someone who’s just started the journey or even considering starting it, there’s something here this morning for you. So from this passage, there’s going to be three facts about Jesus that can encourage us. And incidentally, this is a bad sermon insofar as it’s going to have a huge first point.

(5:42 – 5:56)

It’s going to have a pretty small second point, and it’s going to have a tiny third point, but it’s just the way I want to do it. So number one, Jesus is gracious. He restores the failure.

(5:58 – 6:08)

We’re beside the Sea of Galilee. It’s a matter of weeks since Jesus has risen from the dead. Jesus has appeared on the shore.

(6:09 – 6:28)

The disciples had been fishing, and a miraculous catch has then been followed by a breakfast. A breakfast cooked and served by Jesus. And all of this is happening, verse 9, beside a fire of burning coals.

(6:29 – 7:00)

In other translations, you might have it rendering it a charcoal fire. And that detail is almost certainly significant, because there’s only one other place in John’s gospel, one other place where a charcoal fire is mentioned, and that is in chapter 18, when Peter was standing beside a charcoal fire. Jesus was on trial, you remember, in the house.

(7:01 – 7:06)

He’s on trial for his life. Peter is standing outside. He’s warming his hands at a fire.

(7:07 – 7:29)

And it was there that for the third time, he denied that he knew Jesus. Peter disassociated himself from Jesus beside a fire. It’s impossible not to think that this would have entered Peter’s mind as he sits and eats his fish with Jesus across the fire.

(7:30 – 7:41)

And it’s certainly on Jesus’ mind. Jesus is going to have this awkward conversation with Peter. And he’s going to have it publicly.

(7:43 – 8:17)

The they of verse 15, when they had finished eating, is a plural they, which implies that the six other disciples, remember there’s seven of them, are still hanging around when Jesus begins this conversation. Back in chapter 13, Peter had boasted publicly before these disciples that he would die for Jesus. The Peter who had publicly boasted is now publicly confronted.

(8:20 – 8:46)

And it sounds a little ominous to begin with, when Jesus singles him out and calls him Simon, son of John. You might remember that Jesus had renamed Simon, son of John as Peter, which means rock. And so he was often called Peter or in the gospel sometimes Simon Peter.

(8:48 – 9:08)

But here, Peter is dropped because Peter hasn’t been acting very rock-like. And this raises the question whether Simon, son of John will be restored again. And so what follows is a series of questions.

(9:09 – 9:24)

These questions from Jesus are simple, but they are probing. Notice that Jesus doesn’t ask Peter whether he’s committed. He doesn’t ask him whether he feels sorry.

(9:25 – 9:37)

He doesn’t ask him how much truth or theology he knows. No doubt these would have been perfectly good questions. But Jesus pinpoints the cause of Peter’s failure.

(9:38 – 10:03)

It’s the same root cause of every human failure. We might say that it’s all just a simple matter of either obedience or disobedience. But the underlying cause of our disobedience is that we do not love the Lord our God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength.

(10:04 – 10:22)

And that we also love other things more than we love God. Why had Peter denied Jesus? Because he loved his life more than he loved Jesus in that moment. He chooses his life over Jesus.

(10:25 – 10:52)

But notice that Jesus puts a particular point on this. He doesn’t just ask him whether he loves him, but do you love me more than these? I take it that Jesus is referring to the other disciples here. Do you love me more than these guys? And that makes sense if you know the rest of the gospel, because this is exactly what Peter had thought.

(10:52 – 11:35)

It wasn’t just that he thought that he would love Jesus to death, but that his love would surpass that of the other disciples who wouldn’t be willing to love him to that degree. It’s a silly sort of arrogance that we can easily fall into. When we ever think that there is something about us, something in our thinking or in our practise as a Christian, and usually we tend to focus on our strengths and ignore our weaknesses with this, but we somehow think there’s something about us that just puts us a few notches above your average ordinary Christian.

(11:35 – 11:52)

We’re a little bit above that for some reason. Peter thought he loved Jesus more, and that pride led to Peter’s fall. But notice that Peter answers humbly.

(11:53 – 12:14)

He begins, Lord, and then he answers, yes, yes, I love you. But he doesn’t say, yes, I love you more than these other fellows. He’s no longer stupid enough to say, I love you more than these.

(12:18 – 12:44)

Just a very quick aside, people sometimes use John chapter 21 as one of the passages of scripture to elevate Peter above all the other apostles and all of other Christians in history, the kind of primacy of Peter stuff. When in actual fact, the passage does the very opposite. Yes, we’ll see in a minute, Peter is given a very important role of shepherding.

(12:45 – 13:02)

But Peter comes to recognise he is not above the other disciples. That’s the whole point here of this conversation. Failure is a painful thing for each of us.

(13:03 – 13:22)

But when it leads, or if it leads to humility, it’s a good thing for us. So Peter kind of answers half the question. Do you love me more than these? Lord, you know that I love you.

(13:23 – 13:58)

And Jesus then responds, feed my lambs, which is the first hint that the failing Peter is going to become the shepherd Peter. I take it here that lambs are a picture of believers, converts, disciples, who like baby lambs need to be fed by their shepherd in order to survive. So John’s gospel, if you like the whole of John’s gospel sort of catching or bringing sheep into the fold, but if you’ve got sheep in the fold, you’ve got to feed them.

(13:59 – 14:13)

Peter’s got to take on that task of feeding them. So that sounds a little more encouraging, doesn’t it? Sounds like Jesus is on the way to restoring him. But then to Peter’s dismay, Jesus asks another question.

(14:14 – 14:42)

And it’s exactly the same question as before. Verse 16, Simon, son of John, do you love me? And Peter replies in exactly the same way. And Jesus then replies in a similar way, except this time he says, take care of my sheep, which suggests a broader set of responsibilities beyond the core task of feeding.

(14:43 – 15:28)

Feeding is going to be the main thing the shepherd does, but actually there’s other responsibilities of being a shepherd. And then verse 17, the third time Jesus said to him, Simon, son of John, do you love me? And we’re told that Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, do you love me? Now, I need to say something about a common way of reading this passage and a common way that we often hear it preached. And the interpretation says that what is really significant here is the words that Jesus uses for love.

(15:29 – 15:45)

This is hidden to us in English, you’re maybe looking down and saying, well, it’s just love, love, love, love. But in the original language that’s written in Greek, there’s actually different words for love. And there are different words, two words actually, that Peter and Jesus are using as they go back and forth here.

(15:46 – 16:00)

So one word is agape. Agape means something like selfless, sacrificial, loyal love. It’s a choosing to sacrificially love someone.

(16:02 – 16:13)

People sometimes say that it’s a divine love, or it’s a love that only God has. But actually this word is used much more broadly in the New Testament. It’s used also negatively.

(16:13 – 16:28)

For example, it said that Demas loved, and the word there is agape. He agape’d this world in such a way that he chose it as his new loyalty. And he sacrificially loved it.

(16:29 – 16:42)

So there’s that word here. And then there’s a second word that’s used, and it’s the word philio. And philio means something like brotherly love, or the love of a friend.

(16:42 – 16:49)

You know, Philadelphia, you know, the city of brotherly love. It carries over even today. And this is a crucial point.

(16:49 – 17:00)

Sometimes people will say that agape is a higher form of love. So it’s up here. And then philio, brotherly love, is a kind of lower earthly sort of love.

(17:03 – 17:22)

And so if you follow that logic, the conversation goes like this. The first time around, Jesus says to Peter, do you agape me? Do you love me with a loyal love? And Peter can’t reply that he loves Jesus with a loyal love. And so he says, Lord, I philio you.

(17:23 – 17:34)

I love you like a brother. And then the second time, Jesus says, Peter, do you agape me? And again, Peter says, not quite, Lord. I philio you.

(17:34 – 17:59)

I love you as a brother. And then the third time, something different happens in the Greek text. Jesus asked Peter, Peter, do you philio me? Do you love me with a brotherly love? It’s almost like he graciously comes down to Peter’s level and says, well, if you can’t love me this much, then maybe you’ll love me this much.

(18:03 – 18:14)

It’s really curious that the word does change here. It’s appealing. It’s very preachable, but I must say I’m a little cautious about it.

(18:16 – 18:27)

It’s not that I think that there aren’t slightly different meanings to agape and philio. They do mean slightly different things. But I don’t think it’s the case that agape is up here and philio is way down here.

(18:29 – 19:19)

In John’s gospel, God the Father is said to love the Son both with an agape love, John 3, and with a philio love, John 5. In John 5, it says the Father loves, he philios the Son with a brotherly love, and he shows him all that he does. We wouldn’t say, would we, that God the Father has a higher love for Jesus and a lesser love for Jesus, right? But he loves him in both ways. Similarly, you know the phrase we meet in John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the disciple whom Jesus loved? Sometimes the text says the disciple he loved with agape love, and other times it says the disciple Jesus loved with brotherly love, philio love.

(19:20 – 19:30)

Jesus loved him with both sorts of love. He was sacrificial in his loyalty to John. He had brotherly affection for him.

(19:31 – 19:56)

And so I don’t think the big point of this passage is that Jesus is graciously lowering the standard of the love he’s asking of Peter. Notice in the text that Peter is not comforted by Jesus’ third question. Peter doesn’t kind of have a big sigh of relief and go, oh, thank goodness, Lord, finally, you’ve used the word philio.

(19:57 – 20:14)

That’s great, I can meet the standard of brotherly love. What is emphasised is not the terms, but the times. Verse 17, Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time.

(20:16 – 20:38)

This surely is a painful reminder that Peter had failed to love Jesus three times over. And it gives us a universal principle that we all need to recognise. That for Jesus to graciously restore us, he needs to, first of all, make us face up to our sin.

(20:40 – 20:48)

I mean, Jesus knows all about it anyway. Jesus knows everything, as Peter himself says. Jesus, you know my heart.

(20:48 – 21:05)

You know what love is there and what love isn’t there. Peter’s the one that needs to see how lacking his love for Jesus has been. Yes, Peter loves Jesus, but it’s a faltering and failing love.

(21:06 – 21:28)

And yet Jesus responds again, feed my sheep. I think by this point, it is clear that Jesus has forgiven Peter, not only because he stops asking him, there’s not a fourth question, but because he gives Peter an important role. And this is all done publicly before the other disciples.

(21:29 – 22:00)

See, we might think at first that Jesus doing this publicly is to shame Peter, and I’m sure he did feel ashamed, but it also had the effect of publicly restoring him so that no one could question the fact that Jesus and Peter were on good terms again. How gracious Jesus was and how gracious Jesus is. And because he is that gracious, we can therefore trust him and we can follow him, which brings us to the next section.

(22:00 – 22:11)

Jesus is calling. Secondly, Jesus is calling, he determines our path. You see at the end of verse 18, Jesus says to Peter, follow me.

(22:13 – 22:32)

I suppose that could be a simple invitation to kind of follow him up the beach, because evidently that’s what happens. They go for a walk, as we see in the context. But in the context of what surrounds it, I think there has to be a deeper meaning in the passage and in the whole of John.

(22:33 – 22:46)

It’s interesting that in chapter one of John, we don’t have time to look at this this morning, but two things are emphasised in John one. Jesus is gracious. Three times we’re told that Jesus is full of grace in John one.

(22:47 – 22:57)

And there’s a call of discipleship. John one ends with Jesus calling disciples to follow him. So there’s Jesus is gracious, disciples are called.

(22:57 – 23:17)

And it’s the same two things when we get to the end of John’s gospel. Now, right at the end, Peter, whose name has returned in the text, is commanded to follow again. He’s to follow Jesus and to express his loyal love and his brotherly affection for Christ.

(23:17 – 23:39)

And how is he to do this? Not only by shepherding the sheep, but supremely, verse 18, by dying for Jesus. When he gets older and weaker, he will be dressed by others. He will be led somewhere he won’t want to go, and his hands will be stretched out.

(23:41 – 23:59)

It’s a bit of a foggy prediction of the future, but thankfully, John clears it up for us. Jesus was predicting the kind of death that Peter would die. And it sounds like crucifixion, doesn’t it? Stretching out of the hands.

(24:02 – 24:21)

The Peter who had denied Jesus would one day die for him in loyalty and brotherly love. This is the path determined for Peter, and it is the path by which he will glorify God. He will glorify God by his death.

(24:22 – 24:38)

And just something worth noting, as we pray for the persecuted church, and as we think about Christian martyrs, it is not a tragedy when a Christian dies for Christ. It is a horrible thing. It is an unjust thing.

(24:38 – 24:58)

It is something to be sorrowed, but it is also a glorification of God that draws people to Christ in many circumstances. What a bombshell this must have been. And Peter’s response is very relatable.

(24:59 – 25:16)

He swivels his head and he notices that the disciple whom Jesus loved is walking behind them. They’ve evidently left the fire. Peter and Jesus are walking down the beach, and John, I don’t know what he’s doing exactly, but he’s kind of a few steps behind.

(25:17 – 25:50)

And Peter asks, what about him? I assume he’s asking, will he die in the same way as me? And Jesus says, essentially, that’s none of your business. If I want him to remain alive until I return, then what’s that to you? You must follow me regardless. Jesus wasn’t saying that John would never die.

(25:51 – 26:07)

Some people apparently later took it that way. He was only saying that if he wanted him to remain alive until he returned, then he was sovereign over that decision, not John, not Peter. Obviously, these are unique individuals.

(26:09 – 26:27)

Peter and John have unique roles in the history of the church. Yet I don’t think it’s wrong to see that the essence of this remains true. The Christians follow the same Jesus, but Jesus determines the particular path for each of us.

(26:29 – 26:49)

John’s path was not the same as Peter’s. Peter grew older, and then he died on a cross. John grew very old, and he grew old enough to write a very mature gospel and to glorify God in what he wrote down.

(26:49 – 27:17)

He had a relative peace which allowed him to glorify God in this way. We follow the same Jesus, but we walk the path that his providence lays down to us. That’s why we always need to catch ourselves when we spend our Christian lives looking sideways at the lanes of other Christians, the paths of other Christians.

(27:18 – 27:30)

That is nothing but a recipe for arrogance or envy. God puts you where he wants to put you. God gives you what he wants to give you.

(27:31 – 28:00)

Jesus does through you what he wants to do through you, and it doesn’t matter how it compares to brother A or sister B. I mean, these were both perfectly good paths, and Jesus chose them for them. Peter accepted his assignment, and so did John. In verse 24, I think John is telling us that he’s made the most of the path Jesus had given him.

(28:00 – 28:21)

He couldn’t glorify God as a martyr, but he has glorified God by writing this gospel. This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. I think here John finally emerges from the shadows, and he’s saying, I’m the guy.

(28:21 – 28:30)

I’m the guy who wrote this gospel. The disciple whom Jesus loved is the guy who is the author. This is my testimony.

(28:31 – 28:46)

This is my written account. And then he adds, curiously, he adds, we know that his testimony is true. It’s a shift from my to we.

(28:47 – 29:01)

Some people think it’s a kind of royal we, but more likely, there’s probably some kind of circle around John at this point. Maybe he’s speculating a little bit. Maybe his fellow elders at Ephesus or something like that.

(29:02 – 29:22)

And it seems that there are others who are now picking up the pen at the very end of his gospel saying, yes, this guy, John, he’s the real deal. What he is testifying, we agree, is true. And with that, it looks like the gospel’s done.

(29:23 – 29:42)

The loose ends have been tied up, and yet it would be a wrong note to finish on. It is always the wrong note to finish on the servants, not the master. It is always the wrong note to finish on the disciples, not the teacher.

(29:43 – 29:55)

And so in very brief fashion, John ends by heralding that Jesus is great. He started his gospel by saying that Jesus is great. He did it at length.

(29:56 – 30:26)

And now in a single sentence, he ends the same way. He says, Jesus is so great that he cannot be contained in what is written about him. That’s quite a thing to say at the end of your gospel, isn’t it? John, I mean, I’m assuming John has spent a lifetime preparing to write this weighty account, his personal account of Jesus’ life and death.

(30:28 – 30:46)

This gospel is in some people’s estimation the finest account of the life of Jesus. It is a divinely inspired and authoritative account. And yet, even so, John says, this isn’t even the half of it.

(30:48 – 30:59)

It isn’t even the half. Jesus did many other things as well. What I’ve told you is only part of a much bigger picture.

(31:02 – 31:17)

Many other books could be written about him. I suppose John muses that if everything about Jesus were written down, then all the libraries in the world wouldn’t have enough books to contain him. I walked past Pollock Shaw’s library this morning.

(31:17 – 31:30)

I was just thinking about it. I go in there sometimes and it’s got all these sections. You know, it’s mostly crime, graphic, comics for teenagers, stuff like that.

(31:32 – 32:17)

You would have, think about this, you would have to clear out all the sections of the entire library and fill every single section with books about Jesus. And John says, there still wouldn’t be enough room for all the books that you’d need to write. Because how do you possibly contain the giver of life in books? How do you fully capture the word became flesh? How do you sum up the fulfilment of every promise and every shadow of the Old Testament? Jesus is the bread of life, the all satisfying water, the new temple, the Passover lamb who was slain.

(32:18 – 32:37)

He is the risen conquering Christ, and yet he is forever the gracious one who invites sinners like you and me to breakfast. Incomprehensibly great, but so very gracious.

(32:41 – 33:17)

Do you believe in him? Have you gracious been restored to him? Do you know your sin? Do you know your sins have been forgiven? Some of us have been walking the road for a while, like Peter. And we think we’ve put ourselves in a place that we’re beyond his redemption. We are wrong.

(33:18 – 33:39)

If we think that, we have not understood the heart of Christ. Are you following him? We are called this morning to follow him afresh. As he calls us to glorify him, down the paths that he himself has determined.

(33:41 – 33:45)

What a wonderful thing. What a wonderful Jesus. What a wonderful call.

(33:47 – 33:52)

Let’s respond to it. Let’s respond to him. Let’s pray.

(34:02 – 34:29)

Father, we thank you for the incomprehensibly great Jesus. We thank you for the one who is God, who is truth, and yet he came full of grace and truth. We thank you that this gospel ends with the biggest failure in the gospel, being restored to life and service.

(34:31 – 34:49)

So give us hope today. Show us the gentle heart of Christ, and draw us afresh to faith, to love, and to following him. And it’s in his name we pray, amen.

The post Forgiven and Restored – John 21v15–25 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Tonight we’re looking at Psalm 48, which can be found on page 571 of the Chapel Bibles, and I’ll start by reading this. Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise, in the city of our God, his holy mountain. Beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth, like the heights of Zaphon, is Mount Zion, the city of the great king.

God is in her citadels. He has shown himself to be her fortress. When the kings joined forces, when they advanced together, they saw her and were astounded.

(0:35 – 2:43)

They fled in terror, trembling seized them there, pain like that of a woman in labour. You destroyed them like the ships of Tarshish, shattered by an east wind. As we have heard, so we have seen, in the city of the Lord Almighty, in the city of our God, God makes her secure forever.

Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love. Like your name, O God, your praise reaches to the ends of the earth, and your right hand is filled with righteousness. Mount Zion rejoices, the villages of Judah are glad because of your judgments.

Walk about Zion, go round her, count her towers, consider well her ramparts, view her citadels that you may tell of them to the next generation. For this God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide, even to the end.

A few years ago now, when I was at Bible school, there was a teacher there who, he would come once a year, who really stuck with me. He would come to teach one module. It was the Creation to Christ module, where he’d start at creation and preach through to Christ, as the name suggests.

It was 52 lessons that spanned the entire Old Testament and up to the crucifixion. It was originally designed for teaching unreached groups about the Bible. And the central focus of these lessons really stuck with me, especially the way he said that particular focus.

He would stand there, arms spread, the glory. And that has always stayed with me. And today we’re going to talk a little bit about how we can share in that glory.

God’s glory permeates this passage in the same way it permeates the entire Bible. I would say that the Bible, in a lot of ways, could be considered a declaration of God’s glory. And while the word glory isn’t specifically mentioned in this passage, it is mentioned, the word is used, depending on your translation, around 600 times in the Bible.

(2:45 – 3:02)

And many, many more times is alluded to. And but while the word itself is not used, the meaning is there. That is why in verse one it starts, great is the Lord and most worthy of praise.

(3:04 – 3:32)

It starts by telling us how great God is. It then, while it mentions God’s glory, grants his praise, it then moves into describing a city. So how is that connected? In the Bible we see a lot of mirrors, a lot of reflections, and this city mirrors God’s glory.

(3:33 – 4:16)

Beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth, like the heights of Zaphon is Mount Zion. There are, in that verse alone, there are multiple symbols. We have Mount Zion.

Now Mount Zion is an actual hill that is very often visited in Israel. But the link to Zaphon in the land of Canaan and the people, nations surrounding Israel at that time, Zaphon was to them what Olympus was to the Greeks. It was the connection between earth and heaven.

It’s where the two were supposed to meet. The Jews at the time would have known this. The nation of Israel would have known this.

(4:17 – 4:40)

They would have also known that Mount Zion is the actual only connection, and not the physical Mount Zion, but rather what it symbolises. Mount Zion is mentioned multiple times in Scripture, one example being Hebrews 12. But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.

(4:45 – 5:01)

In this context of this passage, remember this is written by the sons of Korah who were Israelites. In the context, this alludes to some degree to this actual city of Jerusalem. But that is an incomplete picture.

(5:05 – 5:23)

And I also believe that there is a present reference that is also an incomplete picture in the church of today. But much of it is still hidden. So, we’re going to explore a little bit past and present reflections of God’s glory before we get to a final fulfilment.

(5:26 – 5:43)

In verse 9, it mentions, Within your temple, O God. The temple of God, as we all know, was built in Jerusalem. It is where the presence of God resided in Israel until the glory of God departed from it.

(5:48 – 6:08)

And we know that Israel was God’s chosen people. God chose Israel, and God put his glory in amongst the people of Israel. But the people of Israel, as we have seen from history, have been defeated again and again.

(6:08 – 6:21)

And that temple was destroyed. So, this can’t be a complete picture of what’s being described in Psalm 48. The church today also has a temple.

(6:24 – 6:45)

1 Corinthians 6 says, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. Anyone who is in Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And we can see, in the way we treat each other, glimpses of the glory of God.

(6:48 – 7:06)

But we are still fallen creatures, as we talked about this morning, for those who are here. We are wretched beyond comprehension, and yet, God has said that we are glorious. And God has said that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

(7:10 – 7:36)

But even this, as we are fallen, is not a full reflection of what we see in the passage. Two weeks ago, Colin spoke about the Bride of Christ in Psalm 45. In Revelation 21, in verse 9, it says, Let me show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.

(7:38 – 7:56)

What it then goes on to describe is not a woman, it’s not even people. What he goes on to describe is the Holy City, the New Jerusalem. Now, as Colin told us a few weeks ago, the Bride of Christ is the Church.

(7:57 – 8:20)

This means that the only interpretation here is that the Church, as well, is the Holy City. But there’s something different about the temple in this Holy City. In verse 22, it says, The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

(8:20 – 9:06)

There is no need for a temple anymore, because God is the temple. Now, this brings us to something that I find utterly incredible. What is it that makes the city so wonderful? What is it that makes the city glorious? Where does the righteousness and glory of the city come from? Verse 3, it says, God is in her citadels.

He has shown himself to be her fortress. And throughout the passage, there is reference to God being in the city. The city itself, without God, is nothing.

(9:08 – 9:29)

But with God, it is glorious and beautiful. The Church’s righteousness is the righteousness of God. And something more incredible is that God already views each and every one of his children as glorious and righteous.

(9:32 – 9:43)

In Romans 8, it says, The Spirit you received does not make you slaves so that you live in fear. Rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, Abba, Father.

(9:44 – 10:10)

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now, if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. The tense used in this passage is not future, it is past and present.

(10:12 – 10:37)

Anyone who is in Christ is already viewed by God as fully justified, fully glorified. But why don’t we see the effects? Well, the very next verse in that passage says, For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. The glory of the church has not yet been fully revealed.

(10:39 – 10:54)

God views us in the way that only he can. But in glimpses like Psalm 48, we are given a chance to cast our minds vastly into the future. Well, it could be tomorrow, we don’t know.

(10:56 – 11:07)

But for us, it is the future. For us, we can’t see the future fulfilment yet, but we are given glimpses of it. And what beautiful glimpses.

(11:08 – 11:33)

Beautiful in its loftiness, walk about Zion, go round her, count her towers, consider well her ramparts, view her citadels, that you may tell of them to the next generation. We are given glimpses here and in Revelation and in many other parts of the Bible of the glory of which we can be a part, not because of anything we’ve done, but because God has imparted his glory onto us. Thanks to the completed work of Christ.

(11:38 – 12:06)

Now, I find it incredible that God, the perfect God, would share his glory with someone like me. But I also find it motivating that despite my wretchedness, despite my sin, he views me as a holy son of God. And I find it motivating to live as a holy son of God.

(12:07 – 12:21)

And anyone who is in Christ, you are holy children of God, glorious and righteous in his sight. Use that and act like it. Now, we will always stumble.

(12:21 – 12:32)

That is why we cannot see the full picture yet. Because we are imperfect, but we will see it in the future. But there is a warning.

(12:33 – 12:53)

There is an alternative. In verses four to seven, when the kings joined forces, when they advanced together, they saw her and were astounded. They fled in terror, trembling seized them there, pain like that of a woman in labour.

(12:53 – 13:13)

You destroyed them like the ships of Tarshish, shattered by an east wind. The kings, the enemies of the city. There are only two groups of people in the end.

(13:14 – 13:33)

When the Lord returns, there will be two groups, the city and the enemies of the city. We can see this in past and present events. The world has always set itself against God and his people.

(13:35 – 14:00)

When Israel was in the land, the people around them constantly fought with them. Assyria, the Philistines, and it was not Israel who defeated them over and over. Judges seven in the story of Gideon, when the 300 trumpets sounded, the Lord caused the men throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords.

(14:01 – 14:19)

In second Kings 19, Sennacherib, as he was trying to destroy the nation of Israel. That night, the angel of the Lord went out and put to death 185,000 in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies.

(14:21 – 14:42)

And later, once Sennacherib had gone home, one day while he was worshipping in the temple of his God, Nisroch, his sons, Adrammelech and Sherezer, killed him with the sword. Israel did not defend itself. God did it.

(14:44 – 14:55)

It was not Israel who had the power or ability. It was God. And the flood.

(14:58 – 15:16)

We’re told that every thought of man’s heart was constantly evil all the time. The people of the world at that time set themselves directly against God. And so God let them face the consequences of their actions.

(15:18 – 15:31)

But he spared Noah, for Noah had faith. So in this, it is not us who are glorified. It is not Israel who is glorified.

(15:31 – 15:43)

It is God who is glorified. And yet he shares that with us. In the present day, the world still sets itself against God.

(15:43 – 16:01)

We can see it by looking at the, watching the news, sometimes just by looking outside. Pagan religions are all over the place. And particularly Islam, murdering Christians in Nigeria and across the Islamic world.

(16:03 – 16:22)

The Middle East has a strong hatred of Israel, which I believe is due to the fact that Christ came from Israel. The world was blessed through Israel. And so the world hates Israel because they set themselves against God.

(16:25 – 16:39)

LGBT movements, they call their events pride, the original sin that led to Lucifer’s downfall. We see war in Iran. We see it in various parts of Africa, civil war, international war.

(16:41 – 16:59)

Even a staunch atheist, Richard Dawkins, a few years back, talked about the benefit of cultural Christianity. He talked about, he could see the glimpses of glory through the church. And yet he has dedicated his life to opposing Christ and opposing God.

(17:00 – 17:35)

That is what the world does. And in the future, as it talks about in Psalm 48, the imagery destroying them like the ships of Tarshish, shattered, reminds me of the imagery in Revelation 18. We have the fall of Babylon described with pain and death as people tear apart themselves in opposition to God.

(17:36 – 18:00)

And ultimately we see Armageddon when the devil leads the nations of the world against the people of God. And in Revelations 20, verse 15, we see the final consequence of that. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

(18:02 – 18:22)

That is a finality of which anyone who is not part of God’s city should fear. So there are two choices here. All who put their faith in Jesus Christ will have an eternal share in the glory of God.

(18:22 – 18:30)

We are seen by God already as his children. We are seen already as justified. We already are heirs and co-heirs with his son.

(18:34 – 19:06)

And because of that, we have been invited, because of Christ’s work, we have been invited into an inheritance. We get to be part of that glorious city in the end when all the people of God from past through to the beginning, back through to Adam and for the rest of history in the future, all of us gathered together, that is the final city of God with the presence of God as its temple in its midst. And that is a beautiful picture of which we get to be a part.

(19:08 – 19:40)

Or any who refuse will be thrown into the lake of fire and the sight of God’s glory and the sight of his beautiful city and any chance of being part of it will be lost to them forever. But for those of us who are part of the city, for those of us, we have the most glorious finality to this chapter. For this is our God forever and ever.

(19:41 – 19:57)

If we are in his city, he will be our guide even to the end. Let God be your guide. Be joyous that you can take part and be a part of his holy and glorious city.

(20:00 – 20:16)

And remember to share that with others. Because once we get to the end, if they have not joined in, they will not be able to. So let’s pray.

(20:19 – 20:43)

Thank you, God, for sharing your glory with us. Thank you for making us holy and blameless and righteous in your sight when we do not have done nothing to deserve it. Thank you for the completed work of Christ that we may all look forward to viewing your holy city, to being a part of your holy city.

(20:46 – 21:01)

May we see each other in the same way you see us. May we see each other as glorious and full of hope and righteousness, heirs and co-heirs with Christ. And may we gaze with wonder upon your people and your holy city.

(21:02 – 21:04)

In Jesus’ name, amen.

The post The Glory of the City – Psalm 48 appeared first on Greenview Church.

Luke 7, verse 36. When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.

As she stood behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is, that she is a sinner.

Jesus answered him, Simon, I have something to tell you. Tell me, teacher, he said. Two people owed money to a certain moneylender.

(1:03 – 2:11)

One owed him 500 denarii and the other 50. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which one of them will love him more? Simon replied, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.

You have judged correctly, Jesus said. Then he turned towards the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

You did not give me a kiss, but this woman from the time I entered has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not pour oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven as her great love has shown, but whoever has been forgiven little loves little.

Then Jesus said to her, your sins are forgiven. The other guests began to say among themselves, who is this who even forgives sins? Jesus said to the woman, your faith has saved you. Go in peace.

(2:13 – 2:23)

Well, again, thank you for your welcome. It’s been lovely to be with you this weekend and great to have a look at this passage together. Let’s ask for God’s help as we do so, shall we? Let’s pray.

(2:26 – 3:02)

Father, we know your word is like seed sewn on the ground and can result in different responses. And we pray we would not be those with hard hearts where the seed is taken away by the evil one. And we would not be those who respond, but respond with a shallow and superficial response that dies away or where our response is choked by other issues in life.

(3:05 – 6:11)

But in your kindness and by the work of your spirit, might we be good soil where your seed of your word bears fruit and gives glory to you. Amen. Well, in the seminars that some of you were at yesterday, we were thinking about emotions.

I made some comments about how different sort of personalities and we kind of emote in different ways. I’m half English and half Welsh, which is where my curious surname comes from. And so I often say to people, I think it’s why I think in bullet points, but I cry quite easily.

I’m a bit of a softy really. All it takes is a vaguely poignant moment in a film and some appropriate background music. And then one of my kids will say, Dad, are you crying? Yes.

Others of us, of course, might be more stoic and unmoved. Rarely, if ever, would we cry. Some people might describe that person as a little bit cool, cold.

They of course might reply, no, no, I’m just stable. The point is we each have our own emotional range and different things that will move us. The question I’d like us to reflect on this morning, whatever your emotional makeup is, does Jesus move you? Whether you cry or otherwise, does Jesus have an effect on your heart? You may be very familiar with Jesus.

You may know about him, trust him, live for him. And the question I want to ask you is, how does he make you feel? You might be here and not know Jesus very well. You may be discovering things about him, which is brilliant.

And I would like you to see that Jesus has the potential to move you. And to do so, not because of a superficial touching moment with appropriate background music, but because of who he is and what he does. That Jesus’s ability to move us emotionally is because of how significant he is.

(6:13 – 6:49)

That’s our topic this morning. And it’s our topic because that issue of emotion in response to Jesus is at the very heart of this passage in Luke’s Gospel. There are these two contrasting characters in it.

You saw them as we read. There is a Pharisee called Simon and there is a woman who remains unnamed. And the greatest contrast between them is how they feel.

(6:50 – 9:03)

How they feel towards Jesus. Just follow the story with me. Verse 36, when one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table.

The Pharisees were part of the Jewish religious leaders of the day. And so far, they’ve been investigating about Jesus because he seems to be kind of on their turf. And they’ve not been responding well to him overall.

They’ve been criticising him, opposing him. But this guy, Simon, at the very least, wants to know more, wants to question him, so gets Jesus over for a meal. But Luke isn’t interested in the conversation they have.

He jumps to the moment a woman appears on the scene. Verse 37, a woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. Now I think it’s most likely this woman has met Jesus before, and I’ll show you why I think that in a moment.

And I think she now hears Jesus is in town and she hurries off carrying this jar of perfume. It’s like the equivalent of calling around with an expensive gift of some kind. Maybe she was planning on anointing Jesus, maybe she was planning on giving it to Jesus, we’re not sure.

But when she gets there, it seems that she is overcome with emotion. Verse 38, as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. The positioning might sound strange, you know it starts as she stood behind him at his feet.

(9:04 – 12:20)

How’d you do that? Well the answer is he’s there in the days back then, you would eat reclining on your side, so he’s lying on his side eating off the table, and she is standing at his feet end behind him, and she starts crying. Crying so freely it seems the tears are running down her face and running off, and she is now wetting his feet with her tears, and with nothing else available she then uses her hair to wipe those tears away. She kisses his feet and then pours this perfume on them.

It’s a moment of emotional outpouring. Jesus says later it’s an expression of love. Simon the Pharisee is not so impressed.

Verse 39, when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this he said to himself, if this man were a prophet he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is, that she is a sinner. In Simon’s day and in Simon’s mind people were divided into different categories in terms of how they lived. At one end of the spectrum there would be Simon’s group, people like the Pharisees, they were very concerned about God’s law, about obeying it, about how they lived, they were scrupulous in it, so they were kind of the top league in obedience terms.

And then you’d have a kind of a middle group, the kind of ordinary people who didn’t step out of line badly, but they weren’t as scrupulous as this bunch, but they were kind of okay and so on, keep their nose clean. And then you’d have people they referred to as sinners and these now are people who basically know they are disobeying God’s law. They’re not in a sense particularly trying to keep it and everybody can see that about them, everyone knows it about them and they say they say there’s a sinner and in fact Luke introduces this woman, verse 37, saying a woman who lived a sinful life and Simon now says Jesus should know what kind of woman she is.

She’s bearing the label sinner and he ought to know. People have said commonly that this woman was a prostitute and we’re never actually told that, that’s a kind of a tradition that’s kind of got lent on. She might have been, that would be an example of that group, we don’t know.

(12:20 – 14:25)

But she clearly belonged there, she knew she belonged there, everybody else knew she belonged there and so in Simon’s mind Jesus shouldn’t have been receiving any attention favourably from her. Don’t let her touch you, she’s a sinner. Jesus clearly should have said go and go and clean up your life first, then maybe come and see me.

Clearly Jesus doesn’t know this, thinks Simon. Jesus has some words for him, verse 40, Simon I have something to tell you, sounds ominous I think. Tell me teacher, he says and he tells a story about two people who owed money, verse 41, they owed money to a money lender.

They are literally referred to as debtors, two debtors, two people in debt to this guy and one owes 500 denarii and the other 50 and your bible might have a little footnote telling us that a denarii is like a typical day’s wage. So one owes like a month and a half of salary and the other owes more like a year and a half of salary. It obviously depends on your salary but we’re probably talking a few thousand or kind of 50, 60,000 pounds today.

But neither of them can pay their debt and so Jesus says in his story, verse 42, that the money lender forgave the debts of both. Rather than wait for a payment which won’t come, he just wipes the slate clean, it’s just gone. Great bank manager, love to have one like that.

(14:26 – 15:37)

Interestingly the word that Luke uses from Jesus for forgiving these debts is the idea of being gracious. He showed grace to them, that is undeserved mercy. He was gracious to them, undeserved kindness and just lets it go.

And Jesus’ point of course is that this is a picture of God forgiving our debt to him. God is a God of grace who forgives the wrongdoing, the debts of his people, the moral debt we owe him. And Simon would have known this, Simon knew his Bible very well.

He would have known Psalm 103, God removes our transgressions, our sins from us. Or Psalm 32 which speaks about the great blessing it is that God forgives and covers over our sins. This isn’t a new idea to Simon.

(15:37 – 16:55)

He knew God was a God of forgiveness, at least in theory. He hadn’t really thought what that meant though for someone like this, this woman. And so Jesus ends his story at the end of verse 42, which of them will love him more? And Simon replies, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.

He sounds slightly reluctant. Perhaps he can tell where this is going. But the logic is undeniable, isn’t it? The bigger the debt, the greater the gratitude, the greater the love.

The bigger the debt, the more aware you are of what’s been wiped away, of how much generosity and mercy has been shown. If someone owes you 10 quid, if you borrow 10 quid off somebody and they say, you say, oh, thank you very much, I’ll pay you back. And they say, forget about it, don’t worry.

You probably will forget about it. But if you owed hundreds of thousands of pounds and someone paid it for you, you would not forget. You would be overwhelmed.

(16:55 – 17:45)

Wow. They do that for me. And Jesus applies it in verse 44.

He turned to the woman and he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I came into your house, you did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman from the time I entered has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

See, Simon, it turns out, hasn’t even treated Jesus with the normal polite customs of the day. Or maybe he thinks he’s being generous, having Jesus over at all. And by contrast, this woman has lavished her affection on Jesus.

(17:47 – 19:28)

And the key verse explaining it all is verse 47. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven as her great love has shown. Jesus sees this outpouring of emotion, the tears, the perfume, the kisses as a display of love, great love for him.

And she’s the one in the parable who loves much because she’s been forgiven much. Let me just clarify in verse 47. When it says, her many sins have been forgiven as her love has shown, it’s not that her love has earned her forgiveness.

The way it’s phrased here, it’s hard to get across in English, but it’s kind of in a past, past tense. It’s that her sins have been forgiven are forgiven in the past. Her love is now an expression in the light of that.

It’s the same in verse 48 when he says your sins are forgiven. It’s have been already. Or verse 50, your faith has saved you.

It has already. These are not pronouncements of forgiveness and salvation in the moment, freshly bestowed. They are reassurances of what was true of her already.

(19:30 – 23:18)

This is why I think this woman has met Jesus already or at least heard him speak. She has heard something of his message. She has responded.

And Jesus is saying she came that day when she heard he was in town with that bottle of perfume to say thank you, to express her love for him. And her love was so great that when it arrived, when she arrived there and actually met him and so on, it resulted in this outpouring of emotion. She’s been forgiven much and so she loves much.

Let me come back to my question. Have you ever felt like that about Jesus? Could you imagine feeling like that about Jesus? There are two things that combine to produce this love. It’s very simple.

I’m sure you can see them already. The first is in an awareness of our sin that we are in debt. See Simon thought this woman was a sinner.

Do you notice Jesus agrees? He doesn’t play down her sin. Verse 47, her many sins. She sinned a lot.

I know it. She knows it. You know it.

We’re not denying it. She’s in debt big time. That’s the first element, an awareness of sin.

And the second is an experience of forgiveness. Her many sins have been forgiven. She knows it’s gone.

She knows that the slate is wiped clean. It’s not going to be held against her. Knowing our sin, experiencing Jesus’s forgiveness.

That dynamic, that kind of combination, that is at the heart of the Christian life. The Christian is not someone trying to please God and get into his good books. Not someone trying to climb the ladder of acceptance with God.

A Christian is someone who loves Jesus because they know they’re forgiven by Jesus. And that love of course will result in lots of things in their life. It will result in wanting to live for him, trying to please God and serve him and work for him and so on.

But the motivation and the heart behind it are utterly different. So can I ask you a question a different way? Do you have an awareness of your sin? Do you think you’re in debt before God? The whole Bible story is that we created by God and to live for him have rebelled against him, turned away from him, rejected him and so are in debt to him. There are all sorts of ways we kind of shrink that.

And the Pharisees were very good at this. Simon would have been good at this. Set ourselves standards which are reasonably achievable.

(23:20 – 27:02)

I don’t do A, B and C. I don’t murder, steal, commit adultery. I do do X, Y, Z. I do give money and go to church and read my Bible and so on. Set certain rules and standards you can keep.

Keep going for a while and after a bit you think you’re doing quite well. You’re going to end up thinking well God’s quite fortunate to have someone as nice as me around. But I’m supposed to love God with all of my heart, mind and soul and my neighbour as myself.

Rather than doing quite well I’m in more debt every day I live. Or we could play the comparison game. It’s another thing the Pharisees were very good at.

You look at someone like that woman and you think well compared to her I’m doing pretty well. It’s like doing 80 on the motorway and someone passes you doing 100 and you tut. Terrible what some people do.

You’re breaking the law as well. Just because somebody else’s debt might be bigger or more obvious than yours doesn’t mean you’re not in debt. It may be that you are not very aware of being in debt to God and I’m afraid I have to tell you that you are.

And it may be you think it’s not too bad and I have to tell you that it’s far worse than you think. I remember lunchtime at our house one day after a Sunday service. A bunch of people back and one of our more senior members, ex-missionary, ex-pastor, elder, you know pillar of the church type of guy was there and we were washing up I think and somehow we ended up talking about sin and a bunch of young guys kind of talking about different things whatever and then very quietly he just said at one stage the older I get the more wicked I realise I am.

Okay that gave us a little a little moment of realism. I tell you these things not with the point of discouraging you. I don’t want us to make us feel bad about ourselves.

It’s so that we’ll love Jesus more. A small view of sin means a very small love for Jesus and I’d like to encourage you as a church be honest about sin. It’s all sorts of implications for our life together actually in terms of honesty, realism, straightforwardness.

I don’t mean we have to go into detail. We just don’t play the let’s pretend game. Let’s pretend actually we’re all really quite nice.

I’m not very nice. If you knew it was in my heart you wouldn’t particularly want to listen to me this morning and then embrace forgiveness. It’s very easy actually in church life to talk about forgiveness, sing about forgiveness, hear about forgiveness but I use the word embrace quite deliberately.

(27:03 – 27:18)

You can talk about it, sing about it, hear about it but not actually embrace it. You can think God love offers you forgiveness you know but it kind of comes with strings attached. As long as you improve it’s a kind of probationary forgiveness or something.

(27:20 – 31:40)

You find yourself doing deals with God please forgive me and I’ll. I’ve done it again but forgive me and I’ll never. We’re adding our own strings now.

If that’s how we think about forgiveness it’s like it’s got lots of small prints. There’s no love and joy and celebration or you hear the words you’re forgiven. They just don’t sink in.

Feel guilty before, feel guilty afterwards. Can’t be that easy and we need to spend time mulling on, reflecting on, embracing Jesus’s words. When he says he just forgave the debts of both in that parable he means it.

He says to the woman your many sins gone, wiped away, not to be held against you. We are in fact in danger I think sometimes of having our own version of that kind of spectrum of the good people through to the terrible people and we kind of go oh no no we’re all sinners and yet somehow we still think that and somehow I have to be at this end of the spectrum if I’m going to really be forgiven. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work recently on 18th century minister John Newton who many of you probably will have heard of.

He was a slave trader unfortunately and even having come to faith continued in the slave trade and then later went into ministry. I’ve been doing some reading and writing on him. He writes extensively about how he now looks back on his previous life in the slave trade and he clearly committed what he then regards as appalling actions.

Slaves were tortured, he talks about putting slaves in thumbscrews and things. Slaves were quite often raped by the crew of ships and a lot of people actually think who know about these areas think John Newton would have taken part in that. He never tells us, never tells us explicitly but it was very common practise I’m sorry to say it’s horrible.

He wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. How great the sound that saved a wretch like me. I remember mentioning this once and somebody came up to me afterwards and said she was she was shocked and horrified by what I’d said about John Newton and she didn’t think she wanted to sing Amazing Grace anymore and I said I understood that.

It’s horrible to think that’s the case, it’s revolting. But ultimately do we think he’s forgiven? Yes, yes I suppose he is she said you know not reluctantly. Would he be allowed to celebrate forgiveness? Would God want to see him smile and embrace, say I’m forgiven it’s wonderful? See if we feel particularly guilty maybe over particularly awful sins the wonderful truth here is those are forgiven and God wants you to embrace forgiveness and smile and if you might look at others and think well they are at that end of the spectrum they’ve performed awful sins God wants them to smile and if I start to think no no actually they need to be more up here I haven’t really understood my sin and I certainly haven’t understood Jesus’s forgiveness.

(31:44 – 37:02)

I want to encourage you as a church to speak about the totality and completeness and unmeritedness, graciousness of Jesus’s forgiveness and I want you to do that so that you’ll love Jesus more and that will shape you, it will shape this church. Those are two very simple things honesty about sin, embracing forgiveness, they are transformative in our lives and the life of a community that orientates itself around these things. You know if you embrace those things for example you’ll find it easier to forgive others.

When someone hurts you, ignores you, offends you and I’m afraid it’ll happen in a community. I don’t mean to make light of it but if we’re all so fully aware of our sin and Jesus’s forgiveness of us we’ll forgive each other. It’ll have lots of knock-on effects like that, it’ll keep you going in your Christian life, it’ll keep this church united, it will result in love between you and it will shape you.

John Newton I’ve mentioned, he spoke of the everlasting shame he felt because of his past, understandably, but actually he went on to say he discovered more about his sinfulness later in life when he was living a perfectly respectable life. He spoke of Christian growth as growth in awareness of his sinfulness and growth in awareness of Jesus’s grace and forgiveness. Right towards the end of his life, a little bit before he died, he uttered what became some very famous words.

He said, my memory is nearly gone but I remember two things. I am a great sinner and Jesus is a great saviour and that shaped him. He was humble, he was thankful.

When was the last time you felt like this woman felt towards Jesus? Shown in whatever way you might express emotion, whether you cry or not is not the issue. The issue is whether when we’re aware of our sin and aware of Jesus’s forgiveness, we love him. And I don’t mean to suggest that this woman then kind of walked around, you know, sort of perpetually overcome, you know, weeping then, goes home weeping, wake up the next morning, I can’t stop crying.

No, no, it was a particular moment, a particular moment of realisation where it came home with force, resulting in this, I imagine this settled into a peaceful reassurance, a quiet gratitude. Maybe sometime later on she’d reflect and another tear would run down her face, I don’t know. I just know in my heart I can so easily speak of my sin and forgiveness and it’s just become commonplace to me.

And there are moments, there have been moments when that comes home with a greater force. God convicts me, I see Jesus’s graciousness and I cry because I’m half Welsh and I cry quite easily. It will be shown in different ways but the heartbeat of the Christian life is love and gratitude to Jesus.

Let’s pray together, shall we? Father God, we thank you that your heart for us is a heart of love shown in sending your Son, the Lord Jesus. He is the one who loved us and gave himself for us. We thank you, you love us despite us, despite our sin.

We thank you, you love us with such such graciousness that brings forgiveness full and free and we pray in your kindness you would help us see our sin and be honest about it. You’d help us embrace forgiveness, whatever it is that we know we’ve done wrong, to know that coming to the Lord Jesus means it is wiped away. And we pray in your kindness we would love Jesus more as a result.

Amen.

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