Humanity has cared about the end of the world since the beginning of the world. It is a concept that is not uniquely Christian. People from different cultures, different religions, and generations all agree that there is such a thing as the end of the world.

Throughout this series we have been talking about the fact that Jesus andThe Religious Establishment looked nothing alike, acted nothing alike, talked nothing alike, andtreated people nothing alike. When left unchecked, we tend to act like The ReligiousEstablishment. However, our job is to look and act as much like Jesus as possible. If we aregoing to get this right and reach our potential as a church, we need you. Jesus invites us tofollow, but he doesn’t promise that following will always consist of what we want to do, have timeto do, or think is convenient to do. Jesus knew that if we are going to do our part and are goingto fully engage, we are going to have to surrender parts of our life.

You read through the gospels and it couldn’t be any clearer—Jesus built bridges to those whohad been overlooked and left behind. He touched the leper, hung out with the tax collectors andsinners, he talked to Samaritan women, and he made hated minorities the heroes of stories hetold. He did favors for Roman Centurions, who were the instruments of Roman oppression. Hedidn’t play politics, He wouldn’t answer every question asked of him, and he didn’t take a publicposition on everything. He fed people. He healed people. He taught them in such a way thatthey understood what He was saying. He built bridges. He said things like, “follow me,” insteadof listing prerequisites or telling them to stop what they were doing.

The Religious Establishment had 613 rules that people had to keep. It was nearly impossible tofollow all of those rules, especially if you had a job. They had created different categories ofpeople to determine who was in and who was out. If you were Gentile? Out. Tax collector? Out.Samaritan? Out. Leper? Out. Shepherd? Out. They built barriers. They looked at Jesus andthought he made it too easy, too simple. Jesus looked at the Religious Establishment andconcluded they were making it unnecessarily difficult for people to turn to God.

Jesus took a personal interest in individual people. Jesus reminds us that it isindeed hard to hate up close. However, it can also be hard to love up close. Up close we tend tosee the blemishes, the inconsistencies, the shortcomings—all the things that can make it achallenge to love someone. That’s why Jesus prayed in the garden for his followers to be one.He prayed that they would love and serve one another in such a way that the world wouldbelieve their message. This prayer is perhaps the only prayer that believers have the capacity toanswer on Jesus’ behalf.

The Religious Establishment of Jesus’ day operated itself in a culture of labels,classifications, and categories of people with assigned values. Those noticeably imperfect wereleft out and left behind. The Temple, which was the epicenter of Jewish life and faith, reinforcedthis hierarchical way of life. Gentiles and half-breeds were only allowed in the Outer Courts,Jewish women could go beyond the partition to the Court of Women, Jewish men could gofurther still, priests operated in the sanctuary, and the one priest, the great hight priest, would goonce a year into the Holy of Holies. It was into this world that Jesus entered and introducedgrace. It was this grace that turned the Religious Establishment up on its head. Jesus lovedpeople with uncompromised truth and unconditional grace, and it took the world by storm.

Good churches and bad churches can both believe the Bible. If you ask themthey would each say, “Of course we believe the Bible.” Throughout the gospels, we find thatboth Jesus and the Religious Establishment believed all the parts of the Bible. However, theydisagreed about what point they believed the Bible was making. Both groups believed in theinspiration of the scripture, but the real issue was that they had drastically differentinterpretations and applications of the Bible based on what they believed was most important inthe scripture.

There are good churches, there are bad churches, and there are churches that fall in between. If being engaged in a local church isn’t optional for Christ followers, then the big question that looms is which church one should engage with. There are many ways to answer this question, but in today’s content we concentrated on how good churches think about sin and respond to those who sin in much the same way that Jesus did. Bad churches, on the other hand, tend to respond to sin and react to those who sin in much the same way as the religious establishment of Jesus’ day. There was a stark difference in how Jesus talked about sin, spoke about sin, and responded to those who sinned compared to that of the religious establishment. In this message we learned that what we think of when we think of sin and how we feel when hear about or see sin is very important and very telling.

The church is a group of people not a place. That is what Jesus meant when He said He would build His Church. He spoke of a group of people who believed that He was the Christ, the Son of the Living God. The church is God’s plan A on changing the world and there is no plan B. Throughout the New Testament, we find that a believer’s interaction and involvement in the local church was something that was never regarded as optional. The church wasn’t something they did or something they went to; it was who they were.

For some people the Christmas message is difficult to believe. It seems too perfect to be believable. But what if the Christmas story wasn’t so perfect? What if instead it was a very imperfect story which makes it something better than a perfect story: a true story. In Matthew’s gospel we read about the genealogy of Jesus, which reminds how perfectly imperfect the story of Christmas really is.

By all worldly measures, the night of Jesus’s birth was a silent night. Apart from a few shepherds, the rest of the world was oblivious that God had come in human form. The bigger story of Christmas is made up of many more silent nights—146,000 silent nights, to be exact. After speaking through the prophet Malachi, God went silent for 400 years—no audible word from God, no miracles, and no prophets. Even so, God was at work preparing the world for the birth of his Son, and, in the fullness of time, on one silent night the savior was born.