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Morning It's great to see each
one of you here this morning. I think there might be some folks
sitting back and overflow. We're thinking of you People
watching online. It's just great to be together
as people It was a sad week in our nation. I think for everybody
For about half the people in the country the votes didn't
go their way but if you're an American of any party and Wednesday
was a sad day, right, to watch a protest in Washington turn
into a forcible entry into our Capitol building that led to
five deaths. So if you're an American and you're a Christian,
now what? What do we do now? Where do we
look for hope? We're continuing this morning
in our studies in Matthew, right where we left off last week.
But I honestly, I was praying this week about what to preach
on and I felt like this is the best passage I could come up
with for us to look at today. In the summers, for me, in past
summers, often I've gone with my buddy Jake Heppner, who lives
in Minnesota. We go canoeing up in the boundary
waters of Minnesota. So in between Minnesota and Canada,
there's this wilderness, and you can only get in there with
a canoe. You have to carry all your stuff. There's mosquitoes
the size of horses. Something that often happens,
you can imagine by looking at this picture of it, if you're
in a canoe there, there's just not a lot around you to go off
of. And so often as we're canoeing
in the wilderness trying to go from one lake to another, we're
like, where are we? And the right thing to do is
to stop rowing, get out the map, get out the compass and think
now, what's north and where are we at and where should we be
going? And I feel like the election's over, it's time for American
Christians to stop rowing for a bit, pull out the map and the
compass and ask ourselves, now what? Right? Joe Biden's gonna
be inaugurated in 10 days. What's true north for us followers
of Jesus? What do we do now? And where
do we look for hope? Okay, so let's start with the
most important thing. The most important thing is love
the Lord your God above all else. Now, where we're at in Matthew,
I accidentally blocked it. There's buttons that do things
I don't even know about. Where we're at in Matthew, this is
the last week of Jesus's life, and we are here at April 1st
on Wednesday. We've been studying this controversy
with the leaders in the temple. Two days from where we're at
today, Jesus is going to be hanging on a cross, and so we're very
near the end of his life. What started this chain of events
that we're at right now is back in 21 verse 23. Look there, Jesus
is teaching in the temple and the Pharisees come and publicly
challenge his authority. Matthew 21, 23, see it there.
When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders
of the people came to him while he was teaching and said, by
what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you
this authority? Well, Jesus answered the Pharisees
in a couple of different ways. One, he told three parables,
and in these parables, without exactly saying it outright, Jesus
said, I am the Son of God, sent by God himself, and turned it
on them and said, you will be judged for not recognizing me
as God's Son. That was the parables, and then
after those parables, the Pharisees, if you look at chapter 22, verse
15, They came up with another tack.
Matthew 22, 15 says, the Pharisees went and plotted together how
they might trap him in what he said. And so the Pharisees came
first. They tried to trap him with a
question about taxes. And then their rivals, the Sadducees
came and tried to trap him with a question about resurrection.
Both attempts failed. And then we come to our passage
here, Matthew 22, verse 34. But when the Pharisees heard
that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together.
One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him.
So the Pharisees try again. What they're trying to do is
get Jesus to say something that's gonna get him in trouble, where
they can kick him out of the temple or kick him off the planet,
would be better in their minds. They're trying to trap him, they're
failing, and so they're trying again. This is their third attempt,
twice for the Pharisees and once for the Sadducees. They're working
together in this case. And so they send a lawyer. Now,
this man's not a lawyer in the sense that we think of as a lawyer,
but he's a, we call him a theologian. He's an expert in the law of
God. And so he's, maybe they've picked their best, their best
expert at debating the finer points of the law. And they're,
they're trying to get Jesus to say something that's out of line. So they send this lawyer and
he asks what sounds like an innocent question, but he's not asking
out of a genuine heart, he's trying to trap Jesus. So look
at verse 35, the lawyer comes, he says, verse 36, Teacher, what
is the great commandment in the law? Now, how's that a trap? What are they expecting Jesus
to say that's going to get him into trouble here? I don't know for
sure that Jesus was known for thinking kind of independently.
You tend to do that when you're divine. And so he had said things
up in Galilee that if he said here, they could, they could
jump on him for he said things like the son of man is Lord of
the Sabbath. And so maybe they think Jesus
is going to say something blasphemous, like I'm above the law. Well,
they're hoping that Jesus, and although it's Jesus, so he, I
mean, he spoke the law in the first place. It wouldn't really
be blasphemous, right? But they're hoping he's going to say something
they can jump on him for. Verse 36, teacher, what is the
great commandment in the law? Now the Old Testament law has
612 commands. So Jesus, which one is most important?
Which command? I mean, all the commands are
important, but which one should we follow more than all the rest of them?
They asked. The Pharisees themselves debated this question. Different
rabbis had suggested different answers to the question. What's
most important? Jesus says there actually is a right answer to
this question. The right answer is Deuteronomy
6, 5. And then he quotes it to them in verse 37. Look there. Jesus said to him,
what's the greatest commandment? You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind. This is the great and foremost
commandment. Well, the Pharisees were looking
for Jesus to say something controversial. They failed here. This particular
commandment that Jesus said is the most important might be the
command that was most on their tongues for the life of an everyday
Jew. These Jews, they recited this verse and the one that came
before it every morning when they got up and they recited
this verse again when they went to bed at night. Every time a
Jew went to the synagogue, the service began with this verse.
When in prayer, a pious Jew would wear these words strapped to
his forehead. They had these little leather boxes, and they
would tie them to their heads, and inside the box would be these
words. And also, the words that Jesus is quoting here, these
words were written on the doorposts of their houses, they would write
them on their gates. I mean, these words were everywhere
in the life of an ordinary Jew. What are the words Deuteronomy
6, 4, and 5? It goes like this, quoting from
the Old Testament, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord
is one. You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
might. So in quoting this as the most
important commandment, Jesus is telling them, hey, listen,
the command that you hear and use the most often, that's the
most important one. Love God and love him above all
else. He says, love him with all your
heart and all your soul and all your mind. What's the difference? Why does Jesus say heart, soul,
mind? Well, all three of these words,
it refers to the same thing. Heart, soul, and mind is all
referring to our inner person, who we are on the inside. But
they have slightly different emphases. The word heart refers
to who you are on the inside, who you are. It's like your identity. And we're to love God from our
very identity, from the core of who we are. The word soul
includes a person's emotions. It's used in scripture when Jesus
was in the Garden of Gethsemane weeping, shedding drops of blood
in his grief. He said, my soul is deeply grieved.
My soul is grieved to the point of death. So our soul is the
seat of our emotions. Other places a person's soul
is described as being well-pleased or their soul is described as
being at rest And so Jesus says if you're happy love God out
of your joy And if your heart is ripped apart with grief in
that moment when you're torn apart inside love God from your
grief Love God with your heart and your soul your mind One Greek dictionary says that
the word mind has to do with understanding, reasoning, thinking,
and deciding. And so with our thoughts, we're
to love God. When I'm focused in thinking
about something important, I'm to love God with those thoughts.
When my mind is wandering, I'm to love God with those thoughts. If I set my mind to something,
if you have goals and dreams, we're to love God with those
goals and those dreams. What's Jesus say? What's he mean
when he says, love God with all your heart and all your soul
and all your mind? What he's saying is that with
everything that you are, with what you feel and think and believe
and decide and hope for and long for, all of these things that
are you, love God with those things. That, Jesus says, is
the most important thing. There's no other command that
matters as much as that. Now, with love, Love is a thing
that prioritizes, and we recognize this. I love chocolate, chocolate
chip cookies. I love them. I love them so much
that I am willing to put on a pound or two every time my wife makes
a batch. I'll lose it later. It'll be fine, but it's worth
it, right? There's things I love more than chocolate chip cookies.
I love you guys more than cookies. I mean, if you came over and
there was a batch, I'd give you some of my cookies. Shows, I
mean, the level of concern I have for you as your pastor. Well,
let's say, and really, boy, I pray for all of you. We do as a staff,
as elders. But let's say that there was
a situation where one of you were in a crisis and my daughter
were in a crisis, right? She's in the hospital or something.
Where am I going to be? Well, I love you, but I'll send
Fred, right? Because I need to be with my
daughter. Love prioritizes. There was a time, a little over
20 years ago, Chris and I had been dating for months, and I
had just gotten to the place where this is the girl I want
to be with forever, right? But we hadn't ever... used the
word love with each other before, because I think we both just
kind of knew this was a big deal to say I love you. So it wasn't
something we had done. And so I used to go visit Chris,
it was like three and a half hours away, so I would have plans
for the visit, what I was going to accomplish. This visit I wanted
to accomplish telling her that I loved her, because I really
did. And so We went to our favorite place and it was under this tree
outside. It was as romantic as Mike Kalinske
can get. I tell Chris, hey Chris, I love
you. And Chris knew because we hadn't
used those words before. She knew that I didn't mean I
loved her like a chocolate chip cookie. What I was trying to
say was, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life.
I wanted to put her above all other people, so long as we both
shall live. And I was kind of hoping that
she would feel the same about me. I was saying all that in
those words. And Chris's response, I still
remember it, she said, thank you. And so then we left. And it was great. And I was worried.
We got together again the next day before I left back for school.
And then she told me she loved me. And she told me why she had
waited. She had decided that she didn't
ever want to, just in an emotional moment, tell somebody that she
loved them, like the guy she's going to be with. Like she wanted
to be well thought out. And I mean, I'd come prepared,
but she didn't know this was coming. And so she went home and prayed
and said, Lord, should I go tell him I love him? Right. So it
was a big deal. Okay, now the Lord, He commands
us to love Him. What kind of priority are we
supposed to put on our love for God? Are we to love God like
a cookie? Are we to love Him like a friend?
Like a daughter? Like a husband? According to
the Lord, we are to love Him above all other loves. We're to love Him with all our
heart and all our soul and all our mind. And so here's a question
for each one of us. Do you love God above all other
loves? This is the most important thing
about each one of us. Do we love God above all else? You know,
that's the only way that God will enter into a relationship
with you. We have to put Him first because that's where He
belongs. If we're to know God at all, we must love him above
all others. Hold your finger here in Matthew
and turn over to the next book, to Mark. Mark, of course, tells
the same story as Jesus, but he includes some things that
Matthew doesn't and vice versa. In Mark, when we finish this...
conflict between Jesus and the disciples in the temple. Mark goes and he tells this story. Matthew doesn't tell it, but
I think that Mark intends for this to be an illustration of
what Jesus has just said about love. So we're in Mark chapter
12. Look over at verse 41. Mark 12,
41. This happens right after the conflict in the temple. Mark 12, 41. And Jesus sat down
opposite the treasury and began observing how the people were
putting money into the treasury. And many rich people were putting
in large sums. A poor widow came and put in
two small copper coins, which amount to a cent. Calling his
disciples to him, he said to them, truly, I say to you, this
poor widow put in more than all the contributors to the treasury.
For they all put in out of their surplus, but she out of her poverty
put in all she owned, all she had to live on. Here's a widow. She has no husband. She has very
little income. All she has to her name is two
small copper coins which amount to a cent. But this widow loves
God with all her heart and all her soul and all her mind. The
Lord is first for her. And so she's come to the temple
this day and everyone's putting in these great offerings and
she can't participate in that, but she loves the Lord and she
wants to worship him. And so she does what she can.
She takes all of her money. She takes her two copper coins
and she puts them in the offering and nobody else notices except
for the Lord. The Lord sees her love and he's
pleased because she's done what he wants. She's loving him with
all her heart and her soul and her mind. American Christians,
what do we do now? Here's what we should start with.
Love the Lord your God above all else. Boy, has your heart
been uneasy? Have you been angry? I think
a lot of us have experienced those emotions, if not everyone.
But what's going on there? Could it be that for some of
us we've put something else or someone else in a place where
we're putting them up with God and we're loving them at that
level? If that's the case, we ought to take that thing, that
other love that's too high, right, and put it back in its rightful
place and love the Lord our God above all else. Now, if we're going to please
God in our lives, there's not just one thing that we must do.
The question that was asked of Jesus, what's the most important
command? And boy, Jesus answered that perfectly, right? Now we
know the answer. What's the most important command
was to love God with all that we have. But if you're going
to boil down how to please God with your life, you can't stop
there. If you want to know how to please God in the most simple,
basic form, you have to have two commands in your head, not
just one. And so Jesus doesn't just stop with answering the
question. He says, okay, but there's something else you need
to know. Okay, there's another command. There's two great commands. And the second one is this, love
the person next to you as much as you love yourself. Love the
person next to you as much as you love yourself. Look at verse
39, back in Matthew chapter 22. Matthew 22, 39. He's just said this is the great
and foremost commandment. Now, verse 39, the second is like
it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments
depend the whole law and the prophets. Verse 40 literally
reads on these two commandments, hang the law and the prophets.
It's like all the rest of the Old Testament commands are hanging,
they're suspended from these two. You cannot keep any of the
other commandments if you fail to keep these two. Maybe we could
picture it like a door on hinges. Okay, so this door is obeying
God, it's pleasing Him with your life. And this door of obeying
God and pleasing Him, it swings on two hinges. The hinges are
loving God with all that you are and loving your neighbor
as yourself. And if we have those two things,
then we can, there's other things to do, specifics, right? But
if we've got those two things, we can please God and we can
obey Him. But if we lose one of those two, either one, then
that door won't open. We can't obey God. We can't please
Him unless we've got these two things that all the rest of God's
commands hang upon. Love the Lord your God above
all else and love the person next to you as much as you love
yourself. See, God loves people. And so if we truly love him,
we must love the people that he loves. God loves sinners. And if we truly love him, we
must love the sinners that he loves. God loves the people who
hate him and resist him and blaspheme him. And so if we are to love
God, we must love the people that hate and resist and blaspheme
our God. as much as he loves them. The
Bible makes this clear many places. One of them would be 1 John 4,
verses 20 and 21. If someone says, I love God and
hates his brother, he's a liar. For the one who does not love
his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not
seen. And this commandment we have
from him, sorry about Jesus, this commandment we have from
him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
Now, we try to get out of this. This is what the Pharisees did.
This is what we want to do. We want to say, well, who's my
brother and neighbor that I have to love? I mean, surely my neighbors
are the people that are kind to me and that love God and are
fighting for good things and, you know, people that share my
convictions. Those are the people, I'll love them. That's my brothers,
my neighbors. But Jesus has made this very clear already in Matthew.
Your neighbor is whatever person you come into contact with. So
if you're on social media and some person makes a comment there
and you see it, that commenter is your neighbor. Maybe you know
them in real life, maybe you don't, but it's a person. You're
interacting with them, that person now becomes your neighbor. If
you're watching TV and there's somebody on the screen speaking,
maybe there's an actress on the screen acting, you are to love
them, love her as God loves her. Maybe sometimes that means I've
got to turn the screen off because I have love for this person.
Maybe you're listening to the radio and there's someone speaking.
They're quoting somebody's speech or there's a commentator on there.
Well, that's a person and now I'm interacting with them and
so God is calling me to love that person as I love myself. Any person that I come into contact
with in any way, whether virtually or in person, that person now
is my neighbor because I'm interacting with them. I've come into contact
and so this is the person that I am to love as much as I love
myself. Say, well, how much do you love
yourself? Well, you love yourself a lot.
You love yourself a lot. How do I know that? Well, when
you have needs, you meet them for yourself, right? If you have
something that you want and you can get it, you get it for yourself.
If you have something that you want and you can't get it, you
feel sorry for yourself, right? Because we just naturally love
ourselves. It's assumed in the Bible that
this is there. In fact, we all naturally love
ourselves too much. We all naturally love ourselves
too much. The essence of sin is disordered love, right? And
so if I'm loving myself more than I'm loving you, I'm sinning.
If I'm loving myself more than I'm loving God, I'm sinning. And we all do that. Do you know
that the Bible never commands a person to love themselves?
You're not going to find on the pages of scripture, what you
need is to love yourself more. It doesn't ever show up. It's
interesting, it's because it contrasts to our culture. In
our culture, we believe that, like, you have to love yourself. Like, that's the basis of a healthy
life, is a self-love. But that is not an emphasis you'll
ever find in Scripture. Now, I'm not saying don't care
for yourself. I'm not saying don't sleep, don't
eat, don't rest, right? You should do those things. I'm
certainly not saying you shouldn't take to heart what God says about
you. God says he's made you in his
image. He says that he loves you, right? Those things are
real and we ought to cherish them. But when Jesus is Talking
about how to please him how to live a life that pleases him
Basically, the idea is this to please God take your eyes off
of yourself and focus on these two things Love God with all
your heart and love that person whoever it is that you're interacting
with Verse 37, you shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This
is the great and foremost commandment. And the second is like it, you
shall love your neighbor as yourself. Brothers and sisters, we just
finished an election season. I read that the two parties just
spent $14 billion trying to get the people into office. And I
don't know, I mean, I didn't watch all $14 billion of political
ads, thankfully. During a certain season, it seemed
like most of it was coming our way, right? But I don't know
about you, most of the ads that I saw weren't, here's why this
idea for governing the nation is better than this idea, right?
That's not the way the ads come, is it? What were the ads coming
to me, the ones I was seeing, they were all saying, you can't
trust this person. You shouldn't like this person.
Right? It's as if we just had $14 billion
of marketing thrown at us, mostly seeking to motivate us to mistrust
and hate one another. And the money spent was effective. There's so much mistrust and
hatred in our nation now, it boils out and it spills out everywhere. And so for Christians, it's a
good time for us to stop and check our compasses. Okay, what's,
Lord, what's true north for us? Well, true north for us, according
to our Lord, is to be committed to love. Now, I agree, and I
don't want to downplay this, I agree that we are surrounded
by enemies. There's enemies of the gospel, there's enemies of
the Lord all around. But the enemies that surround
us are evil spirits. Satan and his demons are our
enemies. But listen, the people that Satan is using Those people are not our enemies.
Satan is our enemy, but the people that Satan is using, those people
are not our enemies. Look here at Ephesians chapter
six. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against
the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this
darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly
places. And we saw this in Sunday school
today. There are going to be some people that view us as enemies
because we love God first. We're committed to his word.
And so they're going to treat us like enemies. And there are
some people probably are going to come after us and they're
coming after us to try to hurt us and take away the things that
are ours. But as they're coming after us,
we ought to greet these people with love. You know, I don't
think in from scripture that there's one person that's living
that we ought to treat as an enemy You go read 2nd Timothy
and it's talking about these people that God that Satan is
using in the world to hurt God's Causes and it and it says of
them that they've been held captive by Satan to do as well So our
enemy our enemy is the evil one the people that are doing his
work. Those aren't our enemies. They're captives These are the
people we want to love The two great commandments that God gives
to us are not love God and crush evil. It's love God and love
your neighbor as yourself. So I, my prayer for us in 2021
is that in our every interaction with every person, whether it's
online or in person, that all of these interactions that we'd
be marked by love. And I'm praying that in 2021, God would send
us out in love. Like you say, what can I do?
Like everything's falling apart and it's so horrible. Like, what
can I do? Well, here's, I think, what God gives us to do. Are
there some folks that are hurting that you could go and help? Are
there some folks that don't know Christ that you could go and
reach out to? Well, here's, boy, here's something
to do. I think this is what God is calling us to do. He's calling
us to love. So, American Christians, what do we do now? Love the Lord
above all else. Love the person next to you as
much as you love yourself. Okay, the second question, what do
we do? Second question is, where do we look for hope? Where do
we look for hope? Listen, if you're looking for
hope, don't fix your eyes on Joe Biden. If you're looking
for hope, don't fix your eyes on Donald Trump. If you're looking
for hope, fix your eyes on the son of David. Okay, look, we're
jumping back into our passage here. So the Pharisees and then
the Sadducees and now the Pharisees again, they tried to trap Jesus.
Here's Luke's summary of what happened next after all these
traps failed. They're trying to trap him and
he gives this profound truth. Even his enemies are like, whoa,
that's good, right? Some of the scribes answered
and said, teacher, you have spoken well. For they did not have courage
to question him any longer about anything. But since Jesus has
them all gathered together, he wants to take the opportunity
to teach them something. And really he's still answering
their question, by what authority do you do these things? And so
he does it by asking them this question. Look at verse 41, Matthew
22, 41. Pharisees were gathered together.
Jesus asked them a question. What do you think about the Christ?
Whose son is he? They said to him, the son of
David. This is a no-brainer. If you read the Old Testament,
whose son is the Messiah? What's the son of David? It's
not hard for the Pharisees. You know, in the temple, they
kept detailed genealogical records. In AD 70, when it got destroyed,
they lost a lot of that, but it was so important to the Jews,
they would keep records for everybody in the temple. And so, for sure,
the Pharisees pulled Jesus's file, right? I guess he's claiming
to be the people as he's coming to the city. They're saying Hosanna
to the son of David They're like, we'll see about son of David.
Well, if it checks out when he is the son of David by his through
his father and his mother Joseph and Mary So they can't deny that
Jesus is a son of David. They don't want to admit that
he's the son of David Jesus wants to say more What he wants to
say here and what he's gonna say next is, I'm not just the
son of David, but I'm also the son of God. He claims more than
they asked. Look at verse 43. He said to
them, okay, then how does David in the spirit call him Lord?
Saying the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I
put your enemies beneath your feet. Jesus here is quoting Psalm
110. You look it up in the Old Testament,
it goes this way, it's the Psalm of David. Now this whole Psalm
110, if you look it up and read it, it's all about the Messiah.
There's gonna be the son of David, and he's gonna come, he's gonna
rule over the nations. That's the subject of Psalm 110. It
starts off with God speaking to the Messiah. God says at the
beginning of Psalm 110, to the Messiah, he says, sit at my right
hand. But what Jesus points out here
is the first part of this. Okay, so it's the Psalm of David,
David's writing it. The Lord is God. God says to my Lord,
this is the Messiah. Now, Jesus asked him a question.
He says, well, listen, if the Messiah is David's son, then
why does David call him my Lord? I mean, that's not the way I
normally talk to Ethan and Luke, like my Lord, it's time to get
up for breakfast. No, that's not how that works
in my house. It seems like it'd be wrong, right? Why would David
refer to his far-off descendant as my Lord, Jesus asks. And while we're at it, since
we're highlighting how high this person is, first David calls
him my Lord and then God seats him at his right hand. Like who
is this that God himself is going to seat him at his right hand? Jesus asked them, verse 45, if
David calls him Lord, how is he his son? The Pharisees have
no idea how he's, why the Messiah, why David would call him my Lord.
They say, verse 46, nothing. They say, no one was able to
answer him a word. See, the Pharisees, they viewed
the Messiah as just David 2.0. Like, David in the old time,
boy, he defeated Goliath and those Philistines and he set
his people free. And so they're thinking, Messiah
2.0, when the Son of David comes, he's gonna defeat Rome and set
us free. Here we go, round two, it's great. But Jesus says, no,
you're missing something in the prophecies. The Son of David
is more than just another human king. The Son of David to come
is the Son of God. The Pharisees didn't get it.
A few days, Thomas got it. He saw Jesus alive from the dead.
Remember what Thomas said? He said, my Lord and my God. Right? This is no mere man. John would later explain in his
gospel who this Jesus was. In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God and the Word was God. This Jesus
is our hope. Look there at verse 44. There's
two phases to Jesus' exaltation that's highlighted here, and
this is important to note. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at
my right hand. Do you know that's where Jesus
is right now? If you picture Jesus, where do you picture him?
Do you picture him in the manger? Do you picture him on the cross? That's
not where he is. Jesus right now is sitting at the right hand
of God. Hebrews 10, 12 says it. He, having
offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the
right hand of God. I think it's important for us
to note, though, is this where the story ends with Jesus? Like,
He died for our sins, He rose again, He's seated at the right
hand of God, great! No, Jesus is sitting at the right
hand of God, but there He's waiting. See the second, verse 13 here?
Now he's seated at God's right hand. He's waiting from that
time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet.
See, Jesus isn't done with his plan. He's exalted. He's in a high position. The
angels are praising him, but the world doesn't know how glorious
he is. We know a little bit of it by
faith because we know him and we believe these things we read,
but the angels can see it and someday the world will see it.
He's waiting until his enemies be made a footstool. How are
they going to be made a footstool? He's going to come and crush
them. Second Thessalonians one verse seven talks about this.
It says the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with his
mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those
who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of
our Lord Jesus. These will pay the penalty of
eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and
from the glory of his power when he comes to be glorified in his
saints on that day and to be marveled at among all who have
believed. There's a day coming. Jesus is
going to return from heaven. Where do we look for hope? That's
where we're supposed to look. I appreciate Caleb picking the
songs today. The last two songs, we're looking at Jesus return.
That's the hope that's held out to us in scripture. If you're
looking for hope, don't fix your eyes on Joe Biden. If you're
looking for hope, don't fix your eyes on Donald Trump. If you're
looking for hope, fix your eyes on the son of David, the son
of God. And really, this hope that we
know that Jesus is coming, he's gonna defeat evil, this is why
we can love instead of fighting. Because listen, if the triumph
of good in the world was dependent upon us fighting and winning,
then we better get our swords, people, But that's not how it
is. The triumph of good in the world
isn't dependent upon us fighting. Jesus is going to set it up when
he returns. He's waiting for the Father to send him. And until
that day when he comes, while Jesus is waiting to come and
defeat evil, he's made it very clear what he wants us to do.
While he waits and we wait, we're to love God with all of our hearts. And we're going to love other
people as much as we love ourselves. This is our mission that he sent
us on. Will you join me as we pray? God, if we thank you for
your word, and it really is like a compass to us, we can look
there and see north, and boy, just like it is when I'm in my
canoe in the wilderness, sometimes I think I'm going the right way,
I gotta stop and look and realize, oh, that's north. Lord, we thank
you that in this passage you've given us just very clearly what
we're to be about. We're to be about love, loving
all the people that we interact with. We're to be about loving
you above all. And we're to set our hope in
Jesus. We're to set our hope in Jesus, who has been exalted
and sits at your right hand, and one day will return in glory
to defeat evil, and we'll be part of that. So God, will you
give us people to love and busy us with that? Will you lead many
to Christ through us in this year? Will you help a lot of
people that are hurting? Find us and find our help as
we love, like you've called us to do. We pray these things in
Jesus' name, amen.
What Now for American Christians?
Series Matthew - Hulinsky
| Sermon ID | 117211610172620 |
| Duration | 36:03 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Matthew 22:34-46 |
| Language | English |
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