I apologize. All right, so verse 34. So with that in mind from 32 and 33, where Jesus is talking about the confession and the denial, he starts off here with this, do not think that I've come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. So when I opened up reading Isaiah chapter nine, And Isaiah 9 says, okay, he's the prince of peace. We believe in that God is a God of peace. He's a God of hope. He's a God of unity. And we think about the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, love, joy, peace, unity, long suffering, gentleness, meekness, kindness. And so this is one of the concepts, and I would say even one of the bedrock concepts of Christianity and of Jesus is that it's peace. We read the Christmas story, we read the nativity narrative, and it's peace on earth and goodwill towards men. And that's absolutely right. It's exactly what the angels pronounced over the shepherds and over the wise men and over everybody else that was there, or not there. And all that gets really convoluted with tradition. But it is indeed, it is peace and glad tidings and good news that born unto you in this day, in the day of, in the city of David in Bethlehem, is Savior, is Christ the Lord. So how does Jesus say, here, I have not come to bring peace? Is that a contradiction? A lot of people look for contradictions in Christian doctrine. They look for contradictions in the Bible. And this could be a place where they could point to saying, look, you say over here, he's peace, and he's all about peace, the Prince of Peace, and he brings peace. In fact, Jesus tells his disciples over in the Gospel of John, I give you my peace. But here he says, I have not come to. It's interesting is that we've talked about this the past couple of weeks. When we say, do not fear them. I tied that also into the passage over in Matthew chapter six of do not worry. And I told you guys about the phrasing in the language, the Greek language there, or that is the aorist subjective imperative, okay? And it's the idea of don't start. Don't start to fear. Don't start to worry. It's different than stop. So obviously with stop means you are already doing it or it's in the process of. The other way is don't start. And here in the beginning, Jesus is telling them how to think of his ministry, how to think of his coming, how to understand his purpose. And that's how we are to have, that should be the catalyst of us understanding who Jesus is and what he came to do. It's actually the idea of getting rid of or not having, not coming with these preconceived notions, as I mentioned, like universalism, or this idea that there's going to be, you know, this peace and harmony and butterfly kisses and everywhere is going to be happy, happy, happy, right? That's this preconceived idea of what is going to look like under Messiah, this preconceived idea of what's going to look like when the Redeemer comes. So Jesus is telling them, don't start down that path of your understanding of peace, of what you think peace means. Peace is a good thing, and we desire peace. And I think that, as I mentioned just a minute ago, it is one of the fruit of the Spirit. If you could be able to say, if you could be able to parse those out and single it, I think actually it's better understood as fruit of the Spirit where it's all together. It's a total package. But we know that the Holy Spirit brings peace. Believe what the idea, what Jesus is telling them is understand that there was hostility. There was and there is. There is hostility in the world. There's hostility already. This is what Jesus has to deal with. It's a purpose that Jesus came is because the world is a hostile place. In fact, the book of Romans tells us that the carnal mind is at enmity with God. The carnal mind is hostile towards God. The law of God wars against the sin in the flesh. Or rather, better to say, our sin in our flesh wars against the law of God, wars against what God has told us. There is hostility between our will and God's will. There's hostility between accepting that the only way to heaven is to know that I'm a sinner, and that my sins must be forgiven, and that it must be only through Jesus, and only Jesus. It's not Mohammed, it's not Buddha, it's not some kind of meditation routine, it's not anything like that. It's Jesus only, that Jesus died on the cross for sinners. And it's His blood, His sacrifice, His atonement. That's the only acceptable sacrifice that God says, this is good. This is what I accept for payment. That's what God accepts for payment for our sin is the blood of Jesus Christ. And the carnal mind, The human thinking, human pride, human will is resistant to that. In fact, for some people, as the Apostle Paul tells us, it's foolishness. The gospel is foolish. You're telling, so if you think about, if we break down Christianity in the Christian message, it's, so you're telling me that, okay, you believe in one God, but your one God has three persons who are distinct yet undistinkable, but they, okay, so you got three somethings up there, but they're one, and then those three ones send one of them to Earth. So he's the son, but then he becomes a man. So you believe that your God became a man, but he's still God and man, and then he died on the cross, and then he was buried and he rose again, and you have to believe in his blood that washes away your sin, otherwise you go to your hell. So that's how the message is foolish to people who don't have the Holy Spirit working in them, who don't accept that that's the truth, and that's what Christ has done for us. And that's the necessity. That's what God necessitates on behalf of those who will be saved. is that they repent and believe. So when Jesus says, I have not come to bring peace, but I've come to bring a sword, part of that sword, the idea of the sword is obviously it's a weapon, and it's a weapon of warfare, because Jesus indeed is doing war. He is doing battle. He is fighting. If you would, we're gonna come right back here to Matthew 10, but if you would, take your Bible and turn over to the book of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter four. And this is probably a memory verse for most of us. You guys probably have this memorized. Hebrews chapter four. Verse 12. Hebrews 4.12 says, for the Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. piercing even to the division of the soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account. The Word of God. The Word of God. The writer, he describes it as a living and active. It's quick. It is powerful. It is dynamic. It is this sword that divides asunder. Think about this as a scalpel. as a surgeon that has that scalpel and he's able to make those incisions and be able to open up the layers of the flesh and then be able to get into exactly to do, if you think about how they do open heart surgery, where they're able to precisely get to a particular valve in the heart and be able to isolate and be able to cut just that one spot. The precision that God's Word does is both like that scalpel and it is like a Scottish claymore. It is like a huge, huge sword that can just be able to annihilate an enemy in one blow and wreak havoc over the entire body. It smashes, but it also cuts. And the purpose of what this does is actually to expose you to you. It lays open my sin. It cuts through my callousness. It cuts through my hardness. It cuts through the things that I don't want to think about and think that I have failed and I have sinned. And it lays bare and exposed me to me, my weakness, my disease. It shows the cancer that's within me. And then it also shows me the remedy. And the remedy it shows is that I need to confess, I need to ask for forgiveness, I need to repent, and I need to believe that Christ is the hope and Christ is the answer. And that Jesus has saved me. It exposes us. It's what it talks about that being naked is the idea that it's opened. It's not covered up. It's not covered up. It is exposed. We see it, and God sees it. God knows, and we know. The scriptures also describe Jesus as the Word. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He is the Word. He is the wisdom of God, the knowledge of God. He is the manifestation of all that God is, and He has come here to bring this message of dividing asunder and bringing this division. So back over here in Matthew, in Matthew chapter 10, Jesus wasn't just trying to find a, to make a peace treaty. He wasn't trying to call a ceasefire, right? He wasn't saying, okay, hey, I know there's hostility, but let's just kind of like, let's figure out the lowest common denominator. Let's work out a negotiation. Let's figure out, hey, okay, you don't like that. I don't like this, but okay, let's meet in the middle somewhere, right? History is full of people who tried to negotiate with terrorists, people who tried to negotiate with tyrants, people who tried to negotiate their way out of hostilities when it was actually impossible to do so. Probably one of the most famous and most infamous examples of that was in the 1930s with Adolf Hitler and specifically with a British Prime Minister who at the time was, I believe, a man named Chamberlain. And he basically was compromise, compromise, compromise because many of those guys, many of the British Parliament and the French and the Dutch and the Germans and the Austrians and the Russians and Europe, lived through World War I, fought through World War I, which wasn't that long ago in their time. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they went through the harrowing experience that was World War I. And a lot of the guys that were the British Parliament and the ministers and the prime ministers Those guys had, literally, they had mud on their boots, blood on their trench knives. They knew that they didn't want to go through that again, and didn't want to send their sons to it, because that was the generation that was there. And so we could blame Chamberlain, and we could look at these guys saying, man, why didn't you see how bad Hitler was? Didn't you know what he was doing? He was reclaiming this land. He was making advances. He was going into Poland. Like, don't you just see how bad it was? I mean, now, obviously we look back at it now and say, oh yeah, obviously this is bad. But before it happened, sometimes you have to actually let the bad guy do the bad thing first before people can actually wake up and realize, oh, he's a bad guy and he's doing bad things. There was no compromising, there was no negotiating, there was no coming to a peaceful resolution with Hitler, with the Nazis. It had to take a man like Winston Churchill to say, we will fight. If it's in our streets, it's in the air, it's on the sea, we will fight and we will fight and we will fight. It took men, it took the Americans to say, we will fight. We are not going to allow this. People standing up and resisting against it. There had to be a fight to actually ensure peace. I read this, I came across this, Alexander McLaren's comment. He had preached a sermon on this passage. I thought this was a good summation of that. He says, He says, it's not enough to interpret these words as meaning that our Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of his coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace, but an immediate purpose is conflict as the only road to peace. Let me read that last sentence again. The ultimate purpose is peace, Jesus coming to earth ultimately will result in peace. Ultimately, we're talking about the Eschaton, we're talking about the Telos, we're talking about that end game, the end goal, thousands of years from the birth of Christ, whenever he comes back, And whenever he destroys all enemies, everything is defeated. And there's only going to be a new heavens and a new earth where we dwell with God forever and ever and ever in bliss and harmony and true peace. That's the ultimate goal. So the ultimate purpose is peace, but an immediate purpose, the immediate, When Jesus was born 2,000 years ago, and when he had his earthly ministry, his immediate purpose is conflict. Because that conflict is the only road that will lead to true peace. All right, so back here in our text, Jesus says, Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's enemies will be those of his own household. Wow, that doesn't sound great, right? That doesn't sound nice. In fact, it actually sounds rather contrary to Christian doctrine. It sounds rather contrary to what we understand as a family unit and a family structure. Man, we are told to raise our children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Raise them with the compassion of Christ. Teach your children to love God. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with your entire being and love your neighbor as yourself. This was known as the Shema. This was actually the intro into the Ten Commandments. So when you look in Exodus, you look in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter five or chapter six, it's off the top of my head, that This is what the mothers taught their babies. The Hebrew mothers teaching their Hebrew children from ages 2, 3, 4, 5, before they send them off to kindergarten, or whatever Hebrews call kindergarten, that that God loves you, that He loves His people, and that you are to love your God. And you love your God, and you love your neighbor. So we are taught through a family structure, and that we truly believe that God works through families, and that God blesses families. And we wanna see that. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, because our families that are here are all homeschool families. We believe that that's a purpose, that's a good thing. And it breaks our heart to even think about the possibility that one of our children could raise up to be a God-heading heathen, that we could have siblings. We could have brothers and sisters, our biological siblings, that we could be at war with them because of our position in Christ Jesus. That God, by His grace, has saved me, but this, my brother over here, is not saved. He is an unregenerate person. I'm using it as a hypothetical he or brother. It's a sad reality. It's a sad reality to think that we would have to make the choice between Christ or my child. But indeed, it's a reality. This is what Jesus, when we understand truly who Christ is and truly how wretched I am, and in my need for Christ, and the Holy Spirit does a radical transformation within me, and that I become a genuine, true follower of Jesus, I am going to be at odds with the world. I am going to be at odds with those who I used to align with. I spent several minutes talking about the hostility, about the carnality, about the enmity that the carnal mind, the natural mind, the unsaved person has against Christ. Jesus said that they hate me, so they will hate you. And we have to be willing to accept that because we love Christ, the world will hate us. This is a tough passage. This is a tough, very, very tough. Verse 37 says, the person, or he who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it. And he who loses his life for my sake will find it. This is tough. Is this teaching that we have to hate our parents and actually to be a Christian? Is this teaching that we have to hate our kids to actually be a follower of Jesus? Well, no, because if we're supposed to love our neighbor, which we are, That's a commandment, right? We love our neighbor. Your closest neighbor is your spouse, is your kids, are your parents. We are to love them, but we cannot love them more than we love Christ. We have to have Christ be what Jesus says we accept as true. We cannot allow our children to be unexposed to the truth of the gospel, to the truth of the law, to the truth of God. We must tell them that this is what God says and that you must be born again. There has to come a time where we will make a choice to reject a family member's stance, to reject their lifestyle, to reject and even condemn their choices because we are choosing Christ. That is actually sometimes translated and sometimes rightfully so and other times wrongfully so, but sometimes that word idea of hate We look at love and hate. Sometimes it's rightly translated as accept or reject. So love is equivalent to accept. Hate is equivalent to reject. You are making a conscientious choice of affection towards Christ, and you are choosing Christ over your allegiance to your family, to your family member. That is difficult. It is very, very, very, very tough. There's the story, one of the stories of Charles Spurgeon, and Spurgeon's mom, she was a Christian. And Spurgeon was still a teenager and he had not been born again, he had not accepted the gospel, he had not accepted Jesus. And Spurgeon relays a time when his mother, I'm kind of paraphrasing it here, but that she was there wagging her finger in his face and saying, Charles, I will stand on the side of Christ and condemn you to hell as he does. And he said that was one of the most sobering and harshest statements he could have heard coming from the woman that he knew. He knew his mother loved him. He knew of the sacrifices that she had to do to keep him alive, and that she had true affection for her son. But to say that I will align with Christ on the side of judgment, and that I will be in agreement with Christ when He condemns you to hell. It was a shocking and sobering reality check for him. It's interesting that if you are familiar with the story of his conversion, he ends up, He ends up wandering around and he's in this, it's in London, it's cold, it's a wintry night, and he ends up stumbling into this little chapel, and it's a gathering of believers, kind of like this, and there's a handful of people in there, and he comes in, and a preacher sees him, because obviously there's a few people in there, and he says the man starts preaching the gospel from the pulpit directly to him. individually to him, calling him out, calling him specifically to repentance. And that was the night that the Lord chose to bring him to conviction, and that he submitted, he surrendered, he confessed his sin, and he accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. It's kind of funny, it's later on that, so he goes on and becomes a, he gets baptized, becomes a preacher, and becomes a well-known Baptist preacher in England. And we're talking about him, I'm talking about him now, over 100, almost 150 years since his passing, or 130 years since his passing. And another story he had with his mother is that, I believe his mother was, I think it was Methodist, I don't remember for sure, but she said, Charles, I pray for you to be saved, I didn't pray for you to become a Baptist. And he said, that is the goodness of our God is he always blesses more than what we expect. So, but we have this obligation to follow Christ when none others will. And it's the expectation that Jesus gives his disciples say, I have come to, yes, you will have peace. But before you have peace, there is going to be a sword and there's going to be a sword that's going to cut through you and it's going to open up your heart, expose your heart. And then from there, that's going to bring another division. And there's going to be a division between the believers and the unbelievers, between the Christ followers and the Christ haters. There's going to be a division between the sheep and the goats. Ultimately, there will be a judgment throne seat. There will be Christ sitting on the judgment throne. And there's going to be a place where he says, the sheep come into paradise, come into what I prepared for you. And then there's going to be a place for the goats. And he's going to divide the goats to go into that everlasting punishment. Jesus is telling them, I've come to do this. If you would allow me to look at one more passage. It's a parallel passage in the Gospel of Luke. And in Luke chapter 12. When I say parallel passage, it means that a lot of times we know that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they're giving the same details. They're telling us about Jesus. They're telling us about his ministry. They're telling us about the miracles that he did. They're telling us about the conversations that he had, the interactions that he had with people. And then sometimes they have a little bit of different details they add there. Sometimes they have it arranged in different order. Here, this is parallel passages. It goes along with, this is what Jesus said. Matthew tells it in chapter 10, and now Luke is gonna tell us here in chapter 12. Again, it's a parallel conversation that he's having with them. So in Luke chapter 12, if you notice in Luke 12, verse 22, He says, then he said to the disciples, therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor about the body, what you will put on. Life is more than food and the body is more of clothing. Okay. Verse 32. Let me jump down to verse 32. Do not fear, little flock, for it is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Now, verse 49. Let me jump down to verse 49. Verse 49 says, I came to send fire on the earth. If you know, if you're familiar with the Bibles, if you remember the gospel, or you remember what he talks about John the Baptist, we read about in the gospel of John, or excuse me, in the gospel of Matthew, we talk about John the Baptist, the other gospels talk about John the Baptist. That's one of the things that John the Baptist says is that, he says, John says, I indeed baptize you with water, but he who comes after me will baptize you with fire. Here he says, Jesus says, I came to send fire on the earth and how I wish it were already kindled, but I have a baptism to be baptized with and how distressed I am till it is accomplished. Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. From now on, Five in one house will be divided. Three against two, two against three. Father will be divided against son, son against mother, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. It's a parallel passage to what we read in Matthew. Luke adds this idea of the fire, that he's gonna bring the fire. So we have this image of the sword and the sword dividing and cutting away. We also have this image of the fire. And we know that God uses fire to purify, is to melt away the dross, to melt away that which is not good, not useful. It is a refining process. You will be tried through fire. You will have fiery trials, and it is going to refine you. It's obviously fire. It's hot. And there's times where it's gonna be rather unpleasant. Very much so, in fact. But ultimately, it's for your good. And ultimately, it will bring peace. where we come to have peace in Christ. But before we arrive at that peace, we must go through the fire. We must be put under the sword. But then he brings us to a point where we die to self, and then we are made alive again. And we have that resurrection. We have that resurrection. We are looking forward to the eschatological resurrection of our body. But you and I who have been saved by the grace of God, we have already experienced the resurrection of our spirit. We have already been born again, and we have already been raised to new life. And now we can walk in this newness of life. We can be at great peace with God because of Christ, but because of Christ, we will also then not really be at peace with other people. However, we are still called to bring the good news of peace and to bring the great gospel of Jesus Christ. who has glad tidings that there will be peace on earth when all will go through and submit unto him as Lord and Savior. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Oh, Heavenly Father, Lord, as we enter into this Christmas season and we think about the coming of Christ and the beauty of it is and how wonderful it is and the majesty of that, Lord, we also now are confronted with this reality that with the coming of Christ, it brought conflict and it still does bring conflict. Lord, we long for peace. But we know that there actually is a lot of hostility. But Lord, we thank you for Jesus. And we thank you that he did confront evil. And he still confronts sin. We thank you for the Holy Spirit who confronts sin in me. He confronts sin in us. That there is conflict. And Lord, I pray that that conflict though will cause us to draw closer to Christ and we would find our peace in Jesus and we would rest in his finished work for which he came to do. Lord, I thank you for our church. I think we can gather together and that we could together and collectively reflect on what Christ has come to do and what he has accomplished. Lord, I ask these in Jesus' name, amen.