There we go. Anyways, our verse of scripture that we've been working off of is Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 through 16. And actually, we've been going through the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount. We're going to continue to do that, although it's become painfully apparent that we may not get through the Sermon on the Mount. I was going to do kind of a rapid-fire thing this week where we kind of went through each of the, like, sections of the Sermon on the Mount and kind of did a bunch of stuff, but what I have found to be true is that trying to take the words of Jesus and to bring them out in a way that is clear and rapid is almost impossible because he's already done that. He's already laid it out that way. So, you know, I mean, if I really wanted to do that, what I would need to do is just read the words of Christ and then we would be done. And probably not a bad thing to do anyways, but... One thing that's interesting about Jesus is that he is the master of saying a whole lot with a very few words. I'm not sure how to get to a place where you can be like Christ and say just a heap of things in just three or four sentences. I mean, all of everything that he said is so packed with meaning, that it would be impossible to try and just take them and just kind of exposit them in a small, kind of concise way. So I'm gonna do the best I can to try and get through as much as possible and kind of hopefully at least, at the very least, lay out a methodology for you to be able to look at so that you can kind of build upon that if we don't get all the way through it, which we probably will not. So, this is our verse that we were looking at. You're the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a candle, put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick and giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. I'm gonna zoom through this review. If you have any questions about anything that we've talked about so far, there are six previous sermons that are on our website that you can go look at and listen to and kind of get the synopsis of what we've been talking about in detail. So, that'll help you out. But as a way of quick review, you think maybe it's the batteries? Anyways, I need the next slide. By way of review, we talked about identity, who are we? And we arrived at this idea that we are ambassadors of Christ, that 2 Corinthians 5, verse 20 makes it very clear that who we are, we are representatives of Christ, not only of Christ himself as the person, but Christ as the ideals that he promoted. And then if you look further into Matthew, at the end of Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, He tells us that if we will hear and do these sayings, we will be like a wise man that builds his house upon a rock. And if you remember the old junior church song, if you've been in junior church any period of time at all, you'll remember that song where the wise man builds his house upon a rock and the rain came down and the floods came up and the house stood strong, right? The idea is that if we hear and do the things that Christ has instructed us to do, that we would be like that man that builds his house upon a rock, and if we're looking to build a city that is set upon a hill that is a light to the world out in the darkness, then it stands to reason that we would need to know what types of foundations that we should build those on. And when he made this statement in Matthew chapter seven of verse 24, that if we will hear them and do them, what he was talking about very specifically was the Sermon on the Mount in chapters five, six, and seven of Matthew. It makes sense that we should value what Christ was trying to tell us in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. It's absolutely essential that we understand that. And what was interesting is, is when I asked, you know, how many of us know what's in the Sermon on the Mount? And a good portion of Christians just don't know what's in the Sermon on the Mount. Yeah, it's still not working. So give me my next slide, please. So, so far what we have discussed is Matthew 5, verses 2 through 12, some of the other stuff that we've already talked about, and then a discussion on Jesus Christ completing the law by fulfilling the sacrifice of the law. That's a really interesting topic. You need to really pay attention to that one because That's really foundational to who we are as believers, the idea that Jesus Christ paid the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. He was the fulfillment of the law, which is why we no longer need to do sacrifices now. The reason that I'm not standing up here today sacrificing a lamb to cover your sins is because Jesus Christ came and sacrificed himself as the lamb slain before the foundations of the world. to do that for you. It's done forever. It's done for all people. There's no need to sacrifice any more animals or anything. Hebrews goes into telling us that it's not by the sacrificing of bulls and goats, but by the sacrificing of Jesus Christ that we are redeemed unto God. And so, that's an important piece to understand and remember as we look back at the blessedness of or how we live a happy life. And that's kind of what the Beatitudes were all about. They were giving us a way of looking at life, a philosophy for approaching life, if you will, with five character traits and three ways to deal with different types of hardships in our life. And so these are kind of the things that we've been through so far. And then today, we come to a point, give me my next slide, please. We come to the next part, where, nope, next one, please. Thank you, no, this is, yeah. Give me the next slide. This is not the right slide set. We're back on six again somehow. Thanks, Brandon. You're the greatest. All right, well, somebody hand me a Bible. Thank you, sir. You need this? Good answer. We just have to switch gears here and go old school. All right, so let's see here, where am I at? Man, this is a sweet Bible. All right. So today we're in Matthew 5, verse 21, and I'll just read the entirety of it because There's going to be some assumptions that are going to be made about this verse of Scripture. There's also going to be some ideas that get created as to what the Scripture applies to. As is the case, most of...oh, here we are. This is the right slide set. I don't need this anymore. Thank you, sir. I mean, I don't need that particular book this time. All right. So, as is the case with a lot of scripture, a lot of times it's taken and we read it quite literally, which is kind of what people have been taught to do, especially if you come from more fundamentalist circles. You've been taught over the course of time to take the Bible very literally, and that serves you well. You should take the Bible. as quite literally the Word of God, because it is quite literally the Word of God. However, the interesting thing about Scripture, when you're learning Scripture, you're studying Scripture, a lot of times if you take things very literally that are written in the Scripture, like extremely literally, A lot of times you end up misinterpreting it because you haven't taken into account context, you haven't taken into account the use of metaphor or analogy, you haven't taken into account the translations and the difficulty of translating from Greek and Hebrew into English. And a lot of times those translations are pretty unfortunate for us because they were translated by men that were translating it into a certain time period, which is why, like, when you see verses of scripture, say, for instance, where Jesus Christ is talking about the church, right, you might say, Well, you know, if you are, one of the most famous ones is the whole verse on the offense, like if you, at the very end of it, you know, if you have to go take it to the church, right? Well, that's how it's interpreted in most versions of the scripture. However, you gotta think about it contextually, right? If Jesus Christ were to stand before a group of Jews that have no concept of the church and say, hey, look, if you have an issue with each and you can't resolve it, take it to the church. Okay, well, that's great, Jesus, what's the church? What do you mean, what is that, right? And so, taking it from the context of the translators and then putting it into the context of the Jews, oftentimes you find out that that language doesn't always meet up. Does that make it wrong? Absolutely not, it just means that that translation needs to be understood a little bit more intricately. So just reading through a passage, that's why the Bible tells you to study to show yourself approved, because cursory reading oftentimes is not enough. And it oftentimes can lead you into contextual error if you're not very careful. And so, you have to be very careful when you're reading these things that you understand the context, that you understand all the translational issues that might be arising. And I say issues because it's an issue for us. If we were to take that and we were to translate it in our vernacular, it might be a lot different than translated in, say, for instance, the King James vernacular, right? Because a lot of words are different. A lot of things change. Semantics are different. Language evolves. The English language is evolving on a daily basis, and so keeping track of that, you have to understand these things. And by no means am I saying that the Bible is not the literal word of God. It is the literal word of God, but built within that literal framework is context, metaphor, analogy, poetry, Creativity, you have to understand that. So when you're reading through a psalm and he's talking about gardens and flowers and lilies, or like when you're reading through the gospel and he's talking about lilies toiling in the field or spinning in the field. Guys, lilies don't literally spin, okay? That's not a thing they do. They grow, they bloom, they don't go. So to take that literally is very weird. But that being said, that happens. And so we need to understand this scripture from all of those different contexts because there's gonna be some things that we're gonna see that are gonna be confusing if we don't understand fully what Jesus is talking about. So it starts in Matthew chapter 5, 21. You have heard that was said by them of old time that thou shalt not kill and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. One thing to understand about this right off the bat is when we use the word kill in the context of Levitical law, we're not talking about just ordinary killing. We're talking about murder with intent. We're talking about taking someone's life for selfish reasons. We're not talking about a person who might defend themselves. We're not talking about in cases of war. We're not talking about a lot of different instances. We're not talking about going out and killing a cow because you want a burger, right? Okay, so this is... a place where people have taken scripture, they've pulled it out, they've built a context around it that suits their lifestyle. You know, if you were a vegetarian, you might use this verse of scripture to prove that you should not kill animals to eat them, right? So there's all kinds of things that you can do if you wanna pull things out of context to utilize them, but you have to understand, we're talking about Levitical law. Christ is reminding them of very specific Levitical statutes. You cannot kill anyone. And when he says this, he's reminding them of the statute, and that statute is massive. You know, he's not only referring to the Levitical law where it states that thou shalt not kill, you know, in the Ten Commandments and some of the prohibitions that are written in the Levitical law, he's also referring to the laws that were created to help people to follow the law that God created, which would be the laws that the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes have created over time, the religious leaders have created over time. So he's telling them, you know that it is wrong to murder someone. You've been told this from your youth. And the reason that he says that from times of old is because all Hebrew men went to school with the rabbis, right? They all sat in front of the rabbis and they were taught by the rabbis, the law, the Old Testament, the prophets. So they were reciting these things from their youth. This is not something that a Jew would be unfamiliar with. He's just reminding them, you've heard, you know that it is wrong to murder people. which is a good thing, right? I mean, if you are a moral people, probably not a good idea to murder people, unless you're a moral relativist, and then we could get into that conversation if you wanted to, but it's complicated and weird and strange to believe that murdering people might be right because you live in a culture that says that it's right, so it's morally relative to that culture, and yeah. It brings up an interesting thought, actually, about, and this is a thought that I'm struggling with even today, because a lot of the anger, a lot of the animosity, a lot of the hatred that you see in our world today is surrounding political ideology. And politics, people will always be passionate about politics. It doesn't matter what generation that you live in. You know, it used to be that generations before us, they just didn't talk about politics. That was just kind of the rule, right? If you got around a group of people, you just didn't talk about politics. In fact, I was listening to a radio podcaster one time, and he was talking about how they had some friends, and they were friends with these people their whole lives, and he didn't even know that they were religious for like the first 10 years of their friendship, because they just never talked about religion. They never talked about politics. It's not something that they discussed at the dinner table with friends. Well, that has changed significantly, hasn't it? Because that seems to be all that we do talk about is politics. Whether that's because we're inundated with it on a regular basis, you turn on your TV, the 24-hour news cycle has made it so that we are constantly, constantly being input with conversation pieces about politics and about the way that politics are done. You know, how do you draw the line between when it's right to discuss politics and when it's not right to discuss politics, and should a church be involved in some sort of politics, and should the church be involved in the discussion of politics? And we've been through this before, and trying to find your footing in that is like walking in a minefield oftentimes, because there's all kinds of different... kind of avenues that you have to think about. There's legal avenues, there's moral avenues, there's theological avenues, there's all these different things that you have to think about when you're trying to determine whether or not you should be involved with that. But I think ultimately, in the context of what we're talking about here, the thing that we have to be concerned about is if we are engaging in any types of politics, if we're engaging in any kind of moral discussion, we have to be very careful and aware of our own hearts when we're doing that. because the worst thing that we can do is when we start disagreeing with people, we start kind of getting into these conflicts over politics and morality, the worst thing that we can do is begin to develop bitterness and hatred in our hearts for a specific type of people, and that's exactly what Jesus Christ is gonna be telling us here. And he does it by framing it in this idea that it's wrong to murder people, you know that. And if you do that, you're gonna be guilty of judgment. Judgment here defined as an opinion or decision concerning anything, especially concerning justice and injustice, right or wrong, condemnation, damnatory judgment, condemnation and punishment. So if you murder someone, you're gonna be held account legally. by the judicial powers that be at the time. That's just the way that it is written. And at this time, ultimately, that would have fallen to the Sanhedrin. Interesting thing about the Sanhedrin. They were formed in about 200 BC, and that's when they gained their powers of judicial kind of oversight. It's interesting because the Sanhedrin had the ability to condemn people, but it did not have the ability to put people to death. which is what they did to Jesus. But they didn't actually do that to Jesus, did they? You ever wonder why the Sanhedrin brought Jesus to the Romans to face execution? It's because the Sanhedrin lacked the authority to be able to do it, and they knew it. And so in order to be able to murder Jesus, what they had to do was is they had to give it to somebody else and convince them to be able to do it. And so that's the reason that Jesus had to go before the Roman authorities. If that were not the case, they could have done it themselves and the Romans would not have cared one way or another what they did. In fact, that was not uncommon for people to be stoned or for people to face Jewish judiciary executive powers because of some crime they committed. This was something that was still common in that day. They couldn't put Jesus to death, and so that's the same thing here, right? If you murder someone, you're going to go to judgment. You're gonna be facing condemnation, you're gonna be facing damnation, you're gonna be facing sentencing, you're gonna be facing punishment. However that's gonna go around. And so Jesus is reminding them of this Levitical law, but that's not the point of what he's trying to do here. Can I get my next slide please? It's way bigger than just a judicial conversation. Because what Jesus is going to do here is he's going to flip the script a little bit and he's gonna show you that God's law was created not as a legislative system, God's law was created as a moral system. And a moral system is way more powerful than a judicial system because morality has its roots in something deeper than politics. which is oftentimes why politics falls downstream from morality. If you have a certain type of moral inclination, you're going to lean towards one type of political kind of ideology over another. That's why a vast majority of Christians are Republican or conservative or even independent even. But not very many Christians tend to lean towards leftist ideology or liberal ideology. There's a reason for that. It's because our morality pushes us in the direction of the right as opposed to the direction of the left. Now, you have people that run the gambit, I'll admit that, but ultimately, your moral compass is going to determine your politics, and that's kind of how you get to this place where you get people that are kind of fighting about things, right? So he ups the game, he increases the ante, so to speak. And in Matthew chapter 5, 22, it says, but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment, and whosoever shall say to his brother, Rachah, shall be in danger of the counsel, but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Now this is a sermon in and of itself. This is what I was telling you about Jesus Christ because Jesus has this way of saying three things and then outlining out an entire thought process on a particular thing. And in this particular thing, he's talking about hatred, he's talking about anger. He's talking about how you react to a person and that part that we're looking at here is who we're reacting to and how we're reacting to them and what are the consequences. Now, if you take a very literal reading of the gospel and you read that and you say, well, if you say to a brother without a cause, you're gonna instantly assume that what he's talking about is your brothers and sisters in Christ, right? Unfortunately, contextually, that doesn't make any sense because that wouldn't be what Jesus would be telling them. How would he be telling them that, you know, you need to be not accusing or not being angry or having hatred towards your brothers and sisters in Christ because that wouldn't even have been a concept that the Jews were familiar with, so what is he talking about here? That word brother in the Greek can mean a lot of different things. It can mean brother as a paternal brother, it can mean a brother as given by association, or it can mean generally all mankind. And in this context, we're talking about all of mankind, and the way that we know that we're talking about all of mankind is because we're a city set on a hill so that the world may see our works and glorify our God because of them. We're not just talking about you and I. We're talking about the world in general. We're talking about people that are out in the world and how we view them and how we view each other and how we view all people. It's a big, wide brush that he paints here. It's not general or it's not specific. It's not targeted. which is kind of what we try to do with verses like this. We try to target them based on what we might be experiencing at the time, and that would be convenient, but that's just not the way that it works. So, as a general idea, we're talking about the manifestation of anger, and we're talking about the consequences of it. And when I say anger, I don't mean righteous anger. We're gonna talk about that. I'm talking about anger which leads to hatred. Next slide. So let's talk about manifestation and consequence number one. And that's the first part of the verse where it says, to be angry with a brother without a cause. Now, what does that exactly mean and what are we talking about as far as anger is concerned? Because anger is pretty natural. And what's interesting about this verse of Scripture is that it leaves something open. So, if you say that you cannot be angry with your brother without a cause, then what does that also say? That also says that if you have a cause, you are allowed to be angry with your brother. Right, so there's two different things at play here, just within that very same sentence. It's like there is a righteous anger that you can have, there is an unrighteous anger which you can have. The righteous anger which you have is a righteous anger that has a cause. This is completely legitimate. If there is sinfulness involved, if there is morality involved, if there is a breach of theology involved, if there is impropriety involved, there's all kinds of things that can be utilized to justify anger, but ultimately speaking, if you just are angry with someone and you don't have a reason to be angry with someone, then you have a issue. Now, this gets pretty deep, and I hope that I can lay it out in such a way that you understand it because, in reality, we could talk for a week on just that point because it's the...trying to determine what is a cause and what is not a cause is a challenge in and of itself. And then how do you demonstrate that anger? But I don't think that's the point of what Jesus is trying to say here, because he would have elaborated on that. What he's saying is, is that without a cause, you can't be angry with your brother. And you might say that, well, what kind of causes might I be angry with? Or what kind of things might I be angry about? Or what might I be angry with a person about? And, you know, I thought of some things, you know, abortion might be an instance where you can be angry about abortion. You might be angry that someone got an abortion. You might be angry because of all the children that are dying because of abortion. These are valid angers that you can have. You might be angry because of the people who are going into our school systems and in our libraries and trying to indoctrinate our children into LGBTQ kind of ideology. You might be angry about that. Fair enough. That's a moral issue. That's a sin issue. And there's no reason why you can't be angry about something like that because it is definitely morally wrong. So, yeah, or just in general, like sinful behavior. You know, you might look at the TV and see TV movies or shows and see sinful behavior in those and get angry about those things, right? Well, you know, that's fair. Those are things that you can be angry about because, obviously, Jesus was angry about some things like that. In fact, Jesus exhibited anger on a couple of occasions. And so, there is a right way to be angry about those things. And if you look through Scripture, it'll tell you to be angry but to sin not. Because there's a point where your anger turns into sin. Your anger can easily turn into hatred if you are not careful, and that's kind of what we're talking about here further on as we get on. But like an example of hating someone without a cause, right? So here we have the Jews. He's talking to the Jews. He might have said, well, your hatred towards the Samaritans is a hatred that doesn't have a cause, and so therefore it's sinful. Because the Jews hated the Samaritans, and that's a longstanding feud that they had for generations. Oftentimes, or when you read into it that Jesus went through Samaria to get to some place, you oftentimes see where people would question him because of his choices. Because they actually hated them, and you might actually bring that into focus in the world that we have by illustration, you might say that a person that hates a person because of their skin color, or hates a person because of their nationality, or hates a person because of the family that they were born into, or hates a person because of their economic status. These are completely, absolutely invalid reasons to be angry with a person. Which is, let's just be honest, the reason that a lot of churches failed in the early part of the Civil War. The support for slavery, the support for racism and racist behavior and hatred towards black people or people of color. What's the terminology now? I don't know. I've lost track. There is a way to be angry about something and there's a false way to be angry about something and being angry about something is justifiable if it's a moral wrong but just being angry with someone because they're black or being angry with someone because they're Saudi Arabian or being angry with someone because they're Chinese or whatever the case may be. You think that we live in the century that we live in, we wouldn't have these issues but I can tell you, from experience, just even in our own congregation, not with people in our congregation, but people in our congregation experience hatred because of their nationality on a regular basis. So, it happens. And furthermore, I think it's probably natural. I think it would be hard to live in a world where you didn't have that sin. In fact, it'd be hard to live in a world without sin because we don't have one. So understanding that as well, right? So the consequence of this type of anger, the consequence of having anger toward a person without a cause, that consequence is that you're brought before the judicial or smaller legislative body of your community. This would be The people that you would go to, like say for instance, if you had an offense with someone and you went to them and talked with them and they would not repent, so you took two witnesses and then they still didn't repent, so then you would take it to the church, right? That word church is the word ecclesia, which means a gathered group of people. Contextually, it wouldn't be the body of the church as we understand it because that didn't exist, so Jesus wouldn't have told them to go there. What he was explaining to them is you would go to the magistrates of your local community because you guys were angry either for a cause or with a cause, and you needed a legislative branch or a judicial branch to work that out so that it didn't go any farther. So that's what he's saying, it's like you're gonna have to go to those things. Not because you've murdered someone, but because you have anger without a cause that can lead to hatred, and hatred can lead to, these are things that kind of grow. Hatred and anger and those things, they can grow into infestations that cause us to do heinous, terrible things. So we're not just talking about physical murder, we're talking about more than that. So next slide. Manifestation number two, consequence number two. If you say to your brother, Raka, you're in danger of the council. Now, that word Raka to the Hebrews was a hateful, hateful term. It meant that you were worthless. It meant that you were empty. It meant that you had no value, that you were weak. It was a vile, terrible thing to say to someone. If you want to talk about hate speech laws, the Jews had them. In fact, some of the punishments for these things were bonkers, right? But the thing about when you start talking about calling people raka or saying to someone that they're worthless or they're invalid, What you're saying is, is you're saying to them that you have contempt in your heart for them, and that that is what I'm expressing. Because ultimately, there should be no reason that we should be calling out names of spite towards one another, towards anyone. And that becomes very difficult for us. Because again, it's not just directed at us, it's directed at the world in general. And I can't tell you how many times that I have been in communication with believers. And I've heard them say very spiteful mean things about a homeless person, or very spiteful mean things about a woman who has been through an abortion, or very spiteful mean things about someone who is a homosexual, or someone who is of a certain race, or someone who's of a certain ethnicity or nationality. You know, I don't know that maybe they didn't mean it in the way that they said it, Oftentimes, when you say something, you have no control over how it is perceived. In fact, that's not oftentimes, that's every time. So, what he's saying here is that, yeah, there is a way to be righteously angry about a thing, but to think negatively about a person and to say something negatively about a person is wrong. In other words, anger for sin is fine, hatred for people is not. Ultimately, that's what he's saying. There's no room in the life of the believer for hatred. There's just not. It's not written into the Bible anywhere. There's no mandate in Scripture for us to hate certain groups of people. And that's difficult because there are people in this world that probably are worthy of hatred, you know? Child molesters, for instance. You know, maybe they're worthy of hatred. People who are flippant about the murder of children and abortion. Maybe they're worthy of hatred, you know? But then again, the thing we have to understand as ambassadors of Christ, ultimately, is that Christ died for each one of those individuals. And when we start looking at people in the world and we start singling out groups and we start hating them because of one thing or another, then that is when we fall into this trap. I've done it, we've all done it. you know, especially when it comes to politicians, they're easy targets because they're public and sometimes they're easy targets because they just do dumb things, right? And so it's easy to kind of pick out a person that's in the public light as far as a politician is concerned and then to be able to make fun of them and call them names and that type of thing. You know, I suppose that you can do that without hatred in your heart and that's fine, I think it's very hard to do that and demonstrate that you don't have hatred in your heart, because when you start calling people names, it usually means that there's a consensus, that that usually means that you have some type of feeling towards them in your heart, and so it's usually a bad idea to make fun of people that you don't agree with, because then that says something about your heart, potentially. It might not but it definitely does and it definitely puts you in danger because what we're not supposed to be doing is we're not supposed to be calling people worthless and have contempt for people and be calling them weak and then actually just living our lives as if that's pretty normal and it's not. You know that green haired girl on TikTok that's confused about her sexuality and demands that you call her a him, how do you feel about that person? It would be easy to be angry and to have hatred and have spite towards them and Think about the things that they're trying to promote and think about the people that they associate with that are trying to promote these things to your children. It'll be easy to have hatred and look at them spitefully because of the way they look. Ultimately, though, we're not given permission to do that. The whole idea that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son means that you do not have the privilege to be able to determine whether a person is worthy or not. That's the province of a holy God. And a lot of these times, these last two in particular, what you find is that when we start casting judgment like this, what we're doing is we're actually taking ourselves and putting ourselves into the position of God. saying that, oh, you're worthless, right? And it even gets worse on the next page, right? So, in this case right here, this is so significant that if you do this, that you would be brought before the Sanhedrin, which is the larger group of people. I think it was like 72 people. And they would judge you for the crime of saying these hateful things about a person. And man, I'm telling you. It's a good thing we don't have that here. Probably one of the things about freedom of speech that people don't like the most is that people can say whatever they want to about a person and not be held legally in trouble for it. That's not the way the Jews thought for sure. Yeah, I mean, in the next iteration, the penalty for the next thing is pretty darn severe. So anger obviously is okay if it's built around a moral construct that God has given us. Anger's not okay if you have no reason to be angry with this person. And furthermore, if you have that anger and you're angry with a person for a certain moral thing, but then you turn out to have hatred for them and you call them worthless or call them whatever else, then that's a problem. It's the same problem that those religious folks who were protesting homosexuals got themselves into. I've said this before, but there was a fundamentalist church down south that was protesting a homosexual movement that was happening down there. And they had all kinds of just extremely hateful signs about and about calling them names. You know, I mean, it was just, it was an abysmal sight to see the spite and the vitriol that was pouring out of this group of people completely and absolutely without Christ in the midst of that conversation. A person that truly loved Christ would not have been out there calling them names. They would have been out there trying to give them the gospel of Jesus Christ to share with them that in spite of your sin, in spite of your failure, in spite of your faults, in spite of your confusion, Jesus loved you so much that he died for you on the cross of Calvary. That is the message that people that are condemned in sin already face. Do you really think that calling them a name or making fun of them or saying that they're worthless or useless or whatever the case may be, I mean, do you really think that that's any greater than the condemnation that they already face from a holy God who has told them that if they die without His Son, Jesus Christ, that they will be separated from Him for the entirety of eternity? There's nothing you could say that is any more condemning than that. And in fact, that thought should break us. Our thought for that girl on TikTok should not be, well, look at that stupid girl. How does she get in that position? I mean, what an idiot, right? Our thought should be, I wonder how I can deliver Jesus to her. How can I tell her about Christ? How can I show her that there is a heaven to gain and a hell to shun? It gets worse though. Let's go to the next slide. Because this one is like the worst one, and you wouldn't think that, because it doesn't sound that bad, right? Because it says, whoever shall say you fool, or thou fool, you're in danger of hell fire. I love the way that John Gill puts this. John Gill has a way of stating things kind of like very concisely, but very smart, right? Because what he's saying here is there's a manifestation, or there's a manifest gradation in the text from causeless anger in the breast or reproachful words and from thence to censurous judging of a man's spiritual and eternal estate, which is what is here condemned. People do sinful things. People do injurious things. People do awful things. But when we say, thou fool, what we're saying is, and what he's saying is, is that you're not worthy. You are reprobate, not worthy of the belief that I have. I mean, you might say that actually physically to someone, you know, if you see someone that's taken in a sin and you can go to them and say, you know what, you're destined for hell because of your situation. Well, you've made some really dangerous assumptions already. You've already assumed that they're not saved to begin with just because of the sin that they're committing, which is a problem because everyone that is in this room is a sinner. We should establish that right off the bat. There's nobody in this room, including myself, that is above reproach when it comes to sinfulness. We can strive to be above reproach, which is what we should all be doing, and we should all be trying to be an example, and as a pastor, I should be trying to be an example above and beyond that, but ultimately speaking, there's not a single person sitting in this room that can honestly look at another person in this room and say, I am without sin. Thank you. So we need to understand that right off the bat, because that will help us to put ourselves on the same level. which we are. But we're also making positions about this person's spiritual life and that's kind of what we're doing. It's like those signs, I'll go back to those signs, right? Queers go to hell was one of the signs. Right? Now you can take that and you can say it a lot of different ways and you can kind of make a lot of different statements with that semantically, but let's say, for instance, that you're saying that queers, because they are queer, they're going to hell. Well, is that true? Is that the one sin that condemns you to hell? I haven't read that anywhere. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that when any kind of sexual sin is mentioned in a list of things that are an abomination to God, there's a lot of other things that are an abomination to God. A lot of times lying is included with that. And so, if you are comparing someone that has a sexual sin and you say that they're worse than you or they're condemned or they're not worthy of Christ, then you're also saying that you aren't as well because everybody has lied at some point. So, It becomes problematic to begin to assume that people are not saved or are not worthy of salvation, which is what you're saying in that statement, you know, queers go to hell. Well, not necessarily. You're making an accusation that's not actually true. You don't know that. You're making an assumption that a group of people are going to go to hell because of their sin. If you're going to make an assumption that a group of people are going to go to hell for their sin, then pretty much every believer that's sitting in a pew somewhere today are going to hell because we all have sin. In fact, the Bible is very clear that we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. The only difference between you and a person Say, for instance, that is a homosexual and they are lost. The only difference between you two is that you are saved by the grace of God. That's the only difference. And your particular brand of sin, perhaps. There might actually be people in our congregation that are struggling with homosexuality as a sin. They don't wanna say anything about it because they're ashamed of it, but that's a possibility. especially your young people, you should be talking to your teens, guys, about these ideas because they're being inundated with it. If they're going to public school especially, you need to be having conversations with your kids on a regular basis about what this stuff looks like and what the biblical approach to it is. That being said, it's not our duty, it's not our job to determine whether a person is worthy of Christ or not. or that they don't have Christ. We can't make those assumptions. Just because a person has a sin in their life or some type of sin in their life doesn't necessarily mean that they're unsaved because just because you're saved doesn't mean that you become pure in your flesh. It just means that you are no longer under condemnation because you have a spirit that is dwelling within you that is made perfect and born again by the spirit of God. And so that's the only difference. And so understanding this will help us to understand how we approach the world a little bit differently. Because ultimately, man, if you start making assumptions and start making hateful assumptions especially about someone's eternal destiny, Christ said that there's a consequence for that as well. It's interesting, this is another thing that can be taken out of context as well. You'll hear Christ talk about hell a lot of times. He mentions hell a few different times. There's two different ideas that are presented when you're talking about hell. There's the Greek word Gehenna, and then there is the Greek word Hades. The Greek word Gehenna actually has its roots in the idea of Gehenna in the Hebrew. Gehenna in the Hebrew was a location on earth. It was a place that was set aside where they would take everything that is unclean and they would throw it into the pile of things that were unclean. And the consequence of having a bunch of garbage stacked on top of each other is what? Fire. The only reason that our landfills aren't on fire is because they vent them. They have methodologies in which they place pipes and different things so that the methane is vented in a way that it doesn't ignite in the garbage itself. But if you don't do that, if you have masses and masses of piles of garbage all stacked on top of each other, the end result of that decay will eventually be fire. Which is what the Valley of Gehenna was. It was perpetually on fire. And so to tell someone if you accuse someone of being not worthy of spiritual eternity or that they are not a part of a spiritual eternity and just to make that assumption is so bad that you run the risk of being judged and placed into that place of ultimate condemnation with everything else that is uncleaned to be burned forever. Think about that for a second. These are strong words that Jesus is saying here. This isn't like a game. Anger and hatred's not a toy to be messed around with. It's not like an abstract that we can just kind of mess around with a little bit. It's a very serious, very literal problem that we have to deal with on a regular basis, and if we don't deal with it, it breeds hatred in our hearts, and if we don't deal with hatred in our hearts, it leads us to hate people, which he's gonna tell us eventually that If you hate a person without a cause, it's like murder in your heart. Because ultimately, give me my next slide. Ultimately, it's not about the consequences in as much as it's about your heart. Because Jesus is always trying to get to the front end of the issue, and the front end of the issue is the heart, and these are kind of like some of the ultimate consequences and things that you should think about, which is why we read that today in our worship service, because this is part of what we're talking about. Matthew 5.23, therefore, if you bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, not meaning that your brother has done something to you, Meaning that if you have accused your brother of something and you know in your heart that it was out of anger and it was out of hatred or it was out of spite or it wasn't true, and you bring those things up and you present those, if you know that you have done that, it's your responsibility to go to them and talk to them about it, to make it right. If you have done those things, Matthew 5, 24, leave there thy gift at the altar. Just leave it. God's not saying here that he doesn't want to have time with you. He doesn't want to spend time with you. What he's saying is, is that if you harbor these things in your heart, and you harbor these feelings in your heart, and you harbor these desires, and these angers, and these hatreds, and you have these things in your heart, do not bother bringing an offering to the altar and trying to have some type of relationship with me if you have not tried and attempted to make your relationship with your brother correct. Because it's a fellowship breaker. It hinders our fellowship with God when we have these things in our hearts. And so we must pursue those things in order to correct them because if we don't correct them, then it drives a wedge between our fellowship between us and God so much that he says, leave your offering at the altar, don't do it, just leave it there, go take care of the situation, then come back. Matthew 5, 25 kind of shifts gears a little bit. Agree with thine adversary quickly whilst thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. This is an expansion upon the idea where it's helping us to stay out of legal issues and bringing up lawsuits with one another. This is the verse of scripture where people used to say, Christians shouldn't be bringing up lawsuits to one another. Okay, well, contextually, actually, what that says is Christians shouldn't be bringing up lawsuits, period. Not a qualifier to Christians alone, that's not in there. That idea of brother is not just your brother and sister in Christ, that's not what Christ was saying because contextually, they wouldn't have understood that. Your brother and sister, your brother, common man, people that are of the world, right? You shouldn't be seeking to bring lawsuits to those people. Does that mean that bringing a lawsuit is the wrong thing to do? It depends. Is your anger justified in a moral wrong and are you doing it without hatred in your heart? If you can do that and you can say that, you're probably fine. But if you can't say that, then maybe you need to think about it. And obviously, you want to go to that person, you want to try and rectify that situation before it goes to court because that's the right thing to do, which usually happens with people. Most people are good at doing that. You know, you have somebody that does something wrong against you, you go to them and say, hey, look, you know, this was wrong. And we're talking contractually here, we're not talking relationally here. Right? You enter into a contract with a brother and sister in Christ, and you don't follow through with that contract, that person on the other end of that contract has a moral and judicial good to bring you to justice for that. But hopefully they'll come to you and try and resolve that outside of court before that happens. But there are some instances where that just doesn't happen. And that's fine, just make sure your heart is right, right? That's all, just make sure your heart is right. Strive to keep things from escalating because ultimately we want to be representatives of Christ. Matthew 5, 26, verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out dense till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing. What is due? All of it. That's a high standard for Christian business, guys. It's a high standard. Next slide and then we'll close. Ultimately, murder is terrible and illegal, morally and by statute. It's a terrible thing, obviously. But just as bad as anger without a cause, considering someone worthless or considering someone wicked and reprobate, graceless, deserving of eternal damnation. Nobody's deserving of eternal damnation as far as we're concerned. We're not judging them, right? Get things right immediately in your own heart. Take responsibility for your actions. Know when you have committed offense and take ownership of it. This is really hard to do because oftentimes it means an abasement of pride. Be the first to offer apology or forgiveness. Be the first to say, look, this is where I was wrong. And in that, I want to make sure that I reconcile that. That's what we should be seeking after. That's what we should desire, is that reconciliation piece. Taking responsibility for our actions, the things that we have done. Oftentimes, this is a good way to go about this, right? It's easy to look at a situation and to see the offense that you have received. And then when you see the offense that you have received, focus on the offense that you have received. And instead of focusing on the offense that you have received, turn that around and look within yourself and say, what have I done in this situation to be offensive? Now, here's the thing, right? You're not always gonna know when you were offensive or when you were not. In fact, sometimes you can do something very honestly and have no intention of offense at all, but then end up being deeply offensive. This happens. And you may say to yourself, well, I don't wanna take responsibility for things that I didn't do. I wasn't trying to be offensive, so I'm not gonna take responsibility for it. Well, fair enough, but that's not gonna get anywhere. And so oftentimes, like with, Christ taking responsibility for our sins when he had committed no sin. Oftentimes, we have to take responsibility for our own actions in spite of offense. That includes me. I'm not beyond that. I often tell people, it's not the problems that define you, it's how you deal with your problems that define you. And God's given us a very clear way of dealing with people and dealing with hatred and dealing with anger and dealing with offense, and it would be good for us to follow it, even if it's hard. Because there's not any of us here that are beyond that. And if we're going to be a city on a hill that the world looks to and says, wow, look at how great their God is. By God, we need to be an example of how that looks. We need to be an example of what that looks like. So different than the world, so different. Because we're looking within ourselves, we're not looking externally. So different. Give me my last slide. I think that's the last one, yeah. Here and do. I would encourage you to not only hear what Christ has said, but to leave from here and do it. Because that's how you establish a foundation, by hearing and doing, not just by hearing. So hear and do. Do good things. How will we do good in 2023 to the world if we don't demonstrate what doing good to one another looks like. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would fill us with courage and with love as we continue to pursue your will for our lives. It's not always easy to determine. But Father, we know that you have great things planned for this community. We don't know what it is. We don't know exactly what you wanna do here. But Father, we do ask that you would allow us to be a part of it, that you would give us the honor of serving with you So accomplish whatever it is that you have in this community that we don't walk into it boldly and pridefully as like some type of mega church mentality or anything like that, but that we approach it with humility, lifting you above all things in our lives, resting assured that we are delivering the gospel of Jesus Christ as his ambassadors, and that we are bringing honor and glory to you, that people will see our works and glorify you because of our works. And Father, we will honor you for those things. In your son's precious name, we pray.