[SPEAKER_01]: You are listening to audio from Citizens Church located in Plano, Texas for more information about this ministry or to give to this ministry Please visit citizenschurch.com Good morning church For those of you who are newer here, my name is Mike M. Long-signed Terran Mays I serve our Bible classes and theological training here at Citizens Church For the last couple of weeks
[SPEAKER_01]: The most common question that I've been getting is, where have you been?
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought you were going.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm seeing you around.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the answer to that is that I've been on sabbatical since May.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a really wonderful time of rest and recovery and reconnection to myself, to the Lord, to my family members.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as wonderful as it was, it really made me homesick forces in this church.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's really good to be back and glad to be here.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that being on sabbatical, one of the things that it makes you face is this question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who am I to God when I'm not doing anything for God?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who am I when I'm not doing ministry?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know most of you in this room are not in vocational ministry or recently been on sabbatical, but I bet you have felt the weight of the same basic question.
[SPEAKER_01]: all day, or maybe all week.
[SPEAKER_01]: How can God be pleased with me when I'm not even pleased with myself?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I set a bunch of goals for my sabbatical and I accomplished none of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how you know, it was a successful sabbatical.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of my goals was to read through the whole new testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just, you know, I don't need to teach anything,
[SPEAKER_01]: Not very far, because I got stuck in today's passage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I spent the rest of the summer there.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the story where Jesus returns to his hometown.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I started to pull on the various threads found in this text, I just found more and more beauty, more and more grace, more and more gospel, streaming out from the pages, evoking in me a sense of wonder and worship that I would love to be able to share
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to just focus on a couple of the insights leading from this passage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And before we get started, let me just tell you up front.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to be kind of all over the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be in two Old Testament stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be in two versions of the same New Testament story and two different gospels.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we're going to throw
[SPEAKER_01]: two or three or four bits of Paul in for seasoning.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to ask you to hold all these different pieces separately until they all come together like Voltron on at the end, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Promise it's worth it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I've got your Bibles.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole generation that has no idea what I just said.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got your Bibles, going grab it, Luke chapter four, starting in verse 16.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the passage where I stop reading when I got stuck for the rest of this medical.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some quick context here to set the scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus has been doing miracles in Compernium and throughout Galilee, and he's begun to make a name for himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus now returns to his hometown of Nazareth where he grew up, and he goes to the synagogue that he used to attend with his family as a boy, as is his custom.
[SPEAKER_01]: And coming in, he is invited to sit in a special seat where he gets the read a selection from the prophet and then give a short message.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read, and the scroll, the prophet Isaiah was given to him, and he enrolled the scroll, and he found the place where it was written.
[SPEAKER_01]: The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed.
[SPEAKER_01]: To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and he rolled up the scroll and he gave it back to the attendant and he sat down and all the eyes and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he began to say to them, today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing and all spoke well of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And more of all that the gracious words that we're coming from his mouth, and they said, Isn't this Joseph's son?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so far so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus reads from Isaiah 61, about the work of the long promised Messiah, and then basically says prophecy fulfilled.
[SPEAKER_01]: And everyone is shocked in some people that are a little giddy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then Jesus says something,
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems just really bizarre.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally changes the mood, verse 23.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, Dallas, you will quote to me, this proverb, physician, feel yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: What we've heard you did at Copernium, do hear in your hometown as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, truly, I say to you, no profits acceptable in his hometown.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in truth, I tell you there were many widows in Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the days of Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the heavens were shut up for three years and six months on a great camp, famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zeraphath in the land of siding to a woman who was a widow.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah, and none of them was cleansed, but only name in the Syrian, and when they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.
[SPEAKER_01]: They rose up, drove him out of the town, and brought him to the brow of the hill upon which their town was built.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that they could throw him down the cliff, but passing through their midst, he went away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, what just happened?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it was going really well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did you have to say that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you just say like, thanks everybody and joy the buffet, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes out of nowhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what did it accomplish?
[SPEAKER_01]: They go from clapping and speaking well to trying to kill him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, this is the synagogue that Jesus attended as a little kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of people know him.
[SPEAKER_01]: They mention how they know his father.
[SPEAKER_01]: They know his mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: They know his siblings.
[SPEAKER_01]: Usually when you hear this message preach, the focus is on the Isaiah scroll for good reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of good stuff in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I got stuck was I got fascinated by these two other obscure people that are mentioned in this text.
[SPEAKER_01]: the widow and naman, and this passage raised a few basic questions for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, who are these two people?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does Jesus randomly bring them up?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are they so significant?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does he pair them together?
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, why does him mentioning these two people make his former friends and family at our neighbors instantly want you murder him?
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't have that effect on you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And last, why does Jesus feel like he has to say this to these people at this time knowing that it's going to make them mad?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why provokes them like this?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is he trying to accomplish?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I have this rule if you've heard me teach any number of times, you've probably heard it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's this.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you see a reference or a quote from the Old Testament in the New Testament, don't just follow the cross-reference and find it and be like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, because I just want to remind you, verse numbers were not invented until the sixteenth century.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there were no verses back then.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are no chapters.
[SPEAKER_01]: When they are citing something from the Old Testament, they're citing the whole passage, the whole story.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I usually do is I go back and read the chapter, sometimes I read the chapter before and the chapter after because you're getting context.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's do some of that right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the sake of time, we're going to summarize.
[SPEAKER_01]: So just ahead's up, the first story, the story of the widow is super fascinating.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of weird interesting, like, greatest of the lost arcs I've gone in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a lot of distracting, interesting little details in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll let you look it up and read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's first king 17.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm going to summarize this second spend a little bit more time on the second story.
[SPEAKER_01]: The widow is there if I have to stand again in 1st King, 17.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is during the time of the prophet Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: At this time, the people in the kings of Israel have been in continuous rebellion against the one who got.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they've been turning away from him to the worship of Baal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Yahweh, the God of Israel, tells Elijah to prophesy a drought.
[SPEAKER_01]: The drought has a double purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, it's a judgment against the sinful rebellious people of Israel, but secondly, it's a flex on Baal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because Baal is the canonite storm god.
[SPEAKER_01]: He controls the rain they say.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're going to see who controls the rain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the drought becomes so harsh that even the rivers begin to dry up, and the people and the animals begin to starve.
[SPEAKER_01]: First King 178 through 16.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the word of Yahweh came to him, came to Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Arise and go to Xeraph, which belongs inside in and dwell there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Behold, I've commanded a widow there to feed you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So your rose and went to Xeraph.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you don't know where his aircraft is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd look it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: His aircraft is far north of Israel along the coast of the Mediterranean.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is deep and Phoenician territory.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's north of Tire, one of the capital cities of Phoenicia.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's deep, deep, deep in enemy territory.
[SPEAKER_01]: Elijah has to leave his country and go into this pagan land.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he gets there, Elijah finally meets the widow, and then he asks her for some water and a little bread.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she basically tells him, hey, you call me at a really bad time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have completely run out of food.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just have a little bit left.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to remind you, at that time, the word widows basically identical to poor.
[SPEAKER_01]: This woman has lost her husband and has no way of making any sort of income.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she's completely dependent upon her neighbors and her friends and her extended family to give her anything that she has, but we're in the middle of a famine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody has enough to eat so they've stopped giving her anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she says she has a small handful of flour and a few dribbles of oil left in.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's like what I was going to do and you just caught me in the middle of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was getting some sticks so I can make a fire and I was going to make a tiny little cake and try to split it with my boy and then we're going to just wait to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Elijah says something just to wild.
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, go do that, but let me eat cake.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after I'm done eating, then you can go ahead and cook something for yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he continues, the reason why I'm saying this is because Yahweh, the God of Israel, says to you, that your flower and your oil will not run out for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until Yahweh himself ends this drought, you will have enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what does the woman do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what would you do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, nine or one, just crazy person, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, she believes Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: She obeys him, she does this thing, and it is exactly as he prophesied.
[SPEAKER_01]: The eat and the eat and the eat, until the drought is over.
[SPEAKER_01]: A bunch more interesting things happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna gloss over, but the story ends with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: First King's 1724.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what she says to Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, nice heartwarming story, God is powerful, God is faithful, Elijah is a real prophet, like what's to get mad about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go to the second story.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story of name in the Syrian is found in second king's chapter five.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one takes place decades later, Elijah is gone and in his place is his successor, Elijah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the story starts like this, second king's five one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Naman, the commander of the army of the king of Syria was a great man with his master and in high favor, because by him Yahweh had given victory to Syria.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.
[SPEAKER_01]: Long story short, Naman is given great military prowess and is blessed in his military endeavors by God, the God of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it says that what they do with that military prowess is that he attacks Israel and enslaves people from Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of those people is a little girl in Israelite girl, who ends up working in his house for his wife.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this little girl is actually praying for name and she tells name him, she says, if only you could go down to Israel, there is a true prophet there and he would cure you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, name in his desperate, he goes to the king, he says, this is like, he'll tell me this thing, and the king gives him a blessing to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it says that he takes a couple hundred pounds of gold in silver and ten changes of clothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a, this is like, in today's money, millions of dollars.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he gets the lashes house, and the lashes doesn't even come out.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sends a servant with a little note for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sort of comes out, he's like, uh, hold on.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wants you to go jump in the river seven times.
[SPEAKER_01]: And naming becomes furious.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I came all the way down here with all my soldiers and all my stuff and, like, for what?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's too easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have huge rivers back in Jordan.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bigger rivers, cleaner rivers, mighty rivers.
[SPEAKER_01]: But his servants convinced him to do it, and you came down down here prepared you all kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's it?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's it hurt to?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just listen.
[SPEAKER_01]: To his credit, he's one over.
[SPEAKER_01]: He calms down.
[SPEAKER_01]: He does it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after washing seven times, he comes out, and he's completely healed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bible says that his skin is like that of a young child because of that for a skincare routine.
[SPEAKER_01]: His skin is better than when he didn't have a leprosy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not even that the leprosy was gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's restored to what other people didn't even have.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's as if he never got sick.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like he never aged.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's restored.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, let's pick it up in chapter five verse 15.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the aftermath.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is his response to this experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he then named and returned to the man of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: He and all this company.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he came and stood before him and he said, behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So except now a present from your servant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He comes back to the life of full of excitement.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's no free loader.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's worked every day of his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a disciplined man.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's willing to pay for this miracle.
[SPEAKER_01]: He brought his millions just for this reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: Verse 16, but he, Elijah said, as Yahweh lives before whom I stand, I will receive none.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he urged him to take it, but he refused.
[SPEAKER_01]: Name and insist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please, I'm so grateful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please, let me pay you back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me pay my debts to God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Elijah's like, that is not how any of this works.
[SPEAKER_01]: Y'all always blessings are free.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot buy or pay back God's grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's finish this story for 17.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then name and said, okay, if not, then please let there be given to your servant two mule loads of earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: For from now on, your servant will not offer burnt offering your sacrifice to any God, but y'all wait.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this matter, may the Lord y'all wait pardon your servant.
[SPEAKER_01]: When my master goes into the house of remone to worship there,
[SPEAKER_01]: leaning on my arm, and I bow myself in the house of Ramon, when I bow myself down in the house of Ramon, may y'all wait pardon your servant in this matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he's asking is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll tell you now, name and as a trusted advisor, a general to the king of Syria.
[SPEAKER_01]: Has played a role in the temple rituals of the God Ramon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ramon is just the Syrian name for ball.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the Storm God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Naman knows that Ramon is false, and he's firmly committed to worshiping only Yahweh the God of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he has this last theological question, a question about the nature and the character of the God of Israel that he wants to know, and that's basically this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to worship Ramon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that Ramon is false.
[SPEAKER_01]: My heart is fully for Yahweh.
[SPEAKER_01]: My question is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same question that the Lord had teach Samuel in 1 Samuel 16 is basically this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does Yahweh see the way a man sees the outer appearance or does Yahweh look at the heart?
[SPEAKER_01]: He's nervous because he's no longer a pagan, but he works for a pagan, a king who needs him to do his pagan rituals, and he's asking,
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy's old and I love him and he needs my help and I work for him and these are my duties, and I know it's all fake But when I go in there doing my job I know it cannot be what y'all way wants for me But is it my outward religious failure that he cares about or will he see my true heart
[SPEAKER_01]: Will he forgive me even when I fail to do what I know is right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Elijah's response is going peace, shall I?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now those are the two stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, outside of these two passages in first and second kings in the Old Testament, the widow's airfath and name in the Syrian never come up, ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot of these kind of stories that are like interesting, you know, tales.
[SPEAKER_01]: until Jesus mentions them both here in Luke 4.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, going back to my three questions, why does Jesus mention these two seemingly randomly characters as if they're related to each other?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did the mention of these two characters make everyone so murderously angry that they want to kill him?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, why does Jesus feel like he have to bring them up now?
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something about the timing of the announcement of the kingdom and the introduction of these characters, as emblematic of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Matthew's version of the story of Jesus getting rejected
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just gonna read the last two verses for the sake of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Verse 50, this is Matthew 1357.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they took it, fenced at him, but Jesus said to them, a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and in his own household.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look at verse 58.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did not do many mighty works there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of their unbelief.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that marks the heart of the Nazarenes is that they have no belief.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not do many mighty works there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mighty works that they were wanting to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, all right, let's see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you built my table.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you're just a contractor, so I've heard you did all these things, but where is it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're waiting to see what he can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he doesn't do them, because he knows the state of their heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, I want to remind you in the synagogue, Jesus has just announced the coming of God's kingdom and the revelation of the identity of God's messianic king.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the reason that Jesus picks the two people that He mentions and the reason why the counts people get so angry is actually exactly the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's because of this two Jesus, the widow and the name and name are perfect examples.
[SPEAKER_01]: of the citizens of the kingdom of God that Jesus is inaugurating.
[SPEAKER_01]: The widow and name and our Old Testament saints who are saved by grace through faith apart from any merit or any contribution or any works of any kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's not just that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what they are and what they're not.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are pagans.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are foreigners.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are enemies of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them is literally the general of an army that is currently at war with Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no more enemy than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's enslaving Israelite citizens.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not a righteous thing to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have no right to claim God's love.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have no claim on God's covenant assurances.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have no reason for God to notice them or pay attention to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet according to Jesus,
[SPEAKER_01]: who God extends grace to.
[SPEAKER_01]: These two characters who have not been mentioned in the whole Bible anywhere up until this point, they're not crucial to the history of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing pivots on them, but they've been on Jesus' hearts since before the foundation of the earth was laid.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jesus is saying something shocking, controversial to the people of Nazareth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason why they're so angry and they want to kill Jesus is Jesus is saying, in my kingdom, people like Namon are citizens and people like you are not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus is not randomly springing this on them.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a tactical mistake.
[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't miss speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not angry for no reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's exposing something as he always does.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's revealing the vast gulf that exists between his hometown crowd and this foreigner named Neiman.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's this name and new that he did not deserve God's favor.
[SPEAKER_01]: God's wonder-working power to see God's miracles, to taste His grace, and the people of Nazareth, they felt entitled to it, shows what you got.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Nazareens had a million things that they could point to, a checklist of things in order to claim to be God's people, and Naman has none of them, but he believes and they do not.
[SPEAKER_01]: They read from Romans 9, this is the Apostle Paul speaking about the advantages of the Israelites who don't believe in Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I want you to see how easily these words could have been spoken by Jesus about the people of Nazareth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen to this list of privileges.
[SPEAKER_01]: from his 9-4.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises, and to them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to their flesh, from their hometown, is the Christ, who is God over all blessed forever, amen.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these things in this list that I just read are the things that the unbelieving people of Nazareth clung to in order to establish their prerogative as God's chosen people.
[SPEAKER_01]: But look at what Paul says to answer the next, what he says in the next verse to answer this question, if the people of Israel and the people of Nazareth have all these advantages, why is it they have failed to receive their Messiah?
[SPEAKER_01]: While so many foreigners are being grafted in, where six, it is not as though the Word of God has failed.
[SPEAKER_01]: for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all their children of Abraham just because they're his offspring, but through Isaac, shall your offspring be named.
[SPEAKER_01]: What this means is that it's not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but it is the children of the promise who are counted as offspring.
[SPEAKER_01]: Naming in the widow were not the children of the flesh.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were the wrong ethnicity.
[SPEAKER_01]: They lived in the wrong place.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't have any of these things listed in Romans 9 that the Nazarens could boast of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Namely, in the widow, never read the Torah.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never read the prophets.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never learned how to pray Psalm 23 back to God like we learned last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never sat in a booth during the Feast of Tabernacles.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never observed Passover.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never had their sins atone for on the day of a tone in young and poor.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, they never ever set foot in God's temple.
[SPEAKER_01]: to render in any service at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they had gone, they would have been turned away anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Neither name and nor the widow son ever get circumcised, which is the first thing you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have nothing that they can point to, that would merit God's attention, God's favor, God's steadfast, has said love.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing that they can point to to mark them as being covered by His covenant.
[SPEAKER_01]: but they want to kill Jesus, because He's revealed the truth that the Nazarenes are out, and name and the widow are in on the basis of faith alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is so, so important.
[SPEAKER_01]: How can I know that God is pleased with me?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I look?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do I know that the Lord is my shepherd?
[SPEAKER_01]: that I shall not want, that I shall not fear, that I shall do well in the house of the Lord forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do I look when I get nervous?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it because I'm more consistently with my quiet time?
[SPEAKER_01]: I've become more involved in church nowadays.
[SPEAKER_01]: I finally beat all my intrusive thoughts, my anxiety and depression are waning, my marriage is fixed.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, this kind of thinking is the exact poison that Jesus is revealing and unmasking.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing that the widow and Neiman and I can count on is that God is exactly who he says he is.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's literally nothing else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Neiman functions here as a sort of Old Testament version of the thief on the cross.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember him?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who, if he were to be asked, like, why should, why should you be allowed to come in?
[SPEAKER_01]: He would say, well, the guy in the middle said I could come.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your life just says, God sees you, name him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not distracted by all the things that people look at that people count on.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second, we start to try to lean on our religiosity, our church attendance, all these kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: anything other than the grace of God, the character of God, we distort, we poison the gospel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me quote a little more Paul, Ephesians 2, 4, but God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is God's motivation?
[SPEAKER_01]: to move towards us.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is God's motivation to give any favor to name it?
[SPEAKER_01]: God being rich in mercy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mercy by definition can only be given to those who don't deserve it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you deserve to be treated well, that's just fairness, that's justice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mercy is being treated well when you don't deserve it.
[SPEAKER_01]: God is rich in love for people who don't deserve his love.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is who he's rich in love for.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when does he extend that undeserved love?
[SPEAKER_01]: When does he do it?
[SPEAKER_01]: When we were dead in our trespasses.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we were dead, not after we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and we cleaned up our language and we overcame our addiction, we got rid of all of our disorders.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's not after we fixed ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was when we were beyond hope.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we were beyond saving,
[SPEAKER_01]: when he made us alive together with Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is it this way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
[SPEAKER_01]: By grace, you have been saved.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus holds name and out as the example of the Christian walk and of the citizen as a citizen of the kingdom and heaven because he's a reflection of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a New Testament reality in the Old Testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want you to see the phases of name and journey in his story and just see if it resonates with you in any way.
[SPEAKER_01]: See if it's familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, so name and starts off as an enemy of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's resisting God all the way through.
[SPEAKER_01]: He starts off complaining that God's grace is too easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's too cheap.
[SPEAKER_01]: God's way is too good to be true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Surely there must be more than just this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when he experiences God's cleansing power, he feels overwhelmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he wants to feel, he wants to pay God back.
[SPEAKER_01]: to express his gratitude, he has to learn that God's grace cannot be paid back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not because God's grace is cheap, but because none of us could afford it in the first place.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after learning that, and then rejoicing that God is gracious and pledging to worship him, the next thing he does is start to worry that he's going to get kicked out if he lets him down.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does anybody here, or do you need a degree in ancient Near Eastern history to understand this story?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you trust that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is a holy, righteous, gentle, humble, trustworthy, gracious, loving, self-sacrificing shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep, that no one can snatch you out of his hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do not become one of the Lord's sheep who can say the Lord is my shepherd by offering him a really lucrative deal on wholesale wool.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do not do great deeds for God.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not mutually beneficial.
[SPEAKER_01]: You give God the only thing that God wanted from name and his leprosy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing he needed from the widow, her need.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do what name and did and what our children are learning down that hallway right there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You learn to know, love, trust, and obey him.
[SPEAKER_01]: In closing, I have a few sort of random observations and thoughts on these passages first.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a deep conviction that the Old Testament can only be read in light of the New Testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an old saying in what we're formed theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: The old is in the new revealed, and the new is in the Old Concealed.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that we're gonna be doing this semester in Bible classes, we're going to be going through the book of Genesis, very familiar book.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let there be light.
[SPEAKER_01]: But my conviction is that you cannot understand the first atom if you don't see him through the light of the second atom Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first atom is a shadow.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is the radiance.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're interested in sending Genesis that way, this semester, you can send it for Bible class right out of those doors after this service.
[SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, there might be some of you
[SPEAKER_01]: who are listening to this, and you maybe you don't feel like you fit in at our church.
[SPEAKER_01]: You enjoy being here, maybe you don't feel like you fit in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Could be that, maybe you're a little bit more introverted than the people that you see.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you feel like you're older than most of the people at our church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you feel like you're younger than most of the people at our church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you're here and you're not married and you feel like most people seem to be married.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or maybe you're married, but you don't have children yet and you feel like that's what marks you as being different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you don't look like everybody else.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a million ways you can feel like an outsider here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's got something.
[SPEAKER_01]: This story reminds us that Jesus' eyes were on people like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus' kingdom is populated by people who don't feel like they fit in.
[SPEAKER_01]: People who feel their own discomfort.
[SPEAKER_01]: Christ kingdom is an upside-down kingdom where the outsiders or insiders and the insiders are outsiders.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you don't feel that way, just following Jesus will make you feel that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to remind you that even name and the widow who are very different socioeconomically, when they were forever changed and they went back home, the rest of their life, they must have felt like a foreigner in a stranger in their own country.
[SPEAKER_01]: Third, just like the thief on the cross, this story about name and can be also disordered and misused.
[SPEAKER_01]: The misuse would sound like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, name and didn't do anything, he's in great.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't need to get baptized.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did communion?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to come to church anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just a believer and just float around, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If name and overheard you saying something like that, I imagine he would say, are you crazy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know how I longed for any news about the temple?
[SPEAKER_01]: How I want you to go there.
[SPEAKER_01]: How I drilled my servant girl asking if for every scrap of detail, every prayer she could muster up.
[SPEAKER_01]: How I long to learn the prayers, to sing the songs, to offer my service to God, to break the bread, eat the Passover, to partake of the means of grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I couldn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not stuff you have to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's stuff you get to do, and I never got to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have traded places with you
[SPEAKER_01]: I live my whole life in exile in my own country.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lesson here isn't that God doesn't have any rules.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's that God is raising children and not employees.
[SPEAKER_01]: Last, the healing that name and needed was not the leprosy of his skin that I hope nobody in here has.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the leprosy that we all definitely have, the leprosy of the heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: The healing that he received was an external reflection of an internal transformation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Naman was definitely right.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing special about the waters of the Jordan.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't a water that washed Naman clean.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't know it, but we learned in Romans 325 that it was the blood of Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was washed from the inside out.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a song we sing sometimes of blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has these lyrics.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Naman died with so many questions on his lips, wondering his whole life.
[SPEAKER_01]: But at his death, when he was received to a savior, all his questions were answered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after meditating on this passage, and coming back here, I think at first or second week, we sang this song, The Blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I cannot help when we sing this song to imagine Naman in the Resurrection, understanding the lyrics for the first time, singing this to anyone who will listen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I cannot explain there's nothing more real than this in the presence of God, what my heart experienced.
[SPEAKER_01]: When my shame hit the wayside, my sin met the most high I was washed from the inside, I was washed from the inside out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's never been about performance, perfection, striving for acceptance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me tell you, it's only by the blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's never been about deserving or earning.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a gift, freely given.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me tell you, it's only by the blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does anybody want to be holy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Righteous, purified and spotless.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me tell you, it's only by the blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that we would know what it means to be a citizen of Christ's kingdom in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: To understand what it means to be accepted not on the basis of our performance.
[SPEAKER_01]: in our failures, in our up and down every day, but upon Christ who never changes, who's faithful to the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, we believe, help her unbelief.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, I believe this theology and I preach it, and yet, Lord, I waver, Lord.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so, so easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: to look inward.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so easy to wait for, oh God, Lord, that you would strengthen us, to fix our eyes upon Jesus, Lord, to claim to Him, Lord, to say, wash me save your right eye.
[SPEAKER_01]: God, that we would know in our heart of hearts, it's not about us, it's about you.
[SPEAKER_01]: or that we would not just preach the gospel of grace, but although that it would sink deep into our hearts, Lord may it be that we would be a people, marked by grace in Jesus' name we pray.