THE PARABLES OF JESUS: The Parable of the Talents  Matthew 25:14-30

We’ve been in a series the last couple of weeks where we are studying the Parables of Jesus. I have to admit,  parables can be difficult. They aren’t explicit in the way a simple story is.  Jesus at one time said, “I spoke in parables so that you would get this and others wouldn’t get it.”  They can be a little bit tricky to interpret. Parables are stories with a meaning, often to jar a listener into learning something new about the economy of the kingdom of God.  They were a bit jarring to the original listeners —remember, they heard them first—because they challenged conventional wisdom at the time.  Most of them have a twist or an ‘aha’ moment of some kind that turned that thinking on its head. So to understand parables, we have to understand the culture and dominant thinking they were birthed into, and try to find the principle within it and bring it forward into our day and age. Because they can be a bit difficult, I’ve pored over the parables and tried to find the easiest one, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today. No, I’m kidding.  Today, I’m going to walk through a parable that’s considered a complex parable.  There are four characters that we see, but they’re treated as three.  And there is a surprise twist at the end.

We are going to walk through the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25, so go ahead and turn there in your bibles or navigate in your bible app. The parable of the talents is part of a series of three parables that have themes of waiting for the arrival of someone special—a master or whoever it might be—and also a picture of what the appropriate behavior of the characters while they wait looks like, and all three finish with a strong depiction of judgment. And I’ll be honest and say these parables are fascinating and amazing to read until we get to the very last part.  I remember when I knew I was going to do this parable and I reread it and……oh, I really like it….oh, this is interesting….uh oh!  The very end is this harsh judgment part. It would be a lot easier to teach without that, but I think there is an important lesson in the judgment that we don’t want to gloss over. So what I want to today is to walk verse-by-verse through this parable, point out some things we can learn from it along the way, and then end with some practical things we can do to apply this to our own lives as we seek to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. Sound good?

Let’s pray. Lord, today, our hearts are tender for you to speak to us.  Thank you for the Scriptures.  God, I would pray that, Holy Spirit, you would speak through your Scriptures to us that we might continue to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  In Jesus’s name.  Amen.

Okay, let’s dive in.  Matthew 25:14-15 —  Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.  It was pretty common in the ancient Near East for a wealthy person to travel abroad, and when they did, they would designate someone to be a caretaker over their wealth. So we see this man pull together three servants, and entrust his wealth to them. In v15, we see that he gave five bags of gold to one, two bags to another, and one to the last.  Some translations use the word talents.  Many scholars believe a talent was equivalent to 20 years of a day laborer’s wages.    So let’s do some math.  Sir, how much do you make per year? Just kidding!  The point really isn’t exactly how much money it was, it was just saying it was a lot of money, a huge amount of money and resources.

Look at verse 15 again.   …each according to his own ability.

The Greek word used for ability is the word “dunamis.”  What word does that sound like?  Dynamite! One of the definitions for dunamis is explosive power. Think about it this way, dynamite has latent explosive potential, doesn’t it?  If you hold a stick of dynamite in your hand and you light the wick, what happens?  BOOM!  The word dunamis is translated a number of different ways:  talents, abilities, explosive potential. It’s like the Master here was looking at the servants for their potential, their latent explosive ability to do something with what he entrusted them with. Here’s the truth: God looks at every person not just at who they are today, but for the potential He created in them to have. The bottom line is that God’s kingdom is expanding and at work, and He invites all of us to partner with Him in this, and expects us to leverage who we are for his good work.

Because we’re human, it’s pretty easy to look at someone else and the things they’ve been entrusted with, and to compare.  He has better hair than me.  She sings better than me.  He makes more money, he has more stuff than I do.  Or this sentence:  I wish I were more like….fill in the blank.  Who’s with me? We can get so caught up in the comparison game that we focus more on what we don’t have than being faithful with what God has given to us.

The other thing I think is really interesting is that the master gave them portions of wealth, entrusting it to them according to their own ability, and then he told them exactly what to do with it, didn’t he?  No, he didn’t.  I’ve never really thought about that before. He didn’t give them money and then give them a checklist and a lengthy, “Do this, do that” with it, did he? No, he simply gave them the money, and then he got out of town. Why? I believe it’s because he trusted that the servants knew him.  They knew his heart.  They knew how he operated in the world and that they would use the money accordingly to continue his good work. I don’t know about you, but God doesn’t always give me an explicit list of what He wants me to do with the resources He’s entrusted me with. Sometimes God does say do this, but a lot of times, God entrusts us with everything that we have.  That’s why when we give back we say, “Every good gift comes from the Father.”  God gifts us everything and that’s why we return a portion of that back as a symbol that everything we have is God’s.  But God doesn’t always say exactly, explicitly what to do with it.  But, I will say, the Scriptures are pretty clear about the basics, aren’t they?  Feed the hungry—We should do that.  We should clothe the poor.  We should take care of the widow and the orphan.  We should meet the needs of one another.

But what if we aren’t exactly clear how to manage all that God has entrusted us? I was struck by this provocative statement by Dallas Willard: “In many cases, our need to wonder about or be told what God wants in a certain situation is nothing short of a clear indication of how little we are engaged in His work.”  Wow, that’s a painful indictment. But beyond that, think about it this way: We should know the way and heart of Jesus so deeply that managing His resources well is second nature. If you’re not sure what to do with what God has given you for God’s work, press in to Jesus, His way, and His heart. Get to know the master and you’ll discover exactly what to do with what God entrusts you with.

Now let’s see what each person did with their money (v16):  The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more.  But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.   I have to admit that, as a kid when I read this, I thought, “That third guy has the right idea.” Why? Because it was safe.  I know people who lived through the Great Depression, and hiding money was a surefire way to keep it safe…unless the house burned down, of course. How many of you have heard those stories of people who buy a house and do some renovation and find a bunch of money in the walls? I just want to say if that’s you, don’t forget to tithe. Just kidding. The reason they did that is because it was safer than banks.

Seriously, though, it seems kind of risky for the first two guys to take the money and do something with it. You might even say it seemed a little bit frivolous. The Greek here implies that they may have invested in the marketplace. I don’t know if they started a business of some sort, or maybe they were on the ground floor at Facebook, or what, I don’t know exactly what they did.  Somehow, they put the money to work. First century listeners would probably have responded exactly like I did, thinking the guy that buried the money was the prudent one, the one that did the wise thing. The banking system in the first century was relatively new and there was great distrust of it. Some people believed you shouldn’t be putting stuff into the bank, so most hearers probably heard this story and rolled their eyes at the first two guys, and affirmed the guy who played it safe,

But remember, parables were designed to challenge conventional wisdom, to flip the thinking of world on its head, and for Jesus to introduce the economy of the Kingdom, so in a bit, we’ll start seeing how conventional wisdom was flipped on its head. Verse 19:  After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.  We don’t know how long this was, but I will say this, after an exhausting study of the Greek here, I’ve discerned that long time means……a long time.  A fair chunk of time. So the master returned and basically asked for an account of what they had done with his money. At first, we see the one with five bags and the one with two bags of gold report out.

This is interesting that those two characters really serve as one character in the story.  They did the same thing and the response from the master was the same. Look at verse 20:  The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. “Master,” he said, ‘”you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.” His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” The man with two bags of gold also came.  “Master,” he said, “you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.” His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”

The master entrusted his things to these people to manage well, and they doubled the resources given to them. They leveraged their ability, that dunamis power, their potential, their understanding of the heart and way of the master, to double the impact of his resources. And so the master rewarded them in a couple of ways. First of all, he probably had a huge party, and they were his guests of honor. Who doesn’t like a great party? But catch this, he also noticed that they had been faithful to manage his resources well with what they had been given, so the master put them in charge of more.

The MESSAGE paraphrase (by Eugene Peterson) says, “From now on, be my partner.”  The Lukan account of this essentially says, “You’ve been faithful with ten cities, now rule over an entire region.”  Are you getting the picture?  I gave you just a little bit and you did well with it, and now I’m going to give you more responsibility, more ability to do that, because he trusted that their heart was rooted as his heart and they doubled their resources for the good of his kingdom.  There are areas of my life that I think sometimes, “God, why won’t you give me xyz to manage? I want more.”  I want more of this thing—like this car.  I’ll manage this car really well.  Or this kind of house or whatever it might be.  It especially happens when I see others around me having more than I do, and I find myself sometimes feeling jealous of what they get to do or manage.  If we’re honest, I think all of us have been there at some point in our life.   If I’m honest, I can point to areas of my life where God hasn’t entrusted me with as much as someone else, and when I reflect upon that, I realize I haven’t managed the small amount I do have well, why on earth would I expect God to give me more? It’s important that we learn here and do an inventory of our own lives. If you want more, if you want to manage more, then manage what you have well and stop comparing what you have with what God has entrusted to someone else.

Several years ago I was in Bangkok, working with a church there, and I had the privilege of touring the slums. They were on a small strip of land the King had allotted to very poor people. It was filled with tiny little lean-to shacks. I felt so sad that people had to live this way. Kids were playing with sticks in the dirt, that’s all they had. But the jarring thing was, as I navigated through, I saw people that had essentially nothing who were happier than most people I know, myself included! I saw how they cared for one another; how their life wasn’t all about how much stuff they had, it was about the community they lived in. They weren’t all about stuff that they had, they were about who they had, the resources among them, and they were leveraging that for the good of this tiny, little, beautiful community. It wasn’t a situation of, “Lord, why couldn’t you give me more like that rich white person there?”  It was them being faithful with what they had, including hospitality and kindness, and it left an indelible mark on my soul.  I think we should all ask the question,  “How am I doing with managing what God has given to me?”  I’m going to encourage you to write that down and to spend some honest time with Jesus, asking, “Lord, how am I doing with managing what God has given to me?”

Hopefully by now its clear that we have a responsibility to leverage the potential, the power, the resources that God has given us for the good of God’s kingdom.  But now let’s pivot a little bit and look at the third guy, starting in verse 24:  Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed.  So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.”    Wow.  It’s really interesting, if you pull back a little bit, to see the perspective of this third person and how different his perspective of the master is from the first two. Did you catch that?  He believed the master to be a hard man who harvested where he didn’t sow and gathered where he didn’t scatter seed. His perspective of the master was completely different than the others. You’d sure think the other two, if they saw the master the same way, would have been far more careful with the money they were entrusted with. Does that make sense?  It’s like they viewed the master in a way that gave them the freedom to invest his resources.  Maybe they felt safe with him.  Or maybe they felt like he really trusted them.  Or maybe they felt like he really wanted the best for them.  Maybe they felt like they knew his heart so well that they knew exactly what to do with the resources given to them. It’s clear from the Scriptures that this third man viewed the master to be harsh, unethical, and mean, so his experience of the master was birthed out of the way he saw the master.

I have a lot of friends who grew up thinking God was angry with them.   And that meant that their experience of God was that of an angry God, always out to get them. The hammer’s about to drop.  Maybe you can relate. Last week Ryan shared, “The way you see yourself shapes everything else.”  I agree with that 100%.  And I want to expound upon that, because, make no mistake here, friends, our theology of God will greatly impact how we experience God. Our theology of God—what we believe to be true about God—will greatly impact how we experience God.  If the Gospel is simply, “God is angry and wrathful towards us because we are sinners, unless we pray a sinner’s prayer and accept Jesus, it’s easy to form an opinion that “God is an angry God.” That presupposition can greatly influence how we read all of the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament. When you see people saying the Old Testament God was really, really angry, but Jesus came and now God can be nice, because of Jesus, that came from their perspective of who God is.  Does that make sense?

My grandma gave me a bible when I was 10 or 11, and I sat in my room and I read it, because I’m a nerd, from cover to cover.  I wasn’t going to church regularly, I just read the Scriptures.  From reading it, I formed the idea that God was loving and loved me unconditionally, and that He was inviting me into relationship with Him, into the family of God, so to speak. I didn’t know until much later, when I started attending church regularly, that I started hearing how mad God was, and hearing how much God hated sin, and hated sinners.  That was some of the language I heard, and it was perplexing to me.  It wasn’t until years later, as I’ve been a pastor for almost 23 years, listening to story after story from people whose image of God is of one who’s against them.  I want you to look at this popular meme that’s been posted:   Knock, knock.  Who’s there?  It’s Jesus, let me in.  Why?   I have to save you.  From what?  From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in.   This is how so many people see God.  It’s funny, but it’s sad.

If the Gospel for people is simply a “get out of hell” card versus an invitation to the beauty of God’s kingdom, no wonder they have a short-sided view of their responsibility within the kingdom of God. I’m going to say it one more time:  Our theology of God will greatly impact how we experience God.  Some of my charismatic friends seem to have this insanely intimate experience of God.  How many of you know someone who is a charismatic person, or maybe you are?  I have so many other friends that judge those people for them being all about the experience of God.  But I’ve often wondered if the reason we don’t experience God fully is because our theology of God is so limited.   For those who experience God more fully as a loving, generous God, it’s because that is their view of God.

The first two people clearly viewed the master differently than the third, and their view of the master defined their actions.  They took risks and were rewarded. The last one played it safe, and let’s turn and see what happened.  This is where the twist happens.  Now remember how I said parables often had a twist that rattled people and shifted their perspective from the economy of the world to the economy of the kingdom? Now we’re at the point in the story where we see the twist. I mean, listeners would probably have been surprised that the risk takers were rewarded so heavily.  And then it really gets crazy!   Let’s look at the master’s response, starting in verse 26:  His master replied, “You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed?  Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.” 

Holy cow! What a response.  This is the verse that when I got to it, I went, “I don’t want to preach this!”  I love how Eugene Peterson, in The Message, words this.  He has this poetic way of unpacking this and I think it’s a great way to see it.  I’m going to reread this from The Message paraphrase:  The master was furious. “That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest.”    Do you see it? The master never says, “You’re right, I’m a terrible person.” In Luke’s version of this, he doesn’t say that either. The master doesn’t say, “I’m the horrible villain you say I am.”   He simply piggybacks off of what the third person believed about him.  The master is essentially saying, “If you really believed I was that way, why didn’t you try to get some kind of safe results with what I gave you?  You knew I would want some sort of return, why wouldn’t you operate that way?” The third person’s view of the master was so limited, so skewed, that he chose to play it safe—to not live out the economy of the kingdom, but to live with scarcity thinking—and that caused him to be punished for it.

People with a ton of baggage, and we all have baggage, we all have pain, we all have child/family-origin stuff, we have all these things that influence how we see our master.  When we have that and we don’t deal with that, we view the world through the lenses of our stuff.  Someone once said, “If you don’t transform your pain, you’ll transmit it.”  Often we project onto others and we vilify other people.   I’ve seen people play the constant victim because they aren’t being honest about how the condition of their heart influences the way they see others, and they unfairly vilify other people, because of the lens they’re seeing people through.   We do this to God too, don’t we? Often, we make God in our own image of God instead of seeing God for who God really is.  Seeing God incorrectly can lead to a really miserable, empty, scarcity-oriented life.

Look at what the master said about this in verse 28: So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags.  For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.   This is some of the hardest, harshest language we see from Jesus. He’s essentially saying, “My will will be accomplished one way or another. The kingdom economy will be established.  The good news of the shalom of the kingdom IS going to happen.  Those who manage the resources that I entrust to them, I’ll give more to them.  But the one who lives with a scarcity mentality won’t receive the best of the kingdom and will be judged accordingly.”   Again, Eugene Peterson’s translation of this is brilliant:  Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this “play-it-safe” who won’t go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.

It’s clear to me that God’s economy of grace, of the kingdom, is quite different than the world’s economy.  Hopefully you’re seeing that by now.  Read Ephesians 5.  Ephesians 5 is a beautiful passage of Scripture and Paul sort of gives instructions on how to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus, in a dark and hurting world.   He uses this language of “make the most of every opportunity, because the days are dark.”  He’s calling us as followers of Jesus to leverage everything we have to push back darkness and to bring the kingdom down here as it is up there.

So, I want to end today by unpacking FOUR things to chew on in order to be who God created us to be, and to live out the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  I want to encourage you to write these down and put them in your heart and process these in the week to come.  The first thing I want to challenge us to do is:  Make sure our view of God is healthy.   If to you God is the angry, mean taskmaster, I’d love to invite you to consider another way of looking at God, and the best picture we have of God is what? JESUS!  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)    What happened?  Jesus moved into the neighborhood.  Jesus is the best image we have.  I love how Pastor Brian Zahnd says this:  “God is like Jesus.
God has always been like Jesus.
  There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.
  We have not always known what God is like, but now we do.”   What if we were the kind of Church that was so immersed in the life and teaching of Jesus, so familiar with his way and his heart, that we read all of Scripture through that lens?  What if we allowed the words and teaching of Jesus and his character to define our image of who God is and what God is like? For some of us, reorienting our heart in the way of the kingdom starts by changing our view of who God is.

The second thing might feel a little bit uncomfortable: Get to know who God made you to be.  I took a personality profile ten years ago that changed my life.  I always felt I was wired a little bit different than other people, and that people sort of put me in a box, and that drove me bananas.  I always wished I could just go to some kind of psychologist and they’d print out this report:  This is you.  I wanted to know how am I wired, and how do I see the world and why, and how can I best contribute to God’s kingdom?  Taking that test opened the door for me for some massive self discovery of what I was good at, what I wasn’t good at, how I could bring the best value, and what gave me the most joy. As I was reading it, I went, “Wow, this is crazy!”  So I started learning a lot about myself.  Fast forward a couple years.  I was in a season in my life where I was really into screenwriting. I was in screenwriting and film making and entering competitions and writing sit-com pilots and doing all sort of crazy things.  I had a friend of mine who was making this film, and he called me and asked, “Would you like to come to the set of this film, for three weeks, and be sort of our social media/documentarian?  Post on Twitter and Facebook about this and keep people in the loop.”  Behind the scenes, on the set, taking pictures and posting and getting people excited.  It sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?  Two, three years before that I would have been…hook, line, and sinker into this. But the thing is, I had spent so much time discovering who I was, and how I was wired, that I knew that if I accepted this, we’d both be disappointed. I hadn’t even updated my own blog in months. So I didn’t have to think about the right thing to do, I knew instantly it wasn’t a fit.

I’m still discovering who I am, but I consider it a part of learning to live in the way of Jesus with His heart, to do the hard work of self discovery, to do as Jesus would do if Jesus were YOU! I love the words in Ephesians 2:10 — For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago. This means you are beautifully made to do God’s good work in the Kingdom of Heaven, and I so want you to get to know who God made you to be so you can accomplish the good works God arranged for you long ago.  It’s clear to me that God’s desire is that we know the heart of Jesus and the way of Jesus so intimately, and how God has wired us so intimately, that making decisions about what to do with our time, and our money, and our finances, and our energy, and all that sort of stuff would be absolutely obvious.

Some of us have a lot of work to do to get to know the heart and way of Jesus and to get to know ourselves enough to make those decisions pretty easily.  I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who have no clue who they are.  “I don’t know who I am.”  “I don’t know what I’m good at.”   “I don’t know why I’m here.”  Maybe you can relate.    Maybe, for you, you should take something like the Enneagram, or Myers-Briggs, or maybe getting a spiritual director or a coach.   I will tell you that our team, here at South, is really committed to doing our part to help everyone in this room and everyone that’s a part of our tribe become aware of who God created them to be.  We’ve been working really hard behind the scenes on some things that we’ll roll out this fall that I am losing-my-mind excited about that I think is going to help people discover who God made them to be, so they can partner in the very best way with God’s mission here at South.  Who’s excited about that?

So we should reframe how we see God.  We should learn to see ourselves.  The third thing is:  We should put our faith into practice  Years ago, I went through a bit of an obsessive time reading the Scriptures.  I listened to all kinds of verse-by-verse teaching.  I bought a ton of commentaries.  I did exhaustive studies of books of the Bible. I could unpack the Hebrew and the Greek and all this sort of stuff.  I knew a LOT!  One day, one of my friends took me to lunch.  He looked me right in the eye and said, “Larry, you’re getting spiritually fat.” As you can imagine, I was a bit taken aback.  He went on to tell me that he’d been observing this process and that I knew a ton, but that it was time for me to leverage what I knew into action—into allowing God to use me for His glory.  I will say that that conversation changed my life.  It helped me realize that just showing up and listening to great sermons and reading the Bible all day isn’t all that following Jesus is about.

Just like in the earlier parables, the person who’s hard at work when the master comes, who put in the effort, is the one who is rewarded. I firmly believe that the economy of the kingdom is one that seeks to leverage God’s resources for maximum impact, and to put our faith into action. So, Church, look at me. If God’s blessed you with a little, then use the little you have for God’s glory and for his kingdom. If God’s blessed you with a LOT, then use the lot that you have for God’s glory and His kingdom.  It’s not enough to just know a lot about the Bible. It’s not enough to just say all the things about God, or to just attend church. Following Jesus—living in His way with His heart—requires that we put our faith into action.   That we love one another, that we serve one another, that we put others before ourselves, that we stand up for one another, that we’re a voice for people who don’t have a voice, that we are generous and kind with one another, and that we seek to bring God’s shalom into every facet of creation for God’s glory and the benefit of every single person. That is us on mission with God.

For those in this room who say it sounds a lot like “works,” I really appreciate that, and I’m going to go to Dallas Willard again, because he’s smarter than me.  Dallas Willard says,  “We might say, ‘This is dangerous because it could lead to works.’ Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”  Our effort doesn’t earn favor with God; it’s not about because we did all this stuff salvation is now earned.  It is simply the outworking of our faith and it shows that we are choosing to partner with God’s mission in the earth.

Our mission at South is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. We believe that if we are living in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus, we would consistently be growing in being with Jesus, spending time with Jesus.  We would consistently be growing in becoming like Jesus.  People would look and see us becoming like the Jesus that we see in the Scriptures.  We would consistently be growing and doing as Jesus did.  That’s the picture of what our mission statement looks like in your life.  We’re working hard and we’re excited to pour more gas on this to help you be very clear what it looks like to live in His way with His heart, to become like Jesus, to do as Jesus did, to live out our faith.  That’s the way of the kingdom!

Finally, the fourth thing is: Don’t be afraid to take a risk.  I’ve done all sorts of personality assessments and worked for a lot of other people, and there’s one ruling like what is your risk tolerance?  If you sit down with a financial advisor, one question they’ll ask is, “How risk adverse are you?”  This helps them determine where to put your money with investments.  One of the hard things about this set of parables is this idea that when the master returns, his subjects are asked to give an account of what they did with what they’ve been given, and they will be judged accordingly. And I think if we’re honest, some of us have squandered our opportunity to be used by God, because we were afraid, or because we weren’t willing to take a risk, or because we didn’t invest the time to get to know Jesus and His heart, and to partner with it. Or we simply don’t believe God can use us or that we can make any kind of impact.  One commentator said that the third character’s “timidity and lack of enterprise” is what caused him to be condemned.

Not everyone in this room is wired as an entrepreneur and I fully realize that.  We all have a different range of tolerance for risk.  But Jesus never preached, “Accept me into your heart.”  He DID speak an enormous amount about the kingdom of heaven being near, didn’t he?  And these parables were part of the way He illustrated what life in the Kingdom would be like, and it wasn’t a someday, maybe, kind of thing; it was a “the Kingdom is here”  kind of thing. Behold, the kingdom is near.  John the Baptist said it.  Jesus said it.  For a reason.  The kingdom is HERE, it’s happening.  It’s not someday Jesus comes back so we should just huddle and hide until Jesus comes back, that’s not what it is.  Jesus showed us His way, His heart, His kingdom, was different than the normal way of doing things. And for all of us, living in THAT way might ask us to do things that might seem like risky behavior to people who don’t get it.  Are you with me?

Some people are called to sell everything, move overseas, and minister to people around the globe.  God might ask you to do something crazy and get to know your neighbors.  God might ask some of us to befriend people that society deems unlovable.  God might ask you to go serve populations nobody else wants to serve.

I once left a church and an incredible situation to follow where I thought God was leading my family and I. It was a huge risk, and several people told me I was making the worst decision of my life.  But I will tell you, God showed up and did things in me I never imagined.  I love that there are people in this church that are uncommonly generous and kingdom-minded. I think of people in this community, like the Penningtons.  I admire you guys because you have done a lot of what is on this list actually.  They’ve moved overseas and have served selflessly, and now that they live here, they make their home available to people.  I’ve seen them mentoring other people, hosting block parties for their neighbors.   I think about people mentoring marriages and that investment into lives.  I think about Nicole and her team that give of their time every Tuesday night to journey with those with hurts, habits, and hang-ups.  Listen, friends, none of those things are convenient, but I’m convinced of this, God doesn’t always call us to convenience; He calls us to be consistent with the heartbeat of the kingdom.

So I want to say to you, South Fellowship Church, you’re going to hear from me and from others on this stage inviting you to bring your best self to this church,  and to this city, and to this world. And I’m going continue to ask you to align who you are, and what God has blessed you with, for the good of God’s beautiful kingdom—to leverage those things for the shalom, we have the joy of partnering with Jesus, to bring to a hurting, broken, world.

Imagine, if we were the kind of church that took seriously the call to get to know Jesus so intimately, to get to know who God’s made us to be so intimately, and to pay attention to a hurting, broken world around us so intimately that we leveraged every thing we had to be used by God and to let His kingdom come, His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  What if it wasn’t just the Lord’s Prayer that we said, what if we lived it as a church?  THAT, I think, is a beautiful picture of a healthy church on mission with God, and I believe that’s the kind of church God has been forming here and will continue to form.

So I’m just going to ask, what about you? Look at the four things we can do with this passage.  I want you to  ask yourself, “What is one step I can take this week to leverage what God has entrusted me with for His Kingdom?  What’s one thing I can do this week to leverage what God has entrusted me with for His glory, for His name, for the good of others?    Maybe it’s spending some time reading the gospels, seeing the character, the nature, the teaching of Jesus and reorienting yourself to who God really is.    Maybe it’s taking a personality test, or getting a life coach or spiritual director and doing some discovery of who you are and how God’s wired you and how God wants to use you.     Maybe it’s taking steps to put your faith into practice.    Maybe, for some of us, as scary as this might sound, it might be taking a risk.  Let’s pray.

Lord, I love that the Scriptures are so challenging sometimes, even though it’s scary.  I love that you invite us into something so compelling and so beautiful.  My prayer today, God, is that you would speak to this community about who you are, who we are, what you want us to do and how you might allow us to leverage everything we have for your good name, for the kingdom, for the hope of the world.  I pray you give people in this room wisdom.  Wisdom to know what steps to take, that they might see themselves through your eyes.  That the lenses that are smudged and seeing things incorrectly would be wiped clean.  That the economy of the kingdom, the economy of grace would be the economy we all submit to under your lordship, Jesus.  Lord, it’s our honor to serve you, to follow you.  We ask all these things in the strong and powerful name of Jesus.  This beautiful church, together, said….Amen.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

We started a series last week called “The Parables of Jesus.”  This series is all about the parables of Jesus.  Over the course of the summer, we’re going to be studying together these stories that Jesus told.  That’s what a parable is.  A parable’s a story.  It’s two words put together—“para” which means alongside of and “bollo” which means to throw.  It’s stories for normal everyday people—-they weren’t told by the philosophical leaders or taught in the Socratic seminar.  Stories they threw alongside of reality.  The whole goal of a parable was to make people go, “Huh, I never thought of it like that.”  I never thought that the kingdom of heaven was sort of like a field where there’s both wheat planted in it and weeds.  Hmm, I never saw it like that.  The parables are intended to create some spiritual awakening in our souls.

The parable that we’re going to look at today is found in Luke 18:9-14.  This parable is all about Jesus saying, “I know, I get it.”  The way that you look at the world and the way that you see who’s on top, the power structures, and what it looks like to get ahead, and what it looks like when you accumulate wealth, and how to be a good and right person.  I get it.  I get it.  There’s a way that the world looks, but everything is not as it seems.

Fourth of July, Season 3 of the amazing Netflix show “Stranger Things” came out.  Don’t spoil it, I haven’t started Season 3 yet; I’ve been busy, but I plan on watching it.  “Stranger Things” is this Netflix special TV show.  It’s science fiction and ’80s based.  It has all sorts of allusions to ’80’s movies and TV shows.  It’s brilliant.  It’s about this little town in Hawkins, Indiana where the Hawkins National Laboratory performs these scientific research experiments.  They’re working for the United States Department of Energy, but secretly they are exploring paranormal and supernatural activity.  They just happen to unearth, or uncover, this portal to an alternate dimension called the “Upside Down.”  It’s this dimension that exists right alongside of the dimension you can see, but it’s just completely upside down, completely different.  It’s right there, but totally different.

I think what Jesus wants to do today is invite us to the Upside Down.  I think he wants us to reimagine this world that we live in.  His teaching in this text is quite jarring.  I think the question for all of us is will we have the courage to receive it, will we have the courage to embrace it, to enter into it.  Don’t miss this—whether or not you say yes to that question, I believe, will in large part, determine the trajectory of your life.  Luke 18:9-14.  Here’s the way Jesus tells this story:  He also told this parable {He threw this story alongside of their reality.) to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’  But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.  For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Now a little bit of context for us because the story demands it for us to really enter in.  Every Jewish person listening to Jesus’s story here would have recognized what Jesus is talking about.  The people would go to temple to pray, two times every day.  At those times, in the morning and in the evening, there would be a sacrifice made, usually a small lamb.  The priest would offer this sacrifice.  There would be incense that would be lit.  There would be trumpets that would be sounded.  There would be cymbals that would clang.  There would be prayers that would be offered and psalms that would be sung.  Jesus says, in that context, there’s two people coming from their homes.  One a tax collector and the other a Pharisee.  This is like, a Pharisee and a tax collector walk into a temple….   Jesus is about to tell us this grand joke, in a sense.

The word “Pharisee” literally means “separate.”  They were the Bible study teachers.  They were the Promise Keepers.  They were the Campus Crusaders.  They were the pastors.  People who had it all together.  People that other people looked up to and went, “Ah, when we get there, then we’ll be okay with God.”  On the other hand, there was this tax collector.  They were the exact opposite.  They were people who’d rob their own countrymen.  They sold out in order to earn from Rome the right to tax their own people, and they kept driving taxes up and up and up so that everybody else was living in poverty and they were living wealthy.  You have one person that everybody looks up to and esteems as pious and elite, and you have another person who everybody says, “I’m glad I’m not like them.”

That’s the context of Jesus telling the story.  A lot of people read the story on the surface and think the story’s about prayer.  The context is prayer, but the story is about this word “righteous.”  It’s this word about how to be right.  There was a way to be right in the Greco-Roman world and it was by following all the rules, by embracing the moral and ethic code, and by being a “decent” person.  But as you read through the Scriptures, you find that righteousness is way deeper than that.  Righteousness actually has to do with relationship also, not just the keeping of the law, but about being right with another person, being able to look them in the eye and to know that things are okay between you and them.  The question is really about “How are you okay?”  That’s what the story’s about.  That’s what Jesus’s little sermon’s about.  How do you get to the place where you’re comfortable in your own skin?  Where you’re comfortable before God?  How do you get to the place where you’re right with God?

And he told them this parable and here’s what he said.   He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves…..and treated others with contempt.    Notice, the way that they treat other people is determined by what they see in their own soul.  Did you know that the way that you interact with everybody around you, including God, is determined primarily by what you see in you?  {You may want to write this down, if you’re taking notes.}  What happens in you determines what happens through you.  Or we might say it like this this morning:  The way you see yourself shapes your approach to everything else.

When you walked in, you got a mirror.  Would you take that out?  What do you see?  If the way you see yourself shapes your approach to everything else, maybe it would be a good practice for us to be honest this morning about what we see.  What do you see?  Do you see someone who has it all together?  Do you see someone who has got a good resumé?  God, thanks for all the good things you’ve given me and thanks for the things I’ve given me.  Do you see someone who’s broken?  Do you see someone who’s failed?  Someone who’s maybe unlovable?  Do you see someone who’s had to be strong for other people….sort of hold it all together?  Do you see someone…..right now I see someone who’s barely holding on.   Anybody with me?  Do you see someone who’s broken beyond repair?  Or maybe we just see someone who’s good.  All of us see something.  Maybe we could write a word on here that would define the way that we see ourselves, but the way that you see YOU determines the way you treat all the you’s around you.  It overflows into the lives of the people that you love the most and that you care about the most.

Look at the way this played out in the Pharisee’s life.  He told them this story—threw this story alongside their reality—to some who trusted in themselves {Where they went God, I’m right before you because of what’s in me.}  that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt:  “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself…..  It was really interesting.  We see this progression—they trust in themselves for their own righteousness, which shapes the way they view everything else, which determines the position of everyone else in relationship to them.  And what happens?  The Pharisee is by himself, praying.  God, thank you that I’m amazing.  God, thank you that I’m awesome.  Thank you that I stuck that dismount.  God, you did good work in creating me.  And everybody is over here and praying the psalms, going through the motions and they’re all in one little group, one little cluster.  Jesus wants to make a point.  The Pharisee, who trusts in himself for his own righteousness, is standing APART from everybody else.  That’s exactly what happens when we trust in ourselves.  There’s a word that we have for that—pride.  I think what Jesus wants to show us is that pride creates a divide—-between ourselves, and between God, and between the people that we love the most.

If you dive into Galatians 6:2-3, here’s what the Apostle Paul will write to the church at Galatia — Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.  {Which is love—love your neighbor as yourself.}  For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.   Isn’t that interesting?  The thing that prevents you from carrying the burdens of others, from being in life-giving relationship with others, is thinking that you’re something.  Like the Pharisee did.  I’m amazing.  I’ve got it all together.  I’ve accomplished a whole lot.  I read my Bible everyday.  I go to the prayer meeting.  I haven’t missed church in a week.  I tithe on my income….  What starts to happen?  There’s this distance, this divide, that’s created.  Can I invite you to just lean in a little bit today?  As I’ve tried to examine my own soul, what I’ve recognized is that pride is hard to see in myself.  It’s hard to see.  So my guess is most of us are going, “You know who I wish was here for this sermon?”  Fill-in-the-blank, right?  Can we be honest?  Did anybody think that yet?  Yeah.  I think what Jesus might want to say to us today is,  “This sermon isn’t for somebody else, it’s actually for you!”

There’s some devastating things that start to happen in our soul when we embrace this narrative of “I’m okay and I’m good because of what I’ve done.”  Here’s three things that happen in the Pharisee’s life:  1) He starts to have this narrative of his own holiness.  The reason he’s distant is because he believes his holiness needs to be protected by distance between him and dirtiness.  So I’m more holy the more sin I stay away from.  Man, isn’t that interesting how some of these things just keep coming back around.  We still try to define holiness based on what we stay away from.  There’s a whole Christian subculture that’s built around helping you stay away from people that are broken and sinful and hurting and in pain.  You want to know the problem with that?  Jesus!  Jesus entered in with sinful people.  He entered in with broken people.  He entered in with people who were in pain, and he started to reverse that narrative, that narrative that says, “Oh, if I get near ‘sinful’ people, then I’ll become sinful.”  He goes no, no, no, no, actually what happens is when holiness encounters sin; it’s not that holiness is made dirty, it’s that sin is made clean.  So when Jesus touches a leper, He doesn’t get leprosy, the leper is healed.  When Jesus encounters a demon, he drives out the demon, he doesn’t get it himself.  That’s his perspective on holiness.  The Pharisee’s holding onto this old method of I’ve got to stay away from everything that’s dirty so that I can remain clean.  I think a lot of times, pride creates a divide by giving us a faulty narrative of what it means to be holy.  You know you’re holy by not what you stay away from, but because of who you know, and the grace that you receive.  That’s New Covenant holiness, friends.

But it doesn’t stop there for this Pharisee.  It’s not just the narrative that he believes about the way that he’s made holy.  There’s this word Jesus uses to describe the perspective and attitude of the Pharisee—it says he treated others with contempt.  Which literally in the Greek means emptiness.  He looked at them as empty people.  As people who were sort of soulless, and you can see why.  His perspective—I have done all these things.  And I have tithed.  And I have attended temple.  And I have done all of those things out there, that, by the way, weren’t even required by the law.  And they haven’t.  And the fact that they haven’t means that they are unworthy of love.  The narrative he believes is that I’m valuable based on what I do and based on what I produce.

Can I give a pastoral word to all the parents out there?  I think one of the most dangerous things we can do as parents is hold onto that narrative—we’re valuable based on what we produce.  Because what we see in us, always determines what we give to others.  So if the story we’re telling ourselves is I’m valuable based on what I produce, what’s the story that our kids are going to end up hearing?  You’re valuable based on what you produce!  I think one of the truths he wants to teach us is that if I find my value in what I do, I measure everybody else by what they do also.

I can remember, a few weeks ago, my son Ethan was pitching.  Every time he walked somebody—he had a rough game so he walked a few people—he would look over at me (I was coaching).  It was this look of “Are we still okay?”  I’ve failed.  I’ve let you down.  Are we still okay?  The next time he was on the mound, I went up to the mound, put the ball in his hand, knelt down right in front of him and said, “Hey, bud, I want you to know that whether you strike every batter out or walk every batter you face, you’re still my son and I love you exactly the same!”  Man, I wish I would have done that earlier in the season, because he pitched so much better that day!  I wish I would have done that earlier, because he’s carrying this weight….   That’s my narrative, you guys, I’ve got this perfectionism, performer narrative that spins around in my head, and when I let it go it goes crazy, and it spilled over onto my son and somehow he’s gotten in him, “My dad loves me when I strike people out, but when I walk people I’ve got to look back to make sure we’re okay.”  I don’t know about you, but I want to kill that narrative as quickly in me as I possibly can so that it dies in him too, because it’s no way to live wondering if you’re okay with the people who love you most.  If you’re here today and you’re wondering if you’re okay with God….if you’re looking back at him going, “I failed.  Are we still okay?”  His question back to you isn’t “How much have you done for me lately and what have you produced, and what sort of dividends are coming out of your life?”  His question back to you is “Are your hands open to receive grace and mercy from Jesus?”  That’s the only question he cares about.

This Pharisee just can’t get there, so what happens?  The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other men.” I mean, can you believe some of these guys?  These extortioners.  These unjust. These adulterers.  Or even like that dude over there!  Can you believe that dude has the audacity to enter into YOUR temple courts to come and pray to you?  That tax collector—he’s ripped everybody in here off and he shows up in church!  Oh man!  Me, I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of everything.   Five times in two verses, this guy says to God, “I’m sure you’re amazing and you’re great, but can we talk about me?  Could we talk about how awesome I am?  You’re good, but let’s talk about me!”  Five times in two verses.  Then he says, “Hey, God, let’s also talk about them.  Let’s talk about how much better I am than those people.”  Have you’ve ever been to a prayer gathering that turned into a sermon somewhere along the way?

Here’s what this guy does.  Like I mentioned, he’s playing by rules that God didn’t give.  These weren’t things God commanded.  He’s made up his own way of being right with God, which is what we call religion.  Isn’t it fascinating how people who make up their own way of being right with God very rarely fall on the wrong side of that equation?  He’s like, God, I’m good.  What does he do?  He’s measuring himself against everyone else.  His first narrative is: I’m holy because I’m separate.  His second narrative is: I’m valuable based on what I produce.  His third narrative is: I’m okay because I’m better than them.  It all falls under this banner of pride.   You know what the devastating thing about this line of thinking—the ‘I’m better than them’ line of thinking—is?  It’s impossible to love if you’re in competition with somebody.  If you’re comparing yourself with somebody, you’re competing, because there’s only two ways I climb this ladder that I feel I have to climb.  One is by actually climbing it and getting better, so I can then pat myself on the back and go, “Aren’t I amazing?”  The other is if you go down a few rungs, I go up a few rungs.  So if you’re comparing yourself to people, you’re competing with people.  And if you’re competing with people, it’s impossible for you to love people.  If you’re comparing yourself to people and it’s impossible for you to love people, then comparison is actually the death of the greatest command.  So we have to find something that allows us to look in the mirror and go, “In all of my brokenness, in all of my failure, and in all of my pain, I’m still okay, and it’s not because of any of the resources inside of me.”  If Jesus were here today, I think he would say, “Man, when we talk about righteousness….righteousness isn’t primarily about whether or not you’ve broken the law, it’s about a broken relationship.”

So let me just ask you some diagnostic questions.  Pride is hard for us to see in ourselves, so here’s some questions to ask.  Maybe if the answer is Yes to some of these, maybe there’s some work that God just wants to do in your life.  Don’t be afraid of that.  There’s a difference between condemnation, which is the enemy’s voice, and conviction, which is the voice of the Spirit.  The enemy wants to condemn so he can beat you down.  The Spirit wants to convict so he can show you that you are down and start to lead you up!   *How easily are you offended?  *How hard do you try to convince people you are right?  Don’t you imagine that if you were to talk to the Pharisee, he would have just said like, I don’t get what the big deal is, I’m right!  And he’s wrong!  How hard do you try to convince people you’re right?  *How hard is it for you to admit you’re wrong?  If you’re like I can’t remember the last time that I was, then this sermon’s for you!  *How often do you think, I’m not as good at fill-in-the-blank as that person?  You might immediately go, well, that’s not pride, that’s actually self-deprecating.  It’s just the opposite side of the coin.  It’s just pride where you haven’t succeeded in your game.  *How often do you try things you might not be good at?  Because people who struggle with pride and perfectionism, typically avoid things that they might fail at because that would be a huge blow to their ego.  I know because I’m preaching to myself!  *How do you respond when people treat you like a servant?  *How hard is it for you to genuinely encourage others?  *How much do you empathize with people who’ve failed?  Or who are in pain?  *How often do you share the deepest parts of your soul with trusted friends?

In Jesus’s story, the Pharisee is created to serve as a warning for us.  To create a spiritual awakening.  To go oh, maybe I’ve been playing this game.  Maybe I’ve just been coming to church and maybe church has turned into a ledger sheet for me to show to God, to say to God, “God, are we okay?”  Maybe today there’s some sort of awakening in your soul, by the power of the Spirit, where Jesus is going yeah, this isn’t for that other person you thought it was for, it’s actually for you and I want to do some business on your soul.  Maybe you’re going, oh my goodness, pride creates divide and the pride in my life has actually cut me off from some of the people I love the most.  Maybe it’s also cut me off from God.  Maybe you’re here today and you’re still thinking it’s somebody else’s fault.

If pride is the clandestine destroyer of all relationships—and it is—Jesus also invites us to one of the secrets of success.  I love the way John Stott put it:  “Pride is your greatest enemy; humility is your greatest friend.”  Verse 13 — But the tax collector, standing far off, {See, the Pharisee stands alone—these are intentional word choices by Jesus—as if to say, I’m better than you.  The tax collector stands far off, as if to say I could never get that close.  It’s different.} would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, {Which was typically something reserved for females to do in the ancient Jewish culture, and it was something reserved for funerals, for lament, for a death that’s happened.  So he’s beating his chest, not God, I’m good and I’ve got, but God, I’m broken and I’m in need.}  saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” 

Here’s what’s interesting: They’ve walked up to the temple.  They’ve seen a priest slaughter a lamb, spread his blood.  They’ve seen the incense rise.  They’ve sung the psalms.  They’ve cried out their prayers to God.  They’ve done everything.  And yet, he’s still thinking there’s something off between us.  Here’s what he recognizes:  He recognizes that going through the motion of religion will never touch the deepest places of his soul that he knows are broken.  So what does he do?  He does the thing that all of us who receive grace and mercy do—-he asks for it!  The truth of the matter, friends, is that humility frees us to receive mercy.  Originally I had in my notes, humility releases mercy, but that would be theologically false.  Humility does not release mercy.  Humility is the thing that releases the thing that we’re holding onto that prevents us from capturing God’s mercy that is always being poured out.  The only thing that can keep you from accepting God’s grace is your unwillingness to admit that you need it; everybody who admits that they need it, receives it.  The Pharisee is so obsessed with his own resumé that he is unable to receive God’s grace.

What Jesus teaches — Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.  This is the upside-down!  It is!  If you want to gain your life, lose it. (Luke 9:24)  If you want to know what it means to be great in the kingdom, be the last. (Matthew 12:16)  If you want to be the greatest of all, be the servant of all. (Luke 22:26)  This is messed up, upside-down, inverted, paradoxical kingdom living.  That’s what it is.

If you’re tracking with me, my guess is your question is yeah, but Ryan, how do I become humble?  It’s the right question.  If you try to become humble and you succeed, where does that leave you?  You’re like, “Man, I’m the most humble person I’ve ever met! I’ve really been working on humility and I think I’ve stuck the dismount!”  Immediately you’re knocked off the podium.  So how do we do it?  Let me give you two ideas.  1) I think Mother Teresa said it best: “We learn humility through accepting humiliations cheerfully.  Do not let that chance pass you by.”  I think the way we step into a life of humility is by being humiliated.  Sounds fun, doesn’t it?  Where do we sign up for that?!  We want to avoid that like the plague, don’t we?

A few weeks ago, Kelly and I were in Costa Rica on vacation.  We were hiking along this trail in the jungle.  It was just gorgeous!  These massive birds chirping, monkeys howling; it was this picturesque scene.  We walked passed this little hut in the jungle, and there were these dogs in the backyard of this hut that were just ROWR, ROWR, RUFF, RUFF! They were going crazy, so I just responded!  My adrenaline kicked into gear and I started to run as fast as I could.  My wife happened to be a little bit in front of me, and in order to save her life from these vicious dogs, I pushed her out of the way so that I would be in between her and the dogs, to give my life for her.  At least that’s my version of this story!  I fell down face first, on the trail, and these dogs come rushing out.  Rowr, rowr, rowr!   They were the two most vicious Chihuahuas I have ever seen in my entire life!  I am lying face first in the dirt; Kelly is laughing at me and asking if I’m okay.  The guy comes running out of his house and says, “Oh, did my dogs scare you?”  I’m like face on the ground, “No, I’m good. Uh, I thought I saw a quarter down here.  I was looking for it….”  It was just her and I and something in me was like, “You should feel embarrassed.”

Just the thought of being humiliated fills us with fear, doesn’t it?  I think what Mother Teresa is saying is that there will be opportunities for you to embrace that feeling and go, “Yeah, maybe I’m imperfect.”  Maybe there’s some flaws, maybe there’s some shortcomings.   See, what happens in us when we’re humiliated is the false self that we’ve tried to construct, the public self, the I’m okay self, the look-at-me self, starts to die.

Here’s the other way we can embrace a posture of humility.  We can position ourselves to experience greatness—God’s greatness.  No one stands on the edge of the Grand Canyon and goes, “I’m pretty cool.”  No one puts their blanket out on the Pacific Ocean, watches the sunset and goes, “That’s pretty great, but have you seen what I’ve done lately?”  Nobody holds a baby, crying for the first time, and thinks to themselves, “I am awesome.”  In each of those scenarios, they think to themselves, “God, YOU are GREAT!  God, you have been good.”  We can step into humility by embracing the humiliation that’s going to come.  Don’t chase it!  It’s coming for you!  But, we can also position ourselves to experience God’s greatness and his mercy and his love.

The beautiful thing about humility is it is the very thing that allows us to carry the power of God.  Here’s the thing, friend, you can either choose with your life to carry YOUR strength and YOUR power and YOUR pride, or you can choose to carry God’s love and God’s grace and God’s mercy, but you can’t carry both.  Which is in your bucket today?  What Paul would say is:  We have this treasure in jars of clay, {He’s talking about the gospel, the good news that in the midst of being broken and sinful and needy, you are loved and showered down with mercy and grace and the kindness of the divine.} to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.  (2 Cor. 4:7)

As we land the plane, can I just say that I think there’s some danger, too, in this message, so let me just try to stave it off, if I can.  What I’m not saying is that you should look in the mirror and go, “What a pile of garbage.”  That’s not humility.  That’s actually false pride.  You shouldn’t say, “What a pile of garbage.  I have no worth, because I haven’t added up to God’s standard.”  You’ve heard narratives like this in Christian circles.  Basically, when you go to church, your expectation is when I walk out the doors I should feel worse than when I walked in.  If we don’t feel guilty, we haven’t been to church.  What I think you should think when you look in the mirror is I am imperfect, and I’m broken, and I’m sinful, and in the midst of all of that, I am a dearly-loved child of God.  I carry his image.  I’m indwelt with his Spirit.  He has called me and made me holy, not because I’m amazing and I’m awesome, but because his grace and mercy has been showered down on me, and I’ve just gotten low enough to know that I need it.  He’s placed me in the heavenly realms with Him.  He’s forgiven me and calls me His child.  He hasn’t put inside of me a spirit of fear and timidity, but one of strength and courage and power.  I think when you look in the mirror you should see both your brokenness and your beauty, and my hope is that you see God’s grace reigning and showering down on it all.

So what do we do?  We’re going to come to the table in just a moment, but you might want to write this down: In the kingdom of God, downward mobility (tax-collector mentalities) actually leads to an upward trajectory.  Here’s what that might look like in your life this week, because I want to give you some handles for this.  *What if this week you embraced your smallness by entering God’s presence.  The Scriptures are really clear:  Be still, and know that I am God. (Ps. 46:10)  So one of best ways to forget that God is God and to think that you are God is for you to keep going on that hamster wheel of success.  I think Jesus might want to say to us, “Just slow down.”  Worship and enter my presence.  Stop!  Pray.”  *Maybe this week you decide to serve the people around you.  Maybe it’s a roommate or a friend or a family member or a child.  Maybe it’s something simple like a note of encouragement, or an arm around them, or a word of truth spoken.  Maybe you do something that just needs to be done and you don’t tell anybody about it.  What if this week you chose to serve selflessly and then accept it as part of your discipleship when you’re treated like a servant?  “They’re treating me like a servant.  Jesus, that’s part of your school of shaping me in your image.  Help me respond appropriately.”    *What if this week you started to look at every single person that you saw and you attributed to them intrinsic value; they didn’t earn it.  They didn’t do anything to accomplish something so that they have value, but rather than earned worth, they have intrinsic value.  It’s just there.  They’re a child of God.  My friend Carolyn says she’s been practicing as she drives, looking at other drivers and just imagining that the image of God is stamped on every single one of them—the good drivers and the bad.  Maybe that’s a practice.  *Maybe today you just admit your need and receive his grace.  You can either earn or you can receive, but you can’t do both, friends.  You can’t do both.  You only receive grace if you know that you need it, and God never says No to anybody who asks for it.

Some of you are here today and you’re going, “Man, Jesus, maybe for the first time I just want to say to you I need your grace,” and He’s saying, “Welcome to my kingdom.”  Here’s the question I want us to wrestle with as we come to the table this morning…..maybe for some of us it’s going, Jesus, I need your grace in this area of my life.  I’ve been trying to be strong, but today it’s time to admit that I am weak, and I need you to show up.  And I need your Spirit to infuse my brokenness.  I need your life to take over my death.  I need my trying to be replaced by your showering down of grace and mercy.  As we go to the table this morning, would you just take a moment and would you ask Jesus….Jesus, where do you want to infuse grace into my life today?  Where have I been trying and you’re inviting me to receive?

You know what’s amazing?  In John 13, John tells us the story of Jesus celebrating the Passover meal—-we’re going to celebrate communion in just a moment; would our servers start coming forward?  That night, Jesus gathered his disciples around the table and he took off his outer garment and he tied a towel around his waist.  He got down on his hands and knees and started to wash his disciples’ feet.  I mean, this should absolutely shock us.  The one being in the entire universe that could be prideful isn’t.  Isn’t.  He shows us what God is like; that God doesn’t beat his chest even though he could, he gives his life so that you and I might be made right.  So that you and I might be welcomed back.  For 2000 years, followers of Jesus have been getting low enough to crawl to the table to remember that they’re people in need and that God fills that need.  To remember that they’re people empty and God fills them with his life.  To remember that they’re people who are broken, but they’re beautiful because they’re loved.  To remind themselves that they’re people who have failed but they’re not failures; they are children of the Most High God because of the grace of Jesus.  As you come this morning, would you come knowing that you are deeply loved.  Would that be what you see in the mirror, in the midst of all of the junk going on in your life, that there might be that view that transcends it all.

{Communion instructions}

Let’s pray.  Jesus, would you fill our lack with your abundance?  Would you replace our trying with your Spirit?  And Jesus, would you overshadow our failure with your grace?  Our arms and our hearts are open, speak to us as we celebrate this table today, we pray.  In Jesus’s name.  Amen.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS: The Weeds and Seeds     Matt. 13:24-35  

A week ago today, my family and I were leaving to go to a week at Mount Hermon.  I taught there last week, and the family went and had an awesome time.  Kelly and I are both Type A people.  Our flight left at 8:45 and we left the house at 6:00 am because we like to be on time.  If you followed the news last Sunday, you might have heard there was a little bit of an accident on Peña Boulevard.  If you know DIA, you know that Peña’s really the only way to get into that airport.  We left our house at 6:00 and about 6:30 we’re at that stretch of Peña that juts north and then heads east to the final stretch that takes you into the airport.  When we turned east, we hit gridlock traffic like I’ve never seen on that street before!  It just came to an absolute screeching halt!  Kelly and I looked at each other and said, “This isn’t good,” and started Googling what’s going on.  Turns out there was a huge accident up front.  From 6:30 to 7:00, we just sat there and didn’t move at all.  We saw (on Apple Maps) there was a shortcut you could take and get off the road and sort of circumvent the issue a little bit.  We did that and ended up in another line of cars.  You may have heard that there were some people who took a short cut into an open field and they got absolutely stuck; that wasn’t us, but we could see them from where we were.  As we were waiting, I was saying, “Okay, if we get there 7:45 (an hour before our flight leaves) we’ll be just fine.”  It hit 7:45 and we were still stuck.  Then I said, “If we get to the airport by 8:00, I think we’re going to be okay.”  We started to move a little bit more, but we didn’t pull into the airport until 8:10.  I went and parked in short-term parking, which, by the way, if you do that for a whole week, costs you $175, I found out.  We ran into the airport, got through security, begging and pleading with people to let us through.  I was in such a hurry I put all my kids luggage on the conveyor belt to go through security, and I left mine there.  We got down to the train and I’m standing there empty handed.  Kelly says to me, “Where’s your bag?”  I went, “Oh, I blew it!”  I ran back and said, “It’s going to be easier to find a flight for one than it is five.  You guys get on the flight.  You go!”  I ran back to security and asked if they had a bag and they asked, “Does it have a car seat on it?”  “Yeah, I’m that idiot.”  I run up to the gate…..it’s three minutes after the flight was suppose to have taken off.  As I’m running up, they ask, “Are you Mr. Paulson?”  “Yes, thank you, Jesus!”  They said, “Reid was really worried you weren’t going to make this flight!”

As we were waiting in line, we saw people who decided that waiting in line wasn’t going to be for them; they were going to miss their flight as most of us waiting in line.  So they tried to turn around and get out of the line.  This guy had a Jeep so I guess he thought he would be okay, but, if you remember, it rained pretty hard the Saturday before, and that field was absolutely mud.  I didn’t get him in the picture, but he was standing with his arms crossed looking at what was formerly his car.  I thought to myself, “Yeah, waiting’s hard.”  Especially when you’re waiting and you don’t have any sort of time frame for when that next thing is coming.  Waiting’s really difficult.  I think our tendency, as human beings, is to try to look for any short cut that we can, in order to get around the waiting.  How many of you have tried to circumvent the line at an amusement park?  We wait for food to come at a restaurant.  Or maybe it’s waiting for that next season of life.  In high school, just waiting to get done so we can get to college.  In college, waiting to get done so we can find that job…..or at least our parents are waiting for us to find that job.  Or maybe it’s single and I’m waiting to get married.  Or maybe it’s that next season, that next job, that next opportunity.  Waiting can be really hard.

Will you just lean in for a moment?  Everybody waits.  Everybody waits in life.  But not everybody waits well.  The way that you wait, in many ways, will shape the life that you live.  What we’re going to circle around in these parables that Jesus is going to tell this morning is that life in God’s kingdom requires waiting, with both patience and persistence.  I don’t know about you, but I can wait with patience at some times in my life and sort of sit on my hands and go, “What’s going to come is going to come, and I don’t have any control over this, and I’m just sort of along for the ride.”  OR, I can say, “I’m going to make it through this season.”  I’m going to turn around and find away out of it.  But to wait with a balanced approach of patience…..God, you’re at work in ways I can see and in ways I can’t see…..AND God, you’ve called me to work also, but to trust that you’re the one that makes something of this and you’re the one that moves us along the field.  To do BOTH is really, really difficult.

I think we can add on top of this that as followers of Jesus—you may or may not agree with this—it often seems like God is often on a way different timeline than we are.  It feels like God moves way slower than we want him to move.  At times, we can look up to heaven and pray and go, “Hey, God, are you doing ANYTHING in this?”  I was reminded last week of someone who said, “God moves slowly.  Will we learn to move as slow as Him?”  To that end, Jesus tells some parables. Matthew 13 is where he launches into his sort of storytelling ministry, where Jesus begins to tell a number of parables.  They’re directed toward the nation of Israel.  They’re his immediate audience, but they certainly apply to you and I today too.  Here’s what this parable says (Matthew 13:24) — He (Jesus) put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field…

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be talking about this subject of parables—a number of different parables that Jesus told.  I want to give us some context for what that word actually means.  It’s two words put together—para, which means “to come alongside of, to strengthen, to build up.”  Paraclete—an encourager.  -Bollo, which means literally “to throw.”  So it’s Jesus walking along, in his everyday life, and he’s going to throw some stories alongside there normal, everyday existence.  A lot of followers of Jesus presume that parables are intended to confuse us, because often they did.  But I want to assure you, that’s actually not the original intent of a parable.  Parables were used primarily by fishermen.  They were used by tradesmen.  They weren’t taught in Socratic seminars.  They weren’t used by the philosophical elite.  They were just sort of the everyday man’s and woman’s way of communicating some sort of truth. William Taylor said it like this:  “The purpose of parabolic teaching is clear; its aim is to elucidate truth, not to obscure it, still less to conceal and issue or to serve as a punishment.”  Parabolic teaching was intended to create spiritual awakening.  People would hear Jesus teaching and he would say, “This is sort of like that.”  The kingdom of God is sort of like a wheat field and they were intended to go oh, oh, I didn’t see it like that before.  I didn’t get that before.

He tells these stories, because stories have power.  As Robert MacKee, the great storyteller and studier of stories, said: “Stories are the best way to get ideas into the world.”  I would argue that they are also the best way to get ideas into our heart.  To that end, Jesus starts telling stories.  Most of his stories are parables that he tells, in Matthew 13, about the kingdom of heaven.  Which begs the question what in the world is the kingdom of heaven?  I’ve met so many followers of Jesus that cannot answer that question.  It saddens me because if we were to say to Jesus, “Jesus, you have one sermon to preach on this stage; what would you preach about?” we can pretty well guess because it’s what he taught about everywhere he went.  His one sermon would be about the kingdom of heaven.  It was HIS central message.  So what is the kingdom of heaven?  The kingdom of heaven is anywhere that God gets his way.  That’s what the kingdom of heaven is.  It’s where the rule and reign of God is realized—that’s the kingdom of heaven.  The kingdom of heaven, today, Jesus would say, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and the kingdom of heaven will be fully someday.  The kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, is anywhere God gets what God wants.  Whether it’s in God’s world and in your family, and in your home, and in your workplace, and anywhere you go at your school.  Or in your heart.  When you forgive, you invite the kingdom.  When you love, you live in the kingdom.  It goes where you go, if God has His rule and reign in you.

Jesus wants to tells some stories about what that kingdom is like, what that rule and that reign is like.  I want to read for you a number of verses, and Jesus is going to tell you three stories that all connect about what his kingdom is like.  Matthew 13:24-33 — He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.  So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.  And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?  How then does it have weeds?’  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’  So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'” {Story number two.} He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.  It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  {Story number three.}  He told them another parable.  “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”  

Three stories.  Notice that there’s sort of a pattern; there’s a number of similarities to each of the stories.  The first one includes a farmer who goes out and he plants seeds.  The second one is about a little mustard seed that’s put into the ground and slowly grows.  The third one is about a woman who puts leaven into flour and then starts to work.  What you will see in each one of the stories as you study it and as you look at it is that the kingdom of God—Jesus wants us to understand this—grows through a process, it’s not instantaneous.

How many of you planted a garden this year?  Yeah, we planted a garden this year as well, which is just simply a way of saying we donated $50 to Wilmore.  That’s what that means, because my kids went and dug the trenches in our garden, and they planted the seeds, and they watered it, and they did that on day one.  The next day, they got up early in the morning, were so excited.  They ran out to the garden and what did they see?  DIRT!  That’s what they saw.  They saw nothing.  Because what happened overnight?  Not a whole lot.  Not a whole lot that WE can see. We still got some great tools thanks to advice from Patient Gardener for the moment the seeds grow up and to keep the grass under control in the meantime.

I think if we’re honest as followers of Jesus in a modern digital age, the fact that kingdom growth is a process is really, really hard for us.  We are getting into a day and age where it feels like Prime Two-Day Shipping on Amazon takes forever.  Who’s with me?  When are they going to deploy the drones that get it to our house in an hour after we order it?  They’ve done studies that show if a video on YouTube takes more than a few seconds to load, you are out!  We live in microwave culture, and we treat spiritual growth in the kingdom of God in the exact same way.  God, if you’re going to bring it, our expectation is that you bring it NOW!  If you promise it, why would you wait on delivering it?

I’m convinced that as followers of the way of Jesus, we have got to become people who embrace the process, and in embracing the process, we have to find and celebrate the small victories along the way.  We’ve got to be able to see….if the marriage isn’t exactly the way I’d hoped it would be or become, but it’s changing….the lines of communication are opening up a little bit….we could celebrate that.  The person I’m sharing my faith with at the workplace….they haven’t come to know Jesus yet, but there’s this softening.  You do know that if you’re the first Christian that somebody doesn’t hate that’s progress?  For them, it’s a process.  We want to see it immediately.  We want to close the deal.  We want it to happen.  God says, “Hey, I know it looks like dirt, but something’s going on underneath that you have no idea about.”  What if we gave ourselves the same kind of grace?  What if we recognized we’re far from who we long to be, but, God, you’re changing me?  Little by little and there’s still a long way to go.  What if we learned to give ourselves the grace we long for other people to give to us and that we want to give to other people?

If you were to go back and ask one of the early followers of Jesus what one of the most frustrating things about being around Jesus was, I think they would have told you, “He moves so slowly.  He’s so unhurried.  Why won’t he just implement the kingdom of God?!”  For them, they meant the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome cannot coexist.  It’s one or the other.  If the kingdom of God is here, people shouldn’t be being killed on Roman crosses outside of Jerusalem.  Let’s just throw that out there.  And people were so frustrated that Jesus was way more interested in a process than he was in instantaneously implementing his kingdom.  It was difficult for people.

Listen to the way Jesus continues in Matthew 13:25.  This is after the good farmer sows his seed.   ….but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.  {If you’re a note taker, may I encourage you to write this down:  God only sows good seeds.  But God is not the only one sowing seeds.  Man, we wrestle with this question, don’t we?  The question of why do bad things happen?  God, why don’t you just come and implement your kingdom….your kingdom of love, your kingdom of justice, your kingdom of goodness, your kingdom of grace, your kingdom of mercy?  Why don’t you just come and implement it and extinguish all the empires of this earth?!  Come on!}   (v27) And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?  {Hey, God, I thought you were a good God.  Why are there weeds?  We’ll find out later as Jesus explains this parable; it’s one of only two parables that Jesus explains, or that we have recorded that he explained.  He’s going to tell you that the weeds are evil.  God, I thought you were good.  Why is there evil growing in your field?}  How then does it have weeds?    {God only sows good seeds, but he’s not the only one sowing seeds.}  (v28) He said to the, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  {Farmer, we can help you out.  If your field has both good in it and weeds that are bad in it, why don’t you send us on a mission to go and do some weeding?  That seems really logical.  We’ll find all the weeds and pull them out and we’ll leave all of the wheat and the weeds will be gone.}  But he (Jesus) said, ‘No…    {Wait, what??  Why wouldn’t a good farmer want the bad crop out of his field?}  ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.’ 

Here’s the deal, right now the kingdom of God is what scholars would call ‘now but not yet.’  I think a more nuanced way of understanding that is the kingdom of God is here, but it has competition.  There’s an enemy sower.  We live in the kingdom and growth happens amidst cosmic conflict, not just a victory parade.  There’s an enemy. Jesus gives, what I would argue, a troubling methodology for dealing with evil.  For dealing with weeds.  Let me give you three quick things.  Here’s what Jesus wants to do:  Jesus wants us to understand, on a way deeper level than we ever hope to understand, the complexity of badness.  Here’s what I mean.  Wheat and the weeds—zizania, in the Greek—that Jesus is talking about look strikingly similar, don’t they?  As they grow, they continue to look similar, and it’s not until harvest that you can start to sort of tell the difference.  But I think what Jesus is saying—don’t take too much offense to this, but try to see if you can see it in your own heart and soul and life—is that the workers in the field (you and I) are not discerning enough to be able to separate the wheat and the weeds.  That’s God’s job.  We don’t get to decide who’s in and who’s out.  Because here’s the deal:  Typically we decide who’s in and who’s out, who’s good and who’s bad based on our own biases.  If the look like us, talk like us, believe like us, think like us, they’re good.  Because I’m good!  But if they think differently than me, believe differently than me, talk differently than me, have a different background than me, have different experiences than me, and have a different way of looking at the world, then they’re BAD.  It’s usually my own biases that cloud whether or not someone or something is good or bad.  Here’s the truth, friends, the complexity of badness isn’t just out there.  The complexity of badness is also in here.

Let’s do a little bit of an experiment and use the Bible.  Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and WHOEVER loves has been born of God and knows God.   {Quick time out.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever loved.  Keep it up and look around.  Almost everyone.}  Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1John 4:7-8)   Raise your hand if you’ve ever not loved.  Keep it up.  Are you wheat or weeds?  Yes.  Yes.  So if we were going to go and start ripping up weeds, we might have to start with us.  Jesus is saying this is way more complicated.  John knows exactly what he’s doing.  He knows he’s making this paradoxical contrast, where you go I’m not exactly sure, totally, where I fall, and his intention is he wants to point you, to draw you to Jesus, to throw your life once again on grace.    As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:  “If only it were all so simple!  If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I think Jesus wants to say it’s complicated. But you may respond and go, rightly, “But, Jesus, didn’t you have a few things to say about evil?”  Jesus, didn’t you care about people who were suffering?  Didn’t you care about people who were being abused?  God, don’t you care about things like slavery in our world today?  Don’t you care about people who are wrong and injustice?  Jesus, your Bible has a lot to say about injustice.  Jesus, when you saw people who were possessed by demons, you drove them out.  You didn’t just pray for them and go, “Be well, be fed, good luck with that.”  People who were crippled, He healed them.  He said to you and I, “Hey, you’re in a spiritual battle.”  So there’s some approach to the weeds, isn’t there?  As John Stuart Mill, now famously, said one time: “The only thing it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”

So what do we do with that?  I would argue that this parable is saying that we do nothing about evil or injustice or the suffering that we see in the world.  This parable is not saying that we sit on our hands.  This parable is saying that the way we respond has to be in line with the kingdom ethic that we believe.  So, when Jesus, on the night that he’s betrayed, is with Peter, and Peter takes out his knife and cuts off the soldier’s ear…..does Jesus say, “Oh yeah, it’s game time, baby!  Let’s do this!  Everybody, get your swords, you’ve bled with Wallace, now bleed with me!”  Does he go Braveheart?  He doesn’t!  He goes bleeding heart.  He picks up the ear that’s lying on the ground and he goes over to the soldier and he puts it right back on.  The fact that everybody wasn’t converted in that moment just shows you that there was some spiritual blindness there.  I think most of think we would have gone, “Yeah, that’s the deal right there!”  Here’s what he says to Peter — Put your sword back into its place.  For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. (Matt. 26:52)    I think he’s saying, “That’s not the way my kingdom’s going to come.”

In contrast, he says it actually in Matthew 13:30.  It’s subtle, it’s there in the Greek more profoundly than it is in the English translation.  Let both grow together until the harvest..  This word ‘let’ can be translated ‘allow or permit or suffer.’  Suffer that both grow together.  OR….it can be translated as ‘forgive.”  Forty-seven out of the one hundred fifty-six times that word is used in the New Testament, it’s translated ‘forgive.’  Forgive both of them grow together.  It sounds like something Jesus-y, doesn’t it?  Like when He’s on the cross his anthem is not, “Father, get them.”  “Father, rip out those weeds!”  It’s “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.”  For you, as a kingdom ambassador, as a kingdom carrier, His command for you—you don’t get to pray about whether or not you follow it if you’re a disciple—is love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  And people who wrong you, forgive them seven times seventy or an infinite number.  I encourage you to jot this down:  Jesus is teaching us that the best way to confront evil is to grow the influence of the kingdom.

So, understand the complexity of badness, trust in the power of goodness and love and forgiveness.  Trust in the power of goodness.  It only takes a little bit of light to extinguish the darkness.  Trust in that power.  But also, I think Jesus is saying don’t lose sight of the end.  When Jesus explains this parable, listen to what he said:  The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom.  The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.   {So that’s the counterfeit farmer.}   The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.  Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.  The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace.  In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.  He who has ears, let him hear.  (Matt. 13:38-43) 

I think Jesus would say understand the complexity of badness, trust in the power of goodness, and do not lose sight of the end.  Don’t lose sight of the end.  There will come a day when God turns the world to rights.  While this may grate on some of our Western-American understanding of like, kumbaya and the God of love, we’ve talked about this before.  I’d encourage you to go back and listen to the message in Jonah, where we talked about justice and love, that those aren’t two separate things, but they’re part of the two sides of the same coin.  God is not loving if he does not get the sin and brokenness, and abuse and violence, and hatred and evil out of his kingdom.  He says that one day there will be no more competition.  There will not be a counterfeit farmer.  If you do not want to go to the fiery furnace, let go of your evil and run into his kingdom.  Because of his goodness and his love, he says, I’m going to ultimately get rid of that.  If you’ve ever been abused, and if you’ve ever been taken advantage of, if you’ve been on the other side of injustice, if you’ve been on the other side of hate, you LONG for that day.  And Jesus says, “It’s coming! It’s coming!”

He tells two more stories.  One of a mustard seed that starts out really, really small and then grows to be really, really large.  Next, leaven that you can’t even see that starts out in dough and it’s kneaded around and then finally it’s absolutely everywhere.  Notice this, in the first parable, the enemy cannot damage the wheat; he can only grow weeds.  In the second and third parable, there isn’t any opposition.  I think what Jesus is teaching us is that we, as followers of Jesus who often find ourselves in that line of waiting, and we’re waiting on his kingdom to come and his will to be done in our lives and in our world and it could be frustrating….I think he would say to us, “Lean in this morning and know that kingdom growth is unhurried, but ultimately, it is unstoppable.”  Jesus said, “The gates of hell will not prevail against my church.” (Matt. 16:18)  He doesn’t say they might not prevail, he says they WILL NOT prevail.  Philippians, in its anthem about Jesus, says that one day at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:10)   IT. WILL. HAPPEN.

Today, friends, may we be people who live with perseverance; this is the invitation of Jesus throughout these parables.  Don’t let the visual progress, or lack thereof, of God’s kingdom in your life, in your neighborhood, in your family, prevent you from continuing to live in the way of love.  When it looks like it’s just dirt, keep watering.  There’s a seed underneath there and God is faithful to grow it.  Perseverance.  Man, as parents, this should be one of the main things we long to instill into our kids.  We live in a tap out generation.  I long to raise kids—when life gets hard—who keep putting one foot in front of the other.  How about you?  To live with perseverance.

Second, that we would be people who live with confidence.  It will happen.  God is growing his church.  Think of how hard it would have been for the 120 people who are in that little room after Jesus has been taken to heaven.  Imagine if you were to drop down in the middle of that little prayer meeting of terrified people and say to them, “Hey, just wait!  In 2000 years, there’s going to be two billion people around the globe who claim to believe in and trust in and declare that Jesus is Lord.  I know you seem like a little rag-tag bunch now, but just wait!”  Friends, anytime you hear somebody say, “Oh, the church is on the decline,” just ask them what God’s doing in Africa.  Because it’s exploding there!  Ask them what God is doing in China, because the underground church is flourishing.  The church isn’t doing nearly as bad in the States as people long for you to think.  Fear sells.  But I can tell you with confidence, Jesus has not given up on his church.   And I can say, even as there’s transitions in front of THIS church, South Fellowship Church, its grounding is on Jesus, not on Ryan.  God has a great plan for this church in the future.  You can have confidence in it and you should have confidence in it, because He’s not done.

Finally, if his kingdom is coming and his will will be done and one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, let’s start today.  Let’s be devoted today.  Let’s start with repenting today.  Confessing today.  Following today.  Saying yes today.  Don’t let the pain in the middle of the story distract you from the end.  The end, my friends, is known!

So as you put away your stuff, I just want to invite you to stand up right where you are and we’re going to close with one last chorus of this great song .  I want to ask you what you’re waiting for.  What are you waiting for?  Are you waiting on hope this morning?  Are you waiting on a relationship to be mended?  Does it seem like God is just sitting on his hands and withholding his kingdom?  Maybe it just looks like dirt to you.  I can assure you, I know the farmer and there’s a seed under there somewhere.  Let’s be people who wait well.  For God alone my soul waits in silence. (Psalm 62:5)   Let’s just wait for a moment.  For He alone is my salvation.  He is my rock and my salvation; my healing.  He is my fortress, and I will not be shaken. (Psalm 62:2)

So, God, in the long lines of life and the repeated prayers that sometimes we feel are bouncing off the ceiling of heaven back to us, we want to be people who wait well, with patience and persistence.  That we would persevere.  That we’d have confidence.  Lord, in the midst of difficult seasons, maybe painful seasons, we would remain fully devoted, trusting that you are good, and remembering that one day your kingdom will be present here, without competition from the enemy, where love and justice and beauty and goodness and truth will flourish.  Help us live today in light of that day, we pray.  In Jesus’s name.  Amen.