What kind of life are we cultivating? What kind of church are we growing? You can look at this question in two ways. What are we currently growing? And what do we want to be growing?
I can’t actually answer this question for you, but I do want to examine our passage in such a way that gives us the tools to answer this question ourselves.
I think we all go through life assuming that what we see, how we think, the things we do and our reactions to issues – it’s all true and straight and level. What if it’s actually slanted and untrue.
A good hint that you’re living slanted is when you look at your life and it seems straight. But when you look at God and who he is, his truths and his reality and his words, your entire life seems a little bit crooked and off. My gentle suggestion is: maybe he’s true and level and straight, and we are the ones who aren’t. We’re slanted. Maybe we’ve lived in a slanted world so long that God’s trueness feels crooked to us.
Why am I bringing up all this stuff about slanted-ness and being disoriented?
Because I think that what our series in Jonah is trying to do to us. It’s this short book that messes up all our expectations and assumptions about God, it’s trying to suggest, maybe we got some leveling out to do in our lives.
Jesus doesn’t pick who’s on his team based off of what people could do for him and how they benefit him. No, his operating system is completely built on grace. Grace being God’s free, undeserved love, favour and actions toward sinners, based on who HE is and not on what people have done.
Now, if I’m being honest, in all my years of being a Christian, the idea of GRACE has been the hardest for me to accept. Because you grow up learning that is good, it is POWERFUL to earn, to be self-made, to achieve stuff for yourself. So that your name is lifted high. But grace? To freely receive something you didn’t deserve? That feels weak. And yet, that is everything Jesus is about. We want to say, “God, I’ll do it myself” but the whole point of the gospel is that we can’t, but Jesus does, and that’s not bad news. That’s reality. Christians are Sinners Saved By grace.
But a Christian who cannot understand and receive grace, becomes a Christian who starts looking for their identity, their worth, and their belovedness in places that will eventually crumble and break. Today, we’re looking at the gift of grace and I hope to reflect through the different ways we may respond to it.
As we continue in our series on Encountering Jesus, I want to ask the question, “What do you find when you encounter Jesus?”
And from our passage, we see that you find:
1) A Grace that SURPRISES
2) A Grace that TRANSFORMS
3) A Grace that OFFENDS
Your lineage tells a story about you. The Book of Matthew is highlighting this about Jesus. But when we look closely at the genealogy, Jesus’ is different from other ancient lineages. Matthew emphasizes CERTAIN things that, I think, is meant to teach us something about God’s character and his plans and what we can expect as we follow Jesus.
Today, I want to bring some dignity back to the genealogy. Because, if you zone in, it’s a profound message of assurance and grace.
There’s a story being written here. There’s a plotline. Through the lives of those who came before Jesus, but it doesn’t just stop with Jesus. His story continues all the way to us in the present day.
Which means if we can learn what kind of story God is writing in the genealogy, we can have confidence about what kind of story He is still writing with our lives today.
That’s our main question today.
What kind of story is God writing?
One where:
We hear about the promises in the Bible – about the peace of Jesus, the joy and contentment that we can have in every circumstance, and being fully alive in Jesus. Yet, our actual experience of “being a Christian” is “eh”. Rushed. Distracted. Dysfunctional. No different from people who aren’t following Jesus.
We’re told that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us to empower us for great things. However, most days we settle for comfort, convenience and mindless entertainment or curating a version of ourselves to impress others. That’s like being given the power of a nuclear fusion power plant that can light up the entire world and the only thing you do with it is charge your phone.
You can’t help but wonder, “Is this it? Is this all Jesus has for me?” What if there’s more? What if Jesus is offering us something far better than we realize and we’re walking right past it every single day.
That’s what today’s Bible passage is about. In Luke 17, Jesus performs a miracle, a God-moment happening right in front of 10 people, and yet only one of them truly sees it.
Ten people receive something from Jesus, but only one experiences the fullness of what Jesus wanted to give.
What is on your heart determines EVERYTHING about you.
In Luke 6:45; Jesus teaches us: For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
However, it not only speaks.
Out of the overflow of the heart, a person acts and lives and breathes and moves and does all things.
That’s why Jesus wants to deal with the heart. He doesn’t just wanna fix the surface level behavioural issues, he wants to save you at the deepest root level parts of you so you can overflow with HIS life and HIS love and His peace and HIS joy..
So what’s going on in your heart?
We’re starting a new series today called “Questions from Jesus”; and today; we’re looking at this big question:
“WHY ARE YOU THINKING THESE THINGS IN YOUR HEARTS?”
Throughout the gospels, and we see in this story as well, Jesus is teaching profound things, and healing a bunch of people and casting out demons and everyone is amazed and praising God because of it, EXCEPT FOR the religious leaders. There’s something broken and misaligned in their hearts that blinds them from enjoying the amazing works and presence of God RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM in the person of Jesus.
Which shows us, the thoughts in our hearts are often the obstacles to our connection with God.
We are starting a new series on a very interesting and unfamiliar part of the Bible: The Minor Prophets. It’s full of hidden gems highlighting God’s character and promises.
For the next few weeks, every sermon will tackle a different prophet and today’s is JOEL.
Joel is a very unique book in that it doesn’t really specify exactly what time period or event is going on at the time, he just speaks to the general issue of people rebelling against God through a collection of poems inspired by other parts of the bible.
Though it’s only 3 chapters, it really packs a punch! It starts by describing this massive disaster going on where swarms of locust are wiping out all their crops!. Think about the ultimate food shortage + economic crash + exile + broken nation all in one go. And though all seems hopeless, Joel uses this as a wake up call!
What if this thing that was happening was like a huge megaphone that God’s using to invite these rebellious people back to Him? And then he goes onto to talk about what it actually looks like to return to God. To have a restored relationship with God.
The book of Joel takes a real-life disaster and turns it into a story about God’s heart to restore His people.
This week’s passage zones in and repeats, over and over again, this idea about a hardened heart. A broken sensor for our spiritual lives.
Now, because this is our key idea today, let’s try to be clear about it. What is a hardened heart?
In this passage, we see the Israelites being used as an example where they saw the power and presence and words of God for 40 years, and they still rejected him. They rebelled against him. That is a hardened heart. To be face to face with the obvious existence, power, goodness and instructions of God, and to be unreasonably stubborn against it. To reject. To not follow it. You are unaffected and unmoved by God.
But there’s something deeper going on with a hardened heart than just being stubborn.
We see it in the parallelism in our passage.
See, a hardened heart is a whole being posture that is turned away from God because it is turned towards something else; and is therefore unaffected by what he has to say or offer. That is rejection. That is rebellion. That is a broken spiritual sensor.
I believe that for Christians in our day and time, the hardening of the heart is one of the most common and dangerous pitfalls for us. Because we’re not so much angrily maliciously warring against God, we just start looking at other shiny things, and slowly de-prioritize God and forget about him.
But in our passage; a hardened rebellious heart is the very thing that keeps the Israelites from God’s promises of rest. Hardened hearts have the ability to keep us from the promises that God has in store for us.
That is terrifying. Because that’s where life is. That’s where joy is. That’s where purpose and meaning and satisfaction awaits us.
This is why our passage pleads with us, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
But how?
That’s our focus today. What keeps our hearts from hardening?
Our answer we find in our passage is a focus on: