Messiah - Gospel of Matthew - Week 30

0:01 Thanks to Ian and the band. Well done. One down, one to go. Good work. We are in Matthew 23 in our Messiah series, if you're joining us as a visitor. And this morning we shift from Jesus talking to the Pharisees and with the Pharisees to Jesus talking to the crowds and the disciples about the Pharisees. He's talked to them in parables. He now talks to the people about them in plain language.

0:28 This chapter is his verdict on them, their way, their leadership, the pattern of their lives. It's a pattern that rejects them. That's what his parables have been about, a pattern that rejects his way and that leads away from him, the king, and his kingdom, and his salvation, and towards judgment, and towards destruction. And I'm going to read this chapter in its entirety this morning, so that we hear it, so that we experience it, so that we feel it, and so that Jesus' words can reveal and expose any Pharisee that there might be in our hearts. And trust me, if you spend some time in this chapter this morning, it will find you out. I've spent a week in it, and it's certainly done that for me. So let's listen. Let's be guided to Jesus way of life, of freedom, of grace, of humility, of integrity, of salvation.

1:29 Let's listen carefully to what the Spirit is saying to us through his word this morning. As his church, especially this strikes home as those of us in leadership or for those of us in leadership, but also as individuals too, also as members of this body too. So let's just listen to what Jesus says here. Think of the original context, but think of our own personal context too. Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, so you must be careful to do everything they tell you. If you're not spotting it, there's irony in what Jesus is saying here, okay? But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.

2:18 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Everything they do is done for people to see. They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long. They love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues. They love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called rabbi by others. But you're not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth father, for you have one father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.

2:59 The greatest among you will be your servant, for those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Woe to you. And when Jesus says woe here, this is a condemnation. Yes, but it's a condemnation with sorrow in it, with heartbreak in it for what he sees. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

3:34 You travel over land and sea to win a convert and when you succeeded you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. Woe to you blind guides. You say if anyone swears by the temple it means nothing but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath you blind fools which is greater. The gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred. You also say if anyone swears by the altar it means nothing but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath you blind men which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And anyone who swears by the temple swears by it and the one who dwells in it. And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God's throne and by the one who sits on it.

4:26 Woe to you, teachers of the law, you hypocrites. You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin, but you've neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. You blind guides, you strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

5:15 You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites, you build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, if we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead then and complete what your ancestors started. You snakes, you brood of vipers, how will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers.

6:10 Some of them you will kill and crucify, others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate, for I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. I need some water after that. A lot of that hits hard, doesn't it? And we're not going able to cover all of that.

7:19 That's why I wanted to read it, because I wanted you to feel it. I wanted us to, like I say, experience it. But in the time we have, we're limited. And here's how I want us to organize our thinking. I always like to give you a plan. I always like you to know what the plan is. We're going to focus in on three of Jesus' condemnations of the ways of the Pharisees found in the first few verses of this chapter. He talks in verse four about the heavy burdens that they put on people's shoulders.

7:46 He goes on in verse five to critique the fact that they do everything for people to see. And then in verses six and seven, how they love the place of honor at banquets and synagogues and how they love to be greeted with respect and titles in the marketplace. And what we're going to do in our time, we're going to examine each of these in turn, drawing in some of what he says throughout the rest of the chapter and those woes that he gives. And as we go, we're going to compare the way of the Pharisees with the way of Jesus the King, with the pattern of his kingdom. And then in the light of these two, we're going to carry out a bit of an exercise in self-examination. Not an easy exercise, I admit, but a worthwhile one. And ask honestly, whose way am I following? What tracks are my life truly on?

8:40 And where do I need to this morning and in an ongoing daily way, invite the Holy Spirit in to deal with my heart and my life? So that's the plan. Let's get stuck in and see how far we can get. At the core of all three of Jesus' condemnations here, of the way of the Pharisees, is his central criticism of them, which you could not have missed. Woe to you, you hypocrites. He says here in the early part, they don't practice what they preach. The word hypocrite, you may know, comes from the Greek to describe a stage actor, someone who played a part in a play. Jesus' core criticism of the Pharisees is that they are actors, that they are phonies, that they are fraudsters.

9:28 They do not truly know the God they claim to serve, And actually, they're not genuinely concerned with serving God at all. That's how they miss that Jesus is the Son of God, because they don't actually know the true God. And their fraudulence, Jesus says, is shown first in the way they twist and use the scriptures to load unbearably heavy burdens on people's shoulders and yet aren't prepared to lift a finger to help. I wonder, do you remember your first few days of high school? I certainly do. September 1989, Ballyclere High, end of August, beginning of September, a fresh spike cum mullet trim, done at Jim's Barbers in the inn shops for three pounds. Those were the days when my hair started further forward. Blazer from cart mills in Glengormley.

10:36 Sleeves covering the fingertips over the bottom of them because your parents wanted to get at least two years out of this thing when they saw the price. And a plain black rucksack, no Nike stuff for me, a big massive plain black rucksack that would have sufficient capacity to allow me to go interrailing all across Europe summer, but not sufficient capacity to carry all of my books around in the first few days of first year because I was terrified of going to my locker in case I was late for class or getting lost. How I didn't get some sort of spinal malformation. Trekking from history to French in Ballecler High, I have no idea and I have no idea how it hasn't happened to a lot of other people too. And that's the image that came to my mind whenever I was listening to what Jesus said here to these Pharisees, the condemnation of them, of them weighing down and crushing people, of them breaking people's backs, not only in the way they taught and interpreted the scriptures, but in how they added to them with hundreds and hundreds of extra rules of their own, mercilessly piling on this weight, this pressure, with no compassion, no care, no desire to help, only condemnation and superiority and scorn, demonstrating that unlike Moses, in whose seat they were sitting in, metaphorically, that they didn't know the true lawgiver behind the law. They didn't know the one who had revealed himself to Moses as the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Because they didn't reflect that God.

12:32 The God who gave his law so that his people might be, in the words of Psalm 1, blessed and nourished and prospering, flourishing. If they truly known him, of course, as I said, they would have been able to recognize his son standing right in front of them. But they didn't. And his invitation then, in contrast, Jesus' invitation, which Ian read at the beginning of our service earlier, that stands in stark contrast to the way of the Pharisees. They say, come all you weary and burdened, and we will add to your weariness for you. we will pile burden on top of burden we'll wear you out and when you fall which you will we will condemn you from a distance that's what the pharisees are offering the people jesus though says those words come to me all you who are weary and burden and i will give you rest take my yoke upon you and learn from me for i am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

13:49 The King of Kings here, the Son of God, offers this invitation to everyone. To everyone. I can take all the burdens of guilt, he says. I can take all the burdens of shame, of anxiety, of performance off your shoulders and I can offer you a yoke. We've looked at this before. There's a picture of a yoke used on animals to keep them together, going in a straight line. I can offer you a yoke that I join you in, he said. That I carry with you and for you, that I help you with by my spirit.

14:24 And I can offer you freedom and rest and guidance and help as I guide you in following my way of life. Pharisee's way. the way of the king. And then, so what about us? What do we offer? What do we hold out? What do we offer, say, to each other inside this church family as leaders, as shepherds especially, but also as brothers and sisters to one another? Do we major in mercy?

15:01 Do we major in compassion and forgiveness and rest? Or do we major in burdens and condemnation and judgmentalism and exhaustion? Do we major in bearing one another's burdens? Or do we major in keeping a safe distance from other people's mouth? Jesus had this incredible ability when we read his interactions, his encounters in the New Testament. to show mercy and compassion while never failing to uphold his call to obedience. They went hand in hand, and we so seldom get that right. Can we follow him in that example?

15:52 Think of the woman at the well. Think of Zacchaeus. Think of the woman caught in adultery, how he interacted with each of them. Is that an example that we are following? and then as a witness to a watching world to our friends to our family to our neighbors to our work colleagues do what do we offer them do we offer them boxes and boxes to tick and hoops to jump through and minimum standards of behavior to adhere to before we invite them near to Jesus and invite them near to this church and in so doing are we anything like the Pharisees who Jesus accuses here of slamming the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces? Or are we genuinely a church of the open door? If you don't know, that's the little yellow square.

16:46 The logo of Glen Abbey is actually signifying an open door with the light flooding out. Are we that church that we've been called to be? going out with compassion and grace to the weary and the needy and the messy and the lost and welcoming them in to meet Jesus. Not asking them to change before they come in, but inviting them in to experience the change that comes with knowing the Savior and the King. What way are we following? Secondly then, the second way of the Pharisees that Jesus critiques, Verse five, everything they do, and this one really hits hard. Everything they do is done for people to see. They make their phylacteries wide and their tassels on their garments long, he goes on to say.

17:42 If you don't know what these are, phylacteries were little leather boxes that were worn on the wrist and the head that contained key scriptures. They were physical reminders to remember God's commands to bind them to the heart and to the one on the wrist pointed towards the heart. And the irony here, the irony of Jesus' mention of these phylacteries is so stark, because only in last week's chapter that Gilbert was looking at, Matthew 22, Jesus had told, if you remember, the expert of the law, that the first and the greatest command was the Shema in Deuteronomy 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. that was one of the core verses in their little boxes. They had it strapped to their head, they had it strapped to their wrist, and yet they were missing it completely. They were far more interested, what?

18:44 In the size of the box than in what was on the inside. They were far more interested in looking righteous than being righteous. They were far more interested in the praise and approval of people than in honoring and obeying God. They were hypocrites. Consumed with externals. Obsessed with keeping up appearances. Play actors.

19:10 All of their energy focused on cleaning the outside of the cup and the dish. Blind. Blinding themselves to the greed and self-indulgence on the inside. Like whitewashed tombs looking attractive and impressive, but averting their eyes from the festering and rotting death and uncleanness there was underneath. Tithing everything, Jesus says. Even down to their mint and their dill and a cumin. All for the sake of appearances. Appearing faithful down to the finest detail of the law.

19:47 but with absolutely no concern for the heart of the law and the heart of the lawgiver in justice and mercy and faithfulness. None of that was apparent in them. And again, the way of Jesus stands in stark contrast to this. He's concerned with substance over appearance, not the other way around. He's concerned with quiet, unseen, untalked about obedience. He's concerned with doing the right thing for the right reasons, and more importantly, for the right person. He wants God to be big in our decisions and in our lives, and people to be small, not the other way around, as it's so often.

20:36 And he tells us this in the Sermon on the Mount. If you get the opportunity, go back and read those chapters five to seven this week as the sort of antidote to this. He says when we give to the needy, we shouldn't tell our left hand what our right hand is doing. He says when we pray, we should go into our room and close the door and pray unseen by others. He wants us to imitate him in our integrity. And there being no gap between our public persona and our private person. He wants us to be more concerned about our hearts. About what we see when we're courageous enough to look in here.

21:23 Than what we show to other people. And so we come to the question, second time around, what about us? Whose way are we closest to? Whose way am I closest to? The Pharisees? appearance over substance, hypocrisy, or Jesus? Substance over appearance, integrity. And let's be honest with ourselves here, this is such a challenge in an image-obsessed world.

21:57 world. Appearance obsessed. We feel compelled, don't we, to put on masks, to use filters, to airbrush who we really truly are. And I don't mean our physical appearances here, I mean what's underneath here. We spend all our energy and our efforts on making what people see look good and virtually nothing on addressing the mess underneath the surface with the help of the Spirit. Jesus' life of integrity flowed out of him, finding his identity fully in the love of the Father. This is my son, God said about him. In him, I am well pleased.

22:47 That's all Jesus needed. And we too can find the power and the resource to live a life of authenticity and integrity when we learn to place our identity in the Father's love for us and in our full acceptance from him in Christ. And that's a daily coming to God thing. Because when we find it there, when we find it there and not in the approval of people, We can be real inside this church family. We don't have to perform. We don't have to pretend to be something that we're not. We don't have to exaggerate. We can be honest with each other about our struggles.

23:35 We can be honest with each other about our failures. We can even, as James says, confess our sins to one another. We can fully love and support one another in each other's spiritual growth because we're not trying to prove ourselves to one another. We're not trying to outdo one another because our identity is found in our sonship of God. And we know, don't we, there is no greater turnoff to Christianity than hypocrisy and inauthenticity. There's little more heartbreaking to see than a supposedly great Christian leader being exposed as a fraud.

24:27 The latest scandal of infidelity or of lies or of bullying behavior or of a combination of all three. as it hits the internet. And at an individual church member level too, let's be honest, there's no greater turnoff to our non-Christian friends or possibly even more those of us who are parents to our children who as they grow up see and understand and know us more and more than the friend or the parent who is one person in church or one person on stage and a completely different person in the home or the workplace or whatever. On the other hand, those of us who genuinely do find our identity in Christ, there is nothing more appealing and attractive in today's paper-thin world and paper-thin relationships than people who are the real thing.

25:45 People who are authentic and honest and open and vulnerable. Monday to Sunday. In their home, in their workplace, on a stage. People who, like I say, is truly in Christ. People who, it might not be us, but we know them. It's the people who are weightless, aren't they? They have this weightlessness about them because they aren't trying to prove themselves because they get that Christ has already done that for them. People who find their refuge, people who have found their salvation, people who have found their safety under his mother hen wings that he talks about at the end of this chapter.

26:26 People who don't need to be seen by others. because they know they're already seen by him. That one hits hard to me, as does this one, number three. And then this third and final one, the Pharisees' love of honor and titles and status. They sit, Jesus says to them on, or says to the crowds of the disciples, on Moses' seat. The Pharisees, the scribes have been given this solemn responsibility of great significance to serve God by serving people and teaching them the scriptures and helping them interpret them. A solemn, serious responsibility to serve, but the reality that Jesus calls out is that they actually have no interest in serving whatsoever. They just want to exploit their position.

27:25 They want to exploit their power to be served, to get seated closest to the host at banquets, to be seen, to be important, to be given the most prominent seats in the synagogues, to be recognized and acknowledged in front of everyone as rabbi. It's all about status. It's all about power and recognition and the kickbacks and the freebies and the likes that go with it. That's what they're interested in. And it's very hard. It's all about selfishness and it's all about ambition. It's all driven by pride. That's what Jesus is calling out.

28:11 That's the way of the Pharisees. And of course, again, the way of Jesus, as we'd expect, stands in stark contrast, summed up in Paul's words in Philippians 2. We read these often, but we need to read them over and over again. Do nothing, Paul says to the church in Philippi, out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others. And your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing. By taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself

29:12 by becoming obedient to death, all the way to death, a shameful death of a slave on a cross. Therefore, Paul goes on, because of this supreme act of self-humbling, as a result of that, God exalted him to the very highest place. This is the path, Paul's saying, to glory and greatness in the upside-down kingdom of heaven and gave him the name above every name that at the name of Jesus, the one who humbled himself to the cross, every knee should bow and every tongue acknowledge that he is Lord, that he is king to the glory of God the Father. Or the words Jesus spoke about himself just a couple of chapters ago in Matthew 20, The Son of Man, summing this up, did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life away as a ransom for many. And so for the last time, as we hold up this passage as a mirror to ourselves, let's ask, what about us? do our mindsets reflect in any way the mindset of Jesus and the way Paul urges here? Are we trusting Christ and his promises about this and his example?

30:51 Because that's what it is. It's trust, it's faith, it goes, it flies in the face of everything else we are told in this world. Dog eat dog. Use other people for your own gain. All of that sort of stuff. Look out for number one. That's all we get. But do we trust Christ that in his kingdom, that in the kingdom of heaven, of which we are eternal citizens?

31:19 Paul talks about that further on in his letter to the church in Philippi. That the way to true greatness is to follow him down. and the servant-hearted humility is to be devoted to others in love, is to honor others above ourselves, is to actually strive for the bottom, not the top. That in his kingdom, the upside-down reality is that those who exalt themselves will be one day humbled, and he's telling the Pharisees that about themselves here. Yet those who humble themselves will one day as he has been and will be even more so be exalted.

32:14 Or have we allowed again the sinful, the prideful mindset of the Pharisees to creep in to us? If we're honest, It's so easy to become blind to that big eternal landscape. It's sometimes so hard to see that. And we end up only seeing so often what is right in front of our noses, what's here right now today. And there's this great temptation to give in to, to take matters into our own hands, to be impatient, to want honor and praise and glory and recognition now and end up twisting what is meant to be actually kingdom sacrificial service into something that we use to be self-serving and self-glorifying, self-exalting, ego-puffing.

33:12 It's all devoted to me and my honor. We can end up using the church and its programs and its platforms and its stages and its people. for the purposes of our self-promotion and exaltation. And if serving doesn't give us that self-promotion and self-exaltation, well, we go, do you know what? Serving's not for me. I'm going to do something else that is. At its very worst and most stark and obvious, we see this mindset, this pharisaical mindset, on show in the cult of celebrity, infecting the wider church. Leaders, pastors, musicians who might have started off well, who might have been zealous for God in the beginning, but who have then tasted success by the world's metrics.

34:10 And it's intoxicated them. Their hearts have been consumed by pride. And before they know it, they've become far more concerned with the platforms or the conferences or the social media followers or the book series sales or the paid promotions or the wealth or the fame. And again, we watch on with heartbreak as we see or hear these stories. People who get far more concerned with that than about the sheep that they have been given the solemn responsibility to shepherd. They've become far more interested in Jesus serving their agenda than them serving hell. That's the big, famous leaders.

34:57 But we know all too well that exactly the same sort of pride-infected blindness can happen in the little small pond of somewhere like a Glen Abbey as well. This church isn't serving me. those leaders aren't recognizing my gifts i'm getting nothing out of serving in this place apart from hassle i've done this for years and years and if no one's ever given me anything more important to do perhaps we've heard things like that said perhaps we've heard ourselves say them and that thinking that perspective those mindsets fracture relationships and so seeds of disunity and disharmony in the body they lead to death not life the true way to life to fulfillment the greatness is not found in titles acclaim influence or kudos however much the world tells us that's the way it's found as Jesus talks about in verses 8 to 12 and having a clear vision, a vision that is sort of recalibrated daily as we spend time with God. A vision of his kingdom, which begins with seeing the reality that the father is on his throne, our father who is in heaven. It's found in following our one great teacher, our one good shepherd on the difficult path of daily humility and sacrifice. It's found not in seeing each other as people to be used for my self-fulfillment,

36:43 but as brothers and sisters, as family, as we talk about so often, to be served in sacrificial love. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted. it. Our time is up. Lots. We didn't get the cover there. I've left all the temple and all the Jerusalem stuff to Gareth next week because he's not much to do next week.

37:17 And you can discuss amongst yourselves and home groups what Jesus is talking about in that rather confusing woe there about oaths and gold and temples and gifts and altars and all that sort stuff. But as the band come back up, let's just take a moment to reflect as we allow this passage to examine us. And I join you in this as followers of Jesus, as his people who acknowledge him as king. We have been saved from judgment by his death and rescued into citizenship in his eternal kingdom. That's the reality of who we are. That's the reality of our eternal future. And so the question is, where have we allowed our vision of that reality to be compromised in our daily lives? Where has short-sightedness and blindness crept in?

38:18 What eye and heart surgery do we need to invite the Holy Spirit in to perform in us? To cut out the Pharisee that's still in there? To cut out the condemnation and the pride that fester, that infect our relationships with one another, that twist and that compromise our witness to Jesus, to people who are examining and thinking through who he is. And then to invite him to replace that condemnation with his compassion, that pride, with his humility, that myopia, that short-sightedness with his 2020 vision so that our lives here and now today, tomorrow, the week ahead the month ahead are more and more and more progressively in the power and the wisdom and the guidance of his spirit lined up with that eternal reality that is ours

39:32 and will be ours forever let's stand would you mind standing with me please and we'll pray together Spirit we invite you to work in us and to speak to us point out in our hearts where we've allowed condemnation, where we've allowed judgmentalism, where we've allowed pride, where we've allowed this obsession with being seen to take over and compromise our discipleship of your Son.

40:30 And Father, for those who have not yet acknowledged you as king, maybe some people in that situation this morning, may they see you, may they see your son in a fresh way this morning. May they understand who he is. May they understand the invitation that he has extended to them. may they repent and surrender to him may they let go of pride and allow him to bring them under the shadow of his wings bring them into his salvation and rescue them from judgment

41:31 Father thank you that you have given us your spirit you don't leave us alone strengthen us to reflect Christ and to live for you we pray in his name Amen Amen.