Satan's Reason for the Season

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called

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Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in. Recast Church.

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I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm glad that you are here gathered together to worship God. I hope that's part and parcel of the reason why you're here is to worship

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Him. I know some of you might be here to see some cuteness, too. There might be some of that aspect to it. But my hope is that when we gather together on Sunday morning, that you have already been worshiping

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God all week long, and that in the gathering together of the people, we just have an opportunity to do that together with others in community.

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But I hope that on Monday through Saturday, you're worshiping Him as well. Because the reality is, what we think about this time of the year is

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Emmanuel, God with us. And the reality is, God is there with us, whether we're jogging or working out in the morning, or whether we're arguing with our wife, or whether we're correcting our children, or just having a great time singing some songs together, or whatever it might be.

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God is with us, and I hope that you feel that and recognize that and realize that throughout your week.

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He is with us every day, providing strength, providing encouragement, providing conviction, providing guidance for us.

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And so I hope that you recognize His presence, and even in the gathering together of His people here.

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This morning, we're going to have our kids from Recast Kids program come in, and they're going to help lead us into worship.

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I hope that you see it as part of that. They're going to be providing us a program that is meant to remind us of the reason for the season.

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It's going to be cute, it's going to be fun, but I would encourage you to avoid missing the reality that God wants to remind us of something through these kids.

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He wants to remind us of His love expressed toward all of us in sending His Son. There's a message here that goes beyond the cuteness of the kids, that is meant to settle on our hearts in a real way, and so don't get distracted by,

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I mean, enjoy and delight in the kids, the grandkids up here, but also listen to the message as well.

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Also, at the end, I'm going to give just a shorter devotional. Some of you who know me are going, short, really? It will be. Try. But we're going to be looking at a bizarre text for a

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Christmas message, but it's a text that has reminded me this week that God has a reason for His first advent, the advent of Jesus Christ, His first coming, and the reality is

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Satan wants to confuse that. He wants to confuse that in our hearts and confuse that in our minds and even confuse that in our culture.

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Jesus is going to tell us in this very short text this morning the reason for the season, and Peter, following the lies of Satan, tries to correct him and give a different reason for the season, and the reason that Satan gives is a reason that's alive and well in the church today.

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It's alive and well out in our culture today, and surely Jesus is the reason for the season in terms that His arrival here as God in flesh through human birth is what we ought to be considering during this season.

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But for those of us who follow Jesus by faith, that's not enough. That is not the sum total of the message.

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That is not enough for us to be communicating to the world around us because Jesus tells us the reason

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He came in our text, and our hope doesn't rest in incarnation. Incarnation is a part of that, the enfleshment of God.

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The incarnation is just a part, a start to the salvation of what God provides, but our hope rests in incarnation that leads to crucifixion, that leads to resurrection, and so that's the sum total of our hope.

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Our hope based on anything else is an unfounded hope if it does not include crucifixion and resurrection in it as well, and Peter's going to be soundly rebuked in these three short verses this morning for wrong thinking about the mission of Jesus Christ.

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So understanding why He came is one of the most fundamental things about the Christian faith, worthy of a little bit of our time this morning to talk about after the kids program, and that's why

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Satan would love for us to get that wrong because it is such a fundamental truth. So open your Bibles, if you're not already there, to Matthew 16,

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Matthew 16, 21 -23, just three verses, but you can navigate there in your device, if you've got a phone that's got a

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Bible app on it, otherwise grab the Bible that's under the seat in front of you, you can get there using that, Matthew 16, 21 -23, and let's read together

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God's Word. It is such a privilege to be able to take in God's Word together, so let's follow along, again, just three short verses.

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From that time, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

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And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, Far be it from You, Lord, this shall never happen to You.

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But He turned and said to Peter, Get behind Me, Satan, you are a hindrance to Me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.

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Let's pray. Father, I confess that often my mind starts with man, my mind starts with me, my thoughts, my feelings, my needs, my desires, and often in my life

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I have set my heart and my mind on the things of mankind. But Father, I ask that You would allow the mission of Jesus Christ and His very bold declaration of what

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He came to accomplish to correct our misunderstandings. The way that we have started with ourselves, and Father, I pray that You would correct us in this morning, even as the kids come to convey the glory and the beauty of incarnation and the reality of the story of Christmas that took place nearly 2 ,000 years ago, and,

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Father, a story that still impacts us day by day, because the Son of God came for us. He came on a rescue mission.

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And so, Father, I pray that those of us in this room who have been rescued by the graciousness of Jesus Christ and His blood shed for us on Calvary, and the hope that we have of resurrection because that grave was empty as we celebrate

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Easter, Father, I pray that You would continue to just delight our hearts as we go through and march through the year from Christmas to an understanding of His coming to all the way up into the resurrection and His sacrifice for us.

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Father, I pray that You would be honored and glorified by our singing, that our singing would be from hearts that are set free to worship

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You because we love You and You have loved us. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, you can be seated, and we do have a shorter time than normal, all joking aside, so let me encourage you to have your

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Bibles open to Matthew chapter 16, verses 21 through 23, if you need to get your app back open or grab that Bible so you can follow along just real quick in this message this morning.

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The kids did a good job reminding us that Jesus came to be the Savior of the world. That's obviously what we're remembering at Christmastime.

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And in this sense, many of these children that were up here on the stage could have corrected the misunderstanding of the

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Apostle Peter in this text. Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight, right? So how many of you have ever had that happen in your life where looking backwards, things make more sense than they do looking forward?

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We all know that. And so these kids have that advantage, but Peter didn't in our text.

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And so we see that there's a misunderstanding here on Peter's part about the reason that Jesus came.

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The text is short, the event is easy to describe, and a little bit of the context just real quick. Last week, the disciples, through their spokesman

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Peter, conveyed that they believed that Jesus was both the Messiah and the

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Son of God. It was a high point of faith, a high point in the history of humanity where the

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Father revealed to humanity that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and the Son of God.

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It had been granted to Peter by the Heavenly Father we saw last week to conclude the true identity of Jesus Christ.

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So it was a gift from God that we would come to understand who Jesus is and the significance of his life and why he came.

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But what Peter meant by the word Messiah was different than what Jesus meant by the word Messiah. And so literally,

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Jesus removed himself far away from the Jewish establishment way up north in Israel to reveal this to his disciples, to declare himself and basically agree with them that he's the

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Messiah because he didn't want all the misunderstandings. Because there's so many misunderstandings around the word

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Messiah, especially in that day and age, and Peter was guilty of that same fundamental misunderstanding here in the text.

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What Jesus meant by saying he was the Messiah and what Peter meant by declaring Jesus the Messiah were two different things.

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So in verse 21, Jesus began, it says, to teach them. From that time on, from the time that they came to realize that Jesus Christ was

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Messiah, he began to teach them something about that title, something about himself, something about what he came to do.

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And it says he taught them that he must, in that role of Messiah, he must go to Jerusalem, he must suffer many things, at the hands of the religious leaders, he would be killed, and then he would be raised by the

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Father on the third day. Now this is the first of three times that Jesus predicted his own death in the

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Gospels. And he wasn't merely showing off, it wasn't merely to say, ha, I know the future, and I can see, I'm gonna die,

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I'm gonna die, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna have to go to Jerusalem, they're gonna mistreat me, I'm gonna die there. He was working to counteract significant deception in the hearts of his followers.

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They thought the Messiah would come as an earthly king. They thought he would come as a military conqueror.

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They thought he would reestablish Jewish dominance in the land, and ultimately at the core of that was the belief that Jesus would come and make life easier for them.

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That his goal was to serve us and make our lives a little bit more comfortable. That was their thought.

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And as he begins to teach them, he teaches them that the Messiah must be abused, he must suffer, he must be killed, but he must be raised to new life.

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All of this in order to complete the mission, what it meant to be the chosen one of God to come and rescue us from our broken relationship with our

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Father. Well in the text it's kind of interesting, Peter took him aside, it says in the text, to rebuke him.

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In that sentence, Peter took Jesus aside to rebuke him, how many of you think that there's trouble coming for Peter?

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Take Jesus aside, rebuke him, set him straight, correct him, fix him, let him know where he's gone astray, that's a crazy thing,

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I mean, so kind of Peter, the word that's used there in Greek is to take somebody by the arm and gently lead them off to the side.

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He's, Jesus, come with me for a second, you got something wrong here. And so kind of him to not correct him in front of his followers, you know, good job,

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Peter, the master, the Lord over all, I got something for you, Jesus. I don't know if maybe the commendation of Peter last week got to his head, you know, he was told that you are

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Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and you're gonna be used significantly and here's the keys of the kingdom,

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I'm gonna use you to help establish the church and the book of Acts and all of that, so maybe he thought, wow, I'm something. But here he seeks to correct

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Jesus and set the record straight. And anytime, by the way, let me just encourage you, anytime you encounter Jesus saying something in the gospels and his revealed word that you disagree with, let me just encourage you to take a minute, consider where you're wrong and don't open your mouth about it, like don't try to fix him, don't try to correct him, take what he says as the gospel truth.

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His statement in verse 22 is incredulous, what Peter has to say in correcting

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Jesus, far be it from you, Lord, in other words, this shall never happen to you.

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Jesus says, I'm gonna die, Peter says, am not, Jesus says, am to, Peter says, are not, you get the picture.

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So consider for a moment where this level of disagreement comes from in Peter, that he would have the boldness, the brazenness to disagree with Jesus, his master.

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He just said he believes that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. How in the world, what in the world could go on in a person's heart that would lead them to disagree with somebody that they just said was the

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Son of God, and I would suggest to you that nothing shy of tradition, rooted in years of wrong thinking could make us want to correct

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Jesus. But I think in many ways we're all guilty of it, aren't we? We're guilty of misunderstanding or even misrepresenting the reason that Jesus came, and we can get caught up in all kinds of things just like Peter.

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You see, Peter was raised on stories of the promised Messiah, a Messiah who would come and rescue his people, probably from childhood up, probably parents, grandparents shared stories with him of the one who would come and occupy the throne of David, the one who would come and push out those filthy

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Romans who were occupiers of Israel during this time, people who placed heavy burdens and taxation on the people, killed people wantonly.

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And so he had heard from childhood up that God was going to send someone to deliver his people, a different kind of deliverance, of course, they had that wrong.

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In this sense, I want to point out the very generational nature of many errors that we fall into.

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Wrong thinking about God and his plans happens over time as we stray away from the word of God as our authority and we begin to spread our preferences as rules and our thoughts and pastors pass on just a little bit skewed messages to other pastors, to other pastors, and eventually we find ourselves off track in our understanding fundamentally about the nature of Christ rather than going back to the book itself.

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And that's why I encourage you, as much as I love preaching and I study and I research, I encourage you to check,

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I want you to have the Bible, that's why I want you to have the Bibles open when I'm talking, I want you to dig into this and see that the things that I'm saying are coming from this.

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And if I say something that isn't in this, then I'm wrong, okay, that's the point. And so we need to constantly, as individuals, as a church, we need to keep coming back to the word of God and take that as our rock -solid anchor of truth.

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In verse 23, Jesus sternly turns the rebuke back on Peter. The word turned to him is almost kind of turned on him, it's a little bit of a strong word here,

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Jesus is not, and we see, Jesus, sometimes it's hard to tell what kind of mood he's in when he says some things, some things he says playfully, some things he says in jest, some things he says very sternly and seriously, this is, there's every indication in this text that he is very stern with Peter here in this text.

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Even suggesting that Peter is repeating one of the temptations of Satan, now, I don't believe for a second that Peter was possessed by Satan or that he was literally

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Satan or that Satan was literally present there, what he's basically getting at is that you're repeating the very temptation that Satan gave me in the wilderness.

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Earlier in the book of Matthew, Satan had taken Jesus out for 40 days into the wilderness and had issued three temptations to him, one particularly, he had brought him up to a high place, showed him all of the nations of the world and said, all of these that the

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Father has given to me, so ultimately God has given over the kingdoms of this world to Satan and he said,

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I'll give them all back to you if you'll just bow to me and worship me. Notice what's absent in that obtaining his kingdom, if he goes that route, no cross, no suffering, no

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Jerusalem, no religious leaders beating him, mocking him, ridiculing him, spitting in his face, no crown of thorns, no spear in his side,

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Satan is saying, I'll give it to you, I'll let you be the ruler over everything that has been, that's under my charge if you'll just bow to me.

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Well, Jesus won that temptation, he won over that and now he finds that one of his very inner circle is repeating the very same temptation to him.

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Jesus, you don't need to die, surely you as the Messiah, as the Son of God, you don't have to suffer, you don't have to go to the cross,

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I mean, what are you talking about? People love you, Jesus, nobody's gonna hurt you and certainly not on my watch, who's the one who pulled the sword out in the garden, cut off the ear of the high priest's servant?

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Peter, I'll protect you, Jesus, I got you covered, there's no way anybody's gonna touch you when I'm around.

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And Peter, who in our text is called the Rock, that's what his name means, got a picture of him, we uncovered it, this is probably an approximation of what

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Peter looked like there, just a guess. Just a few verses ago, he was called the

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Rock and now in our text, the word that Jesus uses for him is stumbling stone, there's a play on words with his name here in this text as well.

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Scandalon, the word means, we get our word scandalous from it, it's a stone, a rock that is placed, not placed but is actually in the path, can't be removed, probably too heavy during this era this time and you just can't get around it, so in the darkness, right dead set in the middle of the path, you'd be wandering around and boom, you'd trip over this rock that was there that nobody could move.

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And Jesus here is telling him, get behind me, don't be in front of me trying to trip me up.

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As long as you stand in front of me, says Jesus, you are a hindrance, that literal word stumbling stone, you are a hindrance to me, in the

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English Standard Version. You see, Peter has got the mission of Jesus Christ all wrong and he got it wrong because he had the wrong priorities.

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It says in the text here at the conclusion in verse 23, his mind was set on the things of man instead of setting his mind on the things of God.

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You see, the Christian life must begin with what God says, not with our thoughts, not with our feelings about God, not with impressions in our heart about what

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God must be like because he likes the same things as me. That's why we are to be a people of the book, because in the book he tells us what's up and in the book he tells us how he rolls.

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And this leads to the one main point from this morning. I want us all to consider this over this holiday.

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Are we setting our minds on the things of God or are we setting our minds on the things of man?

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Think about how this worked out in Peter's life. What does it look like to set your mind on the things of man? Peter was concerned for his people, great.

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Peter was concerned for himself. Peter was concerned for where do I fit into this plan?

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And so Peter thought Jesus had come to make things easier for people in this life. He did not.

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Peter thought Jesus came to defeat the Romans. Jesus came to defeat sin and death. Peter thought

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Jesus came to sit on an earthly throne, but Jesus came to hang on a cross. Peter thought that he was about to be made vice president of a new powerful empire established by Jesus.

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But he was about to enter into the service of an invisible kingdom that would lead to his martyrdom, his very death.

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He thought Jesus would never die and Jesus came with the very sole purpose to die.

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See we live in an era of church history where it's common for people to say, Jesus came here to make you wealthy.

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Jesus came here to make you healthy. People will tell you that Jesus would never get in the way of anyone's pleasure or anyone's self -fulfillment or self -actualization.

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Many even think of Jesus as merely a help along the way to our self -fulfillment. Sure, I'll take a little

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Jesus as long as he's gonna help me meet my goals. Jesus came to rescue broken, fallen sinners through his death, his burial, and his resurrection.

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So that our hope now rests in a resurrection that he will provide and our hope is an eternal kingdom, in an eternal kingdom that will come after his return for us.

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Not establishing the location of our hope here in this world, but how many of you have lived years long enough to actually recognize that the hopes that you place in the things of this world are misplaced?

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You're already starting to feel that. You're already starting to see that. You're able to identify that the things of this life cannot quite fill the longings of your heart.

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Why? Because there is another life after this one that all of those pleasures, all of those delights, all of those things that you're trying to fill your heart with point to a better kingdom, point to a better place that he has for us.

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And so, our hope rests in heaven. Our hope rests where Christ is seated at the right hand of our

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Father. And the fact of the matter is, we ought to be storing up treasures in heaven.

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And that is setting our mind on the things of God as Jesus would have it here in this text. And his plan, set your hope in his plan, his ultimate purpose that he's revealed to us, not on the one that we're trying to make up for him.

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And the reality is, just like for Jesus, going, I must go to Jerusalem, I must suffer hardship,

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I must die, but I will be raised again, that's a pattern for our lives.

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I will suffer, there will be hardships, there will be difficulties, but the story ends well for anybody who belongs to Jesus Christ, better than you can imagine.

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And that's the model, that's the picture of what Jesus is doing here in this text.

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It will include hardships, and it will include challenges in this world, but hang in there, brothers and sisters.

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There is a hope coming for you if you belong to Jesus. So as we come to communion this morning, consider the great mission that Jesus came to complete on our behalf.

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He came to offer himself as the sacrifice for our sins. And if you believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that he died to save you from your sins, then

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I encourage you to come to one of the tables, and take a cracker and juice to remember his body that was broken for us, and take the juice to remember his blood that was shed for us.

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The tables are set up a little different, there's tables in the back, there's a table up front, is there another one in the back over here?

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So take advantage of that, and be patient with one another, because we're a little bit crowded today, that's a great thing, but just be patient, and get up at your own pace, and take the elements, and you can take those back to your seat, you can take them there.

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We're a little bit casual on that front, but we're very serious about taking this in a meaningful way that reminds us, this is a remembrance service, it's a remembrance of what

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Christ has done for you. And so if you belong to Jesus Christ, if you've asked him to save you, I'd encourage you to go to one of those tables during this next song.

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But remember this, the mission of Jesus Christ was clear, he uttered it, he spoke it often, it was straightforward, but Satan would love for us to confuse it with all kinds of misunderstandings, and even more so, he would love for us to water it down with cutesy traditions, but don't let

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Satan tell you his version of the reason for the season, because Jesus didn't come to set up your kingdom, but his own.

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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the beauty and the glory of this time of the year,

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I thank you for incarnation, and even though this message isn't heavily, this text isn't heavily centered on incarnation, without the incarnation, we do not get to crucifixion, we do not get to resurrection, and therefore we would have no hope, and so we thank you for every step along the way of the mission of Jesus Christ, that he would humble himself and come down here as the kids expressed so well, in terms of that manger scene and recreating that for us.

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Father, the awesome interplay of your divinity being celebrated by angels in a chorus of angels, but the reality that it was sung to just lowly shepherds, and then this mission that you shared, that Christ shared in his adulthood to bring that message forward, that he must go to Jerusalem, he must suffer, he must die, but he would be raised again.

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Father, I pray that you would allow that pattern to be a reality in our hearts, even as we face many people face challenges over the holiday season, many have great traditions and celebrations, but Father, I pray that you would prevent us from watering down the glorious beauty of what you have done for us, and that we would be people of your book that would follow you, love you, and bring honor to you.

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Thank you for the opportunity we have to come to the tables and for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on our behalf, and it's in his name that I pray, amen.