Matthew 4:12-17 - Jan 7, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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All right, well, I'm so glad that you all have decided to join us today, whether it's your first time, whether you've been here every

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Sunday since I've been here. My name is Matty, I'm the pastor for Mount Zion Community Church, and I didn't know if I was going to get into this, but just briefly, just so you all know who are here for the first time,

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I'm also a chaplain in the Army Reserve, and I have a little bit of training that I have to go to. So this is my last Sunday for roughly the next three months, so I will have a series of guest speakers and some other people preaching for the next 12 or 13 weeks or so while I'm gone.

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So that's either good news for you or bad news, I don't know, we'll find out. If you've never heard me preach before, we'll see after the sermon's over whether you want to come back next week or in three months.

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But what we're doing, if you've never been here, is we're walking verse by verse through the

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Bible. Now I've only been here for about 10 weeks or so, so we are in the Gospel of Matthew, and we've reached the point where we're going to be looking at the fourth chapter of Matthew and verses 12 through 17.

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But I wanted to talk a little bit first about something that I find really interesting, and I think if you really think about it and you really get down to it, think about how much of our society, how much of our culture and the world that we live in rests on foundations that were established by Christianity, rests on the foundations that were established by a culture that believed the

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Bible, a culture that read the Bible and, you know, maybe not everybody believed everything that they read, but they still respected the

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Bible. And how much of our society, at some level, at least requires a

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Christian worldview or aspects of a Christian worldview to function the way we all think that it should.

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So everything from our legal system, especially our legal system, to just the basic moral framework that we need for a society that operates in a way that we would consider to be fair, it all comes from Christianity.

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It all comes from the principles that are in the Bible. Yet, despite all that, there are people out there who think that America or even the world would somehow be better, or it would somehow be more equitable.

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And you notice that I said equitable, and I didn't say fair because those two words are completely different.

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They're words that sound the same, but they're so far apart as to almost be absolutely opposites.

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But they feel like if we could somehow rid the world of every last bit of Christianity, if we could rid the world or rid

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America or our culture of every last bit of scripture or even biblical morality that exists, somehow we would be better, or we'd be in a better place.

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I think we all know that's not the case. But one area that I think comes from Christianity, and this is not related to morals directly, although it sort of is, there's a concept that's essentially universal in that everybody understands it.

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It's understood by Christians, it's understood by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, pagans, and everyone in between.

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Every belief system has a model for this, yet the concept itself finds its origins in Christianity, and it finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christianity as well, in the life of Jesus.

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And just like everything else, this isn't a coincidence, because what we believe here is that that's because God created all of it.

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And the concept that I'm referring to that I want to talk about a little bit today is the concept of light and darkness, or light versus darkness.

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So we see this in the very beginning of the Bible. So the first chapter of Genesis, right where we start, it says this, "...in

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the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the

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Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, let there be light, and there was light.

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And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness."

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So we see, again, from the very beginning, from the creation of the earth, light and darkness is a concept created by God.

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And pretty much everybody acknowledges that just about all religious systems find in their beginning some kind of darkness, and out of that darkness comes some kind of creation.

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And usually that creation, whatever it is, is signified by a kind of light.

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And in a lot of religious traditions, that light is turned into something that is either almost like a

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God, or is a God. And this is a small G God, not like our big G God. For example, the

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Egyptians have Ra, the sun god. So the sun is the light that was created, and then a god is created from that, and worshipped as part of that religious system.

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Now I found some interesting stuff, some definitions to help out with this illustration, and I found them on encyclopedia .com.

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And while encyclopedia .com is not a website that I would ever recommend for any other kind of, you know, issues of eternal importance, don't get any of your

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Christian definitions from encyclopedia .com, please. What it does give us is what's probably a pretty good representation of what our culture, or what our society views on any given issue.

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And it deals with this issue of light and darkness. So I'm going to read a few quotes from the website.

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So this one is in reference to religions, and it's interesting, especially when you compare it to Christianity.

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So we already talked about how the fact that pretty much every religion starts with some kind of darkness, and creation involves light.

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Now they said this as well. Conversely, many mythologies describe the end of the world as a twilight, or darkness of the gods.

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That is the disappearance of light in a final darkness that engulfs all.

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And that's a pretty interesting concept, so keep that in mind. Keep the idea of darkness as the final part of the world in your head.

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We'll get back to it in just a second. So encyclopedia .com also sums up the whole concept this way.

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They say, generally speaking, light serves as a symbol of life, happiness, prosperity, and in a wider sense of perfect being.

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As a symbol of life, light can also serve as a symbol of immortality. Darkness, on the other hand, is associated with chaos, death, and the underworld.

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And that's pretty accurate. Of course, then they got to take it a step further, right?

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They go on to say that yes, this is how it's seen, but they also go on to imply that even though they exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, they require each other to function, right?

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They basically say that darkness is what you have to have to guarantee the continual existence of light.

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And while it's true that, especially for us with our limited ability to comprehend things in relation to God, it is easier to understand darkness, or it is easier to understand light when we have darkness, right?

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We have sunrise and we have sunset. But what this idea is doing is very subtly undermining the idea that this is somehow under the control of God.

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It's saying that these are sort of two impersonal forces that are in control of each other, and they just sort of balance each other out, which

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I will tell you is not the case. But Scripture talks about darkness, too.

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And Scripture talks about darkness as the end of the world. Let's look at just a few verses.

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These are going to be from Matthew that talk about darkness. Matthew 8, 12 says this, "...but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into the outer darkness.

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In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." So that's part of the story of the centurion.

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Now, this is the parable of the wedding feast, Matthew 22, 13, "...then the king said to the servants, bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness.

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In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." And the parable of the talents, we see this again,

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Matthew 25, 30, "...and throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness.

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And in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." And then finally, the crucifixion.

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"...now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour."

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And this word, this idea of darkness, it appears throughout the

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New Testament, and it's used to describe the fate of people who don't believe in the gospel.

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A couple more verses, this time from Revelation, because Revelation has a lot of pictures of this darkness.

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So, one of the first is the fourth trumpet, the fourth angel. It says, "...and the fourth angel sounded and a third of the sun and a third of the moon and a third of the stars were struck so that a third of them would be darkened and the day would not shine for a third of it and the night in the same way."

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That's Revelation 8, 12. And then a little bit later in Revelation, we have the fifth bowl.

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So, these are some of the plagues that are happening and some of the judgments that are happening in Revelation. It says, "...then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast and his kingdom became darkened and they gnawed their tongues because of pain."

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So, there's a lot of information about darkness, and there's a lot of warnings about darkness, and there's a lot of scripture about people being sent into darkness.

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And that's similar to a lot of the religious traditions that we're talking about, because they show the end of the world, having everything consumed by darkness.

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But, now I want to take a second to show you yet another way that Christianity is different, because that's another one of those things that you'll hear, is that all religions are basically the same.

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They're all a way to get to the same place. We're all going in the same direction, and religions are just a different way to get to the same place.

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And it's not true. If you take nothing away from this today, and this wasn't even really part of what

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I have written down, take away this. Christianity is the only way to eternal life.

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There is no other belief system, other than the belief in Jesus Christ and the work that He did on the cross, that will find you in heaven.

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So, let's look at what the Bible has to say about the end of the world and about eternity for believers.

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Revelation 22, verses 1 through 5. It says, And there will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and of the

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Lamb will be in it, and His slaves shall serve Him, and they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.

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And there will no longer be any night, and they will not have need of the light of a lamp, nor the light of the sun, because God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever.

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So, while darkness is a part of a lot of traditions and a lot of frameworks,

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Christians have the idea of eternal life. The end of your life, I hope, will not find you proceeding into just an eternal blackness, but into an eternal light.

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And I wanted to talk about the light -darkness dichotomy or comparison, because it's something that's universally understood, and it's something that we find everywhere.

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But, for our purposes, we see that it finds its complete fulfillment in the life of Jesus.

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And that brings me to the verses that we want to look at today. So, I said earlier, we're in Matthew 4, verses 12 -17.

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So, I'm going to read all of those verses, and then we'll sort of walk through them one by one and talk about what they mean and what kind of implications they have.

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So, verse 12 says, Now, when Jesus heard that John had been taken into custody, he departed into Galilee.

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And leaving Nazareth, he came and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, in order that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet would be fulfilled, saying,

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The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the

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Gentiles, the people who were sitting in darkness, saw a great light. And those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a light dawned.

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From that time, Jesus began to preach and say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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Now, as we look at this passage, the first thing that we see is that Jesus just found out that John the

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Baptist had been taken into custody. So, if you recall the verses that we looked at over the past few weeks, we saw

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Jesus coming to John to be baptized, and then we saw

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Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the devil. Now, to go straight from the temptation to the fact that Jesus heard that John had been taken into custody by Herod, well, that implies that a little bit of time had elapsed.

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This wasn't like an instant thing where, you know, immediately came out of the wilderness and John was…

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John was under arrest. And we'll see later, as we get to some of the later chapters of Matthew, exactly what happened with John and why he was arrested.

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But, you know, for now, we'll just say that it's also part of that light -darkness paradigm.

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John was shining light on some dark acts that Herod was doing, and Herod arrested him for it.

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But, one of the bigger takeaways here is the fact that Matthew is primarily concerned with showing that Jesus is the king, right?

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That's the theme of Matthew. Jesus is the king. Jesus is the promised Messiah that we see in Scripture.

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So, the details of what happened in the time between the temptation and John's arrest, which is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and a half or so, they're not really that important to Matthew, even though they show up in the other

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Gospels. So, the theme of Jesus as king doesn't necessarily require some of the stories that we see, for example, in the

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Gospel of John. So, in the first chapter of John, this is one of those stories that everybody loves, right?

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This is the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana, the time when He turned water into wine.

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So, seeing that miracle is important to that Gospel, but it doesn't necessarily add to the fact that Jesus is the king.

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So, that part was left out of here. So, we're moving just straight from the temptation to the start of Jesus's ministry, because what is important to show that Jesus is the king is that His ministry is now beginning, because we talked about the fact that John was the herald of the king.

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The herald was announcing the coming of the king, but now that the herald is gone, the king has arrived, and the king is beginning

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His ministry. So, one other thing that I hope that we've established over the past weeks here is that none of the things that happen here are random.

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None of them are by chance. None of what Jesus does is just, just because He happened to do it.

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Everything that happens here is ordained by God. Man, it's really windy outside.

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And we also, we know that Jesus has perfect knowledge of these situations as well, and we know that Jesus has the ability to perform any kind of miracle.

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You know, He knows what's happening. He can make anything happen that He wants, but despite that, we know that He submits

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His own will to the plan of God, and He submits His own preferences to what

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God has ordained for Him to come here and do. And along these lines, we see this.

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We see that when He found out that John had been taken into custody,

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He departed into Galilee. So, He left His hometown of Nazareth, and He departed into Galilee.

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So, immediately, the first thing that our minds jump to is the fact that He did this because He was in danger, right?

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Herod took John into custody. Well, Herod might take Jesus into custody as well. And by the way, this

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Herod is a son of the other Herod that we saw earlier that tried to kill all the male children. This is a different Herod.

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So, is Jesus running away from Herod? No, Jesus is not running away from Herod. In fact,

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Galilee was still under the control of Herod. So, it wouldn't make any sense for Jesus to run into another territory that Herod controlled to get away from Him, because Jesus is not afraid of any person.

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Jesus is not going to change His plan or His action because of a man.

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Jesus does what He does. He moves to fulfill God's plan.

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So, interestingly enough, another reason that He was departing was because of the Pharisees and the

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Sadducees. So, remember, these are the religious leaders at the time. And these guys hated

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John. They saw what He was doing out in the wilderness. They heard the message

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He was preaching that convicted them, because it directly contradicted the things that they were teaching about how you found eternal life.

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So, they had it in for John. But now, John's off the scene. And if they knew about John, you can be sure that they knew about Jesus, because John was telling everybody that Jesus was greater than him, and He was coming in and He baptized

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Him. But, once again, Jesus is not running from the

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Pharisees and the Sadducees. Jesus is not afraid to confront the Pharisees and the

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Sadducees. And we know this, because as we get farther along in Matthew's gospel,

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He's going to take it straight to them. Jesus is going to go into the temples.

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He's going to insult them. He's going to correct their teaching. He's going to let everybody know the false things that they are out there telling the

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Jews. But these confrontations don't take place on other people's schedules.

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The confrontations, they take place on God's timetable. So, Jesus is withdrawing, because it's not time to take this stuff directly to the

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Pharisees and Sadducees yet. That'll happen soon enough.

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But, another thing that we have to understand, and that we should expect, is that Jesus made

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His move to fulfill a prophecy that we see in the Old Testament. Yet another prophecy that Matthew is pointing out from the

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Old Testament, to show that Jesus is God, and to show exactly who He is. So, going back to what we just read, verses 13 through 16 show this.

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Keep that phrase in mind. The people who were sitting in darkness saw great light, and those who were sitting in the land in the shadow of death, upon them a light dawned.

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So, what we see here is the scripture to be fulfilled by this move of Jesus is coming from Isaiah chapter 9.

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So, we'll look at verses 1 and 2. It says this, So, in these verses 13 through 16, we see some geographical references.

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So, as part of this prophecy, we're talking about some cities and some regions, and there's basically three of them.

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Two of them are contemporary to the readers at the time, and one of them is one that they would understand based on their knowledge of the scripture.

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So, the first thing that we see is that Jesus withdrew into Galilee. So, Galilee is the larger region where this is taking place, and it's basically, if the

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Sea of Galilee is right here, well, for you all, Galilee is sort of around here.

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It's basically to the west of the Sea of Galilee, a little bit to the north, a little bit to the south. And it was a region that was known for agriculture.

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It was known for fishing because the Sea of Galilee, or maybe lake is a better term.

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It's not really a sea. It is a landlocked body of water, so it's not a massive ocean. But, you know, it was known.

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It was known for these agricultural, these food producing type of industries and activities. In some ways, it could probably even be considered out in the country, right?

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Jerusalem, Judea, these are the big cities. Galilee, Nazareth, Capernaum, these are the smaller places.

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So, John MacArthur says this, the Jews who lived in Galilee were less sophisticated and traditional than those who lived in Judea, especially those in the great metropolis of Jerusalem.

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They even had a distinct accent in their speech. We see this a little bit later in Matthew when the people were accusing

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Peter of being with Jesus and they said, you were with him, your accent gives you away. So, again, a specific kind of accent from there.

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But Galilee is where Jesus called his disciples from too, so that's pretty interesting. So, we'll get to a little bit more of Galilee's significance in a minute.

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But the next locality or the next geographical reference we see is to Capernaum or Capernaum, which translates to the village of Nahum.

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And Nahum was another one of those Old Testament prophets. Now, we don't know if that village was named after him.

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It might have been. But what's even more significant is that Nahum itself, the prophet's name, is translated as compassion.

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So, there's a chance that, you know, it was named that way because the people there were compassionate.

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So, Jesus has taken himself out of his hometown of Nazareth and he's withdrawn into Galilee, specifically to this little village in Capernaum.

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But what's even more significant is that now, through the prophecy, we have a historical reference.

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And we have a historical reference to these regions of Zebulun and Naphtali. Now, these are named for some of the tribes of Israel.

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And in the 19th chapter of Joshua, we see that there's a handful of tribes.

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The tribes of Asher and then obviously the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, they were given areas in this region of Galilee as their inheritance.

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So, again, this is going back to the historical significance of things that are going to be seen in Scripture.

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And John MacArthur says this, he says, contrary to God's command, these tribes, Zebulun and Naphtali, failed to expel all the

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Canaanites from their territory. And even worse, they intermarried with them and compromised with the pagan practices of these people and compromised their own religious traditions.

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Now, this compromise weakened them significantly. And another historically interesting fact about them is they were among the first tribes to be deported by the

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Assyrians in the 8th century. And if you want a Scripture reference for that, we see that in 2 Kings 15 29.

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I'm not going to read that one today. But the impact of all this is that Jesus left the regions that were well known for their practice of Judaism.

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He left the big city. He left the flashy churches. He left the well -known teachers in Jerusalem and Judea.

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And he withdrew into this place where Jews did live and Jews did exist, but where they had compromised their traditions and they had compromised their beliefs and their their version of their religion was kind of watered down.

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And, you know, this is exactly what happens. And this is exactly what we would expect when you integrate yourself too far into the world or when you intermarry with people who are of a different religious tradition.

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It sounds fine, but ultimately somebody has to compromise.

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Something has to give. And in this case, it was the Jews and how they followed

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God. But then, this is why the term

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Galilee of the Gentiles is so significant. Because again, they weren't known for how faithful they were to God.

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They weren't known for the piety of their religious practice, but they were known for being a group of people with watered down beliefs and watered down traditions.

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People who have been dominated by the pagan society that was surrounding them, despite the fact that that land was given to them by God directly as an inheritance to their tribe.

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So Galilee didn't exactly have the best reputation with the people at the time.

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We see this in a couple of places. In the Gospel of John, John 7 41, people are arguing about Jesus and somebody says, no, for is

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Christ going to come from Galilee? Implying that that's ridiculous. And we also see this with Nicodemus.

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So, you know, Nicodemus has had a secret meeting with Jesus. He believes who

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Jesus is, but he still can't quite reconcile it because his tradition is just too strong.

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He's got too much to lose, but he's talking to the Pharisees and he's trying to get Jesus a fair hearing.

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Then in John 52, the Pharisees respond this way. They say, are you also from Galilee?

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Search and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee. But that's just, that's their, their, their, oh man, what's the word

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I want? That's their prejudice coming through. They live in the city, so nobody can come, nobody significant can come out of the country.

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And that's the, the framework that the people who received Matthew's Gospel would have had.

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And they would have had that framework for their perception of who the Messiah was and where he would have come from. So that is why it's so significant for Matthew to reference

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Isaiah 9, verses 1 and 2, because what that does is that reminds them from their very own scripture and from their very own tradition that hundreds of years before they were ever born, the prophet

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Isaiah told them that the Messiah would show up there and told them that the people of Galilee of the

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Gentiles saw a great light and upon them a great light dawned. Now there's also a very significant implication that comes out of this fact that the light of Christ was first shown on the darkness of a pagan region rather than on the shiny, sparkly, religious, pious, self -righteous culture of those bigger cities.

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And, and we'll get there too. That'll be one of the, one of the takeaways of the passages. But before we do, let's take a quick look at verse 17.

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So verse 17 says, from that time Jesus began to preach and say, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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So we see something significant here too, right? We see the fact that Jesus is basically preaching the exact same message that John was preaching when he came.

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Jesus is telling everyone exactly the same thing, but this is different.

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It's the same message, but the fact that it's coming from Jesus makes it different.

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Now, the Greek word for preaching, it's keruso, and what it means, what it really means as opposed to preaching, like, like what, again, like what we think about as preaching, is it means to publish or proclaim.

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What it doesn't mean is it doesn't mean to convince. Or it doesn't mean to argue.

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Or it doesn't mean to try to persuade somebody of something. And the reason for that is,

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Jesus's goal in this preaching is not to persuade people.

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It's not to change minds. And when we preach in our churches, the goal that we have is not to convince you that this is true.

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It's to tell you what the Bible says, and you work that out with the

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Holy Spirit yourself. Because remember what I told you before, the choice to be saved is not yours.

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Salvation is purely an act of the Holy Spirit that you cannot initiate by your own choosing.

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And I know that's a hard thing to say, but we'll talk about that a little bit in, in a few minutes too. But again, the point is no one will ever be convinced to follow

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Jesus by a well -constructed argument. You know, I could be, I could have a background as the greatest attorney in the world and decide to build each and every one of these sermons as an airtight legal argument with every proof that you could possibly need to intellectually conceive of this.

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But it doesn't matter, because I do not convert anyone. I don't save anyone.

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It's the Word of God that saves people. So, preaching just means that we proclaim the

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Word and we let the power of God's Word speak for itself in your own heart.

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And that's what John did, and that's what Jesus is doing here. But the message, the message for the people here, the people who were living in darkness of sin, was that they needed to repent.

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They needed to repent and turn to the light of the kingdom of God, because Jesus is telling us and telling them that the kingdom of God is here, or that the coming,

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He is the kingdom of God. So, the kingdom of God is there for them. And, and we looked at repentance a couple of weeks ago.

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We looked in depth at that concept, but just as a brief refresher, what it means for you is it's a complete turning from sin.

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So, this is a heart change. This is a lifestyle change brought about by the power of the Holy Spirit, but it's turning from sin and it's turning to God.

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And what repentance is, is evidence of a heart that's been granted salvation by the

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Holy Spirit. And this is the message that Jesus spent His entire ministry proclaiming.

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So, when we look at these verses, what do we take away from them?

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Well, as usual, I have three things that I thought of. Actually, I have a fourth, and this is a bonus one.

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We won't go too in detail into that, but that one is that everything that happens is part of God's sovereign plan.

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And that's hard to swallow sometimes, but it's true. Look, we'll never understand all of this.

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It is beyond our ability to comprehend what God's plan is. But that, that is something that if you look at Scripture, you see the promises, you see the promise of eternal light and revelation, that is what is promised to you.

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And God's promises always come true, and they don't always look like what you think they look like.

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That would be on your Matty Bingo card, probably. So, one of the first things, and I wasn't,

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I wasn't quite sure how to phrase this. So, I said, every day we are faced with a choice between light and darkness.

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And I also said the battle between light and darkness pervades every area of our lives. And the reason that I sort of flip -flopped and waffled about how to phrase that is because I really want to be careful using the terminology of choice.

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You can choose to sin or not to sin, so that's basically what this comes down to. So, let's make this as simple as possible when we think about light and darkness.

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Light comes only from the things of God, only from the things of God.

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Everything else is ultimately a path to darkness, no matter how bright and shiny it looks.

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And this is important for us to understand, because our modern world gives us a very distorted view of what darkness is.

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If you think about this on the most simple surface level, we have so many ways of artificially lighting things up, right?

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The darkest part of the night, the middle of the night, I could go into my living room and flip a switch, and in that room it will be so bright,

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I won't know that it's night outside. And this messes with all kinds of things in our lives. This messes with our biology, it messes with our circadian rhythms, you know, people say

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I'm not a morning person, I like to stay up late. Well, if you had artificial light, that probably wouldn't be the case. Or if you didn't have artificial light, that wouldn't be the case.

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So, in the same way as we can flip a switch and have things be bright, the world can take any activity, the world can take any temptation, anything at all, and artificially light it up and make it look good.

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Even though the world itself, the people that are presenting these temptations, they don't know

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God. It's all completely shrouded in darkness, in reality.

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But they know exactly how to shine that artificial light on it to make it look appealing.

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The light hits it, and it goes bling, and we have to look at it again.

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And this can be so many things. Sports, hobbies, work, charity, activism, money, even family and church.

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Because if you take any one of those things, any one of them, and you put them above God, or you put them in front of God, you're turning them into an idol, and you're basking in the light of this idol, this artificial light.

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And you know what will happen to that artificial light? That light will be snuffed out into darkness.

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And if you are shining that light on yourself, you will also be snuffed out into darkness.

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And again, I'll say this one more time, that includes church, that includes family.

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But listen to how you can put religion above God. I think the perfect example of this is

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Matthew 7, verses 21 through 23. Jesus says this, Not everyone who says to me,

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Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter.

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Many will say to me, Lord, Lord, in your name did we not prophesy, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name do many miracles?

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And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.

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So this is the first thing that we have. Every day, light and darkness will battle for your attention, and light and darkness will battle for your affections, and your heart, and your mind, and your time, and your money, and God's place in your life.

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So make sure you're filling up your mind. Make sure you're filling up your heart with the things of God.

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The second lesson that we have from these passages, when we consider the fact that the world is out there tempting us with darkness, it's really easy for us to say, that's our enemy.

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Those people are our enemy. But that's not true. The second lesson is that the message of the is for everyone.

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So we see this demonstrated in the fact that Jesus first shined his light in Galilee of the

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Gentiles. He wasn't sent to the religious people.

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He wasn't sent to the people that everyone thought would be the ones to receive the

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Messiah. He was sent to shine his light in the darkness of a pagan world.

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And again, this is a theme that shows up all throughout Scripture as well, but one of the most dramatic places that we see this, and we hear words that are so significant, is when

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Paul tells the story of his conversion. And he tells the story of his conversion in Acts 26, and verses 16 through 18 is where Jesus, he's recounting

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Jesus talking to him. And Jesus said to Paul, but rise up and stand on your feet.

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For this purpose I have appeared to you, to appoint you a servant and a witness, not only to the things you have seen, but also to the things in which

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I will appear to you, rescuing you from the Jewish people and from the Gentiles, to whom

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I am sending you. And this is the part right here, to whom I am sending you, to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the authority of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in me.

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So, Paul went from killing Christians to converting them, but also to opening the eyes of everyone so that they could see the light of Christ and turn from the darkness of Satan in the world.

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Now, we also see this. This is one of the most popular things that people say when they want to shut you up.

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They say, but Jesus ate with sinners. Jesus ate with sinners and outcasts, and it's true.

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But Jesus did not eat with sinners. Jesus did not hang out with what were considered the worst people of society to defend their lifestyles.

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Jesus came to these people to highlight to us the fact that no one's sin puts them out of God's reach.

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We think they're our enemy because they disagree with us, but to God, there's someone to be saved.

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And again, do we know who God is granting salvation? We do not. So, that means it's not up to us to decide who is or who isn't, but here's the thing.

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He took that message to tell them their sin was never out of the reach of God, but what was the message?

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Repent. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. So, that message of repentance that Jesus took to anyone and everyone is appropriate to be proclaimed to all people, because as we know, anyone who calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. And as if we needed one more thing, we can look at the last verse of Matthew, or the last two verses,

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Matthew 28, 19, and 20. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you. And behold,

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I am with you always, even to the end of the age. So, this message, this message of repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, is for the whole world.

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We do not decide who is going to repent and who is not going to repent. So, it's on us, it's our role to bring the message of Jesus to our culture.

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And finally, the third lesson is that the message is repentance, and repentance is the response that the gospel of Jesus Christ requires.

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Because I said that the message of Jesus is appropriate for sinners and outcasts, it's appropriate for the people that we don't like, but it's also appropriate for each and every one of us, okay?

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Because the message of Jesus is not, you're okay the way you are and I love you anyway, continue doing whatever it is you want to do.

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That's not the message of Jesus. And that's probably the biggest perversion of the gospel that we experience these days in churches everywhere, because it's what we want to hear.

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But the message of Jesus is what we see in chapter 4 verse 17, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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And the reason for this message stems from the love of God.

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Repent sounds like a mean message, it sounds like a judgmental message, it sounds like one of those messages you tell people because you're better than them and they need to fix something, but it's not.

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Repentance is ultimately the most loving message that you can deliver to anyone, anyone who is living contrary to the

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Word and the will of God, which in some way is all of us. So, you know, we don't sit here and think that we're better than everybody else for some reason, because we all needed that salvation.

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So, repentance is the message of the New Testament. And when the

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Word of God causes us to feel guilty, like if you read something in your

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Bible, in your daily quiet time, and all of a sudden it hits you and you feel guilty or you feel grief, that's actually a good thing.

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And the reason it's a good thing is because it is evidence of your salvation. If you feel conviction and you realize that you've offended

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God because of something that you read or hear, that shows you're on the right track.

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So, we see this in 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verses 8 through 10. Paul writes this, for though I caused you sorrow by my letter,

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I do not regret it, though I did regret it, for I see that that letter caused you sorrow, though only for a while.

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I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to repentance, for you were made to have godly sorrow, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us.

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For godly sorrow produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world brings about death.

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So, the difference here is the difference between actually being sorry that you sinned against God and being sorry that you got caught doing something that you weren't supposed to do.

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So, that's the difference here, because the gospel of Jesus is that He lived a perfect life and died for our sins.

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Each and every one of us needs that. And you will continue to sin, but 1 John 1 9 says, if we confess our sins,

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He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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So, you always can take your sin to God. And scripture also tells us about our true condition apart from Jesus Christ, and if there was any message that I would leave you with for three months, it would be this one, okay?

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It's that the gospel tells us everything that we need to know. So, we can start at Romans 3 23, and some of you might know exactly where I'm going with this, but Romans 3 23 says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

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And we have to hear this, right? Because the gospel is the good news. You've heard that, the good news.

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But we don't care about good news if there's no bad news that requires it, right?

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So, if we ourselves think that we're good, if we think that we're generally good people, and that we're good enough to get to heaven because we went to church and we gave to the poor, and we read our

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Bibles once in a while, and we're just kind of nice to each other, and nobody dislikes us, we don't know that we need the good news.

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But Romans 3 23 tells us that. It tells us that each and every one of us have sinned, no matter how good we think we are.

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Each and every one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And what does that mean?

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Romans 6 23 is what that means, for the wages of sin is death. The wages of sin is that eternal darkness that closes in on you, and then everything goes away except for your pain, and except for your torture, and except for the suffering that you experience for all eternity.

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Literally the eternal darkness that we suffer in apart from Jesus. So we get those two verses, and and we look at the fact that that's happening, and we despair because there's not a thing good about that.

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But Romans 5 8 reminds us of the hope that we have, because Romans 5 8 says this, it says, for God demonstrates

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His own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And that verse is so significant, and the second half of it is so significant, because Christ did not die for us because we did enough good things for Him to decide that it was time to be crucified.

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He's like, okay, Matty finally, finally was nice enough to his wife that I can die, and he can have salvation.

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He died while we were all still sinners, and we did nothing to deserve it, but He did it anyway.

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And that is the good news, right? Because the good news is that this salvation is for each and every one of us, and this is why

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I told you that you can't lose your salvation. You know why? Because you didn't earn it.

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If you didn't do anything to get it, you can't do anything to lose it, because that would be saying that Jesus's work on the cross was not sufficient to keep you saved, and that's heretical.

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So, God demonstrates His own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners,

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Christ died for us. And that takes us back to the second half of 6 23, because that tells us that even though the wages of sin is death, the gracious gift of God is eternal life, and Christ Jesus our

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Lord. But as we continue down this path, Romans 8 1 continues the good news, because it tells us this, because we're still sinners.

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Christ died 2 ,000 years ago, but we're not perfect, and we're still not good. But it says, therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because you have been given the gift of salvation through the

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Holy Spirit, through the work of Jesus on the cross. And you have sinned in the past, and you might have done really bad things, and those things make you feel guilty.

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But guess what? God has forgiven you. God has forgiven you, each and every one of you, for those things that you've done.

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Now look, they still have consequences. You still feel that guilt, and if you did something bad to somebody else, that doesn't go away.

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But before God, Jesus has taken all of that from you. All of it.

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You're forgiven. And Romans 10 9 wraps things up.

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It tells us how we can partake of this gift of the good news. It says that if you confess with your mouth,

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Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved. But let's keep reading, because the next few verses answer a lot of questions, including how it is that we get this blessing for ourselves from the

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Holy Spirit. And this starts in verse 10. It says, That means, if you believe, you will not be turned away.

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Abounding in riches for all who call on Him, for whoever calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. Remember what we said before. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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I call upon your name. Please save me. Without Jesus, without this, without the work that He's done, there is nothing.

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There is nothing but darkness. And there's nothing but darkness no matter how much of that artificial light you try to shine.

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You can go buy those LED light bulbs that will stay on for 200 years or whatever it is.

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Those lights, put them on your life to try to make it look good. But without Jesus, that light will always go out.

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Those lights will always turn to darkness. So again, take those verses from Romans.

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If you take nothing else, remember that whoever calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. So I want to close with just this one verse from Ephesians 5 .8.

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Ephesians 5 .8 says, Father, we thank

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You. It's always appropriate for us to thank You because You took us from the darkest places that we could imagine.

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You took us sitting in the eternal darkness of sin and the eternal darkness of shame, and You sent

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Your light to shine on us. You sent Your light to save us.

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From that eternal darkness. God, once again, I know that some of these things have become so familiar to us that we don't see the significance, and we don't see how remarkable it is, and we don't see what a miracle it is that You sent

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Your Son, Your perfect Son, to be a person like us and to die for our sins.

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We also don't always see what a miracle it is that despite the fact that You are holy and You are perfect and we have no business approaching

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Your throne through the work of Jesus Christ, we can do just that. And not only that, we can join

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You for an eternity of salvation in heaven. God, so today

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I pray that if there are people in here whose hearts have grown cold, who are closing themselves off to Your Word, and who feel like they're too far away from You, or they've done things that can't possibly be forgiven, that they hear the words of these passages, that they hear the words of Romans, that they hear the words of Jesus saying, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and they call upon Your name to be saved.

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God, we need a move of the Holy Spirit in each and every one of the hearts here, and in our church, and in our society.

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And we know that it's only through You that that can happen. God, so as as we continue to look for Your light, as we continue to do our best to shine

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Your light, to hear who You are, to read about who You are, and to study Your Word, God, I pray that the

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Holy Spirit would just open our eyes to Your truth, and that we would make it part of who we are.

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God, we thank You for sending Your Son, and we love You, and we pray all these things in Jesus' name.

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Amen. Amen. All right, so we will close with hymn 104 in the