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Don Filcek; Matthew 19:13-15 The King's Kids
To the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in.
Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here. And it's been a blessing to have the tent outside, right? But at the same time, we had to make a call this morning, and it was not an easy call.
And as Dave said to me earlier, it's almost a guarantee that it's not going to rain now that we decided to meet indoors. So we'll see how that all pans out. Our ideal would be to be outside. I am going to ask you as much as possible, and we are not doing any policing of this whatsoever, but I would just ask you to wear a mask while you're inside if you can, if you're medically able.
And that is in as much as possible. It's up to us to honor the governor that we have over us at this point. And so I'm not judging, and I discourage all of you from looking around and judging. We don't know where everybody else is medically, and at the same time, that's what the governor has asked of us.
So, and again, I recognize how uncomfortable it is. We look around, and we go, well, we usually have about 100 people here, and you can count. And so we recognize that meeting inside is not ideal, but I'm confident and entrusting God that everybody is here that's supposed to be here right now this morning to hear from God's word.
You know, it's awesome how much God loves us and how much he has cared for us, and I would ask that you guys would please be in prayer for the staff and the elders of the church as we work through future plans.
We don't know what the fall holds for us, and the reality is all of us have had to go through that, right? All of us have personally had to be extremely flexible in our careers, in our interactions with other people, and all of that.
But we're trying to do the best we can here as leadership, taking everything into account, taking into account finances. I've had several people come up to me over the course of the last few weeks and say, why don't we do this every summer?
Why don't we meet outside? And how many of you have kind of enjoyed being outside under the tent? What happens here at nine o 'clock when we're meeting inside is everybody is super, like, you guys look like deer in the headlights.
So let me just ask you a question again. How many of you have been glad to have a tent outside? Like, are you grateful for that? Get a little bit of interaction, get the blood pumping here. It's been a really good thing, and some people have said, oh, I wish we could do this all the time.
The thing is, it's $600 a week for us to have that tent out there, and that's a bill that's racking up. And so obviously our ideal would be able to meet indoors as soon as possible. And so we're trying to take into account finances, spiritual needs, the government laws, the government guidelines, and so that's been a tricky thing for us to navigate.
And so it's been a lot for us the past few months. So I just ask you, the reason I'm bringing any of this up is that I'm asking you please to double down on prayer for one another, for our community, and for our outreach to this community out here.
And so I just ask that you would please be praying as we work through things here. And recast, I want to remind us this morning that we are a church. We're a church, and I know that's like it says that on the sign, and you knew that when you came here.
You were like, I hope I'm going to church. But we're a gathering of people. Hear me carefully. This is key for us to remember. We're a gathering of people indwelt by the very Spirit of the Almighty God.
And I remind you of this so that you might be moved to consider the deep and glorious position we have to make a difference in the world around us. We have the answers of hope. We have the answer of purpose.
We have the answer of peace that the world is looking for currently. You see it all around us. They're looking for those things, but they're looking for them in politics. They're looking for them in medicine and vaccines, and they're looking for them in rioting.
And they're not finding hope, purpose, and peace in those things. So for that reason, I've sought to lead us during this this crazy time with some sense of stability. I hope you felt some sense of stability.
We keep coming back to God's Word week after week. I don't see the need for us to have knee-jerk reactions to the troubles that are swirling around us. But instead, I want to keep shining out a steady confidence that His unchanging Word shows us His unchanging desire to win us all the more and more to His unchanging good news.
That good news didn't change with COVID. That good news doesn't change with the racial tensions in our communities and in our culture. It's unchanging good news. The good news, namely, that Jesus died to save a people out of the nations of the world, and He promises an eternal kingdom to all who would come to Him by faith, trusting in what He has done to pay the penalty for our sins.
And so we're going to keep plugging away through the Gospel of Matthew here until we're able to get the kids' ministry back in full swing. The reason that that matters is that the next series I was going to take on was the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon.
I think it's probably wise to wait until after the kids have a full-blown kids' ministry going before we dive into that subject. And so that's why we're kind of continuing on through the Book of Matthew until we can get to a place where those kids are occupied with their own lessons, and we can dig into what tends to be a little bit more of a steamy book.
So speaking of steamy, is it kind of warm in here? Is that just me? Yeah, we got the AC cranked down, so hopefully probably by the end of the service, it'll be cooler. So we'll see. But our text this morning is short.
It records for us a simple event in the life of Jesus Christ, but it has a powerful impact in our understanding of three things, what He is like, what we ought to be like, and where all of this is heading, where's it all going.
And so as we read this text this morning, I want to contrast this with a text that's coming next week. Now I'm stealing a little bit of my thunder, but I think that the author of the Book of Matthew, Matthew himself, ties in stories so that they kind of come, accounts that dovetail against each other so that we can see some contrasts and some things that are going on there.
In the text this week, Jesus readily blesses and prays for young children and says, don't hinder them, don't stop them from coming to me. Let the children come. And He even says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to people who would be like those little children.
But then next week, a man is going to approach Jesus who seems to have it all together. He is rich. He is young. He's got his whole life in front of him. He's a man of significant authority. And further, he's a man who, in some sense of, like, internal assessment of himself, basically says, I've kept the law to the best of my ability.
He's a religious guy. He's a wealthy guy. He's a good guy according to earthly standards. But he ends up walking away from Jesus and not coming to Him, but being turned away. And he's turned away because what he lacks, these little children have.
He lacks humility. He lacks a willingness to enter into a relationship of dependence upon God. He has other things. In his context, in his case, his wealth is what he's depending on. And so ask yourself while I read this short passage this morning, what kind of person does God accept?
That's what this is about. What kind of person does God accept? Or another way to word the question that might be running around in your mind as I'm reading this, who will inherit the kingdom of heaven?
So let's open our Bibles to Matthew 19, verses 13, 14, and 15. So just three verses, 19, 13 through 15. I'll give you a second to get there because it'll probably take you longer to turn there than it will for me to read it.
But Recast, this is God's holy and precious word. This is, again, I say this almost every week. It's a privilege that we have to hear from the Almighty God in the gathering of His people. He wants to change something in us through this word.
Then children were brought to Him that He might lay hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.
And He laid His hands on them and went away. In our text this morning, Jesus is on His way to die. He's on His way to die in Jerusalem and everything that's recorded from this point on in the book of Matthew is leading toward His death.
Every place that He stops along the way is a final place of His visit, His last time there along this journey on the road to Jerusalem where they're going to welcome Him and say, Hosanna in the highest, and welcome Him like a kingly entry.
And then a couple days later they're going to be shouting, crucify Him, and He is going to die on a cross for our sins. And so that's what's happening here in this text is you've got to have that as the backdrop of every interaction that He has moving forward in the book of Matthew.
He has said goodbye to His home territory and we have this recording here happening among the crowds on the way to the place of His sacrifice. And verse 13 gets right down to it. Some children are brought to Jesus.
Now, I think that Matthew intentionally and the other Gospels intentionally leave out the details so that we don't get hung up in the weeds. We don't know their ages. We don't know how many of them there are.
We don't even exactly know who brought them to Jesus, although it's fair assumption. How many of you think it's fair to assume that it's their parents that brought them? Like in this culture and in this context of the time, the time frame that we're talking about, it's quite likely that the parents are bringing the kids to Jesus.
Matthew didn't want our applications to run down those kinds of detailed lines, so he leaves the specifics blank. He leaves a fuzzy notion in our minds of some children being brought to Jesus. But what we are told is that they are brought for a purpose and he wants to zero in on that purpose to some degree.
They are brought to Jesus so that He could lay hands on them and pray for them. Now, that was a common practice among Jews during this era and it was more prominent surrounding the Day of Atonement so that some people would even date this to a date of the Day of Atonement in the year that this occurred.
The Day of Atonement on the subsequent day, people would bring their children to a prominent scribe or rabbi or teacher and have them prayed over. And religious people had an understanding, a general understanding, I think even to some degree still do today, that the blessing of a notable rabbi or a scribe would confer some extra blessing as if having the pastor pray for your children would be better than having someone else pray for your children.
Now, that's not a true notion, by the way. I don't have any more power than anybody else when it comes to prayer. But Jesus doesn't correct them here and here's the reason I think that's significant. Jesus does not correct them and say, you're thinking about this wrong.
Anybody can pray for your kids. And I think that in part He doesn't correct them because they are right to bring these children to Him. They have brought them, not just to a religious leader, they have brought him to the very Son of God and in that they are doing right.
They have brought their children to the right place. Do you see that? Do you get it? I mean, imagine finding out later that you had brought your children to be blessed by the very Messiah Himself, the Son of God.
Now, men, do I want to launch out into an application that could take basically the rest of our time if we went down this road. But let me leave you with this question as we move along in this text. And this is a question for those of you who have raised children, are raising children, or one day may raise children.
So even the singles here, I still want you to ask this question. Who would you or who have you, who are you bringing your children to? That can be a very convicting question for some of us that are further down that road, but it is one that all of us ought to consider.
To whom do we take our children? I think for many of us it's a grab bag, right? We take them to TV personalities, we take them to sports and athletic figures, we take them to all different kinds of people, but who ought we to be taking our children to?
A question for us to consider. But the end of verse 13 introduces here a bit of drama. The disciples, and I think we ought to read in that phrase, the disciples, probably the 12 disciples, the 12 inner circle.
And they consider themselves here in the text, and it's shown by what they say and what they do, that they consider themselves in a sense to be agents for Jesus. They were his agents. They fancied themselves to be his handlers in public, the gatekeepers of his time and his energy.
And these people bringing these children, they didn't have backstage passes to the Jesus show. So unable to produce the backstage pass, they're basically being told, no, you can't have access to superstar Jesus here.
And so they rebuked the people. An extremely strong word that's used multiple times in scripture, so we can go back and look at other ways that it's used, and usually any quotation in scripture that follows this Greek verb, if someone is said to rebuke someone and then it says what they said, what they said has an exclamation point with it.
So that when Jesus rebuked, for example, earlier in Matthew, he rebuked the wind and the waves, what did he say? Peace! Exclamation point. Be still! Exclamation point. When someone is rebuked, it is implied in this Greek word that there would be a raising of the voice.
There would be a strong emphasis in this statement so that we don't have recorded for us what the disciples said to those who are bringing their children to Jesus, we just know that it was emphatic. It's stern, it's direct, it's authoritative, it is corrective.
Get your kids out of here. Jesus doesn't have time for that, or whatever it might have been. Now, I don't want to speculate too much, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see why the disciples wanted to protect Jesus from these intrusive children.
Since Jesus goes on to highlight the value of these children in verse 14, it's obvious that the disciples were devaluing them. It could be argued that Jesus has more important things to do with his limited time on earth than confer blessings and prayers on little children.
How many of you could imagine a line of thinking in your own heart, in your own mind, that would ascribe that? Go ahead and raise your hand. I mean, I could. I could say, Jesus, you got bigger fish to fry.
Why not head to Rome? Why not tackle all of the problems that are going on politically around you? Who's got time to sit in, hug on these kids, and pray over them, and bless them? What would you expect God in flesh to do with his time on earth?
Where would you expect him to go? And more to the point, who would you expect him to spend time with? Jesus corrected his self-appointed handlers, and he said the iconic phrase, let the little children come to me.
Don't hinder them. And although I believe that this is a very literal meaning, and what I mean by literal is that I picture as they're bringing children, Jesus getting down low and looking at the kids and saying, guys, guys, get out of the way.
Let them come. Don't get in their way. Don't hinder them. Don't bother them. Don't push them away. Let them come. There's a literal sense in which he says, let the little children come to me. Don't hinder them.
But there's no doubt in my mind that he fully intends a double meaning. Already back at the start of chapter 18, we saw him use a child as a metaphor, a great representation of the humble and dependent person that God brings into his kingdom.
The disciples asked, who is greatest in the kingdom, and what did Jesus do? In early in chapter 18, he brought a child into their midst and said, one like this, one that's humble like that, one that's dependent like that.
So we already know that he has in mind to the disciples a metaphor that children are like disciples. So look at what Jesus says, look at what he says at the end of verse 14. To such belongs the kingdom of heaven.
And I want to point out, he doesn't say immediately in this context, these particular kids that are coming to me, they're in my kingdom. That's not what he says at all. He's not talking about those specific kids because instead he says, to people such as these, to people like these children, people with a humble dependence like a little child, those are the ones who not only will be in my kingdom, but to them will belong the kingdom.
So our original question, who is Jesus bringing in? Jesus is bringing in the humble, the weak, the dependent. But who would we bring in? Who do we value in our culture? What kind of people do we want on our team?
I would suggest to you that often we want the strong, we want the independent. And to be quite frank, sometimes we're looking for somebody who's proud and demanding and capable and strong. When I was studying this, so many things going on in our culture snapped into focus just by considering this one truth that Jesus is showing us in this very short text.
What I think he's getting at here and what he's demonstrating and modeling in his interaction with kids from chapter 18 through this passage here, blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the little children brought to Jesus, for to such belong the kingdom of heaven. Poor in spirit means not knowing that you have nothing to bring, that you're impoverished in your soul and you've got nothing to offer.
Meek, not being a demanding and belligerent or caustic person, even on social media. Little children, humble and dependent. From racial tension to mask wearing, to the way we speak about leadership, to the way we handle changing things, we want changed.
And I see a lot of people who want change. The understanding of what godliness looks like in his kingdom is key. And it looks like a humble dependence upon him. Power and authority is not what we've been raised to think.
We have to unlearn what we have learned about power and authority. The world in which we were raised has taught us wrong. We have been taught how to grow up big and strong. We have bought into survival of the fittest in so many categories of our lives.
And what Jesus is bringing about through his kingdom is a people of stable and strong dependence. Where? On themselves? No, on him. He's not calling us to the naivety of a child. He's not calling us to the ignorance of a child, but a dialed-in devotion and dependence upon our king.
What I think ends up producing a hardened strength that comes from being lifted up and set on the rock of ages. A resolve that doesn't come from hope in our own intellect, hope in our own muscles. Some have more than that.
Or hope in our own wisdom, our own knowledge, or our own resume, or whatever it might be. But a resolve that comes from trust in a god who is eternally for his people. So, I believe that the church is a very powerful force.
So, how does humility and meekness and dependence factor into the powerful call of the church to be changing the world around us, to be a powerful influence in the world around us? Well, I think if we do not have a humble trust, the humble trust of children, then we will only be as strong, church, as the strongest one among us.
That's the extent of our strength if we're depending on ourselves. But if we are a people humbly trusting and depending on the Almighty in the course of all of these swirling storms that are going on around us, we will only be as strong as the Almighty God in whom we trust.
That's pretty powerful, isn't it? It's very strong, indeed. Church, we are a force to be reckoned with when we realize what we are in faith before the Almighty God. And to a humble and dependent people who have faith in God, the kingdom of heaven, it says in the text, will be given.
The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these little children. That's crazy. I mean, think about this. To the one who is like a little child in their dependence and in their humility, they are owners of the kingdom.
And think about this. It comes at us weird. Who owns a kingdom? It's a real literal answer. I want to hear it. Somebody said it. The king. There's a right answer. There is an owner to a kingdom, and it is a king, the one who is over the whole thing and gets to call the shots over the whole thing.
So how can Jesus here say that the kingdom of heaven belongs to anyone other than the king, who in this context is, of course, himself? And I suggest to you that as the rightful king, our good king shares his rule with his people.
He shares his kingdom with his humble and childlike people. By verse 15, the disciples have been chastised, the kids have been permitted to come to Jesus, and a lesson has been conveyed. And so he lays hands on them, probably prays for them, drops the mic, and walks away.
And in this passage, Jesus corrects two things for the disciples. He corrected their thinking about who is worthy of time and care, and further corrects, once again, their faulty understanding of his kingdom.
He's constantly trying to help them to understand the nature of his kingdom comes in humility, not in strength. They still expect him to become a dominant force. They expect him to become a dominant political and military leader who's going to oust Rome and conquer the world.
And he's constantly dropping mad hints every direction that, listen, this is going to come through humility, this is going to come through dependence upon God, it's going to come his way. So for application, I want to start with the overall attitude of the text, with a couple of general applications, then we're going to mine specifically.
So first question that we need to ask ourselves when we come to the text is, who does God show himself to be in our text? He is a God who delights in a humble dependence upon him. That's the nature of our God.
Salvation is only through faith and trust in him, a dependence upon him. We only come to a saving relationship with Jesus by admitting that we cannot save ourselves, and throwing ourselves all the way over on Jesus and his sacrifice to save us.
He is a God who saves anyone who would humble themselves enough to come to him for mercy and for forgiveness. And then second of all, who is he calling us to be? He's calling us to humble ourselves before him.
If we have not yet asked him for salvation, this would be a great day to say, Jesus, save me. I want to lean on you, I want to humble myself, ask for forgiveness of sins, and ask. But if you're here, and I know that this is many of us, if you're here and you belong to him, we still may need a rebuke this morning.
Who would we think was a waste of time for Jesus? As harsh as it sounds, the disciples rebuked people for wasting Jesus's time with mere little children. Who would that be for you? Who would you hinder from coming to Jesus as a waste of his time?
But further, I'm going to blaze through five statements that come from more of the surface of the text. You see, the deeper applications here in this text are about kingdom and our attitudes of humility and dependence upon God, but on the surface there's these children, real children, real physical children standing before Jesus.
And he responds to them in a certain way, and I think that we can learn even from that on the surface. He's obviously using his interaction with these kids to teach some deeper lessons, but even the way that Jesus interacts up here with face-to-face interactions matters.
And so here are five lessons. If you're taking notes, you can jot these down, and I think they'll be on the screen as well. But the first is that Jesus had time for the weak and vulnerable, and so should we.
Jesus had time for the weak and vulnerable, and so should we. Second, Jesus had correction for those who had a more important agenda. And I think we can think about times in our lives where we've expressed a more important agenda than maybe what God desired in that moment.
The third thing is that humble children make time for humble children. If we are a humble child before God, we will be the kind of people who would bring others to Jesus, even the lowly, even maybe literally bringing little ones.
The fourth observation from this text and kind of thing that I would love for us to apply is that the meek shall inherit the earth. This is just an application from remembering the radical nature of God's kingdom.
The first will be last, and the last will be first. The prize does not always go to the strong. The prize will go to the humble. The prize will go to the dependent. Think about how you interact with others around you, especially during this time where everybody, we can get caught up and we can get swirled into the entire world around us and all of their voices, and we can give back what we're getting, we can push in hard, and we can become less than meek in our interactions with the world around us.
The last one, bring the little ones to Jesus. I mean it literally, like bring the children in, bring the children in to hear the message. It's kind of ironic, shameless plug here, we need a recast kids director right now, and this passage just came up.
It wasn't intentional. Spencer's covering it for right now as an associate pastor. He's got other things he could be doing, but certainly his agenda is not above taking care of children. He's doing that for now, but we're confident that God is going to bring us someone who can manage and administrate that ministry area for us.
Just to clarify, we've always intended to hire from within the church, and so we're at the point right now where we've had this announcement out long enough that we need a children's director that we're considering maybe for the first time looking for a director position outside of the church, and so pray for us on that front.
But if you're considering that or you're thinking about that, we would love to know that. If you think you've got some administrative skill that you could bring to the church, it's about a halftime position and you can get more details if you want.
If you're interested, contact me. Yes, shameless plug for ministering to children here in a passage that's about ministering to children. But let's come to communion this morning and prepare our hearts to take communion in humility.
As we take the cracker to remember his body that was broken for us, and we take the juice to remember his blood that was shed for us, let's do so with a good dose of childlike humility. Let's lean in with dependence upon him.
He is our strength. He is our hope. He is our stability in this crazy world. But for those who have come to him with childlike humility and with a childlike dependence, ours is the hope. Ours is the hope of a glorious kingdom, a glorious kingdom that we look forward to without viruses, without racial injustice, without fear, without death, and without end.
Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace. I thank you for your mercy that covers us. I thank you for the way that you demonstrate, even through these lessons like working with little children, the way that you would point to us and identify in us a need for humility, a need for a dependent, not an independence.
We are such a radically independent. It's put in us from an early age. We are people who don't like to lean on others. Father, you're calling us into a dependent relationship with you and even a dependent relationship in your church.
Father, I pray that you would move among us with meekness, that you would move among us to reach out to the children. I just thank you even just as I think about eight babies about to be born here in the next few months and just the way that you are growing our church in that way.
Father, I pray that you would continue to bless the children that are represented here, even the children that are not able to be here this morning. We long for and look forward to that time that we can get our recast kids program back up and running hopefully this fall.
Father, I look forward to the things that you're going to do in the lives of kids in this next generation through the church, the church at large and even recast. Father, I pray that as we come to communion that you would impress on us the humility that comes in this juice and in this cracker, that we couldn't do it ourselves but you have sent your son to do for us what we could never accomplish, our very salvation.
We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.