June 27 2021
Matthew 7:12
Last week being Father’s Day we had the kids over and they cooked us up a wonderful lunch, grilled steak and baked chicken which was great. Now, I wasn’t expecting any gifts because I think just having my kids around is the best gift but Elizabeth, our oldest child, her love language is giving gifts; this is just the way she’s always been. So, of course, she bought a gift, which was a dish towel. That might seem like a weird gift for Father’s Day but this was no ordinary dish towel because this one had a great saying printed on it which reads:Danger! Holy Bible: Bible use can become habit-forming. Regular reading can cause loss of anxiety, fear, and a decreased appetite for impatience and anger. Symptoms include increased love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If symptoms persist, just Praise The Lord! Isn’t that great?! I love it! It has to be my favorite dish towel ever. What makes it even better is that she gave it to me a week before we would be talking about the fourth article of faith for the Church of the Nazarene which is all about Scripture. So, yes, timing is everything!
So, yes, today we are going to be diving into the Bible today as part of our Summer Series, called Confident. As we have said before this title comes from something Jesus told his disciples on the night he was betrayed as found in the sixteenth chapter of the gospel of John, where we read, “In this world you will have afflictions but be confident for I have overcome the world. To be confident means that we have an intensive trust in something and this is what we should have in the articles of our faith. So far we should know that we should have an intensive trust that the God revealed to us by Jesus is a Triune God, a God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is because that our God is a three in one God that we can trust that our God is love, it is his nature, not just something he chooses to do if and when he feels like it. So, his loving us does not depend upon us, what we might do or not do which is really great news. Not, only that but we should be intensively trust that Jesus is the very Son of God because he arose from the dead through the power of the Spirit of holiness. Jesus was fully God and he was also fully man having taken on our corrupt flesh through his Virgin birth, being born through an action of the Holy Spirit. It was because he united himself with us through his taking on our flesh that now we know that when Jesus died upon the cross, our sinful nature died there with him. When Jesus arose from the dead three days later, we too arose to new life through the power of the Holy Spirit which justifies our claim of righteousness. And when Jesus ascended to the throne room of God we ascended there with him so that Paul, writing in the third chapter of Colossians, could say that now our life is hid with Christ in God and when Christ is revealed in glory so shall we be as well.
The third article of faith that we covered last week was all about the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the God who comes alongside of us and speaks into our lives. The Holy Spirit is able to come to us now because Jesus has taken upon himself the judgment that was ours so that because we have peace with God he can at last come near to us. This God who is near to us, the Holy Spirit, Jesus tells us, is sent to us to lead us into all the truth. The Way that the Spirit leads is the Way that we know as Jesus and the Truth he leads us into is the Truth that Jesus is, the very Truth about our Heavenly Father. It is the Spirit in us that bears witness to the world. The Spirit pours the love of heaven into our hearts, the Spirit creates communion between us and our Heavenly Father and it is the Spirit who is the Spirit of our adoption, the Spirit that causes us to cry out Abba, Father. It is when these three things are evident in our life that our light shines in a dark world and they begin to understand about sin, righteousness and judgment.
So, with all of that behind us we come today to the fourth article of faith which states: The Holy Scriptures: We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained within is not to be enjoined as an article of faith. Ok, so that has a lot of big words that we first need to figure out, like plenary, for example. Plenary just means full, or complete and so what is being said is that we believe in the complete inspiration of the Scriptures. Inspiration actually means to be breathed into, which is an interesting way to think of how God breathed the Scriptures into existence. All of this is just another way of saying that God’s fingerprints are all over the Holy Scriptures, all 66 books. This also means that we don’t have to concern ourselves with the how of how the Bible came to be but instead we are to focus on the who of the Bible, who is the Bible about. Another big word found in this article of faith is the word inerrantly and it just means to be without errors. Now, it is important that we see just what it is that is without errors, because if we look and see what this article of faith says is without errors it is the revelation of the will of God concerning all things necessary to our salvation. In other words, there are no mistakes in Scriptures as to what God has revealed about how we might be saved. Do you begin to see just what is really important about the Bible?
So, with this understanding in our heads that the Holy Scriptures main focus is on the salvation of humanity, lets turn to our text for today that comes from those Holy Scriptures. The reason I have chosen this particular text is that just as we needed Jesus to reveal to us the truth about God, that our God is a three in one God, so too I believe that that since Scripture is considered the Word of God, then we should allow Jesus to reveal to us just what this Word is all about. Here in the seventh chapter of Matthew’s gospel, we hear Jesus reveal to his disciples something very astonishing, that the entirety of the Law and the Prophets, the bulk of the Old Testament can be all summed up in one little phrase. This pithy little statement comes from the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus where God speaking to his people through Moses tells them that they were to love their neighbor as themselves. Now, yes, this is slightly different than what Jesus has declared here in the seventh chapter of Matthew because here he states that whatever you wish others to do to you, do also to them. What Jesus has done if you study both of these statements side-by-side is that Jesus has defined just what exactly is meant by loving ones neighbor. The reason I believe Jesus has done so is that the statement that he gave, what is called the Golden Rule, is very similar to statements found in ancient civilizations like Babylon and in modern philosophies and religions. What all these other people state though, is this: Whatever is hateful, harmful, or hurtful don’t do that to others. This sounds a lot like what Jesus said until you begin to think about it and then it becomes clear that it is very different. This other rule merely states that as long as I don’t do something that might hurt someone else, that is all one needs to get along in the world. It is merely the avoidance of wrong doing which could easily be done by just staying in bed and avoiding people but we have to ask ourselves is this really loving someone else? Jesus would answer, no, just not hurting someone is a great start but it isn’t really love. No, in order to love to actually have to do something; you have to do the good that you desire to happen to you and go and do that good to someone else. This is how Jesus defines love and it is very similar to how the love that is to be found among the followers of Jesus is also defined. When we read in the fifteenth chapter of John where Jesus tells his disciples that they were to keep his commandments and abide in his love, the love Jesus was speaking of as the love known in the Greek as being agape love. Agape was one of four words that the Greek had for love, another word you might be familiar with is philia which is known as brotherly love or a love between comrades. Agape love is a special love and the early church took the word agape which had originally meant preference to use as this special kind of love that was demonstrated by Jesus. Agape love is a love which shows a preference for others over oneself as in I would rather love you and think nothing of myself. That’s really the essence of agape love, a love that seeks the good or the best for those a person comes in contact to. So, do you see how agape love is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us that whatever we wish that others would do to us this is the standard as to what we are to do for them. This just begs the question then just what is it that you want others to do to you?Most of us would probably say that we would like other people to treat us with respect, that we would like others to be honest with us, to be understanding with us when we mess up and forgiving of us when we hurt them I suppose that most of us would like others to listen to what we have to say, to seek our goodwill, to be there for us when we are down and to come and celebrate with us when life shines on us. These same things that we desire are the very same things that Jesus tells us that we are to do to all the others who pop up in our life; this is what agape love looks like in action. And if you are wondering if we are ever getting back to talking about the Holy Scriptures, doing all these things that we would desire others to do to us, this incredibly enough, Jesus tells us is the Law and the Prophets.
When we hear Jesus tell us something like this we quite naturally want to justify this statement. Is the Law really all about doing to others what we would want done to us, is this what the first five books are all about? Well, if we look at those first five books, the central storyline that consumes most of the books, Genesis through Deuteronomy is the story of God setting his people free from slavery in Egypt. What is interesting is just why did God allow this to happen? I mean, he is God, he could have made a way to bring them out of Egypt before the people of Israel ever became slaves because, you know, he’s God. We don’t really know the full reason why God did what he did, perhaps it was to demonstrate his power and goodness in a mighty way not only to his people but to the world but another reason that is given for the people of Israel having their experience in Egypt is that it made them better people. Listen to what we read at the end of the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” Did you hear what was said here? Their experience down in Egypt was a preparation for them to think and ponder on so that they could understand just how they wished to be treated. When God set them free then they were to take their painful experience and turn that around and do just the opposite, treating the strangers the way they wished they had been treated when they were strangers themselves. So, what God was doing in his Law was using the painful experience of his people as the motive for them to create a new way of living whereby they would do to others as they longed to be treated down in Egypt. Much of the Law then was helping the people of Israel remember the very fact of their pain and to remember that God had set them free from that pain in order that they would become people who refused to inflict a similar pain upon others. We see this in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy where we are told that God commanded his people to observe the Sabbath every seven days because they were to remember that they were slaves down in Egypt who never got a day to rest and now that they were set free from that life they were to make sure those around them got to experience a time of rest. So, with just a quick look we understand that, yes, Jesus was correct the Law is founded upon this idea of a love which does to others what we would want done to us.
Well, not only did Jesus say the Law was founded on doing to others as we would want done to us but he also spoke about the Prophets also basing their cries for justice on this very same thing. The mention of the prophets points us to the reality that the people of Israel failed miserably to hold on to the ideal that God had hoped they would live by. Generations went by who no longer remembered what it was like to be a stranger, what is was like to be a person abused and hurting at the hands of another and with that loss of memory there was also a loss of love for the others that the people of Israel encountered even those closest to them. The prophets pointed to the fact that the Law was simply unable to be kept by God’s people but all was not lost because to these lost people, to a lost world, God sent a Savior. Earlier in Matthew’s gospel in the fifth chapter, Jesus, told his disciples that he had not come to abolish the Law but he came to fulfill the Law. Jesus then is the one who came to make our treating others as we would want to be treated a reality for all people. In other words, with the coming of Jesus there are no excuses as to why we should not act this way toward others for Jesus has done all things possible to make this love a way of life. It is understanding that Jesus is the one who came to make it possible that we can now fulfill the Law that helps us figure out what he meant when, in the fifth chapter of John’s gospel, that the Scriptures bear witness about him and further in that same chapter, we hear Jesus also say that Moses had even written about Jesus. It is quite amazing to think that the Scriptures, which Jesus meant to be, the Old Testament, are what bears witness to Jesus! Yet, if we know that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law then it makes sense that the Scriptures would quite naturally speak of the day when God would come into our reality and create in us a new heart, a heart on which would be written God’s law. The reference to Moses points us to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, where Moses tells the people of Israel that the Lord their God would come and circumcise their hearts so that they might love the Lord their God with all of their hearts and with all of their soul, so that they may live. The God who came to God’s people and cut away and condemned life in the flesh with his death upon the cross was none other than Jesus.There upon the cross our sinful nature in the flesh was condemned to death so that when Jesus rose from death through the power of the Spirit, we too might at last be able to live by the power of the Spirit. This giving of the Spirit is what makes it possible for us to fulfill all the Law, to do to others as we would want done to us. We read this in the seventh chapter of Matthew just before Jesus gives us the Golden Rule. There Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and it shall be found; knock and the door shall be open to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks it will be opened. If you know how to give good gifts to your children how much more will your Father in heaven give the good, the Holy Spirit, to those who ask him! Therefore, because God has given you this, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. This then is the Old Testament, the Law and the Prophets, that we should do unto others as we would want done to us, finding its fulfillment in the New Testament in Jesus Christ who came so that God our Heavenly Father could send to those who ask, and seek and knock upon his door, the Holy Spirit, the one who pours the love of God into our hearts so that we can love him by loving others. The authority of scripture then, is when we accept the reality it presents and we live our lives loving others for this is our salvation. The question that only you can answer is if this: can you say honestly that scripture is the authority over your life? I pray that you ask, seek and knock on the door of your Father’s house and receive the Holy Spirit so that the reality spoken of in Scripture might be yours today. Amen!
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