King & Kingdom Come: Owed Nothing, Given Everything

Welcome to an audio teaching from Windsor Park Baptist Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

If you would like to look at the message notes or see some questions for reflection that take their lead from today's teaching, head to our website windsapark.org.nz and head to the online tab where you'll see services and series and you can download different resources from there.

Thanks for joining us, and we hope you're encouraged by today's teaching.

Welcome back to our Luke series and to our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem.

After today's message, we only have three sermons left in this part of our Luke series.

And in just a couple of chapters, Jesus will make his entry to Jerusalem for Holy Week, and we'll pick that part up early next year.

In this stage of the journey, we've been unpacking various teachings and parables of Jesus.

And last week I know many of us were impacted by Grant's message on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Who knew?

He Lazarus was the only person named in a parable.

And that's just one of the joys of going through a full gospel like we're doing with Luke.

We get to interact with parts of Scripture that might be less familiar to us, and we're going to be doing the same thing today.

But I want to start today with a quote not from Jesus but from a sports coach.

And in fact, this is an American rugby coach.

Yes, I mean a rugby union in the USA.

And while you Kiwis might not need any American wisdom on how to play the game of rugby, his saying is worth hearing.

And it goes like this entitled to nothing, grateful for everything.

The motto is attributed to coach Jack Clark, and it has become a powerful life and sports mantra, meaning that success and good things must be earned through hard work, and nothing in life is owed to you.

While it comes from a secular context, this quote captures the heart of what we're talking about today from Luke chapter 17.

Luke 17 · chapter mention

So I've shortened it for our title Owed Nothing, Given Everything.

The start of chapter 17 contains some striking instructions on sin, repentance, forgiveness, and faith in the context of community.

Really, in this section, Jesus is talking about something we talk about a lot at Windsor, doing life and faith together.

And we could have spent our whole sermon there, but today we're going to focus on the two sections that follow.

The first is a short and uncomfortable parable that Jesus tells his disciples, and that starts at verse seven.

Suppose one of you has a servant ploughing or looking after the sheep.

Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, Come along now and sit down to eat?

Won't he rather say, Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink?

And after that you may eat and drink.

Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do?

So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, We are unworthy servants.

We have only done our duty.

Last week, when Grant preached on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, a number of people commented that they'd never heard the parable at all before.

And fair enough, it's a big Bible that we read, and there are lots of stories, and some get a lot more coverage than others.

But I reckon even less of us will have been familiar with this week's parable, known as the parable of the unworthy servant.

Some of you may have even pulled out your Bibles at this point to check that it's actually there.

Because on the surface, it doesn't sound very Jesus-like.

But it's there.

Jesus said it and he meant it.

So let's unpack it together.

Jesus first asks the disciples to imagine themselves as the master in the scenario.

When your servant comes home from their work in the field, he asks, Will you be waiting with the red carpet rolled out and dinner ready for them?

Of course not, the disciples think.

Great story, kind of obvious.

Let's get on to Jerusalem.

But Jesus isn't finished.

Cleverly, he lands the parable and he flips the script.

You're not the master in this story, but you're actually the servant.

Here's verse 10.

So you also, so this is where he's applying it to them, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, We are unworthy servants.

We have only done our duty.

First of all, as we start to unpack this challenge in teaching, I want to highlight that last word, duty.

Does the servant expect special thanks when he does what he was asked to do?

Well, no, they've got a job to do and they get on and do it.

It's their duty.

And duty is not the most attractive call to action.

It sounds to our modern ears unglamorous, uninspiring, and well, it's not very sexy.

But I want to make the case that duty is both compelling and fitting for Christian life.

My favorite quote around this subject of duty comes from Ronald Rollheiser.

I've shared it actually before, but it's so good that I want to share it again.

Writing about the transformative power of everyday life and faithfulness, he writes this.

Stay inside your commitments.

Be faithful.

Your place of work is a seminary, your work is a sacrament, your family is a monastery, and your home is a sanctuary.

Stay inside them.

Don't betray them.

Learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life elsewhere.

And without constantly believing that God is elsewhere.

The unglamorous and repetitive work of showing up to school in cold winter mornings, doing uni assignments, raising young children, commuting to work, caring for aging parents, doing the food shopping, walking the dog, washing the dishes way past your bedtime because you've hosted people for dinner.

These are all the dutiful spaces where we can encounter God in everyday life.

Duty may be unglamorous, but deep down we all know its value.

When I was in England recently, I went to Catholic Mass with some of my Catholic family.

And it was the end of the school year in England, and the local Catholic school was having their farewell mass as they said goodbye to the year sixes.

As part of the Mass, they also honored two teachers who were finishing up, one of whom had worked at the school for over 20 years.

As this teacher shared about the privilege that it had been to work with every kid, to play a small part in their journey, and to see her own children and now grandchildren attend the school, she summed up by saying that she couldn't have imagined a better place to spend her life.

My second cousin and I laughed afterwards that we'd gotten way too emotionally invested in this woman's story.

This woman was a complete stranger to us, but we were almost in tears running up to hug her after the service because we felt this deep admiration for her years of dutiful service.

Duty in the long run is compelling, but it is also fitting for Christian life.

It is also required.

The Greek word translated as duty literally means to be indebted or to owe something.

In Jesus' parable, the servant's hard work, as admirable as it may be, does not put the master in his debt.

In the same way, nothing that we do for God puts him in our debt.

Everything is a gift from him anyway.

Our stuff, our talents, our relationships, our very lives.

Our worship is to offer those things back to him without condition.

Often, however, we bargain with God.

I'll trade you a couple of hours here for resolution in this area.

I'll give up this thing if you bless this new endeavor.

I know I can be tempted to think like this about coming into ministry.

I I can start to think, like God, I I gave up a promising career to follow your call.

Now, you know, do your bit, take care of this.

But the truth is, God owes us nothing.

He owes me nothing.

In the words of a song that we'll sing at the end, Jesus, you don't owe me anything.

Now, all of this might still sound harsh and un Jesus-like, especially those words, unworthy servants.

So before we move on, I want to make it clear that Jesus is not saying we are worthless.

Nor is he saying that our worth is only based on the things that we do for him.

What he is saying is that nothing we can do will put him in our debt.

Nothing we can do will make us the master and him our servant.

That's just not how it works.

And remember that this is coming from the same gospel as the parable of the prodigal son, who returns home to his father planning to become his servant with the words, I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

But the father is having none of it, and throws a raging party to celebrate his son coming home.

So, yes, we are servants of God, even unworthy servants, but because of God's grace, we are also celebrated as sons and daughters.

Owed nothing but given everything.

And that brings us back to our quote from the beginning: entitled to nothing, grateful for everything, written for a sporting context, but a great posture for the Christian life.

And gratitude is now where we're gonna focus as we look at our final section.

I'm sure you're familiar with the good Samaritan.

We're now gonna meet the grateful Samaritan.

This is from verse 11.

Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him.

They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, Jesus, Master, have pity on us.

When he saw them, he said, Go show yourselves to the priest.

As they went, they were cleansed.

One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back praising God in a loud voice.

He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.

And he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, Were not all ten cleansed?

Where are the other nine?

Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?

Then he said to him, Rise and go.

Your faith has made you well.

This is a story of gratitude and intimacy, of a surface healing and a deeper healing.

We can track the major movements of this story through distance.

Initially, when Jesus meets the group of lepers, we are told that they stood at a distance.

And this was a requirement at the time because of their skin condition.

This was literally the original social distancing.

They had to distance themselves.

There are many things that can still keep people, can keep us at a distance from God.

But despite the distance, the people cry out for help, and Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, which was the official way for them to be proclaimed healed.

So off they go, and on their way they're healed of their leprosy, but physically they end up further from Jesus.

Now these first two movements involve all ten of the group, but in the return journey, only one of them comes.

One of them returns to Jesus and is now closer than ever, coming right up to Jesus, even falling at his feet in gratitude and praise.

Not only is he healed on the surface, but now Jesus says to him, Rise and go, your faith has made you well.

A deeper healing has taken place for this man because he sought deeper intimacy.

He was not content to just accept the gift, he went back in gratitude to the giver.

All ten experience the healing, but only one enters relationship.

Jesus praises the man for it, but he also makes it clear that the other nine missed the invitation.

The question for for you and for me is are we more like the other nine or the grateful Samaritan?

When push comes to shove, are we more after the gift or the giver?

The healing or the healer?

The saving or the savior.

When I was a kid and I'd get birthday cards, I open them up like kids do, and I expected to see money fall out.

I was way more interested in the gift than I was the giver.

My parents had to remind me to read the words, who is the card from, and remember to say thank you.

On one level, my parents were trying to teach me good manners.

Be grateful, say thank you.

But on a deeper level, they were teaching me that gratitude is the pathway to relationship.

That's what the Grateful Samaritan teaches us.

All ten lepers experienced healing, but only one enters relationship.

As we close soon, we're gonna listen to a song called Nothing Else.

And this is written by Cody Khanes.

The version that we're gonna sing is an acoustic cover produced by a New Zealand group called Sabbath.

The words of this song remind me that when it comes to Jesus, he owes me nothing, but he's given me everything.

Like the prodigal son, I'm undeserving of even being called his servant, but he welcomes me home, not just as a servant, but also as a son.

And even as Jesus says to his disciples later, as a friend.

In response, what can I offer him but my full attention, my service, my affection, my allegiance, my obedience, which are ways of saying my whole life.

I can offer all of those things to God and still none of it puts him in my debt because he has given me everything, even though I was owed nothing.

Let's pray, and then we'll close by listening to this song, Nothing Else.

Father, we thank you today for your grace and mercy.

We thank you for your generosity to us that even though we are unworthy, that we are not deserving of your grace, that we are owed nothing from you.

Thank you, Lord, that you have given us so abundantly everything.

Thank you, first, Lord, that you created us, that you've made each of us in your image, just surely out of your generosity and creativity and overflowing love.

Thank you that you made us in that way.

And then even when we've turned to our own ways, Lord, that you've sought after us, that you've generously and graciously sought us and redeemed us and brought us back to you.

We thank you, Lord, and we want to posture ourselves today in gratitude for everything you've given us, for for the talents and resources, but most of all, Lord, for for your love for us, for salvation itself, for restoring us to relationship with you.

So as we move into the rest of today and this week, help us to be people who are humble, knowing our position with you, knowing that everything we've received from you is a gift, and living as people of gratitude, who are faithful in what we need to do for you, knowing that you've given us everything, offering you in return our whole lives.

We thank you, Lord.

We commit ourselves again to following your call on our lives.

It is a gift to walk with you, even in the everyday, ordinary moments.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for joining us for the service today.

Uh, we'll see you next week, and we're going to close by listening, as I said, to that song, Nothing Else.

I pray that these words would help land this sermon for you as you posture yourself with humility and gratitude to God for all that He's done for us.

I just wanna stay here.

Caught up in the home.

Nothing that caught up in your friend.

I just wanna take you at your feet.

I'm caught up in holy.

If there are ways that we can continue to support you or help you in your journey, please reach out to us.

Head to our website windsapark.org.nz and you'll find various ways to contact us.

God bless.