Matthew 12:1-21 - Three Essentials for a Flourishing Soul

We study through books of the Bible here at the Village Chapel.

We have extra copies.

If you didn't bring one with you, you'd like one to follow along.

Would you just uh raise your hand up real high?

It's always helpful, I think, to have the text in front of you since we do this verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and book by book.

Let's see if I can get to my slides here.

I know they are in existence somewhere.

And ah, there we go.

I get so excited when I do it right.

That's just great.

There we go.

So the study is called The King and His Kingdom.

And uh we are uh looking at the eyewitness account of a man formerly known as Levi, the tax collector, uh, one of the disciples of Jesus.

This is the first book of the New Testament.

Uh he, Levi, a Jewish man writing, we think with a Jewish audience in mind, because he does quote the Old Testament close to a hundred times and connects the dots between the Old Testament and this person, Jesus, who is the king.

And this is his kingdom that we're studying about as we go through the text.

Uh, I'm gonna call this the three essentials of the flourishing soul.

There are more than three essentials, but uh, we're gonna highlight three out of this text here.

As I read through it, you just uh uh look along, follow along in your copy of the Bible, or if you have one uh online or something like that, you'll be able to see if you can't pick these out.

Uh we'll treat it like uh where's Waldo or what's at uh Highlights Magazine, where's the squirrel, how many of them are there, and see if you can uh dig in that way.

But I think we're gonna attempt to uh clarify and answer, if we can, or manage some questions.

Why did the claims of Jesus become sources of such great tension between him and the religious leaders of the day?

Why was there tension there?

Um what did Jesus say are some of the essentials for our soul's flourishment.

What is that?

What is Jesus' view on that?

Um did Jesus' teachings on such matters still speak to the deepest longings of our hearts today.

And I'll remind you that in our last study, um, which we just uh ended with those beautiful three verses of the last bit of uh chapter 11.

I'll put them up on the screen so you can see them again.

But um, Jesus answered that question, where can we find rest for our souls?

Interestingly, he didn't point to a desert mountain hideaway, he didn't point to a luxury cruise ship getaway.

In telling us where we could find rest for our souls, Jesus didn't point to a faddish religious philosophy, a popular self-help book, or a new approach to self-discovery.

Jesus actually had the audacity to point to himself.

And here's what he said to the disciples.

It's up there on the screen.

Would you read it along with me?

Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

A couple of things I want to point out there, which we didn't have time to get to last week, and uh hopefully I'll be able to uh not only do this little bit of a review step back, but it'll launch us forward into what we see in chapter 12 here.

But uh notice that there are two kinds of rest there.

There's a rest that is given and a rest that is found.

We are to be engaged with God in a relationship with God.

It's living and active.

Um He offers it as a gift, this rest that we so long for, all of us do.

All of us are exhausted at some point.

All of us are stretched thin, like too little butter over too much bread, as Bill Beau Baggin said.

And we feel that.

It's not just a bit of doctrine or dogma.

It's actually existential reality for some of us from time to time.

If it isn't yours right now, just wait.

It's coming.

So there's a rest that is given, but there's also a rest that is found.

And that rest that's for your souls, that you will find, that Jesus says you will find, is found in him and in you taking his yoke upon you and you learning from him.

Are you doing that?

We have so many resources available to us in our day and time.

I walk into my own library at my home, I probably have a couple thousand books in there, and I'm not hurting for something to read.

I'm not hurting for research, resources for preaching.

I'm not hurting for devotional resources at all.

They are aplenty and available.

The question is, do I actually engage with God?

Um, when you come here, you can walk through the door, you can be distracted by what someone's wearing or how someone smells, or if you get a close talker.

Have you ever had a close talker in church?

Close talker are just those people sometimes.

And they always have halitosis, so there's some kind of a breath problem, and yet they really want to be right in your grill, don't they?

Um but when you come through the door, what is your purpose in being here?

Just checking a box culturally?

Are you actually seeking to encounter God, to worship God, to express yourself to God, and to receive from God?

These are great questions.

I uh look at those verses.

And I just love those verses.

And I I uh, as I say, some of the sweetest promises in the New Testament right there.

Let's move right into chapter 12, remembering that Matthew didn't stop at the my yoke is easy and my burden, load is light or my burden is light.

He didn't stop there and go, I wonder what chapter 12 will be.

No, chapter 12, the chapter assignments were much, much, much later when the English Bibles were being printed up and the verses even later than that.

And it's just so we can kind of navigate, find our way through the text.

Matthew just rolls right on through.

That's why he says at that time it connects, doesn't it?

At that time, what time?

At that time, Jesus was saying these kinds of things, or at least somewhere near that time.

It's a it's kind of a broad, at that time, it's kind of a broad statement, but it does connect it to what Jesus just said.

And we're told an interesting thing here.

Jesus went on the Sabbath through the grain fields, and his disciples became hungry and began to eat, or to pick rather, the heads of the grain and to eat.

When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, Behold, your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.

But he said to them, Have you not read what David did?

David King David, someone they revered, someone in their history that they looked up to.

Did you not read, have you not read what King David did when he became hungry?

He and his companions, this is from, this is a reference to 1 Samuel 21, which we've studied together when we did the study of 1 Samuel.

Um, how he, David, entered the house of God, they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those with him, but for the priests alone.

Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?

How do they break the Sabbath?

They lift up something heavier than a fig, when they lift up the animal carcass to offer the sacrifice.

When they move the furniture in the temple around to accommodate the worship of God and the sacrifices of God's people.

They are literally breaking, if you're just going to be a rule follower, they're literally breaking some of the rules.

And so it's another case where those in leadership were saying, rules for thee, but not for me.

Or is there something else we need to learn here?

Jesus then goes on, but I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.

Right about now, if you were watching this on a screen, the face, the heads of each of those religious leaders would begin to boil, the skin would pop with bubbles, steam would be coming out of their ears and their nose, their eyes would be bleeding, they would be so mad, so angry, so upset that he would say something like something greater than the temple is here.

But if you had known what this means, I desire compassion and not a sacrifice, quoting from Hosea chapter 6.

Hosea 6 · chapter mention

You would not have condemned the innocent.

Here's Jesus pronouncing and declaring his disciples innocent for what they did, and the same for David, and the same for the priests in the temple when they're doing the sacrificial work on the Sabbath.

And then their head does explode with the next verse.

It actually goes all over the place.

For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

This is just the temple and the Sabbath.

Are you kidding?

Departing from there, he went into their synagogue.

Behold, there was a man with a withered hand, and they questioned him, meaning Jesus, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?

And Matthew tells us what their motive is, in order that they might accuse him.

Okay, so this is written a number of years after.

There's plenty of time to dialogue with people who were there, plenty of time to uh talk with people like Nicodemus, with people like Joseph of Arimathea, who are even on the Sanhedrin Council, and could have said, Yeah, we were all talking about that.

Yeah, no, we actually wanted to catch him in something so we could discredit him.

And he said to them, verse 11, What man shall there be among you who shall have one sheep?

And if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out?

Of how much more value then is a man than a sheep?

So then it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath, reminding us biblical anthropology is not neutral.

In God's eyes, humanity, the only part of creation that he created in his image, is of greater value than cockroaches or than other parts of his creation, inanimate objects like rocks or water.

So biblical anthropology has a different view.

And with that privilege of being created in the image of God comes a responsibility for creation care, a responsibility for us to bear the family image, a challenge, if you will, to all of us.

And so there he is, Jesus.

They present this possibility of healing someone on the Sabbath to him, in order they might accuse him.

And he says to them, if you had a sheep that fell on, you would lift it out.

That certainly would be against their Sabbath rules as they had dressed them out.

And then he says to the man, verse 13, turns to this man, and he said, and nameless man, stretch out your hand.

And he stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other one.

Not three months of physical therapy, not six months of physical therapy, but right there, right in front of their eyes, on the Sabbath, stretches it out and literally is now made the same, made whole, if you will, on the Sabbath.

The Pharisees went out.

They counseled together against him, Jesus, as to how they might destroy him.

They wanted to discredit him in verse 10.

Now they want to destroy him in verse 14.

Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there.

Many followed him and he healed them.

Say it?

I love the alls of the Bible.

That's a great one to circle.

How many did he heal on that occasion?

All of them.

Did he do it that way every time?

No.

We'll visit the pool of Bethesda again, where he healed one man out of what would have been likely thousands, maybe a few hundred at least.

And he healed one person.

But here, we're told by Matthew, in this particular occasion, many followed him.

Many followed him.

I don't know what many means, but it's many.

It's not one, it's not two, it's many.

And he healed all of them.

And he warned them not to make him known, in order that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, and this is him quoting from Isaiah 42, Behold, my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased.

I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles.

This is God the Father predicting Messiah coming and what's going to happen through Messiah.

And he will proclaim this justice to the Gentiles.

He will not quarrel nor cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.

A battered reed he will not break off.

That's so beautiful, right there.

A battered reed he will not break off.

A smoldering wick he will not put out.

How often do you feel like a battered reed, a bent reed?

I was out cutting some of these hydrangeas, I think you see out here in the lobby.

I was cutting some of those.

We have a little deck of those around, or a little place where there are a bunch of those, like way too many of them around our house.

And also I was cutting some of them.

And some of the thinner ones would like bend like that.

And I'm thinking, I literally thought this the other day.

I thought, how do I, I don't want to waste that's got such a great flower on it.

I thought, duct tape.

Duct tape, you know, kills the beauty, but saves the bent reed.

Here's Jesus.

He's not gonna, he's not gonna break off a battered reed, and a smoldering wick, he will not blow out.

Remember when you were kids, won't let say get out.

Three of you.

Okay, good.

That's good.

I heard the people online, the people watching online, they sang it right out.

I want you to know that.

Um he but a smoldering wick, look at how gentle and lowly he is, right?

A brutal reed, he will not um uh break off a smoldering wick, he will not put out so beautiful the way he says this, until he leads justice to victory.

Most of us would say we love justice, we want there to be justice in this world.

What does it look like?

It looks like things being set right someday, and this is the promise of Jesus.

That's why the Christian faith is so forward-looking, so forward-looking as to almost be impervious to the fears, the anxieties of the present.

Not totally impervious, of course, but nonetheless looking forward with so much confidence in who he is and his promises that we know the final outcome is good because it's his.

In Jesus' name.

Amen and amen.

So these three themes, you might say, I don't really see that there, or I see some of that there, but not all of that there.

Um, these three themes, as I sort of meditated on this text this week and tried to try to ask myself the question, like, how does this impact our lives today and the way we experience our relationship with God?

Um, these uh these interesting places he goes, some of these symbols, some of these rituals that the ancient Jews were practicing are all wrapped up in these 21 verses.

And so there's much talk here about the Sabbath.

And the word Sabbath actually means rest.

The ten times the Sabbath is mentioned in the book of Matthew, eight of them are in this chapter alone.

So it has to be considered as a primary theme for what is the Lord is trying to communicate to us in chapter 12, the idea of rest, the idea of a context for our rest.

Where is that context where we can rest?

Now, a lot of you, maybe, maybe you've uh you're are you how many of you uh are light sensitive?

Are you light sensitive?

You can't sleep very well if there's too much light.

I'm a little bit that way.

Kim is definitely that way.

She's got those serious bomber blinders that she puts on, you know, and um and it they're great, they're awesome, blacks everything out, and she's got good good darkness to fall asleep in.

Um uh you might have a neighbor that has a barking dog.

You might have uh uh uh some people in your neighborhood that drive by with loud cars or loud music or whatever it might might you might be able to think of physical reasons why you didn't get to sleep.

How many of you can sleep on an airplane?

Anybody got that gift on an airplane?

You can fall right out.

I do not have this gift.

I I I I covet your gift.

I I I want this.

I, you know, and Kim does that.

She does, she brings her visors and on the airplane, puts those on, and they say to that annoying person next to her, don't even think about talking to me.

And she's all she's got she's well equipped for rest on that.

What is the context for the rest that your soul is desirous of?

And what do we see here about the context for rest?

Very important, I think.

Worship.

Now you you you might think there's not much here about worship, but of course the temple is mentioned.

And and and the temple, man, that's the that is the locus of worship in in the New Testament time and the Old Testament time as well.

Uh I love going to the the ruins of the you know the temple mound and and being able to touch stones that are hundreds and hundreds, a couple thousand years old.

And uh, but and it's not magic, but it's just interesting to me that for the Jews, this was indeed the center, the the place.

And place is so important in worship, it really is.

Not saying that's not important, but but what is the object of your worship?

And it appears to me that if they got into the place where they worshiped the building, that might enrage them if he were to say, something greater than the temple is here.

That might actually enrage them.

When I was growing up, the church I went to a very conservative church uh in many ways, and and um uh the furniture inside the sanctuary was uh sacred in some way, and again, I'm I'm not trying to diminish having reverence and being grown up in our thoughts and all of that sort of thing.

But when the there's just a thin line, isn't there, when we move into worshiping the building.

And I felt like we I felt like we had an opportunity to learn that over the last couple of years.

When we couldn't come to the building.

And the test of whether or not we worship the building was how mad we might have gotten that we couldn't come to the building.

At least I felt that for me.

Maybe, maybe that.

But it it was a question that pressed in on me.

The building, nothing wrong with the building.

There's nothing wrong with having the building, nothing wrong with having the temple.

God gave them much instruction about the use of the temple and all this.

But what is the object of our worship?

And I just want to say, we will be constantly dissatisfied if the object of our worship is not God Himself.

Anything, even good things that replace God will put us in a place where we will get upset that Jesus claims to be greater than that thing.

So that's, I think, important, and then this hope thing here.

So we have really the context for rest, the object of our worship, and I think the source of our hope is also here.

Especially that beautiful last verse, 21.

It's so, it's so amazing.

Why?

Because I'm a Gentile.

You may or may not be, but I am.

My mom swears we are 132nd portion Israeli.

Um she wants to be Jewish so bad.

All right, mom, maybe she's watching right now.

So, mom, maybe we have 132nd of us as Jewish.

That's right.

It's possible.

Um but our hope isn't in being Jewish.

Our hope is in the one who offers salvation to everyone on the planet, no matter where they were born, no matter what race.

This is the most inclusive religion on the planet.

Do you understand that?

Because it's not just for the people from this nation or this zip code or that race.

The Christian faith puts an offer out that is an offer to all, anyone who will repent and believe.

It's not an unfolding of a list of rules for you to follow.

It's just an offer, and it's an offer of hope, hope in the Lord.

All right, now I got a few things.

I just there are a couple things I thought you might enjoy knowing about, and I've got a few minutes left.

So as I say, this is uh this is this is actually the first mention of the Sabbath in the New Testament, and there are eight times in this chapter, ten in Matthew.

But the the Sabbath itself, 138 times throughout the Bible, 78 in the Old Testament, 60 in the New Testament.

Certainly, uh reminder, the word means rest or repose, observed on the seventh day of the week for Jews, which would be uh sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

God's laws concerning the Sabbath, these spoken laws concerning the Sabbath, go all the way back if you want to read some of those specifically to Exodus chapter 20, the fourth of the Ten Commandments, put it like this.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Yeah.

Not just remember the Sabbath day to stop working, not just take a day off.

You know, we're like, we're like, most of us work five days a week, right, in our culture.

And some people are talking about four days a week.

And so if you're gonna follow exactly the rules, you know, of this ancient law, it'd be you'd work six days a week and you'd keep the Sabbath day holy.

From the collective four gospel records, we see how conflict over the Sabbath will be at the center of all of this tension, a lot of this tension between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day.

Um already in the first century, ancient rabbis had come up with hundreds of diverse applications for God's Old Testament Sabbath law.

Here, the religious leader said to Jesus that his disciples had done that which was not lawful on the Sabbath.

But was it unlawful?

Or was it just non-traditional?

Although the expression the law was used in reference to the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Old Testament, it was also a term which could refer just to the Ten Commandments, or sometimes it's a reference to the entire Old Testament.

In addition, the first century Jews sometimes would use the law to refer to the interpretations and traditions of the scribes and Pharisees.

These interpretations and traditions were called midrashim.

They were like the rabbinic commentaries of Old Testament scripture.

There were two categories of midrashim, halakhic midrashim and haggadic midrashim.

And that haggedic dealt with the more narrative portions of the scriptures, whereas the halakhic midrashim deals with more like the rules to follow.

So eventually the midrashim would be followed by the Mishnah and the Talmud in the third century A.D.

These contained 63 tractates on various subjects of the law.

In English, it makes a book of about 800 pages.

Twenty-four chapters were about Sabbath regulations.

The rabbis who wrote the Talmud established 39 categories of work that cannot be performed on the Sabbath, according to their view of the Hebrew Bible.

These include cooking.

Some of you gone, Amen.

Let me get some Sabbath.

They include washing clothes, constructing, repairing, writing, making a fire, cutting, fishing, and so on.

They also added several other activities that could lead to violating the Sabbath.

For instance, one should not climb a tree on the Sabbath because you needed to avoid breaking a twig and violating the rule not to cut anything.

Okay?

You were not allowed to spit on the ground because if you spit on the ground, your spittle might furrow the dirt, and that would be considered plowing.

Yeah.

Women were not allowed to look at in a mirror on the Sabbath because they might see a gray hair and be tempted to pluck it out.

And that could be considered harvesting.

I don't know why that didn't apply to men as well, but for some reason it didn't.

According to William Barclay, the old Scottish Bible commentator, quote, this is too long to put up on the screen, but the law lays it down that the Sabbath day is to be kept holy and that on it no work is to be done.

That's a great principle, but these Jewish legalists had a passion for definition.

They asked, what then is work?

All kinds of things were classified as work.

For instance, to carry a burden on the Sabbath is to work.

But next to a burden, next rather, a burden has to be defined.

So the scribal law laid it down that a burden is food equal in weight to a dried fig.

Yeah.

Enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put on a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye salve, paper enough to write a customs house notice upon, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, read enough to make a pen, and so on and so on and so on, 800 pages of application.

So they spent endless hours, as Barclay says, arguing whether a man could or could not lift a lamp from one place to another on the Sabbath, whether a tailor committed a sin if he went through or went out with a needle in his robe, whether a woman might wear a brooch or false hair, whether a man might go out on the Sabbath with artificial teeth, and yes, they had them back then.

Or an artificial limb.

Or if a man could lift his child on the Sabbath, you see the weight, the burden, the difficulty, the hurdles.

You had to jump to be approved by the religious leaders of that day.

And you thought just getting to church was hard.

Well, rest.

Where's that in this?

According to the scribal interpretation of what the disciples did, they plucked the wheat, and that's harvesting.

They rubbed it between their hands and that was threshing.

They separated the grain from the chaff, and that's the work of winnowing.

And so, according to their interpretation of God's laws, they established human traditions that these disciples went against.

In Mark's Gospel chapter 2, Mark records Jesus as saying, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

And I think the Pharisees, religious leaders, got that backwards.

What are we getting backwards?

What's the context for our rest?

What's the object of our worship?

What are we placing our hope in?

Good questions for us to ask when we read a passage like this.

Our rest should be a quiet confidence in Christ versus our own religious practices.

For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, verse 8.

Come unto me and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11, 28.

And of course, if you take his yoke and learn from him, you will find rest for your souls.

Secondly, worship.

We treasure God's presence more than anything else, including this building, including the programming, including getting it right in so many different categories.

And how many of you, we've all probably been members of churches that got their focus off of God, as far as the focus of their worship, off of God, and for a moment or two, and maybe for a long time, into some aspect of their theology, their philosophy, or their ministry.

Now we we do that in the rest of the world as well.

There are some people worshiping money, sexuality, and pleasure.

They're finding their entire identity and center of life in those categories.

That's getting it wrong, according to the Bible.

We need to treasure God's presence more than anything else.

And then in our hope, trusting all out comes to the one who is the loving, sovereign Lord over redemption history, a battered reed, a smoldering wick.

He's so gentle.

He's so tender with you, with me when we're broken, when we're about exhausted as we can be, when we think our faith is flickering and about to go out.

He's gentle and lowly with you and with me.

And that happens for all of us at some time.

And these religious leaders were making it hard for people to believe, to trust and hope in Christ and in the gospel.

How about us?

And how do I make it harder for myself even to trust, to rest in Christ?

To redirect the focus of my worship expressed unto the Lord Himself.

Let's get a little help from a few of our older brothers, Spurgeon.

Let but your mind be like the mind of Christ, and you'll find rest unto your souls.

A deep rest, a growing rest, a rest found out more and more, an abiding rest.

Not only which you have found, but which you shall go on to find.

You see, he's saying, give yourself a break, you who have run out of gas.

Give yourself a break and look to him, look to Jesus.

Don't expect that just because you accepted Christ a long time ago, or you made a decision or something a long, long time ago, that that was meant to be just the end of it all.

No, that's not the end of it all.

The clock continues to tick.

We lift up the empty hands of faith and we continue to receive rest from Jesus.

And we continue to find rest in him as we take his yoke upon us and learn from him.

Yaroslav Pelikin, I've quoted before, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, whereas tradition is the living faith of the dead.

Tradition's okay.

It's the ism that's the problem.

And these Pharisees, these religious leaders, were in the ism category.

Because it was really their own rabbinical interpretations and applications of God's Sabbath law that was pressing them to accuse Jesus' disciples of having broken the Sabbath law.

Where is your rest found?

Where is your worship directed?

Where is your hope sourced in?

Pharisaic righteousness was an outward conformity to human traditions.

Christian righteousness is an inward conformity of mind and heart to the revealed will of God.

You see how Jesus keeps pressing it back to the heart, doesn't he?

The religious leaders of the day, they wanted to be about the minutiae of the Sabbath law and how you stack up against following all that.

And they made it so difficult.

You couldn't even leave your house.

This is the fascinating thing to me.

You couldn't even leave your house for more than 1,100 meters, okay?

And so they got around their own law by tying a rope to their house and being remaining connected to their house.

And when they made this accusation to Jesus, I want to ask this question.

Jesus is in the grain fields with his disciples.

They're picking the grain, they're pinching it, and they're eating it.

And these guys, that's where they accuse.

How'd they get there?

How'd they get there if they didn't break their own tradition to leave their house and go out into the field and accuse Jesus and his disciples of doing this?

Pharisaic righteousness was outward conformity, and it's usually quite short-sighted.

I'll close with this quote from my favorite all-time Bible teachers, a guy named Steve Brown.

Some of you will know who he is.

One of the great dangers for Christians in the world is that we are far, far too religious.

We go to religious movies, we read religious books, we associate with religious people, we eat religious cookies, and we wear religious underwear that is far too tight.

So were these scribes and Pharisees.

He says, Don't get me wrong, I'm religious too, but the Holy Spirit isn't in that way.

It's so important for us to keep that in mind.

The house of God should never be more important than the God of the house.

The Sabbath should never be more important than the Lord of the Sabbath.

And so when Jesus comes and makes these claims, come to me and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, learn from me, and you will find rest for your souls.

Two kinds of rest.

That's great.

Two sources, two ways to source that.

Are you sourcing that?

Have you come to him?

Good question.

I don't know.

I have no way of knowing.

Online, have you come to him?

Are you seeking rest from him?

Have you taken his yoke upon you?

Identifying completely with him, walking right alongside him like two cattle would under the same yoke.

Going where he goes, seeing what he sees, crying over what he cries over, rejoicing in what he rejoices.

And so important for us to keep all of that in mind.

I'm going to close a second time, and it's by J.C.

Rowe.

We make a great mistake if we do not encourage the very first movements of a soul towards Christ.

Let the ignorant world scoff and mock if he wants to.

We may be sure that bruised reeds and smoldering wicks are very precious in our Lord's eyes.

If that's you today in the room, if that's you today online, why not turn to him?

He is gentle and lowly.

Why?

Because he's the only one worthy of our worship.

And so for your experience of worshiping to be complete, to be satisfying, it can't be something finite.

It's got to be the infinite God that you worship.

And then, no matter where you're from, you or Gentile, no matter what nation, no matter what people group, no matter how far you have run from him, he offers you the hope of his salvation.

And it's sourced in him, and it's a gift he gives to you and to me.

Let's turn to him.

Lord, thank you for this passage.

Thank you for all the promise that it hopes or that it holds out to us.

Thank you for the wideness and your mercy that you love people from every tribe, tongue, people, group, and nation.

Thank you, Lord, for the kindness and tenderness of making this offer to each and every one of us, this offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Pray that you would come, move on our hearts, transform us.

And may this good seed of the word find fertile soil in our hearts and minds.

May it dig roots and bear fruit in our lives for the glory of Jesus in his name.

Amen and amen.