"Two Paths, One Way" Matthew 7:28-29 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew 7, verse 28.

Matthew 7:28

When Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes.

Shots fired is what I've said about that.

Imagine being a scribe reading this.

We loved the preaching of Jesus, the crowd said.

It was nothing at all like our scribes.

Martin Lloyd Jones described this concluding portion here as by no means a useless or idle epilogue, and reminded you that if you're reading a novel and you come to the epilogue, if you didn't care about the ending of the novel, you wouldn't read the epilogue.

Who cares where they're doing in 20 years?

But if you are drawn into the novel, then the epilogue, of course, is mandatory.

It captures your mind.

And such is the case here.

The Sermon on the Mount has driven us through the teaching of Jesus.

And so now you want to know what happened next.

And Matthew lets us know that the crowd went their way astonished at his teaching.

I came across a study this week by St.

Stephen's University in Canada.

They do this study every few years and have for, I don't know, 40 or 50 years.

It is a global survey, people in like 50 nations around the world to determine who the most famous Americans are.

As far as people in the world and other countries go, what Americans are most famous to them?

And they rank their responses.

And uh, well, this year I'll let you know the survey that just came out, the four most famous Americans are, in the order the survey gave, President Obama, President Trump, LeBron James, and Taylor Swift.

Kind of checks out, doesn't it?

I flipped through the previous decades of surveys.

I was maximizing my time.

And there is a thread through almost all of the surveys.

It's almost always two presidents, like one current, one former, a basketball star, and a musician.

For the longest time, it was uh President Reagan, President Clinton, Michael Jordan, and Michael Jackson.

I don't know if the Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift trade is good or an improvement or a sign of decline of our culture.

Who knows?

I wouldn't dare comment on it.

Those are the most famous Americans.

What we just read over the last several months is the most famous sermon ever preached.

And by famous, I mean it is more recognized, more read, more studied, more preached than any other sermon.

If people were to be presented with texts from multiple sermons, this would by far be the most famous one of them all.

Now, what makes it so famous and so powerful, it might surprise you to think about it, it's less about the content of the sermon and more about the preacher.

It's more about who Jesus is and how he is constantly brought to the forefront of every portion of this sermon.

This sermon is so famous and so powerful because of who preached it.

Now I know going slowly, we've gone basically a verse or two at a time through the whole thing, as you go through it at that pace, you lose sight of that because you're studying the trees when you go through it at that pace, and you're studying the ethical implications of every passage in the kingdom ethics and you know the practicality of every part of this sermon, of course, that you can lose sight of the forest.

And the forest in this sermon is who Jesus is.

This sermon is a sermon about the authority of Jesus Christ.

And you can tell that because when the crowd went away, they were not talking about the beautiful intricacies of the poetry, the opening beatitudes.

I mean, what a clever introduction to, in such poetic format, to link all of these beatitudes with that wordplay about happy or the holy and that kind of stuff.

They weren't talking about that.

It's a powerful conclusion.

You have two gates and two paths and two kinds of teachers and two destinations, two houses, two foundations.

They weren't talking about that.

When the crowd left this sermon, what had so captivated their minds and their conversations was nothing other than Jesus Christ.

It certainly is a binary sermon.

Every part of it is showing you there are two ways to live.

There's only one way to salvation and every other way.

You can come to God through the Beatitudes, through mourning over your own sin and receiving the righteousness of Christ.

You can build your life on the narrow path and you can build your house on the rock of Jesus' words, or you can refuse to mourn over your sin.

You can try to be righteous like the scribes and the Pharisees.

You can walk on the wide path, you can build your house in the sands.

And those are the two different ways to live.

It is either heaven or hell.

And the focal point of the sermon is Jesus Christ.

So you're either in Christ or outside of him.

You're either following him on the narrow path or you are lost with the crowd on the wide path.

Everything about this sermon magnifies and puts forward the person of Jesus Christ.

And you can really see that when you review the whole sermon, which you could do if you wanted to do.

And I know you want to do it, so let's go.

Flip over to Proverbs chapter, I mean to Matthew chapter 5, where it begins.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

In verse 3, Jesus opens his mouth, and what comes out is the Beatitudes.

Eight of these blessings, nine down into verse 11, that are repeating to you what it takes to be happy in this world.

Now, even in studying the Beatitudes, don't lose sight of the fact that Jesus, in giving instruction this way, is making himself the authority on two things.

The authority on what it takes to have a happy life and on what it takes to receive the righteousness of God.

Jesus sets himself up as the dispenser of wisdom in those two categories.

If you want a happy life, if you want a blessed life, you need to listen to Jesus Christ.

So this is not just philosophic words of wisdom, this isn't sophistry from a fortune cookie or anything.

This is declaration from the Lord of the universe what it takes to be happy.

So by these Beatitudes, Jesus is establishing his authority over the human disposition.

Moreover, he's also telling you the only way to be right with God, to mourn over your sin.

And I've repeated the introduction to this of the Beatitudes in almost every sermon from the Book of the Sermon on the Mount.

Almost every sermon we've gone back to the Beatitudes, I've drawn out to you how the way to salvation starts with mourning over your own sin, confessing your spiritual bankruptcy, recognizing your poor in spirit, asking for a righteousness that's outside of yours, hungering for righteousness that's not yours, receiving it through faith as a gift from God who fills and satisfies the hungry with his own righteousness, who calls you a son of God, who shows you mercy for your sin, forgives you, and in light of that you can now shine and you can be useful to God in his kingdom.

Those are the beatitudes.

But if you take it one step up above that, you recognize just in the very existence of the Beatitudes, Jesus is declaring that he has authority to tell you how to be right with God.

He is the one that gives righteousness.

If somebody walks around diagnosing your illness and handing you a prescription, you would assume that they were a doctor.

Their prescription is as valid as their medical license.

So it is with the beatitudes.

Jesus diagnoses what is wrong with you and your human condition, tells you what you must do to fix it, namely, humble yourself and come before the Lord, and he prescribes a righteousness that is his, not ours.

The Beatitudes, as intricate and poetic as they are, are a statement of the authority of Jesus Christ.

But the Sermon on the Mount goes on that way.

You want to be used by God, you want to let your light shine into the world.

Jesus tells you how to do it.

The whole imagery of the city on the hill, that's Israel in the Old Testament.

And Jesus here is condemning Israel.

They failed to be the city on the hill.

They had their light and they hit it.

Jesus is going to raise up a new Israel that will let its light shine.

It will transform the nations.

It will attract people to God.

It will succeed where Israel failed.

Why Jesus doing this?

He's putting himself up as the judge of Israel.

He's telling you what kind of people God uses.

One of the top three most radical verses in the Sermon on the Mount is certainly verse 17, where Jesus says, Don't think that I've of chapter five, where don't think I've come to abolish the law of the prophets.

I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

Just a phrase that captures all of the Old Testament for the Jews, the law of the prophets, and the writings.

Jesus summarizes them and says, I didn't come to abolish them.

Instead, I came to fulfill them.

Now some people argue, oh, Jesus is merely putting himself under the law.

No, he's doing more than putting himself under the law.

He's fulfilling the law, he's completing the law from the inside out.

This word for fulfill means to bring it to its conclusion.

Israel had been governed by the law and the prophets for thousands of years.

Ever since they crossed the Red Sea into Israel or into the wilderness, God gave Moses the law.

The prophets appointed to the Savior.

They've lived under the law.

The Pharisees have tried to uphold the law for centuries.

They've been waiting for the expected Savior.

They've been living under the law.

And now Jesus comes along and says, I'm going to bring that whole period of our history to a close.

I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up from the inside out.

I'm going to keep the law.

Of course, he's under the authority of the law, but he fulfills it.

He does everything it commands.

He brings that chapter of the law and the prophets to its conclusion.

Do you see how even in that it's him elevating himself above the law and the prophets?

He doesn't abolish them, he completes them.

No person could say that, no human being could say that.

But Jesus does.

And he means it.

He means it.

He says, The heaven and earth aren't going to pass away until all the law is accomplished.

And of course it will be accomplished through him.

From there, he then moves into your heart.

He starts dealing with categories of sin: anger, lust.

You can just read the headings in the SV.

Anger, lust, divorce, oaths, retaliation, your enemies.

This is very personal stuff.

He's not talking about public sins.

He's not even talking about adultery or murder here.

He's talking about the sins in your own heart, your own anger, your own lust.

He gets into your secret sins.

Sins that nobody else knows about, Jesus knows about.

That is another declaration of his authority.

He's placing himself as the sovereign, omniscient Lord, even over your own hearts.

Sins that you have that nobody else knows about, Jesus knows about them.

He claims them, he judges them, he condemns them.

Through that passage, he says, if you want to live by righteousness, you better exceed the scribes and the Pharisees.

They try to be righteous, you better be more righteous than them.

Notice in the way he says that, he's condemning the scribes and the Pharisees.

These are the most religious people who have ever lived.

And Jesus said, if you want to live by religiosity, if you want to get to heaven by being religious, you better surpass them.

Jesus makes himself the teacher of the scribes and the Pharisees, and he gives them a big fat F.

They fail.

Which is another statement of the authority of Jesus Christ.

From there.

Chapter 6.

He talks about giving to the poor, giving to the needy.

And he says, Don't give in such a way that you're putting yourself on display.

Notice that he's talking about being able to read your motives.

It's one thing to say that Jesus sees your secret sins, he's not talking about sins right here.

He's talking about the good things you do.

And he says, I see your good things, and I see the motivation behind your good things.

He's judging your motives when you're doing things like giving.

Who can do that?

Who can read your heart?

Jesus can.

He reads your heart like he's reading the mail.

He puts himself above you and above your motivations.

He keeps going in chapter 6.

He tells people what kind of prayers the Lord doesn't hear.

Imagine coming out to a group of people, praying together, and putting your arm around them and saying, Hey, I've got news for you.

God doesn't hear your prayers.

Who could say that?

Nobody could say that.

Nobody knows what kind of prayers God can hear and God doesn't hear.

Jesus does.

And he says, he says, listen, you guys, if you're praying like that, God does not hear your prayers.

And then he goes further and says, if you want God to hear your prayers, pray like this, and then teaches them how to pray, which is another statement of authority.

He's saying, here's the ID card to get through that gate.

Use it.

That is making himself the authority over even prayers, over what kind of prayers God hears, what kind of prayers God answers.

From there, he goes to fasting, giving, and anxiety.

Three very personal, very private things.

What you eat, what you do with your money, and what you worry about.

Right into your kitchen.

These are the categories of things you're not supposed to talk about on Thanksgiving with your family.

You can talk about what you eat on Thanksgiving.

But the other ones, Jesus just seizes them and says, You want to give money like this?

Let me tell you how to give your money so that you get rewarded in heaven.

Who would know that?

Who can keep track of what you do with your money throughout your life in such a way that he promises you if you do it this way, you'll have a reward in heaven?

Who could possibly say that?

But Jesus says it.

Who can critique what you worry about at night when you're falling asleep?

Jesus does.

He knows your heart even then.

And again, he still keeps going.

Chapter 7.

He says, by the way, you are not allowed to judge other people.

Like he just judged your secret anxiety and your giving and your fasting as he just judged you.

He tells you, you may not judge each other.

You don't have the authority, because you might be inclined to say, Jesus is judging these motives.

I'm going to also.

Then Jesus says, No, it belongs to him and him alone to do that, not to you.

You don't have his authority.

So you don't get to judge each other.

Then he follows that by saying, What kind of people you can and can't evangelize?

Don't cast your pearls before someone.

And that rubs us the wrong way.

If somebody were to tell you, hey, that person's rejected the gospel, move on.

You would say, How dare you?

The gospel is precious, and there's no way they're going to be saved without the gospel, and I love them and I want to keep giving the gospel.

You can't judge what a good use of my time is and how important it is that.

Who knows?

God might save that person.

Then Jesus comes along and tells you exactly that.

Another statement of his authority.

He's demonstrating his authority time and time again.

Then verse 12, probably the second most radical thing in the sermon.

Whatever you wish others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.

So he began the sermon by fulfilling the law and the prophets.

He ends it by summarizing it and, in a sense, rewriting it.

He gives you the golden rule.

Now I know that's borrowed from Old Testament principles.

He's not inventing it out of new cloth here, but he is restating the law and the prophets in his own way.

It's implied that the greatest command, the love of the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is above that.

You live out the rest of the law on a horizontal level by loving your neighbors and your enemies and treating them in the way you would want to be treated.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the scribes would never dream of doing what Jesus just did.

Jesus is rewriting the law.

The Pharisees and Scribes, as I mentioned, are holding up the law.

They spend their whole time holding up the law.

They have a whole religious system devoted to how they hold up the law.

They have a whole, it exists to this day in Israel, this whole intricate dietary restrictions, this dietary system where you don't mix dairy and meat.

Why not?

Because nobody knows what it means that you can't boil a goat in its mother's milk.

Who has any idea what that means?

So they have a whole system that dominates their country to this day because they wouldn't dream of altering or touching or doing anything to alter the law.

They're all spending their whole life holding it up.

And then Jesus comes, fulfills it, summarizes it, and moves everybody along.

They're holding up the law, and Jesus says, You can put that down.

That's all they know how to do is hold up the law.

And Jesus says, I got this.

Fulfilled.

This is a radical statement about the authority of Christ.

But then the final kind of trumpet blast of his authority here is chapter 7, verse 21, where Jesus declares that nobody goes to heaven unless they do his father's will, which is his will.

Isaiah 7:21

And then he says in verse 23, the key feature of those who go to heaven is that Jesus knows them.

I began by telling you the most famous Americans, President Obama, Trump, LeBron James, Taylor Swift.

Let's choose the least controversial of those.

Taylor Swift.

You know, it's one thing to say, to measure how many people in the world know her.

She's a global star and everything.

How many people in the world truly know her or would recognize her or have some kind of mental cognition of who she is?

That could be a very large number, sure.

It's a very different thing to ask how many people she knows.

And then to base something significant on whether or not she knows you.

Do you see how that narrows the funnel dramatically?

That's what Jesus is doing in Matthew 7.

These people are showing up in heaven saying, I know who you are, Jesus, and Jesus turns it and says, I don't know you.

In so saying, Jesus is making his knowledge of individuals the determined feature in their salvation.

It is not sufficient to know him.

He has to know you.

Who would say that?

What kind of megalomaniac would say the only way to go to heaven is not just to know me, but for me to know you?

This is exactly what Jesus declares.

He makes himself the authority on who is saved and who is not.

And the determining feature of those who are saved is that they are known by Jesus.

You're not going to get a more extreme authority than that.

He follows it in verse 24 by telling people that they need to do these words of his.

The takeaway is Jesus' words from this sermon.

The whole thing is about the authority of Jesus Christ.

We can lose that because we're reading this from a distance, aren't we?

We're 2,000 years later, you're reading it on the pew around your family and friends, or you're reading at your home in your quiet time with your coffee.

You're not in the shores of Galilee with this uneducated Galilean in front of you, waxing eloquently about what it takes to have righteousness.

So it's very easy for us.

It's in the Bible, you know, so it's very easy for us to lose sight of just how insane these words are.

Just how world-tilting, upside down, upending they are.

But that's what the crowd was talking about when they left, isn't it?

They went away, they could not believe the kind of authority that Jesus was claiming for himself.

They couldn't believe it.

Their scribes would never dream of that.

But Jesus did.

There's another way you can understand the Sermon of the Mount.

I won't take you through the whole thing again, but there's another way.

I did this this week.

I went through the Sermon on the Mount and I underlined every first person pronoun in the sermon.

Every time Jesus referenced himself.

I know this is someone speaking.

If I tell a story about myself, if I say, This week I went to so-and-so, all the heads go up, all the eyes lock in.

So imagine you're out there in the Galilean hillside with Jesus.

The first time he's preaching this, you don't really even know who he is.

You've heard of him and signs and wonders and whatnot, and your friends have brought you, and there's a massive crowd out there, and this guy is teaching this.

You're gonna lock in with what he says about himself.

The first person pronoun is when Jesus talks about persecution.

And blessed are you in chapter 5, verse 14, when you're persecuted for my sake.

He elevates himself.

Imagine a person who says, It's actually good for you if you get beat up on account of me.

If somebody punches you because they're mad at me, you should count yourself lucky to be associated with me.

When Jesus Says this, he's making himself out to be more glorious and more meaningful and more significant than we are.

He's elevating himself above us.

You should be happy to be counted among the followers of Christ, even when people punch you for it.

Because of how glorious Jesus is.

That's the first person pronoun.

Followed by 14 times, Jesus says, I say to you, I say to you, I say to you.

You've heard said, I say to you.

And he's giving new words.

The contrast what you've heard with what he has to say.

Fourteen times he rattles this off.

Now he's unending and uprooting the Phariseeal system.

Now, not everything that he says you've heard said was wrong.

A lot of things you've heard said were right.

It doesn't matter.

He's giving new words for them.

Then in chapter 7, we talked about this where Jesus says, the way to heaven is to do the will of my Father.

In that statement, Jesus is showing a union and a unity with the Father that is not ours.

He's contrasting.

You can't go to the Father except through the Son.

And Jesus refers to the Son as my Father, not our Father, like He did earlier.

No, here it's my Father.

He ties that to verse 23, the declaration, I will declare to them, I never knew you.

Depart from me.

And then finally, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them.

This is a sermon about the authority of Jesus.

So Jesus, when you take all of this together, Jesus has the authority, listen, to set the terms of salvation, to describe human happiness, to satisfy the human heart, to fulfill the law, to uproot the religious leaders, to upend the religious traditions, to judge your secret motivations, to decree new laws, to hear your prayers, or to refuse to hear your prayers, to tell you who to evangelize, to label false teachers, to inspect the fruit of his people, to save the sheep and to damn the goats.

That's what Jesus has the authority to do in this sermon.

Now, if you look at that list, or if I were to read it again, you would notice that every one of those things is something unique to deity.

Only God can do those things.

Only God can set the conditions for human flourishing, only God can set the terms of salvation.

Only God can elevate himself above the law and over the law and fulfill the law and give new law.

Only God can label false teachers in that respect, and only God can save the sheep, and only God can damn the goats.

This is the only things that God can do.

So all of these things that Jesus is declaring in the Sermon on the Mount that He has the authority to do are prerogatives of deity.

So this is a long attestation not only of Jesus' authority, but of his union with God.

People will ask, where does the Bible say that Jesus is God?

How about the Sermon on the Mount?

Where he repeats this over and over and over again.

He has God's authority.

Can you see now why the crowd was stunned?

Can you see now why afterwards the crowd goes away like, what did we just hear?

They'd never seen anything like this.

Authority is going to be a recurring theme.

They're going to keep coming after Jesus about this.

They're going to ask him at the last week of his life, by what authority do you do these things?

Remember when he clears out the temple, they corner him the next day and say, Who gave you the permit to clear out the temple?

Who gave you the authority to teach on the southern steps of the temple?

Where's your paperwork?

And Jesus tells them, let me ask you this by what authority did John the Baptist preach?

And they couldn't answer that question.

If they said John preached with God's authority, then the crowd would want to know, why didn't you persecute John?

Why'd you let the Romans kill him?

Or if they said John had no authority, he was a fraud, the crowd would have turned against him.

That dynamic is already on play here in Matthew 7.

This is Jesus' first major public sermon.

At the end of it, the crowd walks away and they're already wrestling with that dynamic.

Nobody speaks like this guy.

What do you do with this?

He's making himself out to be like God.

And of course, when they finally ask Jesus to his face in the middle of his ministry, where does your authority come from?

Remember what he says?

John 12, 49, Jesus says, I haven't spoken on my own authority.

I'm not making this stuff up.

But the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment, what to say and what to speak.

When Jesus is saying this, he means it in a twofold sense.

In his humanity, he's literally under his father's authority.

In his humanity, he is submissive to his father's will.

He's only going to do what the father has commanded him to do, demonstrating that he is sinless.

He will fulfill the law because he is a sinless man.

He's only doing what God has commanded in the law.

In his deity, his will and the father's will are one.

His mind and the father's mind are one.

His commandment and the father's commandment are one.

And so he really can only do the Father's will, because it is his will as well.

So this statement, John 12, 49, is wonderfully crafted by Jesus to demonstrate both natures.

He is walking in his humanity, completely submissive to God's word.

He is walking in his deity at one with the Father.

He can only do what God Himself commands, what to say, what to speak, everything about his life.

When you say the authority of God, what does that mean?

The authority of God is his ability to create and make and fasten and shape the world however he wants.

Everything else falls underneath that.

When you read early church fathers writing the first few hundred years after the church started, they always refer to authority in relationship to creation.

And we don't think like that now.

We have authority structures and ranks in the military and whatnot, but you recognize that our authority structures are all weak.

They're all lame sauce, you know?

You have law enforcement that you can rebel against or fight, and law enforcement is corrupt, or you have laws the government passes.

But what is a government law?

I mean, that doesn't mean anything.

You know, Congress passes a law and the Senate passes the law and the president signs the law, and then it goes to a judge who can say, I like this part and not that part.

And you can try to rewrite the law, and maybe the Supreme Court says, Yeah, that's totally fine.

This is this is law, that's fine.

And 20 years later, they'll come back and say, Oh, never mind.

I mean, our laws ebb and flow up and down, back and forth.

They're amended, they're repealed, they're frozen by the courts.

They have nothing like this in Jesus' lifetime.

When Jesus says that he has authority, when the scripture says God has authority, Psalm 119, verse 89, God's word is settled in heaven.

Psalms 119:89

It means that God's decree for all things is settled in heaven and he has the authority to make it happen.

I mean, a king could say, bring me a million dollars, but somebody's got to go get it.

God's authority is just different.

God says million dollars and boom, million dollars.

God says cow and there's a cow, God says chair and there's a chair.

God says what he wants and it happens immediately.

That's authority.

We don't have anything like that.

That's the authority God has.

He can make whatever world he wants, he can make it exactly like he wants, and this is the world he made exactly like he wanted it, to put on display the glories and wonders of Jesus Christ.

So everything in this world is created through Jesus, by Jesus, we read that earlier in our scripture reading Colossians 1.

All things come from him and through him, and all things point to him.

By him were all things made, for him all things are made, to him gives all things give glory.

All the prepositions you can think of, Jesus is the word of God that created the universe, and it all points to him.

That's his authority.

He is the word of God.

You think of the God's glory on display in the universe, it's displayed through his word, the Bible, it's displayed through his word, the Lagos Jesus Christ.

And in the Sermon on the Mount, those two are the same.

The Word of God and the man Jesus Christ are the same.

And so God's authority is on full display through this sermon.

That's why it's the most incredible sermon ever preached.

Because it puts the magnanimity of our Lord, the authority of his glory, all on display.

The crowd understands this.

Remember, they didn't get caught up in the nuances of the sermon.

They were just flabbergasted by everything Jesus said.

Verse 28, he finished the sermon.

The crowds were astonished at his teaching.

That word astonished is a fun, a fun word.

It means to have your mind struck from the inside.

To get hit in the mind so hard that your mind can't function right, but it's a hit from the inside.

Like we have the English word concussed, you get hit on the outside and you are disoriented, you lose awareness.

This is a word for getting hit on the inside of the mind.

I read one Greek dictionary that says this word literally means, quote, to be hit so hard in the head you lose self-awareness.

You got bonked in the head so hard that you don't know where you are or who you are, kind of thing.

Only that this word has the implication that happens from the inside out.

We have a very cool English idiom for this, don't we?

Mind blown.

That's how we say it in English.

That you saw something that was so radical it blew your mind.

That's what happened to the crowd.

They hear this sermon by Jesus and they walk away with their minds blown.

They don't even know where they are anymore.

Why?

Because verse 29, he spoke to them as one who had authority.

That was their takeaway.

I want to close by letting you know.

That word is used in Matthew's gospel four times.

The word for mind blown, four times.

This is the first one.

They hear Jesus teach the Beatitudes, the two paths one way, they hear that sermon and their minds are blown.

The second time is when Jesus goes to Nazareth and he preaches in the synagogue there.

He reads the scroll, rolls it up, and says, This is fulfilled in your hearing.

And the crowd is there.

This is where Jesus grew up.

And they say, Who is this guy?

Isn't he the carpenter's son?

Isn't he Mary's son?

That's what they say.

The implication being, where did he learn to preach?

He's the carpenter's son.

Where did he go to seminary?

What rabbis discipled him?

Where did he learn any of this?

They couldn't believe, and they say it was his preaching and the signs he did.

Those are the two things they say.

They couldn't believe his words and all the signs that he did, knowing that he was the carpenter's son.

And it says their minds were blown.

They were astonished, amazed, flabbergasted, gobsmacked, bewildered, bewitched, befuddled, whatever you want to say.

That happened to those in Nazareth.

The third time the word is used.

The rich young ruler comes to Jesus, says, What must I do to be saved?

Jesus says, keep the law.

The rich young ruler says, I have done all that.

Jesus says, Sell you have, give to the poor, follow me.

Jesus is elevating himself above the law, saying you've only fulfilled the law when you have a loyalty to Christ.

When you follow Christ through your life, that's what fulfilling the law looks like.

Jesus is elevating himself above the law.

The rich young ruler bounces, goes away, is like, No, I have too much stuff, I'm not doing that.

He goes away sad.

Peter's angry.

Remember, Peter wanted a famous person to follow Jesus.

He was excited about it.

He's angry.

And Peter says, What?

How come he can't follow you?

And Jesus says, easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven.

Peter rightly understands, you know, we as Americans are like, that means rich people can't be saved.

Peter rightly understood this and goes, wait, if that's true, nobody can be saved.

If a guy with all the power and authority of the rich young ruler can't get to heaven, there's no hope for any of us.

And Jesus says, exactly.

With man it is impossible.

But with God, all things are possible.

Jesus makes a declaration that he is sovereign over salvation, that he will save whom he wants to save, when he wants to save, how he wants to save them, and he saves them through preaching of himself.

Jesus can save whomever he wants to.

And the next verse says that Peter was astonished.

That's that word.

That blew Peter's mind.

Like, wait a minute, we've been following you for three years, trying to get a meager following, and you say you can save whoever you want, whenever you want.

I want my money back.

He couldn't believe it.

And then the fourth time.

Last few days of his life.

Jesus is in the temple preaching.

The Sadducees come up to him to corner him, upset that he cleared out the temple the day before.

And they come to him with the story of the widow, the three-stay widow, the sad widow.

Her husband died.

So she remarried.

The second husband died, she remarried.

The third husband died, she remarried.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, they all died.

She remarried.

Now she's got seven husbands waiting for her in heaven.

Pop quiz Jesus, who will be she, who will she be married to in heaven?

Do you remember the encounter?

What an arrogant question.

You get one shot at Jesus, and that's what you come up with.

And just the smugness of the question, too.

It reads like it's the kind of question they've been asking at cocktail parties for 30 years.

It has the air of like the atheist university professor who's like, I'm not a Christian because how could all the animals fit in the ark?

So lame.

And they ask that to Jesus.

And Jesus hits it to the cheap seats.

First of all, the Sanhedrin, I mean the Sadducees don't even believe in the resurrection to begin with.

And Jesus tells them that.

You guys are asking that question because you have no idea what you're talking about.

You don't know what the resurrection is like.

Secondly, the scripture says that God, and he says, the scripture says, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Do you think God is the God of the living or of the dead?

The Sadducees were so befuddled that they dare not speak another word.

And Jesus got the lawyers to be quiet.

And it says the crowd was astonished.

They had their minds blown.

They couldn't believe what just happened.

Take those four encounters together.

Jesus says he has authority over salvation.

Jesus says that he has the authority to fulfill the law in Nazareth.

Jesus says that he has the authority to choose who will be saved, the resturing ruler.

And Jesus now has the authority over the resurrection because he is the God of the living.

People can't deal with that.

And they're amazed.

Do you know what?

It's not enough to be amazed at Jesus and what he says.

Anybody with eyes can read the Sermon on the Mount and have their mind blown.

Anybody with ears can listen to this, unless they have a very callous heart.

I grant, if you have a callous heart, maybe this doesn't get through.

But if you have just a normal reading of this, you're going to be blown away by how profound and amazing what Jesus said is.

But that doesn't mean you're saved.

The people who are amazed at this would follow Jesus for another year of his life and leave when he stopped giving them food.

The people who are amazed in Nazareth five minutes later tried to throw him off a cliff.

The people who are amazed at the temple steps cried for his death two days later.

Lots of people are amazed at Jesus that don't surrender their life to him.

What's the difference between being amazed and saving faith?

It's recognizing the authority of Christ and placing yourself underneath it.

Saying, Jesus, you are the Lord of the universe.

I submit to you.

I believe in you.

I give you my life.

You do what the rich younger ruler wouldn't do.

You follow Jesus.

You do what this crowd was called to do.

You build your house on the rock of the confession of Christ as Lord.

You recognize that He is indeed the God of the living.

Lord, we're grateful that you are the resurrected Savior.

Even the resurrection proclaims that you are the God of life.

You're the Lord of Sheol, you're the Lord of the grave, you are the Lord of heaven, you're the Lord of the universe.

I pray for anyone who's here today that has never given you their life.

I pray that today they would hear these words of yours.

And they would turn and recognize your authority.

They would submit their life to you.

And that you would save them because you are a loving God who loves to save people who come to you through Christ.

So I pray that you would do that today.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.