The Kingdom is Like... | The Way of Jesus

Hey everyone, and welcome to the brand new Burnett Church Podcast.

My name is Tim, and I'm your host and the pastor of Burnett Church.

Today's podcast uh is the audio from part one of our series called Reactions Speak Louder, in which we start to unpack how our reactions affect the world around us and also say something about our relationship to ourselves and to Jesus as well.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Just before I get in, I want to say again, really uh warm welcome to you if you're new.

Uh this is your first time here.

Uh we design our church uh to be a place where we try and remove as many barriers as we can.

You notice that you know we don't dress particularly fancy on Sunday morning.

If you don't, you know, have a closet full of really uh high-end church clothes, like the Nigerian wedding that I was at yesterday, um, you know, then it's okay.

This is a place for you.

Uh we want you to be able to come and explore whether you're a believer, not a believer, a skeptic, unconvinced, it doesn't matter to us.

We try to have this come as you are ethos.

And I recognize that this series that we're in, you know, The Way of Jesus and kind of coming back to basics might feel a little bit more like it's for the convinced than some of the other series that we do.

We try to do things that are really practical so that if that's you, if you're not a person who's yet come to faith, that's okay.

You can belong here before you believe and you can get something out of it.

I've talked to people who are of completely different faiths, and they come to our church and and they still are able to apply the teachings of Jesus to their life.

I think it's one of the beautiful things about the way that Jesus taught is that he was concerned about the life that we're living.

And so, even if we're not living life as a person of faith, there are still opportunities for us to integrate and to try it on and to see if it works.

In fact, that's one of the early invitations that Jesus' followers gave to their friends.

Just come and see this man who told me everything about the life that I'm living.

So, as a recap for you, we're doing a series called The Way of Jesus.

And uh, what do we mean when we say, I follow Jesus?

You know, like it seems to me that I've I I I hear that from a number of different people, but it means different things at different times.

Like for some people, I follow Jesus means I dress a certain way and and I come to church a certain way, right?

So we want to be clear about what we mean as a church, but we also want to be clear about what we think Jesus meant.

And last week we we we started exploring the idea that, you know what, following Jesus is way more than sorting out your afterlife.

Right?

Following Jesus is about way more than just making sure that whatever happens after I die isn't really, really terrible.

Right?

That Jesus has plans for the life that you're living today.

It's more than just moral choices, though.

It's more than your politics, it's more than knowing what you believe.

It is life.

A life that Jesus imagined for us.

A life that God imagines for us.

And sometimes it gets really difficult because, you know, if you do a quick check, you can do this again this week if you want.

Like look at the person next to you.

Everybody in the room is alive, yes?

Great.

Great, that's good news.

We don't need any ambulances right now.

This is a good thing, right?

For Jesus, it seems that when he talked about life, he was talked about, he talked about something beyond our mere existence.

But that it seems for us that we define life by things that exist for us or don't exist for us, and Jesus called us to something more.

We explored how, if you go back and you look, the beginning of the story that the scriptures tell about how we began to interact with God, it was when God gave us the breath of life, and in so doing made us realize we cannot experience the life that we were designed for without God.

Coming to know God, coming to follow Jesus is the thing that gives us the purpose, that transform mere existence into life.

When we find him and we begin to learn about him, we begin to realize that our pursuits, our goals need to become something that he's pursuing.

I said last week that we need to trust that what he pursues is what's best for you.

We're invited to build our lives, as he said in Matthew chapter 7, on his foundations.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention

Build your life on the rock.

Build your life on me.

And we finished asking, what does this really look like?

How does it land in our lives?

What are the the concretes, the tangibles?

And it would be nice if Jesus was maybe a little bit more direct about some of these things when he taught.

But he did use one repetitive uh word picture to help us understand what it is that he really wants for us.

That repetitive word picture was wrapped up in the idea that God was going to bring his kingdom to earth.

And so Jesus talks a lot about the kingdom of God.

In fact, it's the most common thing if you wrap all the different topics in the Gospels together.

It was the thing that Jesus talked about the most.

More than 40 times in the four Gospels, Jesus refers to the kingdom of heaven.

Now, some of that is repetitive, but even if you take out all the repeats, there's over 12 unique stories that Jesus tells to try to help us see his vision for the world.

And so this morning I want to talk about three of those.

Three of those parables that describe the dream that Jesus has for the world and therefore for us.

And the first one sounds like this.

He told them another parable, so he's already been telling parables, but he tells them another parable.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field.

Though it's the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it's the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree.

So the birds come and perch in its branches.

Now, because Jesus uses the word garden here, I don't know about you, but when but when I was a kid, I used to think that like, you know, mustard, mustard trees were probably like bushes, you know, like like the berries grow on them or something like that.

Mustard plants are full-size trees.

Like they get mature tree-sized things.

They come from, if you've ever seen, I mean, this is just a mustard seed, you've probably seen it in your kitchen thousands of times.

And and this is a pretty famous story.

So there's lots of different interpretations for this.

In the past, I've actually spoken on this before and talked about how one of the understandings of this parable is what Jesus is saying is that small things, when trusted to God, sometimes become very big things.

Like sometimes things that we do that are very simple become huge in the life of another person.

Because God partners with us, multiplies our efforts through kindness and generosity and all of these other things, so that when we do small things, he takes them and makes them huge.

That's a perfectly good interpretation of the story.

But it's not the only one.

This is the beauty of Jesus' teaching through parables.

There's not just sort of one layer to it.

It's like an onion.

You can just keep peeling it back and peeling it back and peeling it back.

So, what else might Jesus have been saying to this?

Well, I'm gonna give some credit to uh uh another pastor, a guy named Craig Rochelle.

I stole this analogy from him, uh, so I don't want you to think I'm plagiarizing.

Uh I just borrowed it from him uh for my own purposes.

This week, uh or last week, actually, I was listening to a podcast, and he was talking about this very story.

And this is what he brought up that I thought was so fascinating.

You know, every tree, we experience trees as things that are life-giving, right?

We experience trees as something that gives back to us, right?

We all know that trees are necessary for us to like recycle the air so that we have clean air to breathe.

We all know that, right?

Trees are also a source of nutrition for us.

They give us the fruit that we enjoy in the summertime.

We're all looking forward to when fruit is in season, right?

But do you ever think about how trees, trees actually kind of start out as takers?

Right?

You put a seed in the ground, and the first thing the tree does is it grows a root system, and it just starts pulling all the moisture and the nutrients and everything else out of the ground around it.

It's very selfish, actually.

You know, seeds are very, very selfish.

But that's what immature things do, isn't it?

Isn't that how we all come into the world?

You know, those of you who have children understand this intimately.

Right?

Children do not come into the world with a sense of fairness or a concern about anybody else.

They just want what they want.

They are very, very selfish.

And when they don't get their way, they make your life miserable by making that god-awful noise that comes out of their mouth.

Right?

They just take.

They take your patience, they take your time, they take your resources, they take everything.

That's how immature things are.

Seeds are no different.

But the beauty is that if we invest in those things enough, things that take can become things that give.

That's what we experience in trees most of the time.

We don't see the whole section of their life where they're just taking and taking and taking.

What we see is the end result.

Maybe this is why sometimes we're so impatient with each other and with ourselves.

Because we don't see how nature works most of the time.

The immaturity happens under the soil.

But the goal is not to keep the seed under the soil, right?

That's a that's a loss.

If the seed never breaks through and never becomes what it's supposed to do, if it never matures, we would consider that a loss, a failure.

The way of the kingdom, I think what Jesus is trying to say here, is that the way of the kingdom, the way that he has designed the world, the way that the world is going to work best when we work fully with God is that immature things become mature things, things that take become things that give.

Jesus' dream then is that people bring whatever they have into his kingdom and for a time receive, right?

So that they can grow.

It is perfectly natural for you in the early days of your journey of faith to just receive for a little while, to get nourished for a little while.

But the way of the kingdom is not that we stay there.

I think some of the people who are most disillusioned, confused, frustrated with their experience at church are the people who stay in the receiving section too long.

And actually, the faster that you can get towards moving towards the giving section, the more and the faster and the better your experience with the kingdom of God becomes.

Because what you begin to learn are that the fruits that God wants to produce in your life are where purpose is really found.

We spent a whole eight weeks, nine weeks talking about those fruits last year.

So if you weren't here when we did our whole thing on the fruits of the Spirit and you want to catch up, you can go, it's all on YouTube.

But right, producing things like love and joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

These are the things that we are supposed to bring into the world as we receive from God and grow up and mature.

And these are the things that other people begin to get nourished by, right?

One of my favorite illustrations I've ever heard about the way that God has designed life to be lived out, if we get in tune with this vision that He has called the kingdom, and we all start to realize that it's our calling, it's our purpose to move from receiving into the giving.

There are 8.6, I think, was the statistic I was able to find.

8.6 billion of us now?

I'm not quite sure what the math is on that.

But if everybody gives 1% back into the world more than they take, our surplus is really good.

Like we don't need to worry about famine.

We don't need to worry about thirst.

We don't need to worry about the basics of life.

Everybody has what they need if everybody gets on board with this plan that Jesus has.

The kingdom is a place where everyone, everyone learns the reality of this famous phrase.

It is better to give than to receive.

The way of the kingdom moves us away from taking into giving.

Jesus continues in the same passage.

We're in Matthew chapter 13, by the way, if you didn't catch that on the notes, and Jesus tells these stories kind of in succession to one another.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

So he says, he then told them still another parable, still in parable mode.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about 60 pounds of flour until it worked all the way through the dough.

You know, one of the things that we say here is important to our church is that we remain outward facing, right?

To ensure that the fruit that's being produced, whatever's being produced in the lives of the people who call this their home, is, as God intended, being shared with the world outside.

And we talked about this a little bit last week too.

You know, if if if the word evangelism makes you cringe, you're not alone.

I think it's a word that has grabs some connotations that maybe it was never supposed to have.

So while it's uh important to me that we're an outward-facing church and that we share with those around us, it's also equally important to me for us not to make it weird.

You know?

Like not to make it something that creates this unnecessary, you know, awkwardness between people.

Sometimes going out and as Jesus said last week, you know, fishing for people, whatever word you want to use, does become awkward.

But it doesn't have to if it remains as it was intended, which is entirely relational and intentional.

I think you guys watched a video while I was on vacation where uh my friend Joel talked about our uh need to invest in the world around us until an invitation is appropriate and possible.

That's what we miss so often.

So often we're not content with the way that God wants to work in the people around us, that we force our way into situations and scenarios that God's like, your fruit isn't ripe yet.

Don't give that to anybody.

Nobody wants to eat your green banana.

You know, like nobody wants to eat your unripened fruit yet.

God is the one who makes sure that the fruit that's being produced in our lives is ready.

It's God who does the mixing in the story, right?

Ultimately, ultimately the work of drawing people into the kingdom is his.

We have a part to play, yes.

But he puts us in situations where he's produced the fruit that those people need, where it's actually wanted, where it's going to be helpful.

Right?

Let me show you one way that it worked out in my life.

When we uh were in our 30s, we were starting a church from scratch in Toronto.

Toronto is um downtown Toronto, especially, uh, which is where we live.

We live right at the corner of Blue Rennes Padina.

If you're ever there, it's the University of Toronto, is everything sort of uh south and east of the neighborhood that we lived in.

Um and and it's one of the most, you know, sort of um disinterested, disenfranchised places in our world uh as it relates to Jesus and the church and all those things.

So we knew we couldn't just show up and say, hey, we're gonna start a church, would you like to come?

That wasn't gonna work.

That we had to do some work first.

And so what we decided to do, um, you know, trying to sort of drawing on some of my my personal experience as a musician and an artist, that's what I did before I got a real job as a as a pastor, I was a worship pastor.

Um we don't have a worship pastor, so I can say that right now.

Um but um you know, I was a worship pastor and then I got a real job and became this pastor.

Okay, so uh so but but back when that was kind of like what my experience had been, we decided we were gonna go and serve people by gathering some of the artistic in community in Toronto together.

And we would host events uh at pubs and bars around downtown.

Uh our favorite venue was called the Smiling Buddha, which I thought was awesome that we were starting a church out of the Smiling Buddha anyway.

Uh we were at the Smiling Buddha, and we were doing this thing, and we and we weren't talking about Jesus at all.

We were just trying to do things that we thought people who love Jesus should do and make friends, right?

And and and what we experienced was that time and time again, Jesus would make it really clear when the fruit was ripe.

Like, so for instance, we we had this friend named Mary, and uh Mary was one of the artists.

Uh, I'll always remember Mary because if you're a child of the 90s, uh, she did an acoustic cover of Salt and Peppa's Shoop that I will never forget.

It was amazing.

It's fantastic.

If you're not from that era, that's okay.

Uh just let it go by.

But Mary had this amazing, she was a fantastic singer, guitar player, songwriter, artist.

And so it was her birthday, and we went to uh the salon where she worked.

Just in the middle of the day, we pulled up and like blocked traffic in downtown Toronto and went out and gave her a gift.

And she came out and she's like, you know what?

You guys are so different.

What what's the deal?

I don't know, we had known Mary for three or four months at the time.

And that was that was the door, that was that was the opportunity that we were waiting for, right?

We didn't really have to do anything other than love on Mary well, and God opened the door because the fruit was ready.

And we had a beautiful, growing relationship with Mary the entire six years that we were in Toronto.

See, people of the kingdom are designed to produce kingdom fruit.

People of the kingdom start out receiving, awesome, but they mature and they become a life-giving plant to everyone around them.

People of the kingdom get mixed in to the culture around them.

And and and Jesus' presence in their life creates the growth around them.

Sometimes we're just impatient with God, not on his timeline, not on his plan.

But but but can I say something?

Sometimes that becomes an excuse too.

Like we're like, well, God's not really working, so I don't really believe he's gonna work.

Or we don't really put ourselves into places where God can work, right?

Like our whole world becomes about church and church people.

Um, and and that's probably the wrong movement as well.

You know, because it seems to me that part of the the point of this story is that is that the yeast, right, is is is the active agent.

That's that's all of you, that's that's the people of the kingdom, is getting mixed into the culture around it so that it can react and grow, right?

And there's uh another really important detail with the story that we might be inclined to miss.

Let's let's read it again and I'll emphasize.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour.

Did you catch that the first time we read it?

60 pounds of flour.

Do you know how much 60 pounds of flour is?

A lot.

Right?

And and Jesus wants us to see that.

Sometimes when the Bible uses numbers and, you know, there's like the point isn't that it was exactly 60 pounds of flour, the point that it was a lot of flour.

Why?

Because 60 pounds of flour could have fed a village for a week, right?

So Jesus is not saying, hey, this little bit of yeast was given to you so that it can get mixed in with your family, and your family can grow, although he cares about that, and that's important to him.

We should notice that Jesus has an aspiration and an intention, a vision, a plan to change the community around us.

Change the whole village to provide not just for us, but for everyone.

So Jesus' vision for the kingdom is this relational living that transforms whole communities for the better.

His vision is that your life and my life are supposed to play a significant role in that work on his timeline in his way.

So the first story tells us the way of the kingdom moves from consuming to producing, from receiving to giving.

And the second story, I think, Jesus' way of the kingdom moves us outward to change families, friends, neighbors, neighborhoods, communities, etc., etc., etc.

The last parable that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 13 ties in some of what we talked about last week, right?

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

So you can go back and watch if you weren't here last week, that's okay.

That's on YouTube or our website.

And has more to do with the response that we should have, that those of us that are here should have, that those of us that are, you know, consider ourselves part of the kingdom, which you may or may not at this point, that's okay.

You're welcome, come as you are, right?

But those of us who who are um who are actively a part of what Jesus is doing in the world, right, this is this tells us about how we should be reacting.

Right?

What level of commitment, what level of reaction does Jesus say we should have when we really understand what we've been invited into?

Here's what it says the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.

And when a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went out, sold everything he had, and bought the field.

So that he would never lose it.

Guy, let me ask you a question.

What was the coolest gift you ever got for Christmas?

Just think about it for a second.

Lego?

A specific kind of Lego?

NASA.

NASA.

I was really hoping you'd say something like the Death Star or, you know.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Do you remember how many pieces were in your NASA set?

Thousands.

Yeah, this is this is like if you just went and watched uh uh Spider-Man, you saw Peter Parker and Ned working on their thousands of pieces of Lego together.

Mine was also uh hitched to a recent movie.

Uh mine was I one year for Christmas, I got every He-Man figure and the castles that went with it.

My grandma just went bonkers.

It was awesome.

It was awesome.

She said it was because I learned how to how to write my name for the first time, but it was just because my grandma was like that.

She was she was incredible.

Nanny Norma was great.

She gave me everything.

Now, here's here's the interesting part.

Um, I don't have one of those anymore.

I don't have any of them.

I wish I did.

They're probably worth a whole lot of money.

I mean, mine were probably drawn on and the arms were missing, and you know, like as kids things do.

The point is, I didn't treasure it forever.

Right?

As cool as I thought that was.

And as cool as you think.

Trev, still have the thousands of Lego?

Nope.

No, you might have one piece though, in your kids' box that made it from your house and got stuck to a piece of tape on a moving box and you know, as as things do.

But you don't have the whole set anymore.

And it's not proudly displayed in your house anywhere, no, no, right?

Like they lose their sheen.

And this is probably why the Masters of the Universe movie did so poorly, is because you know, those of us with nostalgia for these things don't hold them in high regard 40 years later, right?

You know, it it lost its shine.

And and and maybe maybe that's your story with your faith right now.

Right?

Sometimes, sometimes we move from a space where faith was really, really, really central and important to our lives.

And then our enthusiasm fades.

Right?

Maybe we still have our faith, but but it's just it's just not what it used to be.

Right?

Maybe we haven't even found our faith yet.

We're not even sure that this thing is much of a treasure at all.

Right?

But maybe it's just softened over time, found its way into a moving box, and our mom and dad threw it out after a while.

You know, if things are prone to lose their luster that way, right?

What makes the kingdom any different?

What would make someone sell everything that they have to secure one thing?

I think I think for us, I think it's how it changes our joy.

I I I I I think and that might sound like like really simplistic.

Except I don't think joy is simple.

I think happiness is simple.

You can be happy pretty quick.

Go get a taco after church, that'll make you happy.

You know, like like happiness is easy, it would make me happy anyway.

Maybe you don't like Mexican food, that's okay.

Um that would make me happy for a little while.

But I'm talking about the kind of unshakable with you always sense of purpose and peace and joy.

I think the more we discover what the kingdom really is, what it's really supposed to do, what it's really supposed to be about, the more it fills us with the things that we actually want.

Not just our craving for tacos, but the things that we, when we're alone and with our thoughts, lying in bed thinking about our day, hope defined the day that we just lived.

The kingdom is supposed to, when we realize it, when we see it for what it is, beckon us.

Beckon us like all of those movies that we've watched about treasure hunters going off to find some treasure that they've only heard about.

They give everything to become a part of the kingdom and to see it become a part of the world that we live in.

So the way of Jesus is a journey that moves us from taking to giving and discovering life's joy when we do.

These stories are woven together throughout the teachings of Jesus to help us imagine the world as it should be.

To imagine our lives as they should be.

And I wish that that meant that would just happen when we mentally ascend to the place where, yeah, I believe that.

Yeah, I believe that.

I wish it was that easy, you know?

It seems to be designed for our participation.

And what that means is that it calls to us to do something, to give something, to see it happen.

Right?

And sometimes we're frustrated by that.

You know, when when when when our when our journey towards the kingdom starts asking us for for more, right?

We're we're frustrated by that.

Because we like our stuff, we like our time, we like our resources, we like the things that we have.

But but if we're honest with ourselves, there isn't anything in life that we're building that doesn't ask us for something.

Right?

Like nothing worth having is actually free to us.

Everything costs something, right?

But the question is, what in this life am I willing to pay for?

Right?

Because selfishness costs something, consumerism costs something, isolation costs something, anxiety costs us something.

Like there's lots of things that cost us in our life.

Are we being intentional about what we're trying to bring about in our life and the life of the people around us?

Jesus invites us to invest in the dream of the kingdom.

And when we do, in my experience, I think if you if you ask around the room, it's been other people's experience, that we discover something of great value.

We find purpose that goes beyond just receiving and consumption.

And the world around us begins to change.

It grows, it becomes full of the flavor of the life that we talked about last week.

And moving from existence to life is worth everything.

That's why the most common description of what Jesus spoke about is the gospel, right?

The gospel literally just means good news.

And as we wrap up today, I just wanted to share a quick video uh with you.

If you haven't come across this resource before, I would encourage you to spend time on the website, the Bibleproject.org.

I think they do a fabulous job in helping people understand the scriptures.

This morning I only have so much time, so so I and I'm loquacious, so I talk a lot.

Um, and so I can't tell you everything that I want to tell you.

The story is so much bigger.

The Bible Project guys are good at taking really big stories and condensing them down.

So I wanted to share this one with you, and then I'll I'll come back and wrap up here in a second.

There's this beautiful poem.

It's in the book of Isaiah.

The city of Jerusalem has just been destroyed by Babylon, a great kingdom in the north.

And all of these Jewish people, they've been sent away into exile, but a few remained in the city.

And they're left wondering, what just happened?

Has our God abandoned us?

Right, because Jerusalem was supposed to be the city where God would reign over the world to bring peace and blessing to everyone.

Now, Isaiah had been saying that Jerusalem's destruction was a mess of Israel's own making.

They had turned away from their God, become corrupt, and so their city and their temple were destroyed.

Everything seems lost.

But the poem goes on.

There's a watchman on the city walls, and far out on the hills we see a messenger, and he's running towards the city.

He's running and he's shouting, Good news! And Isaiah says, How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news.

Beautiful feet?

Yes.

The feet are beautiful because they're carrying a beautiful message.

What's the message?

That despite Jerusalem's destruction, Israel's God still reigns as king, and that God himself is going to one day return to this city, take up his throne, and bring peace.

And the watchmen sing for joy because of the good news that their god still reigns.

Now in the New Testament, we find this same phrase, the good news.

It's the Greek word Ewangaleon, and it's also sometimes translated with the word gospel.

So when Christians say do you believe the gospel, they mean do you believe the news?

But not just any news.

In the Bible, this phrase is always about the announcement of the reign of a new king.

And in the New Testament, the Gospels used this phrase to summarize all of Jesus' teachings.

They say that he went about proclaiming the good news of God's kingdom.

So Jesus saw himself as the messenger, bringing the news that God reigns.

Yes, but the way that he described God's reign, it surprised everybody.

I mean, think a powerful, successful kingdom.

It needed to be strong, able to impose God's will, able to defeat its enemies.

But Jesus said the greatest person in God's kingdom was the weakest, the one who loves and who serves the poor.

And he said that you live under God's reign when you respond to evil by loving your enemies and forgiving them and seeking peace.

This is an upside-down kingdom.

Now Jesus also said that this kingdom was arriving with him.

Yeah, so for example, there's this really interesting story where there's a high-ranking Roman officer, and he comes to Jesus begging him to heal his servant.

And he even calls Jesus his Lord, acknowledging that Jesus is his authority.

Jesus praises this man for recognizing what no one else yet had.

That not only was Jesus announcing God's kingdom, he was the king.

And so the word gets out that this Jewish man from Galilee is talking and acting like he's the king of Israel.

He's appointing twelve disciples, which are an image of Israel's twelve tribes.

He's healing people, forgiving people their sins.

And all of this so threatened Israel's leaders that they finally decide to have him kill.

Jesus let them.

Yeah.

Which is a weird thing to do if you're trying to become king.

That's right.

But for Jesus, this is what had to happen.

Jesus saw the sin and the devastation of his people Israel as just one small part of the entire human condition.

How all humanity has rebelled against God, resulting in the tragedy and devastation of our whole world.

So how is God going to bring his reign over such a world?

Jesus believed it would be through an act of sacrificial love for his enemy.

This is why in the Gospels, Jesus' crucifixion is depicted as his enthronement as the king of the Jews.

Yeah, he receives a crown.

And the good news now is that Jesus has defeated death and that he reigns as king, that he's dealt with our sin and corruption himself, and that he's conquered it with his life and with his love.

And then Jesus sends his followers to go out and keep announcing this good news of the upside-down kingdom.

And to invite everyone to give their allegiance to him, the king who defeated death with his love.

The truth is the whole of Scripture is pointing towards the good news.

Why should we pay attention?

Why should we even consider the notion that we might give anything to see Jesus' kingdom come true in our time for our family, our friends, our communities?

The answer is Jesus.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

There are so many competing stories for our attention and for our allegiance.

So many versions of this existence that we can participate in.

Why this one?

I'm gonna steal another line from another preacher because I think it sums it up beautifully.

For me, it's become pretty simple.

If a man can predict his own death and resurrection, and then pull it off, I'm gonna do whatever he says.

Let's pray together.