False Security | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Okay, today is the last message in our series called the Prophetic Anthology.

We're looking at we're looking at the 12 minor prophets and the six major themes of those 12 books.

I gotta be honest with you, it was a little nerve-wracking preaching a series on the minor prophets in June.

Alright, you just never know how that's gonna go.

Alright, June's already usually people start traveling and leaving, and sometimes, you know, people are like, I don't know if I want to go to church.

It's sunny today.

And then the pastor's preaching on the minor prophets.

You're like, yeah, you know what?

I think I'll mow the lawn.

You know, I'm good.

Okay, and you just never know how people are gonna respond.

But you guys have been down for it, man.

I I gotta commend you.

I I've just, it's been kind of cool from my perspective, just a lot of people sharing with me testimonies of the way God's used these messages.

It never ceases to amaze me because the Bible sometimes gets a bad rap as this archaic, old, antiquated book, and yet you start looking at things that are, you know, 2,800 years old, okay, and you find just unbelievable similarity to the world that we live in right now.

The application often isn't that hard to see.

It's sitting right there if we look at it the right way.

So that's what we've been trying to do.

Uh when you think of the minor prophets, if you've not been here, I'll give you just a few things so you don't get lost.

Um, minor prophets, when you hear minor, it doesn't mean lesser.

It doesn't mean that they were less significant or that their messages were less important than anybody else.

It just means the books are concise and short.

That's why they're called the minor prophets.

And then the idea of a prophet is someone who God raises up to disrupt the status quo.

In other words, it's a godly disruption.

When we think of disruption, usually we think about someone who's antisocial or someone who's antagonistic.

But God would use these prophets not to be antagonistic for the sake of division, but for uh contrition and for repentance and for getting people back on track.

And we've just been honest about that since the beginning of this series, that no matter how much you mean well, no matter how sincere you are, all of us find ourselves off course from time to time.

So we just mature enough to know that sometimes the lesson I don't want to hear is the message I most need to hear.

And sometimes God may even use a messenger that I wouldn't have asked for to deliver that thing.

And sometimes it's delivered in a provocative way because sometimes it takes shocking things to shock the system.

And so we we've seen that all throughout the book, and we've predetermined to be receptive to whatever God would want to say to us.

Uh we talked about the six themes, uh, well, five uh five, and we're gonna get the sixth today, but the we talked about idolatry, we talked about predatory economics, uh, religious hypocrisy, shallow worship, and bad leadership.

And today we're going to complete the six with the theme false security.

False security is trusting the wrong things for safety.

Trusting the wrong things for safety.

Uh, what I'm going to do is show you again, if we looked at those 12 books together, you would see that there were four things that the nation of Israel, who at the time was a divided nation, okay, so they're a northern and southern kingdom.

When you read the minor prophets, when you see Israel, it's talking about the northern kingdom.

Some of your translations say Ephraim.

Whenever you see Ephraim, don't get confused by that.

It's not talking about individuals' name, it's talking about the northern kingdom.

That's shorthand language for the northern kingdom.

And then Judah is the southern kingdom.

So you have within the kingdom of Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms, uh, you have really four big things that cause them to put their security, their safety in these things, and these things were misplaced as we're going to look.

The first is they believed that because we are part of God's in-group, we're safe.

In other words, the nation of Israel had a covenant with God.

So they had a covenant, they had God's law, so they had the Torah, God's command.

Uh, they knew the one true God, Yahweh.

And so, in their minds, because we are God's chosen people and we have the temple and we have the promised land, we're good.

Like God likes us better than everybody else.

And uh, you know, whatever we do, it's gonna be fine because we're in God's in-group.

Micah 3.11 says, uh, her leaders, speaking of the nation, her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, her prophets tell fortunes for money, yet they look to the for the Lord's support and say, Is not the Lord among us?

No disaster will come upon us.

In other words, they they they sort of think their corruption is no big deal because they're God's people.

Okay, because we're part of the in-group.

We got the right theology, we know the one true God.

Therefore, all these things we're doing that are out of alignment with the word of God and the heart of God, they're not that big a deal because we're God's people.

Look in Amos 9:7.

Amos 9:7

God says, Are you Israelites more important to me than the Ethiopians?

Ask the Lord.

I brought Israel out out of Egypt, but I also brought the Philistines from Crete and led the Arameans out of Kerr.

In other words, yeah, of course, I know you love the story of how I brought you out of Egypt and the Exodus, but don't forget, like, I made everyone in my image.

Uh I love the Ethiopians too.

I love the Arameans too.

Uh, I love the Philistines too.

And so they thought because they had got a covenant with God and they had the temple of God, that somehow uh that they were safe and that their conduct and behaviors didn't matter.

Uh the next thing is uh they were they had a false security in their imperial alliances.

Okay, in other words, our powerful superpower allies will protect us.

Hosea 7, 11 says, the people of Israel have become silly, witless doves, first calling to Egypt, then flying to Assyria for help.

Okay, so it paints a picture of a bird flitting back and forth between these two empires.

And of course, you have to remember Israel is a relatively small nation.

And so they're they're among, they're they're constantly being pressured by uh foreign empires.

And it says, so instead of looking to God's word and and looking to God to be their protector, okay, they go to these other nations and they broker deals with them, they pay tributes to them, okay, in a way that, again, it's not like it's necessarily wrong to have a foreign alliance, but the way they were going about it is they're paying financial tributes to get these empires off their back, but instead of the elites, the people with the wealth paying it, they actually the elites broker the deal and then they pass the cost down to the people at the bottom, and so they're buying off Egypt and they're buying off Assyria at the expense of their own countrymen, of their own brethren.

And so, because of that, they think they're safe because the king of Assyria is off our back and Pharaoh's not giving us a problem.

Meanwhile, you offended God and you don't really seem to care too much about that.

Um Hosea 12, 1 says, the people of Israel feed on the wind, okay, which is a metaphor of uh eating something that will not sustain you.

You you're trying to live on something that cannot nourish you.

So it says they they feed on the wind, and it said they chase after the east wind all day.

They pile up lies and violence.

Look at this.

They're making an alliance with Assyria while sending olive oil to buy support from Egypt.

So their foreign alliances, they actually valued above being faithful to God and God's word.

The next was they trusted in their military strength.

They thought, because uh because we are uh have a great military, we're fine.

Uh Hosea 10, 13 says, You have eaten the fruit of lies, trusting in your military might, believing that great armies could make your nation safe.

Uh the fourth false security they had was they trusted in their prosperity.

They thought we're safe because we can hide behind our financial fortresses.

Hosea 12 8, Israel boasts, I am rich.

I've made a fortune all by myself.

No one can has caught me cheating.

My record is spotless.

Hosea 13 4, when I fed them, this is God speaking, when I fed them, they were satisfied, and when they were satisfied, they became proud, and then they forgot me.

It did not fit into their theological framework to think that they could be prosperous financially and for God to still have a problem with them.

The way that they believed, their theological framework was if we are doing our duty at the temple, we're checking the religious boxes, and we have financial prosperity, that is proof, open and shut proof, that God is on our side, that God is happy with us.

And one of the messages that the prophets had a very hard time getting across is that prosperity is not proof of God's approval.

I just want to sit here for a quick second and make sure that we don't buy the same convoluted theology that they did.

Prosperity, okay, is not necessarily proof of God's approval.

God cares how you got it.

God cares what it took to get it and what you had to do to people in order to get, okay.

There's nothing wrong with having stuff.

There's nothing wrong with having power or prosperity.

Those things are not wicked in and of themselves.

The question is, what did it, what did it take to get it?

And so just having it doesn't mean that you're blessed.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the confusion.

We we just looked at the confusion they were in.

The question is, how did we get so confused?

And second is, how do we get out of here?

Okay?

How do we get here and how do we get out of here?

So let's take everything we just talked about, we'll set it on the shelf, we'll come back to it in a second.

I want to go back to when I talked to you guys about idolatry, uh, I shared something with you.

I want to go back and revisit as a foundation to answer those questions.

So if you remember, we talked about with idolatry, we talked about we have reasonable desires that are reasonable but corruptible.

And if they're corrupted, okay, if they're corrupted, then ultimately they go from reasonable desires to ultimate demands.

Okay, and so we talked about four reasonable desires power, pleasure, peace, and connection.

Right?

Those are not bad, those are good things.

In fact, power, having a measure of power, we would use the term agency.

Right?

The idea that you're an empowered person, that's not that's not a bad thing.

That's a good thing for you to have agency.

Okay, that's a good thing that you have ability.

The New Testament calls them gifts.

God made certain people have gifts to do certain things well.

Okay, you have ability, and part of that ability is then responsibility, that you now have something that you carry, some authority.

That's good.

All the way back in the garden, God gives Adam the authority to name all the animals.

He gives them the power to work the land and to work together with God.

So you get some power.

We don't let it go to our heads, or we shouldn't, but it's nice to have some power.

That's good.

It's agency.

Uh pleasure, okay, delight.

We are sensory beings.

We have, you know, taste, see, smell, sound.

Uh I think I missed one.

Touch.

Okay, you get it.

Uh you have you have you have senses and and uh nerves, and when you have a sensory experience, it's awesome.

You see something great.

You want someone else, hey, did you see that?

You see that, hey, run it back.

I want you to see this.

I want you to see the same thing I see.

Okay, you taste something awesome.

You're like, oh, eat this, try this.

I want you to try this.

Okay, you want people to taste it, and and and when you have that, oh, this is so good, and then they go, ooh, that's just isn't that great?

That's just a wonderful part of the human experience, right?

Okay, we get the idea, beautiful sounds.

I mean, just a moment ago, the choir, you know, just I even told them, I'm like, I love our musicians, they're incredible.

But I was like, don't overpower those voices, because boy, when those that choir, when they all are singing in synchrony, it does so.

I want everyone to hear that.

It's just powerful, it's a sensory experience, right?

So you get the idea, like this, these are good things, and it brings delight, okay, back to the garden.

All these fruit trees, just eat eat of all of them except one, but but but eat, you just get all a get a good taste that's a proper sensory experience.

And then peace, right?

Stability, order, rest.

Order's great.

Have you ever just cleaned a room and just been like, ah, like it was just it was just messy for a while, and you you start cleaning it, and you just you got that thing done, you're like, ooh, man, that's good.

You say if you ever cleaned a room so good, you set up a chair and just looked at it.

Just like, ooh, that feels good.

I've done the opposite too, man.

I I I've gone in, man, the room was dirty.

I was too tired to clean it.

I just went to a different room.

I've just gone room to room, all through the house, so I found a clean one.

Just to get a little bit of peace, okay?

A little bit of peace, a little bit of order is good.

Rest is good when you're nice and rested, having something to just relax.

Okay, this is peace.

You're supposed to have this.

Reasonable desire.

Connection, belonging.

Man, we had men's night the other night on Friday night.

It was great.

It was great, okay?

You know why?

Connection.

I mean, we had a beef jerky wall, which I was, I couldn't wait to get here just to see what that was.

I was like, beef jerky wall?

What is it?

You know what it is?

It's a wall with beef jerky, is what it is.

And I've had more than my fair share.

And then, and then I mean, there was a chicken wing eating contest, which I mean, nobody loses when everyone's eating chicken wings.

It was great.

Three-point shooting.

Okay, we had all these activities.

We could have been doing anything, dude.

We were together.

It's awesome.

Belonging, man.

I've got my tribe, I've got my people, I belong here.

I give and receive love.

This is good.

This is what families are about, this is what communities are about.

Okay.

What what the Old Testament would call this 250 times is the word shalom.

Most of the time it shows up as the word peace in English, but it peace isn't big enough.

It needs all of this.

The Hebrew word is a range of meaning, and it means all of this.

It's a good life.

Not perfect.

Not perfect doesn't mean it's free of conflict.

We're not talking about a fantasy.

We're talking about real world.

I'm in right relationship.

I have agency.

I'm not good at everything, but I'm good at some things, and I know my place in the community.

I get to contribute, I give, I receive, I'm loved, I give and receive love, I have some rest, I do some hard work, okay, and I have a proper sensory experience.

That's a real good life.

Now, here's the problem.

We are vulnerable.

We are vulnerable.

Vulnerability leads to fear.

Once I realize that these things can be, I'm vulnerable to not having them.

In other words, the first time somebody broke up with you, okay, you're in a romantic relationship or you're dating, someone broke up with you against your will.

You wanted to be with them, they didn't want to be with you.

You felt what it felt like to lose the power, something was taken away from you, and you you felt pain.

You felt what a broken heart feels like.

You felt what it's like to want someone to not be wanted back to feel that level of rejection.

Okay, when someone took something or somebody walked away from you or took something away against your will, or someone died and there was nothing you could do about it.

Okay, uh, you we understand that we can lose agency.

If somebody uh took your agency away, someone abused you, okay, someone someone hurt you, okay.

Now you understand your vulnerability, that vulnerability leads to fear.

I'll never forget 17 years ago my first child was born.

And I'll never forget that.

And I remember leaving the uh uh hospital, and leaving the hospital, we load that baby carrier and and and the baby seat, and then I'm in charge of driving, and I I remember like it was yesterday.

I grabbed that wheel at 10 and 2.

Yes, sir.

Right for decades I've been doing this.

And I put that baby in there, and it was like back to the fundamentals, okay?

And all of a sudden I became a defensive driver.

And trust anybody.

Look both ways like 10 times.

Just make sure nobody's coming yet.

Okay?

I remember before I put it in drive, I remember thinking now somebody could hurt me.

But before you hurt me, I you just hurt me.

I can get through it.

You you heard her?

You can really hurt me.

You can really hurt me.

I felt vulnerable.

A few months later, in our neighborhood, the the we were in Toledo at the time, the economy was down, and during when the economy went down, people started breaking into people's homes.

So there were all these burglaries in our neighborhood.

And I came out one day, this is a Ella is an infant.

I come, I came out, my neighbor stand out there, he said, You hear what happened?

I said, No, what happened?

He said, Last night, he he works third shift.

He worked third shift, he's at work, his wife calls him in a panic.

What's going on?

She she said, I can hear adult male voices in the baby monitor coming into the room, and our child, there's grown men trying to break in our baby's window.

So he's in the car driving home as fast as he can, on the phone, trying to support his wife, okay, and talk her through all this.

He tells me that, and I had this whoosh of fear and vulnerability.

And so I went to Cleeland's outdoor world.

And Cleeland and I came up with a plan as to how my house was gonna be safer today than it was yesterday.

Some of you know what I'm talking about?

Few of you are judging me right now, and I couldn't care less.

That's your problem.

You gotta deal with being judgmental.

Some of you are judging, that's fine, dude.

I don't care.

We ain't even having that conversation today.

Few of you are judging me, and a few of you are like, yeah, bro, I got one too.

Alright, so the idea of being overpowered in something that could crush my spirit made me feel vulnerable, which provoked fear, which led to overwhelming need, demand for control.

If you've been hurting relationships, you're gonna be tempted to want to control relationships.

You've been hurting your finances, you're gonna want to control those finances.

Anywhere that you experience pain and hurt and vulnerability and fear, you're gonna want to take control.

Pleasure, same thing.

If you deal with uh the opposite of pleasure is what pain.

You suffer.

Or you're numb.

Okay, or you're you you're you're deprived, sense, you know, deprivation.

Okay, you get to this place where where you now are are it goes from just simply being delight to indulgence.

Indulgence.

In other words, I'm I'm overindulging.

It's I I just want to feel good.

If you've been under pressure and you've been in pain or you've been numb for a long time, you just I just want to feel good.

And there's people all the time who make decisions that they know are bad.

They know this is not gonna quench the thirsting of my soul, they know this isn't taking me, but I just want to feel good today.

I just want to feel good right now because I I've gotten to this place where in my vulnerability and in my fear and in my suffering, now I'm over here.

Peace, right?

The opposite is anxiety.

You're dealing with anxiety, your your your world is chaos, right?

So now often that leads to an escape.

I'm just trying to escape, I'm trying to get out, and my uh my my mind is racing so much I can't sort it out.

And so you look for an escape.

It could be through a substance, it could be through some activity.

I just want to forget about my reality.

And then again, connection.

Uh if belonging is at its best, at its worst, it's it's isolation, it's loss.

Again, it might be someone who literally walked out on you, or it might be someone who died.

They just they they didn't do anything wrong, they just died and and they're gone.

And so now that loss makes me want to just hang on to everybody, and so now, again, at its worst, it becomes code dependent.

Code-dependent.

Okay.

And so we understand how how this, how fear and vulnerability now takes these this idea of shalom, and it takes us out of bounds, and it makes us prone to not only idols or syncretized theologies, but what it does also that we've not talked about yet, is it distorts healthy community and robs us of communal relational shalom.

I want you to think about this.

This here, this security is designed to be delivered in community.

Okay?

So, in other words, I have my ability and my responsibility, and in the healthy community, we esteem people for doing their part.

We don't create some hierarchy.

You may have an org chart, so to speak, or there may be some different levels of authority or power based on clarity, but in a healthy community, we know it takes a lot of people doing a lot of things to make the world go round, and you don't have to be at the top of the food chain to be honored.

We understand you did your thing.

Thank you for using your gift to contribute to the community.

So there's esteem, there's honor, there's respect within the community.

People are treated right.

And you know, again, this is language we've already used.

Hesed, unfailing love, mercy.

It's a commitment to a person.

So the Hesed that we receive from God, his covenantal love and mercy, we then he says over and over again through the prophets, okay?

I'm just connecting dots back to, I don't want us to miss this and all the six messages.

He got God keeps bringing them back.

The Hesed that you get from me in the covenant needs to become part of the security of your community that you give to each other.

So the idea of a commitment to one another, the idea of Mishpat, which is restorative justice.

Not only if somebody messes up and breaks the law, we want to help them get back to the best version of themselves.

Or maybe for some to get to the best version of themselves for the first time.

But for others who maybe shot their shot in a business deal or they tried to do the right thing and somehow a famine hit or sickness hit or something outside.

We want to we're gonna lend to them without a bunch of interest because we don't want to drown them in that.

We want them to get out.

It's why it's built into the law.

Don't harvest the edges of your land because somebody's going through a hard time.

They also are an image bearer.

Don't make them come knock on your door.

Uh help yourself, man.

That tree's for you, bro.

Get what you need, get the sustenance you need.

We're in the same community.

We're living in Shalom, Hesed, um, Mishpat.

And so this is what God gave them.

This is the ethos of their community.

But instead of following what God gave them and the ultimate security coming again from relationship with God and each other, they buy into, they flip back and forth between Assyria and Egypt.

And what happens is empire is built not on the power of love, but on the love of power and the power of fear.

And so now empires are designed to have transactional relationships.

Transactional relationships.

Not simply reciprocal, right?

Reciprocal makes sense.

We understand the ecosystem, things are circular.

We understand you give and receive love and we replenish.

We're not talking about that, we're talking about transactional, which is I only do this if you have value and you can offer something, that all of that represents your value.

If you don't have that, you're worthless, right?

If I'm a Hebrew slave in Egypt and I can't make bricks, I have no value.

And in an empire, when you have no value, you're eliminated.

You're discarded.

We don't need you.

You're just another mouth to feed that can't work.

And so what happens to me?

I'm gone.

What happens to my wife and kids?

They end up going and having to earn some value.

So the idea that in an empire mentality, what you have is people now substitute shalom and relational connection, true relational security for a fake version of that, which is essentially me buying tokens that I can exchange within the culture and actually having transactional relationships instead of covenant relationships.

I've got some good stuff.

If you like like uh reading um academic papers and things like this, uh, especially if you're kind of a psychology enthusiast, okay, I've got stuff because by the way, modern psychology proves what I'm saying over and over and over again.

Um essentially, it says this.

Well, I'll I'll actually show you the paper.

If you want to go fact-check me, read the stuff on your own, okay.

Go ahead and bring it up.

I'm gonna cite my source, so I'm not up here going, somebody said something one time, and you're like, whatever, dude.

Okay, so look at this.

The symbolic power of money, okay.

So this is published in the Journal of Psychological Science.

So this is uh the symbolic power of money, reminders of money alter social distress and physical pain.

Okay, so you see that.

Strict screenshot it and go read it on your own time if you're into that.

But I'm gonna summarize it for you.

This is what they say.

The higher level of relational connection that you have and relational satisfaction.

In other words, if I said, tell me how do you feel in your human relationships, in your home, in your extended family, in your community, in your okay, in your relationships, how secure do you feel?

How connected do you feel?

And if you go really high, I feel really accepted, I feel unconditionally loved.

I believe in my circle, in my people, if something happens to me, if I end up for some reason, man, uh hungry, if I end up homeless, if I end up jobless, if I end up in a spot where I really don't have anything to offer according to the culture, I believe that there are people that love me based on who I am enough.

Someone's gonna give me something to eat, someone's gonna help me get a place safe, someone's gonna help give me a shot, get me back on my feet.

Okay, at some point I'm gonna have to work for myself because nobody gets to just be dead weight and have people dragging them through life.

I will have to get back up, but I know if I'm down, I've got people that help me up.

So if you are like that, if that's if you have a high relational satisfaction, I feel fulfilled and connected, they have a much lower materialistic drive.

And the opposite is also true.

So, in other words, uh people that have low satisfaction, they go, I'm you want to know what I believe?

I believe if I can't produce, nobody will be there for me.

If I end up hungry, they'll let me fend for myself.

If I end up with that, nobody's even gonna let me sleep on their couch.

I I think if I'm destitute, they're gonna let me be destitute.

If that's your belief, it literally immediately provokes materialism.

Yeah.

A desire to a craving for money, a craving for status, a craving to find any sort of social capital that I can have because my belief is if I'm not pretty enough or I'm not powerful enough or I don't have enough resources, I'm in an empire.

And the empire is materialistic, and the empire, the empire is driven by transactional relationships.

And if I have nothing to transact with, I've lost faith that anybody's gonna love me for me.

So because you don't love me for me, I'm gonna make sure I have something to trade with.

And if I have nothing to trade with, and by the way, I'll have a fear in the back of my mind that what I have to trade with isn't enough, and I could lose it.

So I live in this constant fear that leads to shallow relationships, which leads to vicious cycles.

I know I'm talking fast, but just hang with me.

It leads to vicious cycles like this.

I'm a workaholic.

Why am I a workaholic?

Because I'm trying to get some capital to make sure I don't end up suffering and no one cares.

I don't end up depleted and no one cares.

I really deep down, I want agency, delight, stability, and belonging.

I want shalom.

But but we've gone a long way from that.

Now I'm just trying to control and I'm trying to make sure that if nobody it's dog eat dog out there, if nobody looks out for me, if I if I'm vulnerable in any way, okay, I'm gonna end up by myself, I'm gonna end up alone.

It's it's terrible, it's it's a visceral fear.

And so, because of that, that's why I work so hard.

But here's the problem with that workaholic ends up spending all their time with workaholics who are also in transactional relationships, so your best energy and your most of your waking hours are working with other transactional people who are all playing nice because we work together, but we all know if I can't produce, I get eliminated.

And that's who I'm giving my best to, and the people I'm in covenant with only get me when I'm wiped out.

When I've got nothing to give.

I'm not even cultivating those relationships.

I'm not making space for those people.

Because I don't, why?

Because I have a deep fear that's driving me.

I'm I'm gonna help somebody today.

I probably not everybody.

Some of you guys are past this.

I'm gonna help somebody with this.

There are some of you today, there are some of you today who love God, love God, committed to God, faithful to God, but you've got this gnawing issue of greed, materialism.

You care way more about what people think than you want to admit.

You're always trying to level up on status, you're always puffing your chest out, trying to show everybody how successful you are.

You find yourself acting like you have more money than you do, trying to look like you have more money, you got no cash because you're in debt, trying to pay off one credit card with another so you can get another materialistic thing, and you know it's off, you know it's bad, and you love God, and you know, you keep saying, Yeah, I still have an issue with greed.

Yeah, I still have an issue with status, and you can't figure out why God won't deliver you from it.

And this is why I'm gonna just help you right now.

The issue is not you and God, the issue is your human relationships are shallow.

And it might start in your own marriage, it might be within your own people, your own family, the people closest to you, that you feel deep down, if I can't produce, I will be eliminated.

And so, because of that, the draw for materialism, you keep calling it greed, but I'm gonna I'm gonna rename it today.

It's survival.

You're actually probably not that greedy, you just want some peace.

You really want to be loved, but you've given up on that because the empire has taken over, and the empire set the tone of the culture.

We got away from covenant, we got away from Hesed, we got away from Mishpat.

This old archaic book that's been telling the truth from the beginning.

So, how how can you be in the world and not of the world?

How do we get out of this mess?

How do we live in a world that's driven by the love of power and the power of fear?

People that are so far entrenched in transactional relationships, I might have to fake like I'm more successful, I'm smarter, I'm stronger, so that I have something to trade on.

Otherwise, I get eliminated.

How do we get out of it?

I end with this.

Where I love to end every chance I get with Jesus.

I appreciate you guys being patient.

Alright, this is my third time doing this.

The other ones is like we gotta turn the lot over.

There ain't nobody else coming.

Alright, so I'm gonna just give me like seven minutes to go over on this one if you don't mind.

I will wrap it up.

So Matthew 25.

Matthew 25, here's what's going on.

It's called the Olivet Discourse.

It's basically right before Jesus goes to the cross.

He's on the Mount of Olives.

He has his disciples.

They're literally looking down at the temple.

Jesus is giving them, uh, trying to, I mean, you know, when you're about to go to the cross, everything we're talking about is the stuff that really matters.

We're wasting no words now.

This is very important.

I want to make sure you get it.

And so in Matthew 25, 31, Jesus starts out, he says, uh, but when the when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne.

Now, what he's doing here is he's borrowing prophet language.

This is all, it's all rings of the Old Testament.

He's pulling from Daniel, he's pulling from uh uh Ezekiel, he's pulling from a lot of these prophets, and it's creating throne imagery, but it's like royal judgment.

So the king's about to judge.

And it says, All the nations will be gathered in his presence.

This is apocalyptic literature.

It's it's it's uh he's reaching to the past and he's reaching to the future, and he says, uh, all the nations will be gathered in his presence, and he will separate the people as a shepherd separates sheep from goats.

Okay, now, sheep, again, they would have gotten it like this.

Sheep were seen as obedient animals.

These are the ones that remember John 10, where he says, I think it's 1027, he says, My sheep know my voice.

All right, they know me.

We're connected.

I say something, they follow.

In fact, he says, the bad leader, the false shepherd, has to scare the sheep because the sheep won't follow them.

So they go, boo, scare them, so then they'll run, they can get them to move.

But instead, a shepherd doesn't have to do that.

They the sheep know his voice and they follow him.

So the idea that the sheep, okay, these are the true followers, and the goats are the ones that are disobedient and hard to work with, right?

They're the ones that there's the difference.

By the way, again, in their world, just to let me teach for a quick second, what what you have is in the in the royal metaphor, they often would use shepherds for with kings.

So the king, even though they're, again, they're not physically in a field, they're saying, I'm like the shepherd of the nation.

In fact, if you've ever wondered, why did a king have a scepter?

That's kind of weird, right?

Like they're holding this royal stick.

Like, what is a scepter?

Well, scepter was shepherd imagery.

So think about the Lord is my shepherd, right?

And he says, by your rod and your staff, right?

They comfort me.

Well, what is a rod and a staff?

The rod and the staff are there to not only guide the sheep in the right direction, but they're there to take care of the predator.

So this is a I'm I'm gonna protect you with the rod and the staff.

I'm gonna fight for you.

So the king's job is not only to guide the people, but to keep the predators off.

So the idea of a scepter was like a staff.

It was like using shepherd imagery, but in a royal sense that this is the king's job to love the people.

Okay, as if they were, he was a shepherd and they were the sheep.

So he says, okay, so at the end of days, you've got now you've got this visual.

Royal imagery.

It's like somewhere between a throne scene and a judgment scene.

And he says, I'm going to separate the sheep and the goats.

Verse 33 says, and he'll place uh the sheep at my right hand and the goats on his left.

And verse 34, the king will say to those on his right, the the sheep, the the true followers, he says, Come, you who are blessed by my father, and inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world.

And why?

Why us?

What makes us sheep?

Why would we get such an honor?

Verse 35.

I was hungry and you fed me.

I was thirsty and you gave me a drink.

I was a stranger and you invited me into your home.

I had nothing to transact with.

I had no status, I had no money.

In fact, I was nothing but a hungry, thirsty, naked stranger.

And you brought me in.

I was I was naked, you gave me clothing.

I was sick.

I couldn't even work, and you cared for me.

I was in prison.

I was incarcerated, I was locked up, I had all of my liberties taken away, and you cared about Mishpat to help restore me.

You visited me, you valued me when I had no value to offer you.

And he says, These righteous ones will reply.

What?

Lord, when did that happen?

I don't remember that.

We did all that?

When when did we do that for you?

I don't remember seeing you out there.

When were you hungry and we fed you?

When were you thirsty and we gave you something to drink?

When were you a stranger and we gave hospitality or naked and gave clothes?

I don't we don't even remember this.

What are you talking about?

When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visited you?

And the king will say, I tell you the truth.

When you did it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me.

When you brought shalom, God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

When you did it for the person who had no transactional value, you did it unto me.

And then he goes on to talk to the goats.

And he says, you know, depart from me.

I never knew you.

He says, you know, and he goes through the same thing.

I was hungry, you didn't feed me, I was naked, you didn't care about it.

I was a stranger, you didn't bribe.

Okay, he goes through all that, and they're like, When, Lord?

We don't remember.

So what's funny is both the people that were the sheep and got it right, and the goats that missed the whole thing, they're both shocked.

It's almost like one of those tests.

You think you're taking one test, but you're actually taking a different test.

You come in, they got you doing this test, and you think it's about this, but the whole time they were testing you on something you didn't even know you were being tested on.

So he says, He says, I know my sheep, and my sheep know my voice.

And he says, the ultimate measure of this will be how it comes out in terms of how you do a relationship with each other.

And of course, some say, Well, Lord, if if we would have known it was you, we would have done it.

And he goes, I know.

Now you know.

So here's here's the reality.

The world's not gonna teach us how to do this.

Empires don't do this.

Empires don't do this.

So we have to figure out how to be in the world and not of the world.

We don't have the magic button to go fix everybody.

We can start with ourselves.

We can turn that mirror around, we can start in our homes.

We we may need a new vision for our marriage.

We may need a new vision for our family, how we think about each other.

We we may have to start something that we've never seen done before.

We may have to create a new Hesed, Mishpat, Shalom family culture when we came out of chaos.

When we came out of dysfunction.

We have to decide what kind of community we will be within the community.

What kind of church do we want to be?

What kind of neighborhood do you want to live in?

What are we gonna be?

What are we gonna be?

Today I leave you with three questions that I ask you to bring to the Lord.

First question is, what am I looking to for security that I should be looking to God for?

Is there anywhere in your life that you have a false security?

You've been looking to something for control.

Maybe your vulnerabilities led to fear, and that fear has led you to then start to create idols and to look to other things other than God.

The second is what fear is driving my need for control, accumulation, or self-protection?

What fear is driving that?

The third is, has my pursuit of security made me more generous or more guarded?

Let's pray together.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

Lord, we refuse to allow ourselves to become discouraged by the world around us.

And we also refuse to become discouraged in well-doing.

Because we know in due time we'll reap a harvest if we faint not.

Lord, we thank you for the way that even a Bible with 66 books and an Old Testament and a New Testament, an old covenant, and new covenant, we can really boil it down to some simple things you really care about.

That our relationship with you is a demonstration of unconditional love and commitment that then we should offer to our brothers and sisters.

That, Lord, your justice is restorative justice.

And Lord, that justice should be offered to restore ourselves and the people around us.

Lord, it's your will for our lives and our community that we find the appropriate power, pleasure, peace, and connection.

And yet we, Lord, we know that life often throws curveballs.

And in this community, God, I pray that you would shape us as imperfect as we are, as vulnerable as we are, to be able to create a community that makes what happens here on earth look an awful lot of like what you intend for it to look from heaven.

Help us to be a community of shalom.

And Lord, every time we veer off course, send a prophet.

Send a prophet, send somebody to call it out.

Lord, even if that doesn't it's not somebody preaching from a stage, maybe it's not even somebody who's who's quoting scripture and verse, Lord, do whatever.

Bring it, bring it in a song, bring it in a documentary.

Lord, bring it, bring it in the most unlikely source, Lord.

Help us to see, help us to see, give us ears to hear, give us eyes to see.

For your glory in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.