Authority in the Kingdom

We're in the uh a series right now we're calling the kingdom of God.

And uh this is what Jesus in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what Jesus talked about.

Said he came talking about the good news of the kingdom, the you on Gileon of the Kingdom, announcing that there's a new kingdom that's here.

And so we took last week and we uh took a whole message to talk about how that would have been heard by the people that Jesus was talking to, and what are the uh the distractions or the things that would have prohibited them from fully picking up what Jesus was putting down.

And ironically, uh we find a lot of similar things that are distractions or things that we would have a hard time being able to see past in order to receive what Jesus actually meant when he talks about the kingdom of God.

Uh last week we did a compare and contrast to the empire mentality, is what we called it.

So we looked all the way back at the earliest civilizations and a lot of the early empires, all the way up to modern uh nations, and we found that there's some things in common, that it's they're built on the love of power and also on the power of fear.

Sometimes people who crave power they do it because they're just narcissistic, egotistical.

They like to manipulate, they like to control people.

But often people crave power not for that reason.

Sometimes they're just afraid of not being in power.

So why would you want to be big and powerful and wealthy and all these things?

Well, it might be because you want to pull the strings and manipulate people, but it might not be that.

It might be simply you you want to be impenetrable yourself.

You want to be able to protect yourself.

And so again, nations and empires are built on that.

When Jesus came talking about the kingdom, he wasn't talking about government, he wasn't talking about military, he was talking about human beings, hearts, relationships, families, communities, and uh ultimately how that functions best.

And then he serves not only to teach that way, but as a personal example.

And so we're gonna look into that today.

I want to uh pick up where we left off last week.

It was in a conversation where Jesus is talking to his disciples who are having a hard time seeing past empire, and he says to them in Matthew 20, verse 25, He said, You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, right?

Matthew 20:25

So again, power, love of power, they lord over their people, and the officials flaunt their authority over those under them.

Okay, again, fear, they cast fear, and he said, But among you it will be different.

Whoever wants to be leader among you must be a servant, whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave.

Even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve humbly and to give his life as a ransom to sacrifice for many.

I want to zero in on that word authority, the word authority.

In fact, today's message uh is going to be about authority in the kingdom.

Authority in the kingdom.

That's gonna be kind of our big word authority.

Um, okay, if you look at this, and if you were to read in the original language here, you would see the root word that's used in authority is the word exusia.

The word exusia shows up a hundred, oh over a hundred times in the New Testament.

Um, couple little Bible study things to think about.

So if we think about um biblical Hebrew, okay, and the the vocabulary and the number of words that were available to the people who wrote in biblical Hebrew, they had about 8,000 words at their disposal.

8,000.

If you compare that to Webster's dictionary in modern English, okay, there are about 470,000 words in the dictionary.

470,000 entries in Oxford's English dictionary.

So you're talking about a whole bunch more words available.

Languages evolve.

If you actually look at our modern language, you'll see it's even a few other interesting things.

Like we have about 170 to 200,000 words that we would call common English words.

Okay, they're just part of your vocabulary.

We talk, we understand each other.

470,000 entries.

But if you look at like words, there are words that aren't English, but we understand.

So for example, cannoli.

All right, cannoli is not an English word, cannoli is an Italian word.

But if you watch The Godfather Part One, after that one scene, they say, leave the gun, take the cannoli.

You knew what it meant.

You knew don't act like you haven't seen The Godfather.

You're all holy in church.

You're like, what?

I've never seen such a thing.

I only read my Bible.

Yeah, whatever.

Um we know what cannoli is.

You know what teriyaki is, right?

I ordered teriyaki chicken.

Nobody has to explain, you know what it is.

It's not an English word, but if you take words like teriyaki and cannoli, it's like a million words.

It's a lot.

So we have a lot of words to work with.

The reason I tell you that is because when you're reading your Bible in English, it's coming from a language that had much limited vocabulary, but the words are packed with a range of meanings.

And that's why if you were to read in the original language, you would see often like a word like exusia would show up in the original writing, but then it would have different meanings when translated into English.

So here's what we're gonna do so that we can understand the range of meaning, so that we can interpret a little bit better, because good interpretation leads to good application, and bad interpretation leads to bad application.

So we want to keep getting better at this.

Okay, authority, exusia, go ahead and bring it up.

This is from um from like a Bible dictionary.

It has here's range of meaning.

It could mean force.

Okay, so you exercise authority, it means you're able to make somebody do something.

That's why in our world, every child has a guardian.

That guardian has authority over that child.

They can make that child until that child hits an age, we would say 18 years old, but they hit an age where they should be able to govern themselves.

Until then, somebody can make you do stuff you don't want to do by force if necessary.

Next, we have capacity.

Okay, I have the capacity or that we'll say the jurisdiction, okay, to make this decision.

Another would be competency.

Competency.

This is a good one.

We use this term all the time where we would say, so-and-so is an authority on that subject.

They're an authority, which means, okay, we've dabbled in it, we know enough about it to be dangerous, but so-and-so went to school for it for 12 years.

And so we're going to defer to that person because they're an authority on the subject.

Another would be freedom.

Okay, good example of this would be at the Ford House.

Okay, I have freedom to go anywhere I want.

So does my wife, because we pay the bills.

If we roll up into Ella's room and she's like, excuse me, this is my room.

Excuse me, it's my house.

I have the authority.

If I feel that I need to go into this room, I will do it.

Okay.

So again, authority, freedom to roam, to go wherever you want to go.

Uh we also have mastery, okay, whether it's mastery of a subject or again, it could be mastery of a person, you have authority, but then also, and this is the next one, this is what I really like, this one delegated influence.

Okay, so this would be you leave someone in charge, or you give somebody, it's a more powerful person giving someone power and delegating that influence.

So now, when we look at the word exusia, written over a hundred times in the New Testament, okay, we look at this range of meanings, and what we're going to pull together is we're just going to pull a few of these, but we're going to see authority in the kingdom according to Jesus.

All right?

Okay, here's a this is here's where we're going to start.

Matthew 7.

And some of you, Matthew 7 rings a bell because you're like, man, I was here for that Sermon on the Mount series where we spent months in Matthew 5, 6, and 7 looking at what Jesus taught.

Okay, what is Jesus doing?

He's interpreting their law, he's interpreting the Torah and how to fulfill it.

In other words, how to think correctly about it, but then how to live it out in the real world.

And we took a lot of time, how Jesus dives deep into the heart of a person, that you could technically keep the law and yet violate the spirit of the law if it's not changing you on the inside.

So a lot of it is is is driving the conversation deeper, okay?

So after Jesus taught, and remember, a lot of what he taught was subversive.

He would say, You've heard it said this, but I say this.

You've heard it said this, but I say this.

At the end of this, with this really diverse audience, people from the Decapolis, the Ten Towns, uh, and then people from from the uh people who were uh pagan, people who would have been very conservative Jewish, all these people together, it says in verse 28, when Jesus finished saying these three chapters worth of things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching because he taught as one who had exusia.

He taught as one who had authority.

And then Matthew gives a contrast, and not as their teachers of the law.

So he's contrasting the authority that Jesus taught with, with the authority that their teachers of the law taught with.

Okay, so when you read that word authority, if you were to just read it cold, you might think that it's saying Jesus taught with a heavy hand, that Jesus taught like a boss, that Jesus taught with this authoritarian sort of energy.

But actually, when you you look at it like we looked at it in depth, that wasn't his tone at all.

And when you look at range of meaning, what it's talking about with Exusia here was that Jesus taught with a level of competency.

Jesus taught with a mastery of an understanding of the Torah that was more than just I memorized it and I can spit it back to you, but I understand the spirit of the Torah and how it's connected to the heart of God.

And these people are sitting here like, wow, we've never heard it like this.

He's speaking with a level of delegated influence, not delegated influence by any person or any human.

They're going, this stuff that we're hearing is from God.

He's been given this authority by God.

And so you see, again, the range of meaning and authority.

He spoke with a level of competency, with a level of freedom, capacity, not a domineering sort of thing, which is what they were used to.

Let's stay in delegated influence for a moment and let's remember what we've we've talked about with Matthew.

Do you remember those of you that have been around?

We talked about the context of Matthew, that Matthew wrote the book of Matthew to a Jewish audience.

So it was written for us, but not to us.

So it's relevant to us whether or not we are Jewish people, but at the same time, we need to understand who he's writing it to so we make sure we understand what he's saying, and we can pick up some of the assumptions that are written in there, because unlike the other gospel writers, Matthew doesn't explain because he assumes you know.

And so one of the things that they would have understood about authority is the delegated influence of the interpreters of the law.

So I'm gonna give you another word.

This is a Hebrew word, the word is shmikah, and the word shmikah will be up on the screen, the word, I believe it'll be up on the screen, the word shmikah essentially was a process of rabbinic ordination.

So it was the giving of authority, the delegating of authority from other rabbis with shmikah to someone who had demonstrated competency.

So this was the ability to interpret the law, to stand up in front of people, to stand up in front of the nation and interpret the law.

And the reason that matters is because the interpretation of the law into their relevant world was going to turn into how they behaved.

So you're giving someone the power to interpret the law, you're giving them the power to essentially prescribe action steps.

So, in other words, to in their world, the way you receive the shmikah or delegated authority is that two rabbis with shmikah who had demonstrated competency and character, in other words, this isn't a power-hungry person, and this isn't a person who's driven by the power of fear.

They don't love power or power of fear, they're truly looking at God's word and they're showing you what it says and presenting it to you, and so they would delegate that influence from two people who had proven that would lay their hands on you and would delegate that authority to you.

Okay.

So that sounds great.

Like that seems like a wonderful system, and it seems like it would work because we all have to take God's word and apply it contextually to the world that we live in.

So this would seem to work.

Here's the problem.

When you look at how something works on paper and how something works in the real world, how many of you know sometimes it don't work like that?

You're like, on paper, it should work.

But when you add human beings, it doesn't always work.

And so here was the dynamic in Jesus' day is because you have an empire, you have Rome, and Rome has delegated authority and influence to the chief priests.

These are the Sadducees.

Okay?

The Sadducees were part of what's called the Sanhedrin.

You hear Sanhedrin, think Senate.

So it was part of, they had a senate, so to speak, of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

It's very similar to our world.

The Pharisees were very conservative.

They wanted nothing to do with Rome, they were anti-Rome, and they were very conservative in their interpretations of the Torah.

The Sadducees were given, they were delegated power and authority from Rome, and so they had a vested interest in Rome's success.

So they would have been considered more progressive or liberal.

They're the other side of the aisle from the Pharisees.

So they make up the Sanhedrin.

So what do you have?

You have the Romans who are an empire, and then you have the Sanhedrin, which is an empire within an empire.

And it's that Sanhedrin, that group of people, that give the authority to the rabbis or the interpreters of the law to be able to say what to do with it.

Now you're like, who cares?

What does it matter?

Okay, I'm with you.

All right, you tracking with me?

This is about to get good.

I'm about to bring you a text that if you don't understand this, it really doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

But with all this knowledge, we're gonna read it, it's gonna come alive.

You ready?

Here we go.

Matthew 22, starting in verse 15.

It said, When the Pharisees, or the conservative part of the Sanhedrin, met together to plot on how to trap Jesus into saying something for which he could be arrested.

They sent some of their disciples along with the supporters of Herod.

Some of your Bibles say Herodians.

Okay, again, this is a group of people who would have been in relationship with the Sadducees.

These would have been progressive.

So along with the supporters of Herod to meet with him.

So now the picture's starting to really shape up.

You have both sides of the aisle, Pharisees, conservatives, Herodians, uh, we'll say liberal, progressive, both sides of the aisle staring at Jesus, and they've come together and they don't like each other, but they have an enemy in common, and that enemy is Jesus.

And so they're they're figuring we're gonna get this guy into catch 22 and we're gonna make him offend one of us.

And it says in verse 16, they they uh oh they said, Teacher, they said, we know how honest you are.

You teach uh the way of God truthfully.

All right, so they're trying to appeal to what they think would be his ego and love of power by buttering him up.

You are impartial and don't play favorites.

This is all a big setup.

Verse 17, now tell us what you think about this.

Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Okay, this is about to get good.

We read this, we think it's about taxes.

It's totally not about taxes.

This was about political hot takes, hot buttons.

So anytime you've ever scrolled through, you know, the internet or or or social media and you see these hot takes, and you're like, I'm just here for the comments.

So you go in the comments and you're too classy to comment anything.

You just want to read what less classy people have to say.

All right, and I'm not gonna get in there, I don't want my name on any of this, okay, but I will have my eyeballs on this stuff because I want to, okay, this was a hot take, and I'm gonna tell you why it's a hot take, and we're gonna show you why authority to interpret the law mattered.

Here's why this was a hot take.

In Jesus' day, okay, there was what's called an imperial tax.

If you read this in Mark, it literally says imperial tax.

What is an imperial tax?

An imperial tax was where the Roman government would tax nations they had conquered a special tax that they had to pay that the Roman citizens didn't have to pay.

And they would pay with a tribute coin.

In fact, I have an example, okay, of an actual reclaimed, found tribute coin from Jesus' day.

All right.

And there's a guy on there, the picture is Tiberius Caesar Augustus.

His picture's on there.

Now you can see, uh, you probably can't see it really well, and if you're watching online, you probably see it better than folks in the crowd, but there are words written around there that are hard to read.

But I'll tell you what they say.

What they say in English is around the picture of Tiberius, it says, Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of divine Augustus.

Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of divine Augustus.

So the coin, okay, is essentially putting Caesar's name next to the word divine.

Why does this matter?

And why should we pay this or not?

Well, what is the first commandment in the Torah?

In the Ten Commandments, the commandment numero uno is thou shalt have no other gods before me.

So if you have the power, if if I've been delegated influence from the Sanhedrin to interpret the law, it's not just thou shalt have no other gods before me.

It shows up into application.

The application is about taxes, and the taxes are about money, and the money is about empire and the love of power.

So who are you going to delegate the power?

If you're the Sanhedrin, if you're a Sadducee, what sort of person, what sort of rabbi would you delegate the power?

Are you looking for someone who has who is immune to the love of power, who is not controlled by the power of fear and is the most competent?

Or are you looking for someone who will say, Well, this tribute coin isn't worship?

This isn't worshiping Caesar, it's a coin, you should pay the taxes, right?

So what you have is the hot take is the Pharisees say, This coin has a man's picture on it.

And it says he's divine.

And if you take that coin and you give it to that man, that is tantamount to violating the law.

That's violating commandment number one, you are worshiping Caesar.

And so they're telling people not to give the pay the tax.

And the Sadducees, who really their biggest interest is to keep Rome happy so that they keep power because they love power and they're afraid of what would happen, they're telling you, ah, don't worry about that, just pay the tax.

So what do they do?

Now the story came alive.

Jesus is sit standing in between both sides of the aisle.

They hit him with his zinger, hot takes.

Jesus take a hot take, hot topic.

What do you got?

Should we pay the tax to Caesar?

The imperial tax.

But Jesus knew their motives.

Verse 18, you hypocrites, he said.

Why are you trying to trap me?

Here, show me the coin used for the tax.

And they handed him the Roman coin.

He asked, Whose picture and title are stamped on it?

Caesars, they replied.

Well then, he said, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.

And his reply amazed them and they went away.

Now, when you really look at what's going on here, right, they're they're they're so enraptured in this political Sanhedrin tribute coin Roman thing.

They're so caught up in that reality, they're missing by a mile what Jesus intends to do with the kingdom.

They think it's all about government, okay, and God bless governments, and and Jesus doesn't tell them to not participate in the government.

He's like, participate, man.

Pay your taxes.

He's like, Whose picture's on there?

Uh Caesar?

Yeah, fine.

Pay Caesar what's Caesar's?

Go ahead and give it.

He's like, the problem is you're asking the wrong question.

The problem is you're obsessed around the wrong thing.

The problem is you tried to trap me and you're playing a game, and you're obsessed around this empire game.

And because you can't beat Rome, you've created an empire within an empire.

So you got your little empire, and you're caught up in your political games, and you're coming and you're trying to catch me in the middle, and you think that.

It really matters, and it's just a coin.

It's a coin.

Whose picture?

Oh, Caesar's on it?

Go ahead.

Give Caesar what Caesar's.

He worked hard for it.

Give it to him.

It doesn't matter.

You're asking the wrong question.

You're focused on the wrong thing.

Give Caesar what Caesar's and give God what's God's.

What is God's?

What is he talking about?

What does God want?

What does God want from you?

What does God want from me?

He wants our hearts, man.

He wants us.

The kingdom that Jesus is talking about, he's not talking about a government.

He's talking about the kingdom of your heart.

He's talking about the kingdom of your home.

He's talking about everywhere you go, the good news of the kingdom is there because you function in a way that is operating in the power of love and sacrifice.

So he's like, look, you're gonna have to learn how to be in an empire and not of an empire.

You gotta be in an empire and of a kingdom.

So go ahead, man.

Pay your taxes, go ahead, man, vote, do what you gotta do.

Like, do it.

I'm not saying to not be a part of it, I'm not saying to boycott it.

He's like, but you've put all your eggs in that basket, and so now you've made your whole life about this, and you're coming to me with this, and you're trying to trap me with this, and this whole thing's become a game.

I'm not willing to play.

Pay Caesar what's Caesar's, his coin, his name's on the coin, his face is on the coin, that's fine.

What God really wants is something altogether different.

He wants your heart, he wants you.

You know what's interesting is Jesus has this authority, and everywhere he goes, his teaching is subversive.

It's messing with the empire within the empire.

And so everybody keeps asking him, where does your authority come from?

Where does your authority come from?

Where do you get the authority to say the stuff that's different than what the teachers of the law are saying or what these other people are saying?

And this is where we come back to what we know about Matthew.

Right?

So we talked about Shmika, which is the authority to interpret the law, and that's given when two people with Shemikah, people with authority, would lay hands on you and declare you essentially worthy, uh, and and would ordain you with that with that power.

And so now with that knowledge, and with again a group of people who would have, we assume, would have understood that.

Go, let's go back and read one of the most powerful verses and look at it through that lens.

We go back to before Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 3, 16 and 17.

Look at this.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water.

At that moment, heaven was open, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him, casting a light on him, touching him.

And as a voice from heaven said, This is my son, whom I love, with whom I am well pleased.

And so what the readers of the book of Matthew would have understood was that in Jesus' day, what it would have taken to gain the delegated influence from the system, the delegated influence from the Sanhedrin, okay, he wasn't going to qualify for.

And it wasn't because he didn't have freedom and that it wasn't have competency and that he didn't have power, it was that he didn't fall into what it would have taken to have this delegated from people.

And so it shows essentially Shmika from God the Father Himself, from the Holy Spirit, touching him, giving him that divine authority.

In fact, later, and I'm just going to summarize it because I'm running out of time, but if you go read John 19, remember when Jesus is on trial before Pilate?

And Pilate is afraid because everybody's going, crucify him, crucify him.

He's like, Why?

They're like, Well, this guy's a blasphemer.

He says he's God.

And Pilate's like, I don't know, man, I kind of like this guy.

He takes Jesus into the private place and he goes, Where are you from, man?

And Jesus doesn't say anything.

And and Pilate says, if you read it in the original, he says, This don't you know, he says, Why aren't you talking to me?

Don't you know I have the exusia to set you free?

And I have the exusia to crucify you.

I have the power, I have the delegated influence to kill you or set you free.

Don't you know?

Why are you not talking to me?

And Jesus says, You have no power except from what you've been given on high.

You have no power except for what you've been given on high.

Jesus understood that there are certain times and certain empires where you're not going to qualify for the thing you should qualify for, but you have to walk in a divine authority that comes from God Himself.

Instead of caving to the Sanhedrin, instead of caving to the system, instead of falling into that to ultimately walk according to kingdom principles and the authority that's ultimately given to you by God.

And to walk in that freedom.

To walk in that freedom.

Two more things and then I'm done.

Colossians 1.

Colossians 1 is uh is a really powerful text.

It's the heading in your Bible probably says the supremacy of Christ.

This is written 30 years after Jesus lived and died.

And it's the Apostle Paul trying to help the Colossians understand the authority of Jesus and so and the supremacy and the deity of Jesus.

And it says the Son being Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

The Son, if you want to know what God's like, you look at Jesus.

This is why we say Jesus is perfect theology.

Jesus doesn't just teach perfect theology, Jesus embodies, he is the visible image of the invisible God.

Jesus is perfect theology, the firstborn overall creation.

For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.

So what it's saying is that before Jesus physically showed up in the earth, okay, the physical embodiment, human version of Jesus, Jesus always was.

So it's again talking about his deity.

Um it says uh visible and invisible, thrones, powers, rulers, or exusia, authorities.

All things were created through him and for him.

Now look at this next part, verse 17.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

He is before all things.

One of the challenges that we have from really seeing clearly and responding to the authority of Jesus is often we look at Jesus through the lens of other people.

Maybe the person who brought us into the faith, uh, maybe other uh teachers and leaders, and so often we look at Jesus through the lens of other people.

What we have taught to us through Matthew is that Jesus has the ultimate authority, the ultimate shemikah.

There is no other rabbis rabbinic ordination process where somebody can have a clearer, better, more authoritative, true, competent, okay, view.

Jesus' authority was delegated from God.

And so that's what we look at.

And I think one of the challenges we have, they had it and we have it, is you we often look at Jesus through the lens of other people instead of other people through the lens of Jesus.

And I'm telling you, this is how hard it is sometimes to piece this together.

We have, if you look at history, you have Jesus, after that, you have Paul.

Paul wrote a bunch of stuff about Jesus.

So we look at often Jesus through the lens of Paul.

And then after Paul, you've got a lot of early church people.

You have Francis of Assisi, and eventually we have Augustine, and you have Constantine, and then you end up, you know, with uh Martin Luther and the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, and from there there's a bunch of people named John.

It's like John Calvin, okay, uh Jonathan Edwards, uh John Wesley, okay.

I don't know, everybody was named their kids John at that time, apparently, but it's all these people that founded now denominations and the beliefs and everything.

And so we look at Jesus through the lens of John Wesley, back through Francis of Assisi, uh, you see what I'm saying?

All the way back through Paul through Jesus to Jesus.

So we're looking at Jesus through four different lenses, and then it keeps going because now we got Billy Graham, and then we got grandma, and then we got mom and dad, okay, and whoever brought you into the faith, your Sunday school teacher, your pastor, maybe even me.

So what we do is we look at Jesus through Paul instead of Paul through Jesus.

We look at Jesus through grandma and grandpa instead of no disrespect.

Don't you dare leave here and go, my go to your grandma and tell her my pastor was talking about you today.

Okay, don't do that.

We love grandma, we love grandpa.

This is no disrespect.

But often uh even our grandparents or the people who were feeding us or bringing us into the faith were looking at Jesus through the lens of somebody else.

All respect to Billy Graham, all respect to Martin Luther, all respect to all of them.

But nobody has more authority and shmika and exusia than Jesus.

And so we live in a time better than ever that we are able to go back to the story of Jesus to look closely at the life of Jesus.

And your emotions, like mine, are gonna be disrupted at times because I came in, I learned about Jesus from someone, and I looked at him through somebody else's lens.

And you're now at a place when you were a child, you thought like a child, but now you're an adult, and you got to be able to go and look over some of that and come back to the purity of the kingdom of who Jesus is, what he came to do, what he said, what he didn't say, when he used force and when he did not use force.

He said, Look, you're you're here, uh Pilate.

You think you have exusia.

I could call 10,000 angels right now to come down.

You think you have force, but he withheld his force.

He sacrificed himself.

The reason I say this is because often we look at Jesus through the lens of politics, politicians.

We look at Jesus through the lens of sincere people who brought us up with values that they said were Jesus.

And I'm just telling you, if you dig in a little bit further, you might see some discrepancies.

And when you see those discrepancies, we go to Shemikah, the ultimate authority, the exusia of Jesus.

And Jesus is not only our authority, he is our example of authority.

This is how we show up.

The reason that Jesus talks so much about the kingdom wasn't because he was trying to reshape the government, he was doing it because he understood that inside of every door of every home, inside of every community, in every relationship, there are authorities and there are powers and there become kingdoms, and that his way of doing kingdom needs to show up in the grassroots of our lives.

So here's my question for you.

Does your authority, because you have some force?

Some of you are in positions of power, you can move resources around according to your will.

You have force with your physical body, you're bigger, you might be the strongest physically one in the home, the most intimidating person around.

You you you have a degree, you're educated, you have a competency level above other people.

Are you beating people up with your credentials?

Are you beating people up with your master's degree?

Or are you using it to sacrifice for them?

Are you doing it ultimately showing up like kingdom, or are you showing up like empire?

We all have some exousia.

You have some areas of freedom.

There's some rooms you can go in that nobody else can.

How are you administering?

How are you administering?

How are you leveraging your authority?

Do you look more like kingdom or do you look more like empire?

I'll say this last thing and then we'll baptize some folks.

Let's make a deal, man.

Let's make a deal.

Let's start with the fact that we know we're humans, we're not perfect.

But let's make a deal together that you and I would try our absolute best to look over and look over the heads of the people.

Instead of looking through people to see Jesus, look at everybody through the lens of Jesus.

Let's go, let's let's go on a quest.

Let's find the real Jesus.

Let's find, let's dig deep.

Let's dig deep and let's find the real Jesus.

And let's do our very best to exercise our exousia in such a way that people don't have to look over our heads to see Jesus.

That they can look into our eyes, that they can watch our behaviors, that they can see our conduct, that they can see what we do with our force and our competency and our capacity and our freedom.

And they wouldn't have to look over our heads to see Jesus.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in the name above all names, the ultimate exusia, the one with the great authority.

Lord, the one who gave us an example of leadership authority that was built on the power of love, not the love of power and not the power of fear.

And Lord, we know oftentimes in these types of realities and conversations in our context, sometimes we miss the point.

It's so easy to, because these tangible realities that are in front of us sometimes cause us to slide into empire mentality even when we don't realize it.

And yet, moments like this, Lord, you're able to bring a peace and a wisdom to us as we open our hearts to receive it.

God, I pray that you would help us as a collective, as a community, to be able to be in an empire without being of an empire, to ultimately walk as kingdom citizens, and to be able to take and dis determine your law, your word, and how that shows up in real life decisions.

We know, Lord, in the book of Matthew, they were trying to figure out what to do with this tribute coin.

And Lord, we we have our own versions of tribute coins, and so help us, God, to see clearly.

Help us, God, to find unity, to find unity, even though we don't have everything in common.

We praise you, we love you, we honor you, and we walk in your truth as your kingdom citizens.

Lord, may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, in Jesus' name.