The Mountain and The Glass

Well, happy Mother's Day to each and every one of you.

I want to take a moment.

My name is Greg, by the way.

This is the mother of my children.

Shaylin Ford.

And um we're gonna be co-teaching today.

I want to take a moment though and shout out my mom, uh Janna Ford, uh great mother.

I could tell she's a real one.

She she's a hero.

Uh I could tell many, many stories, but um uh I would I don't I don't want to do that.

We don't have uh time necessarily, plus she'll start clapping back with her own stories.

And so you you you don't want that smoke.

I know I don't want that smoke, but um but do want to just take a moment and acknowledge a few things.

One, uh today really we're we're celebrating uh both mothers and mother figures.

You know, I know that a lot of times even uh uh women who are not able to have children for one reason or another, or don't have children for one reason or another, play a significant role in the lives of people in your life and give guidance and wisdom and support.

And we just want to say thank you uh to each and every one of you.

I hope you feel the love.

I know that um on a day like this, days like Mother's Day and Father's Day and holidays in general often come with um mixed emotions for some uh for a variety of reasons.

And if that's you today, I want you to know that uh we we get it, and we're glad that you had the willingness to come out today and uh be a part of of today's today's uh events.

Before I get into the text and we get going, do you have anything you want to say?

Man, I couldn't have said it better myself.

If you've I mean if you've wiped rear ends or or wiped tears, wiped rears or wiped tears, right?

Like it's if you've done those.

It's a bar.

Did you just come up with that?

I really didn't say that.

We need to have you up here more often.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Yeah, that's that's amazing.

Anyways, now that I put it in the crudest terms possible, happy Mother's Day.

I feel right at home.

Okay.

Let's uh yeah, let's move on.

Um, I'm gonna open up in prayer.

I think this would be a good time for that, and then we'll we'll get into the word.

God, we come to you in Jesus' name.

I thank you for the power of your word.

The way that you show up week after week, frankly, day after day, moment by moment, often, Lord, and you you show us what we need to see.

Uh God, that's what we want.

We want to see what's clear, we want to see what's true about you.

Uh, and Lord, we know in looking at your word, you show us what's true about us and how we need to adapt and adjust our thinking and our behavior.

And we're willing to do that, Lord, if it's you speaking.

And so we invite you in today in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.

So we're just gonna continue on in this series.

We're just gonna uh teach this together, but we started a series a few weeks ago called the Sermon on the Mount.

It's just kind of right on the nose that the title, it's from Matthew 5 through 7.

And Matthew 5 through 7 is a compilation of some of Jesus' greatest teachings, and it's delivered to us by Matthew, who was an eyewitness.

And so, you know, chances are uh Jesus may or may not have, you know, on this mountain done all of this teaching at one time.

He may have sat there and said, Hey, I'm gonna just deliver um a lot of stuff I want you to know.

But chances are Matthew had watched Jesus travel from village to village, city to city, crisscross the Sea of Galilee in many, many crowds of people, and picked up on these themes, picked up on these messages that Jesus taught and put them all in in one place so that we would have them.

And so that's what we're doing.

We're taking a deeper look at these um teachings and really looking at what Jesus wants us to see and how does he want us to think, okay, and looking even beneath the surface, because I really believe it's Jesus' intent in teaching this to take people out of the surface of the conversation into a deeper way of thinking that transcends even the context, okay, that Jesus was in.

It makes it really still relevant to us today.

So we've been in Matthew 5, we walked through the Beatitudes and talked about last week salt and light, okay, and and what do you do with the tension between let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven?

And then he says, Hey, when you do your good deeds in Matthew 6, he says, Do them in private, and so no one sees.

Um, and so he's talking about motive.

So we're just gonna keep going uh uh in Matthew 5 and pick up in verse 17.

You want to take it away?

Yeah, I'll just start reading right through.

We're gonna start with Matthew 5, 17 through 20, because this goes right into everything we're gonna talk about today.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished.

Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

It's a pretty intense passage of scripture, and I'm we're gonna dive into breaking that down, but I actually wanted to start off with uh kind of an example that you and I found this uh recently that really spoke to us, and that's why we've got this up here today, actually.

So one of the things that I love to do is just look around the internet and learn historical things and whatever, and and I found this incredible piece of information.

I don't know if any of you are fascinated with like the history of film or anything like that, but Walt Disney was actually really an innovator in that space.

If you guys can actually pull up on the screen um that still shot, there they invented a camera.

They were sick and tired of the fact that everything that they did in animation felt one-dimensional.

It just felt like it was flat, right?

Everything was painted on one screen.

And so they invented this specific kind of camera.

Go ahead and leave it up there, where it was layers and layers of glass, and they would paint one piece of the picture on each part of the glass.

Hey, by the way, if you if you look that way at that other screen, the people at home will feel like you're gonna be.

There we go.

There we go.

I'm so sorry.

Um so right here, ready?

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, all those layers of glass, and the camera would be at the top and shoot down through, and so it would give them depth of perception.

And then the other thing they found was that it didn't just apply to animation, that they could actually use that in real life as well, and they could layer things on top of real photos.

So, for example, we've got a real photo of a hill here, and this is something they actually did if you go watch Mickey and the Beanstalk.

Any of you, you know, a classic Disney fan there, nobody, okay, it's just me.

I'm the only one that watches Old Disney with my kid.

Um, but uh, I've got my youngest is like obsessed with old cartoons.

Any old Tom and Jerry, like, yes, okay.

See, they're they we got it.

You shame them for making the beanstalk.

So they're like, yeah, yeah, Tom and Jerry.

Yep, love it.

My kids and I watch it every day while we pray together.

And I make meals from scratch.

I am so sorry today, guys.

But they would they would actually put a layer of glass in front of it, a lot of times farther away, to create depth of perception.

And on that glass, they would.

I'm no Disney animator, so this is gonna be rough.

But on that glass, they would, you know, they'd make a that that is supposed to be a castle.

Let's put a little flag on top.

Yeah.

But they would draw a castle on top of the hill, and then they'd start adding trees out in the field, and maybe they'd run a road up to the castle, and and so they started putting things on a real landscape that were man-made.

So they took actual nature.

Swiss family Robinson is another one.

They took the actual bay.

Hey, see, okay, I like you guys.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

I appreciate you.

They would take actual landscapes or things and they would paint a ship in the bay.

And so they were able to take things that already existed that had been created in nature, and they would layer something man-made on top of it.

Yeah, I think that's it's a really powerful way to sort of introduce today the tension that we want to work through, which is when it comes to religion, when it comes to faith, Christianity, the Bible, okay, how do we know what's the thing God made and what's the thing man-made?

What what what's the thing worth preserving, worth obeying, okay, what came from the mind of God, what's actually holy, and what is just an heirloom, or what is just something that a person came up with, people came up with, that it's okay for it to just go away, and it doesn't mean that you know, because sometimes folks will put something um man-made and then sign God's name to it at the bottom, and it's it can be hard for us to know the difference.

This is the exact situation that Jesus showed up into and the issue that they had, and so in the Sermon on the Mount, he's kind of dealing with this.

Let me give you a real quick um just to make sure we're all on the same page.

I don't imagine you were all here last week.

Uh, I talked about the context Jesus showed up into in first century BC, the five Jewish responses to Hellenism.

So, what's Hellenism?

Okay, think back to Alexander the Great trying to take over the world, creating an empire, and certainly he went in with military force, but what he did was create cultural change.

He was an evangelist for Hellenism.

And he had really four pillars of Hellenism.

One was education.

So he said, We're gonna take a lot of the things you thought were that there were myths and mysteries, and we're gonna create a deeper, better education.

Um, second was uh health care, and so they learned more about the human body, more about medicine, and helped people be healthier and treat their illnesses.

Um the third was entertainment, so it created the theater, great shows, great plays.

Um, and certainly you can shape and shift culture and get ideas to travel through stories and through entertainment.

And then the fourth is athletics, and so they created arena, and so you it taps into your tribalism, it traps into your sense of competition.

So when you teach children to compete at an early age, they can compete, um, you know, be competitive with anything.

And so what he did when they would go into these different countries and take over, what would he do is put Hellenism in front of people, go, you know, you can maintain your you know traditions or your culture, but here's Hellenism, and a lot of times people were like, This is better, you know, this is better.

Innovation comes with this, um, you know, again, better education.

What's wrong with that?

Um, so it started to really proliferate.

So now you have in the first century BC, the five Jewish responses to Hellenism were go ahead and bring those up.

I I uh just to give us like shorthand, you had the Sadducees who were the chief priests.

These were the religious, powerful people, and they joined with Rome.

Okay, they joined with them.

They were like, you know what, I can be uh a Jewish leader, a chief priest, and I can go to the theater, and I can go to the uh gymnasium, okay?

And so they they really actually received their power, their judicial power, um from the Romans.

You have the Herodians who, same mentality as the Sadducees, like, you know what, this Hellenism thing is pretty cool, I can do both, and yet they but they weren't like religious leaders or priests.

Then you had the Pharisees, who were like the counterpart of the Sadducees, but they did not embrace Hellenism.

They saw it as a huge problem.

We're gonna talk more about the Pharisees today, but they were against Rome, and but they took a nonviolent approach.

The next group were the zealots, again, same mindset as the Pharisees.

Hellenism is a problem, it's tainted um our our faith, it's tainted our law and Judaism, and so we're gonna be against it, but we're tired of talking about it.

We're tired of pontificating.

We're picking up a weapon and we're gonna fight back, even if it's little coups and rebellions.

Um and then the Essenes were like, what Rome?

They went out to the Dead Sea and created a compound and just removed themselves from everything, and they're the ones that came with the Dead Sea scrolls.

Yeah, no shade to the Amish, but yeah, basically that same idea.

Yeah, that they would go, they went and hit out.

And so um, okay, so I bring this up because as we're talking about what is God's thing, and then what is man-made, let's talk about the Pharisees, because Jesus says in Matthew 5.20, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees.

Well, what is he what does that mean?

What is he saying?

Okay, the Pharisees, here's how they viewed the whole situation.

They're like, look, guys, let's learn from history.

If you look at the history of the of our nation, every time we disobeyed God, we ended up having a nation come and judge us.

Whether, if you open up the Old Testament, you start reading, it's the Amalekites, it's the Jebusites, it's the Hittites, uh, did I say Midianites already?

It was Midianites, it was the Philistines, eventually it was the Babylonians, the Assyrians.

We are under God's protection and we will experience prosperity and freedom if we obey God.

When we disobey God, what happens is a nation comes in and takes over us until we repent.

And you see that over and over throughout the Old Testament.

You see this cycle that they go through where it's like they're following God and then they fall away.

And then some nation comes in as judgment over them, and they fall to them, and then they all repent, they get right with God again, everything's they're delivered, and everything's fine again, and then they fall away again, right?

And it's over and over and over.

And so you can see how the Pharisees would come to the conclusion, guys, Rome is God's judgment on us right now because we're getting it wrong.

And so we need to be absolutely letter of the law and not miss anything so that God will lift them off of us.

You know, we're we're at the bottom of the cycle right now, and if we want God to take them away from us, we have to repent and get it all the way right.

Imagine how annoyed you would be as a Pharisee who's going, How many times does this have to happen in our history?

And everybody who's breaking the law or breaking the Torah is like you're going to be.

Ruining it for all of us.

You're looking at the Pharisees or Sadducees, you're looking at the Herodians, you're looking at these guys like you're the problem, right?

So it would create a judgmental perspective, it would make you really frustrated with the people around you.

So how did they respond?

The way they responded is they developed what became 200 years later, became written as the Mishnah, okay, and then eventually was the Talmud, if you've ever heard of those things.

But at the time it was the oral law.

It was the oral law.

So what they did was this exactly, they took what God gave in the Torah, the law, and they added hundreds and thousands of oral traditions, creating more detailed definition of how people should conduct themselves, because their thought was we have offended God.

God is judging us because we're not keeping his rules.

So if like we want to be careful because maybe we're accidentally breaking his rules, we have to create greater definition.

I was just gonna say, if you want to kind of understand in general, broad terms, what the Mishnah and the Talmud were, it would be like the picture is the Torah, and the Mishnah are all these things that I painted on top, and then the Talmud is a description of all the things I painted on top.

Like it's a commentary on a commentary on a picture.

Yes, and again, with pure intent.

We'll we'll assume pure intent.

The pure intent was we have to stop offending God, we have to create greater definition, and so it just added to this like eye-crossing amount of data that you're trying to keep up, but it created a culture of legalism.

Let me go.

I was gonna say, I think you're gonna do it.

I was just gonna say, give them an example of that.

I'm gonna give you one example.

So, so we're gonna talk about the Sabbath, all right?

So Exodus 20, verses 8 through 10.

Exodus 20:8–10

This is from the Torah.

So this is the the the mountain and the grass and everything.

This is the God sent uh law.

Yeah.

So it says, remember that to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God.

On that day, no one in your household may do any work.

So they go, okay, we don't want to offend God by working on the Sabbath, but it that begs the question, what is work?

Okay?

What is work?

Because what might be work for you may not be work for me.

So the they're concluding one of the reasons we're under judgment, we don't have freedom and prosperity, is because people are breaking the law like the Sabbath, they're working on the Sabbath.

So within the Mishnah, they came up with things like this.

You can walk on the Sabbath, but you can't walk more than two-thirds of a mile.

No, I'm not making this up.

This is the Mishnah.

What would be work?

Okay, so they define that.

Anything over two-thirds of a mile.

Now that's man-made, that's drawn on top of it.

Anything over two-thirds of a mile is they said is a sin.

Now you're working on the Sabbath.

So if you happen to love two-mile walks and that's how you connect with God, sorry, okay, you you you broke the rule.

Okay, two two anything over two-thirds of a mile.

There were other things like you couldn't look in the mirror on the Sabbath because that's work.

And for some of us, it is work.

All of us broke the Mishnah today, or most of a few of you, I'm not sure, but most of you did.

Um there's stuff like if the if the fire fire goes out uh in your house, like you, you can't relight it on the Sabbath.

So it was those types of things, right?

They created more legalism, and this is where what Jesus agitates because Jesus shows up now and he's working on the Sabbath according to the Mishnah, not according to the Torah.

They're going, you they're they're trying to apply all this man-made stuff to him.

And look at this.

Now this is gonna make a lot of sense.

Mark 2 27, when they were like, You're working on the Sabbath because he was feeding people or healing people on the Sabbath.

Okay, he was healing.

They're like, That's work.

And Jesus said, Look at this, Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made to meet the meet needs of people and not the people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.

I think that's so important not to miss because some sometimes I think we can miss it in the first interpretation or version of that where it says man was uh not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for the man.

This is even more specific.

It's saying the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people.

You have needs, you need rest.

And not people to meet the requirements, the laws, the petty details of the Sabbath.

Jesus is showing them where they've become confused about why God gave the law to begin with.

In fact, if you go back to Exodus, okay, Exodus 20 is where the Sabbath is introduced.

Look, look at this.

Exodus 23, 12 talks about the Sabbath, three chapters later.

It says, For six days you are to do work, but on the seventh day you must cease, so that your ox and your donkeys may rest, and the son of your maidservant may be refreshed, as well as the foreign resident.

So what he's saying is the reason that this was established was for rest.

We talked about Sabbath back in January.

Why did God establish Sabbath?

Because for 400 years in captivity in Egypt, all they did was make bricks 24-7 as slaves.

And so their entire livelihood, their survival, and their value was in their ability to make bricks, sun up to sundown, seven days a week.

So I want you to take one day off, and I want you to rest your body, and I want you to rest your soul.

I want you to remember, I want you to remember that your value in this world is not in brickmaking.

It's not in how productive you can be.

There's a time to be productive, it's good to be productive.

Doesn't mean your work doesn't matter.

But if you're not careful, you'll get sucked into the vortex of your work.

You'll become short-sighted, you'll become obsessive, it's never good enough, there's never enough, good enough quality or quantity.

And so all of a sudden life passes you by and you were majoring on the minors.

But if every seven days you'd step back and looked at the big picture and allowed a connection, you and God to connect, all of a sudden these things you thought were a big deal, right, would would would have gone into focus, would have gone into their proper place.

And go ahead.

I'm so sorry.

And you were flowing and I interrupted.

I'm sure you guys sound good.

I I was just gonna say, like, so it's not about the idea that somehow you will offend God if you do some sort of physical activity on your Sabbath.

They completely got so distracted by the stuff that they had drawn on that they missed the point of the entire mountain behind it.

God is not mad if you go out and plant flowers today because you enjoy being in a garden.

He's saying, I want you to just find the joy in what you do, and I want you to find your identity in me and not in what you do.

Mean if you look at the Exodus 23, 12, I mean that's pretty loaded when he says, hey, you know, you need to rest, you need to rest your animals, and you need to rest the son of your maidservant.

You need to serve again, the the people, he says you're the foreign resident.

It may be someone at that time, they would have been um tempted to devalue and work them into the ground and drive them in the ground.

He's like, No, everybody needs rest.

You need to step back.

Again, what is the point?

It's not that God is up there going, you know what, if you haven't checked the box and done all the rituals, you have offended me, therefore I'll send the Romans on you.

That's right.

His whole point was to help us not get obsessed with the letter of the law, but to actually understand the spirit of the law, which was find your joy and your worth in me, know that I value you beyond what you can do, and also don't dehumanize the people around you because they are of equal value to me as well.

So good.

I mean, now think about this.

Why why would God want us?

Certainly we can we connect with God every day, but why would God want us to create this habit and this discipline and a ritual around turning everything off, coming into his presence, connecting?

Why?

Is it because God is up there bored and he's like, you know what?

I can't believe they they went seven days and they skipped.

Can't believe they watched the ballgame.

You know, I can't I can't believe they walked two miles, you know.

They had time to plant their hostas, but they didn't have time to show up and take the communion.

What no, it's it's for us.

Why?

In his presence is fullness of joy.

In his presence, I find forgiveness.

In his presence, my shame melts away.

In his presence, I find courage.

In his presence, I find identity.

In his presence, I find strength.

I'm renewed.

Okay, it's in his presence.

And so, yes, God longs to connect to us, but he understands that connection to him rejuvenates, restores, refreshes us, right?

Helps us get past things, helps us see things that busyness doesn't show us.

So that's the point.

And so what Jesus is saying is I understand what you're trying to do.

I understand that you're trying to take the God-made thing and add man-made thing so that you can have enough distance between you and breaking the law that you won't offend God.

But he's like, you're not seeing it the right way.

By the way, which leads me to the next part.

Look, look what it says in uh Matthew 5 17.

He says, Do not think I've come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

Okay, well, what does that mean?

Um, this fall, I'm gonna uh or toward the end of the summer, I'm gonna take a lot of time to talk about what it means to fulfill the law, but I want to just touch on it a little bit here.

So it this language, when we read in English, fulfill the law or abolish the law, I'm not sure what comes to your mind's eye, but for some of us it might be that when Jesus came to fulfill the law, it's like in the prophets, it's like, hey, there was all these prophecies, now Jesus showed up, and that was you know ultimately completing, you know, he was what they were saying was gonna come.

And and when for me, when I hear the word abolish, I hear to do away with, like to completely erase.

And Jesus understood that to some people as he's starting to erase things off the board or say, hey, that's man-made, they're gonna feel like he's desecrating or he's demolishing something holy, right?

And so he's making this distinction.

But in their language, to fulfill, to fulfill the law meant to understand it here properly, and then to walk it out in application properly.

So if you only understood it properly, but you didn't apply it properly, you would have abolished the law.

In other words, it didn't come to life the way it was supposed to.

If it if, or if you if you understood it wrongly as they did, that they weren't understanding it correctly, therefore, but they were living out, again, they were abolishing the law.

So Jesus is saying, I didn't come to abolish it.

I'm not throwing it out.

This is really good.

What Jesus is saying is, I'm showing you what God intended for the law to produce in the heart and the relationships of people from the beginning.

If you look at the 613 laws of the Torah, they're kind of divided into three categories.

You have the ceremonial law, in other words, how we worship God, and we just talked about why would God want to connect.

Okay, it's it's yes, he gets something from it, but it's about what it produces in us.

So the ceremonial law, the judicial law, which was designed to create order in the community.

Let's yeah, let's treat each other, right?

And then the third was the moral law, because it's a better world to live when people aren't lying to each other, when they're not cheating on one another, when they're not stealing from one another, when they're not manipulating.

So he puts these laws again, what's the spirit of the law?

It wasn't because God is up there and he's insecure unless you are staring him in the eyes and telling him how great he is.

It's it's ultimately he loves people and he's creating relationships with us and he's ordering and showing us the way to do things in order.

And so when Jesus is talking about things like the Sabbath, and when he's talking about things, these things that he's taking deeper into going, don't just worry about offending God.

You need to think about how you're treating each other.

I gotta be careful because it this is setting up the next few weeks, and I'm about to start preaching.

Okay, but what he's doing is he's taking them beneath the surface and he's saying, I'm not throwing out what God intended, I'm erasing what man made.

That's right.

And I'm fulfilling, I'm showing you how God intended you to think about this and behave with this since the beginning.

Now I'm just I'm showing you in human form.

Yeah, I I'm I think probably a good way to say it would be that he is creating a structure for us to be able to have more freedom instead of creating this rule book that tries to give us less.

Hey, why don't you give that one more cross-reference and then I'll bring us in um because we gotta get these we gotta get these moms home.

Matthew 5.43.

Matthew 5.43.

All right, I'll take it.

I got it.

Oh, you're talking I'm so sorry.

No, no.

So in Matthew 5.43, yeah, this is this is great.

You have it he says this is by the way from the Sermon on the Mount.

So the same section that we've been talking about, he says, you have heard the law that says love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

Well, the reality is, where is that in the Bible?

It's not.

The love your neighbor part is it's in Leviticus 19, 18.

So Leviticus 19, 18 is the God-made thing.

That's right.

Love your neighbor.

Why?

Because that is the structure that is gonna help us all have a better experience if I'm loving my neighbor and treating him well.

But the hate your enemy part was cultural.

That last group that Greg mentioned, the Essenes, were kind of the originators of that, but it became this widespread cultural thing.

Think about it like for us, okay.

Here's an easy one, like being a buckeye, right?

Being a buckeye automatically means I hate that team up north.

I don't even want to say their name, right?

It's Ichigan.

Amen.

You cross out the M's.

I would never wear blue and yellow together.

Like, you just don't, you know.

And and so, you know, all jokes aside, like that for us is obviously a very mild version, but it's like we assume it's kind of like in there, right?

That if you love Ohio State and you're passionate about being a buck guy, naturally that means I hate Michigan.

And people took it that way.

People took this as love your neighbors means hate your enemy.

And Jesus is saying, no, erase that second part.

You heard it said, but that's not in the scripture.

The scripture part is the first part, and everything else is what we've written on top.

So are you saying I need to rethink my position on the team of north?

That's a totally different subject for a totally different day.

We don't have to dive into that.

I'm not ready to submit that part of my life to Christ yet.

Um I would suggest taking it to him in prayer, but it sounds like you're pretty set.

Thank you.

Sometimes you've got to pick and choose, you know what I'm saying?

Um but no, I I it's it really uh I don't want I don't want us to miss this.

What Jesus is saying, he's he's showing human nature.

Sometimes in love your end uh love your neighbor and hate your enemy feels somehow like it's loving my neighbor more is hating my enemy.

It's creating more division.

Now you dehumanize your enemy because you're their enemy and you might have stuff you need to repent for.

You know, he's ultimately he's taking it deeper.

He's taking it deeper than where they've been.

And real quick, it is Mother's Day, and so here's a a quick way that we can make sure we apply this to ourselves as mothers or people who are in a mother position in our lives.

It is really easy to take motherhood and do the same thing because society will tell you lots and lots of things.

It will draw all kinds of things on top about what it means to be a good mother, and that's not necessarily what it is.

You know, oftentimes I hear moms say, like, I just feel like I'm not doing a good job.

And and if you start trying to dive into why, well, it's because all the things that society told them equate being a good mother.

They felt like they couldn't live up to this plus this, plus this, plus this.

And the reality is, do your kids know that you love them?

Are you showing them Jesus love in their life?

Then you got it right.

You are a good mom.

So don't let all of those other things start piling up on top.

Remember to erase the man-made things and just worry about the heart of it.

So so I have one one last thing for you.

Um okay, so Matthew wrote Matthew, and each of the gospel writers had a motive behind their writing.

All of them wanted to show Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.

But they each, if you kind of study each of the writers, you'll see they they had a little bit of an extra agenda in writing.

And so Matthew, okay, was a tax collector.

Matthew was a guy, at some point in his life, heard all of this Torah, saw all of this oral law, saw all of this division between the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, uh, the Herodians and the Essenes and these different camps and all the division and everything going on.

And at the end of the day, he's like, you know what, this isn't for me.

I don't see my place in this narrative.

Uh Yahweh hadn't spoken in a very long time.

I don't know what's, you know what?

I'm just going to do me.

And so he became a tax collector, and he was willing to do whatever it took to make money and to be wealthy, and it and he just sort of pushed this whole thing away.

And you read in Matthew that Jesus shows up at his tax collector booth and he starts a relationship with him, and it's through the life of Jesus that Matthew gives God a second chance.

It's through the life of Jesus that Matthew sees who God really is.

And so I want to give you a word.

Um, this is a Hebrew word.

The word is mumzer.

All right, it's spelled mamzer, m-a-m-z-e-r, but pronounce mumzer, you can pronounce it mamzer, whatever you want to do.

What is a mamzer?

A mamzer is what in in Hebrew culture was an illegitimate birth.

Okay, so this is a person born as a result of certain forbidden relationships, or the descendant of such a person.

Okay, so so this would have been someone uh born even to a foreigner, um, someone born under scandalous uh circumstances, that person would be considered a mumser.

And they had not only were they treated worse in the in community, but there were certain limitations.

In other words, a mumser couldn't have grown up to be a rabbi, you didn't have an option.

If the word was out, you were a mumser, you were pushed out, you were considered an outsider.

And again, it in the truest sense of the word, and the truest definition, it had to do with the circumstances by with which you were born into the world, literally.

But what you see with Matthew, what's interesting about Matthew is in chapter one, when he is laying out the genealogy and the lineage, and he gives 14 generations, he names five mumsers.

And he names five mothers.

And he names uh we'll just look at one part of it.

Verse 5, he says, Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.

Who was Rahab?

She was a Canaanite prostitute.

That means Boaz was a mumser.

Who was Ruth?

She was a Moabite woman.

Okay.

Uh that means that means that her child was a mumser.

So, and then he goes all the way to Mary, who many believe Jesus was considered in the culture as a mumser.

Because why?

Born under scandalous circumstances.

Born under scandalous circumstances.

Who was her father?

Joseph was gonna divorce her because it's like it wasn't mine.

Whose is it?

Oh, I heard something about, you know, God.

Oh, yeah, okay, that's what they all say.

And so, so Jesus, right?

So, what is Matthew's point?

Matthew, we don't know if he's a mumser or not, because we don't have his background, but he considered himself an outsider.

And when you read the book of Matthew, you're gonna see time after time after time that Matthew shows you Jesus pulling an outsider in.

He's gonna touch somebody who people said was unclean.

I tell you what, uh, because unclean people don't make Jesus unclean, Jesus makes them clean.

And so he'll he'll he'll touch someone with leprosy or or the woman with the issue of blood when she touched him, she was healed.

That Jesus will go to Gentiles, he'll go to people on the outside, or he'll even go to tax collectors.

And the reason Matthew was so adamant about putting this out and making sure that you understood not only what is a mumser, what's called illegitimate or outsider by the world, is loved and received and welcomed and considered a neighbor by Jesus.

Because Matthew wanted you to know that with Jesus there are no mumsers.

With Jesus, there are no outsiders.

That wherever you are, he can reach you and he can pull you close, and that the gospel of Jesus, the good news, is that it's for you, no matter how outsider you've been treated or how outsider you feel.

And this is why Jesus was so intense in his conversations with the Pharisees.

Because although the Pharisees, there was a lot to respect about the Pharisees, highly devoted, highly obedient, uh in many ways, disciplined in their behavior, but the issue of the heart caused them to create so many things that people couldn't keep up with, and then heaping shame on them when they couldn't keep up.

And Jesus said, Hey, instead of taking it from 613 to 2,000 to a commentary on top of that, I'm gonna bring it in like this.

What's the greatest commandment?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Do this and you'll do well.

And so he brings it back into simplicity, but he takes it deeper.

He takes it deeper.

I want to take a moment and uh and just pray for you.

You know, we we we ended with this whole conversation about an outsider.

And today I want to take a moment.

Maybe some of you are here and you're like, yeah, I happen to be in church, or I'm watching church online, and I'm I'm trying to do my best to figure out you know what's holy and what's just an heirloom.

You know, what is from God and what is just something I was handed.

And that that that's a whole process, man.

That that takes a while.

I mean, I think you and I are all all the time going, wait, I thought that tree was real.

No, that's not.

Um that that's a journey of finding freedom in the grace of God, and yet not throwing out the good things that he's given us of how to treat one another and and and ultimately how to connect with him.

But if you're here today and you're walking through this and you're going, you know, I really feel like the outside an outsider, and today uh I need to receive the love of Jesus.

Receive the love of Jesus today.

I want to invite you as we pray together to allow God to cut through all of the complexity, all of the confusion, all of the three dimensional, what's on the glass and what's real, and to connect with you right here, right now.