The Kingdom Way | Luke 6: 6–11 with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor at MetaCurch, and I hope that today's message is inspiring and enlightening and really builds you up wherever you're at in life.

I want to welcome you in wherever you're joining us from.

If you're here at our Helotus venue, man, I'm so proud of the work happening in Helotus.

If you're here with us online, I'm so glad you're streaming with us.

Uh however you got to this message, maybe you're watching it months or years from now online.

Uh I believe that this message is for you, that it's no accident, that you're hearing it.

If you're new to MetaCurch, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here.

I'm so glad you joined us.

We're going through the Gospel of Luke.

Now, if you want to follow through Luke, if you want to take your faith seriously, uh, if you want to take notes so you can retain this information that I've worked very, very hard to present, and you don't forget it by Monday at 3 p.m.

when someone cuts you off on 1604.

You can get one of these.

You can not only follow in Scripture, you can take notes.

Uh, at both of our connect areas today, at both of our venues, you can go and ask for one of these, and they will give you one.

And if we give you one, it is free.

I just ask that you bring it with you and you take it seriously and you take your faith seriously.

We're going through Luke slowly because we want to know who Jesus really is.

Amen?

The real Jesus.

Scripture warns us there will be fake Christs who show up in the world.

There will be fake offerings of hope and significance and security.

And we can be duped and tricked by these fake, false idols if we do not know the real.

We can get tricked by the counterfeit if we are not familiar with what the real deal looks like and feels like and sounds like.

And so we're taking our time.

We've broken it down.

If you haven't been with us into seven sections, we are in section number two called the kingdom way.

And in the kingdom way, Jesus is showing us the way that the kingdom of heaven operates.

And that matters because all of us are enmeshed in the kingdoms of this world.

That's where our scoreboard comes from.

We keep score by the metrics of the kingdoms of this world.

And we just move into greater depths of loneliness and greater depths of depression and greater depths of despair because we don't know how heaven keeps score.

In the kingdom way, this entire section Jesus is showing us, and we're now in Luke chapter six.

Oh, I cannot be more excited for Luke chapter six, because something's about to change.

Jesus is gonna move from demonstration to declaration.

Not yet, we're not there today, and we're not really there next week, but in a couple of weeks, we're moving from demonstration, which means Jesus is walking out the kingdom way.

We can watch his life, we can watch his actions, his reactions, and we can see him demonstrating the way of God's kingdom, but very soon he is going to start declaring it.

He's gonna make it explicit.

And all of this happens in Luke chapter six.

When next week, you cannot miss next week.

I understand the Spurs are playing on the West Coast, the games don't end until one in the morning, I'm with you, I get it, you cannot miss next Sunday.

Because next Sunday, the ministry of Jesus, six and a half chapters into Luke's gospel, changes fundamentally.

What Jesus is doing on earth will change fundamentally after what we see today.

And it will lead him directly to his mission, directly to a cross, directly to an empty grave, directly to an ascension, and directly to the start of what was called a mystery in the ages that came before it is what we call the church, the ecclesia, God's called out people.

You are here as a part of Jesus' new faith family because of what happens in our text today.

This matters because Jesus will be rejected.

Last week we saw a Sabbath controversy.

This week we see a Sabbath controversy.

Jesus has come offering the kingdom to God's people, the Israelites, and Jesus, every step of the way, is rejected.

Right after Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, goes out 40 days in the wilderness, what does he do next?

Luke says he goes to his hometown, he goes to the synagogue, he preaches and teaches, and what do the people say?

Hey, hometown boy, we heard you can do some magic.

We want to see some tricks.

I've got water, I like wine.

Show me something cool.

And Jesus says, You don't understand, the miracles are not an end.

The miracles are a means to a greater end.

I am not your magician.

Uh you don't snap your fingers and I do miracles.

That's not how it works.

He says, What I'm actually here today to do is to set the captive free, to open the eyes of the blind.

I'm actually here for a greater purpose.

They don't like that.

In his first public outing, his hometown drives him, drives him to the edge of a cliff, and tries to throw him off to his death.

Let me tell you about my first sermon as an adult.

It didn't go well, okay?

My mentor, I was a worship pastor at the time.

They would let me preach.

On Monday, my mentor sat me down and he said, Hey, uh, if that's how you're gonna preach, you should lead worship.

Brutal.

I didn't feel great about it, but no one tried to throw me off of a cliff.

Jesus shows up to his hometown and they tried to kill him.

Controversy just keeps following.

He calls his disciples, but not out of the places you're supposed to call them.

He heals and he demonstrates a power that makes everybody nervous.

He eats and drinks, wines and dines with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors.

He has gotten the attention of all of the religious elite.

He is now a problem to them that they want dealt with.

At the end of Luke chapter 5, he tells back-to-back parables, and those parables make it clear to anyone who has ears to hear, Jesus is telling them, I did not come to reform your system, I came to replace your system.

Luke 5 · chapter mention

And we walk into Luke chapter six.

In Luke chapter six, if you weren't here last week, all of our sermons are on YouTube.

You can and should get caught up.

Jesus and his disciples are walking through a field of grain, and they are picking off heads of grain and they are eating it, which is legal.

They can do this.

The problem is they're doing it on the Sabbath, and the religious leaders are watching.

This is what we learned last week.

That religion is always watching.

Jesus is always welcoming religion, is always watching, trying to catch you, trying to ostracize you, trying to separate you.

And listen, I have and I understand it, I see it in myself.

I have a very specific energy today.

I am angry.

And I didn't think I'd be angry today.

I drove here happy.

I sat in worship happy.

And before I got on stage, as I reflected on the message that God gave me to give today, there was a righteous anger that welled up inside of me.

Today might be uncomfortable because there is a spirit of religion that has infiltrated the church, especially in the West and especially in America.

And we don't take it seriously.

We treat it with kids' kid gloves.

And what Jesus is going to show us today is that this isn't some minor inconvenience.

This isn't an annoyance for God's people to deal with, that this is a root of evil that has affected the hearts of God's people, that there is a mission that Jesus gave us.

And look, Jesus didn't come play the game.

He didn't come climb the ladder and accrue power and gain influence and then start a mission.

He came and he gave his life.

He was beaten 39 times with lashes that belong to me.

He was put on his head, a crown of thorns, he was nailed to a cross, he bled and he died to start this movement in order to reach the people who are on the farthest margins of society, who have run out of hope, who don't know if life is worth living, who can't answer life's biggest questions.

And the very people that are meant to represent God are so enamored and so infatuated by the kingdoms of men that we want to control and we want to coerce and we have allowed a spirit of religion to well up in our hearts and well up in our local churches.

And the people that Jesus died to get into the kingdom, we are creating barriers and we should be pissed off about it.

How dare the devil take the ecclesia, the called out people of God, and use us as a weapon against the people that God is trying to reach?

And so I'm angry.

And I've been religious.

I've been religious.

I came up in some environments where I looked at the world and I looked at sin, not as broken hurting people, looking for a way in a world full of lies to deal with their pain.

I just looked at them as others.

And then you know what happened?

I broke under the weight of that, and then I became the people that I used to judge.

And then you know what happened?

Because I viewed God through a broken lens of religion, I was far from God and I didn't believe I could go back to God because I had a distorted view of God, and I was stuck in the very trap of religion that I had put other people inside of.

And so Jesus and his followers are walking through doing what is lawful, but they have a problem because it's on the Sabbath.

And the religious leaders think they own the Sabbath.

They don't realize that they are confronting the God who created Sabbath and blessed it and called it holy.

And so Jesus just cuts to the quick.

This is how we ended last week in verse 5 of chapter 6.

And Jesus said to them, the Son of Man, that's Jesus, that's a title for himself.

The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

I'm not interested in y'all's opinions.

I'm the Lord, the curios, the master.

I am in charge of the Sabbath.

Here's what we learned last week that the Sabbath is unique.

You'll have to go back and listen to that sermon.

But if you are Lord of the Sabbath, you're Lord of all.

Now we have to appreciate what Luke is doing here because Luke is writing broadly chronologically, but he's also writing thematically.

He tells back-to-back stories about Sabbath controversies.

We have to appreciate what Luke is doing.

Last week in our passage, it ends with Jesus claiming to be Lord of the Sabbath, and then Luke walks us right into an example of Jesus demonstrating that he is Lord of the Sabbath.

And we have to lean into this and we have to try to understand this.

And we have to take seriously that there is a spirit of religion that has corrupted our movement.

And if we do not take that seriously, it will persist.

And it will be the dam that holds back the waters of revival that we are on our faces in our time of prayer asking God for.

And so let's walk into our text today.

In verse 6, it says, On another Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled.

This is gonna be Jesus' final rejection.

And here's the context for it.

It's another Sabbath.

And I kind of want to walk through carefully because there are these distinctions between last week and this week.

They're very similar passages, but there are distinctions, and the distinctions make a difference.

Last week was private, it was Jesus and his closest followers alone.

The only reason there was a problem is because by this point, Jesus is enemy number one, and the religious leaders are borderline stalking Jesus, always watching.

That's what religion does.

Jesus welcomes, religion watches.

They're trying to catch him.

They think they have him in a grain field, but they cannot pin him down.

That was private.

This is public.

Jesus is now in the synagogue.

The synagogue was where the Jewish people came in their village to worship, and everyone who could come would come.

Everyone who could come would come.

It is not like today where people attend the body of Christ once every three weeks, because we've got better things to do than to get together with the supernatural.

I'm not gonna beat you up on that today, maybe next Sunday.

I'm not happy about it.

But we have any excuse, we don't come.

That's not how it was.

In ancient Israel, everyone who could come would come.

It was the center of their religious life, their spiritual life, their social life, their political life.

Everything happened in the synagogue.

So everybody is there, everybody is present.

It's very public now, not like last week.

And we have this beautiful gift of a character that we get to see ourselves in in today's passage.

If you look at verse 6, it says that on a Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue to teach, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled.

Now we don't know exactly what condition this was, but Luke is very careful.

We know this, he's a physician, he's an incredible historian.

He puts details that matter.

He doesn't say a hand, he says a right hand, his dominant hand in an agrarian society where if you could not work, you could not eat.

Luke is signaling to us that this man has virtually no means of producing income for himself.

Which means he for sure does not have a wife or a family.

He could not get one because he could not provide for one, which means he is relationally marginalized.

He is also not able to produce income, which means he is probably begging and living hand to mouth.

So he is socially marginalized.

Not only that, but there was an idea that had developed in this culture.

It's not a God idea, it's not a biblical idea, it is a man-made idea that if you have any kind of handicap, a physical, mental, emotional handicap, that you are cursed by God.

And if that's not bad enough, you are cursed either because there is secret hidden unconfessed sin in your life, or there is secret hidden unconfessed sin in the life of your family.

So you are spiritually marginalized, you are physically marginalized, you are socially marginalized, and you are relationally marginalized.

Your life is incredibly difficult, and Luke wants you to know that about this man.

And here's what's beautiful last week it was just Jesus and his boys, and it was religious leaders, and there was a little confrontation, and Jesus claims authority.

This week, this man who has the deformity of his hand, he becomes a stand-in for me and for you.

He is an avatar that we can see ourselves in this story through his life and through his situation.

Because I don't know everyone at MetaCurch, it's gotten too big for that, but I know that you have lived long enough to have felt like an outsider at some point.

I know that some of you have felt significant marginalization, some of you have felt it to a lesser degree.

I know even our young people in here, our 13 and 14-year-olds, know what rejection feels like.

You know what it is like to have a friend that you thought you could count on and for them to go and to drag you behind your back.

The hurt and the pain and the disbelief, even at a young age, everyone in here knows what that feels like.

Everyone in here has pain that has touched your life and has left its mark.

And because you know that, we have a stand-in in this story of someone who has been marginalized in every capacity possible.

So if you have felt pain in your relationships, if you have felt pain socially, if you have felt pain based on something about your physical appearance or your body or your health condition, if you have felt spiritually separated from God to the point that you don't know your way back, you can see yourself in this man because he has all of it.

And so, do you understand that he is a stand-in for us where we can see ourselves in this story?

That's a beautiful gift that God gives us, and it's a beautiful gift that Luke has given us here.

Now, what does religion do?

Religion is always watching.

We learned that last week, but today we are going to see it made explicit in the text.

I want you to look at verse 7.

It says, the scribes and Pharisees were, say this word with me, watching, let's try again, were watching him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath, so they could, listen, find a charge.

Back in the Soviet Union, under the reign of Joseph Stalin, he had a prosecutor general, prosecutor general, a guy named Andrey Vyshinsky.

Now there is a saying, and many of you have probably heard it translated into English.

It originated with Andrey Vyshinsky.

And it translates to English something like this Bring me the man, I will find him a charge.

This is biased prosecution.

Here's how justice works.

Justice works by observing an infraction in the law and then bringing a charge against that infraction.

That's how justice works.

Here's how injustice works.

And like, I'm so done pretending.

I am done pretending.

You're like, I already thought you were done pretending.

I'm so done.

I don't know what God's doing in me right now.

You know this.

We've got about three or four tiers in our justice system.

You know this, right?

You know that you can run over a cat and someone else can kill three people, and if they're a celebrity, they'll get a slap on the wrist and you will sit in jail.

You know this, right?

It's injustice.

And we know we have even seen this in our own country and in other Western countries where there's this idea of we don't know how to charge this person, but we'll find a charge.

You bring me the man, Stalin.

If you want someone locked up, if you want someone in The Hague, if you want them killed, and we want to do it through the channels of government, Stalin, here's his boy, Andre.

He says, You bring me the man, I will find a charge to pin on him.

Bias prosecution.

This is what banana republics do, this is what corrupt governments do, and this is what the religious leaders in Israel were doing.

This is what religion does.

We have to be really careful.

I try to remind you, but really I'm reminding myself because I get so mad at the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes.

We have to be really careful gathering our stones to throw at them, because bro, we do this.

And it's a huge mistake to always see yourself as Jesus in every story.

That's the goal.

But usually I'm the Pharisee.

And Jesus has to keep working on my heart so I can be more and more like him.

Not only do we do this sometimes as individuals, we have done this as the church.

Here's what it looks like we go and we find the charge that is culturally and politically expedient for us.

So as you know, Jesus coming to get rid of religion and pull us into relationship does not lower the standard on our behaviors.

Jesus raised the expectations on his followers.

We talked about that last week.

You know this.

Jesus raised the bar for us.

And so what we do and what we've done as the church is we go through and we find all the sins, all the ways that we go against God, and we just kind of ignore the ones that we're comfortable with.

I cannot tell you how many pastors I had growing up, military brat, moving all over the place, where I would be in a church and they would preach out of one of the lists of sins, like in 1 Corinthians.

And in that list is something called gluttony.

And a pastor 150 pounds overweight would preach on that, skip past gluttony to get to the sexual sins that make a good political clip.

You feel how uncomfortable it is right now?

It's because we're exposing the roots of religion.

And so there is like the narrowest opportunity for sexual activity if you're gonna follow Jesus.

There just is.

The Christian sexual ethics is incredibly, incredibly stringent.

And like most everyone in our culture doesn't live up to it, but preachers don't get on stage and yell at all the men abusing pornography or yell at all of the couples who are sleeping around.

We just focus on the sexual sins that are in the political uh like limelight, and we focus on those and we highlight them because if we want to bring a charge against people that make us uncomfortable, give me the man and I'll find the charge.

This is what religion does.

It handles sin with unequal scales, it handles people with unequal scales.

And we've learned this.

The problem isn't that Jesus is gonna heal this man, the problem is that he might do it on the Sabbath.

It says it right there in the middle of verse 7.

The scribes and Pharisees were watching him closely, watching Jesus to see if he would heal on the Sabbath.

If you missed it last week, the Sabbath is God's day that he gave to his people in the old covenant.

He blessed that day as a day of rest.

It was meant to be a blessing for them.

And the religious leaders over the centuries they built.

Regulations and regulations and regulations on top of God's revelation.

They put 39 categories that they considered work on top of the Sabbath.

And so here's how it worked with healing.

And I'm not talking even about supernatural healing.

I'm talking about going to a doctor on the Sabbath.

You could not seek healing with only three carve outs.

It had to be life-threatening.

You have a broken leg, we will set it tomorrow.

Does that sound like a blessing?

You have a deep cut, we will stitch it tomorrow.

Does that sound like a blessing?

There were two carve outs.

One was circumcision, if you know anything about the old covenant, that was important and it had to happen on a specific day.

So that's law versus law.

They would allow circumcision on the Sabbath.

The only other carve out was childbirth.

And that's just something you can't put off, you know.

Once the water breaks, it's it's not like rest stops on a road trip, you know.

You can't tell the woman to hold it.

It's like the baby's coming, you know.

So that was a carve out, really, just because it had to be.

Any other kind of healing, whether natural or supernatural, the religious leaders decided it's not allowed.

This man who's marginalized and ostracized, hurting and broken in every way possible, can't get healed according to his own religious leaders, the men that God put to shepherd his people.

What would be a bigger blessing on the Sabbath, the day that's meant to be a blessing, than to get healed?

Here's what religion does.

If you're taking notes, you should write this down.

Here's the problem: they held their regulations, religion holds its regulations with the same weight as God's revelation.

All these little nonsense rules that they put together.

Can't heal on the Sabbath unless it's our little carve-outs.

That's just man-made regulation.

If you're interested in context and history, this these oral laws eventually were written down in what's called the Mishnah.

Religion holds its regulations at the same weight as God's revelation.

Religion always ends up trying to protect itself.

I'll tell you a little bit about my journey.

I was religious.

I was young, I was very young, but I was religious.

And I broke under the weight of it, and then I was the person I used to judge.

And I didn't know how to make my way back to God.

And my life changed when I realized my view of God was distorted.

And when I came to the end of myself and was ready to give up on everything, and I turned back towards Jesus, he wasn't a million miles away, he was right in my freaking face, pursuing me the entire time.

It changed my life.

As I started trying to live for God, I had a couple things happen to me to where I ultimately gave up on the local church, and that's wrong.

So let me just tell you, that's wrong.

The local church is the bride of Christ.

You don't turn your back on Jesus' bride and then claim you love him.

But I was young, and I'm not mad at you if you've been there as well, because it's an easy jump to go from the men and women who lead God's church to then also reflecting on God Himself.

But it is wrong to turn your back on the church because men get church wrong sometimes.

Jesus never gets it wrong.

We get it wrong.

We are not the ambassadors for Christ that we are meant to be.

But I was young and I was mad at the church.

Here's a couple things that happened when I started really trying to follow Jesus.

I had a friend in high school, he got his girlfriend pregnant.

That's something that happens sometimes.

It's unfortunate, they were very young.

Um, but I was in a very small town.

Like everyone knows everyone, and everyone is in everybody's business.

Anybody come from a small town where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone's business?

You already know how this goes.

Everybody knew about this by lunchtime, the whole town.

Now, I have discovered the love of Jesus in a way I'd never experienced before, and I'm like, that's what they need.

So come to my church.

Now, at the time I was in the worship band, and so I didn't get to meet them in the parking lot, I didn't get to walk through the lobby with them, I didn't get to find a seat with them, I didn't sit by them in service.

At the end I was all excited because they came and we did the thing and we talked about Jesus.

And they just told me straight up, we are not welcome here.

We won't come back.

Now I missed it.

I wasn't with them.

I didn't see the side glances, I didn't see the whispers, I didn't see the judgment.

I believed them, but I held out hope.

Like, man, maybe it was a bad day, or maybe they misread it.

It wasn't long after that that one of my closest friends, uh, his brother, I've told this story, I'll tell it a lot till the day I die.

His brother had lived a very hard life.

He spent some time in prison, he paid his debt to society, he got out of prison, tried to put his life back together, started working a job, came from nothing, came from no money, didn't have a ride.

We're in a small town, there's no taxis, this is pre-Uber, pre-lift.

Uh, I had a little truck at a 1988 Chevy Cheyenne single cab.

And so he would call, and if I could, I'd go pick him up.

And I'm just like, I'm just like reading this and trying to take it seriously.

Like be Jesus to people who need Jesus.

I'm like 17 or 18, and I'm just, I just think we should do this thing.

And a couple weeks of that, some of the elders, and I just mean that literally, some of the older people in our church pulled me aside.

And we're in a small town.

So everyone has seen me giving rides to the ex-convict.

That's that's how they see him.

It's his identity to them.

And they let me know that my association with him was reflecting poorly on our thing there at the church.

And it was like the spirit of Peter came upon me.

If I would have had a sword, someone would have lost an ear.

I was just shocked.

I'm I'm actually really shocked in retrospect because I really do respect my elders.

Um I did not that day.

I corrected them, not with my words, with these.

I told them I would absolutely not stop helping somebody in need.

A few more things like that, and I was just like, dude, I'm out.

The church is not what I'm seeing.

The church to me was all of the things Jesus was fighting against.

It broke my heart, and it breaks my heart to this day.

And I do think that this spirit of religion has taken root in a lot of our lives.

And maybe not here at Metachurch, but in the Western church more broadly.

And let me just say this: it could also be here at Metachurch.

It happens very quickly.

It's like a very small seed that is planted into your heart.

And if you do not repent of that, which means ripping open your heart and allowing the Holy Spirit to dig it out of you, that small seed will turn into a forest overnight.

And even though you were the person that was living as far from God as you could get and were saved miraculously by the blood of Jesus, you will stand in judgment of the same person you once were.

It happens incredibly quickly.

And I believe it breaks the heart of God.

And when Jesus came, he did not handle the spirit of religion with kid gloves like we do.

And I'm guilty of this too, because we just make jokes out of it.

We just go, oh yeah, you know, and you gotta wear your seat and tie, and you gotta, and you need the pipe and the organ and the it's like, dude, it's actually not a joke, and it should anger us to almost no end that the devil has taken this thing that Jesus gave his life for, his church, and has perverted it into something that puts obstacles in the way of the very people who need Jesus.

And it is our job to fix.

We are not waiting for rescue from this.

The game religion plays is we'll just sit in our little stained glass bubble and wait for Jesus to come get us someday.

I think that breaks the heart of God.

It is our assignment to root religion out when it is in the way of relationship with God.

It is our job to take this seriously, to live with a sense of urgency.

It is our job to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken and dying world.

The Pharisees think that they have him trapped.

I want us to pay very careful attention to our last couple of verses.

In verse 8, it says, but Jesus knew their thoughts, and he told the man with the shriveled hand, get up and stand here.

And so he got up and he stood with Jesus.

Now look, Jesus could have dodged this whole controversy.

Easy.

Jesus is smarter than everyone, he knows all things.

Jesus could have just given his sermon, sat back down, healed the man the next day.

No problem.

But Jesus has come to set the captives free, including those who are held captive by the spirit of religion.

And so Jesus asks this man to come.

This is what Jesus does.

Religion takes those that are marginalized and pushes them further into the margins.

Jesus takes the most marginalized man in the room and brings him to the center.

This is what Jesus offers you today.

He offers you to come to him.

Now Jesus is going to ask a couple of questions, and this just matters.

Jesus could have responded any way possible, but he asks the religious leaders two questions, and here's what he's doing, and here's what we should become experts at doing.

We should become experts at cutting through all the nonsense, all the religion, all the distraction, and getting people to the heart of God.

We're too quick to argue with people.

Every clip that we put on YouTube, somebody's like, Yeah, good luck getting to heaven with your tattoos or whatever.

And it's like fine.

Like God be with you when you stand before Him and have to answer for being saved by the blood of Christ and choosing the spirit of religion.

I cannot bring a vengeance into your accusation that has anything in scale to standing before the holy God of the universe and having to explain why you build barriers to people coming to Christ.

We want to argue too much.

Jesus just gets to the heart of it.

Verse 9.

Jesus said to them, the religious leaders, I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil?

Is it lawful to save life or to destroy it?

Here's the subtext.

Jesus is talking about them, and Jesus is talking about himself.

If this does not make you mad, you need to check your pulse.

The religious leaders went to synagogue that day with one thing in mind: not serving the people, not shepherding the people, not healing the people, not counseling the people, not restoring the people.

They came there to trap Jesus.

That is their motive.

They get to synagogue early to put together some kind of scheme, and in walks the most marginalized man in their village.

And when they see his handicap, they see a person with pain that they can leverage.

And if that does not infuriate you, then you need to check your heart.

You need to ask the Holy Spirit to break down the walls and the hardness that you have built up over the course of your life in this very broken and painful place.

They don't want the man healed, they want Jesus dead.

And so Jesus goes, tell me what is lawful.

Tell me about your little regulations.

What's the purpose of the Sabbath?

Is it to do good?

That's what Jesus is gonna do, or is it to do evil what the religious leaders are doing right there in that moment?

Is it to save a life what Jesus is about to do with this man?

Or is the purpose of Sabbath to destroy a life?

Their hope is to destroy Jesus' life in this moment.

Jesus draws a sharp contrast between himself, God and human flesh, who actually understands the heart of God and the heart of Sabbath, and the religious leaders who are the most corrupt, vile, evil people in the synagogue that day.

Here's the other thing that Jesus does in this moment, and as followers of Jesus, we should really pay attention to this.

He takes out the middle.

Here's what I mean by that.

He only gives two options good, evil.

Save, destroy.

Here's what religion does.

Religion tries to create a third, fourth, and fifth option.

That's why when someone who has decided, if they can't find hope in the next few days, that their life isn't worth living and they're going to take their own life.

And so finally, even though they rejected God long ago, they've tried all the other things the world has to offer, and they think maybe, just maybe, I'll reach out to God one more time.

And where do you go in our culture to reach out to God?

On Sunday morning, you find a local church and you walk through the doors of that church, but they walk through the doors of that church and they're not dressed appropriately.

They're in shorts and a tank top, and you're supposed to be in a suit and tie.

And so they walk in right on the edge of giving up everything, and they're made to know that they are not welcome there.

And the people with the spirit of religion covering their life.

They go, it's not good or evil, it's just policy.

We just have a dress code.

It's nothing against you.

We would love for you to come to our Bible study, but you know, you just haven't gone through the membership class yet.

You haven't jumped through the hoops yet, you haven't proven enough yet.

We're not really sure.

You're living with your boyfriend right now.

We're not sure if you can come to class with us.

You can't go through our program.

We put all of this on people, and it's not that God doesn't have really high expectations for his people, but his first expectation is that you love those and you reach those who Jesus gave his life for.

And we go, it's not good or evil, it's just a policy that we have here at the church, and Jesus says no.

You will reach that life or you will destroy that life, and you will stand before Jesus, and you will answer for it someday.

Every time we have the means and the ability and the opportunity to do good and we turn our back on it, it's not apathy and it's not laziness and it's not a little oopsie.

When we choose not to do good, we choose evil.

We are the body of Christ, we are the bringers of light, we are the hope of the world, and when we are not living our lives to try and save, we are playing a part in destruction.

In this moment, Jesus brings this man up, and things are about to get extremely intense.

You're like, I thought things are already pretty intense today, to be honest.

I'm sure you've had intense moments in your life.

I'm sure you've been in arguments that have really escalated.

Maybe you've even been in some scraps in your life, things get really intense.

Um, maybe you've been pulled over and you had some things on you you weren't supposed to have, and that was really intense.

Uh, maybe you've been confronted when I was in high school.

It's not a story worth telling.

I had a gun put to my head, it was very intense.

I've been in some intense moments.

My belief is if we actually understand verse 10, if we had been in the synagogue, it would have been the most intense moment we would ever experience in our lives.

And so I want to slow down and I want to show it to you.

This is the miracle.

After looking around at them all, remember that, at them all, Jesus told him, Stretch out your hand, and he did.

And his hand was restored.

That's the miracle.

We know it's coming.

This is what Jesus does, he restores things.

But we read this very quickly.

It doesn't just say he looked at the religious leaders, it says he looked at them all.

If you look at the Greek construction, here's what this means.

It means that he looked with intention.

We don't know if there were four religious leaders or 14 religious leaders, but he spent time and he looked at each of them until they looked back at him.

This could have taken 30 seconds, this could have taken 15 minutes.

We don't know.

But Jesus calls this man to the middle.

The religious leaders are like, I can't believe this.

He is falling right into our He's gonna heal this fool on the Sabbath, and we're finally gonna have something on him.

Then Jesus doesn't talk to the man, he talks to the religious leaders.

You wanna do good or evil?

You wanna destroy a life or save a life?

He cuts their legs out from under him, and then before he heals the man, he just stops.

This is gonna be uncomfortable.

Already?

And he just looks until they look back.

And he doesn't move until they look back.

And then he looks until they look.

It's uncomfortable, right?

And he looks.

And if they're looking, looking down, he'll wait.

If it takes 90 seconds, he'll wait until he gets their eye contact.

And he's not bowed up, he's not machismo.

He just he he knows what's coming.

And he takes his time, however much time it takes, until he gets eye contact with every single one of the religious leaders.

You've never been in a room more intense than that synagogue on that day, and here's why Jesus knows he's going to heal him, and he knows that this decision to heal that man on that day will be the thing that ends up with him on a cross.

If you're taking notes, you can write it down like this.

Jesus knows this moment will turn him towards the cross.

Up to this point, Jesus has come, he's preaching in the synagogues, he is offering the kingdom to the people of Israel.

We will see next Sunday, everything changes.

Jesus starts a brand new movement with a brand new faith family, a brand new nation, and he invites what we now know as the church to be the ones who carry the kingdom of God, not Israel.

This is a fundamental shift.

And he knows what's gonna happen in verse 11.

Here's what happens next.

They, the religious leaders, however, were filled with rage and started discussing with one another what they might do to Jesus.

That's how Luke says it.

The other gospels tell us that after he healed this man, the religious leaders went outside of the synagogue and they began to plot how they might kill him.

This is the final rejection of Jesus, and this is when Jesus' ministry fundamentally changes, starting next week.

Here's what I need you to know a man got his life back in the synagogue that day, he was healed, he was restored, and religion was enraged.

That should break your heart and it should shoot fury into your bones.

The spirit of religion is not a slight annoyance, it is not something we handle with kid gloves.

It comes in quick.

I know, I've been there.

And the only option is to rip open your soul and allow the great physician to dig that out of you.

The only answer is to remember who you are and where you were when Jesus found you.

And so, as we begin to deal with the spirit of religion, perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the reality that religion has changed so many of our views of God.

I want to point something out in the text.

I told you at the beginning, this man with the shriveled hand, he's a stand in for me and for you.

He's an avatar we can see ourselves in.

Please don't miss that Jesus asked him.

To come, but he had to stand up, he had to take a step of faith, he had to trust Jesus enough to put himself next to Jesus in the center of a community that had rejected him.

He had to be vulnerable.

And when I was very far from God, religion had distorted my view of God.

And my belief was that God wanted nothing to do with me.

One of the biggest privileges that I've carried in my life is I grew up with a really good dad.

Even to this day, I'm a grown man.

I have children on their way to adulthood, and one kid that's already an adult.

When life is heavy, when I feel a little lost, I can go literally around the corner in my neighborhood.

And I can just be real, open, honest with my dad.

And I know he will love me and he'll accept me, he'll help carry my burdens.

You know, I I pray that I'm that dad to my kids.

Now, there are so many of you who did not have a good dad.

So many of you who didn't grow up with a dad at all.

And you're having to learn to trust a God who calls himself your heavenly father.

And I'm sorry, man, but it should just absolutely wreck us that we have allowed a spirit of religion in a world where so many people already wrestle with the idea of a good father to paint him out to be something that he's not, that so many people have stayed in their sickness, stayed marginalized, stayed in their brokenness.

Because even if someone shows them God, they don't believe that they can come and be vulnerable.

And that he'll love them and accept them and restore them.

And we have to quit playing games with our faith.

And you have to understand it's not Pastor Clayton's assignment to do this for Metachurch.

You are metachurch.

I'm one piece of this, I'm like one one thousandth of our movement.

It is an assignment on your life to be an appropriate ambassador for Christ, to rip open your soul and allow God to remove any roots of religion that are causing you to put up walls that are keeping people out, to learn who Jesus is and to walk how he walked.

Because if we can create environments where those who are broken and marginalized know that they can stand up and take that step of faith and approach Jesus, they will be restored and we will see revival.

As we close service across our venues, if you'd pray with me, just bow your head and close your eyes.

I want to get right to the heart of it.

I feel a sense of urgency today.

I wonder if you've tried hiding things from God or maybe just hiding from God altogether.

Maybe you've told yourself a convenient lie that God doesn't exist, but you're here with us in this moment, and the Spirit of God's pressing in on your life, and you cannot deny it right now.

What if God is your heavenly Father who always gets it right, who loves you without condition?

Jesus knew when he healed that man, it would end with him on a cross, and he did it anyway.

And please hear me, he did it for you.

Jesus went to the cross so you would never have to question how much God loves you.

He loved you with every lash of the cat of nine tails, he loved you with every jeer and every mockery and every bit of ridicule.

He loved you as they stripped him naked and hung him on a cross above the crowd, all of it proving that there is nowhere you can go to hide from the love of God, that there is nothing you can do to disqualify yourself from the love of God, that there is no lie in this world that can hold your heart back from experiencing the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Jesus didn't come to start religion, he came to kill religion and offer you a relationship.

And the only question that matters right now is if you don't know Jesus, are you ready?

Are you ready to surrender, humble yourself, and put your hope in Jesus and Jesus alone?

With everyone's eyes closed across our venues, if you are ready for the very first time to put your faith in Jesus and start a relationship with God, I want to ask you right where you're sitting to just simply raise your hand up.

Raising your hand is a symbolic gesture.

It just says, today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raise a hand, we can say out of God's word that he sees your faith, accepts it, forgives all of your sin, which means there is now nothing separating you from the love of God.

We can say with confidence you have come into an everlasting relationship with your Heavenly Father that will go beyond this life.

All I want to do is help you acknowledge this decision with a prayer.

If you raised your hand, I'm gonna ask that you pray this with me.

I'm gonna ask all believers across venues to pray out loud as well.

Let's pray like this: Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

So glad you joined us for today's message.

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