The King We Overlooked

So the first time I saw that video, I was in Atlanta at a conference this past May.

And I was a DJ for like 15 years, and Randy wasn't.

And it was really awkward because I'm sitting next to Randy, and it gets like into the second fader going up, and he raises his hand, and I'm like insecure.

He knows the song, and I don't know the song.

And I'm like, what is he?

Like some sort of musical savant in parts.

But but anyway, how long did it take you to recognize the song?

I bet some of you were like Randy and you knew it almost immediately, and others of you like me didn't catch on till the very end.

But but what's fascinating is that the song was there the whole time.

Like the melody didn't change, the tempo didn't change, the musicians didn't change, every part you heard belonged to the song.

But depending on which of the faders were turned up and which ones were turned down, the song could become difficult to recognize.

And I wanted to start there today because I think something similar has happened in many expressions of modern Christianity.

Like the Bible hasn't changed, Jesus hasn't changed, but depending on the church tradition in which you were raised or the version of Christianity you first encountered, some parts of the message may have been turned way up while other parts were pushed so far down that you could barely hear them.

And here's the thing this is why this matters.

When the mix changes, the message can sound different from the one Jesus originally announced.

And I actually know this because it's a part of my story.

I mean, for a long time, the message I heard about Jesus growing up emphasized one part of who he is while leaving another part much lower in the mix.

And there's this great experience from my junior year of high school that sort of encapsulates that reality.

It took place one Sunday morning in mid-February.

The year was 1991, and a bunch of you were like, whoa, you are old.

We had to dodge T-Rexes on the way, it was crazy.

But anyway, I attended on a Sunday morning a gathering called Campus Safari.

And it was a large outreach event for middle and high school students, and hundreds of teens and their friends from youth groups from across the area crowded into the bleachers at a large college gymnasium right not far from here.

And as I recall, um it began with a very loud band, which is that's fine, right?

Um I do remember that the lead singer of the loud band had an absolutely awe-inspiring mullet.

Okay, you know what I'm talking about?

So the girls thought he was hot and the guys thought he was cool, so it was working for him.

But anyway, after the band played, a pastor came on stage and explained how much we needed Jesus when we died.

And then he sort of set up a drama in which there was a lone actor standing on a dark stage, illuminated by a spotlight, and informed the audience that she was in hell because nobody ever told her about Jesus.

And then she warned us that unless we received Jesus, we would eventually end up in hell too.

And so then the drama ended, and the pastor got back on stage and invited us to come forward and receive Jesus so we would not go to hell when we died.

And you'll never guess what happened.

Everybody went forward, right?

Like every single person.

I mean, would you go forward?

And you know, I'm analytical and I remember thinking, this is a strange question, asking people, do they want to go to hell?

But anyway, I'm sure that the people who organized that event were sincere.

And they were right about something.

We all do need a savior.

Like, sin is real, Jesus died for our sins, and forgiveness is available to everyone who places their faith in him.

That's not something we should minimize or revise or turn down.

But the message I carried away that morning was almost entirely about what Jesus would do for me when I died.

And while that matters a lot, it left me with a question I didn't know enough to ask at the time.

The question's this What difference was Jesus supposed to make in my life between now and then, like between now and when I die?

Was following Jesus primarily about securing my destination in the afterlife, or had he come to do something in me and through me while I was still alive?

Was I simply waiting to go somewhere someday, or had Jesus invited me to participate in something here and now?

And years later, really for me, starting in college, I began reading the Bible more carefully, and I realized that an essential part of the message of Jesus had been turned down in the mix of Christianity as I had experienced it.

As I read the Bible, I came to realize that the earliest Christians undoubtedly proclaimed Jesus as their Savior, but the confession they placed right at the center of their faith was that Jesus is Lord.

And the word Lord wasn't simply a term of respect, it was an acknowledgement of Jesus as their king.

In fact, and this is really interesting, the New Testament refers to Jesus as Savior roughly 20 times, but it identifies him as Christ or Messiah, that's the promised king, more than 500 times.

Now that doesn't make Jesus a savior any less important, but it shows us that his saving work fits into a much larger story.

Jesus didn't just come to prepare us for heaven later, he came to establish a kingdom now.

He didn't just come to change what happens to us when we die, but he also wants to transform the way that we live.

That's the part of the message I want us to bring back into the mix in this series.

And so, just so we're crystal clear, for the next few weeks, I don't want us to turn down our understanding of Jesus as Savior in order to turn up the idea of Jesus as our king.

I want us to recover the full mix because the one who saves us is also the one who leads us.

Jesus is our savior and he's our king.

And I'm telling you, when you come to see Jesus as King, it changes how you understand his teaching and it reframes what you see it looks like to follow him.

I actually think it can also help you understand something way more practical, like why Jesus talks so much in the Gospels about the kingdom of God.

I mean, if you read it carefully, you'll see he repeatedly says things like, the kingdom of God is like, and the kingdom of heaven is like, and your kingdom come and seek first his kingdom.

Like these statements aren't background noise in the message of Jesus.

The kingdom of God was right at the center of everything Jesus taught and did, from the opening pages of Matthew, the first book in the New Testament, to the closing pages of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament.

Jesus is introduced as a king who has come to establish his kingdom.

He came to bring the life and the values of heaven here and to reclaim what sin had ruined and to establish God's reign in the hearts and the lives of people who would trust him and follow him and represent him in the world.

That is the song we want to hear again.

Here's what's so fun.

That's also why the story of Jesus' birth is far more disruptive than most Christmas cards would make it appear, right?

So you know the story, even if you're only in church, you know, twice a year, Christmas and Easter, but for some reason you're here today, which is awesome.

They're like, look, he's talking about Christmas in September.

I knew they only had one thing they talked about, right?

But anyway, Luke, right, who gives us the Christmas story, tells us that an angel named Gabriel appeared to a young woman named Mary in an overlooked town called Nazareth, and he told her something amazing.

He said, Mary, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

He says, The Lord will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever.

His kingdom will never end.

If you think about it, if our framework is supposed to be Jesus came so I can go to heaven someday, we would expect the angel to say something like, He will forgive people's sins and take them to heaven when they die.

And again, that's true, but it's not what Gabriel emphasizes.

He talks about a throne and a kingdom that will never end.

Luke could not be any more clear.

He is introducing us to a king, his king, King Jesus.

And here's the thing um this was not a promise that God made to Mary for the first time.

It was the fulfillment of a promise the nation of Israel had been carrying for generations.

Like nearly a thousand years earlier, God had promised Israel's greatest king, a guy named David, that through David's family line another king would eventually come, one whose kingdom would endure forever.

And the promise was made and the promise was believed.

And so for generations, the Jewish people waited and they watched, and they endured civil war and invasion and exile, and they waited as Babylon rose and fell, and Persia rose and fell, and Greece rose and fell, and then as Rome tightened its grip on them.

And then in a village, Rome barely would have noticed, an angel announced that the waiting was over.

God's promised king had come.

So we have four accounts of Jesus' life in the New Testament, right?

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

That's that's Luke's story, but Matthew actually makes the same point in the opening line of his account of Jesus' life.

Here's what Matthew writes.

He says, this is the genealogy, the lineage, right, of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

I mean, and this is before Matthew tells us anything Jesus said or did.

He says, listen, you need to understand, Jesus is the Messiah, and he's the son of David.

So from the opening sentence, Matthew wants his readers to recognize the royal claim of Jesus.

Again, Messiah is king.

Jesus is the promised descendant of David.

Mark's account is just as direct.

He opens his account with these words.

He writes, the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

And then John's account, um, what in John's account, one of the first people to recognize Jesus immediately runs to tell his brother, we have found the Messiah, the Son of David, the long-awaited and forever king.

All that to say, like the New Testament writers didn't bury the lead, right?

Like they placed Jesus' identity as king front and center.

And you're thinking, what I was thinking when I first realized this, like, what in the world happened?

Like, what happened between their world and ours that caused the lead to become lost in translation?

And here's what I think happened.

And hang with me, it's a little technical, but you'll follow.

The word Messiah comes from a Hebrew word meaning anointed one.

In ancient Israel, kings were not inaugurated by taking an oath by placing their hand on a Bible.

They were installed by being anointed with oil.

And so over time, the anointed one became a way of referring to the promised king God would send one day.

But most of the New Testament was written in Greek and not Hebrew, and the Hebrew word Messiah wouldn't have meant much to the Greek readers.

So the New Testament authors used the Greek equivalent of Messiah, Christos, the anointed one.

And that's great, but as the Christian message moved from Greek into Latin and then eventually into English, Christos wasn't translated according to its meaning.

Instead, its sound was carried from one language into another.

It wasn't translated, it was transliterated.

And over time, Christos, God's anointed king, became Christ.

And that's why for many of us, instead of seeing Christ as the anointed one and the king, Christ began to sound like Jesus' last name.

And I'm not going to have you raise your hand if you thought it was.

You're among friends, right?

That's how it works.

But Christ is not a name, it's a title.

It means God's anointed one, God's promised King.

And so just something fun.

I've been doing this for a while.

Anytime you read the words Jesus Christ, I want you to hear Jesus the King.

And when Paul writes Christ Jesus, I want you to hear King Jesus.

And by the way, this is so interesting.

That same title is embedded in the name we use to describe ourselves.

When we call ourselves Christians, we aren't just saying that we agree with Jesus' religious ideas.

To be called a Christian is to be identified with God's anointed King.

And that connection actually goes all the way back to the first time the name Christian is used in the Bible.

It's used in one of the writings of Luke, and Luke tells us in a book called Acts, he says, the disciples, the followers of Jesus, were called Christians first at Antioch.

And you're like, that's great, where's Antioch?

Antioch was a large cosmopolitan city filled with people from different nations and cultures and religious backgrounds, and the people there began noticing this unusual new community made of Jews and Gentiles.

And that would have been strange enough, but this group insisted that a crucified Galilean had risen from the dead and was God's anointed king.

And they became known as Christione, people identified with the Christ.

The Christ people, the king's people.

And we don't know whether this name was intended as a compliment or an insult or simply a convenient label, but the name captured something essential.

These people were organizing their lives around their king.

Their ultimate allegiance belonged to him.

And we say, oh, that's great.

You need to know in the Roman world, allegiance mattered because the Roman emperor, they called him Caesar, stood at the center of the empire's political order and demanded its loyalty.

Rome's claim, and this would have been common in the first century, was essentially that Caesar is Lord.

But here come the Christians who will proclaim that Jesus is Lord.

And that had very practical implications.

It meant that Christians could respect their governing authorities, they could pay their taxes, they could live as responsible citizens, but only Jesus commanded their ultimate allegiance because there can be only one king in someone's life.

And this collision between the authority of Jesus and the authority of Caesar didn't begin in Antioch.

It was already visible at Jesus' trial shortly before his crucifixion.

See, when the Jewish religious leaders brought Jesus to the Roman governor in Judea, that's the province that included Jerusalem, a man named Pontius Pilate, Pilate initially treated the case against Jesus like an internal religious dispute.

They're like, you Jews, figure this out.

But then Jesus' accusers reframed the charge against Jesus in terms Pilate could not ignore.

They said, check this out, if you let Jesus go, you are no friend of Caesar.

Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.

So again, it's not subtle.

Jesus was being presented to Rome as a rival king.

He wasn't crucified for telling people to be nicer.

As many of you know, he was crucified beneath a sign that read, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

So to everyone watching, the cross looked like Rome's definitive answer to Jesus' claim.

Rome was saying, hey, this is what happens to rival kings.

Caesar always wins.

Jesus, your kingdom ends here.

And for three days, it appeared that Rome was right.

But then Jesus walked out of the tomb.

The resurrection was God's vindication of the king Rome had rejected.

Rome had declared Jesus defeated, and God declared him victorious.

Rome had sentenced Jesus to death, but God raised him to life, and the implications of that are hard to overstate.

If Jesus had conquered death, then Caesar wasn't the world's ultimate authority.

That's why the earliest Christians' central confession wasn't just a statement about what they believed happened to Jesus, it was a declaration of whom now had the final word in their lives.

That's why when Paul explained what it meant to place your faith in Jesus, he connected belief in the resurrection with a public confession.

He said it this way: he said, if you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved.

And for us, the word Lord, right, that can sound like polite and religious, but in this context, it was far, it was, it was like a far more, more, far more than a respectful title.

It was a declaration of loyalty.

It meant that Caesar doesn't have the final word.

And I know like the idea, like Jesus is Lord, the language may make some of us uncomfortable.

Like we are Americans, right?

Our nation was founded with some very strong ideas.

We don't do kings, we elect leaders and we limit their authority and we reserve the right to criticize them and replace them and complain about them while they're still in office.

And honestly, given the history of human kings, um, our skepticism is understandable.

Human kings have often abused their power, but King Jesus used his power to serve his people.

I mean, historically, human kings send others to die for them.

King Jesus willingly died for us.

Human kings traditionally protect themselves at the expense of the vulnerable King Jesus gave himself for people who could never repay him.

Human kings have often destroyed their enemies when possible, but King Jesus prayed for his enemies.

While they nailed him to a cross, there has never been a king.

There has never been a king like Jesus.

And because there has never been a king like Jesus.

There has never been a kingdom like his, a kingdom that doesn't advance through violence or fear or political control.

It advances as people, one by one, they respond to the good news and they surrender their lives to the king and begin living according to his way.

And that matters because I think, you know, we've been conditioned to hear the word kingdom politically, right?

We picture borders and governments and laws and elections and court decisions and candidates.

And to be fair, even Christians have sometimes confused the kingdom of God with the power of earthly kingdoms.

But Jesus refused to build his kingdom that way.

In fact, when the Roman governor questioned him about his claims to be king, check out what Jesus said.

He said, My kingdom is not of this world.

If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest.

But they didn't because my kingdom isn't.

And of course, Jesus didn't mean his kingdom had nothing to do with this world.

His entire ministry was about God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

What Jesus meant was that his kingdom doesn't come from this world and that it doesn't operate according to this world's methods.

It doesn't need weapons the earthly kings use to defend themselves and defeat their enemies.

And Jesus says, blessed are the meek.

The kingdoms of this world say, destroy your enemies before they destroy you.

Jesus says, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

The kingdoms of this world will say, use your position to make people serve you.

And Jesus says, Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant.

You know, the kingdoms say, protect your image, hide your weakness, never admit you're wrong.

And Jesus says, no, no, no, walk in the light, confess to one another, and humble yourselves.

And the implications of this are just staggering, right?

The kingdom of Jesus, it's not left or right, it's not red or blue, it can't be reduced to a party platform because every political party is a mixture of a human wisdom and human ambition and human blindness.

Followers of Jesus may disagree about politics and candidates, but we must never confuse our political preferences with the kingdom of God.

Political parties want our vote.

King Jesus asks for our allegiance.

And that allegiance should shape our politics and our relationships and our ambitions and everything else, but it must transcend them all because he is our primary allegiance.

King Jesus is not a mascot for our side.

Because he's Lord over everything.

And his kingdom becomes visible, not when his followers win every argument, but when they embody the character of their king.

It becomes visible whenever someone forgives instead of retaliating, and whenever someone tells the truth, when lying would be easier, and whenever someone crosses a social boundary to love a neighbor, and whenever someone uses power for the benefit of the powerless, and whenever a husband serves his wife, or a leader listens to a critic, or a teenager includes the person everyone else ignores, or a generous person quietly meets a need.

That's what it looks like when people begin living under the reign of Jesus.

And this is where the kingdom framework, like seeing Jesus as your king, it changes everyday life.

I mean, if if Jesus is only my ticket to heaven, then I can receive his forgiveness and keep running my own kingdom.

Like I can ask him to save me without ever allowing him to lead me.

And I mean, I can admire Jesus and sing about Jesus and even believe good things about Jesus while I sort of remain on the throne of my life.

And I know that we don't think of it in those terms, but you can't follow a king without surrendering your kingdom.

And that of course, it doesn't mean that we become perfect overnight.

The first disciples certainly didn't.

They give me endless hope for myself.

Thank you, you know.

But they had chosen their king.

And when they failed, they got back up and continued following.

That is discipleship.

Learning day by day to live as if Jesus is your king.

It reframes obedience.

We don't obey Jesus to earn a place in his kingdom.

We obey Jesus because through grace we've already been invited and accepted into it.

And we don't serve to persuade him to love us, we serve because the king has already demonstrated his love for us.

And we don't forgive because the other person deserves it, we forgive because we live under the reign of a king who forgave us.

And we don't give generously to earn spiritual points, we give because everything we have belongs to our King, and our King is generous.

Like the gospel is not simply an invitation to believe something about Jesus so that something good happens to us when we die.

It's an invitation to trust and follow a king and to begin experiencing the life of his kingdom now.

And by the way, if this sounds familiar, I mean, we've all been around this, even if maybe we've never seen it this clearly.

This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is not a prayer for escape, it's a prayer of surrender.

It's a prayer that essentially says, King Jesus, begin with me.

Let what is true in heaven be increasingly true in my home and in my marriage and in my friendships and in my business and in my school and in the way I spend money and in the way I handle anger and the way I treat people who cannot do anything for me.

Your kingdom come here in me.

And that leads to a different question than simply, am I in?

It leads us to the question, who is my king?

Like who has the final word in my life?

When Jesus and my desires point in different directions, like who wins?

We all live in a kingdom.

The only question is whose?

Most of us spend our lives building small kingdoms where we're in charge and we try to control our image and protect our comfort and arrange our circumstances and get other people to cooperate with our plans.

And then we become anxious, right, when our little kingdom will not behave.

And so the invitation of Jesus is not try harder to make your kingdom work, it's come, follow me.

Like trust my rule.

Participate in a kingdom that can't be shaken.

Because in the end, every kingdom in this world is temporary.

Every political movement is temporary, every company is temporary.

So is every institution and reputation and personal empire we build.

But the kingdom of Jesus will never end.

In fact, one of Jesus' earliest followers, a man named John, tells us that one day Jesus' kingdom will be the only kingdom left.

Toward the end of the New Testament, John receives a vision where history is heading.

And here's what he says: he says, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah.

And he will reign forever and ever.

It's like John says, I've seen it.

History is not moving in circles, it's moving towards a king, and one day everything broken will be made right, and violence and injustice and grief will end, and even death itself will end.

God will dwell with his people, and creation will finally become what God intended it to be.

And that's then, but just briefly, I think until then, the church is called to be an outpost of that coming kingdom, like a community where people can catch a glimpse of the future God has promised.

That's what Keystone is supposed to be.

Not just a building where like religious people gather once a week or a club for people who already agree, or an audience that just consumes spiritual content.

That's all fine, but we're meant to be a community organized around a king.

A place where lonely people are welcomed, and hurting people are carried, and skeptical people can ask honest questions, and children are valued, and generosity replaces greed, and service replaces status, and our love is not reserved just for people who look and think and vote and behave exactly like us.

When that happens, people catch a glimpse of the kingdom that's coming.

So here's a simple invitation for you this week.

Um, if you're someone who reads the Bible regularly, just as you read the New Testament, look for the King.

Every time you see the word Christ, mentally translate it, King.

And when you read Jesus Christ here, King Jesus, and pay attention to how often Jesus talks about his kingdom.

Notice how his commands describe the culture of that kingdom.

And notice how the miracles are previews of a world where sickness and hunger and chaos and death no longer rule.

And then ask yourself an honest question: like, if Jesus really is my king, what needs to change in me?

Not just ultimately, but like today.

What do I need to start paying attention to?

Maybe there's an apology that you've resisted making, and your king says, you need to do this, not just for them, but for you.

Maybe there's a habit you keep defending.

Maybe there's a person you've decided doesn't deserve your kindness.

Maybe fear has been making your decisions for you.

And maybe, maybe, like so many of us, your identity has become tangled up in success and approval and money and the acceptance of your tribe.

Maybe you've trusted Jesus to forgive you, but you've never actually surrendered to his leadership in your life.

And the good news is there is grace, and you can begin today.

Not by promising you'll never fail again, and not by pretending you have no doubts, but by opening your hands and saying, Jesus, I trust you not only as my Savior, I surrender to you as my King.

Because I'm telling you, the best news in the world is not simply that you can go to heaven when you die.

The good news is that heaven's king has come to us, and he has invited us to follow him.

And Noah, before I pray uh to close our time, um I want to let you know that Grant and I are relaunching the after sermon with this series.

And so later this afternoon, uh you'll be able to go to Apple uh podcasts and also Spotify.

And Grant um basically grills me, which is kind of fun, on this content.

And so if you want to hear, it's like 20 minutes, like a drive time sort of thing.

Um but if you're interested in taking some of these conversations deeper, um, we would invite you to give that a try this week.

And uh and we will pick the conversation up there next week.

But for now, I'd love to have you stand and I'll close our time in prayer.

And we will have some friends uh under the screen to the left if you're here and you'd like to pray with someone before you leave.

But let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for who you are and for what you have done.

We thank you as well for what you are doing through your story, your living word that stirs deep, deep, deep waters within each of us.

And so I pray that you give us courage to wrestle down what to do with what we've learned.

And ultimately, I pray that our lives would be more a reflection of our King.

It is in his name, the name above all names, the name of Jesus Christ, we pray.

And everyone said, Amen.

Grace and peace, your friends.

We'll see you next week.

Yeah, cool.