Matthew 19:1-12 - Aligning with God's Kingdom

Take our Bibles, go to Matthew 19.

Matthew 19.

We're moving deeper into the Gospel of Matthew.

We've been going through it for almost two years now.

And we're entering a little more deeply into this fourth of five different sections of big chunks of Jesus' teaching.

And as I said a few weeks ago, it all wraps this section all wraps around four questions that Jesus is asked.

The disciples ask him, Who will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

Peter asks, What about forgiving a brother who sinned against me up to seven times?

A little bit later, a man asked him, What good thing must I do to gain eternal life?

And then there's a question that we'll be looking at today, where some Pharisees speak to Jesus once he's returned from Galilee into Judea.

As I was getting ready to study this, I was kind of getting all my commentaries together and opening them up and getting them in proper places to do some research and study.

I came across one comment by one of the commentators.

This is exactly what he says.

The text we are considering in this chapter is certainly not the most inspirational or sensational portion of Matthew's gospel.

Boy, that's exciting, right?

You know, imagine, imagine, you know, spending a long hard day on Sunday teaching and preaching and all the things that go on on Sunday and Monday morning, you're like fighting the weariness of your soul, and you open up your commentary and it goes, This is not the most exciting or exhilarating portion of gospel, Matthew.

Like, wow, thanks, guy.

That's that's really fun.

However, I think he's wrong.

I think this is an exciting portion of scripture.

I think it's a very relevant portion of scripture.

Uh, and I think we'll find great value from looking at it.

There are some things that are in this that might at first surface be kind of challenging to some of you, might be troubling to some of you in the situations that you might have found yourself in in the past or are in at the moment.

And I want us to keep moving through that and just kind of forewarn you a little bit.

Some of this is not going to be comfortable for some of you.

But I think it'll be helpful for all of us, and I think it'll be significant for all of us, especially in our day and age, and especially as the body of Christ as we represent the Lord Jesus in our society.

Now, hopefully, I've not put your guard up at all.

I don't mean to do that by what I've just said.

I just want to let you know that we'll be pushing through those challenging points to get to a place that I think all of us can affirm.

Because what the Lord talks about here is something to do with part of Scripture's instructions about the sacred institution of marriage and its sanctity as decreed by God.

And these things are extremely relevant for us, and especially in our Western culture today, which seems at times to even despise matrimony.

First thing I want us to look at here is the sinful situation that arises arises this question that comes in Matthew chapter 19.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

It says this when Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee, went into the region of Judea on the other side of the Jordan.

Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

Some Pharisees came to him and to test him, they asked, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?

So after watching Jesus heal people, the Pharisees come up to Jesus with this question.

And it's not a simple curiosity question, and it's not a counseling question, it's a corrupt question.

The last times the Pharisees show up in Matthew's Gospels back in chapter 16, where they're asking Jesus for a sign, which he's given more than enough of.

And so they're really just provoking him there and they're provoking him again.

And they're not asking a sincere question.

They're not asking a question to kind of help them deal with a personal situation and they need his counsel.

They're not asking for that.

They're not even asking for him to give an interpretation where they might be able to feel like they have a sense of oneness with him about their particular views, which we'll talk about in just a moment.

No, they're asking this question for a very devious reason.

And the reason is because where Jesus is at at the moment.

Jesus is teaching and preaching and healing in the very same region where John the Baptist was beheaded for speaking boldly about marriage and divorce in direct application to Herod Antipas.

That's why they're asking the question.

They don't care about Jesus' view about marriage and divorce.

They care about putting him into a trap and trying to find a way for Herod Antipas to get behind their desire to have Jesus killed.

And so they want to lead Jesus into this discussion with this question in order to put him into face-to-face confrontation with Herod Antipas, who's already killed John and might just do it to Jesus too.

It betrays where their heart's at.

This is not a scriptural question with a sincere heart that wants to submit to the teachings of Jesus.

This is something far worse.

And so they ask, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any and every reason?

And they are alluding to a discussion that they would have amongst themselves about the application of a passage in the book of Deuteronomy in chapter 24.

And it reads this way: if a man marries a woman and who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and gives it to her and sends her from his house and on it goes.

So that verse sets up a four or five verse discussion about this certificate of divorce and what kind of strength it held over their relationship.

And the Pharisees were asking that question because even internally there was some debate about what all of that meant.

And when you read Deuteronomy 24, you can catch the ambiguities, right?

Becomes displeasing to him.

Well, what what are the criteria?

What are the limits of being displeasing to him?

And then there's the find something indecent about her.

What does indecent mean?

And is it something significant or lesser?

And so they would have these like long conversations about what all that meant.

And the Pharisees were divided up into two different groups.

There were some from the followers of Shemmai, who was a rabbi, that this indecency had to be some major offense and would include adultery, but it also got teased into other areas.

And then followers of Hillel, who thought that some indecency could be, well, anything that displeased the husband.

Well, the Mishnah, which records some of these rabbinic teachings and puts them into writing that were orally transmitted at the time of Jesus, kind of gives us an understanding of what kind of context Jesus was in when this question was asked.

So the house of Shemai, for instance, would bring up the whole issue of infidelity and marriage, of adultery, because there was something indecent about her.

And it would, some of them would say, that's the adultery.

However, some of them took this some indecency and began to say, Well, I think that could be teased out a little further.

And it got to the point in the time of Jesus that this sum indecency became as ridiculous as their wife talking to a man in public, or spinning in the streets with bare arms, or loosening her hair in public.

And the followers of Halil were just as bad as the followers of Shemmai.

They would look at it and say that if there was anything displeasing to the husband, that displeasure was enough grounds for divorce.

So if she spoiled his dinner, for instance, if he didn't like that bad badly enough, that was enough of a grounds.

If she wasn't as clean in the home as he would like, that was enough reason.

Or if she didn't purify the home enough during the times of purification, particularly around some of the festivals, Passover, then she was hampering his quest for holiness and he could divorce her.

And it got down to the point, even where one of the rabbis said that even if he found someone prettier than she was, he could divorce her.

And he puts it this way: she finds no favor in his eyes.

So if his eyes kind of behold something better than she is, then well, that's a disfavor in his eyes, and he can divorce her.

Josephus, a lot of us heard of Josephus.

Josephus married three times and divorced his second wife for exactly that reason.

There was something displeasurable about her.

And so he divorced her.

And it's against that background that these men are coming to Jesus with their wicked, sinful hearts and their evil intentions to ask Jesus this question.

What do you say, Jesus?

What's the reason for this divorce?

How will you describe it?

Are you on Halel's side or Shemai's side?

We're going to trap you.

And they're reaching in to try to grab a hold of whatever he might say.

And it becomes very, very apparent from our vantage point, as we look back on this, that they were not at all about trying to maintain God's word.

They would hunt down a teacher who would give them the permission that they wanted, no matter what was said, to do what they'd like to do.

And if you don't think that doesn't still happen, it certainly does.

More than a few times I've had someone come into my study and say, hey, Pastor, here's my situation.

And they're not asking, what's the biblical view of this, or what can I do in a way to please God here?

They're they're waiting for me to go, let me write you a permission slip.

And you can do what you want.

Because when the conversation starts to get to the nitty-gritty of the biblical mandates and principles that are involved in their situation, they're like, I'm not getting the answer I'd like.

And it becomes, it's written all over their face.

And off they go looking for someone who's going to give them just what they want to hear.

Happens too often.

These men in this society had assumed all the power laid in their hands, right?

And they left the women, their wives, the ones that they made a covenant with, no protection whatsoever.

Just imagine what that must have felt like to be under that.

The shame of divorce held over your head.

Every burnt dinner, every unguarded moment, every roll up of the sleeve, every toss of your hair, every wrinkle on your face might be the very thing that triggers the man you're married to to say, I'm done.

That's extremely unbearable.

Just imagine what the effects would that be.

Hinged on every little detail of her behavior was her stability, her family stability, her social standing, her financial security, to bear the shame of the assumption that she had done something wrong and sinful to receive this kind of action against her.

And all the while her ex-husband's got someone under his arm.

Just walking around.

You know, showing her off to all the other guys.

What a horrible, sinful situation this is.

This is wicked.

Now, that's the sinful situation.

Let's get into the scripture significance here because Jesus gets into this and he answers it, not like they'd like him to answer it.

But boy, does he answer it.

And his first words are, haven't you read?

Well, these are men who read the scriptures all the time.

These are men who pride themselves in how much they know God's word.

They have it on their foreheads and they've got it on their wrists.

They've got it all over them.

They've got it on their doors.

They've memorized it.

They've read it.

Haven't you read?

Haven't you read?

Is a barbed rebuke.

Not just suggesting, but telling them they've been reading scripture wrong.

They've been looking for the escape clause rather than for a pathway, a selfless sacrifice and love within the context of a covenant that they've made.

They're looking for an out.

And so Jesus opens up something they so cavalier cavalierly ignored.

What's that?

The very foundational focus of God's design and purpose for marriage at the creation.

And he brings them all the way back to the book of Genesis and starts there.

And one of the reasons why is he's using one of their beliefs against them.

The Pharisees believed that the earlier a passage was written, the more significant it was.

So if it shows up in Genesis 1 and 2, it's more important than what shows up in Deuteronomy, even though they were resting on Deuteronomy and ignoring Genesis.

They were hypocritical, contradictory.

And so he brings them back to what they would have to affirm as the most significant passage, one of the earliest spots in Scripture, the first turn of the page, Genesis.

And he calls them to look more deeply at it.

And he's causing us to look more deeply at it because our society is warping the view of marriage just like this one.

It's a rampant problem then, and it's a rampant problem now, even in the context of evangelical churches.

But before we look at the details, I just want to set this up a little bit.

Jesus is about to speak, and no surprise to any of us, Jesus is expressing the revealed will of God in the scriptures.

This is not an opinion.

Jesus is not kowtowing to the pressures of the changing times.

He is not putting himself subservant to the moving mores of societies.

He is not giving himself over to the majority opinions or seeking to find relevance among the culture.

He's definitely not politically correct here.

His those things didn't influence him.

They didn't influence his understanding.

They didn't adjust his insistence on the truth of Scripture at all.

He lays it out directly.

And the first thing that he shows us by way of scripture's significance is found in verse four.

That sexuality is God's creation.

Haven't you read, he replied, that at the beginning the creator made them male and female?

The first thing he teaches us here is that sexuality is God's creation.

He made them, first of all, different.

Male and female.

And this difference is not a difference of status, this is a different of function.

This is not a difference of dignity or status or any of that sort of thing, but how they interrelate with each other.

And any society that blurs this distinction is circumventing and violating God's direct purposes and plans in creation itself.

God made them male and female.

This is not a unisex world, nor is it a take your choice world.

It's a world of male and female.

And as we get into this, it becomes very, very apparent that people say Jesus never talked about homosexuality or same-sex marriages.

I think he did.

One man, one woman married.

One man, one woman married.

Yes, he didn't speak about it directly, but the implications of this are extremely clear.

There's no ambiguity here.

He affirms God's design as the union of a man and a woman together.

He made them different.

But wonderfully, he also made them dependent, dependent on each other.

When we were doing our scripture reading together, and Alan put together that point about God looking at the overall sort of all the things that he created and declared them very good.

Well, in Exod or Genesis chapter 2 and verse 18, God makes a pronouncement, it's not good for man to be alone.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And we're still pre-Genesis 3 in the fall here.

And he says, It's not good for Adam to be alone.

And so he makes Eve, and they too together are dependent on each other.

And at that creation, God blesses the two of them.

Adam and Eve are sexual, they are naked, they are married, and they are not ashamed.

The Lord blessed them.

The Lord put his favor upon them and declared it very good.

He called them to join together in sexual union and to have children and to begin to multiply to bring this world to a fullness that wasn't yet.

Telling us here that the sex drive and sexual dependency of a male and female are part of God's original design and not a consequence of the fall.

Part of the perfection which God called humanity to.

And sexuality has been one of those like tough things to talk about that the church has had for a long, long, long time.

In fact, in the history, if you were to look at church history about this, they would say that sexuality was somehow base and earthly and less valuable and important than celibacy, was put on a higher scale than this sort of semi Gnostic flesh is bad, spirit is good kind of mentality.

It's not what God says here at all.

He affirms that.

Their sexual union.

He affirms their differences.

He affirms their dependence on each other, the complementariness of their union.

Jesus moves on by saying, not only is sexuality God's creation, but he goes on in verses five and six to talk about marriage is a commitment.

Marriage is a commitment.

And said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they too will become one flesh.

So they are no longer two but one.

Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.

Jesus says a lot there.

And we could we could turn that little two verse those two verses into a much longer series.

But what he's talking about are family units, a personal bond, and a sexual union in these words.

Let's take a look at the family union part first.

A man will leave his father and mother.

A man will leave his father and mother.

And what he's trying to say is that this new union of a man and a woman together in marriage becomes a separate family unit.

And that's that relationship of the husband and wife supersedes the relationship of a parent to a child.

And it becomes increasingly understandable and intense when you remember that in the Israelite communities, the sons lived in the same location as their parents.

They would just add a room and then add another room and then add another room.

So they they lived at the same address.

So what did Jesus mean, God mean when he said they will leave father and mother and cling to his wife?

It's not a geographical distancing that it's talking about, it's a relational separation.

There is got to be some substantial measure of relational difference from parent to child now that the husband and wife are married.

Because a fresh family unit is in the making right there.

And so a man doesn't take his wife into his father's house, build an extra room, and expect his wife to be under his father's authority.

There's a mutuality of a new unit there, even if the geography is still the same.

And this has application to us.

Obviously, these children who are gotten married are still going to need their parents.

They're still going to love their parents.

There's still going to be some honor to their parents and care for their parents.

All of that is assumed here.

But there's something more significant about the relationship of the husband and the wife together.

And that needs to be preserved and protected.

That needs to be cultivated and not corroded.

Because that's the fundamental building block of society there.

Now, remember, all of this has been laid out before the new covenant community is brought into this world.

This is a creation ordinance.

This is not given simply to redeemed humanity.

This is given to all humanity.

This idea of marriage and this idea of sexuality, these are things that God gives to us as humans so that we might understand who we are.

This is not just Christianity's narrow perspective about marriage.

This is God's perspective about marriage.

So this idea of a family unit, but it goes deeper into a personal bond.

For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, held fast, literally glued, glued to his wife.

This is the super glue moment right here.

This is that tight bond, meaning that they are to be companions together for life, affectionate and faithful to each other, constantly strengthening each other's bonds and repairing the small breaches that occur day to day.

Bonding together, always applying the glue and not the solvent in their marriage.

This is a new family unit with a strong bonding, so much so that this idea of being one flesh comes into view.

And it gets repeated.

And Jesus says, These two will be one flesh, so they are no longer two but one.

So there is this emphasis by repetition that Jesus gives here.

And by using that word one flesh and by using that word glue, what is the Lord doing?

He's showing us the goodness of their sexual union, the preciousness of their oneness.

As one of God's most gracious gifts to humanity is to bond two people together that intimately.

One more thing to say here, and we'll keep moving.

Notice that the commitment comes before the consummation.

The commitment comes before the consummation.

He'll leave father and mother, cleave to his wife, and they too will then, is the idea, be one flesh.

Why do we talk about sexual purity here?

Because it's God's design for us.

Because it's God's creative design for us.

Because it is what is good for us.

Because God looked upon creation and he said he pronounced it all very good.

This is the order, this is the plan.

Anything other than that, less than that, against that, is only for our destruction.

And leads only to the pain and agony of sin.

So this idea of one flesh means the union is bound together.

Emotionally they're one, volitionally, they're one, mentally they're one, physically they're one, socially they're one, spiritually they're one, sexually they're one, financially they're one, and even geographically, as much as possible, they're going to be one with each other.

This is God's design.

This is Scripture's significance.

And verse six tells us the capstone, because marriage is God's doing.

Verse six, therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate.

Now it doesn't say that in the book of Genesis.

Jesus said it here.

And Jesus is making an implication on a passive verb in the Old Testament.

They will be joined together and will become one flesh, as though they're simply recipients of the joining, recipients of the oneness, that something's agently happening on these two people, making them one.

Well, what's making them one?

It's not I married her and she married him, it's they were married because God's the one who joined them.

This union is something God put together.

And therefore it needs to be respected, it needs to be honored.

And he's saying to these men, you're looking for the escape clause, not the pathway that God has designed.

You're asking the very wrong question.

I don't have time to go into the details of the next section.

We've talked about it in Matthew chapter 5 when we went through that passage, but he also says here that divorce is a concession, not a command.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Divorce is a concession, not a command.

Verses 7 to 9.

Why then did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?

Jesus responds, Moses permitted, not commanded, you to divorce your wife because of your hearts were hard.

But it was not this way from the beginning.

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for marital unfaithfulness and marries another woman commits adultery.

The divorce may not always be sinful itself, but the divorce is always because of some sin in some fashion, is what Jesus is saying here.

And he's also saying it's not a mandate that there's even in that a potential for a different response.

The ideal is offered again.

He's not going to get into the nitty-gritty arguments with them.

He's not going to satisfy all the little answers that they want to hear.

He's not going to engage them on the level that they've tried to bring him to.

And you've stomped your feet all over them to try to find out what's best for your little desires.

What he's trying to drive home is the ideal, the ideal, the ideal, the ideal.

So they might go, well, yeah, maybe I should pay attention to that.

And then it gets into the area that becomes home to us.

The disciples in verse 10 make a comment.

If this is the way, the situation between a husband and his wife, it's better not to marry.

Wow, guys.

Really?

You've been with Jesus for almost three years, and that's your response.

Man.

Marriage fidelity, love, care, respect.

Making priorities in my wife.

Man, it's probably better just not to marry at all.

Seriously?

And this aren't this isn't the Pharisees, these are the twelve disciples.

Come on, guys.

Listen to what Jesus said.

He wants to bring us into an understanding of the superior, the surpassing superiority of the new covenant.

He's going to say something here that's going to tease out a principle that helps us as new covenant believers to understand our priorities in life.

So we've gone from the sinful situation to scripture significances.

And now we're going to look at the surpassing superiority of the new covenant.

Jesus is granted the blueprint for marriage, the high ideal that humanity is to experience from the time they were first created, we were first created, all the way up until our day.

This declaration that he made in the Garden of Eden, right?

So what Jesus is teaching here, and what Jesus is implying by what he's saying here, is that all the things that erode marriage, all the things that lead to divorce, all the things that corrupt our relationships, can be fixed if we could somehow go back to Eden.

Go back to where we were.

That's what he's saying.

That the problems that we deal with, the marriage difficulties that we have, divorce and all the heartache and hardships in marriage, they could all be fixed if every one of us could go back to Eden.

If every one of us could be right there, just as Adam and Eve were on that very first day.

And this is what the Old Testament prophets project.

They project a day like that.

They talk about a time that's coming that's like the restoration of Eden in Isaiah 51 and Ezekiel 36.

The prophets project a time when there'll be an end of all the enmity within God's creation, that people will be together, that humans and animals will be as one, that even the creation itself will be free from all of its enmities and strife and the results and effects of the fall.

They use images that talk about the land being full of fertility and life.

It's going to be just like the original fruitfulness of the earth.

They describe a new creation where there's no more sin.

And in just a little while, Jesus is going to hold up a cup and say, This is the new covenant in my blood.

And Paul's going to write some couple decor decades later, if anyone is in Christ, he is what?

The new creation.

The new is come, the old is gone.

So what the Lord is calling us to here is calling us to a newness of life that looks at our relationships and our marriages from a completely different perspective than ever before, restored by the redemption that's in Christ to affirm things that were created for us in the original design of God.

And the world longs for it too.

Watch a romantic movie.

How does it end?

You got a couple after all the ups and downs of the movie and all the tension of the plot comes to resolution, and they're both sitting on a dock in a peaceful, calm waters, and the sun setting, and the glow of the sunset hour is beaming on their faces and just accentuates the happiness that they have, and the next thing you know, the credits start rolling.

Right?

And you're left to wonder what happened.

Well, you know what happened.

It was always good from that point forward.

Yeah, no, it never is.

But that's what you're left with.

Why?

Because that's what we yearn for, that's what we long for.

That's heaven set in our hearts.

We long for something better and greater.

We long for the ideal.

We can see it, but we can't experience it.

Whether we know the Lord or not, it's out there.

It's just beyond our grasp.

And Jesus is saying, I'm gonna bring it to you.

I'm gonna bring it to you.

You will be able to grab this because it's yours.

All things are yours, Paul said to the Corinthians.

And so he's talking about the new dynamic that's here.

He's bringing it.

And he wraps it up in these statements that Jesus is making to his disciples.

Well, if this is the situation between a husband and a wife, uh it's better not to marry.

Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it's been given.

For some are eunuchs because they were born that way, others were made that way by men, and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven.

The one who can accept this should accept it.

It's a very puzzling statement at first glance.

But at the heart of this statement, Jesus is calling us to unswerving loyalty, not just to the marriage, but to the new kingdom, the kingdom of heaven.

Loyalty to Christ displayed by our life priorities.

And so what he's calling us to is, first of all, to acknowledge God's original intents and affirm it.

But another thing that he's calling us to is to reorder our priorities according to the new covenant.

Just as much as he's built up marriage a moment ago, now he's giving something even more important than marriage.

The kingdom of heaven.

And he lays down here three different kinds of eunuchs.

There are those that are born that way, there are others that are made that way, and then there are others who make themselves that way.

And I'll talk about each of those in just a second.

The term eunuch means literally keeper of their bed, signifying that someone sleeps alone in their bed.

So just let that sort of word picture play out a little bit.

Because I think it's a clue to what he's about to say.

In the broadest sense of understanding of the term eunuch, as we know, it's talking about males who do not experience normal sexual development or incapable or lack sexual desire or the ability to reproduce.

Okay.

And he breaks them up into three categories.

First of all, those who suffer this condition because of providence.

Right?

Some were born this way.

Okay.

Some children are born with genetic abnormalities or endocrine disorders, and they're prevented from experiencing sexual maturity.

Some of them are born this way.

Now, before we move past this, I need to say something pastoral here.

It's not the focus of the passage, but I think it's relevant.

Let me urge you to take to heart what Jesus is saying here.

Because how we talk to people who are single or childless matters.

And it matters right in this point that Jesus is making.

Sometimes our casual comments to single people, aren't you married yet?

Or to a couple that doesn't have children, when are you going to have kids?

Can be pierced weapons into a heart of a vulnerable soul, who, because of Providence's sake, no decision of their own, no control of their own, have been living life with a situation they can't change.

And your words, instead of being helpful to them, have just shot an arrow into their heart.

You see, all of us suffer from the effects of the fall.

Some people suffer from the effects of the fall this way.

And we would never say to a cancer Cancer patient, how come you're not free of cancer?

God made us to be healthy.

Then why would you say to a single person, Why don't you get married?

God made us to have kids, be married.

Or to say to a childless couple, why don't you have children?

God made us to have children.

We all suffer from the effects of the fall in some way.

Every one of us.

And there's some folks who, because of the providence of this world, in its fallen state as it is, have a burden that they carry that a lot of other people don't.

And so we have to be careful about how we talk and recognizing that for some folks, this isn't about choosing a certain lifestyle at all.

This is about dealing with something in a fallen world and their suffering.

So that's one category.

The second category are people who are made that way.

Before they reach puberty, they're made eunuchs to prevent them from sexual maturity so that they might dedicate themselves, say, to the royal court, lacking the desire and therefore the temptation of being a problem to the king's sort of harem.

And some of these eunuchs become the trusted officials of the greatest people in the country.

When you think of Potiphar, in the Hebrew he's he's called a eunuch, which might help explain why his wife was going after Joseph so hard.

But then there's the third category.

Category of priority.

The first two have something in common.

There's no personal choice in that situation.

Right?

Born, made.

Born made that way.

The third one, there's a choice.

There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way because of the kingdom of heaven.

What does this mean?

What it's saying is, I think, very akin to what Jesus said just a chapter before, when he said, if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, or if your hand offends you, cut it off.

He's not telling people to pull their eyes out or cut their hands off.

He's talking about the radical relationship we have toward our sin and eradicating it in our hearts.

And so here he's not saying people literally become eunuchs, but that they will live their life as if they were for the purpose of the kingdom of heaven.

Which means that there are going to be some people who are so engaged with God's activity of reigning and ruling in hearts through the gospel, that they will give their life to that and let go of some things that most of the rest of the population practices.

That they will make even this a sacrifice for the kingdom.

They are prepared to leave everything, even that, to follow Jesus.

Now, Jesus couches it with the statement he repeats, right?

He begins and ends it with this.

The one who can accept this should accept it.

And also, if this not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it's been given.

This is not to be the norm, obviously, but it is an example of what is to be.

And what he's saying is that there will be people who will be able to free up their life to serve the Lord in a particular way that might be inhibited somewhat by marriage.

And they've made that sacrifice to do it.

What is the point that Jesus is making here?

Well, he's got one group of guys who found every reason in the book to get out of something.

He's got his own disciples who at this point in time are still looking at the loss section of the ledger and not the gain section.

And they're saying, it's better just never to marry.

And then he's saying, Come on, guys, there are people, there's coming a day when there's people who are going to care so much about the kingdom that they're going to be glad to say no to that.

Not just give up their hands in despair over it.

They're going to be willing to give it all for the gospel.

So quit thinking so negatively.

This is how wonderful the gospel is.

This is how wonderful the kingdom of heaven is.

It's glorious and it's eternal and its power.

Some people have to suffer with this.

Some people are made to suffer with this.

And some people will choose to live like that for the purpose of the gospel.

So he starts with a group that wants to run from any call to commitment, to people that are afraid of any call of commitment, to people who are willing to embrace even the most strict call of commitment.

That's what's happening here.

There may not be any or many in our church body who are making that determination.

But there might be.

And so let's not barb them with kind of joking comments about come on, you're getting older.

Come on.

Should start having children.

It might be that they've decided not to for a higher cause.

The question is, how far down the road are we wanting to go in relationship to the gospel?

What holds us back?

In just a little bit, a man's going to ask Jesus a big question.

What must I do to gain eternal life?

And he's going to say to him, Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor and follow me.

It's a radical commitment.

It's a radical sacrifice.

It's a different kind of sacrifice, different kind of commitment, but no less intense than the one Jesus is speaking about here.

And so he's calling us live your life for the kingdom.

Live your life for the kingdom.

Affirm God's original purposes.

Live in the newness of the new creation.

And make that your highest priority.

Not your pleasure, not your ease, not even the fulfillment of your sexual desires.

Let's pray.

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for these words that Jesus has spoken right in the middle of a trap, right in the middle of some men trying to get his head chopped off.

And yet he teaches us something so deep and so wonderful, so powerful.

Father, it catches all of us and causes each and every one of us to ask the question, where's my heart?

Where's my heart?

We pray, Father, that when we sing, All to Jesus, I surrender, that we do so with sincerity.

When we say that we love each other from a sincere heart, that we would do it, that we might acknowledge the superiority of the new covenant, that we might affirm the significance of Scripture, and that we might say no to any sinful situation that so insidiously tries to call us away from you.

And we pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.