There’s never been anybody like him. In the terrible agony of the cross, everyone around him is furious, and everything around him is chaotic. And yet what is Jesus? Calm, stoic, prepared, and victorious. He’s the master of his own heart. He’s the master of his own tongue. He’s the master of his mind. There has never been anybody like him. And think about the claims that he made during this ministry. Here are some things, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. He said, I am the Son of Man. You know Daniel 7, the one who’s in heaven sitting on the throne? That’s me. Whoever confesses me, Jesus says, I will confess him before my Father in heaven. Whoever confesses me, I will save on the last day. Who says things is like this, except for Jesus Christ, our Lord and Messiah. As followers of Jesus, we want to do what Jesus envisions and what he desires for our community, for our family, and most importantly, for our lives. And so this edict is a way of expressing this longing to have Christ and what he desires and what he thinks that they would become our goals and that they would become our dreams and that they would become what’s made manifest in our lives.
And the reason we do this is because many of us along the way have come to the conclusion that what Jesus says, firstly, is true. That the source of all that is broken in us is of our own making. It’s of the sinful nature that bubbles up and then it becomes expressions in the way that we live. And that what we needed was to disregard guard that sinful nature, and we needed someone greater, something greater, to take the reins of our lives and guide us back or coax us back or persuade us back, even try to manipulate us, push us back on track. That we needed a yoke that binds us to someone whose burdens are easy and whose ways are light, that we needed someone to teach us how to live. And so it’s in that tension that we discover the idea of discipleship. Discipleship is this concept where we find a teacher, we find a rabbi, and we walk along with them. We throw away our ideas and we take on their ideas. Discipleship is the process of leaving our old selves and our old ways on the figurative boat with our Father and beginning the long arduous process of walking in the footsteps of our rabbi who is Jesus Jesus Christ, of being covered in his dust, of being molded into his image.
And now this is such an important pursuit for us that we have decided to take years upon years upon years to study it. And what we’ve done on Sunday morning is we said, Hey, we’re going to come in on Sunday and we’re just going to walk through Jesus’s life. And so you came expecting to see this amazing logo that Tuan made for us. We’ve seen this logo, I don’t know, 50, I don’t know, 100 times or something like that. And week by week, we’ve walked through a harmonization of the Gospels, where we have seen Jesus line by line, moment by moment, account by account, in interaction by interaction. We have heard him teach. We have watched him live. We have seen what he cares about. We have heard what he despises. And hopefully, you have been changed by that journey. But today, we end in a formal way, we end that journey, but we don’t end that journey, right? Because anyone who’s been on this journey knows that you don’t just fix it in two years, that it’s a forever thing to move from one degree of glory to the next. But for now, at least after today, we leave this study and we go on to different things.
And so we’re going to end our time today of the study of the Ministry of Jesus by doing something that I almost certainly cannot do in the time I have, which is why I asked to come up so early. I have about 40 minutes to give you a review of everything you heard in two years. I’m going to do… I’m looking at the time. If you have lunch appointments, you don’t have to cancel them yet. But amen, I’m not going to go that long, but I wanted to just look at some of the themes. I’m not going to talk about everything and you’ll say, Oh, you missed this. Of course I missed this. I’m going to miss a lot of things, but we have we have time. We’re going to walk through everything that we heard. We’re going to interweave the ideas with the accounts. Hopefully, Really, I’ll leave you with something that you feel like, man, that’s like a short YouTube video of what the Ministry of Jesus was about. And because we did this together, what I’ve asked is I’ve actually asked 10 people to help me on this way. I asked members of this church to speak for a minute or so about some of the scenes, some of the moments as we go moment by moment.
And so when it’s their turn, I’ll pass them up. They’ll be up on the screen. You’ll watch them. They’ll speak for about 45 seconds to about 90 seconds. And then I’ll come up. They’ll give most of the applications, and then I’ll continue to weave us through the story of Jesus. Are you ready for all that? Amen. Okay, let’s do it. We started this sermon series on the Banks of the Jordan River. We first preached the message I’m going to reference right now, January the first of 2022. It was our first lesson. It was on the baptism of Jesus Christ. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. There is just something strikingly majestic about this text. All the anticipation of the Bible so far comes to fulfillment right here in this moment. This is, as it were, his coronation. Jesus, the King, comes out of 30 years of seclusion, 30 years of obscurity, and he comes from the quiet seclusion of Nazareth to the banks of the Jordan River. And here, he comes over to John, and John says, I’m not baptizing you. You should baptize me. And Jesus says, I must be baptized by you to fulfill all righteousness.
He goes into the water. He is baptized. And when he is pulled up from the water, this is what it says, As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. And at that moment, heaven was opened. And he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and aligning on him. Just imagine this moment. No one knows who Jesus is. He is totally obscure. He comes to the banks of the Jordan. Only John the Baptist knows. He’s baptized. And when he pulls up, he’s pulled up from the water, heaven opens and all of the crowd, everyone sees this is the Messiah. This is the king. And a voice from heaven says, this is my son ‘I, in whom I have loved with him, ‘ ‘I am well pleased, ‘ announcing that Jesus has been faultless. Jesus is baptized, which is the launch of his ministry, and it says this, Jesus, full of the Holy spirit, left the Jordan, and was led by the spirit into the wilderness, where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. You might wonder why this is important, and here’s what it is. The sinless Adam had been destroyed by the crafty serpent, Satan.
That’s all the way back in Genesis 3, right? God gives this man and this woman a perfect world. They are sinless, but you know how the story ends. They turn against God, they rebel against God. And so here is the question, If this is going to be the one who actually reshapes the world into the image of God, can anyone resist the devil? Is it even possible? If he’s going to save the world, he must first resist the temptations of the crafty serpent. If Satan conquered the sinless Adam, is Satan going to conquer the sinless Jesus? This is the pivotal moment. Can anyone overcome temptation? And you know how the story goes, Jesus wins. But how he wins, I’ll allow Betty to explain.
So after Jesus was baptized, he was led into the desert by the Holy spirit and was tempted by Satan. Now, Jesus refuted Satan’s temptations with the word of God. And that was incredible because that stood out to me and that helped me a lot. I tell you, my temptation, when I’m driving on the road and someone overtakes me or bad-dried me or something, I have to literally quote the word of God to keep me on that straight path because Jesus. And I always think about, I need to set an example, my word and my doctrine, they need to go hand in hand. And so I remember Jesus and his way of dealing with Satan. He uses the word of God. And so these scriptures help when we’re in our wilderness. When I’m in my wilderness, that’s what helps me to come out of it. That’s what helps me to help others when they’re going through their tough times. He did what the word of God said, and he quoted the word of God and Satan ran. Satan ran, he flee, whatever he did to get out of there because he knew the scriptures, and as much as he was trying to use them to his advantage, like a lot of people do.
We try to use scriptures for our purpose. And Jesus used the scriptures back at him, and that’s when he flee. And it remind me this song, Shut the door, keep out the devil. Light a candle, everything will be all right.
I love how halfway through, Betty switches into Patois. I said, I want to be able to do this. This is awesome. This is the early part of the ministry. He conquers Satan using the word of God, as Betty just said. And then from there, he returns back to the Jordan. And what we see is this amazing part of the earliest part of Jesus’s ministry, where Jesus trained and empowered ordinary men. Jesus goes back to John, and as he’s going back to John, John 1:35 says, The next day, John was there again. This is the next day after Jesus has conquered Satan. John was there again, two of his disciples, when he saw Jesus passing by. This is John saying, Look, the Lamb of God. Then verse 37 says, When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. These disciples are Andrew and Peter, and they’ll become the first followers of Jesus. And these ordinary men will be trained and will be empowered to literally reshape the entirety of the world. I don’t know about you, but I had no idea where Jesus would take me when he first called me. And neither do these men.
They had no idea. They chose to follow, and Jesus changed their lives forever. The story continues from these two disciples, then to Philip and then to Nathaniel, and then he heads to a wedding up in Cana. And in that first public moment, Jesus does a miracle by saving a party. After the wedding, Jesus moves from the north by the Sea of Galilee, and he takes… I’m actually going to show you a little map. Well, first I do this. Okay. So he takes the north by the Sea of Galilee. He returns down the way that everyone returned, which is along the banks of the Jordan River. Back to Jerusalem. And when he’s there, he gets into Jerusalem. And we looked at this story, and this was one of the most profound moments for me. But this is what it says. It says, In the temple courts, he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves and others sitting at the table exchanging monies. Those who sold doves, he said, Get these out of here. Stop turning my father’s house into a market. We know the story. Jesus goes away. He makes a cord out of whips, and he drives the people out of the temple and zeal for his house consumed him.
Why is that such an important moment? Well, we see that Jesus is trying to begin to correct religious corruption. People that are using faith to have their own personal desires met. And this will be a theme that we see in Jesus again and again and again. These actions are so profound that And that night there’s a group of people that come, but really through one man, a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is the religious leader or a religious leader, and he comes with respect and honor and dignity, and he goes, Good teacher, I know that you are a good teacher because no one could perform the wonders that you are doing. And Jesus says to him, Hey, how about this? You must be born again. And the first person who is ever told to be born again is not some morally bankrupt person but a well-defined religious man. And he says, You need to start again. You need to start again. And then we get that famous line, the most famous line in the Book of the Bible, in all of the Bible, John 3:16, as John is commenting on the passion of Christ for the love of God, right?
For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, whoever believes, shall not perish but have eternal life. So here in this early part of the ministry, Jesus is gaining followers. The religious leaders are getting a little bit skeptical of him. Here now is a map. This map is too much, but it’s what I’ve been using the whole time. So I know you guys maybe can’t see it, but I’m going to point over here. So I tried to highlight it. If you want this map, I’ll give it to you. I don’t know how I’m going to give it to you, but I will ask for it. I use this map throughout the entirety of the ministry of Jesus. This is how I was able to organize my thinking. So So we have different colors that represent early to all the way to Holy Week. The early ministry stuff is the stuff we just mentioned, the gaining of some of the followers, the baptism, the wilderness of temptation, all of that stuff. So we move from that moment to what we call the early Judean Ministry, which is some of the stuff down here.
But you’ll see some of the dots are up here. Anyway, I’ll share with you, but I want you to know this. This is the most important thing about this map. Jesus is going to make this journey from down here to up here to down here to up here about 10 times. He just keeps making this journey because this is where Jerusalem is and this is where he’s from. So he preaches and teaches up here, and then he comes back down here, rebukes the pharisees, and then comes up here, preaches, teaches, then goes back, rebukes the pharisees. And this journey happens again and again and again and again. Obviously, I’m being a little bit, you know I’m joking about it, but that’s basically the way it happens. And you can see that almost nothing happens in the middle here. Very little happens in the middle, except for a couple of really important stories. In the early part of Jesus’s ministry, Jesus would have done the wedding in Cana, which would be up here. Then come down the banks of the Jordan River, and there’s some important moments in Jerusalem. And then instead of going back up the banks of the Jordan River like he would have done, he instead goes to Samaria.
And in Samaria, the Bible says, he meets a woman. My favorite account in all of the Bible. Here, Fernando is going to talk a little about it. In John 4, we see Jesus encounter with the Samaritan woman, and this text is so layered. You see things from him dealing with political tensions to seeing into someone’s past and even breaking what was back then a social norm.
Out of all these things, the thing that sticks out to me the most is how Jesus that Jesus makes this woman aware of how she had a spiritual need that she was trying to fill with earthly means.
I think the temptation for us is, even after knowing Jesus, is trying to fill that void that only Jesus can fill with other things in our lives. I think I’ve been tempted by that. I’ve fell into making maybe my work my identity, or even my marriage my identity, or all these other things. But at the end of the day, the only person that can really give us purpose and and quench our spiritual thirst is Jesus. We move from this early Judean Ministry to the beginning of the Galilean Ministry. In the Galilean Ministry, there are about 20 accounts that we studied in the Ministry of Jesus, and they all revolved around basically two things. In that northern area of Galile, Jesus is going to heal, and we see him heal a lot of people, blind the lepros, the broken. This is a display of the compassion of Jesus. We have at least 20 sermons in our docket that are about the compassion of Jesus. Jesus taking care of people’s needs. We have healing, and then we have teaching. I want to talk a little bit about the healing. In fact, we’re going to have Richard Rodriguez share the story of Jesus hearing one person in particular.
This story of Jesus reaching out to the demoniac really had an impact on me because I think about Jesus, my Lord, going where no one else is willing to go.
He’s crossing over a lake into a squal, into a graveyard.
He sees a man who has been crying, has been cutting himself, and he reaches out to him and he asks him what his name, and the man tells him we are legion because he is just so possessed.
Jesus is able to heal this man to the point where he is in his right mind. For me, that is an inspiration to do the same thing. It was an inspiration at school to reach out to students, to share with them about the gospel. I’m seeing the impact.
We’ve had people like Emily Vogal, Brittany Filippelli, and Wismar Cleland come out and reach out to these young people that never heard the gospel, and they’re responding.
And to me, that’s That’s what it’s all about.
We have this. Yeah, Amen. We have this amazing account. If you’re like, I know that’s not exactly in the Galilean ministry. I know. I’m trying to synthesize. I apologize. So we have these healings. These healings happen again and again and again and again. And what ends up happening is Jesus is healing so many people that he begins to get a giant crowd. We call these crowds the multitudes. They start with Jesus in that Galilean Ministry, and they don’t seem to leave. Everywhere he goes, they follow. Why do they follow? Well, because Jesus gives them food, because Jesus takes care of their needs, because Jesus de-possesses them of demonic forces. Jesus takes care of them. Jesus cares about them when the rest of society does not. And we see Jesus have a profound impact on these people, these multitudes, these 5,000 men plus women and children, maybe these crowds of 15,000. And in one moment, actually, he does it twice, but in one of these moments, you have this profound story of Jesus actually feeding all of these people. We’re going to have Nat talk a little bit about it.
I’ve read the scripture of Jesus feeding the thousands before. So when I looked at that scripture, I only ever saw that Jesus was divine. I never really picked apart the fact that he was so compassionate on these people. In three versions, in three different Gospels, they use the same word, compassion. I forget about that. I see God, but I forget that we’re not just looking at the miracles, but we’re looking at his character so that we can imitate it. It leaves me thinking, In what areas of my life am I lacking compassion on people? Because I know that I’m the type of person who will only have compassion on what’s easy in some cases. Are there people that I haven’t served? Are there people that I haven’t reached out to and loved up on because they need it? Those are people that needed God’s love. And Jesus was there to meet them. Even when he was trying to go off to get away and rest, he still didn’t turn people away when he needed them. Even when people around him were like, Just send them away so they could go feed themselves. Am I the same?
Am I following 1 John 2:6 when it talks about how I’m not just supposed to know who Jesus is, but I’m supposed to walk like him? Hearing that sermon on one of the many Sundays that we stayed on, the Ministry of Jesus really helped me think deeper about how I could do more, not just stay complacent in this area of compassion for people that I and people that I’m already friends with, but people that I may not know or people that I’m not even comfortable with or don’t necessarily have the same interests of. But I can still love them and have compassion on them the way that Jesus does, too It’s in Galilee where Jesus does a lot of these healings and garners this giant crowd.
And in that crowd, we learned one day that he’s standing up on the side of a mountain and he begins to call the disciples that he wants to be his closest followers. Here he has those four, but then he extends the group a little bit. He adds Matthew to the mix and and Judas to the mix and these other guys to the mix. And he says, hey, come on up, come on up, Thomas, and you, you come up, and you come up. And Jesus selects these 12 men who will be with him for the remainder of the ministry. And it’s on one of those hillsides, one of those days with 5,000 plus people gathered around him, that the Bible tells us that Jesus goes on the side of a mountain and he begins to teach. The most famous of all of those teachings is probably the sermon on the Mount, where Jesus will unpack his theology point by point, line by line, idea by idea. I’ve actually asked Chuck to talk a little bit about the Beatitudes, which is the beginning portion of the sermon on the mount.
Well, located in Matthew, the Beatitudes are a series of blessings spoken by Jesus, and they describe the qualities and attitudes that characterize true disciples and citizens of God’s Kingdom, such as being poor in spirit, meek, merciful, pure in heart, and peace makers, even in the face of persecution. But for me, it’s a time of self-reflection when it helps me gage proximity to the world’s influences. The one that means a lot to me is being merciful. Because I studied that out and I realized that What it actually means is somebody who has tremendous amount of empathy for other people because they’ve suffered a lot of pain themselves. So they know how other people feel when they hear things like, I lost my spouse, or I lost my child, or I’m sick, or I lost my job. They have that ability to go to them and say, Hey, I understand what you’re going through. Let me help. Not everybody can do that. That actually is a gift, but that’s something that God wants us all to be like, is to have mercy, to be able to forgive, to be able to understand how people feel, and to be able to reach out and to help them.
Because now I understand what it’s like when you love God, when you want to follow the Beatitudes, this is going to be part of your call. You will have mercy, and you’ll learn to have mercy, and you’ll share it with other people.
Jesus teaches the sermon on the mount, which is everything from the ideas of marriage to giving an offering, to worry, to eternity. He tells us about who we are to serve. And on the hillside that day, he creates his platform. This is what it means to be a follower of me. An idea by idea, he takes the spiritual truth of the day, dismantles it and rebuilds it anew. And he says, this is what it is, and this is what it’s like to be a follower of me. And man, the teachings are overwhelmed. And people said they never heard anybody speak like him. And so before him are these large crowds, and they’re being converted, and they’re being transformed, and they’re being healed, and they’re being given, and they’re being fed. And it’s amazing. And Jesus is becoming so popular. And this is amazing for everyone, everyone except for the religious leaders. It becomes a moment in time somewhere in maybe that early part of the Galilean Ministry, where They decide, I no longer am interested in participating with Jesus, and instead we will be adversaries, and we will attempt to kill him. And so Jesus has been throughout his ministry, and will continue to just totally rebuke religious people, particularly people that, A, use the message of Christ or the message of God for their own means, and two, people that overlook the least fortunate in society.
He will rebuke and rebuke and rebuke and rebuke. And he will do it so often that sometimes they will be in a crowd and he’ll do it to them in their face and then talk to the crowds about them. And it’s on one such occasion that Jesus tears them up, and then he gets in a boat, and he teaches the disciples about the yeast of the pharisey. Mike is going to talk a little about that. In Mark 8, something really interesting happens. Jesus gets into the boat after rebuking the pharisees, and he’s teaching this lesson to the disciples, warning them against the yeast of the pharisees. And what’s interesting about yeast is that it’s relating or referring to something that’s small, that can be mixed into the hole. And what’s scary about that is that Jesus is warning them against the corrupt teachings of the world and just thinking about the influences that are going around in our society through social media, through the teachings that you see online. There’s just so much access. There’s so many different voices that we’re hearing. But it’s really up to us what we choose to allow to affect us.
And that’s why it’s so important for us to know God’s word for ourselves. So that way we can filter all these different voices we’re hearing against God’s word. And if it doesn’t match up, we can destroy those thoughts and hold them captive and really hang on to God’s word because that will always keep us firm and secure in him. Jesus realized that the pressure is getting a bit much and the crowds are becoming a distraction to his ministry. And so we move from the time of the multitudes into what we call a time of withdrawals, where Jesus takes his disciples away from the crowd and begins to teach them more direct things and things that they won’t even understand until a bit later. In that time, we have some of the most amazing accounts in the Bible, some of my favorite moments is this. This is Peter saying… Jesus asked Peter, who do people say I am? And he says, he gives him a list of things. And he says, well, who do you say I am? He says, you are the Messiah. And then Jesus says this, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jona, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Jesus has this moment, these quiet moments with the disciples. He actually sends some of them out and then pulls them along. And there’s a moment where he takes them up to a mount of transfiguration, where they get to see, three of them in particular, get to see the glory of God. And he does it because he just told them that he’s going to die, but they need some encouragement. So he brings them up to the mountain and says, Look, I am who you think I am. And he gives them compassion and kindness. And it’s in one of moments that Jesus teaches an interesting lesson about children that Vanne is going to share about. In Luke 18:7, it says, Truly, I tell you, if anyone does not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child, he will never enter it. This scripture reminds me how childlike faith pleases God. And Jesus here tells us that we can learn so much from children.
Some of the qualities we can glean from is how they trust their parents wholeheartedly, how they love unconditionally, even their pure curiosity.
I know for my life, if I could just glean from some of those qualities, I know my relationship with God would get deeper and stronger. And as someone who’s always trying to grow in their faith and always trying to grow in wisdom, I don’t often think about how I can mature as a Christian by observing them and how they live. I’m grateful to serve a God whose heart gravitates towards the humble and gravitates towards children. And I’ll be keeping those things in mind as I’m spending time around the children in my life. The lesson from Jesus is plain. These men have been chosen from amongst the crowds, but he says to them very clearly, I don’t want you to accept it like a king, accept it like a servant, accept the kingdom like a child. What a profoundly different statement from the statements of the world. And he goes on to teach them about things like the Kingdom of God. I asked Richard Boll to share a little bit about one of those teachings.
So my text was on the Coming of the Kingdom. It’s a reference of Luke 17:20-37. And in that, the speaker makes a reference, and he specifies, he says that Jesus gives us the warning so that we would take a serious look at our faith and look at our faith and ask the question, if the King came back today, would I be ready? It challenged me because it’s so easy to live in a selfish world with materialism, individualism, and skepticism, And I realized that, hey, one of the things that keep me close to the Kingdom of God is staying in the word of God. So way back in 2015, my wife and I have been starting our Quiet Times and share our Quiet Times together. And since that time, this year, we’re going through the Family Bible, and we basically rewrite down our Quiet Times in the Family Bible, and then we share it with each other. But then I started to realize, I need to be not just concerned about my faith, but about the faith of my brothers. So what I started doing because of this lesson is I started texting, taking a picture of my quiet times and texting it to a number of brothers that I really want to help to encourage them to grow in their faith.
Jesus has been instructing the crowds, sorry, instructing the disciples, and he pulls them away in order to really teach them and help them understand what’s coming and where we’re going with the ministry, with his ministry and what’s going to happen when he departs. We move there to what we call the later Judean Ministry, which is mainly done in the south, where he will do three things. He will heal, he will teach, and can you guess the third one? He rebuked the pharisees. This is what’s going to happen again and again and again and again. The stories people were saying during the Ministry of Jesus, they said a lot of the stories are very similar. And I said, yes, basically he heals, he preaches, and he rebukes It’s the pharisees. And for us, again, I want to mention it again, we are the religious. And so we should really be heeding the warnings of Jesus to those people. We can at least be tempted, to be arrogant, to be proud, to believe we have it all together. And so we see that again in Jesus’s ministry. But one of the most amazing moments in Jesus’s public ministry, in my opinion, is the resurrection of Lazarus.
Jesus sees his brother, his friend, or he hears that his brother, his is dead. And he waits for a couple of days before he goes to see him, and then he resurrects him from the dead. But just before doing that, this is what he says, Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die, and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.
Do you believe this?
What an amazing moment. What an amazing moment to see your brother indirect from the dead and worship God. And later on, you will see that it’s because of this that she anoints Jesus’s feet and pray for him before his death and burial. We move from this moment into what we call Holy Week. Holy Week is… Do you believe this? I read this. Okay, we move to Holy Week. Holy Week is a week full of stories. It took us about six months to cover Holy Week. But Holy Week is we went line by line, idea by idea, because of how important it is. So you have the Friday and the Saturday, where Jesus arrives in Bethany, and then Jesus is anointed by Mary. That’s when she wipes his feet, she puts the alabaster jar on his feet and wipes it with her hair. It’s that amazing moment. And you go from Friday into Saturday into Sunday. And on Sunday, this is Palm Sunday, you have the triumphful entry that Jesus, after coming in, riding that cult, looks over the city and begins to weep. And he goes, How long do I wish you would turn away?
You keep killing the prophets. And I want to gather you, but you just cannot seem to understand. Then he enters the temple, and then later that night, he returns to Bethany. The next day, on Monday, he sees a fig tree, and he curses the fig tree. And he says, Fig tree, you have no fruit. You are cursed. We’re going to see Lauren talk about that in a second. Then he clears the temple and then he returns to Bethany. I’ll have Lauren share a little bit about the fig tree.
In Matthew 21:18-19, Jesus is walking along the road and he sees a fig tree that has leaves. And this is an indication that this fig tree should have fruit on it. But he walks up to the fig tree and it doesn’t have fruit. So Jesus curses this fig tree. At first thinking about this passage, I was perplexed because I feel like, oh, the tree has leaves. This is what we expect from trees. And then you find out this fig tree is actually supposed to have more. It’s indicating that the leaves are good deeds, are righteous deeds. And the fruit is the fruit produced by the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control. And so he expects this tree to have fruit, but it doesn’t. And I love that Jesus expects us to have more than just our righteous deeds. As a kid who was raised in the church, I relied heavily on my good deeds. I thought this is what’s going to get me to heaven at some point. But then after studying the Bible and learning more about what Jesus expects, he actually wants my heart. He doesn’t just want my righteous deeds.
And so in the temptation to drift back to, I just want to be good as we all desire to be. I have to remember that Jesus doesn’t want just that for me. He actually wants my heart. In the second part of the passage, it talks about prayer and how we should pray about everything. And I pray and I hope that I can move more towards the heart and have the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness as fruit in my life. So I’m just grateful that I serve a God who cares more about my heart than my good deeds.
Jesus curses the fig tree. He clears the temple for a second time, announcing publicly that he is condemning the religion of the day. And then he returns to Bethany, and we see we saw this already. The next day, the disciples finally notice the fig tree, and they go, whoa, it withered. And he goes, yeah, you’re impressed by this? I tell you that if you have faith, you can save this mountain, move, and it will move. From there, Jesus goes into the temple and begins to do what? Rebuke the pharisees. He rebukes them again. He denonces the religious leaders, and he gives all those amazing parables of warning. And then we have the all of that discourse, which is the discussion about what’s going to happen at either the end of time or the destruction of the temple. You can debate that on your own. But you have those amazing parables in Matthew 25. Again and again, we looked at those. Joe did an amazing sermon on that, and that was Tuesday. We don’t really know much about Wednesday besides the idea that he was probably preparing for the Passover, because on Thursday, This is our Passover dinner.
Then we have Jesus’s farewell address, which we get in the middle of John, John 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, that area, that portion there where Jesus talks about what it really is to be a disciple. What does it mean? How are people going to know, you have to love one another. Again, putting that idea up against the pharosytical idea of doing something to be seen as righteous and loving people to be known as righteous. Which will you be? Which will you be? That’s what he talks about there. And then Jesus, at that night, pray in Gethsemani. We’ll have Luke talk a little bit about that moment.
So later in Matthew 26, we see the place of pressing, right? Gethsemani, where Jesus and his disciples go. Three times, Jesus goes to pray and cry out to God for help. Three times, he comes back to his disciples, sleeping, right? And I think something I get out of this text here in Matthew is that, man, when Jesus was tempted, he fervently cried out to God, begging for his help, to the one that he knew could save him. And I have to think, is that my attitude, when I’m tempted? Am I the one who goes to fervently cry out to God and beg for his help? Father, if it is possible, take this cup from me, not as I will, but as you will. And so upon seeing this dilemma, there’s two options that we see here. One, I can sleep. Give in to the temptation, ignore the pain. Give in to the comforts that I love to do in a multitude of ways. Or I can wrestle with God in prayer, begging for his help. Will he not send an angel to comfort me? Will he not make his will clear for my life if I cry out to him?
Initially, this makes me really nervous, very fearful. Am I going to fall short in my walk with God? Am I going to let others down? I’m nervous about failure. But at the end of the day, I must watch him pray. Because I have no idea what the future holds for me. One, on the other hand, if I give in to this temptation, the pain that awaits me and the suffering that that will cause, or the incredible victory and blessings that that will wait me when I obey God.
Love that. Gethsemani from Getsemani, we have Friday, which is where Jesus is tried and then also ultimately, crucified. We looked at that story line by line, idea by idea. Joe unpacked it for us, and we saw Jesus. We just watched the whole story. And I don’t know about you, but in that moment, after being with Jesus for two years, it was so profound to me to listen to my Lord, my savior, be killed on a tree. But you know what happens? I won’t have a Saturday slide. You can talk to Paul Franson because he loves Saturday talk. But then what happens is Sunday. The one that they laid in the grave is no longer there. The women go to see and they see that… And the angel says the famous line, Why do you search for the living amongst the dead? He is alive. And then Jesus makes his resurrection appearances to Peter, to the disciples, to those two men on the road to Emmaus. And then we saw the rest of those appearances. And we ended our Ministry of Jesus talk by looking at the latter part of the resurrection story, the end of it, where Jesus sends out the disciples He says, Go and make disciples of all nations.
You have been with me for three years. Now go change the world. And that’s it. That’s the end. I want to tell you about some themes. Jesus has always chosen ordinary people. If you’re extraordinary today, you’re probably not a good candidate for the Ministry of Jesus. But if you’re just regular like me, man, God wants to use you to do some incredible things. The second theme I thought of is the Kingdom of God is here. It’s here among us. We get a taste of heaven here, but it’s not here completely. Completely. And we have to keep fighting and keep pursuing so that we can see it come into fruition in our lives, not really, but in the life to come, certainly. The next theme I looked at is that Jesus hated hypocrites. Don’t be here and be a hypocrite. Another theme, Jesus was driven by his love and compassion for people. The next theme, he loves his Father’s will. Another theme was suffering was a great teacher. That faith in Jesus is more than just words, and that if we are to be truly disciples of Jesus Christ, we are to go into all nations and meet all people.
That is our calling. Along this journey, we saw so many wonderful things. But you know what I saw more than anything is that there has never been anyone like him. That’s what I saw. What I saw is that he is the master of everything. That he’s the servant to the lowly, to the hungry crowds. That he’s a doctor to those who are sick. That he’s a minister to the sinful. That he’s the master of demons and of Satan himself. That he was the ruler of nature. In the boat, they’re crying out, and with one word, he stills the storm. That he’s the enemy of pharisees and of the hypocrites and of the clever theologian. That he is the king of the Roman king. That he is the master of the puppet governments. That he is in total control, self control certainly. We see it as it goes to his passion and his struggles as he prays on the Mount of Olive, fighting sweat and blood and tears and confronts that temptation again and again and again. And yet he keeps his Father’s will and comes forth triumphant and victorious and dedicated to what God called him to do.
There’s never been anybody like him. In the terrible agony of the cross, everyone around him is furious, and everything around him is chaotic. And yet what is Jesus? Jesus, calm, stoic, prepared, and victorious. He’s the master of his own heart. He’s the master of his own tongue. He’s the master of his mind. There has never been anybody like him. And think about the claims that he made during this ministry. Here are some things. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. He said, I am the Son of man. You know Daniel 7, the one who’s in heaven sitting on the throne? That’s me. Whoever confesses me, Jesus says, I will confess him before my Father in heaven. Whoever confesses me, I will save on the last day. Who says things like this except for Jesus Christ, our Lord and Messiah? He said things like, I am the light of the world. You know what that implies? That the world is full of darkness. You know what the one thing that’s going to brighten up this world is? Me. No government, no education, no new institution, no new protests, no none of that stuff.
Nothing lightens the world up except for Jesus Christ and Christ alone. He says, I am the resurrection and the life, which means that any of us who are dead, dead in our sins or one day who will die, guess what? If you are in the family of Jesus Christ, you will come to life again. At a funeral, we shouldn’t be sad for disciples. We should say, I’ll see you in a little bit. These are the claims of Jesus Christ, and they are not ambiguous. He doesn’t go, I am the way, the truth, and the life, except for some people who want to go a different way. He says, I am it. I am the Lord alone. The Bible says of him that at the name of Jesus Christ, every knee will bow. I always say this, but I want to say it again. That means that every knee will bow, or the other, every knee will bow, willingly or they will be forced to bow. At the name of Jesus Christ. These are not ambiguous claims. Jesus was God in the form of man. And see, if God became man, we would expect him to have a miraculous entrance into the world.
And he did, born of a virgin. If God became man, we would expect that he would be sinless, and he was conquering Satan three times in the wilderness. He had no issues. Pilate, the Bible says, couldn’t find fault in him. Satan couldn’t find fault in him because he was holy and undefiled, separate from sinners, a perfect man. He was without sin. If God became man, you would expect that his words, that they would be poignant, that there wouldn’t be careless words that he spoke. There was not a single careless word Jesus ever spoke, that all of his words would be true, that they would be pure, and that they would be authoritative. And the Bible says, no one spoke like he spoke. If God became a man, you would expect him to manifest supernatural powers, and he did. If God became a man, you would expect him to have universal and permanent influence. And here we are, 2000 years later, talking about the risen Messiah. If God became man, you would expect him to accomplish his purpose, and he did. The Bible tells us before the creation of the world, God had planned for this man to die and him to be resurrected for all children of God.
And guess what? He did exactly what he set out to do. You would expect that if he was God, that death couldn’t keep a hold of him, and it didn’t. They killed him. They laid him in a tomb. But that was just a break. That was his Sabbath rest before glory. And if God became man, you would expect that he would give his ordinary men a super ordinary mission. And he gave it to us. All authority, he says, in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples. Do it. Go into all people groups, into all nations, and bring the wonder, the Majesty of the good news of Jesus Christ to all people. If God became man, you would expect him to be exactly like Jesus Christ, our Lord. I hope these two years have been for you as much of a blessing as they have been for me. I severely doubt that because I got to live with these text, man. They were amazing. And it’s the greatest joy of my life to have had this moment to teach these things for you and to talk about them. I I was overwhelmed as I was preparing this because of how much I learned.
I know today was a little bit like drinking water from a fire hydrant, but that’s a little bit of what it was like. It’s pretty amazing, Jesus Christ, our Lord. We started this series by me talking about what you would see. We end the series by me talking about what you have seen. We started the series with us getting on our knees and praying before we had communion. And I want to end our time the same way we started our time. If you’re physically able, would you join me on your knees? We’re going to pray. We’re going to thank God for this communion that we have. We’re going to thank God for the bread and the juice that represents his body and blood. We’re going to pray together. And if you’re physically able, we’re going to pray together this way. And after we’re done, we’ll take communion together. We’ll have a song, and then I’ll come up and talk a little bit about reach offering. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, it’s It’s such a great honor. It is such a great honor to be with you, to have been given the Gospels, to have been given the words of Jesus Christ.
It’s such a great honor to have had the intellect and the mental ability to even go through this series and to look at who you are and what you did with your son and to see to be story by story, a moment by moment, and to be overwhelmed by who Jesus is. Father, every week we sat here, we listened as you were front and center. You, our Lord Christ, were front and center. And you taught us something, or you showed great compassion, or you rebuked somebody, or you taught a lesson, or you helped reframe our thinking. And God, we just sat here and we marveled at who you Father, I know that in our church, there are men and women who are trying their hardest to be followers of you, who are trying to disregard the worldly influences and to replace them with influences of Jesus Christ. And I pray God that We did a little bit of damage to the world as we listened. But more than anything, Lord, I pray as we continue on that our lives will be overwhelmed by the person we encountered in Jesus Christ. Father, we want to be like him.
We want to speak like him. We want to love like him. We want to have compassion like him. We want to treat other people like he treats people. We want to care for people. We want to love people. We want to teach like he taught. We want, Lord, for our lives to be truly covered in his dust, formed into his image, and that people will look at us and go, there is something holy about that guy or that girl. There is something righteous. There is something that’s a little bit otherworldly about that person. God, we want that so desperately. And Lord, we pray that as we did as we started this time, God, that you will continue to shape us into the image of your son. Thank you, Jesus, for your blood that you poured out for us on the cross. Thank you, Jesus, for your body that you allowed to be scarred, pierced, whipped, instead of us having to deal with that penalty. God, thank you for that. And thank you for the amazing resurrection for your victory over sin, hell in the grave, so we can be confident that we, too, will live even after we die.
We love you, Lord. We thank you for this time. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.