Jesus Came to give us Security

We celebrate Christmas as a birthday of Jesus, but it wasn't the child Jesus that was so significant as what he became and what he did that's so life-changing and world-changing for us and for all around us. I've taken a passage from Matthew chapter 23 to talk about what Jesus means to the world and what he's done, and we have the Advent candles that we use as a way of reminding us of these significant facts about Jesus' life and who he was and what he means to us. Jesus came to the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the people of the Jewish religion saying to them, I've come to tell you that the things that you've done in this world are not important, it's what you've done with me that's really important. And you've turned your back on me and you've turned your back on God. And I've come to say to you that there's not a way in the world that you can avoid hell when you do this. Jesus came to warn us about the most dangerous things in this world that we could do, and that is to avoid God and the responsibility we have to give ourselves in submission and obedience to him. So I light this candle to remind us of the importance of Christ and his role of ruler of our lives. When Jesus was talking to the people of Israel, he wanted to tell them not only about the impending curse or doom that they might face, but he wanted to tell them how much God loved them. Jesus came to his worst enemies who were planning to kill him, and it was to those people he said how often I would have protected you like a mother hen does her chicks. Jesus wanted to show us the most powerful thing about God, and it is his great love for us even when we're his enemies, even when we are disobedient, his great love for us. This powerful love that doesn't respond simply to people being nice, but responds because out of his heart he says, I care for you in a way that you can never know. I light this third candle to remind us of another important significance that Jesus brought to us. He came to show us the difference between religion and a relationship with him. I light this candle to remind us that Jesus came to set us free from the rituals of religion, the impersonal nature of religion, to open up to us a relationship with God, living, alive, powerful, and present. I find this in chapter 23 of the book of Matthew. I want to begin reading the last part of that, verse 38. You know, of course, that when Matthew wrote this he didn't write it into chapters or verses. This was done hundreds of years later. So sometimes people who divided this in chapters and verses didn't get it all exactly right. I think this is one place where the end of one chapter leads us to another. Jesus said to them, look, your house is left to you desolate. Jesus was talking to the people of Jerusalem, the leaders, the religious leaders, and he's talking about the temple here. Your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. Do you see these things, he asked? I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another. Everyone will be thrown down. I begin this reading with a word of warning. Look, your house is left to you desolate. If someone came up to you and said that, it would mean that something terrible was going to happen either to your home or to your family, however you would use the word house. There's something that's going to happen that's going to leave your house empty. It's going to leave your house without value or without worth. Jesus begins this section with a warning of curse that's going to fall to the people who are listening to him. Now he's addressing the religious leaders of the nation of Israel, the Pharisees and the scribes, the lawyers who knew the Bible backward and forward, who knew all about it. He was addressing them to say, your worship house, this temple, is going to be empty and worthless soon. Jesus was trying to point out to them the great danger of human religion. You know, there is a difference between religion and faith. You can have religion without faith in God, for religion has to do with rituals and organization and structure. Many of those can be dictated by God and therefore they become spiritual, but some of them are just purely human inventions. The great difficulty Jesus had with the religious people of his day was that they started out with spiritual things that God gave them, but they soon made them into things that were far, far different than God wanted. You can start out at the right place, but it doesn't mean you're going to end up at the right place. For what happened to them was a long story of change and of resistance and rejection of God. The idea of the temple wasn't really God's idea. The book of Samuel tells us that David, after he was settled in his kingdom in Jerusalem, built him a fine house and he was enjoying his fine house and looked out one day and saw the tabernacle, a tent in which God was living, the symbol of God's presence. He said, why is it that I, as a king, am living in a fine, fine palace and God's living in a tent? It just doesn't sound right, does it? So he said, I'm going to build a wonderful place for God as a representative of where he is. And then he called the prophet in and said, here's what I have planned. And the prophet said, do whatever you think is right. But that night the prophet got a word from God. Go back and tell the king he can't do this because of his own bloody past. So David then began to make plans and he planned out the temple. He began to collect the material for it, but he never built it. When the temple was built, it was dedicated as a place where God's presence would be a constant reminder to them. They would look up on the hill, Jerusalem's on a hill, and they could see the temple up there and it would remind them that God is here with us, a constant reminder. For in one room of that place was the Holy of Holies where God was specially to be present, seen as symbol of his presence. In that room was a copy of Moses' instructions from God. These are the things that God has given us to guide our lives in this holy room. There was a table where there was bread every day baked fresh. It was to remind them God has made a covenant promise to us to provide everything we need and the bread is a constant, permanent symbol. There was always a candle lit there to remind them of God's guiding presence. In the wilderness he guided them, in the day by cloud, a fire by night. He's always with us. That's what it intended them to see. But soon they began to organize this in different ways and people began to stray in their attentions to God. They would go to the temple where all this wonderful thing that God had given them to focus on him, but their minds began to wander to other religious activities and they began to worship foreign gods, saying to God, you're not the only one, there's another one over here. So he was removed from this place of supreme authority in their lives. He brought judgment on them. Soon they repented and said, okay, he would change that and over and over again this story went until finally he said, they're never going to get it. He carried the whole nation of Israel off to captivity in Babylon, destroyed the temple. This place was a symbol of his presence and now the people who had so looked at that place were off in a foreign country with no way to find the presence of God. They turned to the instructions of Moses and they began to write those down and explain what they meant and a whole industry of lawyers or scribes began to write down, well, if you keep this commandment, here's what you have to do and here's what you can't do and here's what you're supposed to do. Until there were thousands of pages of these instructions from people about God. Now here, the difference between God's instructions and the people who are telling you what God's instructions mean and slowly the people begin to shift their attention from the words of God to the words of people. By the time the captivity was open, they brought back to over, they brought back to Israel, they built a new temple, wasn't as great as the former one, but again, it reminded them on the presence of God and it was a wonderful thing for them, a place of prayer where they could come and feel the very presence of God himself. Years passed and Jesus has come now. He goes into the temple and there in the place where there was a place to worship, there were animals to being sold and there was money being changed and it was a regular business place. He protested to them saying, God made this a place of prayer and you've made it a place of business. Turned the tables over, drove the people out. They perverted the temple from a place that reminded them of God and his presence to a place of making money. Now the money was made for religious purposes but it left off this prayer where you listen to God and talk to God and God was removed. Jesus tried to clean that temple out but just a few chapters later, now he comes to the place where he's just given up. Your house will be empty and destroyed, he said. God has given up on you. No longer does he expect you to be able to do the things that you're supposed to do because what's happened is you're more concerned about the man side of this than the divine side of this. And the people listening to him were the people who were lawyers. They knew the Old Testament law. They were Bible teachers. But they had been so focused on the words of human beings about what God wanted them to do that they could no longer hear the very voice of God himself. It's like you have a family member that you've been separated with them so far you haven't heard their voice in many years and then you forget what their voice sounds like. So God came in Jesus Christ and spoke to them and they could not even tell it was God. They've been so focused on this man part of religion that they entirely eliminated God from any part of it. That's why Jesus said such harsh things to them because their religion was a religion of keeping rules that people told them they should keep. It was a religion of doing things that people said they ought to do and it's so easy to do that. When I was a kid growing up, you know, they used to say to the boys, here's what you should say. I don't drink and I don't chew and I don't go with girls that do. You know, neither of those things are in the Bible. So easy for us to begin to build a morality out of our own human ideas than it is to build it out of the words of God. It's so easy to appeal to people for compassion and it's so easy to appeal to them for the needs of foreign missions. But what you really should do, like Alan said, is you should say to God, what do you want me to do? If we have 700 people that are less missionaries and we have missionaries that God has said, I want you to be my missionary and I want you to go to this place, God as the planner of his kingdom would have made sure that every person who needed to give the amount of money to make it possible for the missionaries to go, they would do it. That gap is the difference between people giving what they want to and people giving what God tells them to do. It's even the gap between churches that may set goals as to what we ought to give instead of saying, God, what do you want each of us to give? You see, what God wanted with his people was a relationship in which he was their Lord and their ruler and king and they were submissive to him. He didn't want people to be listening to what other people said, but to what he had to say to them. And so the time came when Jesus entered the world and said, I want to tell you, all of your man-made religious stuff is over. It will be desolate. It took them 32 years to build this temple Jesus was looking at and I think they just barely got it completed, I think 68 or 69 A.D. and the Romans invaded in 70 A.D. and tore the whole thing down. God was through with it. And you know, they built another temple, but they don't make sacrifices like they used to. That whole way of religion is completely gone. Completely gone. What Jesus said here was the plan of God. I've made a decision. No longer will I fool with you. You don't listen to me and you don't put me in the place of supreme authority in your life and I'm through with you. The next time you see me, Jesus said, you will say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Now that could mean a couple of things. It could mean one thing that at the last days, Paul hints at this in Romans, that Jews will turn to Christ, receive him as the Redeemer sent from the Father. Maybe he means that. He could mean the next thing that happens to you after you die and you open your eyes, you'll look at me and you'll say, this was the one sent by God and we missed it. I think it's the latter Jesus was talking about. He's talking about the curse on the temple and he's talking about the curse on them. What a sad, sad thing it is. But the disciples, as often times they did, didn't catch it. The man-made part of this religion is so prominent all the way through history. You know, it's still the case. I picked up this the other day. Scuffles have broken out between the rival groups of the Greek Orthodox and Arminian clerics in the turf at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. Bemused tourists looked on as about a hundred priests fought with brooms while cleaning out the church in preparation for the Orthodox Christmas on January the 7th. Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes. Groups of priests have clashed before in the church, built on the spot where Christians believed Jesus was born. It's a trivial problem that occurs every year. Bethlehem Police Lieutenant Khalil al-Tamimi told Reuters, no one was arrested because all of these involved were men of God, he said. Nobody was seriously injured in the scuffles, according to the police. Serious clashes between the denominations which share the administration of the church have been sparked by perceived encroachments on one group's territory by another. The 1,700-year-old church, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, is in bad state of repair, largely because the priests can't agree on who should pay for its upkeep. Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre built on the same site where many Christians believed Jesus' body was taken after the crucifixion have also seen similar incidents. Israeli priests had to break up a fistfight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity's holiest sites. The scuffle broke out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Jerusalem on Orthodox Palm Sunday. Brawls are not uncommon at the church, which is usually shared by various Christian denominations. In this case, witnesses say an Armenian priest forcibly rejected a Greek priest from the area near the tomb of Jesus. They say the attacker felt the Greek priest had spent too long at the tomb. When police arrived to break up the fight, some were reportedly beaten back by worshippers using palm fronds. Two Armenians were detained by police, prompting supporters to stage a rally in protest outside the police station. Rivalry between the six different churches, which grudgingly share the Holy Sepulchre, date back to the aftermath of the Crusades, to the great schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in the 11th century. Each denomination controls and jealously guards its own sector of this site. The holiest sites for believers and the holy people at those sites are in fistfights with each other to protect a piece of ground and a building. Jesus said, by this will all men know you are my disciples when you have love for one another. You see, man-made religion results in conflict, resentment, bitterness, anger, and fighting. When Jesus Christ is in charge of the lives of people, those things begin to vanish. Jesus came to set us free from the kind of religion that would cause us to have resentment and anger and bitterness toward each other. He did this because he came for himself to say, I am your Lord and I will guide you. So he took 12 men and he began to teach them how to live. When he left, he said, I'm going to send my Holy Spirit and now every one of you who receives me as your Lord will receive my Spirit inside of you. If the clergy in these two churches had knelt in prayer in the middle of the temple and said, God, what do you want us to do? He would never have said, take your broom and whack the next one on the head. He would never have said, double up your fist and punch that one in the nose. He would have said, my friend, if you need to stand here by the sepulcher of Jesus and reflect on his death and what it means to you, as long as you choose, you may do so. I will pray for you too. For you see, the God-directed religious life is far different than a human-directed religious life. Human religion causes animosity, anger, and resentment and wars all around the world. But when Jesus Christ is in charge of people, a whole new thing takes place. And Jesus said, I'm through with this and the Father's through with this. It's all over. They were leaving the temple area and the disciples, they were from Galilee and the rural areas and small towns where they were from, and they'd come to Jerusalem. The temple was the most amazing building in the world at their day, and no temple maybe has ever been built like this. It was magnificent and powerful in its vision. And they were looking at it in awe, you know, like maybe a guy from Oklahoma's went to New York City for the first time, and my golly, look at those buildings, it's what they were doing. They walked out and they said to Jesus, look at all this, and it was magnificent. The temple was built out of white sandstone, hardened sandstone, maybe like marble. And it was white all over. And that land where there's very little clouds most of the year, it stood on the hill and you could see it a long way away and it was so bright that it almost hurt your eyes to look at it. And the outside was covered with gold and it glittered in the sun. And they would stand there and look at this with the sun on that gold and the sun on that white and it was a powerful, overwhelming sight. But more than that, when you came to the temple, you found it a terribly fascinating place because in the temple, there were porches around it. And there were huge columns that would hold up those porches. And the columns were 37 and a half feet tall, almost as tall as the front part of this church building. And it would take three men holding hands to be able to reach around each of those columns. They were huge as they stood before people. The building wasn't set like we dig a foundation, but they had big stones on which those foundations were laid. And they were enormous stones. The stones would be like 40 feet long, 12 feet high, and 20 feet across. Imagine that for the stones. The 40 foot stones would weigh an estimate 100 tons, 200,000 pounds. There were some of these foundation plates that were 20 feet long, some 40 feet long, and even a few 85 feet long. Can you imagine a 400,000 pound stone, carved, smooth, laid up against the other so they were just perfectly fit, with the stones on top of it laid there perfectly so they were etched into these other larger stones? It was a fantastic building. It looked to them like nothing in this world had ever been built like that, and I suppose it hadn't been. They were so amazed, but more amazed when Jesus said, the time is coming when this will all be torn down, not one stone on top of another. I don't think anybody believed him. By the time Matthew wrote this book, that had already happened. Before they knew it had taken place. What Jesus was telling us is that the purpose of God is to destroy every religious thing there is in this world, contrary to himself. For he doesn't want us to be caught in the slavery of religion to rules and regulations and requirements. He wants our relationship to be a relationship like a father would have with a child. This is my dad. I can trust him with everything. I can go to him and ask him anything, and he always responds in the appropriate way. If I need to know how to do something, I can go ask him and he'll tell me. If I'm making a mistake, he'll correct me. In love, sometimes he may be a little hard with me, but he'll always do it for my best interest. You see, what God intended from the very beginning was that you and I would have a walk with God every day. In the Garden of Eden, every day God came and he walked with Adam and Eve. They talked. They discussed things. They asked questions. He answered. That's what God's always wanted. He didn't want a bunch of rules, a bunch of book things that requires us to do burdensome stuff. What he wants is for us to look at him and say, Jesus, what do you want me to do about this problem or about this issue? And then he wants us to listen, both with our ears and in the scriptures, to his guidance as he tells us exactly what he wants. He wants to help us with the choices we make in our lives. So we have the wisdom of God with all the choices that we have, but we have to wait, listen, and ask. But you see, they pushed all that aside for man-made rules and man-made regulations. Jesus came to set us free from that and to give us a personal relationship with him, the relationship of a child to his father. If any of you want to come after me, push aside everything else in your life and be prepared to do what I ask you to do and follow me. That's what he asks. Just like he did with his disciples, though they walked with him every day, God wants to do that with you. He wants in the morning for you to get up and say, God, here are all the things I'm faced with this day. Please give me wisdom to do them. Please give me the wisdom to do what I need to do and to leave alone those things that I don't. God, here are the things that I need and I don't know how to be able to resolve them. Would you please provide what I need and trust him to do so. God, there are a lot of things out here that look like they're really going to be big problems for me and it could hurt me, it could destroy my family even. I trust you to take care of me. Spread yourself between me and the dangers that are here. And then through that day, he stands between you and those things. God, I don't know why I'm here, I don't know what I'm supposed to do today. That's okay, son, daughter, I will give you a purpose for this day. That's what he intended. So that we would walk with God with a personal confidence that we're doing the right things because he's guiding us. With absolute confidence that everything we need will be provided for us. With perfect peace that he stands between us and anything that would destroy us. And with the assurance that our life is going to have some value and meaning in this world. And it's a day-by-day personal walk with God. Now you can choose a human religion if you want. There are all of them out there in the world, even some of them bearing the name Christian. But what he really wants for you is a personal relationship in which you recognize he is the divine ruler of the world. And he made you for a purpose. And he wants to give everything he can to help you achieve your purpose in this world. All he needs from you is your cooperation. You have to say, I believe, God, that you are the creator of everything in the world, including myself. And I pledge myself to live in obedience to you. And then day-by-day, read what the Bible has to say, listen to God speak to you, present yourself to God, ask him help with your choices, depend on him for his provision, depend on him for his protection, and live in faith. Now if that's not the way your life is, it's because of you. You can change that for yourself. All you have to do is to say, God, it's a pretty big job trying to figure all this out myself to provide and protect and do all these things. Today I say to you, take control of my life. And from this moment on, I will live in obedience and submission to you. Jesus came to set you free from religion, to give you a relationship of love with himself. Do you want that? Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? As I've been talking, if suddenly you felt like, boy, that really is something I want to have, I'll tell you that that's not your mind alone, it's God talking to you. He's telling you, this is what I've been trying to have for you. He wants you to have it. And he's making that available to you, and he's already shown you that this is what you need. But you have to have the courage to do it. You have to have the courage to trust God and say to him, today, right now, I give myself completely to you. I'm going to try to do what I've heard today, beginning now. It may be important for you today to come in front of the church and say publicly and openly, today I give my life to Christ. You know how it'll be important to you? Because if you feel that that's what you ought to do, that's God saying, this is my next step for you. If you've strayed away from God, from this personal relationship to a man-made religion, maybe one of your own creation, and you want that freshness again, admit to God what you've done. Renew your devotion to him. This is the way God helps you find life in all of its fullness. So Lord Jesus, we know why you've come into the world to destroy our man-made religion that separates us from you. We know that you've come to build this personal relationship of trust between you and us. So I pray for all of us, show us today what we need to do in response to you, that we might find life in its fullness. In the name of Jesus, I ask this, amen. Would you stand, please, as we sing, and if God has placed in your mind a need to express your faith and trust in him, we ask you just to step out from where you are, come to the front and share with me or with Rusty or someone else here exactly what God has asked you to promise to him, and we will pray for you that you'll be able to keep that promise. The Savior is waiting to enter your heart. Why don't you let him come in? There's nothing in this world to keep you apart. What is your answer to him? Time after time he has waited before, and now he is waiting again. To see if you're willing to open the door, oh, how he wants to come in. If you'll take one step toward the Savior, my friend, you'll find his arms open wide. Receive him and all of the darkness will end. Within your heart he'll abide. Time after time he has waited before, and now he is waiting again. To see if you're willing to open the door, oh, how he wants to come in. In Paul's writing in the book of Romans, chapter 6, he's saying to the people, now that you've entered the kingdom of heaven, do you want to know how to make this life full and complete? We'll be looking at that this evening in our service at 6 o'clock. If God has spoken to you today and you, for some reason, feel resistant or unsure and you need to talk, just be sure, look at the bulletin. I have an email address. You can email me or you can call me on the phone. I'll be glad to assist you in any way that you need to know what the next step is for your life. Would you join me in prayer? So, Lord Jesus, thank you for setting us free from religion that burdens us and kills us. Thank you for opening your life to us so we might be a part of you and what you're doing in this world. I ask a blessing on every person that's taken time to be here. And for those struggling with how to respond to you, give them wisdom and another opportunity. In the name of Jesus, we give thanks to you for your love for us and for your gift of your son. Amen. Isn't he beautiful, beautiful? Isn't he Prince of Peace, Son of God? Isn't he, isn't he wonderful, wonderful? Isn't he, Counselor, Almighty God? Isn't he, isn't he, isn't he? Amen. Amen.