The Kingdom of God vs. Earthly Allegiances

time set up thinking about people who had questions about the sermon and set up a box outside the auditorium and asked people if they wanted to ask questions or have something about it and I never got any asked at all. I don't know if any of you ever have questions when you get through a service that you don't want to ask. Some people can do that. Sharon, if she was here, she'd just hold up her hand and ask a question. So she doesn't mind doing it. Somebody was here at a meeting one time and I was doing Wednesday night and she just stopped in the middle of it, held up her hand, asked me a question. The guy after her said, is it okay to do that kind of stuff? I said, it's okay for her if she does it anyway. Whether it's okay or not, I don't mind that at all. If you have questions that you want to ask about the things that take place in the morning or evening or Wednesday nights, I'd sure be glad to respond to them because you can't explain things to people, you know, everybody's satisfaction when you have a lot of people listening because you don't know what their particular viewpoint is or what their particular issue is. So you don't know how to explain everything clearly. So if you have any things like that, I feel comfortable on Wednesday night, Sunday night, just discussing that. I do. Do you? Recently you had a sermon and you talked about separations between Christians and the United States and I think you mentioned the flag and I know our church doesn't have a Christian flag or a United States flag and I've seen them in a lot of churches. Mm-hmm. Well, when I came, they didn't have one and the ones they had were pretty ragged and that was a practical thing. The theological thing about it is that the kingdom of God in the country in which a person lives, I don't necessarily feel like in the scriptures it connects them and I think it's kind of misleading to have a flag of your nation in the church where you go. I don't know anywhere in the world where that's done except here and I think it communicates certainly to foreigners who have come to our country are amazed at how closely Christians here tie their country to the kingdom of God. And the girls that come to Barton that we've been acquainted with are amazed that the people in the United States seem to feel like this country is a more Christian and blessed country than all the countries of the world. It gives a kind of a wrong impression to people who are foreigners to come to our land and I think the connection of our country with the kingdom of God is a little bit misleading. So, I don't choose to do that. I think it focuses too much on our government and our country as opposed to the kingdom of God. So, that's why I don't promote that or haven't ever promoted it. Patriotism, you know, is an important ingredient for us, but when you get to heaven there won't be national flags. And what we're trying to do is present the kingdom of God here on earth as it will be when you get there. Because there won't be a place for Americans to serve God and worship him and another place for Australians or Mexicans. All of us will be together and there will only be one kingdom that we'll look at there. And the kingdoms of this world are passing. So, when we get into worshiping God, the focus needs to be more on the kingdom of God than the earthly kingdoms that men have built. That's kind of my thinking about that. I realize that among pastors and people that's a very minority point of view, but I think it's what God wants and likes. And so, I've never pressed that issue. No, the Sunday School Board material printed that. That's what they ask you to do. As you lined up in a procession, they carried the Bible in, they carried the flags in. But it's very difficult in those settings with children to observe the etiquette of flags because they whack them around, drag them on the floor. So, it's really not a very desirable thing for the country's flag. And there's certain kind of rules about carrying the country's flag. It always has to be higher than any other. And so, it's difficult to make sure that you can actually do that correctly. So, they dropped it finally because that was such a difficult thing to do. Back then, it didn't matter very much. And today, people are a lot more particular about how that's done. The kingdom of God is much bigger than any country. And its allegiance is more important to us than any country. And allegiance to the kingdom of God takes precedence over all earthly relationships. And I think that's what I would want to see as a part of our worship. That it is not divided between earthly alliances and the kingdom of God. That just focus straight on the kingdom of God. But thank you for asking that. I want to use a passage from... Anybody else has any questions? Anytime on Sunday night, if you want to do that, you can just say, I'd like to ask a question. So, I'd be happy to respond with whatever I can think about. So, I want to use a passage from chapter 27 of Matthew this evening. Christ's death, and his death on the cross, was a very humiliating experience for him. But it wasn't just the crucifixion on the cross. There were so many things that took place and what went on that were humiliating to him. I think most of us would try to avoid at any cost, any circumstance in which we found ourself humiliated. Humiliation is sort of a way of which we describe humility. Accepting ourselves in circumstances where we're not in control, we're not in charge, and we're not respected. Those are circumstances in which humiliation happens to us. Most of us, in our reaction to humiliation, try to make sure that we avoid it at all costs. Most people don't witness because they don't want to be embarrassed or humiliated by people getting upset with them or saying the wrong things. The death of Jesus was an ultimate act of humiliation on his part. Whenever we was praying in the garden, we would pray, whenever we was praying in the garden of Gethsemane about what was to take place for him, he knew what crucifixion was, and he knew all the things and circumstances that surrounded it, and he was prepared for humiliation. In the last part of chapter 27, I want to read part of that. There, Pilate is trying his very best to avoid the crucifixion of Jesus, and beginning with verse 19. While Pilate was sitting on the judge's seat, his wife sent him this message. Don't have anything to do with that innocent man, for I've suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him. The chief priest and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas to have Jesus executed. Which of the two do you want me to release to you, asked the governor. Barabbas, they answered. What shall I do then with Jesus who's called the Christ, Pilate asked. They all answered, crucify him. Why, what crime has he committed, asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, crucify him. When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. I am innocent of this man's blood, he said. It is your responsibility. All of the people answered, let his blood be on us and on our children. Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged and handed over to be crucified. I was reflecting on this passage, and the line jumped out at me, what took place. I am innocent of this man's blood, he said. It is your responsibility. And all the people answered, let his blood be on us and on our children. I wondered what would it be like when they were facing this and looking at Jesus being killed. How certain they must have been that this was the right thing to do. They were willing to say, we will take full responsibility for the death of this man. If there is any consequence to come from it, we want that consequence to come to us and even the generations in our family that follow us. When you think about this from this side of the death of Christ and you look back on it, you say what a horrible thing to have asked to happen to you. Would you hold me accountable for killing the Son of God? Would you pass on to my children the accountability for killing the Son of God? What caused me to think of this was, no one would ask that a curse would be given to them. No one in their right mind would say, would you please place a curse on my life? No one in their right mind would say, would you please place a curse on my life? Would you please place a curse on my children? No one would do that. What you see in this story are people who are so convinced that the death of Jesus was a benefit to God that they were willing to risk one of the most terrible things that could happen to ask God to curse them if what they were doing was really wrong. What I began to think about was, what happens when a person is so sure they're right about something, that they would ask a curse to come to them, and yet at the same time they would be so wrong about it? What happens to a person when you get in a situation where you cannot even recognize the Son of God, the righteousness of God, but instead can only see this person as someone worthy to be damned and destroyed? What kind of blindness comes to a person who cannot see God, God's will, and God's purpose? They were so certain they were right that they were willing to say, we want you to kill this man, and we're so sure that we're right that we're willing to say to God, if we are wrong, would you bring all your curses on us? And would you bring all your curses on our children? The blindness to spiritual reality is powerful and strong. They had no doubt whatsoever that Jesus was the enemy of God. They had no doubt whatsoever that he deserved to die, and yet they were so wrong. What happens when a person is so blind to spiritual realities that they can't tell the difference between God and the devil? They thought Jesus to be a manifestation of Satan himself, an enemy of God, when in reality he was God himself. What causes people to get into circumstances where they can't tell the difference between God and the devil? That's like a person whose physical strength and ability, they put their hand in water and they can't tell the difference between boiling water and cold water. Something is terribly, tragically wrong with their physical abilities. Whenever a person comes to the place where they can't recognize the difference between pure evil that needs to be destroyed, which they thought of in Jesus, and the very righteousness of God that needs to be accepted. Now, it wasn't that these people were wicked, wretched people. They were Jewish people, followers of Yahweh God, people who read the Bible, people who knew the scriptures, and yet in this moment, in that setting, they were absolutely spiritually blind. I don't know about you, but that's a little frightening to me. How can a person who knows the Bible like they did come to a place where you cannot recognize the work of the devil from the work of God? How would a person avoid this circumstance? Well, what they got caught in was they were so caught up in their tradition that their tradition appeared to be to them the very words of God. So, the laws that were written to allow them to live within the framework of the Ten Commandments, they were not the Ten Commandments, but they were the additions to the traditions. And all of us talk about, you were talking about the traditions we have in our Southern Baptist life. We get used to those. We get to thinking that they are so essential to us that we ought to do them and keep doing them, when in reality there's not any evidence in scripture that that ought to be done. Bible school, for example. Nowhere do you find in the Bible that Bible school is necessarily given to us in the scripture. Now, teaching our children about God is given to us, but the Bible school or the Sunday school are creations of men. And all the creations of men and the customs of men can become so important to us that we're really blinded to the reality of what God wants. And we hold on to these things that are a part of our tradition. We hold on to them so powerfully that they blind us to the presence of God. When I was a pastor at Larned, there's a family moved into town and we had a very small church, you know. I mean, just probably 10, 15 people come on Sunday morning. And I mean, if you had a new family come to church, it was just like, you know, God opened the heavens and poured down great blessings on us. And so this young family came in and her dad was a Southern Baptist pastor and he was a seed man, sold seed for one of the companies, which means he made pretty good money and had a couple of kids. And boy, it was just wonderful. And she came to church and she said, I am so glad to find a Southern Baptist church. We've lived here in this part of the country for a while and I've gone to other churches. And she picked up the Baptist hymnal, it's in the hymn rack, and she held it up and said, I just cannot worship God in a church that doesn't have a Baptist hymnal. And my joy at having her went down several notches because her own idea of the door to spirituality was not the Bible, nor the scriptures, nor the proclamation of the word of God, but things that were not a part of the Bible. She had fastened her life so much on the external things that they blinded her to the importance and the issues that are real. This happened to these people. They were so caught up in the traditions of Judaism that they could not see God for the issues of the worship patterns that they had. Here is Jesus, the very messenger of God, the very son of God. But when he stood to speak and he didn't do it the way they'd done it before and the way the Jewish tradition said it should be, they could not see past those things to the reality of God. We're susceptible to this. We're susceptible to being caught up in these things that are on the edge that are so important to us that we miss the things in the center. I thought how tragic it would be for a person to live their life thinking that they're serving God, think then that they're obeying God, when in reality they're obeying their own gods as a substitute for who God really is. What is our protection for this? It is the Bible. Reading the Bible to see exactly what the Bible says and what it tells us to do awakens us to the difference between our own tradition and the traditions of the scripture so that we can tell the difference. What was a New Testament church like in those days? How did it really function? We get so used to the way our own churches operate because of the traditions we've carried that we become blinded to what those groups were like in the early days of the church. And if you walk into a building, you begin to look at it based on the things that you've been involved in rather than looking at the Bible to see what the church really was for those people. The traditions of the church, the doctrines of the church, the teachings of the church, so many of them are shaped by our culture that we cannot open our eyes to anything in the scripture because every time we read it, we read into it what we think instead of letting come out of it what the Bible says. There are technical words for this. The word exegesis. Ex means coming out of. Jesus means, it's not J-E-S-U-S, but G-E-S-I-S. To draw out of the scriptures what it says. And then there's another word that every pastor is alarmed at. It's the word eisegesis, which means to read into the scripture what you're already thinking. So when you open the Bible and begin to read, it's very easy to read into it what you've always heard and always thought and always done. Instead of letting the Bible read out to you what it actually says. These people were so reading out of their own tradition, the voice of God, that when God came in human form, they couldn't even recognize him and were so blind to the reality of it that they said, we stand to be cursed if we're wrong. When you read the Bible, it helps you to read it in different translations because as you read the translations that are different and it's phrased a little bit differently, it sort of gives you a different way of looking at it. It's like looking at a horse from all sides. You see different pictures of it. That's what's very critical for us. Helping us see the words of God so that we give God an opportunity to open our eyes to the reality of what's really in the scriptures. These people were blinded, blinded by the presence of their own religion to the very person that their religion worshipped. I can't think of anything more humiliating to them than that. Sure, Jesus was humiliated through this time, but he was humiliated for his faithfulness. They were to find themselves humiliated for their failure to be faithful. Now, Jesus in this story faces his own humiliation, but they released Barabbas to them and had Jesus flogged and handed over to be crucified. I don't know what Jesus thought when he was in the garden of Gethsemane. He was praying with such intensity that he wouldn't have to go through this if it wasn't. He said, I'm willing to do this, but he was sweating like drops of blood flowing from him. The scripture says in agony about what he was going to face. We don't know what he knew about what was going to take place for him. But here he is standing before these who try him. The governor, who's the judge, can see clearly that he's not guilty of anything. His wife sends a message to him saying, I'm distressed by this. Don't do anything bad to this guy. She could see his innocence. The people who were there were so blinded by their own tradition that they couldn't make a good judgment. Pilate tried everywhere in the world to get around this, but they were insistent that Jesus was guilty. Even though he knew that Jesus was guilty, he had Jesus flogged and then handed over to be crucified. If you've seen the pictures of Jesus, what was the movie where Jesus was crucified? The Passion of Christ. I couldn't look at that. I sat in the theater. I tried to look at it, but it's just so overwhelming to me that a human being could treat another human being like that. And then to think that it was Christ who never did one single thing in his life wrong. The beating, the flogging that's taking place was limited by the number that you could hit them because it could cause death. And sometimes people died from that event. It's a long whip with pieces of stone or pieces of bone or pieces of metal on the end of it, intended to rake open the skin of a person. Now you see Jesus, the Son of God, creator of the universe, tied to the post and the soldiers whacking him with those stripes and those bones and those pieces of metal till his back was bloody and raw. What must Jesus have thought? How humiliating a circumstance would that be? To be treated like the worst of criminals. I don't know if Jesus knew that this was what was going to happen to him or not. He knew he was going to die, whether he knew exactly what it was. But in all of this thing, but in all of this thing, think of this, he never had to do or tolerate one single minute of it. He could, at any moment, have said to the Father, this is enough, and called down the angels to stand between him and his enemies who were flogging him. What kind of intensity did Jesus have to stay faithful to what he knew he was supposed to do, with the most intense beating that human body can accept? It gives us a new picture of what it means to surrender to God. Many times I find myself willing to say to God, I'm willing to do whatever you ask, and then some things come to my mind, and I find, like where I was talking about this morning, reasons why I shouldn't do them. And they're oftentimes because it causes some consequence in my life that I don't want to have. Either it takes away time that I want to do something else with, or puts me in a circumstance where I might not want to do it, or puts me in a circumstance or puts me in a circumstance where I might be embarrassed, or puts me in a situation where I may not know exactly what to do. All of those are positions of humility. I don't want to be humbled. I don't want somebody to think that I'm not a good person, that I'm not doing the right thing. And the fear of humiliation often causes me to turn away from things that I know God wants me to do. I look at Jesus, and I see here a man who is so sure of what the Father wants, that he's willing to do whatever the Father asks. I don't know what it's like to have that kind of devotion to God. But to get a picture of someone who humbles himself before human beings, here the soldiers who beat on him, they were not good people, they were not wise people, they were not righteous people. But they beat on him. Jesus faced the humiliation that most of us would never accept. Then Jesus is whipped, and he's turned over to the soldiers. Verse 27 says, the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium and gathered a whole company of soldiers. That's usually around 600 people. And Jesus says, the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium and gathered a whole company of soldiers. That's usually around 600. It's hard to believe they had all 600 there, but they may have had them, but usually a company of 600 soldiers. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him. They wove a crown of thorns and set it on his head. Most of the crowns of thorns are like, you would have a band of stickers, thorns on both sides, but there are a lot of people who know the land of Palestine who suggest that they really were not as spiky as those are, and if they were probably not as painful to Jesus as some of the other things that happened to him, but it was more a way of humiliating him. Oh, you're a king? Well, let us find you a crown. And then they took a red coat from one of the soldiers, and oh yeah, you're a king, you need a coat. The Bible is oftentimes not very clear on presenting colors to us like we're used to. There are many different kinds of colors that amaze me. People have names for different colors. It's green, but it can be green in five different colors or six different colors or a hundred, I don't know. But when the colors that they had were pretty simple, and so they could oftentimes call blue or purple anything between light sky blue to deep purple. So here when they put a robe on him, the robe would have been any kind of color, but it would be in the red line of color shades. So they put this soldier's coat probably on him and acted as if it were a king's dress, humiliating him. You say that you're a king, here is the robe that you need, and here is the crown that you need. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. Their mock was the truth. Jesus sat there and listened to them laugh at him and say, hail, king of the Jews. He knew that they didn't mean it, but he also knew it was the truth. Not one word does the scripture tell us that Jesus ever said regarding this humiliation. They spit on him. They took a staff and struck him on the head again and again. There's no reason for them to do this except that they were cruel soldiers, used to fighting, used to pain, used to suffering, and also trained to kill other human beings. They were soldiers, not people who were simply joining to be a soldier to defend their country, but they were soldiers who sent out to conquer different lands. They were not necessarily patriots. They were soldiers by profession. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe, put on his own clothes, and they led him away to be crucified. Jesus was flogged and then placed in front of the soldiers who made fun of him, who mocked him, spit on him, took a stick and beat him on the head again and again, and they made fun of him. They took off his robe. He was naked in humiliation. Put this robe on him, took it off again, put on his clothes, and then they took him to be killed. The humiliation of Jesus is overwhelming when you see what took place in him. And yet, through all of this, Jesus endured it. I would think that if he thought what was going to happen to him, he would have thought, well, I'm going to be tried, and then I'm going to be convicted, and then I'm going to be crucified. Maybe he knew every bit of this step by step, but Jesus oftentimes experienced things that were not necessarily what he thought was going to happen. Here now, his humiliation is magnified. Not only is he beaten like a common criminal, but then he's turned over to some rough soldiers who have an opportunity to do to him anything they want to do. And the king of the universe, the creator of everything, has to sit there, has to sit there, kneel there, face these people who spit on him, make fun of him, ridicule him, and he never had to put up with it. When Jesus calls us to be his followers, he said, I want you to deny yourself. Take up your cross and follow me. It would be a good thing for us to think of some things that we do in obedience to God that humble us. Things that we do that don't necessarily make us look good, but we know we should do them. Risks that we take in obedience to God that are not risks that we really want to take. To get outside of the place of comfort for ourselves in obedience to God to make sure that our pride and our self-centeredness never stand in the way of obedience to God. One of the most vivid pictures of Jesus' submission to the mission that he had is shown in this crucifixion story. Jesus beat within an inch of his life. And then in a place where most of us would look at a person beaten in such fashion and have compassion and kindness toward him? No. Then after that, his body beaten, now his soul is beaten. He's humiliated. He's spit on. He's ridiculed. He's treated as if he was a stupid fool when he was the creator of the universe. Most of us, I think, you know, would say, I think the beating's enough. God, I think I'm through with this. I need some help down here. Send somebody to take care of these guys. But through all of this, Jesus is absolutely submissive. He accepted his humiliation as a part of the call and mission to which the Father had sent him. I think what I kept seeing in this was, if I take up my cross and follow Jesus, there has to be some times in which I put great risk that what God asked me to do might embarrass me. It might make me uncomfortable. It might be difficult. All of those things say, I don't want to look stupid. And if God has asked his own son to look foolish and to be humiliated, why would he ever pass by asking me? I'd like to promise God that I would do some things for him that I really am afraid to do because I might not look in control. I might not look like I'm a person who's succeeding. I might not look like I'm a person who looks good. But I don't know if I could ever do this. Let's pray together. Has God ever asked you to do something that was just way beyond what you're used to doing normally? And you thought, I'm going to fail and I'll look stupid and I'll look foolish. And you found another reason to say no. Has God ever asked you to do something that you thought you might look silly or foolish doing, and you said, okay, God, I'll do it anyway. If you have, then you know what Jesus was like. Maybe he's asking you something now. And you know he wants it, but you're afraid. You're afraid you won't look cool, or you won't succeed, or you won't do it right. Our pride and arrogance, Father, is a great deterrent to obedience to you. You've shown us in your own son, how he put aside all of his pride and submitted himself to the most vicious and cruel people, to be humiliated and misused. We don't want to be like the Jewish people who misunderstood so badly that they destroyed your son and brought upon themselves the judgment you have and humiliation that you bring to them. We want to be like your son Jesus, who when he knew what you wanted, was willing to do whatever it was, no matter how much it hurt, or how difficult it was, or how painful it was. Give us the faith of your son. Amen. How are you?