“The Mission of the Kingdom”
Sunday, July 2, 2006
Matthew Chapter 9 Verses 9-13, 35-38
There’s a movie out now called Mission Impossible 3. I am not much of a fan of these movies but I do remember watching re-runs of the television show, the originals were a bit before my time. Each episode began with the main character receiving a message that contained the mission. The message would begin with the words, your mission, should you choose to accept it, and then it would go on and describe a seemingly impossible task that the main character would always manage to pull off in the amount of time it took to play one episode. Once the mission was given, the message would always self-destruct so that it would not fall into the wrong hands. There’s something exciting about the idea of a mission that needs to be completed, when I was little my brother and I would pretend to be spies on a secret mission to save the world. I always made sure that he died at some point during the mission so that I could save the world alone! It was good being the older brother!
A mission that seems impossible, a mission to save the world, that’s exactly the reason that Jesus came to Earth. In terms of human thinking, his task was not possible. He was to come to Earth, live without sinning even once, allow the men that He created to kill Him and then conquer death and hell by rising again. When all of that was complete, man would be restored to God through this mission. What was lost would be found, what was far off would be brought near, those who were called sinners would be now be called sons. To us, this looks impossible and for us, it is. Jesus, himself, confirms this later in Matthew chapter 19, when speaking of Salvation, he says: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
So, Christ has come so that Mission Impossible might become Mission Accomplished. In the section that we are going to be looking at this morning in Chapter 9, He reveals the Mission of the Kingdom in three ways. He still has not given much detail about how the mission will be accomplished or the role that He will play in bringing it about, but he leaves no doubt that His mission is to save sinners. That’s why He came, that was the mission that he accepted.
He puts it very clearly in another gospel, in Luke 19:10: For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." He came for us.
Before we look at the mission as it’s revealed in this chapter, I want to look quickly at what else we have going on in this chapter. Last week you looked at the miracles that Jesus was performing. He is beginning to show the authority that was His. Despite the signs, despite the wonders, despite the display of authority over the spiritual realm, people still weren’t catching on to who this man really was. In the first part of this chapter we see Jesus interacting with a paralytic in His own town, the place where He grew up. Jesus leans down over this man and does something that sets off some fireworks. Instead of simply healing the man as he had been doing throughout the towns and countryside, He tells the man that His sins are forgiven. Jesus has been displaying the power of God for the people, but now, He is claiming not just the power from God but He is claiming the same authority as God to forgive sins, this is the first real instance where Jesus claims divinity through His words and actions. Only God can forgive sins. Jesus does not tell him, Son, God has forgiven your sins. He tells him that they are forgiven, and says that He has the authority to do this, that Jesus has forgiven him. There is tremendous weight and meaning behind these words. Jesus is taking upon himself an attribute that is God’s alone, the authority to forgive sin.
The Pharisees pick up on this immediately. They are enraged and accuse Jesus of blasphemy, a sin that was punishable by death in those days. Jesus replies to them in verses 4-7.
"Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? 5 Which is easier: to say, `Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, `Get up and walk’? 6 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. . . ." Then he said to the paralytic, "Get up, take your mat and go home." 7 And the man got up and went home.
I’ll show you my authority, I’ll show you the power that is mine. Get up and walk. And the man gets up. Wouldn’t you love to have been there and to have seen this exchange. Well, the ones that were there still didn’t get it. Listen to verse 8.
8 When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to men.
The people were impressed, but they were impressed that God would allow a man that authority. They still didn’t get that this was the Messiah, they still didn’t get that this was God. It makes sense, somewhat. This was the place Jesus had grown up, these were his people, they had seen him as a baby and a child and a teenager. To think that this was God and that God had been raised in their midst would have been tough to get their minds around at that point. So, Jesus continues to show his authority in this chapter. He displays authority over sin, death, the spiritual realm, and the physical body. He raises a young girl from the dead, He heals a woman who has had issues with bleeding for twelve years. She had no hope of comfort or relief, until her encounter with the living Hope. He heals the blind and mute and drives out the demons from a man who is possessed. The crowds were amazed. The Pharisees were enraged and you can feel the tension rising between Christ and the religious leaders who could feel their control and power slipping away. All of this is setting the stage, all of this is building up until the Pharisees can take it no longer and they send Christ to the cross so that He can complete the mission that He accepted on our behalf. That mission is to save the sinner.
The first way that He reveals this mission here is through:
1) Who He Calls
Jesus is still in the process of pulling together the group of men whom He will use to change the world. Earlier in Matthew we see Him calling a group of fishermen to leave their nets and to follow Him. And they do. Now, we have the account of call that He places before Matthew. READ VERSE 9
How does this reveal His mission? It’s simple. If Jesus has come to seek and save sinners, then you would expect Him to call those who were obvious sinners in the eyes of the world to join Him in His work and Mission. A mission that seeks sinners is going to involve sinners and in Matthew, a tax collector, you have a prime example of sin. Tax Collectors were not very well liked. They worked for the Roman government, so the Jews would have viewed Matthew as, not just a sinner, but a traitor as well. The Roman government required a set amount of money to be paid to them, anything above that went to line the pockets of these tax collectors who could use any means necessary to collect what they wanted from the people. The tax collectors were very wealthy and that wealth came through dishonesty, thievery, and brute force. In other places in Scripture, the term tax collector is synonymous with the word pagan, or one who is without God. Tax Collectors were blatant sinners, they were the epitome of everything that the Pharisees taught against and saw as evil and undeserving of a relationship with God. Jesus walks right by these pious, self-righteous men, and calls to this tax collector. This is the heart of the mission, this is who the mission is all about, and He invites him to follow. Like the fishermen, he does.
The call of Christ is a simple one, “Follow Me.” That call is the same for us today. And Jesus is still calling sinners, like me and you, to follow and advance his kingdom. We are a people who like to accomplish things. We like to get things done. Most of us are task oriented. There’s an excitement in thinking about doing God’s will in our lives. We want to get things done, we want to know the details, we want the whole agenda up front so that we can get started. After all, the sooner we start, the sooner things get done. Following Christ is not going to be a divine list that God gives us that we can check off one thing after another as we get them done. Following Christ is first and foremost a relationship. God calls us to a relationship with Him.
Revelation 3:20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.
He doesn’t say, I’ll come in and tell Him what to do. When we accept Christ, we enter into a relationship like none other in which we commune daily with the God of Creation. Look at the first thing that Jesus did with Matthew. He did not lay out a detailed agenda for the next three years of ministry, He didn’t give Matthew a list of ministry tasks to accomplish, no, He ate with Him. He began to develop the relationship. The time for specifics would come, the time to accomplish tasks would come, the agenda would be revealed, but the relationship came first, all of those other things sprung up from a love relationship with Christ. When the relationship is there, then we can hear God, then He will lead, then He will reveal, and then we can follow.
In the book “Experiencing God,” Henry Blackaby says this: God wants us to respond to Him in this way, Yes, I will follow you one day at a time. Then you will always be in the center of His will for your life. When you get to the place where you trust Jesus to guide you one step at a time, you experience a new freedom. If you don’t trust Jesus to guide you in this way, what happens if you don’t know the way that you are to go? You worry every time you make a turn, you often freeze up and can’t make a decision. This is not the way that God intends for you to live your life. I have found in my own life that I can release the way to Him. Then I take care of everything He tells me one day at a time. He gives me plenty to do to fill each day with meaning and purpose. If I do everything that He says, I will be in the center of His will when He wants to use me for a special assignment.”
We are not called to figure it all out, we are called to follow. God will make His purposes known at just the right time.
JER 10:23 I know, O LORD, that a man’s life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps. God will Lead.
When He called Abraham, He told him to leave the country of his fathers and go to a land that God would show him. That’s it, no more details than that for the time being and Abraham followed where God lead. The Israelites were often asked to follow without knowing the end destination, the disciples were called to follow without knowing all of the details as was the apostle Paul, as are each of us.
Did you ever play follow the leader when you were little? If the leader hopped on one foot, so did everyone else. If the leader jumped over a log, so did everyone else. In order to follow, you had to be able to see what the leader was doing. As we follow Christ, we have to be able to see what He’s doing and where He’s leading. That comes when a relationship with Him becomes our priority.
Christ reveals His mission by who He calls, the very sinners He came to save. Our response to that call is to follow where He leads us as our relationship with Him grows.
Christ also revealed His mission in this passage in verses 12 and 13 when He shares:
2) Who He Came For
MT 9:12 On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.13 But go and learn what this means: `I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
If there was any doubt left after His calling of Matthew, Jesus wanted to clear things up. The Pharisees were appalled that Christ would lower himself and eat with a group of tax collectors and sinners. People that the Pharisees would never spend time with or fellowship with because they were unclean and unholy, certainly not deserving of the same God that these Pharisees claimed to serve. Jesus lets them know that this was not a mistake. This was not a one time deal, Jesus was spending time with those that He had come to deliver, the unrighteous, the unclean.
In those days, for the Jews, if you were not Jewish, or you were not practicing the religion of Judaism, you were considered almost a non-person. The religious Jews had such a puffed up opinion of themselves that they looked at the sinner or the Gentile as hardly human, as being no more important than a dog. So the thought that God had sent someone to this kind, to the scum of the Earth was unthinkable. To watch a religious leader and instructor, as Jesus was, eat and talk and laugh and enjoy being with sinners was hard enough to take. But to hear him say that this was why he had come, these were the people he was called to, these are the ones he came to serve and to save, that would have been too much for them to process.
So now He’s said it. He has come for sinners. Praise God, He came for us! This is where a lot of Christians and Churches struggle today. Are we more like Christ here, or the Pharisees, unable to see past outer appearances.
EPH 5:1 Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
We are to imitate Christ, who is by nature God. Christ came for the lost, for the unlovely, for sinners, Christ loved sinners. We need to be more than just concerned about sinners and hope that the lost find their way someday, we need to have hearts that are broken over the destiny of those who die apart from a relationship with Christ. A passion for the lost needs to be the heartbeat of this church. We can’t sit back and hope that other ministries will reach them. We exist to reach the lost. This church needs to be concerned with discipleship, this church needs to be concerned with Biblical teaching and instruction, Christ modeled these things. This church needs to nurture relationships between Christians so that we can help each other grow, Christ taught and modeled that. But we are called to more than that. But the reason He came, what moved Him, what motivated Him, what drove everything that He did during His ministry on Earth was a love for the lost. Alexander Cameron says, “We are called to be fishers of men, not keepers of the aquarium.” That is what many churches have become, more concerned with those inside the church than with reaching those outside. If we are to imitate Christ, we need to be passionate about seeing lost people come to Christ. Does this describe you? Does this describe us as a church?
Christ spent his time with sinners, with the prostitutes, the murderers, the adulterers, the tax collectors, people who swore, people who drank, people who were different. When is the last time that described you? If someone of that kind walked into this church, would they feel God’s love and acceptance or just the harsh judgmental stares of people who can’t see past the exterior to the soul that is crying out for a Savior.
I was listening to a seminar at a youth conference a few years ago. A youth pastor was sharing about a girl that had attended his youth group a few times. This was in a very affluent church, the teens were suburban, clean cut kids. This girl wore all black clothes and make-up. She had many piercings and tattoos. She quite simply looked like someone that you would not want to mess with or as a parent, you would want to keep your kid away from. The youth pastor talked to her and she asked question after question about God and Jesus and what it meant to be a Christian. She was spiritually hungry. Unfortunately, the youth pastor was the only one that talked to her and after a few weeks she stopped coming. If she had looked the part, if she had blended in, the story may have turned out differently. A few weeks later, the young lady took her own life. She reached out and the church failed. It’s an extreme example, but I don’t think that it is an isolated one. We’ve got to realize that the incredible grace of God that covers us, the Blood that washes away our sins, does the same for all who believe, no exceptions.
God’s will is that we reach the lost. If He never gets more specific than that in our lives we could easily spend a lifetime following just that call. Jesus came for sinners, He loved them, no matter who they were, what they’d done, or what they looked like. We have got to do the same.
Finally, His mission was made clear by:
3) Who He Had Compassion For
Look at the end of the chapter now, beginning at verse 35.
Jesus had been going through the towns, he had been dealing non-stop with people. Healing their sicknesses, teaching them, talking with them. Anyone who works with people on a regular basis knows that people can be draining. We could have understood at this point if Jesus was exhausted. If He had looked out over the crowd and just wanted a break, wanted to be left alone. But look at his reaction. He looks out and he is filled with compassion because he saw their need. He was able to see past the physical problems, past the religious beliefs, he saw the spiritual need. He saw their need for a shepherd that only he could fulfill. When He looked at the crowd, he saw them in light of His mission, in light of what He had come to do. He looked out and saw a harvest just waiting to be picked. As He looked at the small group of men that He had chosen, He understood that the workers were not up to the job, there were not enough and He instructed them to pray for more. In the three years of His ministry, Christ trained these men to reap a harvest and to train others to join in the harvest as well and the early church grew and multiplied as God caused men’s hearts to respond to the Good News and Christians were faithful in going and harvesting the crop that God had prepared.
The harvest is still plentiful today. Look around you. The people you go to school with, the people you work with, the people who live next door, or that you meet at the grocery store, the world is full of people who are longing for and ready to hear the hope that we have. They are longing for meaning and purpose in their lives that only Christ can provide for them. When is the last time you went out to harvest? When is the last time you intentionally built a relationship so that you could have an opportunity to share Christ with someone? I know one thing for sure, we will not reap a harvest if we are not going out into the fields.
We looked a few weeks ago about the command of Christ to stay on the narrow road. We know that God wants us to keep our lives pure and free of sin. We are called throughout Scripture to separate ourselves from the world. We are not to love the world and the things in it. We are called to not get comfortable with the evil that goes on around us. In every instance, the commands refer to the prevailing attitudes of the world. The thoughts and lusts and sin and evil that is rampant, it refers to the things that Satan controls. In not one instance does it mean that we are to cut ourselves off from lost people. These calls to be separate do not mean that we separate ourselves from the people who need to hear God’s message of Hope. The things that we are to avoid, the things of the world will pass away. 1 John 2:17 says: 17 The world and its desires pass away
There will come a day when sin is no more. There will come a day when temptation and lust, and evil ceases to exist. Those are the things of the world that we are to distance ourselves from. But the Bible also teaches:
Ecc 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
See, though the things of the world may fade away, the people of the world are built for eternity. If in striving to separate ourselves from the things, we fail to impact the people, then we have failed to do what God desires of us. The only way to reap a harvest is to go into the fields!
In the 1880’s there was a young Presbyterian pastor in New York City. He had quickly risen in the ranks of ministry and now, by everyone’s accounts, had achieved success like few ministers dreamed of. He was well paid, well loved, and had a huge church in the nation’s greatest city. He began to discover what Christ’s mission was for the church and found that it didn’t match with what his church was trying to accomplish. He went out into the fields, the docks, the slums, the streets and he began to preach. Hundreds responded to the message of the gospel and when this young preacher attempted to bring them into the church, the board refused. These people were different; they would have to go somewhere else. The young pastor resigned that day. He began a ministry with one goal and mission, much like what we’ve looked at today. His vision, in his words, was to: “reach the unchurched and neglected masses both here and abroad.” Out of that ministry began a movement, out of that movement a denomination was born. The Christian and Missionary Alliance was founded on the mission of Christ to reach the lost. We are a part of that vision that began over a hundred years ago. We do well with missions, with reaching the lost overseas. We pray and we give. How are we doing with the lost here in Corning, NY. Lost people moved Christ, he had compassion for them, he prayed that workers would go and reap a harvest. We are the workers that He prayed for and instructed His disciples to pray for. We will recognize the time to harvest when we understand that he still calls sinners like us to join him in his work. When we learn to follow day by day, and when we truly understand who it is that He came to save and take that mission as ours as well.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, hasn’t changed at all. It is simply this: to seek and save the lost. We can be known for many things as a church. We can have the best programs, the best preaching, the best music, in the end those things will fade away. However, if we are a church known for its passion for the lost, for the souls of men, we can bring with us into eternity the only thing that matters, other people.
