The Radical Love Jesus Demands for the Vulnerable

**Chris** (0:01)
For those of you who are new to the congregation, my name is Pastor Chris.
We are what feels like year number three, going through the Book of Matthew. I know it's not quite that long. We're about a year, a year and a half through the Gospel of Matthew. This has turned out to be one of the greatest things the elders have challenged me with.
For 20 years in ministry, I got to basically pick a topic whenever it was my time to preach or whatever it was. And a lot of times it's relevant to my life, relevant to the culture, relevant to whatever's happening. And that's actually not that hard to do. Like you look around the world, whether it's on the news or it's on social media or whatever it is, you can find a topic that you'd like to talk about, learn more about God on. And the elders came to me about a year or so ago and was like, hey, I know that's super popular in Christianity for people to just come up with sermon series. And what's the hot button? Every church has a little bit of a calendar somewhere around tax season. We start talking about the tithe a little bit more, those types of things. But back in the day, which started in Judaism with the Torah cycle, back in the day, you just went line by line, precept by precept. And you could be in a book of the Bible, literally until Jesus came back. And so that was not something that I was well versed in. And so when Brent challenged me to do it, I was like, yeah, we might get there at some point of time. And then I felt like we were supposed to, and Matthew is where we started. And I don't remember exactly why the Lord told us to start in Matthew, but here we are, week number 733, captain's log in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18 will be in 12 through 14 But over the last two weeks in this Kingdom Community Series, we've been talking about the overarching themes of what Matthew chapter 18 is. A lot of times we think of Matthew chapter 18, and we think about, well, what do we do when somebody sins against us? What do we do when we get south side with somebody else? It's a little bit more than that. Matthew 18 is a shift towards, how do you actually do life in the Kingdom Community? Now, let's remember the context of the time. You had the Pharisees who were the teachers of the law. They were what we would consider geopolitically kind of middle class people. They were involved with the normal person on a regular basis. They were people you would see in the streets. Kind of like if you're in Norman, and if you walk into Ben Venuti's, you might see Barry Switzer. You'd probably see one of the Pharisees at the local hummus, or Mettys if that's your favorite.
Huh? Don't get on that, you're back off.
I didn't say either, or I was just giving you two options. I was giving you the Pharisees and the Sadducees. All of a sudden, Brent didn't eat breakfast this morning.

**Brent** (3:00)
Whoo! Whoo!

**Chris** (3:03)
Guess we need to fast forward to next week's message about conflict in the church.
Man, I thought we were going to talk about 99 for the 1 today, Brent. You're over here talking about Laoth Bahamas.
It's important for us to understand the Pharisees were the middle class, they were involved with everybody. You could talk to them. You could see them. You could debate scripture. The Sadducees, they worked more cooperatively with Rome. They oversaw the temple and what was happening in the temple. Then you had the Essenes. You know, they would be like out in Yukon, or they would be out in like Goldsby. That's right, Goldsby. You know, where the cults live, all the other things. So, they'd be out on the sides of the landscape. And Jesus is coming and he's teaching. And so a lot of times people will say, well, Jesus is just always taking issue with the Pharisees. That's not entirely true. Jesus is taking issue with almost every religious system that claims to be of God, that's manipulating and abusing people. He's taking issue with what people had done with the Torah and the Prophets, the Old Testament and the Writings. And he's trying to reframe that on what that should look like in a kingdom community. And that's where we are in the chapter of Matthew, is that the Kingdom of Heaven doesn't measure the greatness of a person the way the world does. We talked about that last week, where it depends upon what car you drive in with or what kind of clothing you have or whether you have a Rolex or whatever the standard is, that we'd say like, oh, that person's doing all right. In the Kingdom of God, that matters nothing.