A mute man speaks, and the crowd says nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel. The Pharisees watch the same moment and reach for another explanation. Matthew 9 puts those two reactions side by side.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Wonder vs. Rationalization: The sermon contrasts the crowd’s wonder (“nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel”) with the Pharisees’ immediate reframing of the same miracle as demonic. What factors—such as authority, loss, or desire for predictability—drive people to scoff rather than wonder? How might we fall into similar rationalizations today, and what role does fear of uncertainty play?
The Cost of Following Jesus: The preacher argues that the Pharisees rejected Jesus because following him felt too risky—threatening their authority, comfort, and stability. What “quarterly reports” or immediate concerns cause us today to shelve our commitment to God’s kingdom in favor of safer alternatives? In what areas of your life or church might you be choosing the predictable path over Jesus’s riskier but ultimately better way?
Safety vs. Transformation: Using the Coyote vs. Acme film and pharmaceutical industry examples, the sermon shows how institutions often choose predictable returns over transformative breakthroughs. How does this principle apply to individual Christians and the church? When have you chosen the “safe path” over the transformative path Jesus calls us to, and what did it cost you?
Kindness and Conviction: The sermon defends Tim Keller’s approach of sitting with sinners in mercy rather than leading with harsh judgment. How do we balance biblical conviction about sin with genuine empathy and patience? Can these coexist, and what does Jesus’s own example in Matthew 9 teach us about this balance?
Healing What Seems Unfixable: Jesus heals both the physical (muteness) and the spiritual (demon possession) in a single act, demonstrating his lordship over all brokenness. How does this challenge us to stop treating certain problems—in our lives, relationships, or world—as beyond repair? What specific brokenness do you need to bring to Christ with fresh wonder, trusting that his kingdom way is good enough?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands; he’s got the whole world in his hands.
Have you seen that they’re talking about finally doing something that surely has been in the mind of Hollywood studios for years? They’re talking about making a live action Jetsons movie. I read about that. Apparently, Jim Carrey is considered the lead for the role of George Jetson. And so you can see it coming together. One thing that struck me as I thought about that is, well, how exactly do you make a Jetsons movie now besides the flying cars? It seems all that far out from where we are. There’s so much that’s happened over the last few decades where, what do you know, we actually are getting closer to that.
But a lot of times as we look at the future, we wonder, well, are we looking at Jetsons future or Terminator future? Are we looking at Rosie? Arnold? Which one is it going to be? And it’s not always clear, right? But what is clear is that while it seems far-fetched that you could either have a Terminator or a cleaning bot, we are on the cusp of something. Something that is very different from what we’ve known. And we wonder, well, what’s going to happen?
I wonder about this live action Jetsons movie, how do you explore that? Will it be as hopeful about the future and progress as the original Jetsons cartoons were? Or is it tempered by the fact that it’s no longer something up in the distance, but rather, wait, this could be next year or the year after? If we know that there really could be a Rosie, but we’re not entirely sure whether it’s a good idea to have a Rosie in our house, then how do we feel about it? Is it still fun or is it frightening?
We’re seeing an enormous change. Our society has been in a state of almost perpetual change for quite a while now. And it’s overwhelming. It’s hard for us as human beings to process. And it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. If anything, it looks like it’s getting to be even more so. It’s hard to figure out how we deal with change and how we deal with even things that sounded pretty good in theory confronting us in reality. What do we do when it actually can happen?
One thing to think, oh, someday the vacuum, my robot will stroll out with her apron on and vacuum for me. No problem. Sounds like a Rosie future. And then we think, but what if the robot decides I’m what needs to be cleaned and decides to get rid of me? Feels a little bit more like a possibility. What do we do in those moments?
If you think about the people during Jesus’s time, they are in a similar situation because on the one hand, they’ve been anticipating the future for a long time. They weren’t anticipating a future of flying cars. They were anticipating a future of a Messiah, one who would actually make things right. And now finally, it feels like maybe that’s here.
What do you do? What we see as the different people react to Jesus is some of the people see Jesus and they say, we’ve been waiting for someone to clean up our houses, to clean up our hearts, to clean up our nation, to clean up our world. And guess what? This is way better than Rosie. The Messiah, the anointed one, the Lord’s anointed is here and he’s going to clean everything up.
And then there were others who encountered Jesus and said, no, it sounds a little bit more Terminator-ish. He’s going to mess up everything and he’s going to destroy everything, including us. We’re not sure about that. You can marvel at the kingdom or you can scoff at the kingdom. But the one thing that Jesus was ensuring was going to happen is people were going to have to respond one way or another to his kingdom. And that remains true today.
Let’s pray tonight as we come to God’s word that we would be those who are ready to encounter God’s kingdom and understand how his future is indeed the future that is best. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. Lord, we thank you for your word. And we do pray that as we come to your word tonight, that you would help us to be those who are in awe of you and what you do. Lord, would you reassure us that as we fear what could happen, we fear what might be removed from us, what might not be anymore, that Lord, you’d help us to see what is. And that it’s so much better that indeed the things that terminate us, that destroy us, that constantly eat at us are the things that you are helping us to escape from. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, if you want to turn with me, we’re in Matthew chapter 9 still tonight, and we’re at verse 32, coming along here towards the end of the chapter. We read, while they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel. Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.
You can imagine, here’s a man that can’t speak, that clearly does more than just not speak. People are looking at him and saying, here’s a man who is demon-possessed, and this man is brought to Jesus. And when he’s brought to Jesus, what happens? Well, this man who couldn’t speak, this man who couldn’t function, this man who exhibited activities that told people, hey, there’s something supernatural and evil possessing him, all that goes away.
So, we continue to see not just fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies, but here it is that this is really, I mean, we’re talking about really dramatic healings here. When we think about what we’ve seen over the last few weeks, we had the paralytic healed just a few weeks ago. We had the tax collector healed a few weeks ago. Then we had a woman healed of her bleeding, and another young woman restored to life, and then two blind men given sight. All that’s been happening.
And that’s notable as we come to this example for a couple of reasons. Now, this is the second demonic healing that we’ve seen in this section of Matthew’s gospel.
But you think about it. A lot of times people say about the Bible, oh, you know, the Bible, it’s so out of date. They had such a cute and antiquated view of everything, and so there’s a man, he can’t speak, and they just say, oh, he must have a demon. Oh, you know, weren’t they nice back then? Matthew, that’s cute that you thought that that was a demon. Now, we could say, well, still, how many people give someone who can’t speak the ability to speak? I don’t care if it’s a demon or not, that’s pretty amazing.
But the other thing that we need to note is the fact that we’ve been seeing healing after healing after healing, different kinds of healings. And so when this man is said to be demon-possessed, the Bible doesn’t write off everything as demon-possession. If anything, we may be more guilty of that as modern Christians, when someone becomes obsessed with demonic and sees a demon under every rock, as it was once put. That’s almost more something we’re guilty of than they’re guilty of.
They understood some of the things, right? Blindness? No, this man’s blind. Don’t need a demon for that, he’s just blind. But here, there’s something about this man, and we’re not told his whole story, that they clearly understood, no, this is something more. It’s not just they can’t speak, it’s something supernatural. And so we’ve been seeing kind of a back and forth here in Jesus’s healings.
Okay, here’s a paralyzed man, I’ll give him the ability to walk again. Then supernatural, here’s a tax collector who spent his life scamming people to restore his heart. And then back to the physical healing. And now we kind of get the two brought together. Here’s a man who can’t speak—a physical thing, right? He can’t speak, but the reason is spiritual. And of course, all of us have spiritual problems, so all of them need spiritual healing. But the two are bound together here to make an unmistakable statement.
Jesus is the Lord of all. He can heal the physical body, but also heal what’s spiritually ailing us. Think about various teachers of the law. They could teach God’s Word, they could tell you what God had said. They knew it better than any of us presumably know it. I’ve mentioned that numerous times, but it’s worth going back to over and over.
We look at these people and say, what’s wrong with them? They’re so bad, these scribes, Pharisees. These are people who had dedicated to their memory scripture more than probably any of us ever will, and spent their life studying it and its applications. That didn’t make them holy, but that’s pretty incredible.
So it’s one thing to know the scriptures. It’s another thing to be the actual fulfillment of the scriptures, and that’s what we see with Jesus here, right? He knows the scriptures, of course, he’s the author of them. They may not realize that, but he’s the one that’s behind them. But he can do more than just say stuff. He does it with authority, because he’s actually the one who can say, okay, demon out, you’re done.
What does the demon do? He leaves. And what’s the leftovers from the demonic attack? They’re gone, right? Now the man can speak, and he’s not demon possessed. And so all the promises, all that rosy future to come is happening here, because there have been promises decade after decade, century after century, that Jesus would come. They didn’t know who he was yet, but they knew the Messiah was coming. You can go all the way back to Adam and Eve, and what’s God doing? He’s promising that one would come who crushed the head of the serpent. You have that whole span of history, that dream of something far better than a flying car, and it’s here.
Jesus is saying, you’re not anticipating the future. I brought the future. Go ahead and get in the flying car. It’s time. I will heal what is broken.
And I think sometimes, because we’ve read all these stories, because this happened two millennia ago for us, we start to go back to where the scribes and the Pharisees were here, where everyone was potentially until they really confronted who Jesus was, which is, these are really nice things which would be nice if they happened. I don’t mean necessarily that we don’t believe they happened then, but we lose the sense of wonder that God’s kingdom actually breaks into this world and does something.
But the people that day that are standing there, at least some of them, they see Jesus take this demon and cast him out, and they say, nothing like this has ever happened in Israel.
I read one commentator who made the point, which I think is quite true here. They’re not saying amazing things haven’t happened in Israel. These are people whose whole identity is built around the fact that God parted the sea and rescued them out of slavery. It’s not like they didn’t think anything ever happened.
These were not a lot of people that just thought, we were here at some point, and we’ve been here, and we’ll always be here. They believe stuff happened, but they’re watching Jesus go after point after point of everything that’s broken in the world, and he can confront it, and if he says it should go away, it goes away. And they say, this is different.
They move, and they see that what God has done is speaking to what God will do. There’s something amazing here. There’s something to wonder at, and that’s the thing I think a lot of times we struggle with.
Do we come to these miracles with wonder? Not just knowledge they’re recorded, not even belief that they happened, but wonder that this is the God who’s still working today. Because the point of that miracle wasn’t that one man no longer had a demon possession. The point of that miracle was not that one man who couldn’t speak now could speak.
I don’t know if you ever say anything terribly profound or not. It’s not like we have the gospel of the demon possesses us mute, and we can say, oh, okay, let me see what he said, and it was dictated to his friend because he wanted to demonstrate that he could actually speak.
We don’t have anything like that. So if he said anything, it was probably normal, everyday things. They weren’t things that God felt that we needed to have passed down to us over the centuries. It wasn’t about him, it was about Jesus and what he could do.
That whatever seems most unfixable is something that Jesus can confront, and I think as we look at these miracles, that’s really the thing that he wants us to see: that whatever we see that doesn’t seem to be fixable, that he’s Lord over that too, and he can fix it.
A lot of times things just seem like they can’t be fixed, and maybe, maybe, just maybe, we’d be better off if they weren’t, because at least we know what’s going to happen. Sometimes that’s why we dampen our wonder, because if I actually start to believe that God works, I’m just going to be disappointed again and again, because in this world there’s a lot of disappointment.
Some future Jetsons movie isn’t the only movie of note hearkening back to the classic cartoons. There’s also a movie coming out at the end of the month, August 28th as I understand, entitled Coyote vs. Acme. Perhaps you’ve heard of this movie. Everyone here knows Coyote, right? Okay, I was going to worry about you if you didn’t, and everyone knows Acme, the source of the best products for catching roadrunners ever made, right? If only they’d work.
So, this movie is a telling of Coyote’s story as he takes Acme to court after all the years of disappointment and failures. But for a long time it was uncertain whether we’d ever get to hear Coyote’s story, because you see after Warner Brothers merged with Discovery a few years back, they looked at this movie, it was finished, they’d spent 70 million dollars putting it together, and said, you know what would actually work better for us? Because we don’t know if people are going to like this movie or not.
If we just wrote it off and said it was a loss and promised never to release it, we could get some of our money back and pay off some of the debt, because we won’t have to pay that much in taxes. There’s those tax collectors again, Bob, you know, right here, yeah. And so that’s what they did, and it was announced the movie was canceled.
I did some research because I was trying to understand how does it make sense to take a movie you spent 70 million dollars on it, and you say, you know what would really make more sense? We’ll just write it off as a loss. You still spent 70 million dollars on it, wouldn’t it be better to try to get something out of it?
Well, the problem is with a movie, you develop the movie and then you have to promote it, you have to make prints that go to the theater, you have to prepare the deals to make the home versions that are going to be on streaming and pair the streaming services and do all this stuff that costs additional money. And the question is, if it flops, have you just spent more money? You’re 90 million dollars in the hole rather than 70. And so the Warner Brothers leadership looked at that movie and said it looks like an Acme anvil. It’s not going to do anything.
And so they wrote it off. Better to lose some money on that movie and not have a success, but at least not lose more, than to lose that larger sum and just wish you’d written it off. So much better.
And I think that’s exactly how the Pharisees looked at Jesus. They said, we’re not really sure how this Messiah thing is going to go. Yes, we’ve been anticipating the Messiah, but we’re not really sure he’s it. And what if he flops? If we actually go along with this thing, and boy, we don’t have to do much to go along with it, because if we just don’t say anything, people are thinking he’ll heal the maniacs now. He’s given the blind sight, the lame are leaping.
I mean, we don’t have to do much other than just sit back. He’s going to be a star. And if he’s a star, the Romans are going to get mad and they’re going to mess everything up.
And it would be so much better. It’d be so much better to not have a Messiah, and have everything kind of nice and stable, and we just take a little loss in life, than to try to actually have the blockbuster and fail. Seems like it’d be easy. Certainly more predictable.
And I think that’s part of what appealed to the studio executives with Coyote versus Acme. It wouldn’t be a success, but it wouldn’t be unpredictable. And they just want predictability.
So the Pharisees, they don’t wonder at the kingdom of God. What do they do? They scoff at it. Take a look at verse 34. If it would come up, I’ll just go ahead and read it.
It really is there. But the Pharisees said, he cast out demons by the prince of demons.
Hmm. Well, whatever Jesus might be doing, it looks like good stuff. But what if we just rebrand it a loss? What if we do this? We say, it could be a real clunker. In fact, he’s casting out demons. It must be the evil one himself that gives him the power. Because, yeah, we can’t deny that he’s casting out demons. We’re not trying to do that. We saw it too. But where’s he getting it from? Where’s it coming from?
Now, the other people that are wondering it, they’re saying, how could this happen? Isn’t this an amazing marvel? Nothing like this has happened. They’re seeing the same thing the Pharisees are seeing. But notably, they’re not the ones that have as much to lose. They’re not the ones whose teaching authority might not be as valuable anymore. They’re not the ones who Romans are going to come to first angrily if it looks like this is getting out of control.
I don’t think, as we look at this, what we would say is that the Pharisees didn’t think that Jesus could do miracles. No, quite the contrary. They knew he could do miracles. They didn’t know if he could do enough to make it worth their while to bet on him.
Let’s just write him off. How do you write off a man doing miracles? You say that he’s doing miracles by evil power rather than good. That’s how you write him.
And this would come up multiple different times. We see later in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this. That one’s not going to come up either. If you want to turn in your Bible, you’re welcome to, but Matthew 12, 25-26.
Knowing their thoughts, he said to them, every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?
Do you realize how little sense this makes? It’s a little wonder that Abraham Lincoln has often attributed this quote, even though it comes from Jesus, but Abraham Lincoln, knowing enough of the Bible to think of it, made a great point.
When a country turns against itself, what happens? It kills a bunch of people. It doesn’t achieve anything good. That’s what we saw in the civil war. And Jesus here, if he were speaking today, might have actually referred to a civil war. That would be common, familiar language to us today.
Why would Satan destroy himself? Now, Satan’s deceptive. Was he really going to start going around and casting out all the demons? How could he do that? It doesn’t make any sense. If you’re trying to build a kingdom, you don’t destroy the kingdom.
If you’re trying to understand the person casting out demons, maybe he’s from a different kingdom.
Now, the Pharisees could understand that just as well. Jesus, they were smart. That’s the thing we don’t want to forget. They were smart. They had wisdom. The issue for the Pharisees was rationalization. The same sort of thing that we do every day.
They did the calculation. They looked at their profit and loss sheet. They looked at all the debts they owed in this life. Forget about eternal life. We don’t need to worry about that right now. I’m just trying to get through today. And you know what will get me through today better than trying for a blockbuster?
What will get me through today is to write Jesus off. And it may not make any sense to say that he’s casting out demons by the power of the devil himself. It doesn’t make any sense, but who really cares? It must be it, because we need a reason that this is happening.
The problem is, where does that ultimately lead them? If it works so well to write movies off, why would every studio produce every movie and just write it off? Never release any movies. You could just keep doing it. We’ll just spend 70 million, then we’ll write off and get 20 million in taxes. That’ll be so great.
No, you go into bankruptcy. It doesn’t work long term. It just works in the moment. Right now, we need to go and report to the investors this quarter that we made some money. Look, we wrote this off and we’re not paying out as many taxes. We’re 20 million dollars better off this quarter. Never mind the fact that we might have put away 100 million dollars down the road, because it’s down the road.
And the Pharisee said, never mind if there’s eternal life down the road, maybe. What we know is right now, we need to have a report for this quarter. And this quarter, what works best is for this crazy man that keeps messing with our system to get out of the way.
That’s why we see growing opposition throughout the Gospel of Matthew. The more that Jesus does, the more that the crowd starts to think maybe there’s something to Jesus, the more they say, you know what? We need to have him written off, because he’s dangerous. He is going to ruin everything for us.
And so it becomes a mounting refrain. We talked about in Sunday School Express about what happens with the parables. Jason referred to it again last week, that Jesus starts to tell the parables. We see this in Matthew 13.
So just a little after they make the accusation again that Jesus is casting out demons by the power of the demonic, just a little after that, what does Jesus do? He quits telling them stories that they can understand.
You see, yeah, they wrote off the loss, and it seemed like it was going to help them out, but then they got written off. The Pharisee that leaves them without hope.
But they have a good quarterly report. They so wanted Jesus to be wrong. They so wanted to protect what they had, that they would rather take a miracle. They’d rather take the coming of the Messiah that they’d anticipated and put their whole lives into studying and understanding in the trash bin than have everything turned upside down and be uncertain. What they do is that Jesus said, write them off.
I’ve read about a number of studies over the last few years where they’ve used the ability we now have to sequence the human genome to find cures for diseases that we have previously only been able to treat.
You see little bits of it, but one journal article was discussing the absence of funding for such studies. It’s kind of interesting when you think about it. If you’re a drug company and your goal is simply to stay in business, which is a reasonable thing for a business to do, which is better? One lump sum cure or being able to safely and predictably every quarter draw in income for those who are treating something that can’t be cured.
Too often the pharmaceutical companies, not in some kind of super dark conspiratorial way where they’re trying to suppress things, simply look at it and say, we don’t want to help fund this study. We don’t want to go further with this research because we can’t demonstrate anything that would justify the amount we’re going to have to spend on it.
We spend all these billions of dollars on this and it actually cures people. We can’t recoup it. It’s still uncertain. We can’t make up for the fact that it might not work. If it doesn’t work, now we spent billions on something that can’t really help us out and it may not even work. We’ll just stick with the things that we know that people will reliably go to the pharmacy every month and pay some money and then the insurance will pay us some more money and we’ll make a lot of money.
At least we know that it’s reliable. And time and time again things that potentially could work get passed by because you can’t actually demonstrate how it could work out well in the end.
But imagine for a moment if they actually embrace this fully. How many things might one person catch in a lifetime? Quite a few. I don’t think we can discover the secret of immortality on our own. That’s not going to happen. That’s God’s business and something else will kill us inevitably. But how many people would suffer less if we could just cure a lot of the things we know about today? Quite a few, including many of the people that choose not to pursue the cures, but they don’t need the cure right now. It’s a whole different motivation.
A lot of times you’ll see someone who’s passionate about this research, they go and do it. Why? Because either they or a loved one has an illness and I’m going to find a cure for that because I don’t want to see that suffering anymore. A very different thing because it’s immediate and it’s present.
Part of the challenge for us in facing God’s kingdom is it isn’t immediate and present for us. At least it doesn’t feel that way. We can talk about eternal life, sort of like we can talk about someday the person who chooses not to do a particular research study might actually get the disease that that research could have cured.
But if you’re talking 10 or 20 or 30 years down the road, what about today? What about the boss that’s going to be angry tomorrow if you can’t explain how your division is going to turn into a profit? It feels risky and following God’s kingdom feels risky.
That’s why even as we say we want to do it, how often do we as Christians still take the worldly way of doing things because it doesn’t feel so risky? We’ll talk about this more tomorrow night in our new steadfast series. I’ll talk about that more at the end of the service.
There’s so many times that we can say an awful lot about our God and believe an awful lot about our God, but we don’t actually want to seek after him because what he has us seek after feels so unsure.
We don’t have to do this, Lord. What if it doesn’t work? I know maybe someday I’m going to die and someday maybe I’ll need eternal life, but right now I just need things to go smoothly this week and so maybe some other time I can deal with this God.
And you know as we rationalize it almost starts to feel kind of demonic that we have to do this. Turns it on its head.
The Pharisees are clearly being unfair. The Pharisees are clearly in sin here, but to them in the moment, I’m not so sure they’re not looking at Jesus and really thinking this looks demonic because it’s going to mess up everything we’ve been doing for God’s kingdom.
Does it kind of look demonic? Yeah, you know, I think it does look demonic. Yeah, you know, it must be demonic and this is what we do. We’re not any different than them.
It’s so easy to do that we talk ourselves into what is bad by convincing ourselves what’s good is bad.
And the Pharisees just want a safer alternative and it seems like going for the safe thing that protects what they’re doing, the ministry that they’re doing, you know what, that seems like a good thing. That seems like a sure thing.
I think it’s what’s led to the rise of the Christian influencers that we’re seeing in this moment that often say they’re going to reject a wimpy Christianity.
It’s amazing to me, I know many of you here appreciate Tim Keller, and I certainly appreciate Tim Keller, and it’s amazing to me watching the number of Christians with a notable audience today who ruthlessly attack a man who’s passed, who contributed a great deal to the kingdom.
And why do they do that? Because he wasn’t muscular enough in his Christianity. He wasn’t tough enough.
He’d sit down with sinners and wouldn’t necessarily just smack them over the head immediately.
He was very clear that he believed in right and wrong and God’s word is the standard on sin, but he wasn’t mean about it.
And you know what happens when we get into the mud with sinners and we sit there and we listen to them? We listen to people very much like ourselves who are struggling with something, and we empathize with them, and we walk slowly with them.
Sometimes we get a little muddy. Sometimes it doesn’t look like we’re doing a whole lot.
Sometimes that’s exactly what the Pharisees said of Jesus. It didn’t look like he was doing a whole lot. Why are you sitting hanging out with these sinners and tax collectors, Jesus? Just preach some good fire and brimstone, and then if you really can do all these miracles, disciples had a great idea. Why don’t you just burn up a bunch of people? It’ll be great.
What did Jesus say about this? Not his way.
Jesus and Tim Keller are two different entire categories. I’m not saying Tim Keller is next to Jesus. He was a man like any other man, but he had a very clear and beautiful testimony, and he spoke about Jesus, and I fully believe that he is with our Lord now.
I think that the pushback that we’re seeing on people like him speaks to the challenge that each of us faces as we seek to live the way that Jesus has called us to.
We’re living a life of wonder at what Jesus can transform.
We get into the mud with people because we believe he can actually transform them.
If we live a life of wonder at what Jesus is doing and his kingdom is doing, we’re content to actually preach what Jesus says and not try to somehow embellish it.
If we believe what Jesus is doing, if we’re really wondering at that, we don’t take the shortcut because we believe that Jesus’ way is good enough.
A lot of people are going to think we’re crazy, and a lot of times people are going to point out all the ways it doesn’t seem to be working.
It doesn’t feel very safe.
It seems like it’d be easy just to write the loss off, and maybe we don’t actually completely give up on Jesus, but we just kind of say, we’ll shelve it for a different time.
You’ll notice on that story I told about our dear friend the coyote, I said the movie’s coming out, and you might say, well, how’s that going to happen?
Well, when Warner Brothers said they were going to do a movie about the coyote, I said, well, how’s that going to happen?
How’s that going to happen?
Well, when Warner Brothers said they were going to just pitch in the trash can and get them the safe money, the people involved in the movie believed in it enough, they started to leak little bits of it.
They started a campaign to pressure Warner Brothers.
If you don’t want it, then give it to somebody else.
Sell it to somebody else because we believe in this film.
It took 18 months, but eventually Warner Brothers said, okay, and they sold the film for $50 million to a different studio that’s going to release it.
That’s how we’re going to finally get to hear what happened between Coyote and Acme.
It took some people who said, I know this seems crazy.
What’s the likelihood, even if you’re a high-powered producer or a high-powered actor or anything else in Hollywood, what’s the likelihood that even someone of that power can really stand against the even greater powers of the studio bosses?
I’m sure people told them, this is stupid.
You’re probably just ruining your career.
Why would you do this?
Yet the film is going to come out.
What do you know?
The people, the critics have gotten to see previews of it.
It has a 98% in Rotten Tomatoes right now.
It sounds like it’s actually a pretty good film.
They believed in it and it came, but it didn’t seem like it.
It seemed like the crazy path.
As the people saw Jesus working, even though it seemed wonderful and they believed it, they saw it with their own eyes like those people saw that movie.
They saw and they knew what Jesus was doing.
It probably was awfully tempting for many of them that weren’t the religious leaders to still listen to the religious leaders.
Do you really want to go into synagogue and have the Pharisees and the scribes point at, oh yeah, he’s one of those followers of Jesus.
She follows Jesus around and listens to everything he says.
There’s a risk to that, even if you actually saw what Jesus is doing.
There’s a risk today because we’re going to get it from every direction.
We’re going to get people that say you just haven’t amped up Jesus enough.
We’re going to get it from people who say, why are you listening to that ancient man that was closed-minded?
If you understand that, it isn’t crazy at all to take the risk.
It isn’t crazy to simply do what I’ve called you to do.
It isn’t crazy to finally stop the scoffing and to soak in the wonder of what I’m doing.
Would you pray with me?
Lord, we do pray that you would help us to be those who wonder.
Lord, even as we read your word and believe your word, it’s still tempting to scoff at parts of it.
That’s quaint. Isn’t that nice?
It worked back then.
But Lord, would you help us to see that your ways are always your ways?
They’ve never been ours.
They’ve never been your thoughts either.
But you don’t call us to do our ways and our thoughts.
You call us to turn to your ways and your thoughts and to watch what happens when we do.
And Lord, we pray tonight that you would help us.
Whatever place in our lives we’re tempted to cut corners,
whatever place in our lives we think the kingdom way seems too risky,
let me try it some other way.
Whatever way we think we can get away with some things,
whatever way we think that we can cut a corner,
whatever way we think we can be unkind because it doesn’t really work to show your kindness and mercy,
whatever places those things exist in our work and in us today, Lord,
would you help us to see it’s not crazy to instead wonder,
say, here’s one who does what’s never happened before.
And that because what has never happened before happens when you call it out,
we know what has not yet happened will happen.
Indeed, you will make all things happen.
We pray this in Jesus name, amen.
Thank you, Jeff.
And as Jeff passes around the communion, the inner ring is gluten-free, the outer rings are not.
We always do ask if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, would you please let these elements pass you by?
We say that not because we want you to scoff at the elements.
We say, well, I’m wondering, look, I’m taking these elements.
But in a sense, it’s sort of like getting the acne product and not reading the instructions.
Jesus says what we should do.
I understand how to use an anvil, but do we?
Jesus says, I actually want you to care about how I say to do this.
What he says is I want you to trust in me.
So if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, would you let these elements pass you by?
Then would you reach out here in person?
Would you in the chat online?
We’d love to pray with you.
Make tonight the night you say, Jesus, I want to do it your way, even when it doesn’t make sense, even when it seems risky.
Even when it seems like there’s something safer that I could do.
I want to do it your way.
Because nothing has ever happened like what you do.
And I want what will happen to be in my life.
You know what he’ll say?
I’ll do exactly that.
Then you can come back next week and we can celebrate together as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Because indeed, this table is open to all who profess the name of Jesus.
And so it wasn’t the night he was betrayed.
Jesus took the bread and he broke it.
And he gave it to them saying, this is my body, which is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.
In a like manner, after supper, he took the cup and he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you under the remission of sins.
Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me.
As often as you eat this bread and you drink this cup, you proclaim the word of death until he comes.
Let us pray.
Father, we do come before you and ask that you would bless these elements, not because how worthy, wonderful we are, but how worthy and wonderful our God.
As you invite us to this table of adopted sons and daughters of the living God, we pray that you would nourish us with the very body and blood of our Savior through the power of your Holy Spirit.
In the precious name of Jesus, amen.
The body of Christ broken for you, take and eat.
The blood of Christ poured out for you, take and drink.
Every time we come to Jesus, I can feel risky.
I wonder if he really will come through.
But here’s the beautiful thing, that his name was and is and always will be the name that moves mountains.
That he is the one who will provide us with the safe path.
And for all who call on his name, there will be the day that he cleans up our carpet in our house, cleans up our very hearts fully.
Because of that, let us stand and praise him.
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