Union Church

Matthew: Jesus and Generosity

Listen along as we continue our series through the sermon on the mount. Today Jesus shows how he reforms our hearts and reframes our focus when it comes to money.

Notes/Quotes:

The true and victorious Christmas spirit does not look away from death, but directly at it. Otherwise, the message is cheap and false. Advent begins in the dark. Advent is not for sissies” Fleming Rutledge

“Do I belong to Jesus or to my desires? My desires didn't die for me. My desires don't care to wipe away my tears. My desires don't care if I'm happy. Jesus is the one who gave his life for me.” - Rachel Gilson

Matthew: Words, Reactions, Relationship

Listen in as we continue our series through the Sermon on the Mount and see how Jesus leads us toward wholeness.

Notes/Quotes:

“The rule was designed to prevent two wrongs—sever retribution that did not fit the crime and self appointed vigilante action.” Jonathan Pennington

Sometimes our hurt feelings are the very last things that want to sign on to holy instructions. If we have a right understanding of forgiveness, we start to see that we don't have to muster up the determination to forgive. Forgiveness is not based on our determination. Forgiveness is based on our cooperation with what God has already done. As God's forgiveness flows to us, we simply cooperate with letting it flow through us to other people. That's how I made the decision to forgive.” Lysa Terkeurst

Matthew: Anger, Lust, Divorce

Listen in as we look at Matthew 5 and see how Jesus aligns both actions and emotions with the Father's heart.

Notes/Quotes:

Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life. It does not have to be specifically “acted out” to poison the world. Because of what it is, and the way it seizes upon the body and its environment just by being there, it cannot be hidden. All our mental and emotional resources are marshaled to nurture and tend the anger, and our body throbs with it. Energy is dedicated to keeping the anger alive: we constantly remind ourselves of how wrongly we have been treated. And when it is allowed to govern our actions, of course, its evil is quickly multiplied in heart-rending consequences and in the replication of anger and rage in the hearts and bodies of everyone it touches. - Dallas Willard

Under Jewish law, a man can divorce a woman for any reason or no reason. The Talmud specifically says that a man can divorce a woman because she spoiled his dinner or simply because he finds another woman more attractive, and the woman's consent to the divorce is not required. In fact, Jewish law requires divorce in some circumstances: when the wife commits a sexual transgression, a man must divorce her, even if he is inclined to forgive her.

“Sin does something terrible to me. Sin turns me in on myself. Sin shrinks my life to the size of my life. Sin makes me obsessed with my wants, my needs, my feelings.Think about this, brothers and sisters. Sin is fundamentally antisocial, because sin causes me to love me more than anything else and to care for me more than anything else. It causes me to be obsessed by what I want, how I want it, when I want it, why I want it, where I want it, and whom I want to deliver it. Sin makes my life little more than “I want, I want, I want I want. Sin morphs all of us into a bottomless vat of demands. I’m a vat of expectancy. I’m a vat of entitlement. I wish I could say that this is not the true me, but it is.” - Paul Tripp

2 Corinthians 5:14-15

Matthew: Gospel Goodness

Listen along as we continue our study in Matthew's gospel and see how Jesus distinguishes between gospel and religious goodness.

 

Matthew: The Good Life

Listen in as we begin the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's gospel and see how Jesus opens up true flourishing in life today.

 

Notes/Quote:

The Sermon on the Mount is:
Good news - God is present, working, and calling His people to life through Jesus
Centered on Jesus - It’s who He is and how He lives. 
All about flourishing - It invites us to the way that life works best
Tension producing - It places us in the already//not yet of the Kingdom

unBeatitudes:
Congratulations to the entitled, for they grab what they want.
Congratulations to the carefree, for they shall be comfortable.
Congratulations to the pushy, for they shall win.
Congratulations to the greedy, for they shall climb the food chain.
Congratulations to the vengeful, for they shall be feared.
Congratulations to those who don’t get caught, for they shall look good.
Congratulations to the argumentative, for they shall get in the last word.
Congratulations to the popular, for this world lies at their feet.

Have you ever met one person who believed and lived by this world’s unBeatitudes and came to the end a satisfied, radiant, wise person?  Even one? - Ray Ortlund

The Beatitudes of Jesus are nothing short of a revolution of evaluation. –Scot McKnight

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. - Martyn Lloyd Jones

What is blessing, then? Scripture shows that blessing is anything God gives that makes us fully satisfied in him. Anything that draws us closer to Jesus. Anything that helps us relinquish the temporal and hold on more tightly to the eternal. And often it is the struggles and trials, the aching disappointments and the unfulfilled longings that best enable us to do that. Vaneetha Risner

Matthew 4:12-25 - The Kingdom of Heaven

Listen in as Anthony leads us through Matthew 4:12-25 and unpacks how Jesus shows us the kingdom of heaven and it's implications for life today.

Sermon Notes/Quotes:

Reading: Matthew 4:12-2

“how you feel about it isn’t really the important thing. It’s what you do that matters.” -N.T. Wright

“pervasive, all-of- life-repentance is the best sign that we are growing deeply and rapidly into the character of Jesus.” - Timothy Keller

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:15-20)

 

Matthew: Baptism and Temptation

As we look at Matthew 3:13-4:11 we see the baptism and temptation of Jesus. It's occasion to ponder the timing of God, the density of our hearts, the humanity of Christ, and the identity of the beloved son of God.

Sermon Notes/Quotes:

Matthew 3:13-4:11

If we hear the Father’s twice-repeated Voice at Baptism and Transfiguration correctly, the one fact the Father wants believers to know, above apparently all other facts, is how much we have in Jesus. “My priceless Son, deeply pleased.” If we know this, we know the most important fact in the world. “Here,” God is saying in so many words, “in this man, is everything I want to say, reveal, and do, and everything I want people to hear, see, and believe. If you want to know anything about me, if you want to hear anything from me, if you want to please me, get together with him” (or in the three words added emphatically by the Voice at the Transfiguration: “Listen to him!” Matt 17:5) - Dale Bruner

The Temptations:

Provision - “We’d rather be fed than fathered”
Protection - “Does he care? Will he protect?”
Providence - “Kingdom without a cross”

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.” - CS Lewis

Romans 5:18-21

You have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief. - Henri Nouwen

Colossians 2:6-15

Matthew: The Road to Renewal

Listen along as we look at Matthew 3:1-12 and how John the Baptist paves the road toward renewal.

Sermon Notes/Quotes:

Matthew 3:1-12 
Isaiah - 40:3-5
Malachi 3:1, 4:1-5

“By the foolishness of preaching, Christ’s kingdom must be set up.” - Matthew Henry

“That John baptizes in the Jordan is a reminder of Israel’s baptism in Exodus by Moses’s parting of the waters. Israel had to face death as it walked across the dry land between the walls of water. John’s baptism calls Israel again to face death that it might live. Repentance is about the life and death of the people of Israel.” - Stanley Hauerwas

“The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. And the same Gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins” –Charles Spurgeon

“I who write and most of us who read inevitably belong, at least in inclination, to one of these two groups or types: we are either (mainly) serious Bible students or we are (mainly) serious servants of the modern world…(It is not fair for any of us to say that “I, thank heaven, am a member of ‘the middle,’ ” that always superior group!) We must learn to read the words “Pharisees and Sadducees” and to see ourselves or we will miss half of Matthew.” - F. Dale Bruner

The wrath of God is not the irritability of God; it is the love of God in friction with injustice. It is the warm, steady, patient, but absolutely fair grace of God in collision with manifest selfishness. - F. Dale Bruner

Romans 6:23

“The sinful heart is never transformed by conformity to the imperatives but only by relationship with the One who cleanses hearts.” Elyse Fitzpatrick

Matthew 2: - God With Us (Christmas in September)

Listen in as we look at Matthew 2

Reading: Matthew 2:1-23

“the birth of Jesus is a threat to thrones and kingdoms.”  -Stanley Hauerwas

“the gospel tells the story of a prophetic figure who suffers the worst that the empire can do to him, execution by crucifixion. But his resurrection and subsequent coming in power expose the limits of Roman power. The gospel constructs an alternative world. It resists imperial claims. It refuses to recognize that the world has been ordered on these lines. It offers an alternative understanding of the world and human existence centered on God manifested in Jesus. It created an alternative community and shapes and anti-imperial praxis.”   - Warren Carter

“When he quotes Hosea 11:1 in verse 15, it looks for a moment as though he is ignoring the fact that the prophet was looking back to Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, not forward to a ‘son of God’ yet to come. But this itself ignores the fact that, for Matthew, part of Jesus’ role and vocation is precisely to make Israel’s story complete: as ‘son of God’ he is, as it were, Israel-in-person, succeeding at last where Israel had failed.”  - N.T. Wright

“Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world where children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants. Christians are tempted to believe that the death of the children of Bethlehem “can be redeemed” by Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. Donald MacKinnon, however, insists that such a reading of the gospels, in particular the destruction of the innocents of Bethlehem, is perverse. For MacKinnon, the victory of the resurrection does not mean that these children are any less dead or their parents any less bereaved, but rather the resurrection makes it possible for followers of Jesus not to lie about the world we believe has been redeemed.”     -Stanley Hauerwas

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.” (Isaiah 11:1)

“For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:2-5)

 

Reflections at One Year

Today Jon shares some reflections and thoughts on Union Church's one year anniversary.