Union Church

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.

Matthew: Salvation and Presence

Listen in as we look at Matthew 1:18-25 and see how Jesus brings His people across the gaps of life.

Notes/Quotes:

"Sin is not a mistake. A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway. A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical misstep. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding. One very difficult aspect of sin is that my sin never feels like sin to me. My sin feels like life to me, plain and simple. My heart is an idol factory, and my mind is an excuse-making factory.In accepting misrepresentations of the gospel that render sin anything less than this, you will never learn of the fruit of repentance.” - Rosaria Butterfield

“Here Matthew gives the Messiah two names, by which we learn the essentials of the person and work of their bearer. Jesus is a human Jew—this is what his name says: “Joshua”; Jesus is also the divine Lord—this is what his name means: “God Saves.” Only when Jesus is seen through this dual optic does the gospel of Jesus finally make sense. And Matthew, perhaps intentionally, begins to grind the lens of this dual optic of true humanity and true divinity already in the initial chapter of his Gospel, a lens that will be polished still more in John’s Gospel and brought to a sheen in the Creeds.” - Dale Bruner

“Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.” - Augustine

What’s incredible about the Incarnation is not so much that a virgin conceived (remarkable though that might be) but that God became man. “What is truly amazing about the Christian faith,” says the physicist Jonathan Feng, “is the idea that God made the universe—from quarks to galaxies—but at the same time cared enough about us to be born as a human being, to come down, to die and be crucified in the person of Jesus, and to bring forgiveness and new life to broken people.” - Rebecca McLaughlin

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.” Brennan Manning

Matthew: Enter the Story of Jesus

Listen in as we begin our series through Matthew and look a chapter 1:1-17. The good news if found in how Jesus uses and meets us in the gaps of life.

Notes/Quotes:

Matthew 1:1-17

Three gaps many Christian contend with:
1) I believe in God's love but struggle to experience it
2) I believe God is intimately involved, but don't often see it
3) I thought I would be further along by now. 
Minding the gap without legalism, shame & guilt is crucial.
- Steve Cuss

“The book of the genealogy” appears to function not only as a heading for the genealogy itself but also as a title for the entire story to follow: a new beginning with the arrival of Jesus the Messiah and the kingdom of God” - ESV Study Bible

“No words or ordering of words in scripture is without significance. Matthew knows he is telling the story of one that was born a king, yet a king to be sacrificed. God had tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. By beginning with “son of David,” Matthew prepares us to recognize that this is a king who will end up on the cross.” - Stanley Hauerwas 

Philippians 2:12-13

Bill Berve: One Verse, One Thought, One Quote

Listen in as one of our elders, Bill Berve shares from Joshua 24.

Joshua 24:14 "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

"God will not force His will or way in our lives. He will set the choices before us and He will give us the strength to follow through once we have made them, but the Lord will not choose for us, that is up to us." Greg Laurie

Life in the Desert: We Are Sent

Listen in as we close our series "Life in the Desert." Today we see how Jesus meets and sends His people.

 

Notes/Quotes:

John 20:19-23

John 3:16 & 17
Mark 10:45
Philippians 2:5-8

“The ‘as’ in this text (John 20:21) tells us that the mission of Jesus to Israel is to serve as a paradigm for the mission of his followers to the nations. This must determine the way we think about and carry out the mission; it must be founded and modeled upon his. We are not authorized to do it in any other way.” - Mike Goheen 

“The idea is not that individual Christians or churches have authority on their own to forgive or not forgive people, but rather that as the church proclaims the gospel message of forgiveness of sins in the power of the Holy Spirit, it proclaims that those who believe in Jesus have their sins forgiven, and that those who do not believe in him do not have their sins forgiven—which simply reflects what God in heaven has already done” - ESV Study bible 

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.” Chris Wright

Jesus moves us from:
Hurry and distraction to rest and presence 
Anger and frustration to trust and dependency 
Isolation and consumption to community and contentment
Apathy and cynicism to expectation, action and hope

Life in the Desert: A Case for the Sabbath

Listen in as we look at Exodus 20 and see how Jesus leads us toward rest.

Sermon notes/quotes:

Reading: Exodus 20:8-10 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“(In Sabbath) drudgery gives way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.” —Judith Shulevitz

“God rested, and in doing so He built a rhythm into the DNA of creation. A tempo, syncopated beat. God worked for six, rested for one. when we fight this work-six-days, Sabbath-one-day rhythm, we go against the grain of the universe. And to quote the philosopher H.H. Farmer, “if you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.” - John Mark Comer

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)

“They (the Israelites) invented the idea of social equality. The Israelite Sabbath institutionalized an astonishing, hitherto undreamed-of notion: that every single creature has the right to rest, not just the rich and the privileged. Covered under the Fourth Commandment are women, slaves, strangers and, improbably, animals. The verse in Deuteronomy that elaborates on this aspect of the Sabbath repeats, twice, that slaves were not to work, as if to drive home what must have been very hard to understand in the ancient world. The Jews were meant to perceive the Sabbath not only as a way to honor God but also as the central vehicle of their liberation theology, a weekly reminder of their escape from their servitude in Egypt.” —Judith Shulevitz

“If you want rest you have to go to Him and if you think you’ve gone to Him but you don’t have any rest you don’t know what you have—you still haven’t taken ahold of what you have.” - Timothy Keller

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

“Sabbath, Anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.” -       John Mark Comer