February 21, 2024 • 55 mins
We delve into Jesus' often overlooked angle to the Gospel - that Jesus is teacher. Drawing wisdom from the Gospel of Matthew, we compare the teachings explore their implications against the backdrop of religious and political backgrounds of His time, and also the modern belief that a meaningful life can be achieved through wellness practices, morality, and self-awareness without a genuine commitment to God.
Finally, this episode presents a helpful creed that encapsulates the essence of the gospel, and if you want to follow along with that, then read from here:
We as a people, believe in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We believe in the Father, who out of love, alongside the Son and Spirit, created the Heavens and the Earth.
We believe in Jesus the Son, who was predestined to rule among us,
Conceived of the the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary,
Who followed in God’s ways and invited all into God’s ways.
In whose Kingdom, decisive victory was in suffering under Pontious Pilate.
He was crucified, died, and descended into death,
Yet, this victory was truly made known three days later when He rose again from the dead, trampling sin and death,
He is now seated at the right hand of the Father and will come from there to judge the living and the dead.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and, with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. Who moves across the Earth,
Dwells covenantally with believers,
And mediates Christ’s presence.
Who enables God’s growth, guidance, and gifts.
Whose power is made known in signs and wonders,
And is moving all things unto Christ’s New Creation.
We believe in the Holy catholic Church,
Called to be shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Family to one another,
Who together seek to know God and make Him known,
Resist evil,
Live simple and communal lives,
Make peace,
And Wisely love their neighbours.
Turn their heads towards the poor,
Seek the common good in Jesus-shaped ways,
And confess to each other when there is failure to live in such ways, offering grace and spurring each other on.
We believe in the forgiveness of sins,
The resurrection from the dead,
And the life and the world of the age to come.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Hello listeners. Thank you for stopping by and listening today.
It's been a while since I've released anything through Deeper and Wider,
and that will probably remain the same for a little while.
But I did want to drop by and give a good old-fashioned sermon for you all today.
The church I'm a part of have been doing a series titled The Good News in a
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Bad News World, and I was given the opportunity to speak as part of that series.
Whilst I I had the opportunity to preach it live recently, I also wanted to
share a podcast-friendly version of that same sermon with you all today. So here I am.
And I want to talk about a dimension of the gospel that's often forgotten about.
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A dimension that, like a key, subtle, missing ingredient when not added,
leads to deflation of the very meal we're trying to raise up.
So too, to miss this aspect of the gospel deflates the very gospel attempting to be articulated.
And so in our explainings of the gospel, we do rightly talk about how God entered
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into the world through becoming a person.
We rightly talk about how Jesus died on the cross, taking on the sins of the
world, defeating death. death.
We rightly talk about Jesus' resurrection, which shows us that he of course
really did succeed in defeating death on Good Friday.
We rightly talk about Jesus ascending to heaven,
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and as such now ruling as king and sending us his Holy Spirit,
all as a way of showing that he is currently in charge and is outworking God's
purposes on earth through the mover and shaker that we call the Spirit of God.
And yes, we rightly talk about how Jesus is coming back again and to renew all of creation.
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And whilst all of this is rightly all the facets of the gospel message a message
that is indeed articulated in the good news that Paul says in 1 Corinthians
15 that is the content of the literal gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John and that is of course the content of Jesus himself when
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he says that the gospel is the announcement of the kingdom of God arriving in
himself All of these sources also,
also speak of another dimension of the gospel of the kingdom.
And it is this, that Jesus is also
the teacher in which the kingdom of God offers for us a new way to live.
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And not just any way to live, not just good advice, but Jesus as teacher,
whose very teachings are framed within the larger good news that he came to bring.
To use a summary of the good news as articulated in my church community,
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the gospel is the announcement of the kingdom of God, demonstrated through the
birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And we are focusing then on the ministry part of that summary,
particularly Jesus as teacher.
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And to do this, we are going to explore the following set of passages that will
set the tone for us as we explore together this, the good news of Jesus as the teacher of teachers.
So follow along with me as we read this set of scripture, beginning in Matthew
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4, verse 17, and going to Matthew 5, verse 2.
From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon,
who is Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the lake,
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for they were fishermen.
And he said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.
Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went along from there,
he saw two older brothers, James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John,
in the boat with his father Zebedee, mending the nets. And he called to them immediately.
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Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every
sickness among the people.
So his fame spread throughout all of Syria, And they brought to him all the
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sick, those who were afflicted, with various diseases and pains,
demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.
And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem,
Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain, and he sat down.
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His disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them, saying.
And that's where I'll end this set of scriptures, just before Jesus gives his
most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount.
But for us, we are going to start not in the 1st century AD,
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but we're going to start this message in the 20th century.
It was the year 1979 where a very cheeky, yet nonetheless catchy song came out
on the eve of the 1st of December.
A song that would make the Rolling Stones list of greatest songs of all time,
a song that the London Education Authority described as quote-unquote scandalous,
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and that the then British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher said was then a quote-unquote song that she hated.
Now, it was not Frosty the Snowman, but it was rather the song Another Brick
in the Wall by the band Pink Floyd.
It was a protest song against corporal punishment and extremely rigid ways of
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doing certain types of schooling, with, of course, the famous lyrics.
We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom. classroom
teacher leave them kids alone
hey teacher leave them kids alone
one of the band members later came out
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to say that he envisioned the song not just as about how some sectors of british
education were at the time but that it became a song more broadly about not
just going along with the humdrum of what we are being taught in society but
rather being willing to question things.
And there is a certain logic to this.
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After all, from the moment you were born, you took into yourself life lessons,
whether said or unsaid, lessons from parents, peers.
Social media, self-help gurus, cliches, news outlets across the spectrum of thought.
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Sometimes it is as subtle as messages from a billboard, or it can be as explicit
as the life lesson quote-unquote that was given to you by your mum or your dad.
For some of us, we explicitly seek out life lessons through listening to podcasts
on wellness or reading self-help books.
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And for others, it is drip-fed through the algorithms of our social medias that
tell us what to think in a constant feedback loop.
We are all being taught, then, how to live.
The question isn't if you are being taught. That's a given.
But it is rather, what are you being taught?
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Now, after that song was released, It was 10 years later that the world would
be introduced to the lovable teacher in the 1989 masterpiece of a film, The Dead Poet Society,
where, of course, Robin Williams plays a teacher, a teacher who has his students
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and wants to grow their imagination,
their passions and aspirations and talents.
The difference between the Pink Floyd song of 1979 and, of course, Robin Williams'
character in Dead Poets Society seems to be whether you're being taught or not,
but whether you are being taught in ways that set you free or keep you chained.
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But that, of course, begs the question for us. us?
Who decides what teachings set you free and what teachings keep us chained?
And how would we know the difference? Is it simply just what quote-unquote feels right, quote-unquote?
Now, that is at least some of the line of thinking in the world that we live
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in today, where our intuitions have somehow become a validator of truth or not.
Now, of course, intuitions aren't all bad.
After all, feelings can be our body's way of telling us something might be off.
Or even within our faith, we have of course the gift of discernment that has
attached to it an intuitive sense to mention feelings in your body.
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And of course, feelings more broadly are rightly interwoven into the rich tapestry
of life, such as feelings of love, passion, sadness, joy. joy.
But for our purposes, the question isn't if sensations that are in your body
are somehow good or bad. That's a sermon for another time.
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Our question is this, whether sensations in your body are somehow the ultimate
and final capital A authority on the largest teachings and big questions of
life for all of space and time.
Now, as creatures made by God, we shouldn't be too surprised that there might
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indeed be stuff buried deep within us that do indeed tap into our God-given
spiritual DNA, and thus into truth.
We are, after all, made in the image of God.
However, we are also creatures capable of deceiving ourselves as we have shaped
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the world in the image of such deceptions,
and then we've re-internalized those images that we've shaped the world in,
and so the deceptions come back into ourselves,
and it goes out and back and out and back, and we've been doing this for thousands of years.
So to simply always trust in what we feel then is to assume that we are somehow uncorrupted.
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But any honest look into our own moonhearts, and also into the broken fault
lines of the society with large that we live in.
All we have to do is look and certainly, surely observe that to simply look inward,
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as if we can just arrive to this incorruptible truth, is hopelessly naive.
So no, we need something, or rather we need someone who has inbuilt authority,
who is outside of ourselves,
who validates for us the truth of the way to live.
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We need the teacher of all teachers,
the one in which even the best of teachers are but a shadow of his wisdom of
how to truly live in ways that truly set us free, not by looking inward,
but by looking outward.
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As part of the sermon series on the gospel that we are doing at Malaku Church.
The pastor there taught a couple of weeks ago, the gospel as seen through the
lens of the incarnation.
God with us in the person of Jesus.
When he spoke, it reminded me of a story of myself coming to faith.
I didn't grow up in a religious or spiritual household, and questions of religion,
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spirituality, church, and God, and these did not feature in my mind and heart.
But at the age of 17, I found myself watching a documentary.
And this documentary, it gave some street credibility to the belief of the youth
group that I had started to visit.
You see, whilst I thought it was powerful that the people in youth group I was
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visiting believed in something bigger than themselves, I wasn't sure if I could
really trust in the God that they had purported to believe as real.
And then I found myself watching a documentary,
a DVD that made the case that the story of Jesus has told in the Gospels,
including the very real death and resurrection of Jesus, that it wasn't silly,
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but was taken very seriously by scholars.
And the implication of that documentary for me was this.
If the Gospels could be trusted as talking about events that really happened,
then when Jesus speaks of himself as God in the flesh, then the question of
whether or not there was a God...
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And who this God would be was answered in Jesus. For truth was not an idea.
Truth was a person. And so faced with arguments on this side and arguments on
that side, I decided to trust that the tomb really is empty, that Jesus is alive,
that he sent his spirit into the world, and that he is coming again to renew all of creation.
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And that as I give my life to this story, I come alive as I trust in him and
as I trust in this, the true story of the cosmos.
Now, the good news of the incarnation of God is a whole other message.
It's one that the pastor at my church preached on.
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But my listeners, it relates to our purposes for this teaching too.
Because after I started trusting in Jesus, because of the belief in the incarnation,
it gifted me with this very simple formula that I then started to live my life
by. And it went like this.
Surely God, the very creator of all things, including humans, would know what's best.
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After all, he created us.
So if I want to live in life what's best for myself, I should follow God's ways.
But how would I know God's ways? Well, God became a human in Jesus.
So I should follow Jesus and his teachings as the model for being the most alive human being ever.
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I should believe, be, and do what Jesus said.
Now, all things considered, that's
not a terrible philosophy that young 17-year-old Nathan came up with.
There are, of course, a few caveats to this, such as, number one,
With 2,000 years of culture and language between me and Jesus' teachings in
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the Bible, I need to take some time to learn what Jesus actually meant by some
of the things that he said.
Number two, it's one thing to be like Jesus. It's another thing to actually
believe that we are meant to be the second person of the Trinity.
In other words, there's a difference between what Jesus says about carrying
our cross, or my cross, lowercase c, and carrying the cross,
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capital C, in taking on the sins of the entire world.
I will leave that one to Jesus. Thank you very much.
C. Jesus also understood his people's scriptures in light of himself,
as well as entrusting others to write about him later.
So I should also consult those works too, on wisdom on how to live.
And finally, D. Following his teachings is not something we do overnight.
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It takes a lifetime of the Holy Spirit's empowering change in us.
In other words, it's called following Jesus for a reason.
We are to follow, not ever thinking that we can rush ahead. head.
We are always the students. He is always the teacher.
And yet, even with these caveats, there's something about young Nathan's logic,
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who looked at Jesus and trusted that he is the teacher who has authority.
Coming then into the set of scriptures that we said before, we are told that
that Jesus went into the synagogue teaching.
This is but a tiny section against the backdrop of all the times in which the
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Gospels depict Jesus as teacher,
and not just any teacher, but as teacher, as it says over and over and over
again in the Gospels, as a teacher who teaches with, quote, authority.
Authority his authoritative teachings
were met by his audience with utter
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amazement and his
audience often contrasted it with other
religious teachings of their day of course
we have the popular teachers of the scribes and pharisees to which jesus's audience
would have known about now the pharisees believed in the coming kingdom of god
like jesus however they They taught also that God would only bring his kingdom
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if all of Israel would stop sinning.
So their teachings, as you would imagine, were extremely strict.
With their teachings having boundaries around them, and those boundaries having
boundaries around them, and those boundaries having, you guess,
boundaries around them.
All in all, the Safes guard any possibility that Israel would thwart the purposes of God.
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Now also, they believed and focused on particular areas of Old Testament law.
Not necessarily bad ones, but often those laws they focused on were done in
such ways that they forgot about what Jesus would call the quote-unquote weightier
matters of the law, such as helping the poor.
And finally, they were themselves pretty hypocritical with their own standards.
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So that's the Pharisees and the scribes of their day that the audience of Jesus
would have known a lot about.
But there were other teaching groups that Jesus' audience would have also had knowledge of.
We have the Zealots, a revolutionary group of people who taught more practical
teaching strategies of guerrilla warfare.
And they did so based on their teachings that the only way the kingdom of God
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would come would be through a nationalistic and violent revolution to take down the Roman oppressors.
And so who therefore longed for a militaristic messiah and who taught the people
the guerrilla warfare tactics in light of this.
There were of course as well the teachings of the Sadducees.
They were a religious group of people who valued the temple system and taught
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the Torah but however also seemed to teach a contradiction with their own lives.
That it was somehow okay to compromise on their religious values is if it meant
being on the right-hand side of the rulers and authorities of their day.
Now, this teaching group also didn't believe in the big-picture doctrine of
the resurrection from the dead, whereby they might actually one day be judged
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for their life, their, at least, life of compromise.
No one to hold them to account within their worldview. How convenient.
And then of course we have the Essenes, a desert dwelling group,
who indeed did have noble teachings on things that we would often associate
with things like spiritual practices such as fasting, silence and solitude.
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But they would often do these things in order to signal their utter disengagement
from the world and in a very self-righteous and often spiritual snobby way.
Instead of these teachers and teachings,
along comes Jesus, who himself had his own vision for the world,
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and with it his own teachings that had bathed into them such amazing authority.
Like the Pharisees, Jesus believed in the coming Kingdom of God that had a high value for the Torah.
But unlike the Pharisees, Jesus taught that God would come as a rescuer first
and then Again, this would make people come alive in such ways that they then follow God's law.
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Not to mention that their focus on the law would be right to be put in right
relationship to God and with each other through the law of love.
Like the zealots, Jesus believed that there would indeed be an overthrow of
power and this practical teaching to reflect this revolutionary spirit.
But unlike the Zealots, Jesus believed that the real enemies to be overthrown
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were sin, death, and Satan.
With this overthrow happening by dying on a cross, and instead treating those
to whom the Zealots conceived as enemies,
in this case Rome and its conspirators, that Jesus would instead command those
enemies to be enemies to be loved.
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Like the Sadducees, Jesus had a high value for the temple and the Torah.
But unlike the Sadducees, he saw that the temple has having become corrupt and
instead taught that he himself would be the true temple of God and that also
that he was be the one who would fulfill the law of Moses.
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And of course, unlike the Sadducees, he lived his teachings with integrity.
And on top of that, believe that there would indeed be a future judgment to
come to both the whole world and indeed the Sadducees, whose life of compromise
they would then have to face up to.
Like the Essenes, Jesus had a soft spot for things like fasting, solitude and silence.
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But he would do such teaching practices in order to be reorientated for a life
of, not disengagement from the world, but of love for and towards the world.
As you can imagine then, how Jesus both goes with the grain of some of these
teachings, but then radically against the grain of some of these teachings and
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teachings groups, you could imagine then why Jesus'
first audience heard his teachings and would have stood back and went,
Wow, this teacher, Jesus, teaches with authority.
Like Jesus' first heroes existing in the world of conflicting teachings and
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each claiming authority, we too exist in confusing times.
And with differing people groups giving differing teachings of what it means
to live and to live well, there's just so many teachings out there.
Especially in the information age we find ourselves.
We are inundated with different working definitions of what it means to have,
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in this instance, a good life.
Now, for our purposes, I do just want to address one of the common things that
I hear in our culture, and also sometimes even within church.
And I will state what that is through
the form of a dialogue I had with a friend. It was about a year ago.
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I was hanging out with one of my non-Christian friends, and I was telling them
the story I told you before.
About how I came to trust the Gospels, and therefore how, as a result,
it gifted me with a new paradigm on how to live.
But his response to all of that was simply this.
Quote, So what? Like, who cares?
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Why follow Jesus and his teachings if one could be taught mindfulness and well-being practices,
learn meaning and purpose outside of the life of faith, and if someone was inspired
by the teachings of Jesus, Jesus, why not follow his teachings,
minus all that metaphysical stuff like his death, resurrection and return?
Why not just Jesus as a good moral teacher and example? Why all that other stuff?
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That's the quote. And how might we respond to this question?
Maybe it's one you think.
Or it's perhaps one that you yourself are wrestling with.
Well, in a nutshell, this teaching that my friend endorsed was basically this.
That the authentic good life can happen without God through having well-being
practices, meaning, and morals.
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So what will be our response? What does Jesus offer?
Offer that there's more than just him as good moral example,
that to which we can then just discard as we please and perhaps just seek our
morals, our meaning, and our wellness somewhere else.
Well, let's address this bit by bit. First, we have well-being.
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Whilst mindfulness and well-being practices
indeed relaxes into a type of
state of poised sorry a into
a type of poised state of being that gifts us then with the propensity to make
decisions without the feelings of being rushed or riddled with anxiety a good
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thing the decisions we ultimately make in that state of poised,
in that state of being. That's another thing altogether.
Now, for our purposes, imagine a soldier, in this case, a sailor in the Navy,
in a US nuclear submarine during the Cold War.
Now, this guy, he was somehow ahead of his time.
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He learned that in order to live a long and optimized life, he would have to
do a lot of things like resistance training. him. And so he did.
Now on top of this, he also developed an excellent sleep routine.
And he experienced a lot less feelings of fear or anxiety due to his magnificent
mindfulness practices that he had just mastered.
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Yet this same American Cold War sailor nonetheless had in front of him a job
to contemplate whether to To push the big red button right in front of him that, if asked,
would launch a nuclear missile, killing millions.
Now, whether this fit, optimized, and deeply relaxed soldier pushes the button
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or not will be based on his moral compass, not on whether he is relaxed.
As a matter of fact, you could argue that if he was too relaxed,
that those unpleasant feelings of,
I don't know about killing millions of people, perhaps he could relegate those
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feelings, regulate those feelings,
put them to one side and feel very zen and at peace whilst millions then die
as he pushes the big red button.
Now, of course, none of this is to rubbish things like mindfulness or well-being practices.
As a matter of fact, we have a rich tradition, even within our own faith,
of Christian contemplation.
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Practices from the time of Jesus that relax us into orientating our life,
not into a poised state necessarily, but rather into a life in which we are
aware of God and more effectively love our neighbours.
And I believe that we need to reclaim such practices, not as an optional add-on
to the life of faith but as the way we become formed more and more into the
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person of Jesus or as what Pastor Mark Sayers would call a quote-unquote non-anxious presence.
Likewise, it is good to look after the body God gave you with things like good sleep,
exercise and of course the practice of Sabbath because there is nothing worse
than having a foggy brain that then tries and makes difficult decisions or tries
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to be present with people in Christ-like ways. It's very difficult.
And yet, like the soldier, the navyman in the Cold War, we don't inevitably
do the right thing just because we're at ease.
We still have to make the moral choices we make based on what we believe about life.
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And it is then spiritual practice that when done to someone,
when done by someone sensitive to the Spirit of God, that it not only eases
us, but it eases us into the presence of God and his calling for our life.
Which, by the way, probably won't include pressing a big red button.
Wellness practices are not enough.
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Secondly, as for those who find meaning outside of faith...
Look, it shouldn't surprise us that there indeed would be people who have rich
meaning outside of faith.
After all, if we believe that we are made by God, that we therefore have spiritual
DNA, that we are made in the image of God, then the longing for a meaningful
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life is buried deep within us.
We are creatures, meaning-making creatures, longing to make such meaning. meaning.
But that does not mean that just because we can make meaning and meaningful
life, that it is therefore in line with the truth of reality.
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We might believe that there is truly light at the end of the tunnel,
whilst all the while not realizing that this light is Jesus himself,
and that we therefore ought to then reorientate our whole life of meaning now
bent towards him and his purposes, not our own.
Now of course I'm thankful that our culture, that in our culture there is a
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growing resurgence of those who long for meaning in life.
That having seen the failure of secularism, that people are hungry for a world
that's enchanted and magical, that our culture wants stories like the books of Narnia to be real.
Yet, often our culture turns to the wrong things to get their meaning-based,
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spiritual-based, existential fix in life.
And by the way, I do believe there is a genuine ministry for Christians wanting
to re-enchant the culture, wanting to kind of stoke the fires of meaning.
That's a good and noble tradition within our faith, particularly in the area
of creativity. Bring it on, I say.
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Yet it is also true that for us followers of Jesus, that perhaps we, like Paul in Acts 17,
after doing the first step of discerning the deepest longings in the culture
that he found himself with, that he then wanted to dovetail their stories,
their poets, their meanings, yet nonetheless in ways that can attach to them
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the truest meaning of life found, of course,
in where all their hungers are deeply longing to, the person of Jesus himself.
Finally, we have to understand that Jesus as teacher is not to be understood
as Jesus Jesus is just giving advice on how to live.
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The problem of just looking at Jesus as just a good moral example is that it
divorces his teachings from their larger place within the story of salvation.
It still centers life all around us, and it still gives us no sense of transcendent
forgiveness if we were to fail even those good, noble morals.
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It's not that we are just merely taught to be anxious.
For example, is that God has created a world where we don't need to be anxious
for anything because a real God or supplier needs both partially in this life
and supremely in the world to come.
It is not merely that we are told and commanded to love God and neighbor as good as that is.
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It is that that command is centered within the story of the kingdom of God that Jesus is bringing.
It is that Jesus commands us then
to love, bearing in mind that he is creating in a world of agape love.
Jesus' teachings, therefore, are always tethered to the bigger picture.
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And that's good news, by the way. Because for those who,
let's say, hunger and thirst for justice and right relationships on the earth,
who deep in their bones think that surely there must be a day where all our
efforts of justice actually amount to something,
then the good news of the gospel is that the new world is coming,
I mean, whereby all that good and noble work actually find their place, not in the abstract,
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not in Jesus as just a good moral example, but Jesus as Savior who is making
a world where everything shall be okay.
And yet, another angle to all of this is if we just try to follow Jesus without
the good news, if we just try to go to him as good advice, get good morals,
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get good lessons, a life philosophy,
but don't see that it's all about a very real teacher called Jesus,
then we would just use his teachings as we see fit while still keeping our life in the center.
Think about it. Think about it like this. Think about it pragmatically like this.
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Do you really feel a high moral obligation to live for somebody you don't ultimately think is real?
I mean maybe maybe not but think
about it like this then you don't feel a higher obligation to
live for somebody you don't ultimately think is real
and so if you don't like jesus's teachings
on something for whatever reason perhaps it goes
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against your 21st century moral cleavities then you don't ultimately feel obliged
to follow in that particular uncomfortable teaching because by this logic after
all if you don't think that the same jesus who gave us a teaching will be the
very real metaphysical being who says you ought to follow in such teaching,
even if you don't like it,
or who will be the very real judge at the end of history,
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then based on that logic, why not pick and choose whatever you feel like following?
Let this or that teaching serve you, and if it goes against your 21st century
moral proclivities, you're going to discard it to the side.
Because guess what? What matters is that you feel satisfied by following the
teachings you want to follow.
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No moral obligation to follow a God who might indeed not be real.
However, this paper cut out DIY approach to spirituality and morals keeps the
very real Jesus on the peripheral whilst drawing upon his teachings as you feel necessary,
but at the end of the day still keeps us, you and me, if we follow in this logic, at the centre.
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We make life all about us, and use his teachings to serve us rather than us
serving him. But my friends...
And I need to hear this too, by the way. If Jesus is real, and his teachings
are all about how to live in a kingdom where he is king, and he is coming again
to remake the entire world shaped by his way as king,
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then that changes the very orientation of our life.
Not to mention, if we have to keep up with his moral efforts,
or we have to keep up with his moral appearance,
then perhaps when we do fail, and we fail every day, How will we deal with this
internal shame on an existential level?
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How can you ultimately feel forgiven for when you do fail if there is no one
to whom will ultimately forgive you?
In Jesus, we not only reorientate our life towards him, but we are also set
free from the shame that comes with screwing up that life.
For when we fail to keep his commands, a very real Jesus can come alongside
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us and forgive us and then empower us again by his Holy Spirit to continue to follow him.
But it has to be real for him to do all of that.
So as for this increasing teaching that we are finding in our culture today,
that the very real, true, authentic, good life without God can happen through well-being practices,
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meaning and morals, morals look i am
obviously thankful for people who are a little bit more relaxed have a deep
sense of meaning and who try to be moral i'm very thankful for those type of
people we still nonetheless have to step back and ask some deeper questions
about what life is all about.
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You can try and go directly after well-being, but that doesn't mean you have
a compass for how to live.
You can try and go directly after a meaningful life, but that doesn't mean you
know what the meaning of life is.
You can try and go directly after morals, but that doesn't mean you're compelled,
to live and orientate your life in a way that's grounded in something real and eternal. eternal.
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In all of this, it is an attempt to go directly after the good life,
yet without a working definition of either good and life.
Perhaps like the kids at my youth group, it is true that we need to live for
something bigger than ourselves.
Bigger than ourselves, someone who defines for us what even good is and what
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life is, and who has the authority to say such things.
And this, my friends, brings us back to this set of scriptures.
Because here we see Jesus locating his teachings within the larger picture of
the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Jesus is the teacher of teachers, yet not as a mere teacher,
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but as the saviour teacher.
All of this brings us back to this set of scriptures then.
Because here in the set of scriptures, as I quoted earlier, we see Jesus locating
his teachings within the larger picture of the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Jesus is the teacher of teachers, yet not as one who is a mere teacher, but a savior teacher.
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And so I ended this section of scriptures deliberately just before he goes into
the Sermon on the Mount, which is by the way, the greatest set of teachings
from Jesus Jesus in all of the library of scripture.
But before we get there, in this set of scriptures, Jesus first invites us to
repent and then to follow him.
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Firstly, to repent, which by the way, in the Greek is the word metanoia.
Now it can mean changing one's mind, yet culturally was used in the first century
when a warring nation would win a victory, march up to the defeated masses and
and declared to them to repent,
to change their way of aligning their life, because there was a new empire in charge.
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It also echoed the Hebrew meaning of the word to, quote-unquote,
return, as in to return to who God had always longed for you to be.
So Jesus then was inviting the crowds to give their allegiance to him and his
kingdom, and inviting people to find out what life is really all about by turning towards him.
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That's the two-fold meaning of repentance, and it's important for our times
because number one, we have to ask what are the powers that are demanding our allegiances in our day?
Perhaps it's this side or that side of politics, or approaching any topic uncritically
through either a conservative, moderate or progressive lens.
I have a sneaky suspicion, though, that whilst there might indeed be wiser leaders
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during different times of history, and whilst there indeed might be ideas that
manifest themselves on certain sides of ideologies,
I'd like to think that perhaps the eternal, trying God who existed long before
there were even such things as quote-unquote sides of parliaments and quote-unquote
rigid ideologies, that perhaps the Son of God, Jesus,
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has called us to give our allegiance to him and his kingdom In ways that is
off the grid in terms of the modern ideologies and the politics of the world
of the left and the right and the moderate.
As the ancient church used to say, Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.
And for our times, we have to ask ourselves where our modern day Caesars are.
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Ah, perhaps Jesus is prime minister of prime ministers, and any of the modern
prime ministers of our time are in no way comparison, left, right, or moderate.
And that then, number two, for us, what it means to then return to our truly human state.
Well, in our culture, we're often taught whatever feels right is my true authentic self.
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Once again, this goes back to that whole notion of what you feel is what is true.
However, the capacity to deceive ourselves rather than allow our desires to
be reconditioned around Jesus is strong.
And as a therapist, I'm so keenly aware of how much Freud's theory has affected
our thinking around desire.
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And the truth is, desire isn't all bad.
But I would argue it's much more nuanced than what Freud would say.
And of course, to be fair, is much more nuanced than just, you know,
suppress everything that you're feeling.
No, desire is much more nuanced than both of those two extremes.
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Let's just focus on what our culture currently teaches, which is just give it
into what you're feeling.
The truth is, give it into your desires does not make you free.
After all, as the late novelist David Foster Wallace once said,
particularly around desire in terms of what he would call worship,
he says this, by the way, not a Christian, but hear what he has to say.
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In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is no such thing as not worshipping Everybody worships The only choice
we get is what to worship If you worship money and things If they are where
you tap into the real meaning in life,
Then you never have enough Never feel you have enough Worship your own body
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and beauty and sexual allure And you will always feel ugly And when time and
age start showing You will die a million deaths,
Worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power
over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid,
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a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
And so on. But the real important things, the things that bring you the kind
of freedom that you won't find out there in the big wide world,
is a freedom that involves attention,
and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about
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other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in a myriad of petty,
little, unsexy ways every day.
That is is real freedom. I would go a step further than Wallace and say that
in the words of N.T. Wright, that true freedom isn't doing whatever you want. That's anarchy.
True freedom is being the person God made you to be, and that takes time.
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You see, desire is not wrong. It's just understanding that that there are our
strongest desires, and then there are our deepest desires.
And in Christ, our deepest desire is to love God and to serve God,
even if it doesn't always feel easy.
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In fact, it might even feel like you're going against the wind.
But as you learn to go against the wind of the culture and all the desires that
live within us, in time we'll be swept up into the deeper and truer wind of
the Spirit, And in doing so, we'll tap into our true selves.
And so, whether it be the political and ideological angle to repentance,
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or the psychological and existential angle to repentance,
we are to turn around and turn towards the one in which when we order our life
like he designs us to order our life like,
we find a new way of life, to repent.
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Then is true freedom.
After repenting, we follow. And so we are called into the next section of scriptures
where Peter and Andrew and James and John follow him.
Now, there is a whole sermon in that, and I'm aware of time.
But for our purposes, it is worth knowing that in ancient Jewish culture,
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the phrase, quote, unquote, follow me, quote, was a well-known invitation.
It was said to Jewish boys who were were so good at following Torah that the
rabbis that they learnt from would invite them to say, would invite them to, sorry, follow them.
And they would often say to them, follow me.
Which meant that you became an apprentice to that rabbi. And if you weren't
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good enough, you know what would often be said?
It is typical that they would become fishermen. So when Jesus called James and
John and Peter and Andrew to follow, it was a grace-filled invitation.
For our purposes, perhaps then it's important to remind ourselves that whilst
we are to follow him, we don't have to have the pedigree of whatever our culture's
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equivalent to having it all together is.
And so now, like Peter and Andrew and James and John and the crowd,
we follow Jesus all the way up the mountain where he gives his sermon.
And it's in light of these teachings that he gives that we learn the way to
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live in light of the gospel of the kingdom.
Now, by the way, whilst it is true that in each teaching he doesn't zoom out
and give a mini gospel message, if we were to deconstruct each of his teachings,
you can see a glimmer of the gospel in all of it. Think about it.
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His example, his teachings to be generous. Imagine how much one could interact
with the poor and show no partiality or be wise in giving with his or her money
because money no longer represented points in a world where God will supply.
Or with perhaps his teachings on lust, one could love their spouse and not look
for any other or expect any other to fulfill them because the love of God as
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displayed in the gospel was enough,
or in anger, how one could be slow to anger and see rather their lives less
in terms of them being right,
because it didn't really matter what they thought about themselves or what others
thought on them, because who cares in light of the fact that who cares what
anyone else thinks or what they think, other than what God thinks.
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And how can all this be true?
Because the good news is that God reigns. And so therefore, you don't have to reign.
We follow then in his teachings because they are so much better than our life of reigning and ruling.
Our life that we think that we can be the kingdom of one.
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We follow in his teachings then. Because they are so much better than what is out there.
Because undergirding his vision of the good life is the gospel that gives us life.
So if we believe in the kingdom of God, if we believe it has come,
that one day it would also come to fill the world in full when he comes to remake
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the entire world, then Jesus'
words of repentance and then following him takes us all the way up to his hill,
the Sermon on the Mount, to his teachings.
And so to live for him, therefore, just makes logical sense.
I mean, if I fly to another country that has different laws and customs other
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than my own. I'm the one who needs to adjust.
I could try and live against the grain of the new place, but to do so would
be a schizophrenic denial of that I am in a new reality.
Likewise, Jesus has bought his kingdom. And so the question for us is this,
are we going to pretend it's not real?
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Or are we going to embrace the reality of the kingdom and thus us embrace his teachings.
My friends, he is the good teacher.
A teacher who shows us what it means to truly live and whose mercies are new every day.
Who has brought to us a new life and who will, by grace and by the spirit of
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God, empower us to live it.
This is not an invitation to pull up your moral bootstraps or to use theological
language to endorse work-based righteousness.
Righteousness no jesus has by
grace bought his kingdom and he
did by grace teach people how to
live in light of his kingdom which by grace slowly transforms people in partnership
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with the holy spirit into the human beings god always desired us to be so much
so that when by grace the kingdom The kingdom of God is fully here at the end of time.
All humans who have followed him will, by grace, be the type of people who will
want to freely embrace the new world of the kingdom of God.
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It is the reorientation of our hearts that puts us on a new trajectory in which
we change over our lifetime.
And so, Jesus as teacher invites you and me into shaping our life in such ways
in which the result is flourishing,
life the way it was always intended to be.
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And so this invitation is an invitation right now as you are.
For he takes you as you are right now.
And so Jesus is inviting you to trust in him and thus to trust in his ways of ordering your life.
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And so our question for you and for me today is this.
We trust Jesus? Like, actually trust him?
Because even if you're a believer listening to this, there will be areas of
your heart that need to hear the gospel afresh.
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So where are the areas of your heart that are un-evangelized that need to hear the gospel again?
I pray that you would receive Christ there and thus see the teachings of Jesus
then as as invitations into ordering life in a new way,
reshaping the parts of us that, in their current state, don't give life anyway.
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Might as well trust him and learn the wisdom of his ways to truly live a life
in line with the kingdom of God.
And so to end today's podcast, I want to gift you with a creed.
And it's a creed that I partnered with writing alongside side in my local church
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community, particularly my pastor.
It's a creed that when we recite together, it reminds us of the big picture story of the gospel.
And so it goes like this.
And it will be in today's show notes if you want to follow along.
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And so we will finish today by reading this together. And it reads...
We as a people believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We believe in the Father who, out of love, alongside the Son and the Spirit,
created heavens and the earth.
We believe in Jesus the Son, who was predestined to rule among us,
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conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary, who followed in God's ways and divided all into God's
ways, in whose kingdom decisive victory was in suffering under Pontius Pilate.
He was crucified, died, and descended into death. Yet this victory was made
truly known three days later, when he rose again from the dead,
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trampling sin and death.
He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and from there will come to
judge the living and the dead.
We believe of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
and with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who moves across the earth, dwells confidently with believers,
and who mediates Christ's presence,
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who enables God's growth, guidance, and gifts.
Whose power is made known in signs and wonders, and is moving all things unto Christ's new creation.
We believe in a holy Catholic Church, called to be shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus,
family to one another, who together seek to know and make Him known,
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resist evil, live simple and communal lives, Make peace and wisely love their neighbors.
Turn their heads towards the poor. Seek the common good in Jesus-shaped ways
and confess to each other where there is failure to live in such ways,
offering grace and spurring each other on.
We believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection from the dead,
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and the life of the world of the age to come.
Glory be to God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Hello listeners. Thank you for stopping by and listening today.
It's been a while since I've released anything through Deeper and Wider,
and that will probably remain the same for a little while.
But I did want to drop by and give a good old-fashioned sermon for you all today.
The church I'm a part of have been doing a series titled The Good News in a
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Bad News World, and I was given the opportunity to speak as part of that series.
Whilst I I had the opportunity to preach it live recently, I also wanted to
share a podcast-friendly version of that same sermon with you all today. So here I am.
And I want to talk about a dimension of the gospel that's often forgotten about.
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A dimension that, like a key, subtle, missing ingredient when not added,
leads to deflation of the very meal we're trying to raise up.
So too, to miss this aspect of the gospel deflates the very gospel attempting to be articulated.
And so in our explainings of the gospel, we do rightly talk about how God entered
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into the world through becoming a person.
We rightly talk about how Jesus died on the cross, taking on the sins of the
world, defeating death. death.
We rightly talk about Jesus' resurrection, which shows us that he of course
really did succeed in defeating death on Good Friday.
We rightly talk about Jesus ascending to heaven,
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and as such now ruling as king and sending us his Holy Spirit,
all as a way of showing that he is currently in charge and is outworking God's
purposes on earth through the mover and shaker that we call the Spirit of God.
And yes, we rightly talk about how Jesus is coming back again and to renew all of creation.
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And whilst all of this is rightly all the facets of the gospel message a message
that is indeed articulated in the good news that Paul says in 1 Corinthians
15 that is the content of the literal gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John and that is of course the content of Jesus himself when
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he says that the gospel is the announcement of the kingdom of God arriving in
himself All of these sources also,
also speak of another dimension of the gospel of the kingdom.
And it is this, that Jesus is also
the teacher in which the kingdom of God offers for us a new way to live.
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And not just any way to live, not just good advice, but Jesus as teacher,
whose very teachings are framed within the larger good news that he came to bring.
To use a summary of the good news as articulated in my church community,
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the gospel is the announcement of the kingdom of God, demonstrated through the
birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And we are focusing then on the ministry part of that summary,
particularly Jesus as teacher.
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And to do this, we are going to explore the following set of passages that will
set the tone for us as we explore together this, the good news of Jesus as the teacher of teachers.
So follow along with me as we read this set of scripture, beginning in Matthew
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4, verse 17, and going to Matthew 5, verse 2.
From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon,
who is Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the lake,
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for they were fishermen.
And he said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.
Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went along from there,
he saw two older brothers, James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John,
in the boat with his father Zebedee, mending the nets. And he called to them immediately.
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Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every
sickness among the people.
So his fame spread throughout all of Syria, And they brought to him all the
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sick, those who were afflicted, with various diseases and pains,
demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.
And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem,
Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain, and he sat down.
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His disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them, saying.
And that's where I'll end this set of scriptures, just before Jesus gives his
most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount.
But for us, we are going to start not in the 1st century AD,
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but we're going to start this message in the 20th century.
It was the year 1979 where a very cheeky, yet nonetheless catchy song came out
on the eve of the 1st of December.
A song that would make the Rolling Stones list of greatest songs of all time,
a song that the London Education Authority described as quote-unquote scandalous,
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and that the then British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher said was then a quote-unquote song that she hated.
Now, it was not Frosty the Snowman, but it was rather the song Another Brick
in the Wall by the band Pink Floyd.
It was a protest song against corporal punishment and extremely rigid ways of
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doing certain types of schooling, with, of course, the famous lyrics.
We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom. classroom
teacher leave them kids alone
hey teacher leave them kids alone
one of the band members later came out
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to say that he envisioned the song not just as about how some sectors of british
education were at the time but that it became a song more broadly about not
just going along with the humdrum of what we are being taught in society but
rather being willing to question things.
And there is a certain logic to this.
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After all, from the moment you were born, you took into yourself life lessons,
whether said or unsaid, lessons from parents, peers.
Social media, self-help gurus, cliches, news outlets across the spectrum of thought.
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Sometimes it is as subtle as messages from a billboard, or it can be as explicit
as the life lesson quote-unquote that was given to you by your mum or your dad.
For some of us, we explicitly seek out life lessons through listening to podcasts
on wellness or reading self-help books.
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And for others, it is drip-fed through the algorithms of our social medias that
tell us what to think in a constant feedback loop.
We are all being taught, then, how to live.
The question isn't if you are being taught. That's a given.
But it is rather, what are you being taught?
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Now, after that song was released, It was 10 years later that the world would
be introduced to the lovable teacher in the 1989 masterpiece of a film, The Dead Poet Society,
where, of course, Robin Williams plays a teacher, a teacher who has his students
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and wants to grow their imagination,
their passions and aspirations and talents.
The difference between the Pink Floyd song of 1979 and, of course, Robin Williams'
character in Dead Poets Society seems to be whether you're being taught or not,
but whether you are being taught in ways that set you free or keep you chained.
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But that, of course, begs the question for us. us?
Who decides what teachings set you free and what teachings keep us chained?
And how would we know the difference? Is it simply just what quote-unquote feels right, quote-unquote?
Now, that is at least some of the line of thinking in the world that we live
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in today, where our intuitions have somehow become a validator of truth or not.
Now, of course, intuitions aren't all bad.
After all, feelings can be our body's way of telling us something might be off.
Or even within our faith, we have of course the gift of discernment that has
attached to it an intuitive sense to mention feelings in your body.
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And of course, feelings more broadly are rightly interwoven into the rich tapestry
of life, such as feelings of love, passion, sadness, joy. joy.
But for our purposes, the question isn't if sensations that are in your body
are somehow good or bad. That's a sermon for another time.
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Our question is this, whether sensations in your body are somehow the ultimate
and final capital A authority on the largest teachings and big questions of
life for all of space and time.
Now, as creatures made by God, we shouldn't be too surprised that there might
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indeed be stuff buried deep within us that do indeed tap into our God-given
spiritual DNA, and thus into truth.
We are, after all, made in the image of God.
However, we are also creatures capable of deceiving ourselves as we have shaped
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the world in the image of such deceptions,
and then we've re-internalized those images that we've shaped the world in,
and so the deceptions come back into ourselves,
and it goes out and back and out and back, and we've been doing this for thousands of years.
So to simply always trust in what we feel then is to assume that we are somehow uncorrupted.
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But any honest look into our own moonhearts, and also into the broken fault
lines of the society with large that we live in.
All we have to do is look and certainly, surely observe that to simply look inward,
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as if we can just arrive to this incorruptible truth, is hopelessly naive.
So no, we need something, or rather we need someone who has inbuilt authority,
who is outside of ourselves,
who validates for us the truth of the way to live.
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We need the teacher of all teachers,
the one in which even the best of teachers are but a shadow of his wisdom of
how to truly live in ways that truly set us free, not by looking inward,
but by looking outward.
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As part of the sermon series on the gospel that we are doing at Malaku Church.
The pastor there taught a couple of weeks ago, the gospel as seen through the
lens of the incarnation.
God with us in the person of Jesus.
When he spoke, it reminded me of a story of myself coming to faith.
I didn't grow up in a religious or spiritual household, and questions of religion,
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spirituality, church, and God, and these did not feature in my mind and heart.
But at the age of 17, I found myself watching a documentary.
And this documentary, it gave some street credibility to the belief of the youth
group that I had started to visit.
You see, whilst I thought it was powerful that the people in youth group I was
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visiting believed in something bigger than themselves, I wasn't sure if I could
really trust in the God that they had purported to believe as real.
And then I found myself watching a documentary,
a DVD that made the case that the story of Jesus has told in the Gospels,
including the very real death and resurrection of Jesus, that it wasn't silly,
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but was taken very seriously by scholars.
And the implication of that documentary for me was this.
If the Gospels could be trusted as talking about events that really happened,
then when Jesus speaks of himself as God in the flesh, then the question of
whether or not there was a God...
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And who this God would be was answered in Jesus. For truth was not an idea.
Truth was a person. And so faced with arguments on this side and arguments on
that side, I decided to trust that the tomb really is empty, that Jesus is alive,
that he sent his spirit into the world, and that he is coming again to renew all of creation.
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And that as I give my life to this story, I come alive as I trust in him and
as I trust in this, the true story of the cosmos.
Now, the good news of the incarnation of God is a whole other message.
It's one that the pastor at my church preached on.
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But my listeners, it relates to our purposes for this teaching too.
Because after I started trusting in Jesus, because of the belief in the incarnation,
it gifted me with this very simple formula that I then started to live my life
by. And it went like this.
Surely God, the very creator of all things, including humans, would know what's best.
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After all, he created us.
So if I want to live in life what's best for myself, I should follow God's ways.
But how would I know God's ways? Well, God became a human in Jesus.
So I should follow Jesus and his teachings as the model for being the most alive human being ever.
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I should believe, be, and do what Jesus said.
Now, all things considered, that's
not a terrible philosophy that young 17-year-old Nathan came up with.
There are, of course, a few caveats to this, such as, number one,
With 2,000 years of culture and language between me and Jesus' teachings in
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the Bible, I need to take some time to learn what Jesus actually meant by some
of the things that he said.
Number two, it's one thing to be like Jesus. It's another thing to actually
believe that we are meant to be the second person of the Trinity.
In other words, there's a difference between what Jesus says about carrying
our cross, or my cross, lowercase c, and carrying the cross,
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capital C, in taking on the sins of the entire world.
I will leave that one to Jesus. Thank you very much.
C. Jesus also understood his people's scriptures in light of himself,
as well as entrusting others to write about him later.
So I should also consult those works too, on wisdom on how to live.
And finally, D. Following his teachings is not something we do overnight.
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It takes a lifetime of the Holy Spirit's empowering change in us.
In other words, it's called following Jesus for a reason.
We are to follow, not ever thinking that we can rush ahead. head.
We are always the students. He is always the teacher.
And yet, even with these caveats, there's something about young Nathan's logic,
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who looked at Jesus and trusted that he is the teacher who has authority.
Coming then into the set of scriptures that we said before, we are told that
that Jesus went into the synagogue teaching.
This is but a tiny section against the backdrop of all the times in which the
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Gospels depict Jesus as teacher,
and not just any teacher, but as teacher, as it says over and over and over
again in the Gospels, as a teacher who teaches with, quote, authority.
Authority his authoritative teachings
were met by his audience with utter
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amazement and his
audience often contrasted it with other
religious teachings of their day of course
we have the popular teachers of the scribes and pharisees to which jesus's audience
would have known about now the pharisees believed in the coming kingdom of god
like jesus however they They taught also that God would only bring his kingdom
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if all of Israel would stop sinning.
So their teachings, as you would imagine, were extremely strict.
With their teachings having boundaries around them, and those boundaries having
boundaries around them, and those boundaries having, you guess,
boundaries around them.
All in all, the Safes guard any possibility that Israel would thwart the purposes of God.
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Now also, they believed and focused on particular areas of Old Testament law.
Not necessarily bad ones, but often those laws they focused on were done in
such ways that they forgot about what Jesus would call the quote-unquote weightier
matters of the law, such as helping the poor.
And finally, they were themselves pretty hypocritical with their own standards.
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So that's the Pharisees and the scribes of their day that the audience of Jesus
would have known a lot about.
But there were other teaching groups that Jesus' audience would have also had knowledge of.
We have the Zealots, a revolutionary group of people who taught more practical
teaching strategies of guerrilla warfare.
And they did so based on their teachings that the only way the kingdom of God
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would come would be through a nationalistic and violent revolution to take down the Roman oppressors.
And so who therefore longed for a militaristic messiah and who taught the people
the guerrilla warfare tactics in light of this.
There were of course as well the teachings of the Sadducees.
They were a religious group of people who valued the temple system and taught
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the Torah but however also seemed to teach a contradiction with their own lives.
That it was somehow okay to compromise on their religious values is if it meant
being on the right-hand side of the rulers and authorities of their day.
Now, this teaching group also didn't believe in the big-picture doctrine of
the resurrection from the dead, whereby they might actually one day be judged
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for their life, their, at least, life of compromise.
No one to hold them to account within their worldview. How convenient.
And then of course we have the Essenes, a desert dwelling group,
who indeed did have noble teachings on things that we would often associate
with things like spiritual practices such as fasting, silence and solitude.
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But they would often do these things in order to signal their utter disengagement
from the world and in a very self-righteous and often spiritual snobby way.
Instead of these teachers and teachings,
along comes Jesus, who himself had his own vision for the world,
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and with it his own teachings that had bathed into them such amazing authority.
Like the Pharisees, Jesus believed in the coming Kingdom of God that had a high value for the Torah.
But unlike the Pharisees, Jesus taught that God would come as a rescuer first
and then Again, this would make people come alive in such ways that they then follow God's law.
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Not to mention that their focus on the law would be right to be put in right
relationship to God and with each other through the law of love.
Like the zealots, Jesus believed that there would indeed be an overthrow of
power and this practical teaching to reflect this revolutionary spirit.
But unlike the Zealots, Jesus believed that the real enemies to be overthrown
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were sin, death, and Satan.
With this overthrow happening by dying on a cross, and instead treating those
to whom the Zealots conceived as enemies,
in this case Rome and its conspirators, that Jesus would instead command those
enemies to be enemies to be loved.
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Like the Sadducees, Jesus had a high value for the temple and the Torah.
But unlike the Sadducees, he saw that the temple has having become corrupt and
instead taught that he himself would be the true temple of God and that also
that he was be the one who would fulfill the law of Moses.
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And of course, unlike the Sadducees, he lived his teachings with integrity.
And on top of that, believe that there would indeed be a future judgment to
come to both the whole world and indeed the Sadducees, whose life of compromise
they would then have to face up to.
Like the Essenes, Jesus had a soft spot for things like fasting, solitude and silence.
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But he would do such teaching practices in order to be reorientated for a life
of, not disengagement from the world, but of love for and towards the world.
As you can imagine then, how Jesus both goes with the grain of some of these
teachings, but then radically against the grain of some of these teachings and
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teachings groups, you could imagine then why Jesus'
first audience heard his teachings and would have stood back and went,
Wow, this teacher, Jesus, teaches with authority.
Like Jesus' first heroes existing in the world of conflicting teachings and
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each claiming authority, we too exist in confusing times.
And with differing people groups giving differing teachings of what it means
to live and to live well, there's just so many teachings out there.
Especially in the information age we find ourselves.
We are inundated with different working definitions of what it means to have,
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in this instance, a good life.
Now, for our purposes, I do just want to address one of the common things that
I hear in our culture, and also sometimes even within church.
And I will state what that is through
the form of a dialogue I had with a friend. It was about a year ago.
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I was hanging out with one of my non-Christian friends, and I was telling them
the story I told you before.
About how I came to trust the Gospels, and therefore how, as a result,
it gifted me with a new paradigm on how to live.
But his response to all of that was simply this.
Quote, So what? Like, who cares?
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Why follow Jesus and his teachings if one could be taught mindfulness and well-being practices,
learn meaning and purpose outside of the life of faith, and if someone was inspired
by the teachings of Jesus, Jesus, why not follow his teachings,
minus all that metaphysical stuff like his death, resurrection and return?
Why not just Jesus as a good moral teacher and example? Why all that other stuff?
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That's the quote. And how might we respond to this question?
Maybe it's one you think.
Or it's perhaps one that you yourself are wrestling with.
Well, in a nutshell, this teaching that my friend endorsed was basically this.
That the authentic good life can happen without God through having well-being
practices, meaning, and morals.
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So what will be our response? What does Jesus offer?
Offer that there's more than just him as good moral example,
that to which we can then just discard as we please and perhaps just seek our
morals, our meaning, and our wellness somewhere else.
Well, let's address this bit by bit. First, we have well-being.
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Whilst mindfulness and well-being practices
indeed relaxes into a type of
state of poised sorry a into
a type of poised state of being that gifts us then with the propensity to make
decisions without the feelings of being rushed or riddled with anxiety a good
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thing the decisions we ultimately make in that state of poised,
in that state of being. That's another thing altogether.
Now, for our purposes, imagine a soldier, in this case, a sailor in the Navy,
in a US nuclear submarine during the Cold War.
Now, this guy, he was somehow ahead of his time.
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He learned that in order to live a long and optimized life, he would have to
do a lot of things like resistance training. him. And so he did.
Now on top of this, he also developed an excellent sleep routine.
And he experienced a lot less feelings of fear or anxiety due to his magnificent
mindfulness practices that he had just mastered.
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Yet this same American Cold War sailor nonetheless had in front of him a job
to contemplate whether to To push the big red button right in front of him that, if asked,
would launch a nuclear missile, killing millions.
Now, whether this fit, optimized, and deeply relaxed soldier pushes the button
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or not will be based on his moral compass, not on whether he is relaxed.
As a matter of fact, you could argue that if he was too relaxed,
that those unpleasant feelings of,
I don't know about killing millions of people, perhaps he could relegate those
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feelings, regulate those feelings,
put them to one side and feel very zen and at peace whilst millions then die
as he pushes the big red button.
Now, of course, none of this is to rubbish things like mindfulness or well-being practices.
As a matter of fact, we have a rich tradition, even within our own faith,
of Christian contemplation.
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Practices from the time of Jesus that relax us into orientating our life,
not into a poised state necessarily, but rather into a life in which we are
aware of God and more effectively love our neighbours.
And I believe that we need to reclaim such practices, not as an optional add-on
to the life of faith but as the way we become formed more and more into the
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person of Jesus or as what Pastor Mark Sayers would call a quote-unquote non-anxious presence.
Likewise, it is good to look after the body God gave you with things like good sleep,
exercise and of course the practice of Sabbath because there is nothing worse
than having a foggy brain that then tries and makes difficult decisions or tries
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to be present with people in Christ-like ways. It's very difficult.
And yet, like the soldier, the navyman in the Cold War, we don't inevitably
do the right thing just because we're at ease.
We still have to make the moral choices we make based on what we believe about life.
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And it is then spiritual practice that when done to someone,
when done by someone sensitive to the Spirit of God, that it not only eases
us, but it eases us into the presence of God and his calling for our life.
Which, by the way, probably won't include pressing a big red button.
Wellness practices are not enough.
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Secondly, as for those who find meaning outside of faith...
Look, it shouldn't surprise us that there indeed would be people who have rich
meaning outside of faith.
After all, if we believe that we are made by God, that we therefore have spiritual
DNA, that we are made in the image of God, then the longing for a meaningful
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life is buried deep within us.
We are creatures, meaning-making creatures, longing to make such meaning. meaning.
But that does not mean that just because we can make meaning and meaningful
life, that it is therefore in line with the truth of reality.
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We might believe that there is truly light at the end of the tunnel,
whilst all the while not realizing that this light is Jesus himself,
and that we therefore ought to then reorientate our whole life of meaning now
bent towards him and his purposes, not our own.
Now of course I'm thankful that our culture, that in our culture there is a
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growing resurgence of those who long for meaning in life.
That having seen the failure of secularism, that people are hungry for a world
that's enchanted and magical, that our culture wants stories like the books of Narnia to be real.
Yet, often our culture turns to the wrong things to get their meaning-based,
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spiritual-based, existential fix in life.
And by the way, I do believe there is a genuine ministry for Christians wanting
to re-enchant the culture, wanting to kind of stoke the fires of meaning.
That's a good and noble tradition within our faith, particularly in the area
of creativity. Bring it on, I say.
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Yet it is also true that for us followers of Jesus, that perhaps we, like Paul in Acts 17,
after doing the first step of discerning the deepest longings in the culture
that he found himself with, that he then wanted to dovetail their stories,
their poets, their meanings, yet nonetheless in ways that can attach to them
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the truest meaning of life found, of course,
in where all their hungers are deeply longing to, the person of Jesus himself.
Finally, we have to understand that Jesus as teacher is not to be understood
as Jesus Jesus is just giving advice on how to live.
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The problem of just looking at Jesus as just a good moral example is that it
divorces his teachings from their larger place within the story of salvation.
It still centers life all around us, and it still gives us no sense of transcendent
forgiveness if we were to fail even those good, noble morals.
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It's not that we are just merely taught to be anxious.
For example, is that God has created a world where we don't need to be anxious
for anything because a real God or supplier needs both partially in this life
and supremely in the world to come.
It is not merely that we are told and commanded to love God and neighbor as good as that is.
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It is that that command is centered within the story of the kingdom of God that Jesus is bringing.
It is that Jesus commands us then
to love, bearing in mind that he is creating in a world of agape love.
Jesus' teachings, therefore, are always tethered to the bigger picture.
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And that's good news, by the way. Because for those who,
let's say, hunger and thirst for justice and right relationships on the earth,
who deep in their bones think that surely there must be a day where all our
efforts of justice actually amount to something,
then the good news of the gospel is that the new world is coming,
I mean, whereby all that good and noble work actually find their place, not in the abstract,
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not in Jesus as just a good moral example, but Jesus as Savior who is making
a world where everything shall be okay.
And yet, another angle to all of this is if we just try to follow Jesus without
the good news, if we just try to go to him as good advice, get good morals,
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get good lessons, a life philosophy,
but don't see that it's all about a very real teacher called Jesus,
then we would just use his teachings as we see fit while still keeping our life in the center.
Think about it. Think about it like this. Think about it pragmatically like this.
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Do you really feel a high moral obligation to live for somebody you don't ultimately think is real?
I mean maybe maybe not but think
about it like this then you don't feel a higher obligation to
live for somebody you don't ultimately think is real
and so if you don't like jesus's teachings
on something for whatever reason perhaps it goes
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against your 21st century moral cleavities then you don't ultimately feel obliged
to follow in that particular uncomfortable teaching because by this logic after
all if you don't think that the same jesus who gave us a teaching will be the
very real metaphysical being who says you ought to follow in such teaching,
even if you don't like it,
or who will be the very real judge at the end of history,
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then based on that logic, why not pick and choose whatever you feel like following?
Let this or that teaching serve you, and if it goes against your 21st century
moral proclivities, you're going to discard it to the side.
Because guess what? What matters is that you feel satisfied by following the
teachings you want to follow.
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No moral obligation to follow a God who might indeed not be real.
However, this paper cut out DIY approach to spirituality and morals keeps the
very real Jesus on the peripheral whilst drawing upon his teachings as you feel necessary,
but at the end of the day still keeps us, you and me, if we follow in this logic, at the centre.
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We make life all about us, and use his teachings to serve us rather than us
serving him. But my friends...
And I need to hear this too, by the way. If Jesus is real, and his teachings
are all about how to live in a kingdom where he is king, and he is coming again
to remake the entire world shaped by his way as king,
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then that changes the very orientation of our life.
Not to mention, if we have to keep up with his moral efforts,
or we have to keep up with his moral appearance,
then perhaps when we do fail, and we fail every day, How will we deal with this
internal shame on an existential level?
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How can you ultimately feel forgiven for when you do fail if there is no one
to whom will ultimately forgive you?
In Jesus, we not only reorientate our life towards him, but we are also set
free from the shame that comes with screwing up that life.
For when we fail to keep his commands, a very real Jesus can come alongside
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us and forgive us and then empower us again by his Holy Spirit to continue to follow him.
But it has to be real for him to do all of that.
So as for this increasing teaching that we are finding in our culture today,
that the very real, true, authentic, good life without God can happen through well-being practices,
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meaning and morals, morals look i am
obviously thankful for people who are a little bit more relaxed have a deep
sense of meaning and who try to be moral i'm very thankful for those type of
people we still nonetheless have to step back and ask some deeper questions
about what life is all about.
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You can try and go directly after well-being, but that doesn't mean you have
a compass for how to live.
You can try and go directly after a meaningful life, but that doesn't mean you
know what the meaning of life is.
You can try and go directly after morals, but that doesn't mean you're compelled,
to live and orientate your life in a way that's grounded in something real and eternal. eternal.
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In all of this, it is an attempt to go directly after the good life,
yet without a working definition of either good and life.
Perhaps like the kids at my youth group, it is true that we need to live for
something bigger than ourselves.
Bigger than ourselves, someone who defines for us what even good is and what
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life is, and who has the authority to say such things.
And this, my friends, brings us back to this set of scriptures.
Because here we see Jesus locating his teachings within the larger picture of
the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Jesus is the teacher of teachers, yet not as a mere teacher,
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but as the saviour teacher.
All of this brings us back to this set of scriptures then.
Because here in the set of scriptures, as I quoted earlier, we see Jesus locating
his teachings within the larger picture of the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Jesus is the teacher of teachers, yet not as one who is a mere teacher, but a savior teacher.
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And so I ended this section of scriptures deliberately just before he goes into
the Sermon on the Mount, which is by the way, the greatest set of teachings
from Jesus Jesus in all of the library of scripture.
But before we get there, in this set of scriptures, Jesus first invites us to
repent and then to follow him.
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Firstly, to repent, which by the way, in the Greek is the word metanoia.
Now it can mean changing one's mind, yet culturally was used in the first century
when a warring nation would win a victory, march up to the defeated masses and
and declared to them to repent,
to change their way of aligning their life, because there was a new empire in charge.
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It also echoed the Hebrew meaning of the word to, quote-unquote,
return, as in to return to who God had always longed for you to be.
So Jesus then was inviting the crowds to give their allegiance to him and his
kingdom, and inviting people to find out what life is really all about by turning towards him.
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That's the two-fold meaning of repentance, and it's important for our times
because number one, we have to ask what are the powers that are demanding our allegiances in our day?
Perhaps it's this side or that side of politics, or approaching any topic uncritically
through either a conservative, moderate or progressive lens.
I have a sneaky suspicion, though, that whilst there might indeed be wiser leaders
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during different times of history, and whilst there indeed might be ideas that
manifest themselves on certain sides of ideologies,
I'd like to think that perhaps the eternal, trying God who existed long before
there were even such things as quote-unquote sides of parliaments and quote-unquote
rigid ideologies, that perhaps the Son of God, Jesus,
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has called us to give our allegiance to him and his kingdom In ways that is
off the grid in terms of the modern ideologies and the politics of the world
of the left and the right and the moderate.
As the ancient church used to say, Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.
And for our times, we have to ask ourselves where our modern day Caesars are.
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Ah, perhaps Jesus is prime minister of prime ministers, and any of the modern
prime ministers of our time are in no way comparison, left, right, or moderate.
And that then, number two, for us, what it means to then return to our truly human state.
Well, in our culture, we're often taught whatever feels right is my true authentic self.
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Once again, this goes back to that whole notion of what you feel is what is true.
However, the capacity to deceive ourselves rather than allow our desires to
be reconditioned around Jesus is strong.
And as a therapist, I'm so keenly aware of how much Freud's theory has affected
our thinking around desire.
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And the truth is, desire isn't all bad.
But I would argue it's much more nuanced than what Freud would say.
And of course, to be fair, is much more nuanced than just, you know,
suppress everything that you're feeling.
No, desire is much more nuanced than both of those two extremes.
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Let's just focus on what our culture currently teaches, which is just give it
into what you're feeling.
The truth is, give it into your desires does not make you free.
After all, as the late novelist David Foster Wallace once said,
particularly around desire in terms of what he would call worship,
he says this, by the way, not a Christian, but hear what he has to say.
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In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is no such thing as not worshipping Everybody worships The only choice
we get is what to worship If you worship money and things If they are where
you tap into the real meaning in life,
Then you never have enough Never feel you have enough Worship your own body
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and beauty and sexual allure And you will always feel ugly And when time and
age start showing You will die a million deaths,
Worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power
over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid,
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a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
And so on. But the real important things, the things that bring you the kind
of freedom that you won't find out there in the big wide world,
is a freedom that involves attention,
and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about
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other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in a myriad of petty,
little, unsexy ways every day.
That is is real freedom. I would go a step further than Wallace and say that
in the words of N.T. Wright, that true freedom isn't doing whatever you want. That's anarchy.
True freedom is being the person God made you to be, and that takes time.
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You see, desire is not wrong. It's just understanding that that there are our
strongest desires, and then there are our deepest desires.
And in Christ, our deepest desire is to love God and to serve God,
even if it doesn't always feel easy.
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In fact, it might even feel like you're going against the wind.
But as you learn to go against the wind of the culture and all the desires that
live within us, in time we'll be swept up into the deeper and truer wind of
the Spirit, And in doing so, we'll tap into our true selves.
And so, whether it be the political and ideological angle to repentance,
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or the psychological and existential angle to repentance,
we are to turn around and turn towards the one in which when we order our life
like he designs us to order our life like,
we find a new way of life, to repent.
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Then is true freedom.
After repenting, we follow. And so we are called into the next section of scriptures
where Peter and Andrew and James and John follow him.
Now, there is a whole sermon in that, and I'm aware of time.
But for our purposes, it is worth knowing that in ancient Jewish culture,
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the phrase, quote, unquote, follow me, quote, was a well-known invitation.
It was said to Jewish boys who were were so good at following Torah that the
rabbis that they learnt from would invite them to say, would invite them to, sorry, follow them.
And they would often say to them, follow me.
Which meant that you became an apprentice to that rabbi. And if you weren't
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good enough, you know what would often be said?
It is typical that they would become fishermen. So when Jesus called James and
John and Peter and Andrew to follow, it was a grace-filled invitation.
For our purposes, perhaps then it's important to remind ourselves that whilst
we are to follow him, we don't have to have the pedigree of whatever our culture's
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equivalent to having it all together is.
And so now, like Peter and Andrew and James and John and the crowd,
we follow Jesus all the way up the mountain where he gives his sermon.
And it's in light of these teachings that he gives that we learn the way to
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live in light of the gospel of the kingdom.
Now, by the way, whilst it is true that in each teaching he doesn't zoom out
and give a mini gospel message, if we were to deconstruct each of his teachings,
you can see a glimmer of the gospel in all of it. Think about it.
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His example, his teachings to be generous. Imagine how much one could interact
with the poor and show no partiality or be wise in giving with his or her money
because money no longer represented points in a world where God will supply.
Or with perhaps his teachings on lust, one could love their spouse and not look
for any other or expect any other to fulfill them because the love of God as
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displayed in the gospel was enough,
or in anger, how one could be slow to anger and see rather their lives less
in terms of them being right,
because it didn't really matter what they thought about themselves or what others
thought on them, because who cares in light of the fact that who cares what
anyone else thinks or what they think, other than what God thinks.
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And how can all this be true?
Because the good news is that God reigns. And so therefore, you don't have to reign.
We follow then in his teachings because they are so much better than our life of reigning and ruling.
Our life that we think that we can be the kingdom of one.
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We follow in his teachings then. Because they are so much better than what is out there.
Because undergirding his vision of the good life is the gospel that gives us life.
So if we believe in the kingdom of God, if we believe it has come,
that one day it would also come to fill the world in full when he comes to remake
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the entire world, then Jesus'
words of repentance and then following him takes us all the way up to his hill,
the Sermon on the Mount, to his teachings.
And so to live for him, therefore, just makes logical sense.
I mean, if I fly to another country that has different laws and customs other
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than my own. I'm the one who needs to adjust.
I could try and live against the grain of the new place, but to do so would
be a schizophrenic denial of that I am in a new reality.
Likewise, Jesus has bought his kingdom. And so the question for us is this,
are we going to pretend it's not real?
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Or are we going to embrace the reality of the kingdom and thus us embrace his teachings.
My friends, he is the good teacher.
A teacher who shows us what it means to truly live and whose mercies are new every day.
Who has brought to us a new life and who will, by grace and by the spirit of
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God, empower us to live it.
This is not an invitation to pull up your moral bootstraps or to use theological
language to endorse work-based righteousness.
Righteousness no jesus has by
grace bought his kingdom and he
did by grace teach people how to
live in light of his kingdom which by grace slowly transforms people in partnership
(50:29):
with the holy spirit into the human beings god always desired us to be so much
so that when by grace the kingdom The kingdom of God is fully here at the end of time.
All humans who have followed him will, by grace, be the type of people who will
want to freely embrace the new world of the kingdom of God.
(50:51):
It is the reorientation of our hearts that puts us on a new trajectory in which
we change over our lifetime.
And so, Jesus as teacher invites you and me into shaping our life in such ways
in which the result is flourishing,
life the way it was always intended to be.
(51:15):
And so this invitation is an invitation right now as you are.
For he takes you as you are right now.
And so Jesus is inviting you to trust in him and thus to trust in his ways of ordering your life.
(51:36):
And so our question for you and for me today is this.
We trust Jesus? Like, actually trust him?
Because even if you're a believer listening to this, there will be areas of
your heart that need to hear the gospel afresh.
(51:56):
So where are the areas of your heart that are un-evangelized that need to hear the gospel again?
I pray that you would receive Christ there and thus see the teachings of Jesus
then as as invitations into ordering life in a new way,
reshaping the parts of us that, in their current state, don't give life anyway.
(52:20):
Might as well trust him and learn the wisdom of his ways to truly live a life
in line with the kingdom of God.
And so to end today's podcast, I want to gift you with a creed.
And it's a creed that I partnered with writing alongside side in my local church
(52:40):
community, particularly my pastor.
It's a creed that when we recite together, it reminds us of the big picture story of the gospel.
And so it goes like this.
And it will be in today's show notes if you want to follow along.
(53:00):
And so we will finish today by reading this together. And it reads...
We as a people believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We believe in the Father who, out of love, alongside the Son and the Spirit,
created heavens and the earth.
We believe in Jesus the Son, who was predestined to rule among us,
(53:23):
conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary, who followed in God's ways and divided all into God's
ways, in whose kingdom decisive victory was in suffering under Pontius Pilate.
He was crucified, died, and descended into death. Yet this victory was made
truly known three days later, when he rose again from the dead,
(53:44):
trampling sin and death.
He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and from there will come to
judge the living and the dead.
We believe of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
and with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who moves across the earth, dwells confidently with believers,
and who mediates Christ's presence,
(54:05):
who enables God's growth, guidance, and gifts.
Whose power is made known in signs and wonders, and is moving all things unto Christ's new creation.
We believe in a holy Catholic Church, called to be shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus,
family to one another, who together seek to know and make Him known,
(54:27):
resist evil, live simple and communal lives, Make peace and wisely love their neighbors.
Turn their heads towards the poor. Seek the common good in Jesus-shaped ways
and confess to each other where there is failure to live in such ways,
offering grace and spurring each other on.
We believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection from the dead,
(54:51):
and the life of the world of the age to come.
Glory be to God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
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