If you're watching or listening to this or you're in one of our churches or you're gathered with somebody in a living room or somewhere and you would say, "You know what? I'm not really a Christian anymore. I grew up in church, but I'm not a Christian anymore." Or maybe you never embrace Christianity at all. I'm so glad that you're listening, watching, that you're here or you're one of our churches today or you're here in the room with me because I so want you, and we started this conversation last week. I so want you and I want us and I want me. And honestly, and this is kind of a big wish, but I so want our nation and I so want the world to recognize and to appreciate and ultimately to accept Jesus for who Jesus claimed to be, for who Jesus is, and specifically for who he is and who those who knew him best knew him to be and who his enemies feared that he might be.
And I want us to discard and abandon the versions of Jesus that reduce him, that reduce Jesus to ... In case of emergency, call Jesus. Say prayers. Sin forgive her and forget her. If you sin, you just ask him to forgive. You reduce him to that. The versions that reduce Jesus to heaven guaranteer. For so many of us, we raised that Jesus is your ticket to heaven. That's kind of how he's introduced. Or maybe later on he was a fellow sufferer or to be kind of snarky, hashtag besties. He's like my best friend. Jesus is my best friend. And are those things true? Well, maybe two and a half of those things are true, but here's the point. In our home, Sandra does all the cooking. I've never introduced her to anybody as my cook.
You don't do that by one time, right? Now, does she do all the cooking? Is she the cook in her home? Yes. Have I introduced her? I want you to meet this as Sandra, my cook. No, and it is kind of funny, but this is unfortunately what the church has done with Jesus and what Christians do with Jesus. And so consequently, if you're not a Christian, it's what the world is, of course, what you do with Jesus. We reduce Jesus. And when we reduce Jesus to a function or a role, we can't help but lose sight of who he is. And we can't help but lose sight of what he's done. And we can't help but lose sight of what he came to do. Today's part two of our series, The Last Kingdom. And as they said last time we were together in part one, if you grew up in church, and I'm going to limit it this time to church.
If you grew up in church, you were taught or handed a simple faith template or faith paradigm I was as well. And this faith paradigm or template that served kind of as the framework, something to put everything about your Christianity in or hang everything about Christianity on. If it was sort of a template or a framework, you took all your beliefs and your convictions and your traditions and your Christian expectations and how you did baptism and how you did communion and when you could get baptized and when you could take communion, all that stuff. But you were given a simple framework and then you just hung all those things on it. And then you eventually were launched into adulthood. And once you became an adult and sort of a thinking adult and you sort of owned your own faith and were trying to develop a faith of your own, you might have revised that template you were handed as a child or modified it or modernized it.
Or you may have found it, and this is so common, you may have found that framework or that template or that synopsis of what Christianity is, you may have found it to be incompatible with the real world and incompatible with your life experience. It just didn't add up. And people kept trying to make your life experience fit within this frame or within this box and you're finally like, "I'm out. " Okay? And you just left it. You walked away from it. But this is why one of the reasons we're doing this series is one of the reasons we do church the way we do. The it, the it that oftentimes people leave or walk away from, the it as it represents Christianity, the faith they were handed or taught as a child, the it that they walk away from is a version of the it, but it's not the original it.
It's not the it that Jesus followers, this is amazing, risk their lives to export to the world. And it's certainly not as Jesus kept saying over and over and as the gospel writer said over and over, that certainly isn't good news. But as we saw last time, and we're going to see further today, the men and women who knew Jesus personally knew better. For them, they make it so clear. He was in fact the Christ, not a nickname, not a surname. It was a title. It was a royal title. He was in fact a king. He was God's final king who came to establish a kingdom, who came to establish God's final kingdom on earth. And what does that have to do with you? What does it have to do with me? And what does that have to do with us? Don't leave early. As king, Jesus did not come primarily to die.
Jesus came to do what kings do. He came to reign, to establish a kingdom, a kingdom that would last forever again the last kingdom. And here's what I would bet. If you had no faith tradition, if you had no knowledge of Christianity, if you were a blank slate when it comes to religion and you were to pick up a New Testament and you understood as you began to read the New Testament that the term Christ refers to a king, an anointed one, God's final king, if you knew that going in, the reality of who Jesus is and the people who knew him best knew him to be, that reality leaps off the pages at you. From Matthew all the way through Revelation. There's 27 books in the New Testament. The term Christ shows up 496 times because the authors of the New Testament did not want us to miss the point.
He was not simply a rabbi, a miracle worker or a sin forgiver. He was a king. He was born a king in Matthew and Luke. He was crucified as a king and Mark and John. He's acknowledged as a king through acts and all the epistles and he returns as a king in the book of Revelation. So for the next few minutes, I'm going to do a quick flyover of the New Testament, not the entire New Testament, but some of it, a lot of it. And the point is, I want you to see it to the point that you can never for the rest of your life unsee it. And I want the significance of this to seep into your lives because that was the point that the apostles and the writer, authors of the New Testament were trying to make. So let's begin with the first book of the New Testament.
Matthew, Matthew chapter one, verse one, the first verse in the New Testament. Here it is. Nobody buries the lead. This is the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Jesus king. Jesus, the anointed one doesn't bury the lead. 17 verses later, just to make sure we don't miss it. Now, this is the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesus, the anointed one. This is the story of the birth of a king. Moving on to Mark, Matthew Mark. Mark chapter one, verse one. Mark doesn't want to bury the lead either. Mark got his information from Peter, who is an eyewitness of the life of Jesus. He begins the beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the son of God. So what are you writing about? I'm writing about good news. If you read my gospel, Mark would say, and it doesn't strike you as anything, but good news, you haven't read it correctly.
So let me make it clear. This is a story about really good news for everybody. It's the story of Jesus, God's anointed king. 13 verses later. We're not even out of the first chapter of Mark. Listen to this. He says that Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. Now here's the thing. If you were to ask most Christians and if I were to ask you, "Hey, what is the good news of God?" Our Sunday school answer is the good news of God is that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. That is not what Jesus was teaching. He hadn't died. He's still around and he's going around Galilee and eventually Judea and he's preaching and teaching the good news of God. Well, what in the world is he talking about? It's not about his death and resurrection. And for three and a half years, he preaches and teaches and preaches and teaches.
What was he proclaiming before that? So fortunately for us, Mark tells us, here's Jesus' message. The time has come. He says, "The king is here. The kingdom of God is near. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to repent and believe this good news." And when we see the word repent, we think about repent from sin. And it's certainly used that way, but the Greek word repent simply means to change your mind and in changing your mind, choose a different course of action. And Jesus is saying, "I want you to repent from some wrong thinking. And I want you to begin to see different and think different. And the king has arrived to help you do just that. " And then he expands on this idea in his most famous proclamation or his most famous sermon that we call the sermon on the mount.
And as you read the sermon about, these statements, they just begin to pop up everywhere once you have this paradigm or this filter through which to read the New Testament. But listen to this statement that you have quoted before. You've heard it so many times before, but within this new framework, the king is speaking. And listen to what he says to this audience as they're just beginning to grasp whose presence they're in. He says, "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to seek first, pursue first, make it a priority. First is in ahead of everything else that you seek. And we all have multiple things we feel like we need to seek." He says, "I understand that. But what I want you to seek first is his kingdom and his righteousness." Righteousness. Righteousness, he's referring to the king's take. The king's take on what is right.
The king's take on what is just. He says, "I want you to put on and I want you to embrace my view of justice and my view of rightness and my view of how the world should work because God, our father created the world to work in such a way and he created you to live in such a way." And Jesus says, "The king has arrived. The kingdom is being established. And you are all invited to participate in it. In fact, in fact, this will challenge you to go back and read. The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew starts in Matthew five. The Sermon on the Mount, do you know what it is? It is a crash course. It is a crash course on how kingdom people act, react, how they pray and how they prioritize and how they treat other people. In fact, his message that we called the Sermon on the Mount was repeated over and over and over and over.
This was his standard message. Matthew, a tax collector, a wealthy man who had scribes working for him. He knocked it out. He got all the significant parts and laid it out for us. This was the message that Jesus taught over and over and over and over. The king is here. The kingdom has come and you are invited to participate in it. And this is what it looks like to participate in the kingdom of God. Matthew, Mark, gone to John, John chapter one. This is amazing. Now, John, again, is an eyewitness of what we know happened in the life of Jesus. He was with Jesus from the beginning. He's one of the original disciples. And Peter, Andrew, James and John, you've heard these names. When Andrew, Peter, Angel, James, John, Andrew. Andrew was part of a group of young men who were disciples of John the Baptist.
And when John the Baptist baptizes Jesus and says, guys, I'm not the guy. He's the guy. You've been following me. You would do well to follow him. Many of John's disciples, the scripture tells us, went and began to follow Jesus. And Andrew is one of those men, those young boys. And he heard Jesus teach. And when he heard Jesus Jesus like John the Baptist was not kidding. This is the guy and he goes to find his brother who will become the most famous disciple, Peter. Listen to what John tells us in John chapter one. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon, Simon Peter, and tell him, this is so significant. Don't miss this. And to tell him, we have found the Messiah. Now John is documenting. John is probably dictating this or writing this, but probably dictating this. He wrote this when he was a very old man.
And he stops and he thinks, wait a minute. He uses the Greek term for Messiah, but then he remembers. Most of my audience, they don't know what a Messiah is. And he actually pauses. There are no parentheses. There's no punctuation in the Greek text. This is for English readers. He pauses and he wants us to know with such clarity, he repeats himself and uses a Greek term to make sure his non-Greek readers know exactly what he's talking about. Messiah means anointed one, but non-Jewish people don't know that. So he uses the other term as well, Christ that all of his Greek readers would understand as anointed one. That's how clear he wanted to make it in this gospel. Isn't that amazing? And then just in case we miss it and we read the entire gospel of John and we get to the end and we still haven't picked up on the plot line because we've been so confused by the language.
And we're still thinking just in terms of the framework of the things Jesus came to do rather than who Jesus is. At the very end of the gospel of John, John's like, okay, I want to make sure my readers don't miss this. And he ends his gospel with a purpose statement. And so John leaves off or he ends his gospel with the big idea and he tells us why he wrote this particular account of the life of Jesus. And here's what he says at the end of his gospel. He says, Jesus, and this is so important. He said, Jesus performed many other signs. He doesn't use the word miracle. He uses the word sign because the entire book of John is outlined around seven. Some of the people say eight, but seven or eight. We would call them miracles. John says, they're not just random miracles.
They're not random acts of kindness. They are signs. What's the point of a sign? What's the purpose of a sign? A sign points to something. He says, "Don't you understand these miraculous things Jesus did? They weren't just random acts of kindness. He was pointing to the fact of who he is and the title he claimed for himself." Jesus performed many other signs as well in the presence of his disciples. There were eyewitnesses for all of this, which are not recorded in this book. He said, "I didn't put them all in here. I just picked a few." He said, "But I picked these few on purpose, but these signs or these miracles that I included are written with a purpose." It's a heni clause in Greek with the purpose that you would believe something. Now, this is the same John that brings us John 3:16. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that if you believe in him, you won't be lost to God, you won't perish you won't be lost to God.
"Believe what? John's like, " Oh, you mean you got to the end of my entire gospel, you still don't know what to believe? "Let me tell you what's critical for you to believe.
I wrote this so that you would believe that Jesus is Christophs. This is so important. He includes the definite article. It appears all over the New Testament. We miss this as well. Christos or Christ is not a name. It's a title that Jesus is the, or the anointed one, the king, God's final king. I wrote this entire gospel of John to convince my readers of who Jesus is and why he came. And then he doubles down. Jesus, that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. And that by believing that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, you might have life and his name.
Again, going back to Mark, let me repeat that. Mark got his information from Peter. Peter was illiterate. We know that from the book of Acts that Peter, Andrew, James, and John, they were fishermen. They were hard workers. They were probably successful. They were going to inherit their father's business, but there were illiterate men that Acts tells us they were uneducated men. So when Peter sat down to tell the story of his story with his life with Jesus, his experiences with Jesus, he dictates these to Mark, who is Greek. And Mark documents what happened after Jesus was arrested because again, Peter was there. He was hanging back worst day of his life, worst mistake of his life. So finally, they get down to it. Okay. Just tell us. Now ready?This is important. The church may have misunderstood who Jesus is. His enemies did not. They understood exactly what he was claiming.
So just tell us, are you or are you not definite article? The Christ, the one sent from God, the anointed one, God's final king. And then they double down, but they can't use the name God because they wouldn't allow themselves to do that because they were so holy, even though they are in the presence of God's son. So tell us, are you the Christ? Are you the son of the blessed one?
And Jesus' answer will condemn him or potentially set him free. Who would lie in a moment like that? And Jesus said," I am. I king. "If this is all we had, this is all we need. And the text says," And they condemned him to be deserving of death. "Look up here," Not because of what he taught, because of who he claimed to be the Christ, God's final king. "And I could go on and on and on and on and round and round and round. New Testament book after New Testament, book after New Testament book. It is everywhere and it is so important. It's important for so many reasons, but let me just kind of be negative for a moment about us, me included. One of the reasons this is so important, recognizing who Jesus is, a king, is that it reveals its surfaces, it pulls back the veil from our shallow, immature, and in some ways arrogant.
What has he done for me lately? Christianity.
Don't answer out loud if you know the answer to this, but do you remember for those of you that read the Bible, do you remember the last thing that Jesus disciples did before Jesus left them?This is amazing. Matthew was there, he records it for us. Matthew says that when Jesus came to us or when we came to where he was waiting, that when we saw him, we worshiped him. Now, these are Jewish young men that you can't even have an image of God. You can't even have representations. You can't even have art that represents God. You're not going to worship a person. I mean, that's what Caesar has been trying to get us to do. Since Rome, since Pompeii came and took to temples in 63, BC, Rome has been trying to get us to worship a person. We're not ever worshiping a person. We're worshiping the invisible God.
And in this moment, these young men worship their rabbi.
If that's all we had, that's all we need. And Matthew's so honest. He says," But some doubted, but of course they did. They saw him crucified and there he stands. Of course, there would be some who doubted, but those who recognized him, they worshiped. "And his response, well, first of all, he acknowledged and received and accepted their worship. He didn't be like, " Oh no, no, no, no, no guys. No, get up. Come on. It's just me, Jesus. No. "He accepted it. And his response, this is a statement. I know I've said it before. I'll keep saying it. This is a statement that doesn't get the airplay it deserves. It is largely ignored. This would change. This would change so much. I don't want to say it would change everything. It would change so much if the church, especially if evangelicals and fundamentalists and conservative Christians, if everybody would pause and strip away all the preconceived ideas and let this one statement plunge through and take hold of our conscience and become the filter through which we experience life and treat people and read the Bible, Jesus stands there and he makes this extraordinarily large claim.
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Who would say such a thing? Within the context of the first century world, there was only one person who could claim authority over a piece of real estate or over a kingdom. And that's the king.This is king language. And he says to this ragtab group of people who are fearing for their lives. Now their outlaws are going to be hunted down. Several of them will be martyred soon, the rest probably later. And he says to them," I have authority over heaven, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. "Who would say such a thing? Not somebody who's just a sin forgiver or a rabbi or a teacher or a comforter or a good example, only a king. God's final king who owes us nothing and gave us everything.
He's the king who can be trusted with everything because he's the good king, who can be trusted with everything without fear, because he's the king who came not to ask us to give our lives for him, but came to give his life for us and turn everything upside down. He's the king who came to reverse the order of things and he didn't come to die. He came to reign and he established his kingdom on earth and you are invited and I am invited to participate in it. And when men and women embrace the values of the king, that piece of real estate gets better and those families get better and those communities get better and those nations get better because he's the king. So got to wrap this up. If you aren't already a follower of Jesus, I don't have any right to tell you what to do, but you should at least consider accepting his invitation to follow because his kingdom has come and in the end, his will will be done.
And the other reason you should consider it is the apostles tell us, and I'll just choose one piece of text, but they all say this. Jesus said this. The reason you should at least consider this is because that someday, someday at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow. This is astounding. Paul said, see, one day, look up here, everyone is going to have that moment like the disciples did when they're like, " Oh, you are who you claim to be. "And in that moment, we won't ask all of our stupid questions. We will worship the king and we have been invited to jump in and do it ahead of time as a commercial announcement to the rest of the world that the king has come and the king is coming. Listen to the rest of this. That at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow those who are in heaven, those who are on earth and everyone who died previously, and not only every knee and every tongue will confess, every tongue will recognize, everyone will get it, everyone will see it, that Jesus, God's anointed king is the boss, is the Lord, has the right to rule, to the glory of God, the Father.
This is what Matthew wanted us to understand, what Peter wanted us to understand, why Luke wrote his orderly account, why John wrote his account, why Luke wrote the book of Acts to say," Look at how this played out in this part of the world and look at how this played out in the world. "And who would have imagined that by the early fourth century, Rome would recognize what we miss. Jesus is a king and we will pick it up right there next time in part three of the last. Hey, thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please make sure you check out the links on your screen for what to watch next and check out the description below where we are going to provide you with free resources designed to help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. And again, thanks for watching.
