And over the last year, we talked about this at the beginning of the year, and then if we realized that the idea of Jesus, the first in Jesus, the conversations about Jesus, have the ability to transform things. We also realized that sometimes we don't have the queries picture of Jesus. We saw in our culture our own rats, how sometimes how religion gets weaponized in some ways that we're comfortable with. So we said, we're going to take a year and we're just going to look at the gospel passage.
We want to see who Jesus is and through this process we want to break the clarity of how we know him and what we know of him, but also the clarity in the ways that we respond to who Jesus is and what Jesus is asking us to do. So all year long every Sunday we've only been reaching for the gospel passage. And multiple times throughout that we come to a passage inside of that passage we see the idea of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven spoke about. And every time it happens, we say, you all don't have the time to get into this right now, we will one day in the future.
And so today, starting this month, we're going to spend the Sundays in this month talking about the Kingdom of God. Matthew says the Kingdom of Heaven, but is that related to the audience that he was writing to? But these two terms are interchangeable. But we're not so much going to look at this trying to figure out what it is.
But we're going to wait. What does it call us to? What is this belief in this Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven? What does this call us to?
And here the church is kind of special to us, but we look at who we are and how we discern our vision and how we decided to respond in our part of our vision. We've got a couple things going on. One of the things that found me for a long time. We've talked about it before Jesus' assumptions.
We believe Jesus is here. We believe Jesus is doing things. Jesus is doing things. Jesus fights us.
We do those things with him. And then also that our greatest fulfillment when we found we accomplished the mission of Jesus along the side of Jesus. That's that fourth assumption means that we believe Jesus is doing things and he's asking us to do it with it. And that's what's best for us and why.
Then our third core value as a church, we said we believe God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for this world. So else as a church, we are intimately connected to this idea of the Kingdom of God. We need to be inquisitive of it, not just we want to know about it, but we realize that we find our lives through it. Our purpose is accomplished through it.
And so we're going to talk about that for the next few Sundays, but today we're going to talk about it really. We're actually going to jump into the first time it was talking about the Gospel of Matthew, and it wasn't even the words of Jesus. It was the words that goes to John the Baptist. And we're going to look at this idea of repentance, how John identifies it.
And we realize that repentance is a step to recognizing. So before I read this passage to the few short verses, I want you to think about this. If you read along on your Bible or on your phone, the scriptures are posted on my family. I like to scroll over to the message notes.
Or you can read those straight behind me. But if you hear these words, you read these words. I want you to listen to them and think about how they speak to direction and how they speak to understanding. In his words, Matthew 3 verse 1 through 5.
In those days John the Baptist came to the Judean wilderness and began preaching. The message was repent of your sins and turn to God for the kingdom of heaven is near. The prophet Isaiah was speaking about John, and he said he was a boy shouting to the wilderness, prepared away for the Lord's coming, clear the road for Him. John's clothes were woven from coarse-camel parry or leather bells around his waist, graffiti at locust and a while of honey, and the kids found cicades at DBSC.
They said they couldn't do it. I had one once on top. People from Jerusalem, John the Baptist had a lot of people from Jerusalem from all Judean, all over the Jordan Valley, went out to see and hear John. Repent of your sins and turn to God for the kingdom of heaven is near.
And Jesus himself and just a couple more verses in the next chapter will say he's saying exactly where repent of your sins. Turn to God for the kingdom of heaven is near. This idea of the kingdom of heaven is a dynamic concept. For the last 100, 200 years, all this more by the scholars had this debate backwards and forwards of this.
The kingdom of heaven is future. Where does it live in time? Where does it exist? And after a long time ago, they realized that the answer is yes.
There's a church we have to realize that this is living in the present, but it's also living in the future. There's hopeful expectation of what we encounter in our daily lives. There's also hopeful expectation for the world to come. And if the church and we don't understand this and live in this, then we will end up having a disjointed sense of faith.
We only believe that God's world is here and the present now that we don't think about what the future might hold for us. Christian church can't live apart from the promise of eternity with God. But also if we don't live thinking of the kingdom of heaven is present, is acting a lot around us, the only thing is hope for the future. Then we seem to have a disregard for the world around us, a disregard for people and for places that as a church, we hold this idea of intention that it's here with us now that is also to come.
What's interesting is also how the Bible defines responsibility. It's not so much about the kingdom, but it's about kingship. It's the way that we view God. The God has always called a people to him that belong to him, that we realize that we belong to God.
That he loves us and he does good things for us. He wants him and better things for us. He expects us to do certain things. This level of responsibility is complicated because we can make it at times in our life.
It's actually quite simple. All we ever ask is people to do is, I need you to look like me including from the UK, from the U.S. to other people. That responsibility we have is how we represent God and the people that we know.
And how we choose to represent God and the people who we might come into contact with. We see Jesus, we see the Lord over us and over us in love. Jesus here on this earth revealed us by the way that he lived, by the way that he did things. Also by the way that he loved people.
All your own texts, we want to see what Jesus says, we want to see how Jesus interacts with people. That's what we've been doing. What is the characteristics of Jesus? What are the characteristics of God and how do I direct myself in those ways?
How do we go through things that he cares about? How do we go through things that he does? How do we look at the way that he loves? Next week we're going to talk about the whole idea of the kingdom out of the kingdom.
We're going to have a conversation about what Jesus said about the people that he ended the kingdom before they thrown out of the kingdom. But we realize that, well, this is very forced across the gospel. They consistently ask for us to grow boundaries. The kingdom is a dynamic mindset.
It's in a heater, and it's also in the future. John also calls us to repent. Your repentance is a thing that nobody likes to talk about. When we think, I think so many times our worldview is so formed by media, by movies and television, I think repentance, I think of all this like kind of crummy detective TV shows I like to watch and the confession booth.
I've been talking about like a weird dark screen between you. We think of that for what repentance looks like. If we think of a description, we realize that repentance has a much thicker concept, but it has a much more positive concept to it. One of the ways that scripture talks about repentance is that it has us to realize what we allow to define our lives and what we allow to stabilize our lives.
One of the ways that scripture talks about our relationship with God is something we harness ourselves to God. Do we see God having the ability to stabilize our life? Or do we realize that we are simply trying to stabilize our own life? Now I'll tell you right now, I know this much about any sort of rock colliders, something like that.
The band of my size and my stature is not designed to go out with anything long rocks. But I watch all the documents on Netflix for that six months. You don't harness yourself to yourself to your sake, is it? What are the YouTube fail videos of people trying to cut down trees and say, keep on going badly?
You don't try to harness yourself to yourself. So to repent, it's an active idea of us realizing, you know what, I'm turning towards and I'm attaching myself towards what actually can provide via stabilizing force in my life. And repentance be such as to turn into a simple form. Repentance means to turn and to recognize.
To turn towards God. And to turn towards God in a way that there's a marked difference in our lives. We can't be attached to two things for our own survival and for our own stability simultaneously. If we kind of dig in even more in Luke chapter 1, this is actually when the angel interacts with Zechariah who's John the Baptist's father, and there's this prophecy through John the Baptist will be, it helps us even kind of understand this even more than this is what angels are in the variety of life.
And he will turn many Israelites to the Lord, their God. He will be a man with the spirit and power of Elijah. He will prepare the people for the coming of the Lord. He will turn the hearts of the fathers of the children.
He will cause those who are rebellious to accept the wisdom of the God. So this idea of repentance and turning is built in really just new John the Baptist is his. And that moment that angel, vision with Zechariah and angels, spread out even more and talks about turning in a different way, it's a different way but it's to return to what he wants to do. To return to what he wants to do.
But also asking us to prepare this idea of preparation and this is preparing something for a purpose. To prepare for a cause, it's the same also saying we're building something for the sake of something. Our preparation matters because our preparation has something we can then fold it out of. So with all this thinking that little John the Baptist said, return from your sins, turn to God.
Description repeats the same thing twice for him. He says there are two different meanings there. Turn from your sins and turn to God. And prepare for the kingdom.
So what if our repentance is a necessary conduit of the mission of God being our world? You know what if we choose to not engage in repentance? What if that means that we don't seek God's mission? What if that means that we can't seek God's mission?
What if our repentance is necessary for the kingdom of God coming a full way and our own community relationships we have and the people of God is placed in our life and our worship heroes on the going and all this things. What if our repentance is the thing that either starts or stops amazing things happening in our midst? Our repentance, our transformation, our whole weakness is a necessary preparation. In Matthew 3, 2 John says this, the kingdom of heaven is near.
There's a reference point in our life. What if our repentance that turned we made that turned towards a different, stabilized agent in our lives? What if that's us having the ability to pull ourselves out of this broken world? To push ourselves into the kingdom of God, to have the ability to recognize when it's near and where it's near and what it wants to do or found us.
So the kingdom of the near is about hope, it's expectations, all those moments that we sometimes have in our life. You know where sometimes we'll be able to do stops. Crazy things happen, feel different, we can't look at our articulate, we know like the Holy Spirit's here, something is doing something, it's near. I think that really less than the last couple of seasons of Stranger Things, when Will gets that weird tingle on the back of his head and he's like, oh it's a better bit down here.
It's a great thing. The mind slayer is near. You know what if our repentance is necessary for us to understand the nearness of the kingdom? What's so funny is if I think back to my life, if you think back to your life, we also move the stories of the church and the past and look at what happens in the Bible as president.
All these amazing actions of God, what you almost always see is that people have entered into a posture of repentance. It's just saying, I know you are near and I am claiming that you are near and I declare that this is where I find my stability. Your repentance is just a step of it. I think it's in housing college.
We talked to the whole summer to film the talk about the kingdom of God, and my boss sent me out to make a video. So this is like 2005, I think back when all the way to talk shows, we go to make videos in the street and people they thought about things. I was like, oh no, I asked those college students, what's the kingdom of God, what's the kingdom of heaven? Every single one of them, all they do is say, that's heaven, right?
It's the future, right? What we said earlier, we divorce ourselves from the present in the future, and we end up just being disjointed from the presence of God. My friend John Endwall says this, what if this is less about us getting into heaven and more about getting heaven? We are just focused on the future.
We lose sight of the present, but if we lose sight of the present, how do we know that we find you? This is less about us getting into heaven and more about getting heaven. This is our first to say that our idea, our imagination of the kingdom is janky. We have a present, right?
If we live in the world, we don't have kings. Our understanding of kings comes from television and tablets. The only typical interaction I have with a real king or a real queen is on weighting in brooches, on reading whatever the national choir says. We have an understanding of this.
But the thing is, the church had a bad understanding of this. People 2000 years ago didn't understand what Jesus was, when he was saying these things. They really liked what he was saying, realized that the way that he was talking about God's kingdom did not mean he was just going to overthrow Rome and just situate the perfect place for them. They got so frustrated by this.
It's almost as though they're saying, hey, we want awesome things for nothing. Do you want some things for nothing? Let's think about how strong this is. We'll ask you.
You can say, hey, will you go do something really hard for me? Well, I do nothing. So my life can be easy to say the second. Just ask for the kingdom.
Just to plop down and give us awesome things. I wish that. When you go to something really hard for me, I won't do anything and I get to say the same in my life, you should be awesome. And she just loves us.
She just died for us. Jesus did not love us and died for us, so we can say. Her pendants is necessary for us to live in this kingdom, in the present, and is necessary for us to go into the kingdom, in the future. I wanted to watch that clip from the 1989 classic, The Abyss, as we talked about this.
I'm going to raise my hand, I can't see anything on the bottom right? There's much weight in the process that you get there in plenty of time. You get down there, I'm going to do it and it's coming wide right about the weights and come on up. Easy.
In front of it, I'm going to make you... Okay, let's go to the rule. It's a... just relax.
Relax, relax. Okay, I'm going to find out. I'm going to hold your breath, take it in. Just like yourself, take it in.
Take it in. Hold your breath now. Take it. We all breathe with it for nine months.
You body will remember. That's it. Actually breathe. There he goes.
Yes, it's good. We all breathe liquid for the first nine months. A movie as they're making super deep dives. They show technology of oxygenated liquid that allows the pressure to not negative effect, the diverge body.
In that moment, he's freaking out. The technicians that we all breathe liquid for the first nine months of our lives. Repentance means to turn back to what we want. The God, even though sin broke into this world, there's always things, has ability to rule over our lives right now.
God left pieces of himself inside each and every one of us to repent. It simply means to turn back to the natural state that we have, that natural relationship. With God, that natural relationship is not one of this favor or of anger, but that natural relationship is just a thing that's actually completely and I will attach myself to you. I know by attaching myself to you that I have the ability to be and to live and to see this kingdom that you're speaking about.
The movie at Harris Realize that he actually literally drowned before you. It's a natural first. But in order for us to experience a life in a world that we can't, in a life in a world we can't live in, concessions have to be made for our safety. You know, what if repentance is necessary not because God requires it?
What if repentance is necessary for our heart to be able to handle what God wants to show us and ask us to be part of things? You know, what if repentance is that safety line that we have? Repentance allows us to live in two worlds, the paradox that Jesus talks about is kingdom. The paradox of these two kingdoms is our ability to live a final life with Jesus.
In the present, the present still Jesus life now where we see and experience glimpses of future eternity of new creation, all while also living and currently existing in a broken world in which sin still attempts to reign, is that stabilizing center in our life? Alignment happens because of our repentance, because of our relationship with Jesus. That's the step that we recognize, that's the step that we already know. Our bodies know this relationship.
That's like we can't live inside this kingdom without repentance. Jesus calls us to that. Like in every single thing else that Jesus calls us to, He is not called us to something without also promising and experiencing His presence.