#5 Lust

series: Red Letter City

title: Lust

teacher: Jacob Bender

date: May 15, 2016

scriptures: Matthew 5:27-30, Matthew 23:3, Matthew 23:25, Matthew 23:27, Luke 8:17, Luke 12:3, Romans 2:16, Genesis 39, Jeremiah 7:30-31, Ephesians 2:10, Luke 22:15, Psalm 51:10, James 1:17. 

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I remember picking up my kids from school on Spring afternoon...  it was just a beautiful day outside and we were driving home. and on the way home, there is this stop sign at Gratiot that we have to stop at and sometimes its really easy to turn onto Gratiot and other times its a total zoo… so much traffic just flying by and the only way to merge onto the street is to turn into the left turn lane and then make your way over… it was one of those days… and even after I had merged into the lane, it only took a little while before the side of traffic I was on came to almost a stop, just tons of cars, and on the other side cars were just FLYING by.

and I looked over, and standing in the middle lane, the left turn lane, was a man just standing there on his phone, laughing. Just standing there in the middle of traffic. He wasn’t really even trying to cross the street, he looked like he was just enjoying a conversation in the middle of traffic, hanging out between the yellow lines. People were trying to get into the left lane from both directions and he was preventing them. It was almost like he didn’t even notice what it was that he was surrounded by… like he didn’t hear the horns or understand the frustration he was causing actual drivers whom that part of the road is supposed to belong to. 

He was so engaged in the world of his seemingly happy conversation, that he paid no attention to the potentially deadly environment that he was literally standing in the center of himself, or the way it messed up other people just trying to get through their commute. and I merged onto the highway and moved on, uncertain of what happened to that guy. But I know this. What he was doing was causing grief and frustration to others… probably unbeknownst to him. and if someone who needed to turn got over and didn’t see him… 

he wouldn’t be laughing on the phone anymore.

It had the potential to fall apart very quickly. 

It was a fine line he was walking on, one that he willingly gave up a certain level of control over his own safety for, to engage in this moment privately on the phone, yet surrounded by hundreds of cars who could take him out at any moment whether on purpose or on accident. I think that sometimes we find ourselves in trouble, and we don’t even realize it. We don’t realize that we are hurting others. We don’t realize the danger that we are in. We are think things like, “Oh, it is only in my mind… it will never go beyond this… and its not hurting anyone.” and we forget that devastating reality behind iniquity…

“whatever your eye hooks to, multiplies.” 

and you can think that you have your own little private life in your head and think that its not affecting anyone but I assure you, that as whatever your eye hooks to, begins to multiple your life will begin to change. And you may not notice it right away, but it will wear on those around you. It will cause grief to people and they may not even be able to figure out why. But the truth is… that the reason that Jesus deals so dramatically with the Spirit of the law is because he knows that where your thoughts go… and what you dwell on, is a window into what you are becoming. 

So Jesus says “lets cut this off at the source.”

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#5 Culminating at Grace

Series: The Narrative of Grace

Title: Culminating at Grace

Teacher: Jacob Bender

Date: December 13, 2015

scriptures: Matthew 1:16-15, Matthew 1:1, 1 Corinthians 1:27, Matthew 18:20, Leviticus 25:1-7, Leviticus 25:5, 2 Chronicles 36:18-21, 1 Peter 2:5, Galatians 6:2.

Q: is everyone’s sabbath year the same? So if I start working in 2003, and you start in 2005, is my sabbath year 2010, yours 2012 or both in 2010?

A: You can read about it in Leviticus 25, but essentially what Happened was God said to the Israelites “when you come into the land I have given you… The land shall keep a sabbath.” So the way I have always understood it (I am not 100 percent though) is that from the time they all arrived, together, the cycle began.

How that applies to you today may vary… For me the primary takeaway from the sabbath year is, “do you trust God, truly? With everything?”

Simple, but in the new covenant, that is how I personally apply it.

Q: Do you think that Luke’s genealogy pertains to Mary & not Joseph? It would resolve some apparent contradictions between Matthew and Luke’s genealogies, but wouldn’t that also mean that Jesus was physically of the line of David through Mary?

That’s a great question, one that I wish I had mentioned in the sermon, and one that we don’t know for certain the answer to. It would make sense that the genealogy would belong to Mary because they are the same until we get to King David, and then the genealogy in Matthew continues through David’s son Solomon (the King) and Luke’s genealogy continues through David’s son Nathan. However, it is hard to say for sure because even Luke’s genealogy begins by saying (Luke 3:23) Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son the Heli… Luke’s genealogy is listed in the more traditional way, only listing the Father and son, and actually takes it all the way back to Adam.

The other question that arises in Luke comes from Luke 2:4-5, when it says that Joseph goes to Galilee to register, because HE was of the house and lineage of David. It said that he went to be registered with Mary, who he was engaged to, who was pregnant, and it was during that trip that she gave birth to Jesus. The way this is written seems to emphasis that he needed to be registered, not her, and that she was marrying into the family.

Matthew in general follows the story of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of Joseph, while Luke takes it more from Mary’s perspective, also adding more weight to the possibility that the genealogy in Luke belongs to Mary. (ie – in Luke, we read about Mary’s encounter with her cousin, Elizabeth, about John the baptist leaping in Elizabeths womb when he is in the presence of the Christ living in a pregnant Mary. It also records Mary’s song the magnificat, and the angel of the Lord visits Mary in Lukes account, where Matthew records when the angel visited Joseph, and the battle that Joseph had internally to keep Mary as his wife after everything that had happened. Romans 1:3 also says that Jesus descended from David “according to the flesh” which many also use as evidence that Mary was also a descendant.

In this message, I should have made this more clear, because it is very possible that Mary was also of the line of David, but we know without a doubt that Joseph was, and because this study is on the genealogy in Matthew, we tried to look at it from the perspective of whom Matthew was writing to. Matthew was written to the Jews, to win the Jews to Jesus, and he knew that in that culture, if the Father, adopted or not, was not of the family line, they would never have accepted him as the savior.

So at the end of the day, Mary needed Joseph to not leave her alone on Christmas, and the Jews needed Joseph to accept Mary if they were going to accept Jesus. It can be said with certainty that Joseph was of the family line of David, and in the case that the genealogy in Luke does belong to Mary, it would reconcile some complicated issues between the two genealogies and would have fulfilled the prophecies with or without Joseph but it would not change the fact that to the Jewish culture whom Matthew was writing to win to Christ, Joseph was a key to this story.

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