title: Dry Bones
teacher: Dawn Bender
date: August 28, 2016
#19 Two Houses
series: Red Letter City
title: Two Houses
date: August 21, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 7:24-29, James 1:22-24, Deuteronomy 6:5-6, Deuteronomy 30:19-20
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#18 Two Trees
series: Red Letter City
title: Two Trees
date: August 14, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 7:15-23, Jeremiah 17:5-8, Jeremiah 22:16, Matthew 23:13, Joh 14:6
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#17 Two Gates
series: Red Letter City
title: Two Gates
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: August 7, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 7:12-14, John 15, Proverbs 17:3, Matthew 18
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#16 Ask, Seek, Knock
series: Red Letter City
title: Ask, Seek, Knock
date: July 31, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 7:7-12, James 3:9-12, James 4:11, 1 John 4:20-21, Matthew 25, Proverbs 8:17, Colossians 1:18, Ephesians 4:15-16.
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#15 Judging
series: Red Letter City
title: Judging
date: July 24, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 7:1-6, Acts 5, 1 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 2:11, 1 Corinthians 4:5, 1 Samuel 24:5, Numbers 15:37-41, Matthew 9, Luke 8, Matthew 13:45-46, 1 John 4:16-17
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#14 Anxiety
series: Red Letter City
title: Anxiety
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: July 17, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 6:25-34, Romans 8:28, Matthew 11:28, Matthew 8:26, 1 Peter 5:7,
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#13 Treasures
series: Red Letter City
title: Treasures
date: July 10, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Acts 20:24, Matthew 6:19-24 (main passage), 1 Timothy 6:18-19, Malachi 3:16, Genesis 11, Revelation 18, Matthew 23:23, Malachi 3:10, Revelation 18, Revelation 13:17, Luke 16:11, 2 Corinthians 6:10, Proverbs 27:20
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#12 Fasting
series: Red Letter City
title: Fasting
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: July 3, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 6:16-18, Hebrew 10:16, Proverbs 20:6, Matthew 9:14, Matthew 9:15, Matthew 3:17, Genesis 3, John 8:44
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#11 Praying
series: Red Letter City
title: Praying
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: June 26, 2016
scriptures: Luke 11:1, Matthew 6:5-15 (main passage), Matthew 18:20, Acts 3:16, Hebrews 4:16, Leviticus 16
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#10 Giving
series: Red Letter City
title: Giving
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: June 19, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 6:1-4, John 5:44, Matthew 23, Romans 2:16, 1 Samuel 16:7, Isaiah 57:15, Jeremiah 22:16, Philippians 3:10, 1 John 4:6-7,
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#9 Love Your Enemies
series: Red Letter City
title: Love Your Enemies
date: June 12, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 5:43-48, Matthew 16, Matthew 18, Leviticus 19:18, Proverbs 24:17, Romans 12:21, Luke 22:36, Matthew 26:52-53, Luke 23:34, Luke 6:46, Matthew 22:34-40, Matthew 10:34-36, Revelation 19:15, Isaiah 49:2, Isaiah 11:4, Ephesians 6:17 (rhema), John 1:14, Hebrews 4:12 (logos), Romans 12, Psalm 23, Psalm 23:5
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#8 Retaliation
series: Red Letter City
titles: Retaliation
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: June 5, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 5:38-42, Matthew 7:11, Exodus 21:23-25, Galatian 2:9, Matthew 7:12, Joshua
On Friday Dawn and I drove down to Ann Arbor to visit Matt and Chavonne in the hospital... Their daughter, baby Charlotte was born, and she is just the sweetest thing. She was born, I think a whole two months early, so she is just absolutely tiny and so so precious. And I just need to say this about Matt and Chavonne. I have never in my life seen two believe glow the way that they were glowing that day. The peace. The excitement, and the love in their eyes toward this absolutely precious child was just amazing.
And I can’t explain it. I know that, their pregnancy was very difficult. They went through some really hard circumstances, things that I could not even begin to imagine… and I know that the whole pregnancy was to a degree plagued with some fear and so to at the end of it all be holding this amazing child obviously was such a sign of the grace of God and an amazing hope for the future.
Jesus says something a little later in the sermon on the mount, and we will get to it in a couple of months, but he says this:
“if you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him.”
and I thought about that when I saw the way that Matt held his daughter. and the look on his face, and the way everything toward Charlie was unconditional love… and as strange as this sounds… it made me realize something about violence. and the way that we treat each other. The same way that Matt looks at his daughter, God looks at all of his children. and I think that for most of us, we want to always know that we can come to God knowing that no matter what we have done, he still looks at us with that same twinkle in his eye. That same unconditional love.
and not only that… but there are millions of other Matt’s in the world. People who think the world of their children. Who would do anything for them. And in every situation that you find yourself in, in which you are paired AGAINST another person… that person is someone’s child. That person has a world of people that he has touched merely by being born….
and that person is a child of the living God.
and if we approach every situation and every confrontation that we are faced with from that perspective, perhaps it would be easier than you think to do what Jesus asks of us here in this revolutionary sermon.
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#7 Oaths
series: Red Letter City
title: Oaths
date: May 29, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 5:33-37, Numbers 30, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Luke 8:17, Matthew 12:36, Matthew 16:16-19, Matthew 18, James 4:7, Ephesians 6, Ephesians 4:27, 1 Peter 5:8, Luke 13:15
I don’t know Rick Warren.
But I have met him.
somewhere out there, there is a picture of me that I have, of Dawn and I with Rick Warren, but I couldn't find it this week. I only have a picture because when I met him, he said “lets take a picture for facebook!” and so we took one… but I guess I never posted it to facebook. and I now I can’t find it. But it exists somewhere. But I don’t know Rick Warren. I had emailed him a couple of times about our bands music because we wrote one particular song that I thought he would really like, and he was very encouraging and said that he did.
The last time that I put out an album with my band was in 2011, and on release day, because of our previous conversations, Pastor Warren very graciously sent out one tweet on twitter encouraging people to go and check out our record.
One tweet, and suddenly thousands and thousands of people were going and checking out our songs. For a few hours our page had more visits than it had had the whole month. Until he sent out another tweet, and the one about us got lost.
His name brought me a temporary sense of popularity.
Because he said it was good, people wanted to hear for themselves.
and I could scream from the rooftops how great I thought my own music was, but when someone who had already done something significant…
like written the best selling book of all time other than the bible… when he puts his name on it, people listen.
It is very easy to use other people’s names to elevate our purposes.
There are certain name drops that become trump cards in conversations. and in Jesus’ time and in the generations leading up to Jesus it was no different. People made promises all of the time, it was not really a big deal. But if a person were to make a “vow” or an oath, it would almost automatically be believed… and that is what Jesus was addressing here. The concept of oaths. Of promising something with someone else’s name attached to it.
But do you even know the one whose name you have attached to your purposes?
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#6 Divorce
series: Red Letter City
title: Divorce
date: May 22, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Matthew 5:27-32, Matthew 19:1-9, Genesis 2:24, Genesis 2:18, Genesis 1:31, Isaiah 1:8, 1 Corinthians 7, Malachi, Jeremiah 3:8, Hebrew 4:15, Isaiah 61, Leviticus 16
In that day, there were two schools of thought that dominated their culture… Two Rabbi’s who lived just before Jesus’ ministry, and they each had two very different yokes. Two very different interpretations of the scriptures, and a lot of the debates in that day, which Jesus was essentially throwing himself into the middle of, in the sermon on the mount… basically were asking this question…
which yoke is it?
Is it Hillel?
Or is it Shammai?
Hillel was always the more liberal one… the burden was extremely light, his yoke was incredibly easy, and normally erred on the side of peoples welfare. He was immensely popular, and was at one point the president of the Sanhedrin (which was like the Jewish Supreme Court).
The other well known Rabbi was Shammai, who tended to be much more conservative… more strict in his interpretation.
So the people would read this verse in Deuteronomy… and they would consider the Ketubahs that they signed their name on…
And what people wanted to know is: what gets me out? Because only a rabbi had the authority to get you out of your marriage, so the question is, “on what grounds will you give me a certificate of divorce?”
And Hillel’s yoke essentially said: indecency is indecency. If she spoils a dish that she is preparing, you can leave. If she burns your toast, and you want out, I will sign your certificate of divorce. Basically his interpretation says, “if you want out, just get out. I will give you a certificate of divorce.”
it was very lax.
But Shammai held a much more strict interpretation. He said, essentially, “no, we can’t do that to women, you can’t throw them out because of burnt toast or because of a bad day… you can only divorce your wife if there is marital unfaithfulness.”
So the people in that day knew what these two rabbi’s thought, and they wanted to know, what does Jesus say?
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#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.
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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Fierce Love (Of a Mother)
title: Fierce Love (of a Mother)
date: May 8, 2016
teacher: Dawn Bender
#4 Anger
series: Red Letter City
title: Anger
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: May 1, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 5:21-26, Psalm 145:8-9, 1 John 4:8, Ephesians 4:25-27, Ecclesiastes 7:9, Hebrews 12:14-15, Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, Ephesians 2, 1 John 4:19-21
This is an issue that a lot of people deal with… and for most of us, the way we deal with it is to stuff it. The problem is that the things you stuff tend to grow roots in the grounds of your heart… Hebrew calls it a “root of bitterness,” - what happens is, if you never process your feelings, you will get so used to having them that you will begin to justify them. Because they will feel natural to you. And what Jesus is saying here is that when that happens, things can get very ugly very very quickly.
and then there is this:
A lot of people have what I call an “Angry God syndrome.”
They have this idea in their head that God is mad at everybody all the time… and they paint this picture of a God who is upstairs waiting, rubbing his hands together in excitement, licking his lips in anticipation of the moment when he gets to finally bring judgment on our nation, and on this group of people, and on this type of person. and the bible does talk about God being angry with wickedness, and there is plenty of talk in the bible about God’s judgment…
But here is the issue.
and this is why the sermon on the mount is so incredibly crucial to our lives... Because people believed all sorts of things about God back then… things that were not right.
Things that were not love.
“God is love.”
AND people today believe all sorts of things about God that are not right. Things that are not love.
and whatever you think that God is like, if you truly believe you are a follower of him then you are going to try and be that… Isn’t that what Jesus says in Luke? A disciple is not better than his teacher, but he will be like him.
So we have this nation of “Christians” who want to be like God…
but they think God is angry all the time!
and this leads to all sorts of problems. Because if God hates this type of person, then you can hate this type of person.
Because we are just trying to be like God.
So… as people who have Jesus in our lives… who are disciples of Jesus and who want to be more like the God that we serve… I think that it is incredibly important that we understand what God is like.
Does God ever get angry? Yes.
Is God living in a constant disposition of anger toward the world? No.
the rest is in the sermon.
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#3 The Law
series: Red Letter City
title: The Law
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: April 24, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 5:17-20, Luke 24, John 16, Matthew 11:29, Romans 7:7, Romans 7:13, Galatians 5:4, Matthew 23, Acts 15, John 1:14, John 19
One of the key questions to understanding the sermon on the mount, is the order of the sermon.
Is it coincidence that Jesus first gave us the beatitudes, speaking a blessing over the broken people who were there with him, before telling them that they were salt and light?
was it laid out in advance?
I am not sure, but I don’t really get an image of Jesus going into his sermons with an outline. I think its probable that everything he said was incredibly timely and that he discerned what it was the the people needed to hear next, and I think that its very likely that he said what he said here about the law, because he realized that these people were beginning to go somewhere in their minds.
again, you have to consider the crowd. Just take the disciples… the bible says that they were often slow to understand. they were uneducated fishermen… beyond the uneducated fishermen were a group of outcasts who had just been told that they are blessed… that they are salt and that they are light.
Could it be that these things were already getting to their heads?
He says “do not think…”
did he get the impression that they had begun to think this?
Jesus has brought a brand new, upside down Kingdom, and with it he has promised the marginalized crowd on the outskirts of the mountain and his ragamuffin group of disciples, that they were ultimately going to be the image bearers of hope.
Could it be that these people began to think in their minds, that everything he was teaching meant he was replacing the law with himself… and that in the new role he had just given them, of being salt and light, meant that they no longer needed to follow the law, but instead needed follow this new teaching.
So right away he brings them back to reality. He says “I didn’t come to do away with the law. Heaven and earth will pass away before the law does… I came to fulfill the law!’
I am sure they were thinking, okay, awesome, glad we got that out of the way. Now lets go back to our beards that we can’t cut, our side burns we can’t trim, the foods we can’t mix together, and the 613 laws that we have spent our whole lives trying to keep even though we know that it is impossible for anybody to ever keep them all perfectly… Why would we have thought that he came to do away with those laws? Silly us.
He only is claiming that he will fulfill them.
"oh... much better... and to think I actually thought he was saying........"
and then its likely they had another moment… one of those “Wait a second!” moments.
Fulfill the law? Is this guy crazy?!!!????!?!!?!?!?!!!!?
The law was not something that the Hebrew people thought needed to be fulfilled. They thought the law was a book of rules that they were bound too. They didn’t understand that they all pointed, as did the rest of the bible, to the coming Messiah. and so for him to come here and say, “I am going to fulfill the law” they would have been totally, utterly, shocked.
but not only the law… but the prophets as well! For those of you who have been joining us at Equip as we have been studying each beatitude in depth, we have been talking a lot about Luke chapter 4, when Jesus said that he had fulfilled the first half of what the Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 61… and how the crowd was shocked by that statement.
But here, Jesus is making, without a doubt, the boldest statement anybody could ever had made in that culture.
He is saying in this moment… “I am going to fulfill the entire thing.”
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#2 Salt and Light
series: Red Letter City
title: Salt & Light
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: April 17, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 5:13-16, Matthew 18:19-20, 1 John 1:5, John 8:12, Matthew 25:14-30
Detroit is the darkest city in America.
We have less working street lights than anyone. And maybe that statistic has changed by now, because I know that the mayor and our city officials have been working really really hard to put up new lights around the city and really make it feel safer for people when they are walking to their cars or walking down the street at night. But most of you who live here have probably experienced what it feels like to walk down a street at night, with no lights.
Its a horrible feeling.
All sense of confidence is gone. Its just gone. You walk on eggshells. You wonder what is around you. Because its really really dark. You can’t see whats right in front of you. and there is something about experiencing a lack of light in a context like that one that makes you realize how valuable the light truly is.
It shows us what is right in front of us. It shows us what is a few feet down the road. It shows us where we parked, and who is walking toward us in that moment.
It brings certainty to a moment.
But how many of you know, we live a world that is filled with uncertainty. It is filled with doubts. It is filled with people walking through their days not knowing what is on the other side of it, not knowing if people are on their side, or are out to get them… not knowing if tomorrow is even going to come.
and in this dark city that still lacks lights to even guide our steps as we walk on the streets… in this dark city that is Detroit but in so many ways can represent life… Jesus tells us that in this city… we are supposed to be another city… a city on a hill.
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