And so Matthew four, verse 12 says,
when he heard that John had been arrested,
he withdrew into Galilee.
He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea
in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.
This was to fulfill what was spoken
through the prophet Isaiah.
Land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali
along the road by the sea,
beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles,
the people who live in darkness have seen a great light.
And for those in the land of the shadow of death,
a light has dawned.
From then on, Jesus began to preach,
repent because the kingdom of heaven has come near.
As he was walking along the sea of Galilee,
he saw two brothers, Simon who was called Peter
and his brother Andrew.
They were casting a net into the sea,
for they were fishermen.
Follow me, he told them, and I will make you fish for people.
Immediately, they left their nets and followed him.
Going on from there, he saw two other brothers,
James the son of Zebedee and the brother John.
They were in a boat with Zebedee, their father,
preparing their nets and he called them.
Immediately, they left the boat
and their father and followed him.
Now Jesus began to go all over Galilee,
teaching in their synagogues,
preaching the good news of the kingdom,
healing every disease and sickness among the people.
Then the news about him spread throughout Syria.
So they brought to him all those who were afflicted,
those who suffered from various diseases and intense pains.
The demon possessed the epileptics and the paralytics
and he healed them.
Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis,
Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond, the Jordan.
This is God's word.
If you have, well, let's start that over again.
So again, we're in the Kingdom Life series
and this is our launch back into the book of Matthew.
And like I said, we're gonna spend about eight weeks here
and hopefully we'll learn a little bit
about what it means to be kingdom citizens.
If you do not have a king, you do not belong to a kingdom.
If you have a king you belong to the kingdom.
I'll say that one more time,
if you do not have a king you do not belong to a kingdom.
If you have a king you belong to the kingdom.
I'm on my mind,
We're gonna answer some questions as we go back
into our time in Matthew under this heading of Kingdom Life.
We're gonna be looking at what does it mean to have a king
and to belong to the king and kingdom?
Or how does one become a citizen of this kingdom?
What are the citizenship requirements?
What are the ethics and values of this kingdom?
How are we to live in light of them?
We were introduced to the anointed one
when we first started our series in Matthew,
the Messiah King who was anticipated by the people
of Israel for hundreds of years before his appearing.
If you guys recall, at his birth,
we witnessed that kingmakers, magi from the east,
came and brought prizes or brought gifts
and worshiped this newborn king.
We learned that his front runner, John the Baptist,
who was also predicted and anticipated
for hundreds of years before his arrival,
shows up on the scene and he's baptizing people
in the Jordan River and calling all of Israel to repent,
to shoo, to turn back to God and prepare
for Israel's coming king.
And Jesus the Messiah, he comes to John
and identifies with the people of Israel
if you remember the story of the baptism of Jesus.
He comes to John and he himself enters the water,
enters the water and receives baptism,
not repenting of his own sins or sins that he had committed,
but identifying with the sin and brokenness of his people.
As Jesus comes up from the water,
the Father God speaks and the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus.
This was Christ's anointing ceremony.
This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.
And what happens next?
Jesus is led by the Spirit to the wilderness
for a time of testing.
God's call, as each one and each and every believer
will experience, God's call in us saying yes, I will to him,
is always followed by a time of testing.
This is to prove the genuineness of our response
to God's call.
Maybe some of you experienced that
when you answered the call to follow God.
The time of testing that came.
Hungry and thirsty from his fasting,
Jesus is tempted by the accuser himself, the devil,
to abuse the calling that he has received
for selfish purposes.
He tempts Jesus to act as if God is there
to serve his needs only.
And he tempts Jesus to avoid suffering at all costs.
Use what's at your disposal to avoid God's mission.
But Jesus passes the test by relying on the strength
of God's love and the power of God's word.
And it is here at that moment that we pick up the scripture
in what we read earlier.
And what's interesting is from verse 11
where that story ends, the temptation of Jesus
in the wilderness, to verse 12 where we picked up here,
that's a jump of a year and a half in time.
A year and a half forward.
And what was Jesus doing during this jump
or this leap forward?
To find that out, we would have to look elsewhere
because Matthew has written his book in such a way
that he's trying to communicate a message
through the way he wrote it.
And he's highlighting the things that are most important
to communicate that message.
And that's why we have, the beauty of why we have
four gospels.
Because we can hop over to Luke and find out
what went on during this year and a half.
Luke tells us that after Jesus was baptized,
he returned to the region of Galilee.
And he's a teacher who's going from synagogue to synagogue
and he's loved there.
They love Jesus.
He's the hot stuff on the scene, teaching in the synagogues.
And so Galilee is this large region.
And to the east is the Sea of Galilee.
And to the north and the west is Syria.
And down to the south is Judah or Judea.
Jesus is making his way from his baptism,
if you remember on the map.
He's at the Jordan River near Jericho,
which is down near Jerusalem.
And he's now making his way back up into the Galilean region.
And on his way, he comes to Nazareth,
the town where he grew up.
It's in the southern part of Galilee.
And when Nazareth, when he enters a synagogue there,
he takes the scroll of Isaiah the prophet.
They didn't have books, they had scrolls.
And each one of these books would have been a scroll
unto itself.
He takes Isaiah the prophet and they had a reading schedule
in the synagogues in the first century.
In fact, we still have records of them.
We know what they read on what days.
It was issued to the synagogues.
And it just so happened that on the day Jesus entered
the synagogue in Nazareth, Isaiah nine is to be read that,
or Isaiah 61 is to be read that morning.
And so he picks up the scroll at the synagogue in Nazareth
where he grew up and he reads,
the spirit of the Lord is on me
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recover of sight to the blind,
to set free the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
The crowd is in awe.
Wow, what a great verse.
Good time at church.
Until Jesus says, today as you listen,
this scripture has been fulfilled.
And they go, what?
Excuse me?
What did Jesus just say?
Did he just claim that the subject of Isaiah 61 is himself?
The Messiah, the servant, the branch of David, the king?
And the crowd begins to talk and ask and speak among itself.
It's like, isn't that Jesus, Joseph's son?
Isn't that Jesus, Joseph's son?
Didn't he build a set of cabinets for us when he was a kid?
That's Jesus, the carpenter boy.
Joseph's son, don't we know him?
Isn't he the kid we saw growing up before our very eyes?
Jesus, not to let an opportunity go to waste,
kind of engages with them and basically says,
you're gonna reject me too.
And after that short exchange, they go from amazement
to being absolutely enraged with Jesus.
Who does he think he is?
Blasphemer.
And so they get up and they drive Jesus out of town,
they bring him to the edge of the hill
that the town is built on and they wanna throw him over.
They wanna kill baby Jesus.
Not a baby anymore, but he grew up around them.
Jesus, Joseph's son, the carpenter,
let's throw him off the cliff, kill him.
The Bible says that Jesus is able
to walk through the crowd and escape.
And so we find that Jesus encountered great hostility
on his pathway after his great anointing and temptation,
and that leads to him getting out of dodge.
When he heard that John had been arrested,
the hostility around what God was doing is growing,
not only with him, but with the whole world.
Not only with him, but with John the Baptist.
It says that he withdrew into Galilee, further into Galilee.
He left Nazareth, which is at the south end of Galilee,
and he moved to Capernaum by the sea,
which is at the north part of the Galilean Sea,
or the Sea of Galilee, away from Nazareth.
And he sets up his ministry there.
It's in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.
And again, in his typical Matthew style,
he makes the connection for us
prophesied in advance.
In other words, this wasn't a surprise
or a wrench in God's plan
that people wanted to kill Jesus.
This was God's plan all along.
How often do we think that the plan of God
is only in effect and intact if things are going well for us?
And that any struggle or difficulty or opposition
must mean God's plan isn't happening.
This was God's plan.
Matthew reminds us of that.
It was spoken by the prophet Isaiah.
Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
along the road by the sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles,
though people who live in darkness have seen a great light.
And for those living in the land of the shadow of death,
a light has dawned.
He's quoting here from the book of Isaiah 9, verse one and two.
And so a little background is necessary.
Zebulun and Naphtali, these were kids of a patriarch
named Jacob of the people of Israel.
And as such, each of his kids were allotted land
in the promised land when the people of Israel
came out of their slavery in Egypt
and they entered into the land,
all the sons of Jacob got a piece of the pie.
Zebulun got his land, Naphtali got his land.
They were two of the 12 tribes.
And after the nation of Israel,
like sometime later after King David and Solomon,
the nation of Israel gets into this bitter infighting
with the kids and who's gonna be king,
and so a civil war breaks out in Israel.
And as a result of the civil war,
this kingdom that God had brought his people out
to establish with the 12 tribes
this kingdom is fractured and cut in two.
And now you have a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom.
The northern kingdom was often referred to as Israel,
or sometimes as Samaria, and the southern kingdom
as Judea or Judah.
Jerusalem was in the southern kingdom,
and so if you were a worshiper of Yahweh
and you wanted to go to the temple to worship,
but you were in the northern kingdom
after the civil war, that was problematic.
And that's why the kingdom was called
the northern kingdom, and so it was problematic.
And that's why one of Israel's northern kings
decided to set up a couple of places
to worship in the north that weren't God's temple.
And this caused all sorts of problems.
If you remember the woman that Jesus talks to,
the Samaritan woman, she's talking about
where she worships and where he worships.
That problem persisted until Jesus' day.
So as we hear in our series on Jonah,
the people of Israel, they had lived in rebellion
and they were in exile, and so he sends a foreign nation,
God sends a foreign nation to discipline them
as his children, to conquer them and lead them into exile
as discipline on the northern kingdom of Israel
in 721 BC.
The kingdom of Assyria, one of the most wicked
and deplorable kingdoms, conquers Israel
and takes them into captivity.
And as soon as they do that,
they go out of the land, guess what happens?
If there's free land that doesn't have anyone on it,
other people take it.
And a lot of other people came into the land
that was once the people of Israel's,
as well as Assyria themselves,
having some control over it still, shipped people in.
Because I don't know if you know,
that's a really great way to conquer nations,
is to kind of water them down by sending your own people
and other nations in there
until they lose their national identity.
They don't know who they are
and you've basically brought them all the way down.
Assyria was no different and they did that often.
And so, after they had been in exile,
the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali
and their lands were all but lost, gone,
never to be reestablished.
And after the Babylonians defeat the Assyrians
and the Medo-Persians defeat the Babylonians,
many of the people of Israel who were taken off into exile
are allowed to return to the land.
But when they come back, what do they find?
It's full of all kinds of peoples.
All kinds of people.
And so, intermarriage begins to take place
and other people take the places.
And so, there's a watering down of culture
as well as connection to their God and to his people.
There are different worships of different types of gods
and kinds of gods and idols.
And so, the people in the north are less devout
and less Israelite than in the region below, the south.
So, around Galilee, that's what Jesus is working with
when he moves into his place.
To Jesus' day, Galilee was looked down on
by the Jewish religious elites.
It was a place of scoundrels, working class brawlers,
fighters, and people who were not devout or lovers of God.
That was noted by Jewish historian Josephus
of the area of Galilee.
And to that place, to the place that is despised,
to the place of scoundrels and working class brawlers
and fighters, Jesus relocates himself
right into the middle of it.
And not only does he relocate,
and Matthew tells us he was destined to do that.
It was prophesied that his ministry operation would move there.
Among those people, Jesus will launch his ministry.
To a people living in darkness,
living in a spiritual wilderness, living without access,
cut off from the religious institution of Jerusalem,
to that people, a great light has dawned.
And if you look a little bit later in Isaiah chapter nine,
that great light is described.
I hope you guys know this scripture.
The great light that has dawned in Galilee of the Gentiles
is a child who is born for us, a son who is given to us.
And the government will be on his shoulders,
and he will be named wonderful counselor,
mighty God, eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
His dominion will be vast,
and his prosperity will never end.
He will reign on the throne of David and over its kingdom
and establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness.
From now and forever,
the zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this.
The great light that has dawned,
the prophecy of Jesus moving to Galilee, to Capernaum,
is a prophecy of a Messiah King coming to a dark,
spiritually blind place and bringing light.
Nearly all of us in this room will spend our entire lives
ministering and working among people
who have easy access to the gospel should they want it.
But did you know that recent estimates say
that only 30,000 people, 30,000 people,
will minister to one half of the entire planet
who have little to no gospel representation?
30,000 Christians will go into the land of darkness,
the shadow of death, with the light of Christ to bring it.
You and I will minister to that other half,
3.54 billion people who have access to it
and are oftentimes rejected.
It is significant that Jesus didn't launch his ministry
with the elites in Jerusalem,
but instead with the ragamuffins
and underdog outcasts of Galilee.
The outsider, the destitute and the marginalized
will always be more receptive to the good news
than the religious self-centered, self-righteous elites.
Always.
You want to know where to begin to minister
to people with the gospel of Jesus Christ?
You wanna know how do I take what is burning within me,
this light, and take it out into a dark world?
Just go.
Go to the underdog.
Go to the outcasts.
Go to the marginalized.
Find the needy and help them and give them the only thing
that they really ever need.
And like Jesus, you'll find receptivity
like you've never seen.
Jesus moves from Nazareth to Capernaum
by the Sea of Galilee, and so the text tells us
that from that time on, Jesus begins to preach
the same thing that John was preaching.
Repent because the kingdom of heaven
has come near, and as John the Baptist's ministry
comes to a close and wraps up, and his purpose
on this earth, his calling, the reason for which
he was born is fulfilled, Jesus' mission
and ministry begin to rise, and he takes up
the ministry of preaching, the kingdom of God.
Get your life in order because God's king
and the king's rule and reign are brought
and the king's rule and reign are breaking
into reality right now.
That's a paraphrase of what he says.
Get your life in order because God's king
and the king's rule and reign are breaking
into reality right now.
And my friends, that message is as much for us today
as it was for them.
How will you respond to the king?
And so the story of the gospel unfolds,
and now there's a scene at the Sea of Galilee
where Jesus approaches some brothers, Simon and Andrew,
who are fishermen, and James and John,
and he says to them, follow me and I will make you
fish for people, and this is the beginning
of Jesus' calling of his disciples.
And this passage here shows a series of events
that are a serious breach of protocol for his day,
totally socially unacceptable in their custom.
It was not proper for a rabbi in the first century,
as Jesus was, to seek out and call his own disciples.
That was beneath his status, below his class.
That was not for a rabbi.
No, a disciple would be required to request admittance
into his rabbinical school, and a rabbi would accept it
or deny it, usually after a thorough evaluation
of the student's knowledge and acumen.
Are you good enough to be my student?
In this way, Jesus is actually acting more like a prophet
than he is a rabbi, a prophet who is looking
for his protege, who he will hand off his ministry to next.
And so Jesus walks up to Simon, we know him as Peter,
and Andrew, by the way, Simon is his Hebrew name,
Peter is a Greek name, and Andrew is a Greek name,
and so you can already see the influence
of what's going on in Galilee.
There's a dilution of their Israel-like-ness.
And he says to them, follow me.
And follow me literally means come behind me.
It means get in line behind me.
And for you and I who read that,
or maybe even heard sermons on this before,
it's really easy to read that as an invitation.
We even say nowadays, invite Jesus into your heart, right?
But that's not how it's written here.
The forcefulness in the wording of what is written here
in the Greek is this is a command with a promise.
Follow me, and you will do this.
And we read it as, oh, if I want to, if I feel up to it,
Jesus is saying, come on, it's time to go.
And he says, I will make you, you are going to become
something from your time with me,
something different than you were before.
By spending time with me, I'm gonna make you fish for,
and this is not gonna be just about acquisition of knowledge.
You're not just gonna learn something,
you're gonna learn to do something.
You're gonna fish for people.
In Jeremiah 16, 16, God actually calls out to fishermen.
It says, he uses his metaphor, and it says that,
I'm gonna gather up some fishermen,
and they're gonna come help me bring judgment
on Israel for her rebellion.
Fishermen are gonna come and bring judgment
on the rebellion of Israel, and Jesus is turning
that around here, and he's saying, I'm calling you
to save men from judgment, to fish for people.
And what an adventure, what an opportunity,
what a crazy turn of events for probably
an otherwise mundane day.
These guys are just fishing, and this guy comes up
and says, follow me.
Jesus is calling these guys into a new life
and a new purpose altogether.
And again, Luke tells us that Jesus had already
met these guys before.
They actually had an encounter before this time,
but Jesus hadn't commanded or demanded anything
of them before, only that he might show them something
in the book of Luke, and you can find that out yourself.
But now he comes with a demand, follow me,
come behind me, get in line.
It's no small demand either.
There is more than just a call to a new rabbinic school here.
This is the new king.
This is what's most important about this,
and as we talk about kingdom life,
this is the new king who's shown up,
not just another rabbi.
The new king shows up and he's calling them
to join as citizens in his kingdom.
Become citizens of my kingdom, follow me.
Not a religious institution or movement,
not a system of belief or ritual practices,
not going to church on Sunday morning
to fulfill your religious duty.
Come behind the king, join the kingdom,
kingdom citizenship.
That's the call.
And in Luke 12, Jesus tells his disciples
that the father delights to give his disciples
the kingdom of God.
It's theirs, he's giving it to them.
The kingdom, kingdom life is for the disciples
of Jesus Christ.
It's theirs to live, and Jesus is calling disciples.
Steven Gregg wrote a book called Empire of the Rising Sun,
and in it, he has this quote.
A kingdom is an entity in which one participates
by loyalty to a supreme ruler who is obeyed
in all areas of personal and civic life.
Jesus goes on throughout the gospels
to describe over and over again
the cost of being his disciples,
almost like he's discouraging you.
I don't know if that's the experience you had
when you met Jesus or when you met Jesus
through a Christian organization or a church,
but it's a very important thing to know.
And I think that's the key to being a Christian.
I don't know if you've ever been to a Christian organization
or a church or with a believer.
If you felt like, man, they really don't want me
to accept this.
But Jesus seemed to go out of His way to tell them,
this is not easy.
This is not easy believe-ism.
This is not cheap grace, what's about to happen.
You're joining a kingdom behind a king.
It requires obedience.
I know we love to say we're sinners, and we do fail,
and that is true, we talked about that in confession.
We talked about obedience.
This requires absolute obedience.
That's part of what it means to understand the gospel, right?
It does require absolute obedience.
And so when we talk about confession,
or we talk about laying our sins before the Lord,
it's because Jesus was perfectly obedient.
It did require perfect obedience, we just couldn't do it.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The gift of salvation is free.
The life of discipleship is hard.
Hard.
Over and over and over again, the scripture says,
if you love me, you will obey me.
Obey.
You want to know if you love me?
You claim my name?
You say Christian?
Look at your life, do you obey me?
Do you obey me?
Do you actively obey me?
Obey me, because a kingdom,
unlike a religious experience or institution,
a kingdom is an entity that is participated in
by loyalty to a supreme ruler
who is to be obeyed in all areas of life.
Jesus told his disciples later,
every one of you who does not renounce all your possessions
cannot be my disciple.
If anyone wants to follow after me,
let him deny himself, take up his cross,
and come behind me.
In that same book, Steve Gregg says,
the true gospel is about,
Nate, you got that up there?
Thanks.
The true gospel is about the rightful claims
of the king and of his kingdom.
Its emphasis is upon the parochial
and the rightful claims of the king.
The parochial is the prerogative of the king
rather than the desires, preferences,
or even needs of the sinner.
That's worth repeating.
Its emphasis is upon the prerogative of the king
rather than the desires, preferences,
or even needs of the sinner.
In the kingdom of God, one sinful self-interest
must be sacrificed to God's choice for one's life.
Those who regard this as too great a sacrifice
should not be lied to, coddled, or bargained with.
They are simply not ready for Jesus.
He will not change his terms to salvage their egos.
This is most illustrated in the encounter
between Jesus and the rich young ruler.
Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?
Tell me the good.
I'll do whatever.
I wanna have eternal life.
What good can I do?
And Jesus says, well, you keep all the commandments, right?
You keep all the commandments, right?
And the rich young ruler goes, well, which ones?
Like there's 613 of them.
All of them are just the 10 commandments,
and Jesus starts listing off some of the main 10 commandments,
the moral law.
Don't murder, don't kill, don't lie, don't steal, whatever.
And the rich young ruler says, I've done all those.
I've done all those since I was a little kid.
I obeyed the law.
What else must I do?
It says Jesus looked at him.
Jesus looked at the rich young ruler and hated him
because he was a rich man.
No, it doesn't say that.
It says Jesus looked at him and he loved him.
And then he told him to sell everything he has
because he saw your idol is your possessions.
Your idol is what you have,
and that will never bring the kingdom life to you.
He loved him, and so he said, sell it all.
Come follow me.
And it says the rich young ruler hung his head
and went away because he had such great wealth.
Jesus is calling each one of us to follow him,
to come behind him.
But it is so much more than a mere intellectual assent
to who he claims to be.
It is a call, an imperative to join his kingdom,
his mission, his way over every other way.
It comes with a promise, though.
He's a good God.
The promise is that we can spend all of our lives,
all of our resources, all of our time, all of our energy,
everything we have, we can pour it out
for the lives of others,
to fish them from the chaotic waters of sin and destruction
and bring them into this kingdom of light.
We can do that.
We get to do that.
We are honored to do that.
This is what Christ spent his life on.
Truly in every way, he spent his life,
including his life, for us, to pluck us,
to fish us out of the dark, chaotic,
and destructive waters of sin,
and to plant us in a kingdom of a good King.
My time belongs to the King and the kingdom.
My future belongs to the King and the kingdom.
My money belongs to the King and the kingdom.
My priorities belong to the King and the kingdom.
My preferences belong to the King and the kingdom.
My hopes belong to the King and to the kingdom.
My desires belong to the King and the Kingdom.
My family belongs to the King and the Kingdom.
My wife belongs to the King and the Kingdom.
My kids, my work, my life belong to the King and the Kingdom.
A disciple of Jesus lives and dies for King and Kingdom.