Hello everyone and welcome to Trinity Sermons.
Here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, we would like to share with you sermons that inspire
and encourage you in your faith journey as together we're learning to love Jesus, live
like Jesus and lead others to Jesus.
And today we are beginning a brand new sermon series and it is called Playing With Fire.
Please make sure to follow our podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes
and we hope you enjoy this sermon.
God bless.
A reading from Psalm 37 verse 1 to 11.
Do not fret because of those who are evil, or be envious of those who do wrong.
For like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.
Trust in the Lord and do good, dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Make your way to the Lord, trust in Him, and He will do this.
He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday
sun.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.
Do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes,
refrain from anger and turn from wrath.
Do not fret, it leads only to evil.
For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit
the land.
A little while, and the wicked will be no more.
Though you look for them, they will not be found, but the meek will inherit the land
and enjoy peace and prosperity.
This is the word of the Lord.
We've just come through the Christmas season, and that means we've been singing songs like
Silent Night.
Silent Night, Holy Night, All is Calm, All is Bright, Round Yon Version, Mother and Child,
Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
It paints a beautiful picture of Jesus, the child, meek, and mild.
This image of the baby Jesus sometimes actually affects our image of the grown up Jesus.
And we start to imagine that the grown up Jesus was also calm and no crying he makes,
and he's this moderate, unexcitable, you know, just, he's not going to, an unoffensive man
who doesn't want to cause a ruckus.
I didn't come here to make any trouble.
This is Jesus.
God once said that Christianity is a mild-mannered religion led by a mild-mannered Messiah who
is trying to make people like you and me more mild-mannered.
But if that is the case, then how do we understand pieces of scripture like this?
Jesus said, I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning.
That does not sound so mild-mannered.
You know, a lot of people would say, you know, Jesus, Jesus was never harsh.
But then you look at some of the scathing rebukes he gave to the Pharisees, you brood
of vipers, you son of a snake is essentially what that means, right?
Or some say, oh, Jesus was never angry.
Jesus was never violent.
But look, he once made a whip out of cords and he turned over the tables and he caused
a small riot in the temple.
People say, oh, Jesus, he was always peaceful.
But you know that Jesus would often, you know, he would answer his hecklers.
And once he stared down an angry mob who was ready to stone an adulterous woman, he was
a force to be reckoned with.
People say, oh, Jesus, yeah, he was always friendly, always compliant.
But once when a army, a detachment of soldiers rather, came to arrest Jesus, he wouldn't
have any of it.
He gave them an earful and he sent them back.
And they went back saying, man, no one has ever spoken to us like this guy did.
You know, they came back empty handed.
And Jesus, oh, Jesus is timid.
Jesus is meek.
Jesus is mild.
No.
And Jesus even gave orders to demons.
He would say, sit down and shut up, you deaf and dumb spirit.
Right?
So, so sleep in heavenly peace.
No way.
That's not the Jesus we're talking about.
Today we're beginning a new teaching series called Playing With Fire.
And we're going to see that Jesus was anything but meek and mild.
And of all the controversial and all the contentious things that Jesus did, the thing that got
him in the most hot water was that he disrespected some of Israel's most cherished symbols and
traditions.
Now, you guys know you're not supposed to mess with people's symbols and traditions,
the religious symbols, the political symbols.
You're not supposed to do that.
You can make fun of Donald Trump.
You can make fun of Joe Biden.
You can call Justin Trudeau all the names you want.
But if you burn a flag, now you're playing with fire.
Something's got to be done to you.
You have gone too far.
If you ever wonder why Jesus died, you got a few theories.
You could say, well, he was politically dangerous to the Romans, so they wanted him executed.
You could say he was just betrayed by someone who he thought was a friend.
You could say that, but the real thing that did him in was that he implicitly and explicitly
attacked some of the treasured sacred symbols of Israel's traditions.
And the saying goes that when you play with fire, Jesus, when you play with fire, you're
going to get burned.
Sometimes when I read the Bible, I'm like, Jesus, don't say that.
And then he says it.
You're like, Jesus, don't go there.
But he goes there, right?
He's always crossing the line.
He's always like things that were out of bounds, things that were taboo, things that he shouldn't
have said he said, and controversy followed him wherever he went.
And I want you to know, I'm not just talking about past tense with you this morning.
Jesus still pushes people's buttons, or at least he should if you understand what he's
saying.
He still pushes you and challenges your traditions.
And some of the things you hold most sacred, Jesus might have a word or two to say about
that as well.
So if we're going to understand what that means for us here today in 2024, we are going
to first have to teleport ourselves back 2000 and some odd years ago to the time when Jesus
was living on this earth in first century Israel.
And over the next five weeks, we're going to do this by looking at the scriptures and
how Jesus messed with, challenged, and reinterpreted five key symbols that got him in a load.
of hot water.
Here's what we're going to look at over the weeks ahead.
We're going to see how Jesus reinterpreted scripture.
Jesus, you can't do that, but he did it.
Okay.
And now we're going to look at how Jesus called out Israel's attachment to the temple.
Jesus, that's a big no-no, but for Jesus, he went after that as well.
Thirdly, Jesus critiqued their idea of family.
And you don't mess with the family, Jesus, but Jesus still did.
He messed with the family.
He went there.
And then fourthly, we're going to look at how Jesus really caused his contemporaries
to rethink what the Sabbath was all about.
And the Sabbath was this cherished, cherished symbol of Israel's identity.
So he touched and pushed all these buttons, got into a ton of hot water as he did.
But today we're going to start with one of the biggest hot button issues back in his
day and in our own day too.
And that is how Jesus challenged and reinterpreted what Israel thought about the land.
And I'm talking about what some would call the holy land, the holy land.
So I wanted to say, you know, talk about playing with fire.
I'm well aware that as we sit here today, there is an ongoing and just tragic conflict
in the land, the land of Palestine, the land of Israel.
Every week here at Trinity, we're praying for that conflict.
We are praying for a peaceful resolution and for peace to triumph over violence.
So I want you to know today, my intention is not to wade into the political ins and
outs of that conflict today.
But we still need to talk about the land because Jesus poked and touched on the land as a big
issue in his own day.
And there's lots we can learn about it today.
So we're going to delicately move in that direction and see what we can learn together.
But maybe one of the best ways to think about it is for me just to ask you a question.
What is your, I should say most, what is your most valued possession?
Your most valued.
The one thing you own that you value above all other things.
If you can hold that in your mind this morning, that'll be helpful because if you had asked
that question to a first century person living in Palestine, they would have said, well,
it was of course their land, their land.
Now let's talk about this land.
What land are we referring to?
I found this little animation online.
I am not a historian.
I'm going to try to walk you through it in like two minutes, but this is the land that
we're talking about.
This land was originally occupied by a group of people.
I think you would just call it Canaanites, right?
Eventually those Canaanites were kind of ruled by the Egyptian empire, which bordered on
the Hittite empire.
And there were lots of Hittite people who lived in that land too.
Now what happened was Israel eventually was released from slavery in Egypt.
They came and they inhabited that land.
However, Assyria rose up and they conquered most of the world, including Israel, and they
exiled the 10 Northern tribes.
Then Babylon came and conquered Assyria and they took away the Southern tribes and exiled
them.
The Persian empire defeated Babylon and let some of the exiles go back home.
And then eventually, of course, Alexander the Great rose to power and he took over most
of the known world, the Macedonian empire, the Greeks.
Then the Roman empire, the time that Jesus lived, they were the ones that kind of ruled
the known world, including this land, this holy land.
And eventually, Constantine became a Christian.
Eventually the Roman world split East and West, the Byzantine empire.
And then, of course, you had the rise of various Islamic kingdoms and empires.
And Caliphate would take control of that area.
And then the Seljuk Turks usurped power from the Caliphate and they took over the area.
Then came the Crusades.
The Pope in Rome sent crusaders into the holy land.
But Muslim leaders like Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, and Syria, they reconquered the
holy land from the crusaders.
Genghis Khan, apparently, Genghis Khan from the East came in.
He came very close to conquering the holy land and briefly controlled some key points.
But for several hundred years after that, the Ottoman Empire owned and occupied the
land.
The Ottoman Empire fell.
And then came the British protectorate that was set up around Israel.
And then in 1948, Israel became an independent nation.
And there was an armistice, which delineated the green line, right?
It delineated where the borders of Israel would be.
Then in 1967, there was the Six-Day War, which happened.
And that expanded the territory even more.
And of course, we could go on and on.
But in recent history, in the past decades, there has been an ongoing conflict in that
area.
And that is an over, over, oversimplified picture of the history there.
But I only show it just to give you an idea.
This is the land that we're talking about.
How many millions of people have died to possess this land or retake this land?
Who knows?
But the question we need to ask is, what is so special about this land?
What does the Bible say is so special about this land?
And why did Israel think this land was so sacred and important?
Well, there's five words that begin with P that will help you understand the answer to
that question.
The first is the word promise.
The land was a sign of God's promise.
They called it the promised land, right?
When God called to Abraham, the first promise he made to Abraham, he says, Abraham, to you
and to your descendants, I will give this land.
And once God's people had been kicked out of Eden, they had lost their land.
They had lost their home, if you will.
But now God is promising them a chance to come back to a land, a chance to be at home
again.
And God says, I will be your God and you will be my people.
And the sign and the seal of that promise will be this land.
So the land represented the promise and the promise was sacred.
That's why it's so important.
But secondly, the land also represented provision, right?
When God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, he said, you know what?
I'm going to take you to a land that is flowing with milk and honey.
And then when they got to the edge of the land, Joshua sent some spies in to check out
the land.
They came back with a huge cluster of grapes that was so heavy they had to carry it with
two men.
And the idea was this land was going to provide everything that Israel needed, milk and honey
and grapes and fruit.
All they needed was here in this place.
It was God's provision for Israel.
That's why it was so important to them.
So it was the land of promise.
It was the land of provision, but it was also the land of possession.
God said to Israel, I want you to take charge of this land and possess it.
I want you to take care of it.
Don't exploit it.
Take care of it.
In fact, God even says, if you don't take care of it and treat it properly, I will scatter
you back to the nations.
And some think that's actually what was happening when Babylon swept in and exiled Judah back
to Babylon.
But anyways, it became, this possession became an inheritance.
It became something that was passed down from generation to generation to care for and to
sustain every family and every generation, allowing them to prosper in Israel.
So it was a possession for them, but more than that, fourthly, the land was a place
of peace.
I mean, Israel at times of being attacked left, right and center, especially when they
had no home and they're wandering in the wilderness, they were very, very vulnerable.
But here in this land, they would have protection, they would have safety and they would have
peace.
Listen to the Psalm we read this morning.
Dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
For those who are evil will be destroyed.
The meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity.
Another word that the Bible uses to talk about this peace is the word rest.
In the land, Israel was going to have rest from all her enemies.
And like Joshua said, right when they were going into the land, he said, the Lord your
God will give you rest by giving you this land.
So are you beginning to see why this land was such a treasure and why it was so sacred
to Israel?
It was their promise.
It was their provision.
It was their possession.
It was their peace.
But there's even one more thing that made this land absolutely sacred and untouchable.
And that was it was the place.
What place?
What do you mean the place?
I'm talking about the place, not any place.
It was the place.
It was God's place.
It was where God lived.
It was where God reigned.
All the nations around them had kings that ruled over their territories.
And this was God's kingdom.
It was the kingdom of God, where God lived, where God reigned, where God ruled.
I watched a movie a while ago.
The name of the movie was called The Kingdom of Heaven.
And the movie was all about the battle between the crusaders and some of the Islamic kingdoms
about fighting over this land.
And the movie was called The Kingdom of Heaven.
It was understood this was the kingdom of God.
This was where God lived.
And in fact, some scholars say that's the primary reason why it's ever called the Holy
Land is because it was the earthly dwelling of the God of Israel.
So in Jesus' day, to get the land back would mean getting the kingdom back.
It would mean getting God back and placing God back where God belongs.
And they felt, I think in Jesus' day, they were so close to this goal.
Yes, they were occupied by the Romans, but just one more revolt, just one more war, and
you could push those Romans out and you could fortify your borders.
And once again, God could live here.
God could reign here.
His kingdom would come on earth.
That is why actually some of Jesus' own followers carried swords with them, right?
Jesus himself talked a lot about the kingdom of God.
And they thought, ah, Jesus gets it.
Jesus understands it.
He knows how important this land is.
He's going to reestablish the kingdom.
Jesus understands the promise.
He understands the provision.
He understands this is our possession.
He understands this is our protection.
This is how we get our peace.
But they were sorely disappointed and highly offended because Jesus had a very, very different
view of the land.
One of the biggest arguments for this is actually the argument from silence.
In the Old Testament, you hear about the land over and over and over again, thousands of
times the land is mentioned.
You get to the New Testament.
It's like the trail disappears.
It's like it's gone.
No one's talking about land anymore.
No one's talking about territory.
No one's talking about this promised piece of geographical area.
What is going on?
And I think all we can conclude is that for Jesus and for those very first Christians,
the land just wasn't important to them in the same way anymore.
But though the New Testament didn't talk about land much, Jesus still did make some pretty
sharp pointed comments, especially if you can read between the lines of what he's saying.
Reading this 2,000 years later, we may not notice it.
But he took, you have to understand, he took that sacred symbol of land and what he said
and what he did.
He totally flipped it on its head.
And he had the audacity, the audacity to kind of say to Israel, to say, you need to surrender
your passion and surrender your commitment.
Give up your passion for this land.
And instead you need to replace it with a passion for me.
I mean, can you actually imagine just how volatile of a statement that would be?
Let me show you how Jesus totally redefined the promise, the provision, the possession,
the peace and the place of God in his own ministry.
Just keep in mind, this is playing with fire.
Okay?
Okay.
The first thing, Jesus redefines the promise that God gave to Israel.
It's true.
Yes, the land was promised to Abraham dating way back.
But Jesus says, you know what?
Now I am the promise.
It's in me actually that that promise has been fulfilled.
In fact, Jesus will say things like, I'm going to go and prepare a place for you.
It's not this place.
I'm going to go and prepare a place for you so that where I am, there you can be also.
This is the new promise, right?
This is where the story was always going.
Jesus says that it wasn't going to some geographical land somewhere.
That wasn't the promise.
The promise was to be with me.
The promise was to be with Jesus.
It's crazy talk.
But even Paul says, no matter how many promises God has made, they all find their yes in Jesus.
Jesus made a new promise to us.
And in Jesus, all of God's promises and that must include the promise of land, find their
fulfillment.
Crazy.
I know, you know, he's asking for it.
Absolutely dangerous, dangerous words.
Jesus is playing with fire.
Big time.
Okay?
But secondly, not only does he offer another promise.
He offers another way of provision.
The land.
Yes, the land was supposed to provide everything that they needed.
Remember the vineyard, right?
In fact, the Holy Land was actually called a vineyard in many of the Old Testament scriptures.
But here comes Jesus in John 15 and he says, you know, actually, I am the vine.
You're the branches.
I'm the vine.
Remain in me and you will have everything you need.
What's Jesus saying here?
Let's think this through.
He's saying that the vineyard God is now cultivating the new vineyard.
There's only one life giving vine in it and it is Jesus.
It is me, he says, and attaching to me, attaching to me alone.
That's the way you get the life.
The life that was once promised through the land now flows through me to you.
Paul said it this way.
He said, my God will supply every need of yours according to what?
The fertility of the land, the harvest of the land.
No.
It is riches in Christ Jesus.
God, Jesus has a goal to say the real way God is going to provide for you now is that
he provided me.
Jesus says, God provides for you.
Yes, he planted you in this land once he did.
Yes.
And that was a provision where provision flow.
But now by grafting into me, that is where the true life comes from.
And that is how God is going to supply your every need.
Good grief.
These are fighting words.
I hope you're understanding how contentious these words are.
But guys, it doesn't end there.
I already told you, Israel understood that land as their possession, their possession.
And I understand it as well that it was a big part of people's inheritance.
It was passed down.
But Jesus offers people, he basically goes around and says, I got a better possession
for you.
I've got an even greater inheritance and that is me.
Take a look at this example.
Someone in the crowd that said to Jesus, teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance
with me.
And Jesus said, take care, be on your guard against greed for one's life does not consist
in an abundance of possessions.
This guy wanted Jesus to arbitrate who gets the possessions from the father's estate.
You can read in possessions there, land.
Land was the most valuable possession.
Jesus says, I don't really care.
Be careful, Jesus says.
Don't get caught up in all this pursuit of possessions.
I'm an even greater possession for you.
Or once a young man wanted to follow Jesus and Jesus says to him, okay, you can follow
me, but first go and sell what you own, give the money to the poor and then come and follow
me.
And we're told that he went away sad.
Because why?
Because he owned so much property.
Jesus says, you can sell it all, come and follow me.
But he couldn't because he was tied up with this possession of land.
Jesus says, I'm an even greater possession.
Or Luke, Luke just comes out and says, he says, none of you can be my disciples if you
don't give up your possessions.
And again, you can read land in there.
If you don't give up on that, you can't be my disciple.
Jesus himself was so valuable, so valuable.
He was the pearl of great price.
He was worth selling everything for in order to have just him.
So you see what he's doing.
He redefines the promise.
He redefines what provision looks like.
And now he's even redefining what the ultimate possession is for God's people.
What about peace though?
What about peace?
The land was supposed to be that place where Israel could finally rest and could finally
have peace from their enemies.
But Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest.
He says, I'm gentle and I'm lowly in heart and you will find rest for your soul.
Not over there, not over there, but right here.
The rest and protection that God promised is no longer centered in a geographical territory.
It is found in Jesus.
It's given by Jesus.
Jesus goes ahead and he just says, peace.
I'm offering peace.
Peace I give to you.
Peace I offer to you.
It is not the kind of peace that the world is offering.
It is not a peace with borders and boundaries and guards and armies to defend the peace.
I'm offering you a more lasting peace.
I'm offering you a deeper kind of rest.
But perhaps Jesus most controversial statement concerned the place of God.
Where was God's kingdom?
Where did God live?
And Jesus just taking his life in his hands, he says, God's place, God's kingdom.
It is not really here in this territory.
It's not in this land because it's another kind of kingdom.
It's a different kind of place.
God's kingdom.
Jesus once said, you know, when is the kingdom coming?
And Jesus said, it's not coming like you think it's coming.
It's not something you can observe.
It doesn't have a line around it.
It doesn't have boundary markers and territories.
Even if people say, oh, here it is or there it is, Jesus says, no, he says the kingdom
is among you.
That is a radical reinterpretation of the kingdom of God.
And I think besides that, Jesus would probably say, well, listen, you know, don't we also
know that God is the God of all the earth?
Right?
Is God's reign limited to one little patch of land in one particular place?
No.
God is the king of the whole world, of the whole cosmos, the great biblical story.
Yes, it started with one group of people coming to possess one holy strip of turf, but it
ends with the liberation of the whole universe with all God's people from every race, every
creed, every tribe, every tongue, all inheriting the promise of God through Israel, through
Christ, through baptism, through the Holy Spirit.
When Jesus spoke about the kingdom, he pointed at something much bigger and much different
than a piece of land.
It was all the world for all of God's people.
My gosh, what is Jesus doing here, everybody?
He's redefining what holy land is.
While everyone's clamoring to get back onto this piece of property, Jesus says, you will
never be home until you find your home in me.
The kingdom of God is not geographical.
It is relational.
And you will know you've entered the holy land, not when you cross a border or not when
you cross a river, but you will know you've entered it when you have gathered around me.
That's the holy land.
Jesus is interested in restored land.
He's interested in a restored people.
So that's what it means actually to come home.
Instead of coming home to a place, you come home to a person.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the land.
He is the promise.
He is a provision.
He is a possession.
He is a piece.
He is the place.
What Israel had once through land, we now have, we all have through Jesus.
And that would have absolutely infuriated Jesus' enemies.
There is no doubt this was a big reason why Jesus was arrested and crucified in the end.
He was challenging and reinterpreting the cherished symbol of land, a symbol of national
and religious identity.
So just to close, what does all this mean?
Let's go back to that question I asked you at the beginning.
What is your greatest possession?
What is the thing that's most important to you?
Maybe today, the thing you need to take away from this message, which was certainly a long
and winding message, is that things and possessions are not what is most important in your life.
Are your possessions holding you back from following Jesus?
Would you be open to having fewer possessions if it meant you could have more of Jesus?
Maybe that's just, maybe that's the one thing some of us need to take away today.
Secondly though, maybe we need to redefine our concept of home.
You know, where do you call home?
Is it a certain address, a certain driveway, a certain lawn?
Is it a certain apartment building, a certain floor, a certain unit in that building?
None of these things are Jesus' definition of home.
Coming home for Jesus isn't pulling into a driveway.
It's gathering around Him.
And so my question is, have you come home to Jesus?
Because when we do, we realize that He is our promise, that He is our provision, that
He is the greatest possession.
He is the one who offers us peace and rest.
He is our place.
May God help us to hear these words today, which were challenging and still are challenging.
And as we hear them, may we not run or resist them, but return to our true home and our
true rest in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope that you found this sermon something
that you will take with you all week long.
Make sure to come back again next week, and thanks again for listening.
Today's sermon was taken from the 11-15 service on January 7, 2023 at Trinity Church, Streetsville
in Mississauga, Ontario.