Lord God, we come before You,
and we know that in many ways
there are things that day after day,
week after week,
we know we still struggle with Lord.
Lord God, as we hear Your Word,
may we be convicted but also consoled.
May we be drawn to repent
and then drawn into grace.
Lord God, help us to see
our need for Your mercy
and to believe it is truly ours.
Lord God, we thank You for who You are,
a God of grace and a God of peace.
In Jesus Christ. Amen.
Howdy.
Well, I want to tell you all
a little something today.
And this is something that I have to explain
a little bit based off of a trick-or-treating incident
from about two years ago.
You see, I've been trying to work on
different outfits and costumes
that I have for different occasions,
but this one Halloween,
I just did not have anything worthwhile.
So, in my creativity,
I put on a polo shirt,
a pair of khakis,
and sat down with a textbook in front of me.
And the children, as they came up for candy,
they said,
what in the world are you dressed up as?
And I said, I am dressed up
as the scariest creature you will come across.
I am dressed up as a math teacher.
The best part was that the kids
decided that they were going to test me
and started throwing out math problems.
Except they're little kids.
They don't have complicated math problems to send out.
And so I could answer the ones that they gave me
in my head,
and the boy types out it on this calculator,
on his phone, looks at me and says,
Evil! And runs away!
And in many ways,
that is the life of the math teacher.
I did get to teach math for six years,
but one of the things that always stood out to me
was this whole conflict of the horrors of new math.
And one of the things that would come up
is I saw Incredibles 2,
and that part where Mr. Incredible is sitting with his son,
and he's pouring over the book,
and all he's saying is, how could they change math?
Why did they change math?
Over and over and over again.
And to realize that in many ways,
this was a fight and a battle
that I had to face as a teacher.
You see, in reality,
as much as there is the mockery of new math,
is that as a math teacher,
I actually understood what the point was.
See, the way that we would do math in previous times
was making sure that we were employable.
We had the skills needed to have jobs in the U.S.
And we made sure that we could get things done
in order to have employment.
But the idea was realizing that the youth of the U.S.
were struggling with areas of abstract reasoning,
critical thinking, and problem solving.
And so the idea was how to make sense of problems
and how to help young people persevere
when they're trying to solve them.
And so with all of this, though,
and I would try to explain it,
but what's the easiest response to that?
Find ways to make fun of it
because we just don't understand it.
And in reality, I have now committed the unforgivable sin
in that I have now discussed math during a sermon.
Yeah, that's the original Greek, right?
Thou shalt not discuss math during the sermon, I'm sure.
But you see, when someone does not understand what you're doing,
or they may know that they can't do the same thing themselves,
it's easier to label them as insane, stupid, or even evil.
And you see, that's the thing about this,
is that we see in our Scripture today,
Jesus' family coming to Him and being dismissive,
like just kind of belittling what it is that He's doing.
Or even more than that, the fact that they were wondering
if maybe Jesus might have gone insane.
And the scribes, the ones who were like the lawyers of the day,
these were the ones who were over there saying that He was evil.
But what was Jesus even doing?
What was Jesus actually doing?
Earlier in the chapter, we hear that Jesus is healing the sick,
casting out demons, proclaiming forgiveness to those with faith,
and showing a new way of following God with hope and life.
See, the issue here is not actually with Jesus.
The issue is that His work went beyond what His family was comfortable
with a member of their community doing,
and beyond what the religious leaders were comfortable with
in their context and communities.
Imagine in our Lutheran context,
if something miraculous were to happen here that we couldn't explain.
Or imagine that we end up with too many emotions.
What if I were to break down in the middle of worship service?
What if you were to truly feel a conviction?
How difficult would that be for you
if you were to see something that you're not used to and not comfortable with?
You see, this is a situation we find with Jesus and the scribes.
See, the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying,
Jesus is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the Prince of Demons,
He casts out the demons.
And Jesus called them to Him and said to them in parables,
how can Satan cast out Satan?
Here's another one.
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
He's going to reiterate it.
If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
And just to be clear, if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided,
he cannot stand but is coming to an end.
No one can enter a strongman's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strongman.
Then indeed, he may plunder his house.
Can Satan fight himself?
And that was what we were really actually dealing with at this moment.
Is that they were saying, oh, these things where you are destroying Satan's kingdom,
oh, clearly you are doing it by the power of Satan, makes absolutely no sense.
You can't hope to win when you spend the whole time undermining yourself.
And the thing is that if Satan were casting out evil or doing God's works,
then it would make no sense.
Or it could even be a good thing if it were even true.
If Satan really were messing up that badly, wouldn't that be great?
You see, you must bind Satan.
You have to overcome Satan to have dominion over him.
Not serving him.
But in reality, don't we do this a lot?
Whenever something doesn't fit the mold of what we're hoping for,
isn't it evil to dismiss it, to ridicule it, to call it evil or wrong?
Because somehow we don't get it or we don't understand.
But even more than this is that then we get to something that is deeper.
The unforgivable sin.
I actually hadn't even heard this term until I went off to college.
I think my old church just never wanted to preach on this.
What in the world could possibly be meant by an unforgivable sin?
It's like, did you forget to put the cards back in the pew when you were done?
Did you not clean up after yourself at home?
Did you say the wrong thing to your mom?
What in the world is the unforgivable sin?
Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven, the children of man.
And whatever blasphemies they utter.
But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness.
But is guilty of an eternal sin.
For they were saying he has an unclean spirit.
So what does this mean?
Wouldn't it have been a whole lot easier if Jesus would have just said,
no one is forgiven for blaspheming God?
That's a nice straightforward thing to say.
And we know you shouldn't blaspheme God.
You shouldn't be doing or saying anything against God.
But Jesus is speaking as someone doing work by God's Spirit.
And He's being told that that Spirit is unclean.
And what He's trying to do is respond to the context.
Because Jesus is pointing out in this context,
do not reject what He is doing when the scribes were missing the point of what He was doing.
Let me try to put it a little bit differently.
When we tell people not to blaspheme God,
like don't go against God and what He wants and everything else,
we can come up with any number of issues that are blasphemy against God.
It is not hard to come up with things that God finds offensive.
Worshipping other gods, probably a good idea not to do that.
Murder?
I mean, Monday mornings it gets a little touch and go sometimes.
But, assuming you can get your initial cup of coffee,
probably not something God is pleased with.
Assaulting one another?
Sexual immorality?
It's all around us.
Many different ways.
Laziness itself?
There are many things that we can point at and say those are blasphemies against God.
But at the same time, we know that God is loving and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding instead fast love.
So, these things are sins, but they're not necessarily unforgivable.
So, there's got to be something deeper here.
What about though, pride, condemnation, lack of self-awareness?
What about making excuses for our choices?
What if we look at all the things that we learned from Jesus,
where Jesus wants us to see our sinfulness.
Jesus wants us to lose the pride.
Jesus wants us to stop condemning one another and bring us to God
and to stop making excuses for our choices.
Blasphemy against Jesus, who He is, the example that He let.
It's sometimes less obvious than don't murder people and don't worship idols.
But it's just as deadly to our spiritual lives.
Is that really what the point is?
But you see, it goes just a little bit deeper.
Is that the biggest thing that would happen is that these scribes would deny who Jesus is
and His purpose on this earth.
See, those scribes denied that Jesus is the Son of God.
That Spirit that was empowering Jesus and speaking through,
they were rejecting that Spirit.
And they were going to reject not only that He's the Son of God,
but also that He took upon Himself the sins of the world.
This is what Jesus was condemning as unforgivable.
Denying the Spirit that affirmed Jesus.
Denying the Spirit that affirmed that Jesus is here to bring people to repentance.
Followed by bringing salvation through His life, death, and resurrection.
This was what we were looking at.
But is this really all that we're meant to consider today?
It is really the only thing that we needed to get out of this passage.
It's the only thing that mattered just to say believe in Jesus
because His Spirit is convicting you.
Believe in what Jesus has done.
Is that really the only point of this?
But you see, the math teacher has to challenge you just a little bit more.
You see, whenever I taught math, it was always tempting just to give the students
problems in the book that I knew they could do.
That was always the temptation. Here's the easy ones.
And then that way they'd have good scores and I'd feel good about myself
and they could go to the next grade and the teacher would be,
oh, they can do all the problems. That's really, really awesome.
But the problem was that I taught sixth grade math
and I taught twelfth grade math.
And having taught them calculus, what I knew was that they had had a teacher
who would just give them assignments and say,
solve the problems and then move on.
There was not the chance of saying, let me challenge how you think.
Let me ask you to solve something beyond what you're ready for.
Let me actually help you to process this.
And then I would see those students that I had either taught physics or calculus
or both to try to go to college to be engineers or architects and quit
because they couldn't problem solve or think critically.
And as much as I knew that those students, those sixth graders,
were going to fail some of these problems I would give them.
Don't worry, I didn't ruin their grades because of it.
But I would give them the challenge.
What was more surprising than the fact that they would struggle
was also the fact that they grew.
And the most surprising was when these kids who had no idea what they were doing
and a few of them would start to get it and then help the rest of them
and then more and more of those students that I've seen graduate over the years
are in math and science classes later on.
So here's the challenge to you.
Is that repeatedly rejecting what the Holy Spirit is saying,
whenever the Spirit is convicting us when we know something is wrong,
is not something to ignore.
Because as God is speaking to you by His Spirit, we're meant to listen.
And if all we do is continually silence what God is saying,
if we just keep shutting ourselves off to it,
not only are we rejecting that we are sinners,
not only are we rejecting our need for forgiveness,
but we're rejecting the God who wants us to grow.
In a future sermon, we are going to have to discuss the teaching of once saved, always saved.
But for today, what I need you to understand is that this is not just for the un-Christians in the world.
This is for you.
Even when we know that things are difficult,
we are still meant to listen to what the Spirit is saying to us.
So is there something that is unable to be forgiven by God?
Not the way that you're concerned about.
You are sinful, and so am I.
We need forgiveness.
And if we believe that Jesus has brought us the salvation that we need,
including all of us, then nothing separates us from that forgiveness.
That is what the Holy Spirit has said.
And that is what we are meant to embrace.
And now, knowing that we are forgiven,
we are called by God to listen to His Spirit and to follow His Son.
So repent and listen.
Even when you fail, because there is no sin that's unforgivable
when we believe we need forgiveness,
and that Jesus is the one who gives it to us freely.
Repent and believe.
This is the Gospel.
Thanks be to God.