God Changes the Person, Not the Law

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[0:00] going. If I blaze on past something that you think I should say about the fill-in sheet, just raise your hand and I'll go back to it because I might get ahead of my skis here a little bit. So just raise your hand and I will tell you what the fill-in the blank is. All right, so let's go to our reading, Matthew 8, 1 through 13. It reads like this. Large crowds followed Jesus as he came down the mountainside. He had just finished the Sermon on the Mount. Suddenly a man with leprosy approached him and knelt before him. Lord, the man said, if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean. Jesus reached out and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be healed. And instantly the leprosy disappeared. Then Jesus said to him, don't tell anyone about this. Instead, go to the priest and let him examine you. Take a look at the leprosy. He said, I am willing. I am willing. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed. When Jesus returned to Capernaum, a Roman officer came and pleaded with him. Lord, my young servant lies in bed, paralyzed and in terrible pain. Jesus said, I will come and heal him. But the officer said, Lord, I am not

[1:19] worthy to have you come into my home. Just say the word from where you are. And my servant said, I will come and heal him. And the officer said, Lord, I am not worthy to have you come into my home. And my servant said, Lord, I am not worthy to have you come into my home. And my servant will be healed. I know this because I am under the authority of my superior officers and I have authority over my soldiers. I only need to say, go, and they go, or come, and they come. And if I say to my slaves, do this, they do it. When Jesus heard this, he was amazed. Turning to those who were following him, he said, I tell you the truth. I haven't seen faith like this in all Israel. And I tell you this, that many Gentiles will come from all over the world, from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven. But many Israelites, those for whom the kingdom was prepared, will be thrown into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then Jesus said to the Roman officer, go back home, because you believed it has happened. And the young servant was healed that same hour. Let's pray.

[2:33] Lord, thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Well, these are all connected and they're all from one book, but that's okay. Matthew is a good representative book about the life of Jesus. They're all good, but Matthew is really good, especially in the book of Matthew. And I'm going to read a little bit of Matthew. for what we're talking about, because Matthew is always trying to connect the story of Jesus back to the Old Testament and to show that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. And that's something we're particularly interested in this particular series. So I want to go back and look at some of these things that we've just read. One was about the temptation of Jesus. The other was about Jesus in the boat with his disciples and the storm. And I want you to think back of the interactions that we've seen so far between God and his people. So think about the garden, where Adam and Eve face temptation, but give into it, right? We think about how God judges the earth in a flood. So we know about Noah and his family. We think about how God gives the law at Mount Sinai, which was designed for life, but also failed in this important way because nobody could

[3:48] keep it. God gave the law and it was good, but nobody could keep it. And so we think about the And even the ones who looked like they were keeping it were just sort of signaling their own righteousness, which itself was breaking the law. And so, actually, let's skip ahead to the, if you want to look at, well, actually not. No, we're on the right track. Okay. So these things are sort of interleaved, but if I get ahead of my skis, you raise your sheet there. So what we find in Matthew is that, Jesus warns about, actually, I am wrong about this. Hold on. They're out of order. Okay. So go to the third line where it says, making a show of keeping the law is actually a violation of the law. So that's the funny thing Jesus says. He says, if you try really hard to make a show of keeping the law, you're breaking the law because you're actually breaking it in two ways. One is you don't actually care about the law. You care about yourself. So you're, that's idolatry. You're putting yourself above everybody else. And the other thing is you're lying. You're not, you're not, you're being a false person. You're not actually that righteous. So there's all sorts of things that are problematic with that. So making a show of keeping the law is actually

[5:08] a violation of the law. And we find in Matthew is, he says, be careful sort of advertising your own righteousness. You should be so circumscribed. You should be so circumscribed that you're not circumspect about advertising your own righteousness that say you're being generous. Your left hand shouldn't even know what your right hand is doing, which is a weird way that that's impossible because they're both connected to the same brain. But that's hyperbole. That's like, you should be that secretive about your generosity, for example. So you don't, you don't want to, you don't want to sort of show off too much about your ability to keep the law because it's not an ability at all. And then this would be the first thing on there. The second, the second bullet point list is in the Sermon on the Mount, we're still talking about the law, which we're not covering, but he intensifies the pun, he intensifies the law in all sorts of amazing ways. So, you know, I'm going to look around, fingers crossed, I don't see a single murderer in the room, but if you have a history like that, I'm, you know, come sit next to me afterwards. I want to hear it, you know, but none of you have murdered anyone. But if you read the Sermon on the Mount,

[6:17] Jesus says, if you call someone a fool, the punishment's the same as murder. And that's jarring because I'm like, I have called somebody a fool. And actually I would go up to God and say, this doesn't seem fair because they actually were a fool. Like they were dumb. You know, they were a fool. Am I not allowed to name a truth? You know? And so what am I supposed to do? Not say it, I guess. Maybe I can just think it, but not say it. But then the Bible tells me to hold every captive, every thought captive. So I'm not even supposed to think it now? What am I supposed to do? And what Jesus would say is really, I need to love the fool and pray for him and help him and even die for him if necessary. And when the law is intensified in all these ways, I easily and quickly realized that I can't do any of it. I'm not capable even of not calling somebody a fool. So the law is there, but it's impossible for me to keep and it's intensified. So the law is there, but it's impossible for me to keep and it's intensified. So far from discarding the law, this is the sheet, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount intensifies the law. He intensifies the law. The law, and he makes us truly despair of actually being able to

[7:32] keep it, which is where we need to be. We need to be in despair of our own ability to keep the law so that we can turn to what God actually does do to rescue us from sin, death, and the devil, and our breaking of the law. Now think about Matthew 4, which we read.

[7:51] This is the beginning of Jesus's ministry. He's tempted, but he didn't sin. I think this is so important. This isn't just some one-off story. This is a really book ending of all of the history of the Bible. And if the goal is, you know, he's quoting from scripture. For one thing, he's quoting from the Old Testament to defeat the temptation. He's reminding the devil of what God actually said, right? So there's this connection between the Old Testament, and the New Testament. But this is, just as Adam and Eve are giving into the temptation at the beginning of the curse of sin, then Jesus not giving in to temptation at the beginning of his ministry is the symbol or the sign that God is now finally dealing with the sin and the death that came out of the fall, of falling into temptation and falling into sin. So there's these parallels between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And so, you know, we're going to the very beginning of the Bible and the very beginning of Jesus's ministry. One is that it plunges humanity into sin and brokenness. And the other, by not giving into temptation, Jesus is now reversing. He's beginning to reverse the curse that God has laid on humankind. And so, the parallels are there. The Apostle Paul notices this in Romans chapter 5. You read chapter 5 of

[9:19] Romans. And he writes, He says, So Paul is always, he's bookending the fall of Adam and Eve and the victory of Jesus over all of that. And so, if you want to read the next line there, there's just one word. Romans 5 tells us, While death reigned in the world because of the disobedience of one man, and actually it was a man and a woman, but it's sort of shorthand. Righteousness reigns because of the obedience of the one man, Jesus Christ. So there's this sort of, this great thing. So Jesus is able to do what Adam and Eve were unable to do. And he's actually able to keep the law. He's able to be obedient to the Father, even to the point of death. Jesus actually loves fools, and he even dies for them. So he's able to do what the law actually requires. And he is the king that the people don't really deserve. So you see that Jesus all along the way, we're kind of just, the point of this is that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the things that God has been sort of moving his people toward all along. So he's, he's, well, there's more to it. There's more to it. So we're going to look about a little bit about the reading about Jesus in the boat with his disciples. This is even before we get to the gospel today. We got, well, it's all the

[10:50] gospel. We got, well, it's all the gospel. We got, well, it's all the gospel. We got, well, it's all the gospel, but to the sermon text about Jesus in the boat with his disciples, there's a connection to Noah. Isn't that interesting? They're in the boat, there's a storm, there's danger. And at the time of creation, God is able to tame chaotic waters with just a word. It's very interesting. And he says, he kind of pulls things into existence. And Jesus carries the mantle of the creator God. And he demonstrates the mastery over whether he puts himself in the boat and he saves his companion. And he's able to do it with just one word, right? And so the next line, it says, Jesus on the sheet here, Jesus in the boat reflects God's power when he speaks an ordering word into chaos. So you see these kind of these parallels from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Jesus, now there's a different sort of circumstance there that the world's not being judged, but there they are in this boat. Jesus is able to speak a word into the chaotic wind and, and all that, and it becomes ordered and it becomes safe. And so he carries the mantle of the creator into it, and he demonstrates the mastery over weather. But this is the interesting

[12:01] thing. Jesus is in the boat with his disciples. So God is changing fundamentally how he interacts with humanity. God didn't ride in the boat with Noah and his family. There's not enough room for all the animals who are in there, I guess. I don't know. But here Jesus is in the boat. So this is the incarnation. God is actually entering into the danger of the world, and he's riding with us in the boat. And he faces danger so much that ultimately he faces the danger to his own life and them, and he goes to the cross for us. So God is, is, keeps trying something new, and we're getting to the point with Jesus where he's trying something that hasn't been done before. He's saying, I am going to have all my power. I'm going to let go of some of it, in which he does in other places. But I'm going to enter the world with them, and I'm going to face the temptations they face, but I'm not going to give in to them. I'm going to face the dangers that they face, and I'm going to be undone by them, by the dangers that are presented to me by other people. And I'm going to die for them. Even the fools I'm going to die for. So you start to see that God and Jesus is beginning to really wrap this all together. And this is, this is why we're Christians.

[13:15] I mean, really, this is why we're Christians. I can't know another way to say this. This is why this is so important, is because it's, it answers all these questions. Jesus is doing this all the time. So, we're beginning to see that all the elements of Scripture up to now, especially as they relate to how God is addressing the problem of evil in the world, are being bookended by Jesus himself. There's all these unresolved problems. Remember? All that, like Abraham, he was faithful, and he believed God, but then he wasn't faithful. And God gave the law, but it didn't work. Then God gave them a king. That was disastrous. You know, all these things that God keeps trying, and it wasn't God's fault, because all his tries were good tries. It's the people that failed. God, you know, God sent them into captivity. He did bring them home, but their hearts never truly belonged to him anyways after that. And so God's, not that he's tired of it all, but he says, at long last, I'm going to do something.

[14:20] So different from everything I've tried before. I'm going to send, in essence, I'm going to send myself. I'm going to enter humanity in the flesh, and I'm going to die for them and save them from their own sin. So, that's one of the reasons we study the Old Testament. It's one of the reasons we like to preach from the Old Testament. It tells us what Jesus was meant to accomplish. And just beware of any church that never talks about the Old Testament, because they're missing all this context, which is super important. Understanding who Jesus is and what he was meant to answer. So the Old Testament is indispensable for us. It's indispensable. We need to study it. We need to read it. I'm really proud of the men's Bible study. We try to alternate every other time between a New Testament book and an Old Testament book. We try. It doesn't mean we always succeed, but it's a good pattern. And I think our hope is, as preachers, Victoria and I, is that we preach from the Old Testament at least once every two months or so. And I think that's a good pattern. And I think that's a good pattern. And I think maybe a little bit more often than maybe sometimes twice in two months. So that's the goal. Okay, let's finally go to our sermon text. You could almost say that that was all preamble to

[15:29] the sermon text, right? There's two sections. First, there's this miraculous healing of the leper. Victoria always steals my thunders. Thunder, really great. But maybe repetition is good for us all. And that itself is miraculous. What I love about this is that first, it says, Jesus touched the man. Then he says, I make you whole. So Jesus actually, before he even heals him, he touches him. That's so great, right? Just think about the order of things there. I think that's important. But what comes after that? After the healing is of real interest today. He tells the healed man to go to the priest and to make an offering. Maybe not at the temple, but an offering at a place where God could be approached. And this would be a place where he, before being healed, he could not approach any of these places. He was not able to come closer to God because it was a law from the Old Testament that, and it was for the sake of public health, really, is that if you come into this midst with a communicable disease, you'll make us all sick. So you can't do that. But it meant he was cut off from this connection to God. And so he was cut off from this connection to God. And so he was cut off from this connection to God, being close to God. And so now that he's made clean, he can go to the priest and prove that

[16:57] he's clean. And he can go and make an offering. And here's the part I really want you, I mean, if you've ignored everything up till now, that's fine. I forgive you. But this is where I really want you to pay attention, okay? The law which excluded the man from approaching God because of his disease is still there. And so he's cut off from this connection to God because of his disease. And that law hasn't changed. Jesus has not repealed that law. In fact, he's reinforcing it. He says, now you can go. Now you can go where you couldn't go before. He didn't change the law.

[17:33] He changed the man. This is super important. He did not change the law. He changed the man. So the next line says, the law which keeps a man with leprosy from approaching the temple or some other place where God is has not changed. Instead, the man was changed. So important.

[17:51] God still has these laws. None of them, I mean, a few of them, maybe we've kind of reinterpreted a little bit. But the law is still there. And in the Sermon on the Mount, the law is only intensified. So Jesus is not discarding law. In fact, he says, do not think that I've come to do away with the law. Not at all. Not in the least. So this is God's plan.

[18:15] He gave the law as an attempt to bring people into righteousness. And relationship with him. It didn't work, but it didn't mean the law was bad. And he's not going to say, I think the law is bad now either. He says, I still think the law is good. I made it. It's my creation. I gave it to you for life.

[18:33] So instead of changing the law, I'm going to have to change you. And the law hasn't changed, but the man has changed because of what Jesus does for him. And so, God hoped that we, keep the law. That's why the law is still important to us. We need to know what it is. And it needs to drive us to despair that we could keep it on our own. And we have to be sure that we're not keeping it in a way that advertises our own virtue. None of that is good.

[19:03] God says, if I rescue these people, it's not going to be by changing the law. And if I do change the law, it will only to make it more intense. So what does God do? And if you remember last week, if you weren't here last week, just remember this is kind of the most important part from Ezekiel. Chapter 36. God says, I will help you.

[19:24] Even this is about coming back from exile, but it's also into the future. I will help you even though you don't deserve it. He was often said, you don't deserve this, but I'm doing it for you anyways. This is what it says in Ezekiel 36. God says to his people, and I will give you a new heart.

[19:41] And I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender response. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender response. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender response. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender response. And I will put my spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees, my laws, and be careful to obey my regulation.

[19:59] So he's saying, I'm going to change you. I'm going to change your heart of stone into a heart of flesh. I'm going to put my spirit in you so that's how you obey the law. The law isn't going away, but you are changing. So God is saying, this is the new rescue. I'm not going to ask you to try harder. You can't change, and the law won't change. So I'm going to change you. and I'll bring you back into my presence. So that's always what this was about, is I'm changing you because really we can't quite approach God in our brokenness and filth and sin. In a way, it's impossible. In a way, it's completely possible because Jesus will touch us. But the holiness of God, the creator of the universe, requires holiness in his presence too. And the only way to reach that is by us being changed. So that's the ultimate rescue, is to change us and to bring us back into God's presence. Just remember that from the very second week we were talking about, God is longing to walk with Adam and Eve in the cool breeze of the evening. And he's in some form with them that enjoys cool breezes. It could be that that was the incarnation there. Because if you have a body, you can enjoy a nice cool breeze.

[21:14] And that's when you can put your heart into it. You can put your arm around the shoulders of your two children that you long to be with. You haven't seen them all day. So that's what God's longing for. He longs to enter the world and bring us back to a place where we can walk with him in innocence and have purposeful work as created creators with him. This is God's plan to bring us back to that thing. And it's a long... We're talking thousands of years at this point and it's still not quite done. Okay. Speaking of done, we're almost done. We're almost done. I want to look at just one more thing at the story of the Roman centurion. I love how these two are really in the same chapter, right? One after the other. We see his faith is great because he understands how powerful Jesus is. And he can just say a word like, peace be still and the storm stops. Or let there be light. And the thing he wants to happen will happen. This is the power of saying something by fiat in effects, by just saying it, may it be so. And so that's faith. That God can do amazing things, impossible things, improbable things. That's the faith of Abraham.

[22:25] That God would give him descendants beyond counting. And God saw that faith and counted it as righteousness. It's super important to remember. So this final word from Jesus then is that, look, here's a Gentile with faith and he has more faith than many of the people of Israel.

[22:42] Like he will dine with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the kingdom of heaven. And many Israelites that I know, he's saying, will not get a taste of it because they don't believe or they won't believe. And so we have the purposes of God to Abraham and his people are coming true. God always wanted all the nations to come to him. So now again, Jesus is fulfilling the Old Testament. The nations are coming to God through Jesus. God never gave up on the Gentiles. His goal was always that his people would be a light to the nations and draw them in. And so in one respect, and you could read a little bit more about this if you have time, but I'm not kidding, if you use a stack of books, this whole tie by N.T. Wright, he's a great theologian and historian and New Testament scholar. He says, in effect, that Jesus himself, in some ways or others, becomes Israel. And he thus becomes light to the other nations and he also takes, takes on the covenantal sort of, we're about to talk about this, the covenantal consequences of the broken covenant onto himself as Israel so that the rest of the world can be saved. Now that's condensing about 3,000 pages of dense New Testament scholarship into like a sentence or two. It doesn't do it justice, but that's really provocative and really great.

[24:09] Great. So let me see. So what Jesus is saying is God always wanted all the nations to come to him, and they're starting to. Jesus is excited that a Gentile is believing, but it's a two-edged sword. Some of the Gentiles are going to come in, he says, but some of the Israelites are going to go out because for some reason or other, maybe it's their connection to the law. That's not quite right. Maybe it's about self-righteousness rather than actually keeping the law. Maybe they're blinded by something. But if some of the Gentiles are going to come in, some of the Israelites are going to go out, and there's going to be this weeping and gnashing of teeth. And so if you want to look at the next line in the sheet, Jesus is really making the case it's no longer your DNA that makes you an heir of Abraham. It's having faith like Abraham that makes you really connected to God. And that's the new covenant. Now, the old covenant was a covenant of God's faithfulness. It was also a covenant of law, although we know that was problematic. But now the new covenant is a covenant of faith. You believe like Abraham believed, and you believe in Jesus like this Gentile did, and there's other people who just can't or won't believe, and that's not good for them.

[25:29] I don't know how else to say it, right? So even Abraham, and this is also the good news, though, and I think that's where there's room for us to hope. The hope is that Abraham had faith in Genesis 15, but he wasn't always faithful. He made a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes from Genesis 15 on. He was not a saint from Genesis 15 on. He made mistake after mistake after mistake.

[26:01] But yet God counted his faith as righteousness because he believed that God could do something impossible and improbable, which was to give him descendants. So we don't have time today to talk about the death and resurrection of Jesus. We will next week because a lot of the proclamation of the book of Acts and Pentecost is about the death and resurrection of Jesus. But I want to recall again from Genesis 15, this really pivotal chapter of the Bible. If you want to really understand a lot about the Bible, read Genesis 15 over and over again. Remember in Genesis 15, God makes covenant with Abraham, and there were these animals that were cut in half as sort of a...

[26:39] It sounds graphic. It was. There was blood everywhere. And that was a warning. That was very common in covenant making at that time is, if either of us breaks our side of this deal, may what happened to those animals happen to us. This is what's keeping us honest, is there's consequences for breaking faith, right?

[27:02] And did God's people break faith? Yeah. I mean, this is what I've been saying for... This is what we've all been saying for a long time. Week after week after week of them breaking faith. They all deserved to be cut in half symbolically. And in a lot of ways, sometimes they were. It was terrible.

[27:26] Finally, in Jesus, God says, okay, there's a covenant with Abraham, just like the covenant of the law. It's still good. It's still in effect. It's still binding on all of us. So you get that? The law is not going to change. Neither is the covenant that God made with Abraham.

[27:44] So somebody's got to get cut in half because of your unfaithfulness. Do you see that? God's not saying it was a bad covenant. I made a mistake. He doesn't say that because he doesn't make mistakes. God says the right outcomes of this broken covenant have to happen.

[28:02] And I'm not going to make it you there. I'm going to make it me. I'm going to make it my son. So Jesus comes in the flesh. He doesn't give in to temptation. He's obedient to God the Father. And he, as sort of the new Israel, takes the place of those who actually deserve the punishment for the broken covenant. So Jesus himself fulfills that covenant too.

[28:31] So the covenant is satisfied. And this is really important because, because one problem we have sometimes in some Christian circles is that this idea that Jesus came to erase all the old covenants. And so, and this is somewhat linked to anti-Semitism in a way too, because they would say that those old covenants are dead and gone and they've been replaced by Jesus so they're ineffective and they're incorrect. And that kind of morphed into a sort of strange anti-Semitism. But if we look at it honestly, we realize that the covenant of the law is still there, but it's intensified by Jesus himself. And the covenant to Abraham is still absolutely there.

[29:15] And it's fulfilled by Jesus himself. And so we need to see that the coming of Jesus is not the doing away with these old covenants, but it's Jesus fulfilling them in a way. That means that they're still important and it means that they're still in effect. And so it doesn't mean that people who don't believe that yet are evil and terrible. This just means they don't believe it yet. That's important to remember. So, we'll see you next week at Pentecost. The way forward now is the new covenant, which doesn't entirely replace the old covenant, but it sort of fulfills it. And the sending of the Holy Spirit to change us, to change how we act.

[29:57] Now, we're at the end. And I wanna just, in your mind, think about it. And I'm stuck at 20, but there's more. Try to count up all the ways that Jesus is fulfilling and bookending and bringing to reality all the attempts that God makes to rescue humanity. How many are there? We've just talked about like 10 of them just now. Jesus is fulfilling one thing after the other. So the very first sentence we have in this thing is, Jesus is fulfilling, God is, the Bible is about Jesus fulfilling all in Jesus Christ.

[30:33] Oh, the very last line. The consequences of breaking the covenant with Abraham were finally paid by God himself by the obedience of Jesus. So the line that's missing is the consequences of breaking the covenant. So that one is a tricky one. I didn't think anyone would get that. When you're thinking about it, you're like, could I just replace one word? That's too easy. You know? But if it's a sentence, especially at the beginning, you're like, where's the logic? Okay, so I see about 20, but there's more than that. All the ways that Jesus is fulfilling what God has been doing all along. So the big takeaway is this. God's plan is to rescue humanity. His plan to rescue humanity has finally found a success formula. And it's Jesus Christ. God keeps trying, keeps trying, keeps trying. We keep failing, failing, failing. Now God has finally tried in a way that we can't fail at. That's how it works. So we're really, God is actually finally being honest about our brokenness, I guess is what we could say. So that Jesus does it, he fulfills it, he does it, he takes the punishment for it. And then the ability to keep the law is a result of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

[31:45] What's left for us? It's either to have the faith or not have the faith. Have the faith of the centurion who says, you just say a word and then something happens. So we say to God, just say the word, God, and change me. Because I can't change myself. I can't do it anymore. All my trying has not paid off. I need you to do it. Take my heart of stone, turn it into a heart of flesh. Put your spirit in me so I can start keeping your laws, which are still good. So that's the faith, the faith of Abraham, that God can do something that seems impossible and improbable.

[32:28] Or to not believe that God could do that. George and I were talking on the way to church this morning. George is quite the theologian. You guys should talk to George sometime. But, you know, there are people who, there's a sort of logical inconsistency. There's people who doubt that Jesus walked on water or fed 5,000 people or healed the sick. They're like, that's kind of a stretch.

[32:54] But if you believe that God created the universe and spoke existence into existence with a word, all that other stuff is small potatoes, right? That's small. That's like, you know, if God can do X and create the universe, he can easily do X divided by 1,000. Easily, right? That's no thing to him. So if God can do that, all this other stuff can happen. And what to me seems like actually the biggest and most amazing miracle of all is that God has changed me.

[33:30] He really has changed me. I mean, I could go through all the ways that God has changed me. And none of it's to my credit, because all of it's to my credit. All of the changes were for the better, which means I started off worse, and that was all me. But all the good changes in my life have come from God. I guarantee you. And I think it's true for you, too. And we probably have to have a Sunday where we all talk about that. Like, what did God do that changed me from a bad person into a redeemed person? I'm not going to say a good person, but a redeemed person. That's the difference. Okay? So that's why coming to faith in Jesus is so important.

[34:07] Do you see this? God has done this amazing thing all through the Bible to get to this point. So much work went into this. And so if we think of our faith as just this personal thing that makes you feel better or gets you into a group to give you a sense of belonging, that's missing out on the greatness of faith in Jesus. Believing in Jesus is to join this sort of just giant, cosmic, epic, fantastic movement of God. That's the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity.

[34:40] You are joining this story when you start believing in Jesus. That's a big deal. You are joining the thing that is the most important, single most important event in the history of all of humanity. More than the invention of the printing press or whatever you want to, whatever you would put that, or the dropping of the atom bomb or the splitting of the first atom or whatever, or Edison making a light bulb. I mean, there's all these lists of things that have happened in history. This is the most important thing. This is topping them all by a zillion.

[35:08] I can't go back and help Thomas Edison create a light bulb. I can't do that. But I can join in what God is doing by having faith in Jesus Christ. I can become part of this rescue because God includes me in it and he changes me. And because God says, you know what?

[35:26] We keep going back to Abraham, but God said to Abraham, I'm going to bless all the nations through you. I'm going to bless all the, I'm not giving up on them. That's what he says to us. That's what he says to the church.

[35:38] Now we bless the nations. Now we are the light to the nation. We're going to talk about that next week. The Holy Spirit, Pentecost, and the church. So that's for next week. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you again. Thank you for the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Thank you that he fulfills all things. Thank you that by coming to you in faith, we have joined this great work of you rescuing the entire world. Amen.

[36:05] Well, let's.