The New Wine – Part 2

Our devotion and obedience to the instructions of Lord must center on our relationship with Jesus and be driven by the grace that we have received from him.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

This morning, we are going to jump back into the passage that we began exploring last week so you can go ahead and turn there and Luke five if you want to. The the part we’re going to look at this morning begins in chapter six. But I want to briefly back up to 533, because the two stories that we’re going to look at this morning are illustrations of the teaching from Chapter five. And if you weren’t with us last week for that sermon, I want to encourage you sometime this week to to go back and to to watch that one. It’ll make this one make a bit more sense and it’ll catch you up. But I will take just a moment here to just to kind of catch us all up together. You will recall that Jesus was asked by the crowd why his disciples were eating and drinking and having a good time while the disciples of John and the Pharisees were fasting and praying and generally living very disciplined lives. Jesus explains to them that he’s not like those other teachers, that he’s he’s different from them. Those teachers were telling people to prepare for the coming Messiah. That’s Jesus. He’s the fulfillment of what those teachers were teaching about. Now, now that Jesus has arrived, bringing the grace and salvation of the Lord, the way people live needs to change to conform to that new reality. And so Jesus asks the question of whether you could make wedding guests fast after the bridegroom had arrived at the party.

And of course you can’t. That’s when you celebrate. Let me change the the party just a little bit so that we can see this, this, this more clearly. Let’s let’s let’s say that you’re throwing a big surprise birthday party for your spouse. Okay? You’re going to have this great big party. And so what do you do? You you secretly book the room and you go in and you you decorate it. You get all the caterers lined up, you invite all the guests. You tell them not to tell your spouse. Right. Because it’s a surprise. And so then they all gather and there’s some kind of a ruse to get your spouse to walk through the door. And what happens when you walk through the door and everybody else surprise. What do you do right after that? Do you go back to decorating? Do you get out more decorations and start to decorate a bit more? Wrap a few more presents, maybe, you know, get get some more guests invited to the party. Is that. Is that what you do? No. You. You start to celebrate that. That’s. That’s the moment when the party begins. You. You. Everything shifts now to enjoyment. It was preparation. Now it’s enjoyment. You eat the food, you open the presents. You don’t prepare for a moment that has already come. And the arrival of your spouse creates this necessary shift in the way that you are now.

That arrival is the difference. And the same is true here with Jesus. That’s what’s happening with Jesus. Everything in the Old Testament was preparation. Everything was pointing forward to the day when Jesus would come. And now that he’s here, there’s no going back. And there needs to be a shift in the way people now relate to God because of it. And it’s this shift to relating to the Lord through Jesus under a new covenant that that gets a little confusing for us as Christians. This is this is kind of one of the tougher things in Scripture. If you have ever thought about what you should do with the Old Testament law, as a Christian, you’ve wrestled with this issue. When you’re doing that, read through the Bible in a year thing, right? And you’re in Leviticus and you’re like, What do I do with this? I don’t I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do in response to this. If you’ve ever had that, you know, it’s one of the more difficult questions of scripture and you’ve wondered how to relate. Well, the illustrations that we’re going to hear today from Jesus will help us to answer that question. But these two stories also do something else. They’re not just here to help us relate the two together. There’s something more important than how to handle the Old Testament law. These these two incidents with Jesus and the Pharisees will address the difference between a religious set of rules and a relationship with the Lord that’s based on grace.

That’s a that’s a huge difference. Most most of Jesus problem with the religious people of his day, with the with the Pharisees and the Sadducees had to do with how they had twisted God’s law into something that it was never supposed to be. Now, this may sound odd to you, but I promise you it is true. The Mosaic Law, so roughly Exodus to Deuteronomy is not a system for being saved and accepted by God. Old Testament law has never been a system for being saved and accepted by God. It is not a list of rules where God says, If you keep these rules, I will love you. You do this for me and I will do this for you. In fact, this is crazy. It’s the other way around. God already chose his people. God already loves his people based on nothing except his own desire to do so. These were not lovable people. You ever read these stories? Jacob was a liar. Moses killed a guy. These are not great people, right? These are incredible examples of humanity. But they are people of faith. That’s what they’re commended for. They didn’t earn God’s love. God gave that to them freely. But they believed him when God told them that they were his people. They received his love. The Mosaic law. Is God telling his family how this household of love and faith is going to operate? It’s the relationship that he’s going to have with his people.

Look, the Mosaic law is just like the rules in your home. This is an easy way to remember this. It’s just like the rules at your house. Do you make rules at your house so that everyone will maintain their status as part of the family? Do you do that? Is that how the rules are set up so that everybody maintains their status like kids eat your veggies or you’re out? Is that how it is? Is that how it is? Well, no, of course not. The rules there as a framework, they’re a framework for showing how this household of love is going to operate. It’s it’s there’s a way that children are to speak to their parents. It’s not if they speak the wrong way, they’re out. It’s this is what a loving relationship with a parent will look like. There’s a time in the day when you’re allowed to be loud and then there’s a time in the day when everybody needs to be quiet, right? Stop screaming after 11. That’s a household rule, right? But it’s so that we can maintain a relationship, a framework for peace and and love and the boundaries allow love to flourish. But let me ask you, do you know those those shows where where you get voted out of the House based on your popularity or your performance? You know, those TV shows? I’m talking about that at the end of the show, they they’ll vote.

Everybody votes and then someone’s out. Right? Right. That’s what religious scholars and the culture of Jesus Day had done with God’s rules. They took the idea of a family. They took the idea, the framework of it, and they turned God’s family into the Big Brother house. That’s what they did. And so you could be voted out of it. It has the look of the community that God created with grace, but they turned it into a performance based religion without love. Now, not every Jewish person had done this. Not it’s not not across the board. But you can see in the critique that Jesus offers today and throughout the Gospels that his problem is with what these men have done in removing gracious love from their religion. And that’s a warning for us. Church. That’s a huge, huge warning for us. Our devotion and obedience to the instructions of the Lord must be the fruit of the relationship that we have with Jesus and should be motivated by the grace that we’ve received from him. That’s where that’s where obedience comes from, comes from a heart of love. If you are a rules oriented person, if that’s kind of how your religion works, you’re sort of a rules oriented person. Today has the potential for being very eye opening for you, and I’m kind of excited for you if you’re if you’re a rules person, if you’re if your view of what it means to follow Jesus is primarily adherence to a list of rules, even a list of rules from Jesus.

Well, I think you’re in for a treat today. So let’s jump in at Luke chapter six. This is verse one. It’ll be on the screen as well. There are there are two stories here, both of them centering on a Sabbath day issue, which I will describe for you here in a minute. Let’s let’s look at this first Sabbath encounter on a Sabbath. While he was going through the grain fields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus answered them. Have you not read what David did when he was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat and also gave it to those with him. And he said to them, The son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. Now, you remember last time that I talked about the difference between sincere and insincere approaches to Jesus? Is this a sincere question coming from the Pharisees? I don’t I don’t think that it is this this question doesn’t have the tone of inquiry to me as if these guys were challenged by what Jesus was doing and really wanted to learn more from him and understand and were open to the idea of changing their minds.

This this actually has the tone of accusation. Their question is, is sort of a passive aggressive way of accusing Jesus because they feel they know better than he does. And let me just say, as I said last week, that this is no way to learn about anything, and it’s certainly not a way to learn from Jesus. We don’t learn by having this attitude. If you if you have this skeptical mindset that says that Jesus must meet my expectations, well then you’re not going to learn anything from Jesus at all. The same holds true, by the way, for those who are religious, who believe that they’ve already got God all figured out and they just they just need Jesus to back up what they think. That’s, by the way, what these Pharisees are doing here, they’re not going to learn. They’re not going to grow closer to the Lord by interacting with Jesus. The disciples are walking along a field of grain and while they do this, they’re reaching their hands out and they decide to eat lunch by taking some of the grain and rubbing it between their hands to get the chaff off of the grain. And and now they’re eating it. And we should know, by the way, that this is not stealing.

You might think, well, maybe their problem is that they’re stealing. This is not stealing. Actually, this is a perfectly normal practice that’s even outlined in the law for the community to be able to do. It’s called gleaning. The only problem here is that Jesus and his disciples are doing this on the Sabbath day. And if you’re thinking to yourself, well, I don’t I don’t remember anywhere in God’s law where it says that there is a problem with gleaning on the Sabbath day. You are correct. There is no problem with gleaning on the Sabbath. It’s just not not a problem at all in the Mosaic law. The problem was in the Jewish oral tradition, later recorded in the Mishnah that said that you can’t work on the Sabbath day and the rules that had surrounded the idea of work. New Testament scholar Darrell Bock says, According to the Mishnah, these disciples were reaping, threshing, winnowing and preparing food. A quadruple violation. Wow. Just to get some lunch. Four law breaks to get some lunch. When the Sabbath was first given to God’s people, God’s law did say not to gather manna on the seventh day. You remember that? Don’t gather manna on the seventh day, because on the sixth day, God will provide you two days worth of food and you’ll gather two days worth and you’ll it’ll sustain you all through. He gave them double portion and they would get through the seventh day. Over the years, that initial instruction about Manna and manna specifically became a rule where you couldn’t roll grains in your hands on the Sabbath day.

They just added to it, added to it, refined it, added to it, and eventually you couldn’t even pluck some grain. So now the Pharisees think they have Jesus trapped. Here’s here’s this supposed teacher misleading everyone away from their manmade law that they had turned into God’s law. And so now they have him in their corner. So so what does what does Jesus do? Well, he points them to the spirit of the law itself. He takes them to some actual scripture to show them how they had missed the purpose of God’s law. And so he he picks. King David, you might be wondering why we read that passage earlier in the service. It’s because that’s the background for what Jesus is going to teach them. Here he picks this King David, a renowned figure to these Jews, and he says, Do you remember when David and his men were hungry and they entered the temple and they ate the bread of the presence? There was there was this incident when David and his men had nothing to eat. And so they they ate the bread that only the priests were supposed to eat. That actually is a violation of the Mosaic law. That’s not some made up pharisaic add on law. That is straight Moses and and they broke that law. They broke it. And so now these Pharisees are stuck because.

Well, if they say David was right to do that, well, how can they argue against Jesus and his disciples having some grain? But if they say that he was wrong for doing that, well, now they’re actually have to say that King David was wrong. And the scripture doesn’t seem to indicate that King David was wrong there. So now what are you going to do? Let me tell you, friends, if you ever find yourself in a in a theological pickle like this, you have missed something. You’ve missed something along the way. If you paint yourself into a corner like this, you’ve missed something. And and there are two things here that the Pharisees have missed. First thing that they missed is that there has always been a place for compassion and grace within the law. They miss that God’s law wasn’t meant to be an unreasonable burden on people. It was meant to guide people and to help them maintain a wonderful relationship with the Lord. That’s why God gave it to us. Rules driven religious people today very often remove compassion and grace from their rules. And they don’t have a category for exceptions or extenuating circumstances or even grace toward people who break God’s actual rules. And the second thing that they missed is that the Sabbath is a gift to us from God. It’s not supposed to be a burden. It’s supposed to be a blessing. Jesus ends this discussion with the son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.He’s referring to himself. But but by that title, he’s saying that he is the representative of humanity, just like David was. If the Pharisees had watched David closely, they’d know that there are exceptions to eat and to stay alive on the Sabbath. They would know that if they’d just listened to their own scriptures. And now that they’re watching Jesus, he’s going to teach them this very thing. The Sabbath is supposed to be a blessing to God’s people. It shouldn’t be a cause for suffering. In fact, the whole law, the whole law is meant to be a blessing, a gift for people. It was never meant to be this difficult, burdensome, overly restrictive, freedom crushing monster that the religious scholars had made it into. There’s two ways you can give a kid a bike. There’s there’s two ways you can give a give a kid a bike in two ways. One way you could you can give them a bike. You can say, Here, kid, I got you a bike. Go have fun. Don’t leave the neighborhood. Watch for traffic. If you build a ramp and I know you’re going to build a ramp. If you build a ramp, put on a helmet. Okay. Be back before dark. Have a good time. That’s one way you can do it. The other way is. All right, kid. Here’s your bike and here’s your workout schedule. You’ll be biking one hour each day.

I want you to record your progress. I expect you to be up to 20 miles per day by the end of the month. Is that a gift? Is that a gift? The law was not meant to be a burden. It was meant to be a gift to show sinful people how to have a loving relationship with God while still living in a broken world. It’s it’s God’s grace. The law itself is God’s grace to us. It it took sinful people to take God’s good gift and turn it into the burden that it became. Now, if hearing this makes you a little nervous because you feel like what Jesus is saying here opens the door for reinterpreting God’s law so that we can explain away sin. Well, that’s just the sort of thing religious people tend to worry about when it comes to God’s gifts. Rules driven religious people are usually scared if we take freedom too seriously or if we allow too much personal discernment, and they believe we’ll end up in a compromised position by doing this, they think real obedience can only be achieved through additional interpretation, which usually means additional rules. Now, let me just say, I do understand that concern here, because we do live in a day and age when when some churches are moving away from what the Bible clearly teaches on sin. We got this sort of epidemic in our country that there there’s these so-called churches that are moving away from God’s clear word.

Instead of explaining God’s word. Some churches and some professed Christians are working to explain away God’s word. And this is a huge problem. People are being led astray from the truth of the Gospel in the name of cultural accommodation. But we have to make sure that the correction to that is the clear, gracious and unapologetic preaching and teaching of what God’s Word actually says. The correction can’t be to to to add to God’s word a list of rules or a way of life that goes beyond what God says and imposes some heavy weight on our church and on our families. Overcorrection to the problem is not a solution. In fact, Paul tells us this, Paul tells us, is not a solution, even though you might feel like it might be a solution. It’s not a solution, He tells us in Colossians two, quote, Human precepts and teachings indeed have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and aestheticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. We think we can create something that will stop sin. And so we add. And we add and we add and we structure and we structure. And Paul says, ironically, it won’t stop anything. That’s not how that’s not how sin goes away. It’s not how it’s corrected in your life and in your heart. The rules people make for themselves and others beyond Scripture that restrict freedom actually have no value in stopping you from sinning.

They tend actually to to cause you to become a sinner in different ways. They tend to make you prideful, judgmental. Secretly sinful in a way that keeps you from confessing your sin and dealing with the sin that’s in your heart. Rules will never have the transformative power that people think that they will have. But don’t worry. There is a solution. There is a solution. There is the thing that the way of killing sin. And by the way, it’s right here in our passage. The son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus is the key to the transformative heart change that you’re longing for the to get to the obedience that you want. It’s Christ himself who is the transformative power. The closer you walk with the Lord Jesus who reigns over the Sabbath. And by the way, every other law, the more you’ll be transformed by the grace of God, which will make you desire in your heart to please the Lord which will make you desire obedience. That’s how it works. You’re transformed by the grace of Jesus. He brings you into the family of God. Your heart is made new, and then you want obedience because you’re in that loving family. You don’t need more rules in your spiritual growth. You need more lordship of Christ over your life. And as you grow more in love with Jesus, as you as you grow in this love, as you, as you, as you feel the love of Christ, and you walk more closely in step with the Spirit of Christ in you, you begin to see God’s law the way it was intended as a gift to you.

Is a guide to you. And we see that in the second Sabbath encounter. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered and the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath so that they might find a reason to accuse him. But he knew their thoughts. And he said to the man with a withered hand, Come and stand here. And he rose. And he stood there. And Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it? And after looking around at them all, he said to them, Stretch out your hand. And he did so. And his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and disgust with one another. What they might do to Jesus. So this time the question comes from Jesus before the Pharisees asked Jesus a question. Now Jesus is going to ask them a question. He’s teaching in the synagogue and there’s a man with a withered hand, which means it was probably bent. His fingers were bent wrist.

Maybe he couldn’t he couldn’t use the hand. And he has clearly come to be healed by Jesus. Everybody knows what Jesus does in a situation like this. Jesus is going to do his thing now that this man has come forward. And so this time, the Pharisees, they just sit back and wait. They know what they know what’s about to happen. And they they know what he’s going to do. And I wanted to just take a moment here to do a little a little heart search. Let’s just let’s just do a little heart inspection on these Pharisees. What do they care about right now? What is it? What is it they hope will happen? Do they care in this moment about sin and and the honor of the Lord? Now, you’d think that that would be what a religious person would care about, right? Wanting to see the Lord honored and glorified. How do how do we get the most God honoring behavior on the Sabbath day? You would think that would be what a religious person would want. But. But they don’t care about that. In fact, they’re now hoping for a rule violation so that they can catch Jesus and have reason to accuse him. These guys are now quietly cheering for sin. So they’re hoping it will happen. They are deep down hoping that someone else will fail so that they can see themselves as superior. Let me ask you. Are you deep down pretty proud of the place of moral superiority that you hold over other people in your family or in the world around you? Or do you? Do you take a sense of satisfaction in the feeling of superiority that you have when you you compare yourself with the moral bankruptcy of your family or your friends? Do you? Do you feel an inward temptation to dig into the sins of other people so that you might even find something really awful there so that you can feel good about yourself by comparison? Are you are you kind of hoping that the black sheep of the family will mess up once again so that you can stand back and go, Yep, I knew it.

Just like always. I knew it. If you have ever felt this way, if you have ever had these thoughts and I will tell you I have. If you’ve ever felt this way. You’ve engaged in the same sin that the Pharisees are engaging in here right now. It’s exactly what they’re doing. It doesn’t look like sin. It looks like righteousness. It looks like righteousness, but it’s fake righteousness. It’s self righteousness. A heart that has been transformed by God’s grace should never root for sin. You’d never root for sin. A heart that’s been transformed by God’s grace would break for sin. There should be an increasingly in your heart, a great desire to see the Lord honored in everything and by everyone, and deep compassion for those who are not yet worshiping the Lord in every way.

You see those who are sinning as those who are far from the Lord. And your heart breaks for them because they need to know the Savior. And it breaks for for Christ because you want to see the Lord honored. These men were hoping that Jesus would sin so that they could accuse him. They should have been hoping for Jesus to worship and honor the Lord because of their great love for God. But here’s the thing. They don’t have great love for God. That secret desire and hope for sin so that they could feel superior as an indication they don’t love God. And that’s what this incident shows. It exposes them for who they really are. And Jesus looks at them and says, Well, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save a life or to destroy it? The Mosaic Law doesn’t say anything about healing on the Sabbath. Nothing. There’s no rule about it at all. The oral tradition says that you can’t heal a person unless the issue is life or death, basically. The Mishnah says the oral law, the tradition, the add on rules say that unless it’s life or death, you have to wait a day. If it’s not life or death, you’ve got to wait one day. This man with the withered hand is not in a life or death situation.

So if Jesus heals him, he breaks the Pharisees interpretation of the work rule for the Sabbath. So in that way it’s just like eating the grain that we saw before, and they are hoping he will do it. They’re hoping he’ll do it. Which tells Jesus exactly where their heart really is. And Jesus asks them this question because they have so mishandled God’s word that they have no compassion. They don’t want to do good work on the Lord’s day. They are rooting actually for what they think is sin. It’s not sin, but they think it is, and that’s what they want. And there is real irony in what Jesus does next. He doesn’t work. Jesus doesn’t work. He just speaks. Do you see that? He speaks. And the power of God works to heal this man. God works on his own Sabbath to heal this guy. Because, of course, the Sabbath is a day when you would do good for somebody. Of course it is. That’s that’s that’s the beauty of God’s Sabbath for these religious people not to see that that means that their hearts are very hard and that they are very far from the Lord. But they’re so wrapped up in their own manmade systems, they can’t even see that they don’t love the Lord that they claim to serve. God’s power is displayed in the healing of this man. These guys lose their minds. They’re so angry and they plot to kill Jesus Church.

God’s Word is intended to be a guide to his grace and love. That’s what it is for us. It reveals the Lord. It teaches us how far we’ve fallen in our sin and how much God loves us. By sending His son to die for our sins, to bring healing to us, to to set us free and to make us whole again. It gives us guidance to us and how to live in light of that grace So we’re always living in light of that. Grace But that’s what that’s what God’s Word does. It tells us how we’re saved and set free so that we can live not only in obedience, but in mission through compassion and reconciliation and restoration that we tell others about so that they’ll find it in Christ. It’s a gift to guide us, to walk in, step with the spirit. It brings about greater and deeper walks with the Lord Jesus who reigns over our hearts so that we will walk in obedience. When you walk with Jesus more closely, it will become your passion to glorify the Lord and enjoy Him forever. That will be what you’ll want to do. Let me tell you, though, what we’re going to need to work to maintain. Let me just tell you, as a church, what we’re going to need to work hard to maintain because of this truth. We need to work to maintain our church’s focus on the unearned, undeserved grace of Jesus as the guiding principle for our community.

That right at the heart and center of who we are as a church is this unearned, undeserved favor of God given to us by Jesus Christ. Our church should always be a gracious community of people who love others and want them to know Jesus. That’s the new wineskin for the wine of the gospel that’s been poured into us. That’s the transformation that needs to take place in us as we carry this gospel. It is historically been very easy for churches to lose this compassionate and gracious approach to the world. It it has been all too easy for the church to slip into a prideful and judgmental place to become a community focused on rules, to become focused on keeping up appearances. Church Do you know what an increasingly secularized society here in Rochester needs? It needs a community of people who consistently share the gospel with each other and with everyone else. That’s what it needs. It doesn’t need a blanket of rules. It needs a gospel centered community. We don’t compromise. We don’t explain away sin. In fact, because of God’s grace, we take sin very, very seriously. We talk about we take sin seriously. And we agree with God’s word in all that. It says in the way that it describes our brokenness. But our mission is not to rid the world of sin through additional rules and extraordinary effort. It is to preach the sin destroying grace of Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.