Religious Persecution

SERMON: 2015-01-04--ac15149--religious-persecution-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:52:10.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The opening segment introduces the sermon topic (religious persecution), and the closing segment concludes the main exposition and application of the message. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, as I said earlier, I want to talk this first Sunday of the new year about religious persecution. I don't really want to put that kind of weighty topic on you for starters of the new year, but I do that this morning for two reasons. One reason is because that is where the narrative in the book of Acts is leading us to. The Apostle Paul has been preaching, as you know, in Thessalonica. He's been there, as best as we can tell, only for a couple of weeks. And then persecution breaks out once again, and so he has to leave and he moves on down the road. And that is the picture of his ministry in the book of Acts. But more than that, while much religious persecution happens in places far away, I believe that it's coming closer to our door, literally all the time. And as if to underscore that, here is what was on our front church door on Friday morning. Can you read that? I hate Jesus and an upside down cross. Now we don't want to make too much of that, but it illustrates, I think, the spirit of the age that is becoming increasingly unfriendly towards Christians and towards Christian community. And part of my job as your shepherd is to prepare you for those days when you're going to be challenged in your faith. And that won't necessarily be deny Jesus or get killed, although we don't know how that goes, but it can easily be deny the truth or you will lose your job. Deny the truth or you will suffer economic hardship or we'll try to turn your children against you. Those spirits are loose within our own age and within our own society. And it behooves us to learn from those who have gone before us and who even now around the world are suffering very, very much on account of their faith. So let's read the next paragraph or two in Acts chapter 17. As I said, Paul has been in Thessalonica. He's been preaching. There have been converts, some among the Jews, but a lot among the Gentiles. And that's where we pick up the story in verse five, but the Jews were jealous, so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason's house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd. But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other brothers before the city officials shouting. They're always shouting when they do this. These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here. Some other translations have it. These men who have turned the world upside down. A very interesting commentary on Paul's ministry, don't you think? These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar's decrees, saying that there was another king, one called Jesus. When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil, and then they made Jason and the others post bond and let them go. The story then continues that as soon as night fell, they smuggled Paul and Silas out of the city, and they go on to the next town down the road, which is Berea, where again they get up despite all the opposition and they continue to preach the gospel. So we're going to reflect on that a bit together today. Join me as we pray. Father, we stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us. And while for most of us, serving you is mostly a question of will we get up on Sunday mornings and go to church, or will we stay in bed, or will we contribute financially and participate in the ministries of the church, or will we just pursue our own dreams? There are others all around the world for whom serving you is every day a moment of life and death. And we don't know what awaits us in this country in years to come, and we don't want to live in fear, but we also want to be on our guard as you have told us, and we want to understand, Lord, what feeds into religious persecution. So I pray this morning that you give me words to put into words what you've placed in my heart, and that you'll give each of us the grace to just receive it and sort it all out and figure how it applies to our own lives. And may we be found faithful, regardless of the cost that we might have to pay, knowing that Jesus was faithful even unto death, and that today he sits at the right hand of God the Father, King of kings and Lord of lords, one day coming back, reclaiming the whole earth as his eternal throne and kingdom. We'll be careful, Lord, to praise you in the middle of it all. In Jesus' name we ask it. Amen. Now, as I mentioned a few moments ago, religious persecution, and I'm sure most of us know this, has experienced particularly in recent years a worldwide resurgence. And while that persecution is often aimed at any religious or ethnic minority group, it is particularly aimed at Christians. Allow me to give just a couple of examples. Some of you will remember Mosul in northern Iraq. It's the second largest city in Iraq. Last June it was overrun by ISIS or the Islamic militant group that has been conquering so much of that world. The city has about 1.6 million people, 60,000 of them were part of the Christian community, one of the most ancient Christian communities in the Middle East. And although at first it looked like ISIS was going to treat them fairly once they had established their caliphate, they turned strongly against the Christians and they gave them all a threefold choice, convert to Islam, pay a head tax, or leave the city, or be killed. As a result, tens of thousands of Christians left the city. Here's a picture of what that looked like in terms of automobiles trying to leave the city. You can imagine the chaos. Some were told as they left the city there were checkpoints where everybody was forced to surrender all their wealth and all their riches. And so they left literally with their shirts on their backs. That is religious persecution of the worst kind. And people that stayed behind, they just got their heads cut off in most instances and there are horrific stories of brutality coming out of that particular city. Moving on to the nation of China. Since 2012, religious persecution in China has increased 40%. For a long time, the Christian community was allowed to flourish, but in recent years particularly there has been a concerted effort not only to get churches to remove their crosses, but whole church buildings have had to be torn down. And here's a picture of one of the largest new church buildings in the city of Wenzhou. Wenzhou was a city where we and I had our biggest audiences because it is known as the Jerusalem of the East. About 15% of that particular city is Christian, and they have experienced high favor among government officials. But you see the city has about 1,500 churches and too many crosses began lining the skyline. So put that picture back up. Here is a brand new building, four stories high, and if you look carefully you will see you see the back hole here is tearing this thing down, and you can go online and find pictures of that whole building reduced to rubble. As of July of last year, reportedly 131 churches had been razed to the ground, and some people think the figure is three or four times higher than that. That's religious persecution. The argument is almost always they're violating some building code. Sometimes that may or may not be true, but there is a real backlash against the growth of Christian churches in that particular country. This next picture that I'm going to show you is a picture that you've all seen many, many times in the news. This is the 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria who were taken captive by Boko Haram. Most are still missing. Some have escaped. They've been sold off, the rest, as wives to Islamic militants or as sex slaves. What most of us don't know is that most of these girls were Christian girls and have had to suffer incredibly for their faith as they've been challenged to either stand up for Jesus or to renounce their faith. I know of stories coming out of Baghdad, out of Iraq, of young children being challenged to deny Jesus or to remain standing up for their faith and for parents watching their kids being slaughtered in front of them because they refused to deny the Lord Jesus. I mean, we can't even begin to enter into that kind of persecution. That's what happens when evil takes root and begins to reign in the country. Some of you may remember seeing this picture. This bus comes out of Kenya. It was a passenger bus loaded with Muslims and with Christians, got stopped by terrorists, and they separated the Christians from the non-Christians and they lined up all the Christians and slaughtered them, 29 in all. In cold blood, and what was really tragic about it is the bus driver was trying to evade the terrorists. But if you look carefully at the picture, it got stuck in the mud and so it couldn't get away. And so you have the blood of martyrs that has been shed. Now as I said a moment ago, you know, we're a long ways from that. I think in North America we still have the rule of law to a very large degree on our side. But the fact is that 70 million Christians, by the Pope's estimation, have been martyrs since the days of Jesus on the face of the earth. And estimates today vary from 10,000 a year to 100,000 a year because nobody really has accurate figures and how do you tally who is dying for Jesus and who's dying for political cause because as you can appreciate, there's a lot of crossover. I do know that in some of these nations now, Christians have begun arming themselves against these militant bands who come in and burn down a whole village in Nigeria. They'll just come sweep it in, burn everything, kill everybody, and only the few that survive get away and of course live with the trauma because I can't even begin to imagine what that looks like. Well, we don't know too much of that in North America but if you put your ear to the ground, then you see that the same spirit that is full blown in some of these horrific nations around the world is also knocking on our door. I mean literally, if you see that image that I just showed you a while ago about "I hate Jesus" with the upside down cross on our front door, that's what greeted our people when they came to work on Friday morning. But there are hints of where it's going in today's society and here are just a couple of the news stories that we've talked about in the past and that you know have been very dominant in the press, there's Trinity Western University, they've been wanting to start a Christian law school. Earlier the B.C. government had approved their law school. In the month of December, the Minister of Education changed his mind supposedly because we have a couple of law societies now provincially that have voted against accepting graduates from this program and so now the argument is Trinity Western can't be allowed to have this particular program to train Christian lawyers because they won't be able to find jobs as if that's the B.C. government's business to decide. So that's going to the Supreme Court of Canada and we'll have to see what happens as we've said here before in 2001, they did the same thing with the Teachers College, they won that at the Supreme Court of Canada, it'll be very interesting to see if that trend holds true or if the changing winds in the country this time will go against them. Certainly something that we ought to be praying about because remember the effort all the time is to marginalize Christians in the world and in the workplace. Nobody cares if you pray at home, nobody cares if you go to church, as long as your religion doesn't change you or govern your public policies or the values that you want to live by and that you think society wants to live by. Now this young woman you may or may not remember, her name is Bethany Pequette, she's a graduate from Trinity Western, I've told you her story before, she applied for a job with a Norse company called Emerald Wilderness Corporation, she wanted to be a wilderness guide and when she applied for the position the company refused to hire her though she was more than qualified saying that she wasn't qualified because, and listen to this quotation, "Unlike Trinity Western University, we embrace diversity and the right of people to sleep with or marry whoever they want." And then he went on to say this and I can't believe this guy would put this in print, he said and I quote, "The Norse background of most of the guys at the management level means that we are not a Christian organization, that we know," and he goes on to say, "And most of us actually see Christianity," listen to this, "as having destroyed our culture, tradition and way of life." Christianity has destroyed our culture, our tradition and our way of life. As if the Vikings, honestly, who used to cross the sea plunder the monasteries of England were a culture that one would want to emulate and hold up as an example. Now you know, that's where it's going. One more quick example and then we'll go on to some other things. Some of you may or may not know the name Adobe, it is a major software company in the world. One of their flagship products is Photoshop, a lot of graphic artists in this congregation and elsewhere would be familiar with that, we use it here in church all the time. They have a policy to give virtually free software to charities and because we're always looking for giveaways, we approach the organization that brokers this for them to see if we are eligible for some free software because some of this stuff costs a lot of money and we're Dutch so we're trying to save you money. And so here's the word, religious organizations, our religious charities are not eligible, listen to this, they're not eligible for this charity program unless they have a separate secular program that interfaces with the community, then you're eligible. I don't, somebody's phone is ringing, I don't quite know what that looks like but then they have another paragraph that applies to everybody that you have to be able to prove to them that you do not discriminate on any level including sexual orientation in your organization and if you can't prove that, you're not eligible for their software, it's not interesting. Now you know I can respect their right to give their stuff to whomever they want but what if this shoe were on the other foot? What happens when Christian bakers don't want to bake cakes for a gay wedding? You know what happens, or when Christian printers don't want to print publicity materials for some gay organization, double standards. And I'm telling you it's only the beginning, it's very easy for us to sit back and say well you know it doesn't apply to me but some of you may remember the quote and I wish I had brought it along and I don't have it literally but you know the quote I think it was from Martin Niemöller during World War II who said first they came for the communists and I did nothing and then they came for the Jews and I did nothing and then they came for the union workers and I did nothing and then it says they came for me and there was nobody left to do anything for me. For evil to triumph all that has to happen is for good people not to do anything. So in the time that we have this week and probably next week there are three questions that I want to talk about in the course of talking about religious persecution. And the first question is this, why persecution? In other words why is it aimed particularly at Christians? It's true there are other people that get persecuted but if you look around the world the worst persecution almost inevitably is aimed at those who are Christians. Second question is what is the mechanism that drives this persecution? What makes people what they are? And then number three and we'll probably won't have time to deal with that this week is how do we respond? Because most of us as I said will not find ourselves in a situation where you know it's do or die but there's a thousand and one ways in which you and I have to make decisions day by day what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ in this particular situation? Whether it's whether or not I take the ridicule of praying at work when everybody else is just digging in really or if it's standing up for justice or for righteousness when everybody else is telling dirty jokes or fooling around. What does it look like for us to respond in the face of being ridiculed because we embrace Christian values? That's where we're going to go with this eventually. So this morning let's begin with question number one. Why this persecution? The answer is real simple. In its most elementary form it's because the Bible says so. Listen to these words of Jesus. This is Matthew 10 verse 22, "All men," this is to his disciples, "he is sending them out as sheep among wolves early in his ministry. All men will hate you because of me but he who stands firm to the end will be saved." All men, before history finishes, all men, all women too will hate God's people then. John 15 he expands on that even further he says, "Remember the words I spoke to you, no servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching they will obey yours also." You've often heard me say this, nobody lived a better life than Jesus and nobody was hated more and in a little while we'll talk about why that is. Now Paul in his writings and certainly in his experience echoes this same sentiment. Second Timothy 312 you've heard me quote this verse a number of times. He says, "Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." This is in the context of reminding Timothy what Paul has suffered in his missionary journeys in Lystra and in Iconium and how he had been treated in Philippi. And he says to Timothy, "This is close to the end of Paul's life, everyone who lives a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." And then we have these words in 1 Thessalonians chapter 3. Where this is the people that he has just been talking to. You know quite well, the context of this is the trials the Thessalonian Christians were suffering because after Paul left they began to experience persecution just like he had. And so he wrote them from Corinth a number of months later because he was concerned will you keep the faith and then he says this, "You know quite well that we were destined for them, that is for these trials, in fact when we were with you we kept telling you that we would be persecuted and it turned out that way as you well know." So Paul made it a part of his ministry to say to people, "You can come to Jesus and you can have all the blessings of God's kingdom, but I want you to be aware that there's going to be a price to be paid." And the reason there is a price to be paid and it's very important for us to understand that is that persecution is an inevitable part at some level of following Jesus because it is rooted, it is rooted in what I like to call the battle of the ages. Genesis 3.15, you know that verse well, "I will put enmity between you and the woman God says to the serpent, and between your offspring and hers he will crush your head and you will strike his heel." And here you have the battle of the ages where Satan opposes the human race in its entirety because he hates us and the offspring of Satan which are those who line up with him in the course of history are going to be at odds with the offspring of the woman which represents God's people, eventually comes to completion of course in the person of Jesus Christ in this battle which ultimately is the Antichrist versus Jesus and all the followers of darkness versus the followers of light. In that battle, God's people will suffer, but in the end Satan will be defeated and God's people will inherit the kingdom. So the more the church, now listen to this and I'm not trying to scare you but we have to be realistic, the more the church becomes like Jesus, excuse me, and the more the world becomes like the devil, the greater will be the clash until eventually as I said you have the Antichrist who is going to set himself up in the temple of God, whatever that's going to look like, he will pretend to be God and he will refuse to bow before any authority and you have what's known as a great persecution and Jesus talks about that in Matthew 24 and other chapters where he says, "If God didn't shorten those days, the elect would not be saved." It's a great uplifting message to start the year with, but to be warned is to be forearmed. So it's important to understand that because let me put it this way, the two value systems are incompatible. The value system of the world and the value system of the kingdom are incompatible. The more the seed grows to maturity in each kind, in whatever age or society that it finds itself, the more the clash is going to happen. The more the Christian church grows and matures in China, the greater a threat it becomes to the powers that be and the more crosses need to be torn down and the more church buildings need to be brought down so that the Communist Party can hold on to its power. Did you know there are now more Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party? And that is after decades of trying to destroy the church. It's often been said the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. So alright, that's the why of persecution. There is an inevitable battle of values and those values cannot be reconciled and at the end of the day, one set of values is going to win and the other set of values is going to be destroyed. Oddly enough, about the only people that understand that with devastating consequences are the Islamic radicals. That's why they're getting rid of all Christians, because you are a threat to what we're trying to establish, which is our version of the kingdom on earth, but a kingdom that is founded in darkness because it's founded in violence and bloodshed. Alright, question number two. So what is the mechanism that drives persecution? Going back for just a moment to the example of China, you know, the Christian community in China in many instances are your best workers and your best citizens. Why? Because they walk with integrity according to, at least they try to walk with integrity according to the teachings of scripture. So why in the world would a country want to make life miserable for some of its best people? It doesn't rationally make sense, but it only makes sense if you understand that the issue with persecution is always the issue of who gets the inheritance and how do you get it. Or to put it another way, how do you get the blessing of God and who gets it? Let me talk about that a little bit, because this will sound very familiar to you in many levels, but it runs much deeper than most of us, I think, realize most of the time. Let me go back to these. You know them by heart now, don't you? But if I say it myself, it's very profound, because this describes two different ways of how you get the inheritance. Let me put it this way. When God created Adam and Eve, why did He create them? He created them so that He could give the earth to Adam and Eve as an inheritance. The Bible says in Ephesians, "He destined us in love to be His sons." In biblical thought, God owns everything, He's made everything, and He can give it to whomever He wants. And He gives it to His children, which is why He made this whole universe so that you and I could enjoy it. And the only condition for receiving it and enjoying it is what? A relationship with Him, an acknowledgement in our part that He's God, He's made it, He's given it to us, and so therefore, we want to walk in relationship and in obedience with Him. As you see in the garden story, Adam and Eve in the garden, and I've often said everything you and I fight for and work for and pray for and try to get into our own pockets, Adam and Eve had given as a free gift. The only condition was know that it comes from me, love me, and serve me. Good deal, don't you think? You know the story, Genesis 3, devil comes along. You can have your cake and eat it too. Look at this great, big, wonderful garden that you've got. Why should you have to listen to God, thank God, and do things His way? You can be captain of your own soul, master of your own destiny, have your cake and eat it too. So you know the story, they sinned, they rebelled, they got separated from God, and death sets in. And you know as well as I do that the fruits of that death are visible everywhere. And when we talk about the extreme violence that happens in certain parts of the world, that's only a manifestation of evil. When God gets exiled and people's selfishness comes to maturity, it's every man for himself against everybody. Well the big question in the universe for Christians and non-Christians alike, everybody knows there is pain in the world, at least most people do. And everybody's longing, if we can put that back up, everybody's longing is how do I get from here back to here? How do I get from a fallen world where my marriage fails, where I run out of money, my body gets sick, I go through financial bankruptcy, nations go to war, my child dies, I don't live forever, how do I get back to paradise regained? And it's important for us to understand that fundamentally there are only two different answers in the world. And that answer is faith or works. Faith means that I recognize I brought this on myself, it's the result of my alienation from God, God wants to bring me back to himself, my sin has to be paid for and I depend on his mercy and as I cry out for his mercy he grants it to me and he restores me to himself and he shows me his face. Works says I can't trust God, don't know if he exists or if he does exist, he's very difficult to please, work says it depends on me. And so success in life is defined by what family I'm born into, how much education I've got, how rich I can make myself, how well I can, what strengths I can draw upon in myself to move me forward. Those two are in violent opposition to each other because for the one self stands at the center and for the other God stands at the center. It's faith versus works and that dual dynamic is established almost immediately after the fall in Genesis chapter four, Genesis one and two are the creation story you know, Genesis three is the story of her fall into sin. In Genesis chapter four Adam and Eve have two children, remember? What are their names? Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel, the Bible says that as they were growing up they brought offerings to God, Abel's offering God received, Cain's offering God rejected. Why did he accept Abel's offering and not Cain's? Well the Bible says Abel was a man of faith, his name means short lived, he knew that he was fragile, that he was made of the dust, that he couldn't solve the problems that were produced by the fall, he leaned upon the mercies of God symbolized I think by the blood sacrifice that he presented in some small way, he foreshadowed the coming of the Lord Jesus I believe and God accepted him and when God accepts you please understand this, he turns his face towards you, he's no longer angry with you and he makes his resources, his power, his ability available for you and Abel got it all back, not because suddenly he became good enough to earn the blessing of God but because he knew that he wasn't and he was justified by faith, that make sense? Now why was Cain's offering rejected? Some people think it's because it wasn't a blood sacrifice and just the sacrifice of the first fruits of the land, I don't know if that's true or not but I know from the New Testament is that Cain is ascribed as being of the evil one, that is to say fundamentally Cain was not a man of faith, that is to say Cain did not want to throw himself on the mercies of God, instead he wanted to depend on the fact that he was the firstborn, on the fact that he could do it himself, that he didn't need to do it in the way that God had prescribed to him and all of that is really evident from the fact that when God rejects his offering he doesn't repent, doesn't fall to his knees and say okay God if this is not the way that you will accept me then what does the story say about him? His countenance, I love that expression, his countenance fell and he was thoroughly peeved and instead of submitting to God he gave in to sin couching at the door, anger grew up in him and what did he do? He killed his brother and then he went out and he established his own city, he named it after his son and you have and I've talked about this before you have in Genesis chapter 4 the two lines of humanity that now develop, the people of faith who threw out scripture are men and women who know they need their God and men and women who do not have faith who think they can make it happen themselves. Now here's a big question, why does Cain kill evil? Well the Bible says his deeds were evil but why were his deeds evil? Because you see when your place in life depends on how hard you work at it and you pride yourself in how hard you work at it and you find that you're not getting anywhere, that God's not interested in giving you even an e for effort, he just totally ignores you because he turns his back to you and then you see somebody else over there who isn't half as good as you are, hasn't tried half as hard, has lived a bad life and he gets the blessing of God without having to work for it and you're sitting back and you're saying to yourself that's not fair and now you get mad because the harder you try the worse it gets and you feel superior and you can't understand why you experience rejection in the way that you're experiencing it. And if you're not careful, murder settles in your soul. And just to try to bring that home a little bit, I mean just look at your own life for a minute because this isn't just out there. What happens when you're struggling in life, you're struggling financially, you're struggling in your marriage, you're struggling with your work and you're trying so hard to do better and you feel so abandoned by God and everybody else and then there's this other person over here, they're not trying half as hard as you are, they're not as good at work as you are, they're not as smart as you are and it's like they're born with a silver spoon in their mouth and you're working like crazy to try to pay off the bills and they're going on a big Caribbean cruise and what happens when you see all of that happening and this is with people that you know? Isn't it true that there's a tad of resentment that starts building up? And what happens when resentment starts building up? Then you start looking for faults in that person's life, isn't that true? And then if you nurture that a little bit, what happens? Pretty soon you become really happy when they have a bad time because it makes you feel so much better that you're not the only one, isn't that true? And if you're not careful, you know what that leads to? It'll lead to murder. And there's a lot of ways to murder people, short of shooting them. Now if we understand that it's a question of how do you get the blessing of God? Do you get it by being good and by working hard for it or do you get it by grace through faith? Then you will understand why here in Acts chapter 17 these Jews are so on Paul's case. Let's take just a few moments to walk through that story and then in a few moments we'll be done. Why are they so angry with Paul that they want to kill him at every turn of the road? Well, the passage says it begins with jealousy. The Jews were jealous. Why were they jealous? Well, I can give you a number of reasons why they would be jealous. I know why I would be jealous if I were in their shoes. They took half his congregation. That's enough to make you jealous, isn't that? The ears of the congregation were turned to Paul and Silas' preaching because you see there is something very winsome about the gospel. If you can show people that the way to God is not by keeping the law and being perfect, then that is far preferable to you have to do this, you have to do that. Remember they had tons of laws that you had to keep in order to be in God's good side. Paul comes along and he says, "Hey, it's all been fulfilled in Christ. All you need to do is believe in Jesus." Well, that turned their whole religious world upside down, I'll tell you. They were jealous. They were jealous because there is a life that flows in Christ that you cannot reproduce by trying to be religious in the sense of, "I'm trying to be a good person." What happens now? Well, now they have to take matters into their own hands because this guy is a threat to our existing world, isn't he? So what do they do? They go to the marketplace and they round up a whole bunch of bad characters. Because how do you get your way? Well, you try to get your way by rounding up a mob. And how do you get a mob agitated? Well, you tell them half truths. And in this particular case, they make false accusations that have a measure of truth, but that are geared and calculated to stirring the worst passions in these people. Notice again how it says this in verse six and seven, "They dragged Jason and some other brothers before city officials shouting, 'These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here.'" And Jason welcomed them into his house. And then this, "They are all defying Caesar's decrees saying that there is another king, one called Jesus." Well, you may as well shout fire in the middle of a crowded theater or throw a fire bomb in the middle of a crowd. Why? Because the Roman Empire was united around King Caesar, the emperor. And any suggestion that there was an other king would stir up all kinds of issues at all kinds of levels and had to be suppressed immediately. But Jesus wasn't looking for a kingdom in the world. He was looking for a kingdom in the life that is to come. He was not a threat to the existing power structures other than the fact that ultimately one day they're going to be judged by him. So it's this lie that stirs up the mob. And once you get a mob going, it is horrific what happens because some of you may remember the story coming out of Pakistan a couple of months ago. A Christian man and a Christian woman, mother of four, four months pregnant, were suddenly accused of having burned the pages of a Quran. The Imams announced it through the loud speakers of their mosques. And immediately 1,200 people came running to this location, knocked down the doors where these two people were staying, and that's a whole story in itself, broke their legs, and then threw them in the kiln oven and burned them to death. That's what mob mentality will do. And don't ever think that we're immune to mob mentality. Because here's the thing I want to end with. It's easy to say, well, that happens out there. Or I may be the recipient of it when things go badly for me. But you know what's really important for us to understand is that the dividing line between good and evil isn't just between this group of people and this group of people. The dividing line between good and evil runs in our own hearts too. And I will say this much, to the degree to which we have elements in our lives where we want to be justified by works as opposed to faith, to the degree to which we pride ourselves in our pedigree, in our talent, in our accomplishment, in our own righteousness to earn the favor of God. To that degree in our hearts we will be offended by those who live by grace and who have the favor of God and the joy of God in their lives in ways that we are not able to find. Think back to the story of the prodigal son and his elder brother. Why was his elder brother so angry? Because he tried so hard to be so good. And why was he so angry with his prodigal brother? Because the no good skunk had spent all the father's keep and now came back sniveling for his father's favor. And instead of straightening him out his father welcomed him home and threw a party for him because this my son was dead and is alive and was lost and now is found. Let me say this one more time. The gospel of grace is incredibly good news for those who are sinners because we all have an equal chance because of Jesus. Doesn't matter who we are, where we've been, what we've done. But the gospel of grace is incredibly offensive if you want to find your righteousness in something other than Jesus. And if that doesn't bring us to the cross, if we don't close the door to Satan's suggestion of resentment that flows out of that place, we have the potential to become killers. You remember the genocide of Rwanda back in the 90s. Most of the Hutsis and the Tutsis involved in that were Christian people who had lived side by side for generations until the devil threw a firebomb in there, played on resentment, it got out of hand, and what 800,000 of them were martyred. And I share this with you not to inspire fear because if God be for us, who can be against us? But I want us to be alert to the dynamics of what happens when you follow Jesus. When you follow Jesus, there will be those around you, sometimes family, sometimes friend, sometimes people that you think are brothers and sisters in Christ who will have it in for you for no other reason than that the spirit of Christ and the spirit of glory rests upon you. And the question then is, how do we respond? What [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:52:06.240; remove through 00:52:10.000] does that look like? And that, Lord willing, is where we want to pick it up next week. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:52:10.000; resume after this marked segment]