2021 08 22 Offended by Jesus

The speaker discusses three versions of Jesus that may offend or repulse people. The first version is the non-legalistic Jesus, who challenges legalistic views and traditions. The second version is the Jesus who turns potential followers away by emphasizing the cost of following him. The third version is the angry Jesus, who shows zeal for the house of the Lord. The speaker encourages listeners to embrace these versions of Jesus, even if they are uncomfortable, in order to have a real relationship with him. their son, Sister Moon. I was not born in 1972, but I saw it later. It chronicles the biography of St. Francis of Assisi, who, of course, is a Catholic, predominantly a Catholic figure, but a lot of Protestants have found some biblical truths in his teaching. No one's perfect, that's my disclaimer. But, at any rate, in the movie, St. Francis has a transformative experience, I guess you could say, as he stares at a rather terrifying-looking piece of artwork of Jesus. It's a piece of art of Jesus, but he is freaked out by it, right? And Stephen, would you be able to throw that image up? I think you know what I mean. Yeah, okay. So, this is not the exact one. I couldn't find the exact one, but this is close to it. Now, I remember watching the movie. Francis is freaked out. Part of that has nothing to do with the painting. Part of that has to do with some PTSD he was going through. But for me, I saw the image, and I was, like, creeped out. I was disturbed. I apologize in advance to anyone who's a big fan of medieval church art. I am not. Not a fan of this kind of imagery. It creeped me out. It kind of repulsed me. It looked a little scary, a little alien, okay? I love Jesus, love art, not super into medieval church art. Now, maybe this illustrated Jesus doesn't repulse you. Hopefully not. That's not the intention of it. But has something about Jesus or Christianity itself ever repulsed or offended you? If nothing ever has, then maybe you haven't dug deep enough past the surface level of Jesus. Because many things about Jesus are offensive to our basic human desires, right? Or I should say our sinful human desires, to be more accurate here. Since the moment Jesus came walking on earth, he was annoying people. There were people that did not like what he had to say. There's people who loved what he had to say. There's other people who did not. Well, my challenge and my big idea for you guys today is that we're not supposed to make Jesus into our image. We're supposed to be made into his. So, while we might think that the culture around us being offended by Jesus as some sort of modern phenomenon, we see in the Bible that people were already offended by Jesus from day one. And it was mostly they were offended by him not fitting the image they expected him to fit, right? They had ideas of what he was supposed to be like. So today, I want to look at a few versions or sides or aspects of Jesus that offended people in the Bible and still offend people today, maybe some of us at different times. And you might be thinking, Chris, why in the world are we talking about this? Offended by Jesus? Rename the sermon Offended by Chris. I don't like this title, right? So why are we talking about this? Well, what's it got to do with your life? My premise here is that we can't have a real relationship with Jesus unless we're willing to see him for who he is scripturally, even if we don't like how that always looks. So let's look at type number one. Type number one is the non-legalistic Jesus. Let me define that real quickly. So by legalism, I would loosely define that as legalism is wanting to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons. It's following what's right exactly in the technical sense of the law or the rules, but it's missing the intention behind it. Why are we doing it? Legalism is your little brother or maybe you were that younger sibling paddling on the older ones. We're not playing by the rules even when it makes no difference. So Jesus did offend a lot of legalistic people in his day, teachers of the law, scribes, Pharisees. His followers even repulsed people like the Apostle Paul, one of the most famous people in the New Testament next to Jesus, before he became Paul when he was Saul. Even he, he was not on board with a lot of it. So let's look at one example. If you have your Bibles, we can turn to Matthew chapter 15 and we'll start in verse one. I've been waiting for this moment to use this new Bible. It's got a nice big print, so I can stand back from here and still read it. Hannah found this Bible for me. And when we were in the Christian bookstore and I was looking at some options, she found exactly what I was looking for. And she said, Chris, you know, the Bible says he who finds a wife finds a good thing. You know why? She said, you know why? Because she'll find everything else for you. So Matthew chapter 15, starting in verse one, some Pharisees and teachers of religious law now arrived from Jerusalem to see Jesus. They asked him, why do your disciples disobey our age old tradition for the ignore our tradition of ceremonial hand washing before they eat? Jesus replied. And why do you, by your traditions violate the direct commandments of God? For instance, God says, honor your mother and father and anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father and mother must be put to death. But you say it's all right for people to say to their parents, sorry, I can't help you for I vowed to give to God what I would have given to you in this way. You say they don't need to honor their parents. And so you cancel the word of God for the sake of your own tradition. You hypocrites. Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is a farce for they teach manmade ideas and commands from God. And Jesus called the crowd to come and hear. Listen, he said, and try to understand. It's not what goes into your mouth that defiled you. You're defiled by the words that come out of your mouth. The disciples came to him and asked, do you realize that you offended the Pharisees by what you just said? Jesus replied, every plant not planted by my heavenly father will be uprooted. So ignore them. They're blind guides, leading the blind. And if one blind person guides another, they'll both fall into a ditch. So because Jesus lived by the spirit of the law, rather than using the law as a tool for others, they were offended by him, right? They weren't interested in actual justice here when they're bringing the law. They wanted to make sure that nobody got away with anything if they couldn't, right? Have you ever been put off by Jesus not being the legalist you wanted him to be? By that brother or sister in Christ having the freedom to do things your conscience won't allow you to do because of your own ideas about Christianity rather than what the Bible actually says? Have you ever been put off by, put off because the Holy Spirit convicts you of your sin, but others seem to walk around oblivious to their own sin? Then maybe the real Jesus might offend you because the real Jesus ate with sinners, tax collectors, women of bad reputation. The real Jesus ministered to people that you might judge others for being around. In Luke, we're not going to go there, but in Luke chapter 5, 27 and 32, I love how the NLT puts another scenario. There's another scenario similar to this, and I love how the NLT translation puts it really plainly. The Pharisees ask why he associates with scum. That's the word NLT uses there. So they're very like, what's the matter with you, right? And if you gave yourself an honest look in the mirror, if I gave myself an honest look in the mirror, does our life reflect Jesus in this story or does it reflect the Pharisees in this story? Am I the one scoffing at the scummy people in my community? Or am I the one sitting down and eating with them and being a spiritual doctor for their spiritual injuries? If I'm honest, way too often I've been that scoffer when instead of that doctor. But let's move on. We're going to move on to type number two here. This is a bit of a different direction here. This is the Jesus who turns potential followers away. So the next version of Jesus who might offend us is the one who turns people away. I'm talking about people coming to Jesus in droves. And instead of Jesus enlarging his territory or planting a sacrament ministry, he turns them away. So how many of you are familiar with Jesus feeding the 5,000? Probably most if not all of us, right? Okay. Well, right after that, according to John's gospel, he walked on water and met with the disciples. And those are both amazing stories in themselves. But we're going to talk a little bit about what happened after that. So the 5,000 realized Jesus had left and they went to go track him down. So that sounds awesome, right? At face value, setting that up. That sounds pretty awesome. The people wanted more of Jesus. Isn't that what we all want? Don't we want our church to be filled with people who want more of Jesus that are coming back for more of Jesus after that? The problem was that they didn't want more of Jesus. They wanted more from Jesus and Jesus understood the difference. So they came back to him looking for more bread and he told them about the bread of life, which was himself. They thought, man, eternal bread. Now that's a refill policy I can get behind. Eastside Mario's? Step aside. I don't know. Do you guys have Eastside Mario's out here? Is that a thing out here? Yeah? Okay. So Jesus knew that they wanted his blessings more than they wanted him. They were too shallow to understand the metaphor he was telling them about the bread of life, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, about the fact that they needed to hunger for him more than his blessings, that they needed to be filled with Jesus, not simply earthly things alone. He wanted to fill the emptiness in their souls more than the emptiness in their stomachs. So let's pick this up for their reaction in John chapter six. We'll just go a little bit forward here. So John chapter six, starting in verse 60. There we go. New Bible problems, right? The pages are stuck together. So many of his disciples said, this is a very, this is very hard to understand. How can anyone accept it? Jesus was aware that his disciples were complaining. So he said to them, does this offend you? Then what will you think if you see the son of man ascend to heaven again? The spirit alone gives eternal life. Human effort accomplishes nothing. And the very words I've spoken to you are spirit and life. But some of you do not believe me. For Jesus knew the beginning from the beginning, which ones didn't believe. And he knew who would betray him. Then he said, this is why I said that people can't come to me unless the father gives them to me. The thing here is Jesus knew who wouldn't follow him and he wanted them to either get it or move along. He loved them and he wanted them to change, but he also knew who he was there for and who wasn't, and he wasn't going to beg anyone to follow him. Like he knew who he's there for. Right? Another great example of this, we're not going to go there, but is in Luke chapter nine. And in this scenario, a series of people come to Jesus basically saying, I want to follow you. And in one of them, he, they don't even say that. He just says, you come follow me. Right? But each of them has some sort of condition, right? I want to say goodbye to my family first. I want to go bury my dad first. They each have these conditions, right? But the ones that had conditions, he was just like, no, they're like, oh Jesus, I'm going to come follow you. Just first I'm going to go to this. It's like, no, no, no, no. I don't want the people who come in with conditions. Right? He knew that they didn't understand the cost of following him and wanted those who understood the cost. You know, I often times when we're telling people about Jesus, we're, we're doing so a lot of people doing this in a very well intentioned way, which is awesome. And we talk about things like freedom in Christ that they're going to have with salvation. We talk about things like the forgiveness, the grace, and that's all part of it. But sometimes we can misrepresent and unintentionally watered down what the Christian life is like when we only focus on those things. Jesus said, the world's going to hate us. People ask me, will my friends think that I'm weird for my faith? Some of them probably will. They killed Jesus for it. I mean, grace, forgiveness, freedom in Christ are all amazing things, but we can't ignore that even Jesus didn't try to sell the gospel with fine print. He took that fine print, he put it up front in bold, and he let people know that salvation is a free gift, but there is a cost to following Jesus. But that can offend our sensibilities, that version of Jesus where there's, oh, it sounds like there's a catch. I don't want to tell people about that version of Jesus, right? But Jesus wants the people who are earnestly seeking him, because Christianity is not a part-time job. Well, we're going to jump to the final version here, and don't put the slide up yet, Stephen, but the final version of Jesus I want to talk about is the one that I personally have the hardest time with. This is the one that personally offends me, that I have to work through. And maybe when I get to it, you guys are going to be like, Chris, what's the problem? I have no issue with this. And for that I say, good, good. You guys are more mature than me. Thank God. But the Holy Spirit is convicting me on this one repeatedly, and that is angry Jesus. So let's turn to John chapter 2. That's just a few pages earlier. We're going to start in verse 13. So it was nearly time for the Jewish Passover celebration. Jesus went to the temple. In the temple area, he saw merchants selling cattle, sheep, and doves for sacrifice. He also saw dealers at tables exchanging foreign money. So Jesus made a whip from some ropes and chased them out of the temple. He drove out the sheep and cattle, scattered the money changers' coins over the floor, and turned over the tables. Then going over to the people who sold doves, he told them, get these things out of here. Stop turning my father's house into a marketplace. Then his disciples remembered this prophecy from the scriptures. Passion for God's house will consume me. Or a lot of other translations say zeal for his house. So some of you might not relate to what makes me uncomfortable here. And all I can say again is I'm glad you guys are more mature. But we have a Sunday school, Jesus loves me idea of Jesus, and that's not wrong. I want to be clear. That's not wrong. It's true. But just like you and I, Jesus is not one-dimensional, right? You have multiple moods in a day, right? And God being the creator is much more complex than us. So I think it's kind of simplistic for us to go, God is only going to ever be like one exact way when we are multiple ways, right? We have multiple sides and facets to us. That's not saying that God is inconsistent or that he's going to contradict himself. He's not going to. But it's a simple fact that there is a front on this Bible, there is a back on this Bible. And they're similar but different, but they're part of the same thing. So Jesus got mad. Full stop. I don't like that sentence. That's hard for me. I've struggled with different times as a kid. I struggled with a lot of anger problems, right? And in lesser ways, I still do when I'm driving. But while I am acting like a Pharisee on the roads, the angry Jesus is not in the passenger seat patting me on the back and saying, yeah, they're really breaking all the rules on the roads, you better give it to them, right? He's talking to me about my pharisaical aggression, right? So others of us might read angry Jesus with a zeal for the house of the Lord. We use it to justify our righteous anger, which is really just anger at people who aren't following God the right way. This is not an excuse for self-righteous abuse. This is not an excuse. When Jesus was angry, it was because people were disrespecting his father. We saw him tick off the Pharisees who thought he wasn't following the law right, and he was willing to offend them, but he was not willing to offend his father, God. I think this version of Jesus is not an example of how we can justify our soapboxes of self-righteous anger, and more of an example of how Jesus may deal with our disrespect of his father. I think it's also interesting that this scenario happens inside the house of God. It doesn't, he didn't go out and get angry for the people in the streets for the things they were doing to disrespect God. He got angry with the people in the house of God who were disrespecting God because he knew that they knew better. You know, we spend a lot of time telling people that Jesus loves you, he's not angry with you, and while that's partially true, the full truth is there are times we can offend Jesus' spirit, and that he will put us in our place. As a pure and holy God, Jesus can be angry without sinning. He can love us, and he can express anger at the same time. But how many times have you had the Holy Spirit try and check you? You know what I'm talking about. And you deflected it as an attack of the enemy. How many times has God led someone to speak with you and challenge you, and maybe they didn't put it in the right words or the right tone, that you were not listening to the right words or the right tone that you like, or maybe it's just that person and you don't like their face, but God was trying to say something to you and you rejected it. You said, I don't accept that because God's words are only good over me. Check the Old Testament. Look at the prophets. So much of their prophecy for God's people is corrective in nature, rather than simple blessings. Not all of it, but many. Now you might say, Chris, that's the Old Testament. We're under a new covenant now. Look to the New Testament. Look to the book of Acts and see a story of two church members who came to Peter, lied about how much tithe they were giving. Peter prophesied their deaths, and it happened right there. Should we take a tithe now, Ralph? That's probably a good time for that. Yeah. But not every harsh thing that somebody comes and tells you that they say is from God is going to be from God. Be discerning, right? What I'm asking us to do here is to take what they say humbly, take it back to prayer, and ask God, is there anything in this, anything at all that you want me to take? Is there any grain of truth you want me to take and be transformed by? So everything that we've discussed today, maybe not every single one for you personally, but maybe one of them, or maybe something else, there's something else about Jesus, might be a painful truth for you. Something that you wish was not the way it worked. But they're true. They're biblical. We have to wrestle with them. That we can't just pick the parts of the Bible that we like. It would be very small if we did. But there's a reason that it's there. So to wrap things up, I want to tell you a story to kind of point us to a challenge to hopefully make this whole thing worthwhile. So when I used to live in Halifax, I had a friend who, he was a Christian as well, but we were from very different doctrinal, denominational backgrounds. We saw certain things very differently. And for the sake of not leading to any division here, I'm not going to denote what those were. But we had some differences of opinion. And I remember telling him in one of the assemblies sort of discussion, debate kind of things we were having about certain doctrine, I told him that if you could convince me that this doctrine that you're trying to tell me is true, if you could convince me that's true, I'd sooner become an atheist than I would be part of your denomination. And to be clear, I still disagree with him on this particular doctrine, but what he said back to me was a really good challenge that I have not forgotten. He said, so what you're saying, Chris, is that if the truth about God was something that you didn't prefer, even though it were true, you would abandon him. And I was like, okay, that shut me up for the rest of the day. But the question we have to ask ourselves is will we abandon Jesus or will we abandon our preconceptions about him? So each of us has a choice today and repeatedly through our life. Will we serve the God who is or who the God we wish was? We're not supposed to make Jesus in our image. We're supposed to be made into his. So I want to challenge you this week to seek out God's word, to seek his face in prayer, to do some self-reflection. I'm going to be doing this too, about who you think God is, who he really is, and if you are willing to let go of your ideas about him and get on board with who he is. You'll have such a stronger, more beautiful relationship in Christ if you do. I just want to pray real quick if we can. Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you that you don't fit our ideas. We thank you that who you are is so much, so much further beyond what any of us could think or imagine. We thank you that who you are is good even when we can't conceive of what is good. Challenge us. Challenge me, God, to see you for who you really are. Lord, the areas that I'm uncomfortable with, when that verse comes up, when that challenge from an unbelieving friend comes up, they said, well, what about this thing that you believe? Help me, Lord, to put aside my preferences and recognize your reality. I pray for each of us today, Lord, that we would comfort us with who you really are, Lord, that it can be scary to find out that you're different than what we might imagine, Lord. But, Lord, comfort us knowing that what you are is better than what we could think of. In Jesus' name, amen.