Matthew 4:23-25

Introduction—Review

I have good news to share with you today! We’re talking about the gospel. Gospel! What happens when you hear that word? I believe that what happens in your inner person when you hear the word gospel will define the trajectory of your discipleship to Jesus.

I believe that lots of christians who have turned to the heresies of nationalism or the social gospel or the health and wealth gospel have done so simply because they got bored with the gospel of Jesus. They got tired of hearing about the God-man who is gentle and lowly and humbled himself to death on a cross. They got bored with that good news and they started looking for a gospel 201. We’re ready for graduate level gospel.

But the truth that we have to come back to again and again is that the simple gospel of Jesus is enough to bring us to tears again and again. It’s more than enough to keep us searching the scriptures for a deeper understanding of all that it means that Jesus is the savior of the world.

We’re studying Matthew’s gospel together, and the first sentence of Matthew’s gospel he has been revealing Jesus to us—-showing us that the Hebrew scriptures from Genesis through the prophets has led up to this man—Jesus.

Matthew has been building his identity from chapter one where he shows him to the be son of David and Israel’s Messiah and he shows him to be the Son of God at his baptism, and that status was tested in the temptation. What we’ve seen, and if you have been with us, I hope you have been felt this… is that Jesus is greater than we think and his mission is wider and more expansive than we think. Matthew even suggests that Jesus’s arrival is like a new beginning to creation. Jesus changes everything! As we’ve studied these opening chapters I hope that you have been moved to worship and to trust. Worship and trust is the right response to Matthew’s picture of Jesus as the son of God who has come to take away the sin of the world.

Introduction- Background and Text

Today, at the end of chapter 4, we see the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.

We’ll read the passage together, but before we do, I want you to imagine the scene with me. Herod Anitpas is the ruler over a region called Galilee. We know from the historian Josephus that this region contained 204 cities and villages and that these cities and villages contained no fewer than 15,000 people. So we have roughly the population of Chicago spread out across region the size of Delaware. Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great who wanted to kill Jesus and he is the one who has just imprisoned John the Baptist. The one who will order that John is beheaded.

We also know that after John is beheaded Herod will hear about Jesus and will be afraid that John has been raised from the dead. Some time later, Jesus will be told to leave the area because Herod wants to kill him. Jesus says, ““Go tell that fox, ‘Look, I’m driving out demons and performing healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will complete my work.’

If you’re wondering if calling someone “that fox” is meant as an insult, yes it is. It means that he is deceitful, crafty, sly. I’m setting this up because I want us to feel the meaning of the disciples going into Galilee on their first mission trip.

Imagine you are one of Jesus’s followers. You know that there is already a king and already a gospel in Galilee. And you are traveling with one whose identity and message is a threat to that king and that gospel.

How do you feel if you are one of the men who has just left a fairly comfortable life as a fisherman? Do you feel that in your gut? A strange combination of excitement and fear and anxiety and hope and maybe a little hunger all mixed up. If you feel that let’s read, Matthew 4:23-25

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 4

23 Now Jesus began to go all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24 Then the news about him spread throughout Syria. So they brought to him all those who were afflicted, those suffering from various diseases and intense pains, the demon-possessed, the epileptics, and the paralytics. And he healed them. 25 Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

This passage invites us to ask the question what is the gospel? We are a gospel-centered church. We believe that Christians live by the power of the gospel in our lives every day. And so what happens when we get the wrong idea about the gospel? I think we’ve seen that reality play out over the last few years as many people have left the Christian faith because it just wasn’t working for them. And it’s what we’ve seen as many churches have become bored with the gospel and have turned to a partisan Christianity that is just left or right political ideologies dressed up with some bible language. And it’s what we see in church that only focus on the spiritual and have little to nothing to say about the evil in our world and the despair in our culture.

Getting a fuller and more biblical understanding of the gospel matters—if matters for you and how you understand what it means to follow Jesus… It matters for us and how we understand what it means to be a church… and it matters for our world because despite what they print in the papers, the gospel of Jesus is the only hope that our world has to find redemption and meaning and justice and salvation.

To answer this question, I want to highlight one pretty simple idea in this passage: The object of the good news is the kingdom of heaven revealed by words and actions.

The object of the good news is the kingdom of heaven. Verse 23 says, Now Jesus began to go all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom

The good news… of the kingdom. Good news is the word euangelion, or in English Gospel. Jesus come into the region of Galilee and he starts preaching the gospel.

Does anyone see a problem with this? What is he preaching ? Many churches, especially in our evangelical tradition, have taught that the gospel is that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, so that we can be forgiven of ours and go to heaven when we die.

If Jesus going around Galilee talking about his substitutionary death on a cross. He isn’t, so what is the gospel of Jesus’s preaching and teaching?

Matthew calls it the good news of the kingdom. It might help us to say the good news about the kingdom. Jesus preaches, “repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

The kingdom is here because the king is here and the king is starting to take ground away from his enemies; he is starting to undermine the agendas of competing rulers. This is the object and meaning of gospel. Jesus’s very presence is gospel and his message is about what it means that he has arrived and his healing ministry is all about demonstrating what his kingdom is like and it’s all about taking back ground from the ancient serpent who tried to stop his ministry before it got started in the desert.

So before he hung on a cross and bled and died, before he was buried and before he was raised from the dead, Jesus preached the good news, and the good news, Matthew tells us is about a king and a kingdom. A kingdom that comes from heaven and invades earth.

We also see that Jesus doesn’t just tell us that his kingdom will come some day. Very often we can think about the kingdom of heaven as a place we go when we die or the place that happens after the battle of Armagedon or something.

In Jesus’s ministry, we constantly see that heaven keeps breaking into the world. People are hungry and heaven breaks in and they are feed by a miracle. People are sick and heaven breaks in and their bodies are restored. Normal people who experience the brokenness of our fallen world catch these glimpses of heaven in Jesus’s voice as he preaches about his kingdom—in his touch as he places his hands on the lame and blind and on the leapers—in his compassion when he speaks to women and allows them to learn at his feet with the men—in his mercy as he forgives sin and invites people into new lives. I’m reminded of what the disciples who walked with Jesus on the road to damascus—they didn’t recognize Jesus but they said their hearts burned inside them.

Matthew tells us that Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

News about Jesus spread. That is the good news about a kingdom spread and people came from long distances to hear him to be healed by him. People came because of the hope that they might get a glimpse of heaven. And they did.

In previous weeks, we’ve seen that Jesus is a type of Elijah and Elisha. Jesus is a prophet and like a prophet, he doesn’t just speak God’s words…. He also enacts his message.

Hosea marries a prostitute… Isaiah goes about naked for 3 years…Ezekiel performed all kinds of wild stunts… I don’t really want to get into it. Jesus too doesn’t just say the kingdom is coming or even the kingdom is here. Like the prophets before him, he enacts his message by demonstrating what the kingdom is like.

In Matthew 4 that means healing the sick and the demon possessed. But we will continue to see Jesus demonstrate and enact his kingdom throughout his ministry, and to make sure you don’t hear me saying that anything less than the cross is central to the gospel message, it all culimates there. That is where the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of heaven have their greatest battle. And once again, Jesus shows us that in his kingdom, the great lay down their lives and forgive their persecutors and trust God the father even to raise them from the dead. The cross is where Jesus pays the penalty for sin, but it is also the place where he is crowed king of the Jews and the place where his prophetic vocation is on display as he is stripped and beaten and mocked. Jesus is coronated on the cross, and if we aren’t prepared to follow that king and to take up our cross then we aren’t prepared to hear to good news about the kingdom.

This means that we have to work to keep our vision of the gospel from shrinking. We have to push against our own self-centeredness that would like for the good news to begin and end with me. We no how that goes. That’s the gospel of “I get to go to heaven when I die.” Praise God that is true for those who have trusted their lives to Jesus, but that isn’t the gospel. We have to push against co-opting the gospel for a cause or an ideology, political or social, or some kind of self improvement as is the self-help gospel. These may or may not contain slivers of the truth but when any of them become equal to what we mean when we say gospel, we risk losing the whole thing, and we will if we don’t repent and believe the gospel. We’ve seen in historically. The social gospel, the health and wealth gospel, the nationalist gospel. They all want an aspect of the kingdom but they don’t want the king who hangs on a cross and all of these false gospels have proved to be various paths that lead away from faithfulness to Jesus.

And we push against these false gospels through repentance and through allegiance to king Jesus and his kingdom. Over the next few months, we are going to study Jesus’s sermon on the Mountain.

What’s that sermon about? It’s the gospel of his kingdom. He is going to say that the poor in spirit are blessed because the Kingdom of Heaven is their, and he is going to tell us how to be great in his kingdom and to pray for his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven… and he will tell us that the gate to his kingdom is narrow and the the righteousness of the pharisees is not enough to enter. For the next few months we are going to study Jesus’s gospel message. The good news about what his kingdom is like, and we will be invited to experience the blessing, the flourishing of living as citizens of that kingdom and subjects of that king.

Gospel-Centered Church

I want to shift gears a little to talk about how this central idea relates to how we understand our mission as a church. Last summer, we changed our vision statement from cultivating a gospel movement to “we want to see NKY look more like heaven.”

On the surface, it looks like we’ve moved away from the gospel.

I want to approach this passage with a question about how we understand what it means to be gospel-centered. We say that we are a gospel-centered church. What does that mean? What comes to mind for you when you hear that a church or ministry is gospel-centered. 

Now compare what comes into your mind when you hear gospel-centered with what comes to mind when you hear that a church is “for the city” or “spirit-filled” or “inclusive.” These phrases can act like a bat signal to the tribe that recognizes it saying, we’re for people like you. 

That’s a problem, because that is not what we mean when we say we are gospel-centered. 

Last year, we changed our vision statement from “we want to cultivate a gospel movement in NKY” to “We want to see NKY look more like heaven.” So we took the gospel out! Well we took the word gospel out. 

Three Gospels

I grew up in a church tradition that was all about experiencing God. Particularly it was about experiencing the power of God through what we called the manifest presence of God. If you get your hands on a Bible that belongs to a pentecostal preacher, hold it by the spine and let if fall open. 9 times out of 10 that Bible will fall open to Acts chapter 2—the story of the early church receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes in like a wind and then like tongues of fire above their heads and they all start praising God in languages they don’t know. 

They encounter the presence and the power of God. For the first couple decades of my life, orthopathy was central. We were God chasers and we wanted to experience his presence. 

And in college, I started reading about the ethical and social implications of the Christian faith. I devoured Shane Claiborne's books The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President. I wanted to see the church take care of the poor and the oppressed and I got involved with a Sudanese friend and we started a nonprofit and we raised money to send some girls to school. One of my friends and I thought it was hilarious to hand people money. We were killing mammon one ridiculous and random act of generosity at a time. 

My Claiborne days were marked by a high emphasis on orthopraxy or right action. I wanted to see Christians live like Jesus and demonstrate radical love and service and sacrifice to the world. 

Around the same time, I started to meet people who called themselves Calvinists. I distinctly remember some disagreements that were taking place at the BCM at that time. My friend was the president and one leader was saying that they needed to be focusing on learning doctrine. For some reason, I remember him saying, we need to be learning words like propitiation. I know why I remember it. It’s because I had a pretty visceral negative reaction to it. 

These people were some early adopters of what has been called the young, restless and reformed wave in the evangelical church—and maybe not the best representatives as they were pretty cold and spiritless (as least in my memory they are). 

But eventually this wave got me too. I drove a lot for work and I would listen to sermons from Sojourn in Louisville, and people like John Piper. I remember listening to a sermon by a pastor in Portland, Rick McKenely, and he said something reformedish, and I think I shouted at my radio something like, “you’ve got to be kidding me… this guy too.” It seemed like all the preachers I wanted to listen to were in this camp called reformed. Over the next few years I would learn more about this movement and how it was like and unlike the historical reformation and in many ways I became influenced by this movement and while I think I avoided many of the more unpleasant characteristics that can come with this camp, I started to learn about historic confessions and catechesis, and how the historic church thought about liturgy and sacraments and started to expand my understanding of Christian doctrine and what we call dogmatics or systematic theology. 

As I recount my experience with traditions or movements that emphasize each of these three aspects of the Christian faith, maybe you can relate. I want to be clear that these experiences are complicated. I think there is something good in each of them, and there is something problematic when one is emphasized without the others. 

We need orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. I think the spiritual maturity that the Spirit has been working in me over the past couple of years is in the marriage of these three things, and in coming back to the centrality of experiencing God in Christ as a launching point into becoming like him and walking in his way.