Don’t Miss The Point

Welcome

Intro

Imagine you’ve just walked out of the most magnificent building you’ve ever seen in your life.

Not a picture of it. Not a video. You were there — you felt the shadow of it fall over you. You ran your hand along the stones. Some of those stones were as large as a school bus, stacked so perfectly that the whole structure seemed less like something men built and more like something God dropped from heaven.

That’s the Temple. And you’ve just spent the afternoon watching Jesus teach in its courts.

But then, on the way out, Jesus stops. He looks back at it — this monument to everything Israel held sacred — and says, “Not one stone here will be left on another.”

And something in you is starting to understand what you’ve been afraid to say out loud. The pieces are coming together — the opposition growing, the religious leaders plotting, the things He keeps saying about what’s coming. He’s been hinting at it for months. The Temple is going to fall. And maybe — maybe — so is He.

So when you get to the Mount of Olives and sit down, and the city of Jerusalem is spread out below you like a painting, the question burning inside you is not really about the Temple. It’s about Him. If You’re going to die — and it’s starting to feel like You are — then when are You coming back? When are You going to come back and fix all of this? When does it get made right? You lean in close and ask Him what every one of us would have asked:

“When? And what’s the sign?”

What happens next is one of the greatest teaching moments in all of Scripture. Jesus doesn’t dodge the question. He doesn’t give a theology lecture. He sits down with His closest friends on a hillside — the same way a father sits down with his kids when something hard is coming — and He tells them the truth.

Today we begin The Olivet Discourse found in Matthew 24.

And I want to make something clear right from the start: We are not here today to decode anything.

I know that’s what a lot of people do with this passage. They get out their charts and their timelines. They try to match verses to headlines. And I understand the impulse — there’s something in us that wants to know exactly what’s coming and exactly when.

But I don’t think that’s why Jesus sat down on that hillside.

I think He sat down because He loved those people.

And I think He sat down because time was short.

And I think He wanted them — and us — to feel the weight of that.

Not the weight of fear.

The weight of urgency.

So let’s read what He said.

Body

THE TEXT — Matthew 24:3–8 (CSB)

“While he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples approached him privately and said, ‘Tell us, when will these things happen? And what is the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’

Jesus replied to them, ‘Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the Messiah,” and they will deceive many. You are going to hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, because these things must happen, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these events are the beginning of labor pains.’”

POINT ONE: The Disciples Asked the Wrong Question — And Jesus Loved Them Anyway

Notice what the disciples asked: “When will this happen? What will be the sign?”

They wanted information.

They wanted a schedule.

They wanted to know the date so they could plan around it.

And here’s the thing — Jesus doesn’t give it to them.

Instead, He says:

“Watch out.”

Don’t be deceived.

Don’t be alarmed.

See to it.

I want to stay here for just a moment — because that word deceived is not a first-century problem.

We are living in one of the most distracted, most deceived generations in human history.

The Great Deceiver doesn’t have to work that hard anymore.

He doesn’t need to come at you with something dramatic.

He just needs to keep you busy.

He just needs to keep you scrolling.

One more video.

One more rabbit hole.

One more outrage cycle on the news.

YouTube and TikTok have made distraction a lifestyle — and most of us don’t even notice it’s happening because everyone around us is doing the same thing.

Deception rarely looks like a lie.

It usually looks like something almost true — or something harmless.

It looks like another hour on your phone when you could have been present with your family.

It looks like being so consumed with what’s falling apart in the world that you forget you’ve been invited into the work of putting things back together.

The enemy’s greatest tool right now is not false doctrine.

It’s distraction.

Pull your attention away from The Journey long enough, and you’ll wake up one day and realize you haven’t been on it in years.

Jesus says: Watch out.Stay awake. Don’t let anyone — or anything — pull you off the path.

And He’s not just talking about TikTok.

He mentions false prophets for a reason.

They were real then, and they are real now.

There is no shortage of voices today claiming special revelation — people who say they’ve cracked the code on what God is doing, who’s really in control, what’s secretly happening behind the scenes.

And I’ll be honest with you: conspiracy theories are interesting.

They’re alluring.

They give you the feeling that you’re one of the few people smart enough to see what’s really going on. T

hat’s a powerful feeling.

But that feeling is exactly what the enemy is counting on.

Because the moment you’re deep in a rabbit hole trying to figure out who’s pulling the strings of world history, you have taken your eyes off the One who actually holds it all.

The Truth is not hidden.

The Truth has a name.

And

His name is Jesus.

Don’t trade Him for a theory.

And that’s the key to understanding everything Jesus says next.

Every response He gives is not about information— it’s about orientation.

He’s not telling them what to know. He’s telling them how to live.

This matters for us. Because if we come to Matthew 24 asking the same question the disciples asked — when, what sign, what year — we will walk away from one of the greatest conversations in history and completely miss what Jesus was actually saying.

The disciples asked when the world would end.

Jesus answered by telling them how to live right now.

There’s a life lesson buried right here in verse 3: The urgency of a moment reveals what we really care about.

When the disciples heard “the Temple is going to fall,” their minds went to timing. When do we need to worry? When do we need to act?

But Jesus redirects them. Because the right response to what’s coming isn’t to calculate — it’s to commit.

POINT TWO: Don’t Be Alarmed — But Don’t Go Back to Sleep Either

Look at what Jesus describes in verses 6 through 8.

Wars. Rumors of wars. Nations against nations. Famines. Earthquakes.

He’s describing a world that sounds an awful lot like… every morning’s news broadcast.

And His instruction is two things at once, and we need to hold them both:

First — “Do not be alarmed.”(v. 6)

That’s not passive.

That’s not “don’t care.”

(Slowly)

It’s a command to a specific kind of peace — the peace that comes from knowing that God is not surprised by any of this.

He told us it was coming.

He’s not wringing His hands.

He is still on the throne.

Paul echoes this in Romans 13:11–14 — “Besides this, since you know the time, it is already the hour for you to wake up from sleep, because now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, and the day is near; so let us discard the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk with decency, as in the daytime: not in carousing and drunkenness; not in sexual immorality and promiscuity; not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.”

Did you catch that? Paul isn’t writing to unbelievers here — he’s writing to the church. He’s telling usto wake up. To put down the things that belong to the night and pick up the things that belong to the day. That is urgency without panic. That is someone who knows what time it is and is choosing to live accordingly.

Second — “These are the beginning of birth pains.” (v. 8)

This is the image Jesus chooses.

Birth pains.

And this is not a coincidence — Jesus is a student of the Scriptures, and He is deliberately echoing the prophet Jeremiah.

Listen to Jeremiah 30:4–7 — “These are the words the LORD spoke to Israel and Judah. This is what the LORD says: ‘A sound of terror, of dread, and there is no peace. Ask and see: Can a male give birth? Then why do I see every man with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor and every face turned pale? How awful that day will be! There will be no other like it! It will be a time of trouble for Jacob, but he will be saved out of it.’”

Six hundred years before Jesus sat on that hillside, God gave Jeremiah the same image.

Trouble that feels like labor.

Pain that has a purpose.

A people who will be saved out of it — not spared from it, but carried through it.

When Jesus reaches for this language, every Jewish disciple in that circle would have felt it.

He is not making up a metaphor.

He is connecting what is coming to what God has always been doing — bringing life through the hardest moments.

Nobody who has ever been in a delivery room thinks birth pains mean calm down, nothing’s happening.

Birth pains mean something is coming.

Something real.

Something that requires everything you’ve got.

But — and this is so important — birth pains also mean something good is on the other side.

A woman in labor doesn’t despair over the pain.

The pain has a purpose.

The pain has a destination.

Jesus is saying: the turbulence in the world around you is not the story.

It’s the contractions before the story arrives.

And what is being born?

Nothing less than the glorious return of our Messiah — and with Him, the Messianic Age.

The age when every wrong is made right, every tear is wiped away, every nation bows, and the Kingdom of God fills the earth the way water fills the sea.

That is what is coming.

That is what the birth pains are for.

So when you look at the chaos around you and feel the ground shifting, remember — you are not watching the world fall apart.

You are watching the world get ready to be made new.

So what do we do with that?

We don’t check out. We don’t bunker down. We don’t spend our energy trying to figure out what trimester we’re in.

We get to work. Because there are people who don’t know what’s coming — and we do.

POINT THREE: This Is What the Journey Is For

Mark 13:10 — the parallel passage to this one — contains a line Jesus slips in that I don’t want us to miss. He says:

“And it is necessary that the gospel be preached to all nations.”

There it is.

Right in the middle of the end-times discourse.

Right in the middle of the wars and the earthquakes and the birth pains.

The gospel must first be preached.

Before the end comes — before the birth, if you want to stay in Jesus’ metaphor — there is work to do.

And that work is not complicated.

Jesus made it simple on purpose.

This why we have leaned into Be with Jesus, Become like Jesus, Do What Jesus Did.

We are not leaning into tomorrow, We are leaning into today.

We are active participants in Today’s Journey.

Leaning into God’s presence.

Learning from Him.

Becoming more like Him.

And then going out to invite others to start that same journey.

That’s discipleship. And this is exactly why we can’t just skip the Incarnation on our way to the Cross.

God didn’t send a manual.

He sent His Son — in flesh, in time, in real conversations on real hillsides with real people who had real questions.

Jesus didn’t just die for us.

He lived among us.

He walked with people.

He ate with them.

He stopped for them.

He sat down with them and taught them how to live.

Every day of His ministry was a masterclass in what The Journey looks like in skin.

Including this day, on the Mount of Olives.

Look at the scene again.

He’s sitting down.

The disciples gathered close.

He’s teaching them.

He’s preparing them.

He’s doing in that moment exactly what He’s telling them to go do for others.

He is leaning in with them.

He is teaching them.

He is forming them.

He is sending them.

And here’s what I love about the disciples in this moment — they leaned in.

They didn’t walk away when Jesus said something hard.

They didn’t get distracted.

They sat down close and they listened.

That’s the right response.

That’s what we’re supposed to look like.

But here’s the question we have to ask ourselves:

What is the point of receiving a message like this if we walk away and do nothing with it?

You don’t sit at the feet of Jesus just to feel inspired.

You don’t learn from Him just to collect good information.

The entire point of learning from Jesus is to become like Jesus — and the entire point of becoming like Jesus is that the world around you starts to look different because you are in it.

The disciples heard everything Jesus said on that hillside.

And then they went and turned the world upside down.

Not because they had all the answers.

But because they had been with Him — and it changed them, and they couldn’t keep it to themselves.

2 Peter 3:9 tells us why the Lord hasn’t returned yet — and it’s not because He forgot, and it’s not because He can’t. It’s because “He is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.”

God is holding the door open.

And not just holding it — He is pursuing people.

He is actively, relentlessly going after the ones who don’t know Him yet.

That’s not a passive God sitting back and waiting to see who shows up.

That’s the God of the lost sheep who leaves the ninety-nine.

That’s the God of the prodigal son’s father who sees him coming from a long way off and runs. God has not given up on anyone.

He is still in pursuit.

And He’s holding it open because He’s waiting on us to walk through our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our families — and invite people in.

Luke 10:2 — Jesus said it plainly: “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.”

The field is full. The need is urgent. The window is open.

This is not a call to fear. This is a call to move.

POINT FOUR: Urgency Is Not Anxiety — It’s Love With Its Eyes Open

I want to address something before we close, because I know this passage can feel heavy.

Some of you grew up hearing this passage used to scare people into salvation.

The tactic of “Jesus is coming — don’t get left behind.”

And some of you still carry the anxiety of that.

I know because I lived it.

I can’t tell you how many times in my high school years I’d wake up after not living up to the standard and be afraid I missed it.

I can remember waking up at my friends house……..

I don’t know how many times I went looking for that one person I knew would not be left behind.

Just to make sure.

Just to confirm I hadn’t missed it.

That’s not faith.

That’s fear with a Bible verse attached to it.

And a lot of us were handed that and told it was the gospel.

I want to offer you something different.

When a doctor tells a patient, “We need to treat this now — waiting will cost you” — that’s not cruelty.

That’s love with the courage to be honest.

When a father tells his kids, “This matters — don’t waste your life on things that won’t last” — that’s not fear-mongering.

That’s a dad who loves his children enough to tell them the truth.

That’s what Jesus is doing on that hillside.

He’s not trying to terrify His disciples into compliance. He’s sitting with the people He loves most in the world and saying — “I need you to understand what time it is. Not so you’ll be afraid. So you’ll be alive in it.”

The birth pains are real.

The urgency is real.

But so is the hope.

So is the harvest.

So is the grace of a God who holds the door open because He doesn’t want to lose a single one.

CONCLUSION: So What Do We Do This Week?

Let me land this thing.

Matthew 24 is not a puzzle to solve.

It’s a posture to adopt.

The posture of someone who knows what time it is — and lets that knowledge shape the way they live every single day.

So here’s what I want to ask you:

Who are you leaning into God’s presence with right now?

Not just you, alone — though that matters. But who are you walking alongside? Who is watching the way you pray, the way you love, the way you stay steady when the world is shaking?

Who are you learning from?

The Journey isn’t something we do solo. We need people in our lives who are further down the road — people who can sit with us on the hillside and say, “Here’s what Jesus taught me.”

And I want to be direct about something: that’s not what happens when you sit in a seat on Sunday morning and listen to me preach. That’s a starting point — but it’s not enough. What I’m talking about is small groups. Study groups. Believers gathered around the Word together, not centered on me as your pastor, but centered on each other and on becoming more like Jesus. That’s where formation actually happens. That’s where people look across a table at someone else’s life and say, “I want what they have.” We were never meant to do this alone, and we were never meant to outsource it to one person with a microphone.

Who are you becoming for?

Becoming more like Jesus is not a private project. It has a mission built into it. You are being formed so that you can be sent. A tree that bears fruit and never lets anyone eat it isn’t fulfilling its purpose — it’s just taking up space.

The fruit of your life, your patience, your kindness, your faithfulness, your peace in the middle of chaos — that is not just for you.

It’s meant to feed someone who is starving and doesn’t even know it yet.

Who are you going to invite?

Not with a sales pitch. Not with a timeline or a chart. Just — who in your life doesn’t know that God loves them? Who in your life is living like there’s no urgency, no purpose, nothing coming?

Go sit with them on the hillside.

The disciples asked Jesus, “When?”

Jesus answered, “Now. It’s always been now. Go.”

Let’s pray.

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