Doing the Unexpected

There were two key aims of the OT law - one principle and one consequential: to constrain retaliatory sin (consequential), and to demonstrate to us the seriousness of marring the image of God by crippling another person (principle - there is a reason why the “eye for an eye” passages come in the context of blasphemy laws). Note that what Jesus says further in this passage does NOT negate the actual point of the Law - that human beings who image God have inherent dignity and are not to be harmed lightly.

How the law became twisted

Note that the above examples are for serious injury (likely malicious) directed towards another person. None of the examples that Jesus brings up in the sermon on the Mount would result in injuries like losing an eye (perhaps a tooth might be lost in the slap, but that would be unlikely)

It becomes clear that the Pharisees had extended this principle from the valid application (malicious intent to harm an imager of God) to including insults and compelled servitude as well. This is a well established line of argument in Jewish jurisprudence (and even in our judicial system today!) - arguing that because a strong case exists for something, a weaker case must follow the same principle. Jesus is aiming here to set the record straight. This is another example of how the righteousness of those in the kingdom must exceed that of the Pharisees and scribes.

The heart issue behind the law

This extension of the existing commandment springs from a sinful desire to protect our rights to our pride, our possessions, and our time. It demands “justice” instead of seeing these moments as an opportunity to witness. It causes us to dehumanize those who would oppose us.

This runs counter to our culture, especially in the United States - we are used to our rights, and we guard them jealously! But in so doing, we fail to live up to the calling and the image of our Savior.

Practical implications:

Slap on the right cheek - don’t guard your right to pride so jealously that it impedes your witness! Don’t rise to the bait of insults! Jesus’ command here is in the context of an insult - in order to slap the right cheek, a person would need to use the back of their right hand. This was meant to be an insult, not to do any significant harm. It is meant entirely to provoke the struck party to anger. Jesus tells us that we ought to defuse these situations by refusing to rise to the bait. In so doing, we expose the insult for what it is. We also demonstrate that our identity is found not in our reputation and what others think about us, but that our identity is found in our Savior.

Example A: insults flung at you by family or co-workers

Example B: Someone says something that you disagree with politically on the internet!

Sue for your tunic - don’t guard your right to your possessions so jealously that it impedes your witness! Be willing to give up what you have to show the injustice of someone’s imposition upon you and that you might be a witness to them.

Example A?

Compelled to walk - don’t guard right to your time so jealously that it impedes your witness! Consider these moments where you are forced to do something that you do not want to do joyful service to God!

Example A: Singapore National Service - how many people simply complained and felt sorry for themselves rather than recognizing the opportunity for what it was - a chance to deeply get to know their fellow servicemen and to demonstrate the gospel to them

Example B: Papua New Guinea (lest I be accused of ignoring the log in my own eye)

In sum - the Christian is compelled to do the unexpected, because grace makes us seek to win the souls of those who would take advantage of us by love rather than demanding our rights (Ferguson 101). How do we do this? Because we know how the story ends! Because we know that there will be justice for all evil and every wrong meted out at the end of time.

Beg and borrow - what is the logical extension of the above? It means that we assume the best of people, that we take their needs into consideration, and we care for them

A better way - consider God as the true victim of our sins.

Key points:

Some laws, like the laws on divorce that we covered earlier in this series, are there because they are necessary, not because they are desirable. God desires that no one should get divorced, but sin requires that some will, so God provides an avenue to accommodate it in light of people’s sin. Retaliation is much the same way - it comes about as a result of sin. Legitimate sin, in many cases, to be sure. But in the new heaven and the new earth, just as there is no room for divorce, there will be no room for retaliation.

The laws from the OT around retaliation are meant to constrain our worst impulses. When we are hurt, we want to see the person who injured us hurt as well. The more they are hurt, generally the better. These laws constrain our sinful desire to see those who have wronged us suffer disproportionately. Contrary to the trite saying that “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”, an eye for an eye helped to control the evil instincts of human nature by limiting our natural tendency towards punitive vigilante action.

Above all, we must consider how we are called to image our God. At the end of the day, God is the true victim of all of our sins. Our sins are acts of rebellion against him. And yet, he is long-suffering. And not only is he long-suffering, he makes a way to redemption through Jesus. If there was anyone who deserved to be allowed to retaliate, it was Jesus! But on the cross, he did not - he suffered and died for the sins of the world.

As Christians we know that one day all sin will be paid for. Either it will have been atoned for by the blood of Jesus on the cross, or those who persist in evil will face the full measure for their sin at the final judgement. This fact should also serve to constrain us. When our overactive sense of “justice” and “fairness” starts to kick in during our interpersonal interactions, we must remember that even if we do not see justice in the here and now, we will see it in eternity. And we ought to pray that rather than falling on the head of the person who perpetrated the injustice, that it has been borne at the cross by the one who first told us to turn the other cheek.

Talk through how this ties back to the beatitudes - peacemakers, lowly in heart

To the prevailing authorities of the day, it was righteous to exact the punishment that we due according to the Law. For Jesus, it is far more righteous to suffer indignities for the sake of breaking the typical human reaction to suffering than it is to demand what one is technically due.

The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Matthew 5. On ‘An Eye for an Eye’ (5:38–42)

The Matthean Jesus speaks against those who would extrapolate from the OT’s ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to justify aggressive protection of their own rights and interests. Jesus insists that in situations of challenge the other person should not be treated as an antagonist to be fiercely resisted and counter-challenged.

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Gracious God, we thank you for the opportunity to gather this morning as your church. We thank you for the chance to dig deep into your Word this morning, and we pray that this is a fruitful time for all of us. We ask that your Holy Spirit would lead and guide our hearts as we seek to draw near to you, and that as we walk through Jesus’ teachings on retaliation and revenge that he would be convicting us of areas where we continue to demand our own supremacy over the supremacy of our king. Let our hearts be malleable, let our minds be opened to your truths, and let our identities be grounded solely in the fact that we have been redeemed through the blood of Christ. Amen.

Introduction

I’d like to begin this morning with a short (possible apocryphal) story about Abraham Lincoln:

When he was an attorney, Abraham Lincoln was once approached by a man who passionately insisted on bringing a lawsuit for $2.50 against an impoverished debtor. Lincoln tried to discourage him, but the man was bent on revenge. When he saw that the man would not be put off, Lincoln agreed to take the case and asked for a legal fee of $10, which the plaintiff paid. Lincoln then gave half the money to the defendant, who willingly confessed to the debt and paid the $2.50! But even more amazing than Lincoln’ settlement was the fact that the irate plaintiff went happily on his way, fully satisfied by it!

The desire for revenge does funny things to a person. It can cause us to do objectively silly things, like pay $10 to settle a $2.50 debt. But, far more often, it can also ruin our hearts and poison our relationships and our witness, causing us to drive people away from Christ rather than draw them to him.

Our passage today is , where Jesus teaches on the principle of retaliation. This is a challenging passage. Like so much of what Jesus says, it goes against our base instincts. It cuts to the heart and exposes what we truly care about and what we truly desire. As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, in this portion of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus has been questioning the conventional wisdom and the conventional righteousness of the religious establishment. He has been directly addressing their interpretations of the Law that miss the point and has been offering his own correctives to tell us how we ought to understand the commands that God has given us. And in these verses, Jesus turns to perhaps one of the best known sayings of the Mosaic law: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”.

To understand the proclamations that follow, we need to first understand the source material. And that means turning our Bibles back to the Old Testament, to Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, where we first see the articulation of this principle. Turn with me, if you will, to :

English Standard Version Chapter 24

17 “Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. 18 Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. 19 If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. 21 Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. 22 You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the LORD your God.”

English Standard Version Chapter 24

19 If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. 21 Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. 22 You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the LORD your God.”

Old Testament Meanings

At first glance, this might seem harsh. The principle here is called lex talionis in Latin, which means “the law of retaliation”. The main aim is two-fold: first, it demonstrates to us the seriousness of intentionally injuring another human being. Second, it restrains our own sinful desires for revenge, ensuring that whatever punishment is levied is proportional to the crime committed.

Let’s talk about the first aim briefly. First, we should recognize the interesting location of this statement in the greater context of the book of Leviticus. We find the principle embedded in a section about blasphemy (take a look a couple verses up in your Bible and you will see it). This is our first clue that there is something more at stake here than simply accidental physical injury. It should also be recognized that the law has in mind intentional crime committed against another person specifically to injure them. When we understand that, it comes into focus much more clearly why this verse would be included with laws dealing with blasphemy - every single human being is an image of God. To put it somewhat provocatively, to intentionally maim a human being is akin to going into a Canaanite temple and breaking off Ba’al’s arm. If you tried that, I doubt that the Canaanites would have been content to simply remove you arm in retaliation!

The location of this verse emphasizes the inherent value of human beings. It demonstrates that humans are in a different class from animals - you can replace the life of an animal by substituting another one in its place, you cannot replace the life of a human; if you murder, you must be put to death. God takes harm against his image bearers seriously - that is something that we should clearly see in this passage.

Now, we should address the fact that it sounds quite barbaric to blind someone because they took the sight of someone else. There is a principle of just compensation at work here as well, and monetary payment was generally accepted and assumed for these types of cases, with the notable exception of murder. You can potentially “fairly” compensate someone for the loss of their livelihood if you cut off their hand. You cannot do that if you take their life. The Law was clear that no compensation could be given for murder - it truly was a life for a life. The punishments (or the compensation payments) were harsh to demonstrate the value of human life and the evil of seeking to injure or destroy an image-bearer of God.

Secondly, however, the passage works to restrain our own sinful desire for revenge. An example might be instructive here:

When I worked in Papua New Guinea, we would occasionally hear about significant violence going on in the nearby towns. After a couple of these incidents, a pattern emerged. Someone would be accidentally killed (generally in a car accident). The tribe of the dead person would then demand satisfaction from the other tribe by raiding the village and murdering the driver of the car. The driver’s tribe would then demand satisfaction for his death by raiding the first village and killing someone else. And on and on it would go, until finally cooler heads prevailed and the cycle of retaliation stopped.

Our hearts are similar. When we are wronged (even emotionally, much less physically!), how often we want to exact terrible revenge upon those who have wronged us. The laws from the Old Testament about retaliation serve to constrain our worst impulses as sinful human beings. When we are hurt, we want to see the offending party hurt as well. The more they end up getting hurt, generally the better! These laws constrain our sinful desire to see those who have wronged us suffer disproportionately. Contrary to Gandhi’s trite saying that “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”, the correct application of “an eye for an eye” keeps a vicious cycle of violence from tearing communities apart.

How the Law was Perverted

So that’s an (admittedly short!) explanation of the original intent of the law. But as we have seen throughout the Sermon on the Mount, the religious authorities of Jesus’ day had re-interpreted it incorrectly. We’ve said before that an interpretive key for the sermon is Jesus saying that kingdom righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees - and we are about to get a great lesson in what that means right here.

Some laws, like the laws on divorce that we covered earlier in this series, are there because they are necessary, not because they are desirable. God desires that no one should get divorced, but sin dictates that some will, so God provides an avenue to accommodate it in light of people’s sin. Retaliation is much the same way - it comes about as a result of sin. Legitimate sin, in many cases, to be sure. But it is there in response to sin, not because it is desirable.

We tend to do strange things with laws that have to do with constraining sin. Take the laws around adultery that we talked about a few weeks back. As sinful people, we are interested in tailoring those laws as narrowly as possible. Often, we want to know where the line is - how far can I go along the path of doing that forbidden thing without actually doing it before it is a sin? Jesus, of course, leaves us no doubt that this is not the right way to look at things; he tells us that if we lust after someone we have already committed adultery with them in our hearts.

On the other hand, we tend to do the opposite thing when we think that a broad interpretation of a law could benefit us. Our law today is a case in point for that. As originally established, it applied to a narrow set of circumstances - intentional criminal physical harm against another human being. But the Pharisees sought to expand its scope, moving it outside the realm of intentional physical harm and into the realm of insult and compulsion. The strict principle of “an eye for an eye” began to be applied to things that it was never intended for, and in so doing, the Pharisees muddied the original meaning of the law. It became an avenue through which to claim one’s rights, and to justify revenge for even trivial things. And when it was applied to trivial things, it caused people to value their “rights” more than the inherent dignity of other people.

In this nation in particular we like to talk about rights. We cling tightly to them. We will fight if we feel they are being encroached upon or abrogated. We also like the idea of refusing to take things lying down and fighting back. Look back to 2016 and the two major candidates for president - Hillary Clinton’s campaign song was “Fight Song”, which sings about taking back rights. On the other hand, one of the main appeals of Donald Trump was that he always fought back about things. It is deeply ingrained in our national culture, and it is deeply ingrained in our own hearts as well. We hate to see our rights minimized and trampled upon. When we feel personally threatened, we demand that we be allowed to fight back.

But Jesus shows us another way.

Laying Down Our Rights

Jesus brings three separate examples to our attention in his discourse here. Verse 39 speaks of an insult (more on this in a moment). Verse 40 speaks of a legal case where we are being sued for our possessions (even the clothes off our back). Verse 41 speaks of someone imposing upon our time. These extensions of the original commandment spring from a sinful desire to protect our rights to our pride, our possessions, and our time. According to the authorities of the day, one could demand justice for any of these circumstances. But Jesus instead calls us to see these moments as an opportunity to witness. As John Nolland says:

The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Matthew 5. On ‘An Eye for an Eye’ (5:38–42)

Jesus speaks against those who would extrapolate from the OT’s ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to justify aggressive protection of their own rights and interests. Jesus insists that in situations of challenge the other person should not be treated as an antagonist to be fiercely resisted and counter-challenged.

Let’s examine them one by one:

In that vein, let’s examine them one by one:

These extensions of the existing commandment spring from a sinful desire to protect our rights to our pride, our possessions, and our time. It demands “justice” instead of seeing these moments as an opportunity to witness. It causes us to dehumanize those who would oppose us.

In that vein, let’s examine them one by one:

Insult

Our first example reads:

English Standard Version Chapter 5

39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

At first glance, this actually looks like it might be a legitimate application of the underlying law. After all, if someone slaps your hard enough, it’s possible that they could damage your eye. But that is not what is in view here. Most people throughout history are right handed. In order to strike someone on the right cheek when you are right handed, you need to slap them with the back of your hand. Think of any medieval movie setting where someone slaps someone across the face and says, “I demand satisfaction!”

Culturally, this was an enormous insult. It was intended to provoke to anger, not to cause physical harm. The intent of the action would have been to goad the one getting slapped into responding in a violent way. It was intended to pick a fight.

Ancient near eastern culture was (and still remains) strongly honor based. It’s why you see things such as honor killings in the Muslim world. An insult cannot be allowed to go without a response if honor is to be maintained. It would be irreparable damage to the reputation of the person receiving the slap if they chose to do nothing.

And yet, doing nothing is exactly what Jesus tells us we need to do. He tells us not to rise to the bait. He tells us to break the cycle of anger and insult by laying down our pride and refusing to engage in the first place. He tells us that the possibility of reconciliation is to be valued far above our pride and our reputation.

Friends, how jealously do we guard the right to our pride and our reputations? Are we so concerned with what the world thinks of us that we will defend them at all costs? Are we so insecure in our identity that we need to defend our honor? Have we forgotten that our identity is not in what the world thinks of us, but rather in who our Savior says that we are?

When we refuse to play by the rules of retaliation and revenge, we expose the insult for the petty thing that it is. We refuse to demand our rights and dehumanize another human being in the same way that they are intentionally dehumanizing us. And in so doing, we demonstrate the behavior of those who have been made members of God’s kingdom. We leave open the door to be reconciled, a door that could potentially be shut forever if we respond in anger, as the other person hopes that we will.

What does this mean practically? It means refusing to allow the insults of others to dictate our behavior and compromise our witness to them. It means suffering the slings and arrows of other people’s words graciously. It means biting our tongues rather than lashing out with a biting response. It means that when we read something on the internet that insults our beliefs, our families, or our friends, we pray for the person who wrote it rather than responding in anger (yes, I’m saying that we need to bite our tongues when someone is wrong on the internet)! It is far better to preserve the possibility for reconciliation than it is to preserve our honor.

Possessions

What about the second example?

English Standard Version Chapter 5

40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

Example A: insults flung at you by family or co-workers

Here, Jesus puts us in the position of literally being sued for the clothes off of our backs. The example is quite extreme. The tunic was the everyday garment of choice for the time period. The cloak was far more valuable - in fact, if it was taken as collateral for a loan, according to , it needed to be returned at sunset, so that the person who had given it up as collateral would not freeze to death.

Here, Jesus puts us in the position of literally being sued for the clothes off of our backs. The example is quite extreme.

Example B: Someone says something that you disagree with politically on the internet!

The implication here is that the person being sued (and we can assume that it is legitimate, because Jesus never tells us that it is not) is so poor that they have nothing left of value to their name but the clothes on their back, one of which the plaintiff could not legitimately take from them. The tunic would surely have been insufficient in and of itself to settle the debt. Jesus uses the hyperbolic nature of this example to make a point - that it is better to give up our right to maintain our cloak in hopes of demonstrating that we have done all that we can to pay off the debt and reconcile with the other person than it is to demand our right to keep it.

Friends - do we so jealously guard the right to our own property that it prevents us from witnessing and reconciling with an accuser? Are we so concerned with getting back every little piece that we are owed and that we deserve that we sow strife and conflict instead of peace and love? Put more simply, do our possessions matter more to us than restoring our relationship with another human being?

Our Time

Let us now turn our attention to the final example, verse 41:

Example A?

English Standard Version Chapter 5

41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

The last example speaks of our right to our own time. There was a practice in Roman times where a member of the army or some other governing authority could impress a person into service for a brief period of time. This would generally take the form of requiring someone to carry a load, like the Romans do with Simon of Cyrene at Jesus’ crucifixion, but could also involve some other sort of menial labor.

To a Jew of the time, this would also have been insulting. The people resented the fact that they were being occupied by a foreign power. To have to perform any sort of service to that power was demeaning (a link back to the first example!) and would generally have been strongly resisted. But Jesus instead tells us that we ought to voluntarily do more than we are required to do for the sake of our witness. We ought to be willing to lay down the right to our own time in order to serve others, even when we have been legally compelled to do so.

In Singapore, every male 18 or older is required to do National Service. This can take the form of serving in the military, the police force, the fire department, or any other of a number of public service organizations. The requirement is that each person will do 2 years of National Service, and will then be on reserve for the next 20-30 years, with periodic call-ups of a week or so a year during that period. We had a lot of younger friends who went through their National Service while we were living in Singapore. The vast majority of them viewed it as a major imposition on their time and their freedom - they complained bitterly about how it kept them away from their families, their friends, and even their church. How great an opportunity might they have missed by failing to serve cheerfully! One young man that I mentored during my time there decided that he would embrace his service with everything he had. He quickly rose through the ranks to a position of authority, and from there was able to speak to many about Jesus. He viewed an imposition on his time as an opportunity to be faithful to his calling. He lived out what Jesus called him to do in verse 41.

Lest I be accused of failing to take the log out of my own eye, I’ll use myself as a negative example. As many of you know, I worked for a time in Papua New Guinea. I hated going there. It disrupted my life in Singapore, and I felt that it impeded my ability to do ministry. I failed to see it for the opportunity that it was. We were effectively stranded in one place with other people, for weeks at a time. I had a chance to get to know them deeply and to share Christ with them, and all too often I let that slip by because I was so preoccupied with what I could have been doing back home instead. I missed opportunities to share the gospel because I felt sorry for myself and treasured my own time more than obedience.

Friends, I implore you, let us not treasure the right to our time so much that we surrender chances to witness to those who have not yet heard about Jesus. Let us take those late nights at work, those unexpected house calls, those impositions by people that we would rather not spend time with and use them for God’s glory. Let us be joyful in serving others, even if we would rather not. For when we lay down the right to our time, we open a powerful door to serve and witness to others.

It is through laying down our rights that we are empowered to fulfill the command of Jesus in verse 42, where he tells us:

English Standard Version Chapter 5

42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

When our hearts are properly aligned, and we do not see ourselves as better than someone else, or our possessions and our time as more valuable than someone’s dignity, we can serve our fellow image bearers in this way. We can give to those in need, we can lend to those who need a leg up. We can do this joyfully and cheerfully because the priorities of our heart have been rightly aligned.

Before we go onward, I want to address one important point. You’ll have noticed that in this passage, all of the examples are personal. Jesus is speaking to situations where we are individually being imposed upon and are being called individually to give up our rights for the sake of witnessing and reconciliation. This is different from abuses of power against other people that runs contrary to God’s word. Laying down our rights to serve and witness to others does not mean standing by and allowing someone to do evil to another person. That would be foolish (and contrary to what Jesus teaches elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount about loving our neighbor)!

However, the injustices in view in this particular text are directed towards us. Here we are speaking about personal affront. Here, when we are personally imposed upon, we are called to die to ourselves, to pick up our cross, and to follow Jesus.

Doing the Unexpected

Giving up our rights is a difficult calling. It seems counterintuitive. Our rights are in place to ensure justice. They are there so that we are not trampled upon and taken advantage of. And yet Jesus calls for us to lay them down. Why?

Jesus does much more than explaining to us why we ought to lay our rights down. He actually shows us what it looks like.

Think back for a moment and recall what it means to sin. It means that our affections are disordered and we are being disobedient to God. It means that we are valuing other things more than we are valuing God - we are placing him in subservience to something else. Because that is what sin is, every sin is necessarily an offense against God. It may be an offense against another person or persons as well, but God is grieved and wronged by all of our sins.

And what does God do? Does he demand every last recompense that he deserves for our sins? Does he cast us down to bear the full weight of what we have done? Does he justly condemn us and cast us all away?

No, he does not. God himself lays down his rights when it comes to our sins. It would be 100% just if he chose to do away with all of us because of our rebellion.

But God does more than just laying down his rights - after all, if he just laid them down, he would not really be just after all, as sin demands punishment. But instead of demanding that we bear the punishment for our sins, he did something incredible. He bore it himself. As the author of Hebrews tells us, we must “consider Jesus”.

If anyone had a claim to the right of his time, it was Jesus. Yet he constantly allowed himself to be interrupted. He had compassion upon the people and spoke to them, cared for them, healed their infirmities. He gave up the Sabbath rest of heaven to redeem his people here on earth.

If anyone had a claim to the right of possessions, it was Jesus. Yet he left the infinite glories of heaven to be born to humble parents in an earthly stable. He wandered the earth without wealth, without possessions, without even a place to lay his head, even though he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

If anyone had a claim to the right of reputation, it was Jesus. Yet he allowed himself to be spit upon and mocked, to be called a friend of sinners and traitors, and hang accursed for the sins of the world on a tree.

Friends, the only way, the ONLY way, that we can live in accordance with these principles is because Jesus has done it first. We have said before that it is not our conduct that gets us into the kingdom - it is what the King himself has done for us. And Jesus himself has bought us with his blood by demonstrating the very principles he teaches here. He laid down his rights so that we might be reconciled to God.

And if there is anyone here this morning who has not yet put their trust in Christ, I urge you to do so this morning. It is my hope and prayer that we all see the depth of our sin and rebellion from God, that we understand that apart from him we are helpless and hopeless, and that nothing that we can do can save us from our sins. But God, being rich in mercy, has offered his own Son in our place, and Jesus has made us righteous through his atoning death on the cross, and by believing in his death in our place and his resurrection, we might be brought back to God. If you find yourself there this morning, I ask you to come speak to myself or Richard or to one of the elders later, as we would love to speak with you and pray with you.

And dear brothers and sisters who are already numbered among the redeemed - let us look to the shining example of Christ as we seek to live out these principles in our daily lives - let us die to our own desires, let us lay down our own rights, and let us live as Christ lived, that in so doing we might call a broken, battered, hurting world into his presence.

Let’s pray.

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank you for your Word. Thank you for Jesus, who demonstrates to us what it means to lay down our rights for the sake of your glory. May your Holy Spirit be at work within us to show us those areas of our lives that we still value more than you, and help us to lay them down at the foot of the cross. Let us act and speak in a manner that is worthy of our kingdom citizenship, and help us to be effective witnesses in every interaction that we have, even when it is with people who are seeking to take advantage of us. Above all, let us seek to show others the image of Christ, and to lay down our lives as Christ lay down his life for the church. Amen.

Communion

It’s now the time in our service where we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper is for believers only, so if you are here today and you have not yet put your faith in Christ, we ask that you allow the elements to pass you by. We do urge you, however, to consider Jesus - to think about who he claims to be and what he claims to have done, and to know and believe that he is powerful to forgive our sins through his death on the cross, so that you might celebrate the Supper with us in the future.

Gracious God, we thank you for showing us you

As the elements are distributed we have much to ponder from our passage this week, but I’d ask that we spend some time reflecting upon how Jesus laid down all that he was due in order to rescue us - how he emptied himself and came down to this earth, about how he was obedient even to the point of death on a cross so that our sins might be forgiven and that we might be reconciled to God. Let us examine our own hearts and see where our insistence upon our rights is standing in the way of our witness, and let’s confess those areas to God, who we know is faithful and just to forgive them, and ask that he give us the strength to live the way that Jesus has called us to live as members of the heavenly kingdom.

On the night he was betrayed, our Lord took bread. And after he had given thanks he broke it, and said “This is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way after supper he took the cup, saying “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

Let’s pray:

Gracious God, we thank you for what you have done for us through your Son, Jesus. We thank you that you did not demand the price that we could not pay for our sins, but that you instead paid that price yourself through your Son. Father, we know that we have so often demanded what we were owed without considering what it says about the state of our hearts. We pray that you would illuminate these areas to us, and that by the shed blood of Jesus our lives would be transformed so that instead of demanding our rights, we would instead desire to take up our cross and follow after you. Lead us and guide us in your ways, as citizens of your kingdom, and continue to transform our hearts and our minds so that we become more and more like Jesus. In Jesus name we pray, amen.

Related Media

Related Sermons