Belonging: Whose King?

33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35 Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 37 Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

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The Losers

Several of our families experienced some really good sports seasons this fall. I got to experience that once. My 7th-grade basketball team won the state championship for our school size. We had a bunch of guys on our team and they threatened to cut those that were not good enough, but then at the last minute kept us all on the team anyway. Looking back, I may have been the worst player on the team. I played about 5 minutes that year, but it was great being a part of that winning team.

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The next year we got second place in the state championship. I worked really hard and won an award at the end of the season: Most Improved Player. That is one of my proudest achievements, up there with my first place trophy for the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, and that season I got to play 15 minutes.

I only played one more year and then quit. Our team did not do as well and I lost interest. I didn't just quit the team, I quit basketball altogether and that trophy I won became nothing more than a memory.

A few years later, having lost a lot more than a few ballgames, I heard a song by a band called Switchfoot called ""The Loser"". Here is how the song started:

Only the losers win

They've got nothin to prove

They'll leave the world with nothing to lose

You can laugh at the wierdos now

Wait till wrongs are right

They'll be the ones with nothing to hide

'Cause I've been thinking, thinking

I've got a plan to lose it all

I've got a contract pending on eternity

If I haven't already given it away

I've got a plan to lose it all

Jesus could have sung that song himself, couldn't he?

Phase 1 of ministry: Show the world what I can do.

Phase 2: Recruit others to come help me do even more.

Phase 3: ""I've got a plan to lose it all"" - from Palm Sunday to the long walk up Calvary's Hill - I've got a plan to lose it all.

And all of us, his faithful disciples are confounded, frustrated, some quitting and many wanting to quit, because we really just want to belong to the winning team.

But for Jesus, life is not a game to be won or a group to show ourselves as better than others.

Our King does not belong to this world, and neither do we.

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A King that does not win

Jesus was killed because of a case of mistaken identity. The Jews wanted Him killed for other reasons, but they did not have the ability to perform any kinds of executions without the permission of the Roman Government. They convinced Pontius Pilate that Jesus was claiming to be ""The King of the Jews."" The Romans even nailed that sign above his head on the cross, at which point the Jews said, ""No wait, He is not our king. He just claimed to be our king.""

They didn't want to be associated with a king that would lose.

Pilate just wanted to figure out what Jesus had actually done since it was his name attached to this execution. Pilate thought he was neither for nor against Jesus. He was effectively trying to be a neutral ruler over Jesus and His fate. But he was wrong.

""Do you ask this on your own or did others put you up to this?"" Jesus asked him. Pilate mistook Jesus for one of his conquered vassals. ""I'm not one of your people,"" Pilate replied. ""Your own people handed you over to me."" He still did not understand. Jesus was not the King of the Jews, nor was He claiming to be.

Jessamine county is 175 square miles.\n

Israel is 8,550 square miles

The earth is 196.9 million square miles

The world is over 23,000 Israel's

some 3/4ths of that may be covered with water instead of landmass, but...

The winds and the sea obey Him. He rules over every inch of it. And more.

Jesus, are you the king of the Jews? No. Jesus is King of so much more than that.

Jesus has so much more to lose than if He were only the King of the Jews.

And He did.

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The Truth

"Aha! So you are a king!" Pilate responded, not listening to the "not part of this world" piece of information Jesus gave him. Pilate automatically assumed that he could be a neutral person because he had more authority than Jesus. Sometimes we think that we can just be neutral about Jesus, neither for, nor against Him. But Pilate was wrong, and we are wrong when we think or act like that. The truth is, Jesus is always the authority over us.

This side of Easter, we forget the cost of discipleship. We want to skip this phase of ministry, skip the spiritual discipline of walking with Jesus daily and allowing Him to shape and form us, and get to heaven and the good stuff.

We want to get back to the wins. But it's not a game. We are not recruiting people to our team. We are not winning souls. Ephesians 2:1 says that before we have a relationship with Christ we are "dead in our sins". Pilate stood over Jesus as if he had the ability to help Jesus succeed or not. For Jesus, it was like walking in a cemetery and being judged by the bodies under the ground. No, the truth is, we have the choice of coming to Jesus and living today, or remaining in death, pretending to live on our own.

As disciple-makers, those who have found life in Jesus, we have the choice of sharing what Christ gives us each day and watching God raise the spiritually dead around us, or hiding it away and being poor stewards of the grace God has given us. As Jesus told Pilate, those who belong to Him listen and obey His desires, not their own.

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Belonging to a King

That's the hard part. We can spend our entire lives trying to figure out how to give ourselves away. We can give everybody we meet $1 and five minutes of our time and hope to look back upon millions of people we touched at the end of our lives.

Or we can choose to give all our money and our time to a small group of people and pray that the investment we made with those few was greater than a shallow investment over many. Honestly, we will waste half of our time and money just trying to figure that out.

The problem is, we all find ourselves re-enacting this moment as Pontius Pilate, trying to figure Jesus out and find the right answer. We find our lives turning into a tragedy like his because we couldn't figure out the right answer and eventually decided that there was no right answer. We come right out and ask the next question from Pilate's lips: "What is truth?" Who can define and decide what the right thing to do is?

And yet, right there, in that moment of doubt and confusion, truth is staring us in the face. Who can decide? Jesus can decide. What is the right thing to do? Whatever Jesus desires.

That's the thing about belonging to a king. It's not about what we want. It's not about what we are good at. It is not about what we prefer? We serve as Jesus calls us to serve. Jesus, not the church, not the pastor, and not our own motives. We listen to God and discern together as the Body rather than figuring it out on our own. And we do it with eyes open in full understanding that, in this world, we are going to lose, and lose big time. We are going to lose it all.

But we don't lose hope because our hope does not exist in this world. We don't belong here anymore. We belong to Jesus, our King. Our hope is in Him. Do you belong to Jesus? Do you hear his voice today? Are you listening?

Listening to God may sound like something very subjective and mystical, and if you don’t recognize God’s voice well, it may seem impossible to you. So I want to leave you with something very practical. Jesus did not get up and preach a different sermon every week or every day. He gave out the same short pieces over and over until His people started living them out. That’s how they knew they belonged to Him. So start where the disciples started. Matthew 5-7. Start with Matthew 5. Read that this week. Every day if you have to. Read it until you find a way to start living some of that out. Then move on to chapter 6. There’s a lot of practical ways to live out Matthew 6. See if you can get to Matthew 7 by the time we get to Christmas Eve. Those three chapters, the Sermon on the Mount, were given to us as a gift, not just to change our behavior, but as a kind of greatest hits of the teachings of Jesus, of what it means to be a disciple. If you learn that sermon by heart, not the words by memory, but by living out those lessons daily, you will be following your King and you will recognize His voice when He calls you.

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