Northside Church - Sydney
Ditto Week 4:Obey as Jesus Obeyed
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Hey, I just want to finish up the service by sharing a few words from God's Word and you see why I use that clip there is that's from the great movie kindergarten cop. And of course Arnold Schwarzenegger is an undercover cop charged with the responsibility of looking after some kindergarten kids and if we just look at that clip we'd see that I think in some ways we could almost see Jesus that way from time to time, right? Just some guy that is barking orders at us, you shall do this, you shall do that. We could see the Word of God that way, barking orders at us to obey you but or else you're going to get it. There is no bathroom. You've got to see the bigger picture here. The reason why he was doing that is because he was an undercover policeman. They didn't know that and that there was a far greater danger at large. You see there was a gunman on the loose and he was saying that to these little kids so that he wouldn't go run off into all directions around the classroom there. He was doing it for their own safety. He was doing it for their own protection. That is his call to obedience for these guys to his agenda actually had their best interest at heart. He was doing it for them. Now one of the things that we've been learning over the past three or four weeks in this series called Ditto is that our Christology shapes our mission. That's a fancy word for saying how you see Jesus affects whether you're going to be like Jesus. In that sense, maybe you've come to this place tonight seeing Jesus as all God for that matter is a bit of a kindergarten cop. Just yelling at you, telling you things to do or my hope and prayers tonight you're going to leave this place saying that he's someone that's got your best interest at heart. The Bible reading tonight comes from John chapter 5 verses 19 and 24, we've got to jump just a quick one. Jesus gave them this answer, "I tell you the truth, the son can do nothing by himself. He can do only what he sees his father doing because whatever the father does, the son also does. I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me his eternal life and they will not be condemned for they have crossed over from death to life." Really what Jesus is talking about there is his obedience to all that God had planned out for him. You see, I think one of the challenges that we have today is that we live in a Burger King world. If you're an American, you're going to understand a little bit better than the rest of us because Burger King is just the American version of Hungry Jacks. But Burger King over there, I was scoffing away at a whopper in the airport and the big slogan right across the greasy wrapper that I had there, it said, "Have it your way. Have it your way at Burger King. Have it your way at Burger King." Sometimes live the Burger King type of life. That is most of the tensions in our lives, I think, come from the fact that we don't get it our way. We want to have it our way, but we don't get it our way. And so when we come to talk about the concept of obeying as Jesus' obeyed, it's really counterintuitive. Really counterintuitive. So how do we obey as Jesus' obeyed? The first thing I want to share with you tonight quickly is that you've got to align your agenda to his agenda. Obedience is to allow another agenda to cut across your agenda. That's what happened to Samwise and Frodo and Lord of the Rings, right? If you haven't seen it, they were living the perfect life and the beautiful shire and all things were quiet and green, it was peaceful and they ate well and they slept well until that day in which the Ring of Power entered their lives. And they were dragged out into a battle between good and evil that was beyond their wildest imaginations. And they were right in the thick of it. What is Christianity then and what does that got to do with Lord of the Rings? See, people can think that Christianity is adhering to right beliefs, we call them doctrines, or right types of behavior, or being a really, really good person or praying lots. No, no, no. You know what Christianity is? Christianity is stepping outside of the shire. Christianity is to engage into a story that is far greater than you can imagine. The story that says there is a God and that he is broken into this world in the person of Jesus Christ and he calls everyday hobbits like you and I into a battle for good and evil that is beyond our wildest imaginations. In other words, Christianity is not good people versus bad people. Christianity is not religious people versus irreligious people. Christianity is the truth that someone else's agenda has broken into the world. God's agenda of justice and love and rightness and beauty, you know, that's what Jesus was modelling, right? You know, he says statements like, "For I've come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of him who sent me." He says also, Matthew, "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the person that does the will of my father who is in heaven." Matthew 12.50 says, "For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother." John 4.34, he finally says, "My food said Jesus is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work." What's he talking about? What's he saying here? He's saying there's something other than the shire of your life. He's saying, "I've come to do the work of someone who's been outside your frame of reference, who's broken in, who's told you that there's something other than the world that currently exists for you, I've come to align your agenda with a greater agenda." You know, I understood how that works when I was chatting to my grandmother many years ago as a little boy. She told me about how she, during the Second World War, went down to Melbourne and in the freezing cold, three or four degrees, she had nothing more than a blanket and in terrible aching, trembling hand, she would peel potatoes for eight hours a day for two or three weeks on end at a time in order to feed the soldiers. I thought, "Grandma, how could you do that day in, day out? How could you do that?" She said, "Easy, for the Empire." I said, "You worked for Darth Vader?" No, the British Empire, Sam, the British Empire, but can you see how it works? And she's no longer with us, but what my grandmother showed me in that conversation years later, that if you want to endure the reality of sacrifice and pain and suffering in your life, you have to live for an agenda or a plan that is greater than your own. You did it for the Empire, for the greater plan and purpose. That's how Sam-wise and Frodo got through it, right? You remember in the two towers midway through, they're under intense battle, they're under attack. They think they're going to die. Frodo says, "I can't do this, Sam." And Sam-wise says, "I know, it's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here, but we are." But it's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now, folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn't. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. Frodo says, "What are we holding on to, Sam?" He says, "There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for." You know, Jesus wasn't obeying God for the sake of obeying. He was demonstrating that he was living for a greater agenda. He was demonstrating that God was doing something much greater. He was demonstrating that there was an adventure far greater than the safe shires of our life. He was demonstrating that there's still some good in this world that's worth fighting for. And it means for you and I tomorrow, when we go back to our desks in our open plan offices in our unibooks and our everyday lives, the question that you have to ask yourself, are you going to recognize that even one day darkness must pass, that the suffering and the sacrifice and the pains of this world aren't going to last forever? That there is an agenda. I love the way that Graham, our senior pastor, says, he used to say to us how he gets up over the morning and he says, "Lord, I know you're at work. Can I be a part of it today?" Come on, guys, you and I know the great story, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Peter Pan, Narnia, they all involve people, ordinary people like you and I caught up in a greater agenda. So, guys, the gospel of Jesus Christ, he's broken to this world and the person of Jesus and he's beginning to make the world right again and he's calling ordinary people like you and me out there to live lives beyond the everyday safe lives of the shy and going to a battle and adventure beyond our imagination. It sounds like the Lord of the Rings, but, guys, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not a story. It's the truth on which every other story, every other great story is based on and so Christian obedience is not rule keeping, guys. It's beginning to realize there's a greater agenda beyond your agenda for Monday morning. That's step one. Step two is consider your choices. If you've got to align your agenda, then you've also got to consider your choices. Like, why is this so difficult in our lives to try and be obedient? You know, the Bible says on one hand that Jesus was a high priest who is not unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we've got one who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet he was without sin. Now, I think we can cop out here a little bit because, look, what do we instinctively think? We think, oh, he was God. He had to obey. He couldn't not be good right. You know, that's Jesus' stuff, this obedient stuff. That's impossible. You know, look, if you're saying that that's impossible, you know what you're doing? You're doing what Luke Skywalker did in the Dagobar system when he was hanging out with Yoda. Luke had crashed his spaceship down into the muddy swamp there, and Yoda told him to use the force to get it out, and he'd said, look, I've done it on bits of objects and all sorts of things before, but with a spaceship, that's impossible. And Yoda says, no, no different, only in your mind. He says, you must unlearn what you have learned. You know what Yoda's saying there? He's saying, Christology shapes our mission. How we see Jesus affects whether we'll be like Jesus in that sense. You see, if we see him as fully God, then of course we say obeying him and being like him's impossible. But if we see him as fully human, then obedience becomes possible, and so therefore we must unlearn what we have learned in that sense. That is, if Jesus was fully man, he learned how to be obedient, not as God, but as a man. And he was tempted in every way, yet he did not sin it. That didn't mean that he couldn't sin what it meant it was that he chose not to sin. See the difference? What's going on here? He says that obedience is possible, he shows us in his humanity, there's just two simple steps to kingdom obedience. You cannot, every time you are tempted, you have a choice to either obey or disobey. And you're thinking, do I turn up at 6 o'clock for this? You know what I say, I think we write ourselves off, we say, I'm a sinner, I'm not perfect. That's why I don't obey God. No, look, can I be really real with you tonight? The reason I don't obey God. The reason that you don't obey God is because we choose not to. At the point of choice, I choose my agenda over God's agenda. And so in that sense, I did that once as a little kid, I choose my agenda over my father's agenda. When I was a toddler, I had a unique obsession with the oil heater in our lounge room. And it was just the beautiful flickering lights of this oil heater and I always seemed to be drawn to it. My father was forever coming in as I was a little kid and yelling at me going, don't touch. He sort of almost slapped me across the hand and he'd pull me across over to the other side of the room and he'd throw me there and I'd just look at it longingly for the rest of the day until there was that particular day when Dad was no longer in the room. And of course, the flicker and the glow and the warmth of the lights just mesmerized me. And I was sort of attracted to it like a Star Wars tractor beam and I crept ever, ever closer and closer. I knew he wasn't watching it, I thought I'm going to show him this time. And I was drawn ever closer like a moth to the flame and I could feel its warmth calling me ever closer to it. I even took my sister's Barbie doll and pushed it into the front of it and watched the head of Barbie slowly melt away. I had no idea, but this thing was magical, it not only looked good, it was magic. And I just wanted more of that warmth, didn't I, and so I went and I pulled up my shirt as a little toddler and I stuck my stomach straight into that thing. And I yelled out the most almighty scream that my father had ever heard. My little interlude with that heater guys was a reflection of the definition of disobedience. As you see, disobedience is this, disobedience produces short term joy, but long term suffering. For those three seconds of glee and getting drawn towards a warmth and just the sense I was doing my own thing and Dad couldn't see what I was going to do. Three seconds worth and then a week's worth of a stomach that was stinging and blistered and disgusting. In fact, almost 30 years later, I've never forgotten that moment, right, neither will you after tonight. Here's the question, do you think I ever did that again as a kid? No. More importantly, what impact do you think that it had instinctively on the way that I trusted the words and the instructions of my father? Friends, I'm going to ask you tonight, are some of the choices that you're making in your life stinging you like a three-year-old with this stomach up against an oil heater? I mean, when the heavenly father, God, says through his word, don't touch. I mean, through his word, he says, don't commit adultery or don't fight back, but bless those that persecute you. Give up your agenda and follow my agenda. Lay down your life for someone else, love until it hurts, go the extra mile. When he says that sort of stuff, do you think he's seriously doing it to steal your fun? He's not doing it to kill your joy. He's doing it in a way that what any earthly father would do is trying to place guidelines in your life so you won't hurt yourself. This obedience guy is simply putting short-term joy and it results in long-term suffering. The other way around, obedience is the opposite. Obedience produces short-term suffering that leads to long-term joy, just ask anyone that goes to fitness first on a Monday morning. It hurts, but you reap the results. Guys, if you want to obey as Jesus obeyed, then you need to consider your choices, right? Jesus didn't obey because he was God, he obeyed because he chose to obey. The reality is, if we want to look deep enough into our lives tonight, if we disobey God, it's not because Jesus was God and he was a miracle man, it's because we don't want to. Your agenda or his agenda, finally, guys, tonight, you've not only got to align your agenda, you've not only got to consider your choices, you've got to know why you obey before you try to obey. Here's the thing that breaks my heart. I think so many churches have stuffed this up. They have used religion and have used the word of God to manipulate people. If you do this, then God's going to bless you. If you give this, then God's going to bless you. If you act like this, then God's going to bless you. If you act like that, then you can't really be a part of our church. We've stuffed it up as Christians because we've got to understand tonight, and this is a message I want you to take away from this place, is that Christianity is the only religion in the world that you've got to work out what you're going to do when you realize you don't have to do anything at all. It's the only religion in the world where you've got to work out what you're going to do when you realize you don't have to do anything at all. Paul says in Ephesians 2, "For it is by grace that you've been saved through faith, not through obeying, and not from yourselves, it's a gift of God, not by works or obedience so that no one can boast." You see, you've got to get your motivation for obedience right in the first place. You need to know why a religion says, "Obey God, and then you'll be saved." Christianity says, "You have been saved already by Jesus' obedience, and so now you're going to obey because of that." Can you guys see the difference tonight? The difference between that is the difference between religion and Christianity. The difference, one will crush you, the other will liberate you when you understand that difference, and when you see that difference, and when you feel that difference, you'll see that Christians obey not because they have to, but because they want to. What do you mean they want to? Look, a Christian is someone who's already had an example of someone who aligned their agenda to God's agenda. A Christian someone who's already got an example of someone who considered their choices and was tempted in every way, and yet did not sin. Hebrews 12 talks about him like this, listen to the message translation, "Keep your eyes upon Jesus who both began and finished this race we're in. Nobody how he did it," because he never lost sight of where he was headed, that exhilarating finish, and with God he could put up with anything along the way, the cross, the shame, whatever. Now he's there in the place of honor right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through, that'll shoot adrenaline through your souls. It's an all-out match against sin, others have suffered far worse than you to say nothing of what Jesus went through all that bloodshed. You know what he's saying here, the writer of Hebrews, it's a gospel according to Kindergarten Cop. You see, John Kimball, Arnold Schwarzenegger, he looked like a dictator with his barking orders at the bunch of these kids and a bunch of innocent children, but he only ever had their best interest at heart and really when it came to the end of the movie, when that gunman was on the loose and he'd finally found them, Kimball went and went and hit all the kids around the school and he took that gunman head on and he copped a bullet for the kids that he was explaining the rules to. What was Jesus doing at the cross? He liked Kimball, he was taken a bullet for his kids. John Kimball established some ground rules at the risk of his life and Jesus Christ lived out the ground rules and it cost him his life. If obedient, so bang God is some agenda that gets under your skin tonight and you find yourself asking why should I go and do this, can you remember that in Jesus we find the only God of any religion in the world that is not asking you to be obedient to anything tonight that he hasn't already been through himself. Philippians 2 says that he was obedient even to death, even to death on a cross. So if you're asking why should I be obedient, it's because he was, but more, more than we'll ever really go through realistic linear lives. So guys, I know, we probably know a lot of Christians out there that align their agenda with God's agenda and they consider their choices and consider themselves to be morally upright and wonderful people. But you know, when it comes to living out the Christian life, there's more bitterness and there's more resentment and there's more hostility and there's more sense of superiority than anyone else that you've met in their life. Why? How? Because if you don't know why you should be obedient, then you're just going to end up becoming ever more bitter and resentful and hostile and superior to everyone else. Christianity is this. We're rewarded for his obedience, not our own and he's punished for our disobedience on the cross. He lived the perfect life so you don't have to live the perfect life. And it means this week, if you stuff it up, nice stuff it up, which little tip we will, it need not lead to a sense of condemnation this week, guys, instead it should be the very engine that drives us ever more into reading his rules and his guidelines for how life is meant to be. So you got to know why before you try, guys, how you see Jesus impacts whether or not you'll be like Jesus. I want to ask you tonight, maybe you've come to this place, maybe this is the first time that you're in a church, first and foremost, would you even consider aligning your agenda to his agenda? Do you realize that there is an agenda other than the shire of this life, that there is a great adventure that Jesus Christ calls us into its way came, friend, do you need to consider your choices? The stings of life happening because you're a three-year-old drawn towards the heat of and you refuse to hear the warnings of a father who just wants your best interest. Most importantly tonight, Christian, do you know why you're obedient to obey because you have to or because you want to, the difference of the two things that you give birth to entirely different religions, one will liberate you, one will crush you. Then consider, know why. God's not some kindergarten cop shouting commands at you. He's got his best interests, your best interests, and heart tonight. You want to come be a part of that wonderful, amazing story, that kingdom agenda that is breaking into this world, even tonight, even tomorrow when we go back to our everyday lives, as Samwise said to Frodo, that's what all the great stories were about, right? I'll leave it with you, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you've broken into this world and the person of Jesus Father, we thank you, this church wouldn't even exist if you hadn't broken into this world and the person of Jesus. Father, we thank you that even tonight as we've witnessed three amazing baptisms, that was something even you, your self-law in Jesus were obedient to and went through yourself. Thank you that you regard who calls us into something that you've always been through yourself anyway in that sense. Be with us all tonight as we consider the choices that we're going to go and make in this life, whether it be a choice to think about that bigger picture, think about a newer gender, a new plan for life, may it give people a sense of hope and meaning and purpose this week. Father help us in those crossroads that we call temptation in life of our agenda or your agenda. Most of all, Father, may we just stop relish, revel in the wonderful grace that is the core message of Christianity, that it's not our obedience, but his obedience on the cross that is the engine for everything we do in this place and the Christian life. We thank you for that. We pray this now in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen