Sermon Transcript
Do you want to be great? What makes someone great? Throughout history, people have been given the title the great, right? A lot of different people have shared that title, right? Alexander the Great is an example.
Cyrus the Great, Catherine the Great from Russia. There’s all sorts of greats in history. The ancient kings, in the time of the Bible, ancient Mesopotamia, even before the Bible was written, were often given that title of the great or great king in their own languages. And that’s actually reflected in the hebrew scriptures. The title king of kings or lord of lords is actually a reflection of that idea of a great king.
And so when later on, when Alexander the Great, when he conquered the Persians, he was given that title from their history, from the line of the Persians, and that was passed on into western culture through the Greeks and the Romans, and then even further on, even as recent as the enlightenment and even the 19 hundreds, the 20th century, in Asia and in the Middle east, there have been people that have been given the title the great. But what does it mean to be great? Right? What is greatness? Is it a title that makes someone great, or is it actual greatness?
Greatness has a lot of subjectivity to it. And when you think of greatness across cultures, across disciplines, greatness is often a matter of opinion. And so when we talk about greatness in the kingdom of God, there’s really only one opinion that matters, and it’s God’s opinion on what greatness is. We want to be great in the kingdom of God. It might help to know how he defines greatness.
So today, we’re going to continue our journey that we started last week of discovering how we can be children of God, how in Christ we are blessed to be called God’s children and to live eternally in God’s kingdom. And so we’ve been looking at the teachings of Jesus in the sermon on the mount and trying to understand exactly what we are called to be as far as living in God’s kingdom. But greatness in God’s kingdom doesn’t come by the way that greatness does in the world’s. Eyes. Greatness in God’s kingdom comes in an unexpected way.
We’ve already covered that in part. Last week we studied through the beatitudes. And so think about it. Would you consider the poor great, or those who mourn or the meek, or those who are hungry or thirsty? Would you consider the merciful great?
Rarely would you see a greatest list with merciful people on it. Right. Imagine a top ten of the purest. Right. Or a top ten of those who are persecuted.
Or a top ten of the peacemakers. Now, you may see that we have world leaders that have been considered great peacemakers, but what about, like, the top ten persecuted? You’re not going to see lists like that, but Jesus list, it doesn’t line up with our ideas of what it means to be great, does it? The kingdom of God is an upside down economy, one where those who exalt themselves are humbled and those who humble themselves are exalted. Jesus says.
And so greatness in this upside down economy is witnessed to in the lives of each individual follower of Jesus, each child of God, by an inside out transformation that takes place in our lives when we are in Christ Jesus. Words to his disciples that we’re going to read here in a moment in Matthew 18 are going to teach us that we have something to learn from the kids that we’re inviting into our service today, that we’re worshiping with today, who are the church not only of tomorrow, but the church of today. And since it’s children’s Sunday, I’m going to go ahead and ask my helper Charlie to come on up, and she’s going to read from Matthew 18 for us if you want to turn there in your bibles. But Charlie’s going to read for us, and Jesus teaches us what it means to be great in the kingdom of heaven. Go ahead, Charlie.
At that time, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He called a little child to him and placed the child among them. And he said, truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name will.
Great job. Thank you, Charlie. Let’s give her a hand.
So, greatness. Greatness in God’s kingdom. All right, there we go. I’m back. All right.
Greatness in God’s kingdom is defined by this surprising question. Right? It gives Jesus the opportunity to answer the question, the disciples asked this surprising question of Jesus, who is the greatest in the kingdom? Now, this isn’t the only time in the gospels where this question comes up. In fact, the disciples will ask, or even they’ll even argue about this within Jesus hearing who is the greatest among them or who is the greatest in the kingdom.
It would be easy for us to find fault with them in their question, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t stop for a moment to consider that they’re still growing in their faith, they’re still learning what it means to follow Jesus. And at this point in history, the disciples of Jesus, they don’t have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them. And so in their minds, when they think of greatness, it goes back to the cultural definition of what greatness is according to the world that they grew up in. So for them, in their minds, to follow a rabbi, which Jesus came teaching as a rabbi, a teacher is what that word means, into a culture where rabbis would come and they would call disciples, and the disciples would follow their master, and the disciples of that rabbi would desire to strive to reach the greatest level of obedience to their master’s teaching. They would naturally want to reach the level that their master had reached in his understanding, in his leadership.
And at this point, the disciples, especially the twelve, they have left everything right. They’ve sacrificed for nearly three years. At this point, they’re committed followers of Jesus. And so they want only to fulfill what, in their minds, they think is Jesus’s agenda for his kingdom. They want this deep commitment to what Jesus is teaching.
Michael Wilkins, in his commentary, adds that the ambition to achieve greatness is a pursuit central to human accomplishment. And on the strictly natural level, it’s not inappropriate. Jesus pointed to the greatness of John the Baptist as the culminating prophet of the old order, though he did state, Wilkins says shockingly, that the person who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John. Jesus said that back in Matthew eleven. Jesus disciples most likely have remembered that comparison, and they seek to advance to the kind of greatness in the kingdom that they think Jesus indicated.
But to Jesus, greatness in the kingdom comes not from human endeavor. It doesn’t come from heroic accomplishment in the name of God. Jesus followers are to become great not from positions of power, not from honorary titles that have been given to them. Instead, they’re to become great by serving, by becoming servants of God and servants of one another and servants of others. And Jesus has already been living out this example throughout his ministry of what it means to live in kingdom greatness.
If we want an example of what kingdom greatness looks like, we need to look no further than to the life and the teachings of Jesus. Jesus served the poor and the weak. He healed the diseased and the disabled and the demon possessed, and he preached the gospel to the lost so that they could be saved as a part of the kingdom of God as well. And now, as he’s done all along with his disciples, disciples, Jesus is setting out to change their way of thinking about what greatness is. They have a worldly model of greatness in mind, and Jesus wants to give them a kingdom model of what greatness looks like.
Jesus often used visual aids and parables in his teaching, and this is no exception. It might be easy for us to miss because Jesus is using a little bit of a different visual aid. It’s not a story that he’s telling necessarily, at least not at this point in Matthew 18, but instead he takes a child from among them and he has the child. He asks the child to come stand with them and he says, truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. We often talk about having faith like a child, right?
What does that mean? What does it mean to have childlike faith? What does jesus mean here by unless you change and become like little children? Is he making a statement about the innocence of children? Maybe that’s it.
Now, the scriptures, Jesus is speaking, he is the word. He’s speaking the very words of God and he lives according to the scriptures. The Old Testament is what we’re talking about here, the law and the prophets, right? Is what Jesus is living according to. The New Testament is yet to be written, and so Jesus is living according to the scriptures.
And if we look back at the Old Testament, it’s actually pretty balanced as far as the innocence of children goes, right? If you’re a parent, you know what I’m talking about. Like, kids are great, but they can also not be so great sometimes, right? They can do things that it’s like, ah, that’s frustrating, right? And the law and the prophets, they don’t make any, they don’t have any qualms talking about the rebelliousness of children.
In fact, the law makes provisions for the rebelliousness of children. David speaks in psalm 51 about how he was sinful from birth. Now you could make an argument that David is speaking in hyperbole there, but still the point is there that we are, even as children, we’re not perfect, right? So Jesus probably isn’t making a declaration about the perfection or the innocence of children here as far as our faith is concerned. But there is something about being childlike, right?
God honors children in the law. In the Old Testament, David writes in psalm 31 39 that we’re knit together in our mother’s wombs and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Elsewhere, the Old Testament speaks of children as a blessing or a gift to their parents, especially when they honor the Lord. So maybe Jesus is speaking to the simplicity of the life of a child, or maybe even the qualifications or the lack thereof of a child in a kingdom. Right?
Or the quantity of faith when he says that we should become like little children. And I don’t think we’re far off here when we think of being childlike in this way, when we consider the rest of Jesus statement about the child among them in his earlier teachings to his disciples, which we’ll get to here in a moment, in Matthew five, it becomes clearer. Jesus says, therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. So it’s the humility of a child that Jesus is pointing us to think about the beatitudes that we studied last week. Remember the poor in the spirit.
Those who mourn are humbled in their mourning, those who are meek. Jesus says, they possess the kingdom of heaven. What do the poor have to offer to God in order to save themselves? Nothing. We talked about this last week.
We come to God empty handed, poor in the spirit, and we have nothing to offer to God in terms of our own salvation, and so empty handed, absent of our own solutions. We come before the Lord as a child, and in the same way we must come before God like little children, humbled, acknowledging that we have a lot to learn, that we’re unable to care for our own spiritual needs, admitting to the fact that we are dependent upon our heavenly Father for even our very lives. That’s what it means to come before God childlike. And perhaps most importantly, we open ourselves up to God’s instruction through his word, to what it means to live according to his commands. We learn what it means to trust him and to obey him.
And so through this living parable of Jesus, what we learn is that greatness in God’s kingdom begins with humility that turns the world’s idea of greatness upside down. And it’s with this upside down greatness of the kingdom of God that we find our source in childlike humility of the children of God. When we keep that in mind, we now return to Matthew five and we read Jesus earlier teaching to his disciples in the sermon on the mount, which will deepen our understanding of what it means to have childlike faith. Jesus said in Matthew 517, do not think that I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets. I’ve not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.
Jesus created, through his teaching, a tension between him and the Pharisees and the scribes, the teachers of the law. And that tension was evident. Jesus came teaching with authority. And his teaching, his way of life. It frequently contradicted the legalism of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
There’s no shortages of examples of this. But, for example, Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. And the teachers of the law, the Pharisees, they took offense at that because they accused Jesus of not holding the Sabbath, of abolishing it. And not only that, the teachers of the law, the Pharisees, they created what they would call a hedge around the law. By adding their own manmade rules to it.
We’re going to talk more about this later as we go through the sermon on the mount. But these rules were often seen as being just as binding in their minds as the word of the Lord itself. And yet, some of these leaders were guilty of turning a blind eye to the brokenness that comes in relationships, turning a blind eye to mistreatment of the poor and. And injustice. But Jesus came to seek and save the lost.
By preaching the gospel to the poor and to the sick. Jesus didn’t come to get rid of the law. He came to fulfill it. The whole law, the law and the prophets, what we call our Old Testament. His life aligned perfectly with God’s will and his teaching found in it.
And what the scriptures teach. Jesus lived with what God said would take place. Jesus fulfilled those prophecies through his life. But it’s more than just fulfillment of predictions. When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, he’s saying he’s doing so through his obedience to God’s word.
And through what he accomplished and what he made possible for us through the cross and through the resurrection. And so the law and the prophets are made complete in the life, in the ministry, the teaching, the death and the resurrection of Jesus. The fulfillment of the scriptures in the life of Jesus is not a reason to set it aside. In fact, what Jesus says in verse 18 is truly, I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.
But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. You want to be great. Do we see how Jesus defines greatness in the kingdom of God? The kingdom of heaven. As a child of God, Jesus is making another analogy about greatness for us, for those who live as a part of God’s kingdom, just as we saw in Matthew 18, when he took the child and put the child before them and said, if you want to be great, you have to become like this child.
He’s saying, if you want to be great, you can’t set aside the word of God. He’s using a play on words here, and it might be easy for us to miss this, right, because of the way that Jesus uses these words. Of course, he says least and greatest. But what Jesus is talking about here, when he’s talking about the smallest letter, the least stroke of the pen, what he’s talking about in Greek, the smallest letter is the Yoda, right? Not Yoda like the Star wars character, but like we would say, I don’t give one iota, right?
That’s where we get that from, is the greek letter Yoda, which it looks like our eye. In Hebrew, that letter is the Yode, and it’s the smallest letter in both of those alphabets. And when Jesus says the least stroke of the pen, what we could think of is, like, an accent mark. You know how some languages have an accent mark, or maybe you’ve seen on type, like a seraph, the little stroke of a pen on the end of a letter. That’s what Jesus is talking about.
And what he’s saying is that not even that smallest part of God’s word should be or can be set aside in the life of a child of God. That even those smallest parts of the letter of God’s word is so important, and it’s so important for us to base our obedience to God on his word. Now, the irony here is that this is exactly this. Abolishing the law, setting aside God’s law. That’s exactly what the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were accusing Jesus of.
And yet, in their hypocrisy, that’s what they were doing. They were turning aside from the law. They were adding to it, creating legalism that was not meant to be there, and they were using it to hold it over other people’s heads. So how does a child of God learn from the Lord? We learn by taking his word, taking him at his word, by taking the scriptures to heart, applying them to our lives, allowing it to transform the very inner parts of our life.
And so it’s with this view of the word of God in mind that Jesus says in verse 20, I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s a surprising statement, isn’t it? Imagine being there with Jesus in their culture. And Jesus points to the people, the most religious, the most in their eyes, the most righteous people of their day and age. And Jesus points to them, and he says, unless you’re more righteous than them, unless you’re better than even them, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
So what’s Jesus doing here? Is he setting up an impossible standard for us? Can we not live this out? Well, no. Sermon’s over.
See you later. Like, we’ll just end there, right? No, we can’t, not on our own, because we come before God empty handed, with nothing to offer to save ourselves as far as our own righteousness is concerned. And yet this is possible with God, with Jesus Christ, with the blood of Christ atoning for our sins, covering our sins so that we can have a right relationship with God, this is impossible for ourselves. But with God, this is possible because we have the Holy Spirit speaking God’s word to our hearts.
We have the word of God in the scriptures that teach us how to be faithful, like Jesus was faithful. So imagine being in these crowds. Remember the different audiences that Jesus was teaching to. You have his disciples sitting there, and they’re hearing this about the teaching of God and the teaching of the word of God. And Jesus disciples are thinking, I can’t be good enough, right?
I need God to do this for me. But then there’s also the crowds. There’s those who are following Jesus physically, but they’re not following Jesus with their hearts. And for them, this is a warning, but it’s also an invitation. It would have seemed impossible for them and their understanding to even to ever attain this sort of righteousness that surpassed the very religious leaders that were tasked with teaching them the scriptures.
But for them, the transformation of their hearts takes place through the grace of God. When they enter the kingdom of God, through the presence of the Holy Spirit given to Jesus disciples. What we learn then is that greatness in God’s kingdom is a result of trusting and obeying the word of the Lord that works from the inside out, coming before God humbled and empty handed, it takes trust. We have to trust God in his word. We have to obey him.
And obedience takes a willingness to learn the ways of Jesus. And we must come before God with childlike faith, meaning that we are ready and we are willing to learn from Jesus like obedient children from their parents. All three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they record these words of Jesus, yes, in varying ways in different times in the timeline, but in the kingdom of God, what the gospels make clear is that greatness belongs to those who take the humble position as Jesus did. When we look back to Matthew 18, his command then becomes clear. He says in Matthew 1810, see that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that there are angels in heaven.
Always see the face of my father in heaven. Here Jesus tells another parable that probably is familiar to us. Some manuscripts also have Jesus saying, first that the son of man came to seek and save the lost. But Jesus says, what do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the 99 on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?
And if he finds it truly, I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the 99 that did not wander off. In the same way, your father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish. So let’s put all this together. Jesus says that we are to come humbly before God with nothing of ourselves, emptied of ourselves, with nothing of our own to offer for our salvation. And we’re to come open to learning from the word of God to learning from the son of God how to live in his kingdom.
And all we have to do to be great in his kingdom is trust him and obey him. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
All we have to do is obey him and trust him. To put it another way, God, our heavenly Father, he wants to save all of his children, and so he instructs us on how to be great in his kingdom. We have a loving father in heaven, and he wants to instruct his children to guide us so that we can live lives of greatness in his kingdom, according to his definition, through the humbled and transformed hearts that we receive in Christ as we live as servants like Jesus lived. In order for that to happen, we have to trust God. We have to trust him to save us, and we have to trust him enough to obey him at his word.
The first way that we can apply that teaching of Jesus is by trusting, obeying his word daily in our own lives. Jesus confirms the full authority of the scriptures for all ages, for all time, even down to the smallest component of the written text. As the apostle Paul says to Timothy in two, Timothy three, the holy scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Paul continues in verse 16, all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. What Jesus commands of the children of God, of his followers, is a commitment from us in our own personal walk with Jesus, a commitment to the word of God, to follow all of the commands of God, from the least to the greatest.
At the same time, Jesus renounces those who would use the word of God to hang over people’s heads. He renounces those who are legalists, who pervert the laws of God into something that’s overbearing or use it to control people or to exclude people from the kingdom of God. Trusting and obeying God as our father is like a loving relationship between a parent and a child. Now, if you’re a parent, I don’t have to tell you that you should have your child’s best interest in mind. You know that, right?
But people are imperfect, and we have so many imperfect examples of what it means to be a parent. Not every parent is a model parent, and maybe you didn’t grow up with that, but God is a father, a heavenly father who’s looking out for the best interests of his children. He watches over us. It reminds me of walking with my children when they were younger, which was an adventure. Let me tell you.
If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about. When your kids are little, you’re like, okay, hold my hand. Hold my hand. Hold my hand, right? Or you’re walking and it’s like, okay, we’re walking.
Okay, here comes the street. Stop. Stop.
You need to listen. I’m trying to keep you alive right now. Right? That’s the goal. Just listen to me.
And so when you’re a parent and your children are young, you have to hold their hand or something bad could happen, right? We know this as parents. But now as a dad of kids who are older, I get to experience, not that I have to hold their hand when I walk with them, but I get to hold their hand when I walk with them. It’s the same way with us and God at first when we’re walking with Jesus and really feels like sometimes throughout our entire lives, we come to God empty handed, and we have to take his hand so that he can guide us every step of the way so that we are safe. He’s just looking out for our best interests.
He’s protecting us from the destruction of sin and death that comes through our own missteps. But as we grow in Christ, as we get to the point where, yes, we will always have to hold God’s hand, but at some point, there’s a change in us and we get to hold God’s hand, we get to walk with him, and we realize the value of honoring God in our lives. This is built right into the word of God, into the commandments of God, one of the commandments, the ten Commandments. Honor your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land of the Lord your God, the land the Lord your God has given you. Paul repeats this children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment, with a promise, so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Now, the most obvious way we just discussed to apply this is by walking with God as our guide, as our father, our heavenly Father. But we can apply this to our own relationships here on earth, too, among one another. That word, translated honor here tomorrow is to show high regard for to honor. And we should, of course, honor and revere God.
But we should also honor and revere our parents both when we are young and when we are older. That means that we listen to their instruction when they have our best interest in mind. In fact, God gave us these relationships as a way in which he teaches us through godly wisdom. But that relationship between parent and child is a two way street. Paul continues in Ephesians six, speaking to fathers, do not exasperate your children.
Instead, bring them up in the training and the instruction of the Lord. It’s a two way street. Our children trust us to lead them in a closer walk with Jesus, and they should, of course, honor that. Now, I realize that not everyone here is a parent. Some of you may no longer have your parents with you either.
But I believe that we can still apply this teaching of Jesus to our own lives by becoming, first of all, obedient children to our Father in heaven. But then also we can apply these principles to our other relationships. We can honor those who lead us closer to Jesus, and we can lead others closer to the Lord as well. And that’s a great way for us to honor the Lord among one another. If anything, perhaps today is a challenge for us to seek out a spiritual parent, to seek out someone who can mentor us, to lead us.
Maybe you’re off on your own as a Christian, and you need to join in a community, a small group that is filled with fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who will build you up unto the Lord. Maybe you need to seek out counsel, wise counsel, from someone who you can trust because they live their life according to the scriptures. Maybe we need to seek out today a spiritual son or a daughter to mentor. Our church is full of children and teens who they have godly parents. But you know what?
One of the most predictable factors in the life of a child of whether they will continue in their faith as an adult is whether they have another adult in their life other than their parents who speak the love of Christ in their lives. That’s one of the most indicative factors of continuing your faith as an adult. And so what if we were a church, and we are a church, that raises that next generation, these kids that we saw up here worshiping with us today, our teens in our church, what if we raise them unto the Lord together as the people of God? God is offering a challenge, and he’s teaching us. The bottom line is this, if you’re going to take anything away from today’s message is that God’s children become great in his kingdom when they trust and obey.
So how is God calling you to help others, trust in him and obey him? How is he calling you to further trust him and obey him? And who is he calling to? Calling you to putting on your heart right now, as we come to this time of invitation, do we hear this challenge, this commission, this command of Christ, to go and make disciples of all nation nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that he has commanded us. We may not all be parents, we may not all have our parents here with us, but we can all come alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ and teach them to trust and obey.