A Kingdom Perspective of Personhood – 5/13/07
Sermon Series: Building Kingdom Focus
Date – 5/13/07
Title: – A Kingdom Perspective of Personhood
Text: Matt. 18:10-14
” “See that you don’t look down on one of these little ones, because I tell you that in heaven their angels continually view the face of My Father in heaven. [For the Son of Man has come to save the lost.] What do you think? If a man has 100 sheep, and one of them goes astray, won’t he leave the 99 on the hillside and go and search for the stray? And if he finds it, I assure you: He rejoices over that sheep more than over the 99 that did not go astray. In the same way, it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones perish.”
Theme: Jesus teaches a new positional attitude in the kingdom. Rather then the focus being on what we get out of Church, it had better be on the need to take the message to the lost.
Introduction: When I was in Junior High, one of the things that my brother and I got to do each year was take care of the bum lambs. If you don’t know what bum lambs are, they are the lambs that either didn’t have a mother or whose mother rejected them. This seemed like a pretty good arrangement. The regular shepherds, who were taking care of several thousand sheep, didn’t have time to spend the extra time and attention that these guys needed, and my brother and I were able to cash in on several sheep that we didn’t have to pay for. Every year we did this we took on more of them until one year we were nursing a little over a 100 little orphaned lambs. When we started out we were doing it all by hand. We started by mixing up the formula and then pouring it into coke bottles. The real adventure started when we took all of the bottles out to the small barn where we kept the lambs. We were hand nursing roughly a couple of dozen of them and they would rush us like a pack of ravenous piranhas. One of the problems that we had to overcome was knowing how to remember which ones we had already fed and which needed to be fed. Our Mother came up with a novel solution. We hung a clothes line across the pen with just enough clothes pins to represent all of the lambs. As we fed a lamb we would clip a pin on its tail. This both signified which lambs had been fed and made sure that we got all of them.
Transition: Taking care of these little ones was a big job. I remember one year on a particularly cold night, they all piled up in a corner in order to share body heat. The next morning several of them were dead as they suffocated one another. Nobody ever said sheep were particularly bright. Don’t you find it comforting how God keeps comparing us to sheep?!? This passage finds Jesus with a small child on His lap, continuing His discipleship lecture to the His twelve workers. Last week we saw that He gave them a lesson on the values that God ranks for greatness: servant-hood, humility, and child-likeness. This week we are taking a look at the value that He places on those that are outside of the kingdom. As we pick up the text we see that Jesus is giving them a lesson on God’s little ones and what they receive under the Shepherds watchful care. The first thing that they receive is protection.
I. God’s Little Ones Receive Protection
a. God’s special protection through
i. Angels
1. Here some of the ways that God watches over us through His angels.
a. Heb. 1:14- “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve those who are going to inherit salvation.”
b. Psalm 91:11 – “For He will give His angels orders concerning you to protect you in all your ways.”
ii. Other Shepherds
a. God has also appointed shepherds in the church to watch over and protect those that are a part of God’s family.
b. Acts 20: 28 ff. gives the shepherds of the church their orders to protect the flock of God.
iii. His own care
1. He doesn’t allow us to be tested beyond what we are able to handle – 1 Cor. 10:13
a. Peter – Luke 22:31 – In this passage Simon Peter has strenuously denied that he would ever leave Jesus’ side contesting that he would be there whether in jail or death. Jesus sadly tells him that Peter would deny him not once but three times and then conveys something him that I find very comforting. “Satan has asked permission to sift you like wheat.”
b. Job – We find a similar event happening in the opening chapter of Job. Satan asks God’s permission to test him.
c. You realize that the conclusion here is that Satan does not have free rein to just jump in your life and mess it up. God limits his activities in the believer’s life. Isn’t that incredible!!!
d. Jesus offers us protection. The other thing about this is that we find Jesus saying to Peter is; “I have prayed for your faith.” Hebrews 7:25 shows us Jesus as a perpetual High Priest standing in the Holy of Holies before the Father interceding on our behalf.
II. God’s Little Ones Receive Salvation
a. God desires all to be saved – not just the elect
i. John 6:40 – “everyone who sees”
ii. John 7:37 – If anyone is thirsty
iii. 2 Peter 3:9 – Not wanting anyone to perish
iv. God’s desire for us to be saved is the great narrative of scripture. The Bible starts with man existing in perfect relationship with God until we decided to live outside of the limits of justice that He set up. All of the rest of scripture is about the salvation that exists for us because God is determined to bring us back into relationship with Him.
b. God has gone to great lengths to provide this salvation.
i. He provided a people through whom He would bring His word and salvation.
ii. He provided a set of laws so that we could see exactly what sinfulness was.
iii. He provided several different kinds of covenant relationships so that we could see what they were and how they were supposed to operate.
iv. He provided His only Son to complete the mission of redemption in buying us back from our own sinfulness.
v. He has provided His Spirit to accompany us so that we could undertake the journey of sanctification.
vi. He has provided the Body of Christ, the community of believers for us to share in His rich blessings and the work we were called to do.
III. God’s Little Ones Receive Restoration
a. Jesus told this parable in a couple of different situations to different people.
i. In Matthew here it is a lesson about the need for them to remember the value of the sheep to which they were called to take part in the shepherding process.
ii. In Luke 15 it is told in a different context. There the Pharisees and scribes are complaining about the fact that a lot of sinners and tax collectors were hanging around Jesus.
iii. None of these religious leaders would have dreamed of spending time around these people.
iv. But Jesus was even doing something worse He was actually eating with them and you know how these sinners are. They are not even doing the ritual cleansing of their hands before the meal. Yuck!!!
v. Jesus tells the same story to this group of religious leaders to highlight a spiritual truth. It is the lost that most need a guide.
vi. Jesus came to bring restoration to those who had stumbled outside of God’s household. He especially wants those who feel like they are so far gone that they can’t be covered by such grace to hear His message of restoration.
Conclusion: Something about being lost and then found. Maybe about George Mallory’s attempt to reach Everest in 1924, almost two decades before Sir Edmund Hilary climbed it. In 1999, His body was found about 800 feet from the summit.
