Our sermon title this morning is Do you Respect Jesus?
We've all heard that we're supposed to love God.
We're supposed to love Jesus, We're supposed to love one
another. What is the definition of
respect? Respect simply means to hold in
high regard, to pay attention to, and to add value and to
reverence. When we respect a person, we're
careful how we treat that person, how we talk to them, how
we relate to them. We do our best not to bring
shame or pain into their lives. We cannot say that we respect
someone when we disregard them, push them aside, avoid them, or
worse, try to harm them and even cause them pain.
The Bible talks a lot about the principle of respect.
And again and again in Scripture, there were instances
when God's people no longer respected God.
They engaged in idol worship. They said they loved God, but
they were not really loving God. Before we go into our text this
morning, out of Mark chapter 12, the 1st 12 verses, I want to set
the tone a bit for our sermon this morning.
And Isaiah chapter 29, verse 13, the prophet writes the words of
God. He says.
Therefore the Lord said, in as much as these people draw near
me, draw near with their mouths, and honor me with their lips,
but have removed their hearts far from me, and their fear
toward me is taught by the commandment of men.
Therefore, behold, I will again do a marvelous work among this
people, a marvelous work, and a wonder.
For the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the
understanding of their prudent men shall be hidden.
What things look like on the outside in Isaiah's day, in the
nation of Israel or the nation of Judah?
These people had no respect for God.
They said they did, but they didn't.
There was the spiritual decline in their time.
The outward appearances look good.
The temple worship was still happening in many ways.
You wouldn't tell by just looking at the temple itself
maybe, or the sacrifices, but all the rest of it was going on
was they couldn't be both and they fell into idol worship.
They disregarded God and as time went on one by one, after the
king after king, they just went further and further.
The prophets came and they prophesied.
They warned, told them to repent, and nothing worked.
And then, in time, the Babylonians came.
They conquered the land, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed,
the glorious temple of Solomon was destroyed, and they went to
exile. After 70 years of exile, some of
the people were given freedom to return.
Those who wanted to were allowed to, and they came back to
Jerusalem, rebuilt the city, rebuilt the wall, and again had
worship. But it was not the way it had
previously been under the rule of King David and Solomon.
While Fast forward to Jesus time.
The people of Israel were in their land, but it was not their
land so to speak. They were under the Roman
occupation, paying taxes to Rome, obeying the laws of Rome,
but had freedom to worship as the law dictated.
And they did. And they believed they were
doing a good thing. At least the the leaders
especially believed that they had the temple, they had the
worship services, the sacrificial services, but it was
spiritually dead, it was cold, it was not genuine.
Jesus was deeply disturbed by what he found and he writes in
and Matthew, the Gospel writer writes the following.
He says Jesus saying to them, hypocrites welded Isaiah, the
prophecy, prophecy about you saying these people draw near me
with their mouth and honor me, honor me with their lips, but
their heart is far from me and in vain they worship me,
teaching his doctrines, the commandments I've met.
I just noticed. Oh yes, it is on there.
I thought it was not, but it sounds not on my slide.
It's on there. That's good.
So teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men, that was
the problem that Jesus had with these people.
Well, that's kind of the backdrop a little bit to our
sermon this morning. We're continuing our sermon
series to the Gospel of Mark and up to this point we have
finished Chapter 11. We've not found one time in all
of Mark 1st 11 chapters where the religious leaders actually
took the time to pause and ask themselves, wait a minute, are
we missing something? Is there something we need to
learn and open up to Jesus? Maybe we were wrong.
That didn't happen one single time.
They just knew they were right. The crowds were wrong.
The crowds loved Jesus. They followed him.
But the Pharisees and the leaders, the Sadducees and the
scribes, the the, the legal teams they had no use from, they
despised him. They wanted to get rid of him in
the worst way. There was no respect or they
were all about keeping the law, no doubt about that.
But in reality, there was no one in the whole nation who was
farther away from God than these people.
The religious leaders, they had knowledge, but they had no
respect for Jesus. They had no relationship with
God. They thought they were the ones
who were favored by God who were right, but they were wrong.
And again it of Matthew, Jesus says woe to you scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut up the Kingdom of heaven
against men for you neither go in yourselves and nor do you
allow those who are entering to go in.
We're coming to the end of the Gospel of Mark, and this is out
of Matthew, but in the final days of Jesus life on earth
before his crucifixion, Jesus had some very tough speeches,
some very tough lectures, we could call it, or rebukes to the
leaders of his day. We want to finish the Gospel of
Mark by the end of August. So we won't be going through
every parable or every story that Jesus tells.
And I would like you to read the whole Gospel and finish reading
what we don't cover. So in today's passage, we'll be
looking at the story of the the vine dressers.
Chapter 12 is a long chapter. It's very densely packed, and we
cannot possibly do justice to all of it in one sermon on a
Sunday morning. So this morning, we're not going
to go through all of chapter 12. We'll only go through chapter
12, verse 1 to 12. It's the story of the vine
dressers, the guys who took care of the master's vineyard before
we read this passage. It's an it's, it's good for us
to just tie this together with what we had last Sunday out of
Chapter 11. Last Sunday in Chapter 11, we
have the story where the end of the chapter where the Pharisees
challenged he saying by what authority or who give you the
authority to do these things? And Jesus simply said, I'm going
to ask you a question. If you answer that, I'll answer
your question. He said the baptism of John,
John the Baptist, was it from heaven?
Was it from men? And they think, OK, if we say
from men, the crowd will stone us because they think it was
from God. If we say from God, Jesus will
say, why didn't you believe him? So they said we don't know and
they were trapped and truly they knew, but they just didn't want
it to be. So they knew John was right by
condemning what they did. They just say we cannot tell.
And Jesus says, I will not tell you either.
But what authority I do these things?
Well, at that point in time, Jesus could have just walked
away and said, you know what? I'm done with these guys.
They don't understand. They're closed, they're cold,
which they were, and Jesus could have left them.
But Jesus did not do that. What happened next is very
interesting. Jesus stayed with them.
He did not leave. Not this time.
It is safe to say, the way I see it, he went on the offensive
here for lack of better wording. He attacked them.
Maybe that's too harsh, but at least he confronted them.
Often times Jesus, Jesus did not seem to bother to engage people
in their arguments. But on this occasion he did not
leave it alone. He went after them.
He went after the Pharisees and they got it.
We'll, we'll read that in a minute.
Not physically, but in a verbal way.
He wanted to communicate to them in a way that left no doubt who
they, the Pharisees, were and who Jesus was and what was
happening and would eventually come to happen.
So with that, turn your Bibles to Mark chapter 12, verse 1 to
12. Then he began to speak to them
in parables. A man planted a vineyard and set
a hedge around it, dug a place for the wine VAT and built a
tower, and he leased it to vine dressers and went into a far
country. Now at vintage time he sent a
servant to the vine dressers that he might receive some of
the fruit of the vineyard from the vine dressers, and they took
him and beat him and sent him away empty handed.
Again he sent another servant, and at him they threw stones,
wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully
treated. And again he sent another, and
him they killed, and many others, beating some and killing
others. Therefore still having one son,
his beloved, he also sent him to them at last, saying, They will
respect my son. There it is.
But those vine dresses said among themselves, This is the
air. Come, let's kill him, and the
inheritance will be ours. So they took him and killed him
and cast him out of the vineyard.
Therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do?
He will come and destroy the vine dressers and give the
vineyard to others. Have you not even read the
scripture? The stone which the builders
rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
This was the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in our eyes.
And they sought to lay hands on Him, but feared the multitude,
for they knew He had spoken the parable against them.
So they left him and went away. It was the religious leaders who
turned and walked. Jesus had confronted them in
public and they knew it. This is one of those stories.
When you read it, it's like taking, you know, you buy these
mattresses in a box with a sponge mattress.
Once you take it out, you can never put it back.
It expands and fills this whole bed.
Kind of. That's what happened here.
You can never undo what he just did.
He exposed them. It is a parable.
One if, if, if, if it had weight mass, it's so heavy you couldn't
lift it, or if it had volume, nothing could contain it.
This parable illustrates the relationship that God wants with
the people He has entrusted the responsibility to, of taking
care of what He's blessed humanity with.
This parable also illustrates that God entrusted himself to
humanity through his son, and it illustrates what humanity did
with his son, and it also illustrates what God would do
and with his son by making him the chief cornerstone.
So in summary, this parable illustrates to us today that
it's never right for us to take at God's expense for self
gratification, what is not ours to take.
We're called to worship God. We're to do it with our lives,
with our whole being. So Jesus told this parable to
the religious leaders of his day because they had taken for
themselves, at God's expense, for self gratification, what was
never theirs to take. Since early times, godly people
have respected God. But those religious leaders in
Jerusalem, they did not respect God nor Jesus at all.
In fact, this group of people had reinvented God after their
own comforts, what they interpreted the Old Testament to
believe and what worked for them.
And as far as Jesus was concerned, they wanted him dead
and gone. What we want to see first is
that we are stewards of what belongs to God.
Let me read verse one to four again.
Then he began to speak to them in parables.
A man planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a place
for the wine VAT and built a tower, and he leased it to vine
dressers and went into far country.
Now at vintage time, he sent a servant to the vine dressers
that he might receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from
the vine dressers, and they took him and beat him and sent him
away empty handed. He sent them another servant and
him, they threw stones, wounded him in the head and sent him
away shamefully treated. Verse 5.
And again he sent another, and him they killed, and many
others, beating some and killing some.
You see, it begins with God. God is the planter.
He's the builder and He's the owner of the vineyard.
Our roles, my role, your role. We we're not owners, we are
stewards. We are managers.
We are stewards of what belongs to God.
God expects his people to be loyal.
From the early stories of history down through the
centuries, God has always looked for people who are trustworthy,
honest people of character, whom he could entrust with
responsibility to serve him, to work for him, to be people who
would glorify God in their life on earth.
God's plan has always been to work through people, for people
to live by example, living out their faith in God in tangible
ways that would communicate to the world around them a life of
loyalty and trust towards God. It started with Adam and Eve,
and we know what they did. And then Noah was found.
Faith from the eyes of the Lord. There's some very significant
character characters in Scripture that we can look to.
For instance, Abraham. Genesis chapter 12 tells us the
story of Abraham. He was 75 years old when God
called him out of the land of the Chaldeans and said, go to a
land I will show you and I'll bless you and make you a
blessing and treat all nations. We'll be blessed.
He was 75 years old. Abraham began the journey.
And if you read the story of Abraham from start to finish, he
was 75 years old when God began the journey.
He was 175 when he died. 100 year journey of faithfully,
obediently walking with God. Yes, he had some mishaps.
He lied a few times. He sometimes listened when he
shouldn't, and he didn't listen when he should.
But he was a man faithful after to God.
He respected God. He never received the promised
land, but his descendants would. And Abram's respect for God
resulted in many future generations being beneficiaries
of his obedience. And today we still benefit from
that. Another character in the Old
Testament is Joseph, chosen by God to be the one who would save
his family from starvation in a great famine.
He was an example of godliness, trust in God in an idolatrous
and ungodly culture. Because of his respect for God,
he was able to practice self-discipline when many a
young man would have fallen for temptation, and even when it
seemed everybody had forgotten him.
Joseph retained his respect for God, for God's code of conduct.
His loyalty to God resulted in saving his family, not just his
family, but the whole nation of Egypt.
Another man later ONS Moses, a leader whom got appointed to
lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land.
Moses had a rough start, but he learned to respect God.
And against all odds, Moses followed God's command,
delivered God's people out of the land of slavery, the land of
Egypt, another man, King David, a man whom God took from
shepherding the sheep in the field to lead his people, the
nation of Israel. He was a young shepherd, but his
heart was right with God, and God used him to lead his people,
the nation of Israel. Yes, he committed sin a number
of times, but he repented each time, changed his ways.
He respected God. More kings came and went, some
godly kings and some not godly, some ungodly, but overall the
nation started to crumble and to just drift into idolatry and to
disrespect for God. The prophets came warning God's
people to to repent, to turn to God and change their ways, but
for the most part it wasn't vain.
Here and there was a good king, but mostly it wasn't vain.
God and His grace kept on sending the prophets, but to no
avail. Then we come to the stories of
Isaiah and Jeremiah, how God spoke through them, repeatedly
warning his people, but the messages went unheeded.
Eventually they had drifted so far that God withdrew his
protection. Babylonians came and overpowered
them, took them to exile from their homeland.
They had lost respect for God, His laws, His prophets, His
prophets, His ways, the worship and respect that was due God was
being channelled into all kinds of other things.
Here Jesus comes along and toward the very end of his
ministry on earth, he's confronting the Pharisees, what
they're doing, and he's telling them a story.
A vineyard like that, commentators say it would have
taken about four years from the time they would plant the
vineyard to the time it would bear fruit.
They understood the message. They understood the story.
They knew exactly what Jesus was talking about.
Vineyards were everywhere in that country at the time.
And it would have been, it would have been very common for a man
to own a vineyard and to lease it out or rent it out to
tenants. Everybody would have gotten that
story. But here Jesus puts a strange
twist to the story. The land owners of the vineyard,
the vineyard managers, they have not been lazy.
They've been working hard and it's producing fruit.
But their motive, they were doing the right things, but the
motive for doing the right things was wrong.
Doing the right things doesn't mean it's right.
They were taking care of the vineyard.
It was a fruitful place, but the reason why they were taking care
of that vineyard that was productive was wrong.
The reason was wrong. We're not respect for the
landowner. It was we're going to get this
for ourselves. They're taking ownership.
It was not theirs to take ownership of.
So Jesus telling these religious leaders, look, guys, what you've
done is wrong and they knew it. They understood.
OK, that's a nice parable, right?
So what about us? Does this even relate to us?
Does what happened in this parable happened to us?
Let's let's look. Do we view what God has
entrusted to us? Do we view it as ours to take an
own when actually we're just stewards.
We've been entrusted with the masters wealth for a season.
We may say, oh, we'd never respect God the way these vine
dressers did. Like you know, they shamefully
treated as prophets Jesus using these servants as prophets.
They're that's the same thing. So the owner sent a servant to
the divine dressers to take some of the fruit back to the owner,
but they responded very badly, aggressively send them away.
Shamefully, it says, oh, we would never do that, would we?
How do we conduct ourselves when we're faced with the truth that
we need to amend our ways, that we need to turn to God?
Maybe we're encouraged to give ourselves.
To turn to Christ. How do we treat such a 10?
We already are doing the right things in some way.
We are all vine dressers, we're all managers.
We've all been entrusted with some form of a vineyard that
we're to take care of. For some people, that's a
ministry in the church. For some, it's a job that they
go to Monday to Friday. For some, it's a business they
run. What is your vineyard?
What we do with a gift we've been given is an indicator of
our respect or disrespect for the giver of the gift.
In this story, the first servant comes, gets beaten shamefully
treated and sent him away empty. This is our vineyard.
We're taking this frost. You get lost.
We don't want you here. The second servant comes, he
gets treated worse. He gets injured in the head, it
says. The third servant comes.
He pays for it with his life. Many others were beaten and some
were killed. Well, we'd never kill anybody,
right? But do we shamefully treat those
who are different than we do? We shamefully respond to those
who remind us of our responsibilities?
Or maybe we don't kill physically, But do we push away
and push aside people who want to be part of our lives and
share in our lives? When we treat others as less
than and mistreat them, I dare say we disrespect Jesus.
When people who call themselves followers of Jesus mistreat
others, especially for the purpose of selfish gain, that
behavior falls into the category of what the vine dressers were
doing with the servants of the vineyard owner.
How should the vineyard owner deal with the situation?
What should he do? The vineyard owner in the story
does not give up hope. He has one more plan to see if
the vine dressers will do the right thing.
He decides to send his son. He says they will respect my
son. Therefore still having one son,
his beloved. He sent him to them at last,
last saying they will respect my son.
Why would he say that? He wanted to believe he was
gracious. He wanted to believe there was
some good in these tenants. He wanted them to make the final
choice, the good choice. He loved his son dearly.
He wanted to believe that because his son was part of him,
his own flesh and blood, they will take my son as they take me
because if he would come, they would have to give it back.
Well, they see the sun coming, and they take this as the
ultimate opportunity. The evil in their hearts showed
itself on full display. Notice verse 7.
But those vine dressers said among themselves, this is the
heir, Come, let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.
So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the
vineyard. They would stop at nothing to
take full ownership. What did not belong to them,
What the vineyard owner had hoped would happen, what he
wanted, what would happen, what he counted on, did not happen.
Not only did it not happen, it happened.
It was worse. These tenants knew this is the
sun. They were aware, and the true
evil nature of these men showed itself in full display.
This was more than just not respecting the sun.
This was deliberate, intentional evil.
They wanted the one who had entrusted them with vineyard.
They wanted him out, and killing the sun was going to help in
that direction. They did not respect the sun.
They killed him. Imagine the scene, if you will,
from the time of planting the vineyard to the first harvest
would be about maybe four years. Time had passed.
The vineyard was producing. We can imagine how these
tenants, these managers would have said among themselves, you
know what, it's going to be a good year this year.
How much do we owe the boss? Nothing.
We've done all the work here. We've taken care of this place.
Imagine their conversations and them saying things like, you
know what, let's just take it. Let's just take hold of it.
Let we'll just we'll just take it for ourselves again.
It was not that they were lazy. They had worked hard.
Now crop was ready. But they took it for themselves
that no intention of giving anything to the vineyard owner.
They went all out the pick. The workers are picking the
grapes, processing them in the wine press.
Juice is being stored for fermentation to become wine.
Harvest is in progress. Until one day a servant comes.
He's got to go. No use for him.
The next guy comes, we sent the last one away.
We were sending away and they hurt him.
The third one, OK, You, you're it.
We're going to kill you. And they did.
No intention of fulfilling their obligation to the owner.
Everything was for them. They mistreated the master
servant and said, boy, shamefully, they injured the
second one, killed the third one.
And finally, it's time for the sun thinking that they can do
this. We may think, well that makes no
sense and it's truth does not make sense, but that's how
selfishness works. Selfishness does not operate on
the making sense principle. Selfishness operates on the what
can I get for myself? I don't care what it does to the
other person. That's how selfishness works.
Once a person knowingly embraces what they know is wrong, they've
set themselves on a trajectory of self destruction that leads
to death. What happened next in the story
is unavoidable. There was no going back from
what happened when they killed the son.
It's been said choices are optional, but consequences are
standard. When you make a choice with that
choice, you also then include all the consequences of that
choice. Like you decide you're going to
rob a bank. That's a choice.
With a choice, you can also embrace the idea.
OK, I'll probably get arrested and thrown in jail.
You can't avoid that. Choices are optional.
Consequences are standard. They're not optional.
Verse 9. Therefore, what will the owner
of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the
vine dressers and give the vineyard to others.
When Jesus was telling this story, he was alluding to what
was going to happen to the Jewish religious system and its
leaders. They, the leaders, would in the
very near future no longer be leaders in the temple.
In fact, there would no longer be any temple.
In less than 40 years, 30 some years or so, the owner of the
vineyard would come. He would show up.
His absence now did not mean he was not going to come.
Jesus said he will destroy the vine dresses.
They will be eliminated. In other words, they would be
killed and many, many were. The vineyard would be given to
others. The ministry of the Kingdom
would no longer be theirs. There would still be a vineyard,
but in a different way, in a different form.
Under no longer under these tenants.
There's no uncertainty about any of this.
This was going to happen from history we know it did.
The consequences for disrespecting the sun.
Commentators mentioned that in 30 plus years after Jesus said
these words, the city of Jerusalem with this temple and
all it stood for was destroyed, was demolished in Matthew 24, in
the final week of Jesus life. Jesus says these words in
Matthew. Then Jesus went out and departed
from the temple, and his disciples came up to show him
the buildings of the temple, and Jesus said to them, Do you not
see all these things assuredly say to you, not one stone shall
be left here upon another that shall not be thrown down?
It did happen. Not one stone was left on
another. The temple has to this day never
been rebuilt. The Jewish religion system has
continued in different forms, but that system, the temple
worship system, the sacrificial system was gone.
Just as a side note here this morning, there have been many
modern day would be teachers and prophets who've predicted
rebuilding of the temple and this year and that year and
different things and on and on. I have seen and heard so many of
these things. I would just caution people
don't put stock and dates and places and times.
We know the system of the the Jewish religious system was
done. It would no longer be the
channel through which God was going to show His grace to the
world. The church was born shortly
after that. Jesus died, rose from the dead,
went to heaven, Pentecost, the Spirit came down and the
transition was done. The birth of the church was that
the vineyard is still going on today.
The ministry continues, but early on, right after this
transition, before the destruction of Jerusalem, the
Jewish leaders, they did everything in their power to, to
subdue, to squash this new movement.
They did not want this change to happen.
They resisted the forming of the church.
There was nothing they could do. And then some 30 years later,
the Romans came and Jerusalem was destroyed in the temple with
it. Jesus says in verse 10 of Mark
chapter 12, Do you, have you not even read the Scripture?
The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief
cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing in its
marvelous in our eyes. And they sought to lay hands on
him, but feared the multitude, for they knew he had spoken the
parable against them. So they left him and went away.
What should they have done? They should have paused and
thought, you know what, let's pause, let's think.
Maybe we need to repent. We're not rightfully doing this.
We're we are vine dressers who are taking ownership of what's
not ours. For all the spiritual blindness
of the religious leaders, they knew this was against them.
They had no response. They knew the crowd was hanging
on to Jesus teachings, so they turned and walked away.
But in the end, Jesus does become Jesus.
The disrespected Son is the ruler.
They knew it was against them. They left and walked away.
And that's that. What about you and I?
They went away to come back again, which they did, and they
attacked again. You read the story, read chapter
12, read the story, read the rest of it.
Jesus was the rejected stone. The cornerstone in a building
structure was the was the main stone out of which everything
else was bit, from which everything else was referenced
or or measured and so on. And Jesus is the cornerstone.
They didn't want Jesus to be the cornerstone.
They didn't want him to be any stone, but not now.
Is he a stone? He's the cornerstone.
He's the king. You see the application here is
the question is not will Jesus get what's his?
That's not the question. The question is, will we
surrender our hearts to him and give to Jesus what is his?
Will we do that or will we destroy ourselves trying to
withhold it from him? And Isaiah reading Isaiah again
verse chapter 45 verse 22 look to me and be saved.
The prophet writes, all you ends for the of the earth, for I am
God. There is no other I've sworn by
myself the words gone out of my mouth in righteousness and shall
not return that to me. Every knee shall bow, every
tongue shall take an oath. He shall say surely in the Lord
of righteousness and strength to him men shall come, and all
shall be ashamed who are incensed against him.
In the Lord all the descendants of Israel shall be justified and
shall glory. When the church began and the
gospel spread, it was under the preaching, the apostles, and the
conviction of the Holy Spirit that many people repented.
Not just the common people, even priests, even some of these guys
who would have maybe been there with Jesus and walked away.
Some of them became obedient to the faith, the message at home.
Jesus told this parable to the leaders of his time to
communicate to them the importance of holding themselves
in relation to God and His plan for His Kingdom on earth.
Those leaders got it very wrong. They used religion for selfish
gain, making it look as though they were doing God's work, but
in reality we're only following man made traditions and rules.
God was not part of it, it only looked like He was.
So what's the application for us?
This story of Jesus suffering and death is now over 2000 years
ago, but the truth of the story echoes down to us through the
halls of time just as if he said it today.
So do we respect Jesus? Do you respect Jesus?
Maybe you want to but need to know how.
You start by surrendering, by repenting.
Jesus gave his life. The sins are paid for and in
grace He saves us. By faith in Him as grace saves
us. We can't come to Him on our own.
We need Him. Then comes the working out of
that commitment. So if we're going to respect
Jesus, then we need to treat people like Jesus would treat
people. We can't have contempt for a
person and then respect Jesus. At the same time we can't
marginalized people in the same time respect Jesus.
We can't mistreat people in the same time respect Jesus.
We can't consider ourselves higher than others and at the
same time respect Jesus. If we exalt ourselves, we're not
respecting Him. We need to ask, where are we
holding on to, what we need to let go?
Put it this way, are there areas of life where we put ourselves
before Jesus? If we do, we're disrespecting
Him. He's made it very clear in
Matthew 25 that how we treat each other is how we treat Him.
So how do I view people as someone to get benefit from or
someone to add value to? If I fail to treat my fellow
human beings with respect, with dignity, with honesty and
integrity, then I'm disrespecting Jesus.
Respecting people does not mean I'll never speak hard truth,
does not mean there'll never be difficult conversations, but
always redemptively hoping it will lead towards Christ
likeness. That's my prayer for us as a
church, for us as families, as individuals.
We will be people who respect Jesus by living out the
principle of His kingdoms here on earth respectfully with each
other, and that we will be faithful vineyard workers in the
work that He's given us to do. Let us pray, Lord, when you walk
this earth from the people whom you should have received the
utmost respect, you did not only get any respect, you were pushed
aside and arrested and tortured and killed.
In the end, on the people's part, it was to get rid of you.
But as you told them, you would become the cornerstone, and you
did. There's no one greater than you,
Lord Jesus. For over 2000 years now in human
time, you've been Lord and King and you will never die.
You will reign in eternity. Your desire is to reign in the
hearts of your image bearers, us, your people.
Your aim is to set us free, free to have a relationship with you,
a respect to trust and love that will live in eternity.
Lord, help us not to just know that.
Help us to practice it. Help us to live with respect
towards each other as you taught us.
Our world needs that, our nation needs it and our churches do
too. The marriages in our community
need it and we all need it and we need it amongst ourselves.
Thank you Lord for your word to us.
Teach us how to walk in humility and respect to you, thank you
Jesus. Amen.