Today we're going to be in Matthew Chapter 9, verses 14
through 17. Then the disciples of John came
to him saying, why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your
disciples do not fast? And Jesus said to them, can the
wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from
them, and then they will fast. No one puts a piece of unshrunk
cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the
garment and the worst tear is made.
Neither is new wine put into old wine skins.
If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the
skins are destroyed, but new wine is put into fresh wine
skins, and so both are preserved.
This is the word of the Lord. Amen.
You guys can have a seat. My name is Eric, one of the
pastors here. Glad to be here with you today.
As always, We're continuing in the book of Matthew.
We're going to be in Matthew Chapter 9, verses 14 through 17
if you want to turn there. If you don't have a Bible, we
have free Bibles back at the book cart.
As always. All those books are actually
free, but please grab a Bible if you don't have one and or you
can follow along if you have a Bible app on your phone.
I only have some of the verses on the screen.
We also keep all of our sermon notes online as well.
If you want to refer to these later on our website,
redemptitsnorthogden.redemptionchurch.com. That's our website and you'll be
able to hear this sermon later if you want to share it with
someone. But today I've titled our
message, Don't miss the wedding of the King.
Do not miss the wedding of the king.
Can you imagine for a moment your friend, a family member, a
loved one was getting married? Maybe you were playing a part in
the wedding, like you know you're in the line, or you're
the best man or the maid of honor, or you played a very
important role in this wedding. And the day of the wedding comes
and you missed it. You missed it because you either
had the wrong dates in your calendar or somebody gave you
bad directions and you never actually found where the wedding
was. Can you now just imagine that
for a moment? Well, today I want you to think
of that, but in in a sense more spiritually.
The Bible says that Jesus Christ has a bride and that's his
church. And one day, one day he's coming
back to get the church and there will be a full consummation of
this marriage and wedding ceremony.
And I don't want you to miss that because of bad directions
or some misunderstandings. And there are people along the
way over this last 2000 years of the church that have given bad
directions or have misunderstood the Bible.
Have you ever heard the Bible used as an acronym, Bible basics
instructions before leaving Earth.
These are our instructions to make it to that wedding.
This is better than Google Maps, all right, And but there are
people that come along and they're like, we'll wait a
minute. This says this and this means
this. And I think that this is what
this means. And that and and and so they get
along the way distracted or misunderstood and and they don't
stay within kind of the frameworks of the doctrines of
the faith and can lead many astray.
So that's why I've, I've titled this don't miss the wedding of
the King because Jesus is in this context where we're at in
Chapter 9, he has come to teach about who he is.
And he does that through little stories, little analogies,
healings, miracles, interactions with the Pharisees and the
religious people of the day. And, and when we look at these
stories, sometimes they seem like so obscure, maybe hard to
understand. And, and we've got to get this
right. We've got to dig into it.
We've got to look at these words and compare it with the rest of
Scripture to come up with the truth of what Jesus is saying.
By the way, there's only one meaning to what is said in the
Scriptures. I know that we want to look at
it and and we think that this could possibly mean this or that
because it's hard to understand, but it only means one thing and
that's our job as Christians for the rest of our life.
We're trying to look at these words and we're trying to find
out not what it possibly could mean, but what does it mean?
What is the truth? I need this boiled down to me to
understand what God is saying to me.
And so that's what we do when we gather together as the church
and we study and we hear the preached word of God.
We're trying to boil down the truth of the passage.
So today I've got three points that I want to talk about while
Jesus is using this time for a teaching.
And the first one is this, that legalistic religion
misunderstands the Old Testament.
There's a lot of things in the Old Testament that could be
taken the wrong way or or taken too literally or not literally
enough. And then comparing it with the
New Testament, like what? What things in the Old Testament
am I supposed to carry along with me to the New Testament?
What things still apply to me today?
And if we get this wrong, what happens is legalism.
If we try to apply these old standards in the old system to
the new teachings of Jesus, then we can get it wrong.
And that happens a lot. That happens a lot in the
church. That happens a lot with us even
as we're reading Scripture. So, so let's look at what Jesus
is saying here as we unpack this point a little bit more,
starting with verse 14. It says, then the disciples of
John came to him saying, why do we and the Pharisees fast?
But your disciples do not fast. So they're talking about
fasting. And by the way, the context of
this is that we've looked in Chapter 9, Jesus healed A
paralytic and the scribes said Jesus was blaspheming because he
was forgiving sins. And Jesus used that as an
opportunity to correct their theology and their teaching.
And then Jesus was eating with tax collectors and sinners.
We looked at that last week and the Pharisees came in and tried
to single out the disciples and, and and and ask why does your
teacher eat with such filth? And Jesus uses that as a time
for teaching as well to correct them.
Now we're in this third part of, of Jesus going to correct some
false thinking. And it starts with the concept
of fasting. So he was just feasting.
He was eating with these sinners and tax collectors, and now it
says the disciples of John come up to him.
They're talking about John the Baptist.
And why is it that we fast, the Pharisees fast, the religious
people are fasting, but Jesus, the guy who's supposed to be the
leader of this whole thing, isn't following our system,
isn't following our Old Testament system of fasting.
Now let's talk about fasting. We've done some sermons on
fasting. You can go look at those.
I'm not going to do a full comprehensive study on what
fasting is, but but a little bit fasting is just going without
food. All right.
That's why we call breakfast, breakfast break.
You're breaking your fast from sleeping and not and going
without food for a while. Then you wake up and you eat for
the first time. So Simply put, fasting is going
without food. Now doing it, as far as faith is
concerned, it's done as an act of dependence, worship,
repentance, and mourning. But let me tell you this, this
is probably what might shock you.
There's no command in the New Testament for Christians to
fast. Not one place does.
It says you must do this in order to be right with me.
Not one. In the Old Testament, there's
only one command. There's one command in the Old
Testament and it was one day a year on the Day of Atonement in
Leviticus 2327. It says now on the 10th day of
this 7th month is the Day of Atonement.
It shall be for you a time of holy convocation.
And here's what it says. It says you shall afflict
yourselves and present a food offering to the Lord.
Now that word afflict and other translations might be used as
fast, fast from food so that you can present a food offering to
the Lord. So one day a week, Israel would
come together while they're wandering through the wilderness
and, and and instituted this day of fasting on the Day of
Atonement. So why do I bring up legalistic
religion misunderstands the Old Testament because so many people
in the history of the church have instituted kind of this,
this legalistic, you must fast. And if you know anything about
the state of Utah and the predominant religion in the
state of Utah, they hold a fast once a month.
It's something that they are supposed to do in order to be
righteous and holy. Other religions do fasting a lot
more than that, but we know the Bible says that the Pharisees
fasted twice a week and they were all doing this as religious
activities to stay right with God.
But we misunderstand some things sometimes in Scripture, and we
turn them into legalistic religious activities that make
us think that these are the things that God is pleased with.
And he's going to, he's going to be happy when we follow all
these things that we do. But we have to understand that
there's only one command, and it's in the Old Testament, in
the New Testament. Now we'll get to the fact that
Jesus does assume that we will fast, but often times in the
church we've been taught that fasting is a way of manipulating
God basically like for our good, right?
If you really want something done and he's not answering your
prayers, all you have to do is quit eating for a while and then
maybe God will listen to that because he likes it when you're
starving for some reason. And so that's what's kind of
turned into, you know, some people's beliefs about what the
purpose of fasting is. A little bit more on on fasting
in just a moment, but why is John the Baptist's disciples
coming and and talking to Jesus? You would think that John the
Baptist disciples had the right information.
You would think that they they were they were following the
correct teachings of Jesus. In fact, John himself pointed
his He had a following for a moment, but then when Jesus
stepped on the scene, he pointed them to him.
John baptized Jesus and said this is the Christ.
But it is believed that there was a following of John the
Baptist that kept going on for actually decades after Jesus
even that never actually came to the full truth about who Jesus
is. So these disciples of John
aren't necessarily on the right team.
They're just a little bit further ahead than the
Pharisees, but they're still stuck in legalism.
And that's why they say, why do we in the Pharisees fast and I
can prove this to you because John had some some confused
followers. If we go to John chapter 3, it
says now in a discussion arose between some of John's disciples
and a Jew over purification. And they came to John and said
to him, Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan to whom
you bore witness. Look, he is baptizing and all
are going to him. So in that passage, his his
disciples are confused and and they say he who was with you
across the Jordan. Here's the problem.
Some of John's disciples started started following John, lifting
John up on this pedestal, thinking he was better than the
coming Messiah. Don't we do that sometimes as
well? We just we did this.
We're doing this series, very spicy series.
You should come to it. It's called Tulip and we're
basically talking about Calvinism versus Armenianism in
Sunday school. And you know, one could say that
some people follow these people in history more than they
actually follow the teachings of the Bible or Jesus.
They get obsessed over names in history.
That's not to say that there aren't people in history,
reformers, Puritans, and, and people that are well respected
that their teachings were pretty good and they fought for a lot
of good doctrine and truth. But sometimes we have all these
different followers or followings in, in the in the
Christian Church where we can get confused.
We're not following some guy dead guy in history.
We're following a guy who's alive in heaven.
His name is Jesus Christ, Amen. But these guys were confused.
They're following John and you can see it in their language.
He who is with you. They don't say the Christ, the
one who who had come, the one that you bore witness to and
Jesus correct Or John corrects him here and he says a person
cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from
heaven. It's like he's irritated.
You know, he's like, you guys are so depraved, you can't
understand it, right? And he he has to remind himself,
OK, they haven't got it yet because it hasn't been revealed
to him, I guess. But he says you yourselves bear
witness that I said I am not the Christ, but I have been sent
before him. And then he goes on to say he
must increase, but I must decrease.
So this is where they got that wrong.
They're following guys in history.
They're following a guy rather than following Christ.
The Pharisees who are mentioned here, obviously, they're stuck
on the law in the hundreds or even thousands of rules that
they added. They are the ultimate legalists
and leaders of a false religion that rejects Jesus and his new
covenant. The problem is one of both
confusion and pride because both of these groups of people are
misunderstanding the Old Testament.
Now we're blessed. We're blessed because we have
the complete word of God. So now let's look at what's the
point of fasting in Scripture. Then it's a call to repentance.
In Joel 113 he says, put on sackcloth and lament.
O priests, wail. O ministers of the altar, go in,
pass the night and sackcloth, O ministers of my God, because
grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the
House of your God. Consecrate a fast, call a solemn
assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land
to the House of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.
So we'll look at these things and we'll say, oh, there's
another command to fast. But this is the prophet of God
telling the people at the time like you need to mourn, you need
to afflict yourselves, you need to fast in a way that shows
repentance. So as I said, fasting can
represent repentance. I'm going without because I'm
just sick about my own sin. The same thing with mourning,
Joel 212 yet even now declares the Lord, Return to me with all
your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and
rend your hearts and not your garments.
Return to the Lord for His gracious, merciful, slowed
anger, abounding in steadfast love, and He relents over
disaster. Mourning Daniel 10/2 In those
days, I, Daniel was mourning for three weeks.
I ate no delicacies, no meat or wine under my mouth, nor did I
anoint myself at all for the full 3 weeks.
Now, we don't often think of fasting as a time of mourning.
And it's funny, we as Christians, we look at the Bible
and we even misunderstand the Bible because you can look all
over the Internet and you can find this thing called the
Daniel fast, can't you? And I know you've done it
because I've done it. A way to get healthy.
The Bible says Daniel did a fast.
And so that's what we need in order to be healthy, right?
When really the fast for 21 days in the book of Daniel was about
morning. It wasn't about your health.
Or here's another one. I'm guilty of Ezekiel 49 bread.
All right, there's this organic bread that's in the freezer
aisle. It costs a lot of money and it
tastes like cardboard and it's really healthy for you.
And, and some, and it's named Ezekiel 49 bread.
Why is it named Ezekiel 49 bread?
Because in Ezekiel 49, it has this passage that talks about
you're going to have to put spelt and Millet and all these
different ingredients together and you're going to have to
bunch it together. And that's what you're going to
have to survive off of. And someone looked at that and
it was like, hey, there's an ingredient, a whole an
ingredient for the most healthy bread in the Bible.
But do you, if you go look at the context of that passage,
it's actually about judgment. It's about you're not going to
have enough food, so you're going to have to scrap all these
little scraps together to make your bread.
And here, what have we done as humans?
We've turned it into the most expensive, organic, healthy
bread because it has a Bible verse attached to it.
That's what we do. And I'll tell you right now, I
have Ezekiel 49 bread in my fridge right now, and I eat it
and it's healthy, but that's not the purpose.
I don't think there's an extra special blessing on me because I
have the right ingredients. We're a little bit superstitious
with the Bible, aren't we? Read verses here and there and
just to start applying them to our lives, hoping for a
blessing. But here you can understand
mourning, can't you, for a second here?
And and how was fasting connected to morning?
Well, when you get a call on the phone that so and so has been in
an accident or a family member's sick or someone has passed away,
do you immediately start thinking about food right then
and there? No, you're sick to your stomach.
Your food is the furthest thing away from you that you are
thinking about when you get the bad news right.
That's the type of fasting that's most often talked about
in the Old Testament. When you get the bad news that
hey, you've sinned against God, there are consequences.
There is judgment coming. There is a you should, you
should mourn over your own rebelliousness.
And that's the type of fasting that the Old Testament is
talking about most of the time. And I'm pretty sure we as a
church probably aren't fasting that way much often.
But if you want to fast, fast in repentance and mourning.
I mean, I'm not saying you can't fast for non religious reasons.
You know, you can fast for your health or do intermittent
fasting, things like that. If there's nothing wrong with
that, there probably is health benefits to it.
But what I'm saying is, is that we need to understand why things
are in scripture and quit applying them to our lives.
If it's some kind of legalistic superstitious blessing that
we're trying to get from God. That's what happens with
religion. Got whole religions made-up of
this type of stuff. And I could go on and on
pointing out, you know, kind of the charismatic movement and all
that other stuff as well. But we have to protect, we got
to understand scripture. And he also says we're not
supposed to be hypocrites about it.
We we looked at the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says when
you do it, you shouldn't be like the hypocrites, like the
Pharisees, don't be like them, but we got to get these things
right. So coming back to our text,
they're saying, why isn't Jesus doing the things that we are
doing? And Jesus is saying, because I'm
the God of the Scriptures and I'm coming to tell you what that
actually meant and what this means, that I'm standing before
you. And what Jesus is going to say
in this next section is my next point.
God with us is cause for celebration.
Why would why would we be fasting and mourning if God
himself has come down to earth and he's here and he's providing
and he's forgiving and he's healing and he's doing all these
miracles? This is time for joy, not for
gloomy mourning. Here's what he says.
You said to them. Can the wedding guests mourn as
long as the bridegroom is with them?
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from
them and then they will fast. This is interesting here.
This is why I've titled it Don't miss the wedding.
Jesus refers to himself as the bridegroom.
Now, what is this? Just some analogy?
Like he's like, Oh, you guys are very familiar with weddings and
and, you know, at a wedding, nobody fasts at a wedding.
Why would you fast at a wedding? That's ridiculous, right?
You might fast all the way up into the wedding so you can look
the best you possibly can, right, to fit into that suit or
whatever. But when you have the wedding,
it's a feast. It's a celebration.
Yeah, that logically makes sense, but it's even deeper than
that. In the Old Testament, a time and
time again, God himself is referred to as the husband of
Israel, the bridegroom of Israel.
And Isaiah used the very word bridegroom, but more, more other
words that are related to that being the groom of the bride.
What? That's what that means that God
is is the husband of his people. There's a an illustration of the
relationship that that God has with his people and it's through
weddings and it's through marriage and that by the way,
you're married person here today or even if you're not.
That is the number one most important thing about marriage
is that it's an illustration of God and the church and that
should rule and govern how you treat your spouse or your future
spouse. It's not just about the other
person can take care of your needs and this and that and the
most important thing is that a wedding is a walking analogy
illustration of God's love for his people, a covenant that
cannot be broken, a promise and love fulfilled.
But this is good news. Nobody's fasting at a wedding.
And, and and Jesus takes this time to say, yeah, I'm the
bridegroom. What does that mean?
He's saying I'm God. I am the God of the Old
Testament that has now come to you, Israel, and you're not even
getting it. You're still fasting, you're
still mourning. You haven't experienced the joy
of my presence of coming in, going on in in that that part
where I was talking about where John the Baptist was telling his
friends that they weren't getting it.
He says this about Jesus. The one who has the bride is the
bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom who
stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's
voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is
now complete. We should be joyful.
That's what that's what the Pharisees and and even John's
confused followers missed. The joy of the Lord has here the
Messiah had come. This is the good news.
All the judgment in the morning can stop because the promise has
been fulfilled that he's come to save them, to take away their
sins. You know, again, I'm guilty of
this, but you know, when you have something as big as a
wedding or a party or holiday parties with your family, isn't
the the killjoy of the party, the one that's on a diet, by the
way, they just won't eat anything.
You know that that all with all these people put all this effort
into cooking all this great food and and someone's over there all
like sucked up face like I can't eat anything.
That was me. I've done that before.
I've probably, you know, been the killjoy at many parties.
But there's no joy in that right, like feasting and food.
And it is it's it often is connected with celebration
because we're celebrating the joy that we have in Jesus
Christ. So back-to-back to the verse
again, it says in Jesus, he, he said to them, can wedding guests
mourn? Again, He applies that word
mourning to fasting. He knows that fasting is about
mourning. As long as the bridegroom is
with them. The days will come when the
bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast.
What does that mean? Well, Jesus is God with us.
Emmanuel means God with us. And when he came to earth, He
was fulfilling that name, God with us.
But even in Matthew 2820 when he ascended to heaven, he said, I
will be with you always to the end of the age.
So God is always with us. But in this time period, in a
moment of time, what he was saying was true.
There will be a time of scary deep darkness of mourning and
confusion that people aren't going to understand.
He's going to be taken away again.
This fulfills something that he was trying to teach them that
the prophet Isaiah said prophet Isaiah and the most the most
Christocentric or the most the the chapter that has the most
prophecy of Christ's crucifixion.
The Gospel of Isaiah in chapter 53 verse 8.
It says by oppression and judgment he was taken away and
As for his generation who considered that he was cut off
out of the land of the living stricken for the transgression
of my people. Jesus was telling them right
then and there there's a party I've come the the wedding has
started or at least the engagement.
It's not fully consummated till he comes back again.
But this has started with my first coming.
But he will be taken away and he's saying he will be killed.
So if we are to fast then it would be because we're sick of
not seeing Jesus face to face. It would be sick.
It would because we are sick of this world.
It would be like the the writer of Revelation, John.
Some of his last words were Come, Lord Jesus, come.
We're not fasting to manipulate God in our prayers or to do it
as a religious activity. We would be fasting because we
are longing for the bridegroom to come back.
And here's a beautiful thing about this.
He gave us a promise in John 14. He says in my father's house are
many rooms. If it were not so, would I have
told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and
we'll take you to myself. That where I am, you may be
also. What he was saying in there was
he was giving another analogy of this.
I'm your, I am. I am, I'm in a a covenant
relationship with you, but the marriage isn't consummated yet
because what I need to go do is go back and prepare a place for
you. Like a husband would go and
build a house for his wife that they could go live happily ever
after, right? We've got to prepare a place
where we can go live together and start a family and and enjoy
each other. And Jesus is saying that that's
what he's doing in heaven right now, preparing a place for us.
The groom of the church coming to get his bride one day.
And it's such a beautiful thing. Revelation 19.
It says there's going to be this great feasting again at the
marriage supper of the Lamb. Write this, Blessed are those
who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
And he said to me, these are the true words of God.
There is going to be another party again soon, church, and we
can look forward to that. This is what Jesus is saying
here in these words. He's telling them that he's God.
He's telling them that he's the Messiah, the Savior that has
come, that you've got some things wrong, You've
misunderstood the whole Old Testament.
And so I want to end with this last kind of take away point
here. The old system is fulfilled in
the new covenant, and there's no going back.
Augustine, who was in a 4th century, 5th century theologian,
very brilliant. Some people think he was one of
the greatest theologians of the Christian Church before it.
It got kind of messed up into the dark ages and then some
people recovered some of his teachings and not say any.
He said all the right things because he had some other weird
teachings as well. And that's where I'm saying
don't follow a person, follow Jesus Christ.
But when where people are right, we can acknowledge that.
And here's what Agustin said, kind of along the lines of the
point that I'm trying to make. He said the old the Old
Testament is in the New Testament revealed and the new
is in the old concealed. As Christians, if we want to
know God and what he wants from us and how to live, we need to
know the entire Bible. OK, but we don't get to go read
the Old Testament without knowing what the New Testament
already says. And we don't go read the New
Testament without understanding all of the fulfillments of what
it meant in the Old Testament. We need to know the entire Bible
to know the whole counsel of God so that we can know God, we can
worship God, and we can be amazed at what He's done in the
New Covenant. Let's go to the text.
He gives us 2 analogies, and these analogies are a little bit
hard to understand at first glance.
I think people have looked at these and been puzzled for a
long time about them. But let's ask the Holy Spirit to
help us through these analogies. Here He says, no one puts a
piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment for the patch tears
away from the garment, and a worse tear is made.
Neither is new wine put into old wine skins.
If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the
skins are destroyed, but new wine is put into fresh wine
skins and so both are preserved. OK, so this imagery of you've
got an old piece of clothing. How many hate it when your
clothes get shrunk because of the dryer, right?
Not because we ate too much and haven't been faster enough, but
because of the dryer or whatever the, the, the clothes are
shrunk. That's what he's getting at is
clothes overtime shrink. They, they, they, they expand
and contract. And if that piece of cloth gets
a hole in it, you don't, Wisdom says you don't go take a brand
new piece of cloth and sew it around it, because then when it
is washed again and again and again, what's going to happen?
They're expanding and contracting at different rates.
It's going to tear a hole. It doesn't fit.
It's not going to fix the problem.
That's what it's saying. This patch is not going to fix
the problem. Same thing with the the the wine
in the wineskins there. But he's telling kind of a he's
making the same point with two, two analogies with new wine.
Well, let's let's say this with old wine skins.
They they're old and brittle and they've already been expanded.
There's some kind of scientific magic that happens with new wine
put into a new wine skin where how you're going to preserve
wine in the olden days was it was like the the organ or the
flesh of an animal sewn together that made a vessel and it was
basically watertight and you would pour wine into it.
And then anybody who's a wine drinker, I'm not a wine drinker,
but I know that it's always best after it's been aged, all right?
The more it ages, the better it tastes.
And so you're aging the wine in this wineskin, this vessel.
And this is where the magic happens with the science.
You know, where the gases from the wine fermenting, because
it's fermenting more and more in the grapes of fermenting, it
causes a gas, it causes an expansion in this vessel.
And now it's puffed up and now the wineskin has reached its
kind of Max capacity. It starts to harden and now it's
it's preserved in that wines going to be good for years down
the road. But if you take an old wineskin
that's already been stretched and cracked and the gases have
already caused it to harden and all of that, and you put new
wine into it, hoping that's going to preserve the wine,
what's going to happen? It's going to further expand and
it's going to burst. OK, Hopefully that makes sense
to you. Maybe I'm just saying this
because it's making more sense to me as we're speaking.
Going back to the point then, that that the old system is
fulfilled in the new covenant and there's no going back.
This is talking about our faith in Christ, Christ in the new
covenant, the gospel that he came to take away sins.
There's a new system. There's no more need for all of
the sacrifices in the temple and to following the 613 commands of
the law in the Old Testament. It was all pointing to Jesus.
It was all pointing to this perfect sacrifice.
But what he's telling them is you can't keep your old system
and take the new revelation of Christ and put it in that
without changing it and it ruining the whole thing.
They don't go together. It's not compatible.
If you're trying to keep the old system without understanding who
Christ is. You cannot put Christ into the
old misunderstood legalistic system.
He's come to make it obsolete. Hebrews tells us the new
covenant makes the old covenant obsolete.
The Son, Jesus Christ came and he did that for us.
We have the Holy Spirit now in our hearts that convicts our
minds to know and to the will of God.
They didn't have that then. Everybody was so confused and
Jesus is saying if you're going to hang on to this old way of
thinking and even your misunderstandings of it and try
to add me in there, you're going to burst.
That's almost talking about judgment.
If you add legalism or keep legalism with the grace of Jesus
Christ by faith alone, salvation, if you add legalism
to it, you will eventually burst from that.
You will be judged at the end of your life or whenever He comes
back. You will not be in the faith.
There will be a great tear. That's a warning.
We as Christians are the the wineskins that should be aging
with joy, with the joy of the Lord that he's come to fill us
up with his new covenant. This was always talked about in
the Old Testament. By the way, look at Jeremiah
3131. He says, behold, the days are
coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with
the House of Israel in the House of Judah.
Not like the covenant that I made with your father's on the
day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of
Egypt. My covenant that they broke
though I was their husband declares the Lord right there.
The bridegroom analogy, Jesus is making sure that they understand
that all these Old Testament scriptures are being fulfilled
and is standing right there. I'm the husband you should be
celebrating. You shouldn't be fasting or
mourning and holding on to this old covenant because I've come
with a new covenant. And then he goes on to say, For
this is the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord.
I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts,
and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his
brother, saying, know the Lord, for they will all know me from
the least to the greatest, declares the Lord.
For I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin
no more. The covenant in the Old
Testament was just a shadow of the things that God was going to
do and fulfill in Jesus Christ. Hebrews 10 tells us this over
and over again. You see that word shadow, and
actually I think I have it in in Colossians 217.
These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance
belongs to Christ. In Hebrews 10 it says, For since
the law has but a shadow of the good things to come, instead of
the true form of these realities, it can never, by the
same sacrifices that are continually offered every year,
make perfect those who draw near.
We need to quit looking at the Old Testament without
understanding the new and trying to pull out principles and pull
out rules and pull out demands and laws that we're always just
pointing to Jesus Christ. But this is what legalistic
religion does. And I know this is kind of a
history lesson, but this is very prevalent in our day and age in
the communities that we live in, but also internally in the
churches as well. In Christ's churches, legalism
happens because of misunderstanding of looking at
words by themselves or paragraph or sentences by themselves and
piercing together this these theologies.
They misunderstand that Jesus came for sinners.
Like we talked about last week, He did all the work of
fulfilling the Old Testament law.
He never broke one of those laws or commands while he was here
and he willingly submitted himself to the cross to be the
sacrifice of all of these sacrifices that were that were
pointing ultimately to his. He's the lamb.
This is we talked about the marriage supper of the lamb.
It was most, most of the time a lamb, a perfect spotless lamb
that was sacrificed for once a year for the sins of the people.
And Jesus is that perfect, spotless lamb that Hebrews tells
us once and for all time. He was the sacrifice for the
sins of all of us. But don't misunderstand the Old
Testament. Don't misunderstand the New
Testament. Don't miss the wedding.
Don't fall for other people's legalistic standards when it
comes to salvation either. In this passage in Colossians
217, it says, Therefore let no one pass judgment on you and
questions of food and drink, or with regard to festival or new
moon or Sabbath. It says You were dead in your
trespasses, and the uncircumcision of your flesh God
made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our
trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood
against us with its legal demands, He set aside nailing it
to the cross. All of the requirements of the
law are fulfilled in Jesus Christ and everywhere Where we
broke those, Christ died for those.
So faith in him alone, not by adding a bunch of religious
works or laws to it, but Him alone.
You will not miss the wedding if you believe that brother or
sister. And if you're here today and
you've been so confused about all of this, I know that even
today, probably confusing still, but one thing I hope and pray
for you is that you would simply see that Jesus Christ is God in
the flesh who came 2000 years ago.
God has a holy standard that all humans should live by, but they
can't, and they couldn't, and they've rebelled and they've
sinned. But Jesus Christ, sent from God,
is the one and only person who can take away your sins.
He took them on the cross. He rose from the third day.
And by faith in him alone can you be made right with God and
be with him forever. Let's pray.
Lord, thank you. Thank you for revealing more
truth to us. And it always comes back to
Jesus. Always.
The whole Bible is centered around Jesus Christ.
If if we ever center our our our learning and our teaching on
anything else other than the cross of Christ, Lord, we've
missed the way. But here you've graciously keep
bringing us back to the cross to Jesus Christ and it's as deep as
we want to go. It doesn't just stay milk for
the the new people or the brand new believers, but it is it is a
full course meal of what it means that God came in the flesh
to die for us and we will never quit talking about it.
Father, help us to continue.