Good morning, everyone. Let's try that again.
Good morning, everyone. Yeah, here we go.
If you are new, my name is Somane Megadi, one of the
pastors. Here we are in Advent.
I think I was 22. I was in Nigeria.
I had this conversation with a friend of mine, and we were
lamenting the way that the country was going, you know,
just spiraling downward, becoming bad.
And I remember we ended with this feeling that honestly, we
understood with Paul when he said, I kind of want to just go
home right now to be with the Lord.
Life sucks. I was 22, 19 years later, that
has not changed. I feel exhausted, and I'm sure
that many of us feel exhausted as well.
With the weight of sin and evil in the world.
We groan and we cry out. How long, O Lord, will you
endure the iniquity that you see?
Will you endure the unrighteousness, the injustice
in the world? Please come, Lord Jesus, and in
Advent, as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, we are also
preparing our hearts for the second coming of the Lord.
Isaiah 11 is one of those passages that reminds us that
Jesus is King, and when he returns, we're going to see how
he reigns fully with righteousness.
That's right. Action that rises straight from
God's character, and then also with justice.
That's action that is a true verdict that sets things in the
right order because King Jesus blesses and he multiplies
anything that reflects his righteousness and he justly
redeems and corrects and if needed even punishes anything
that reflects sin and evil. Matthew 25 makes this, you know,
unmistakably clear. You have Jesus coming and all
his glory in the with the angels are with him.
Such power. He sits on his glorious throne
authority. He will gather all the nations
before him. They must come.
This is not a summit that any nation can opt out of.
They have to come to this. He's going to separate them
sheep from goat because he knows their hearts.
He knows who they are and he knows who are his own.
This is the king we follow. He reigns in righteousness.
He exercises perfect judgement, and he calls all nations to
account. He does more than that, though.
He calls you and I to participate in this.
The question before us today that I'm going to try to answer
is how do we partner with King Jesus to extend His justice and
His righteousness? And that's what we're going to
turn to. Our main passage is Matthew 25,
verse 31 to 46, found on page 780 of the ESV Bible.
That's what we're going to look at primarily this morning.
Let me pray for us, Father. May your word be a delight to us
this morning. May it give us hope, may it give
us refreshing, may it direct our hearts to your Son Jesus Christ
for the glory and praise of your name.
Amen. Amen.
All right, so Matthew chapter 25, verse 31 to 46, to better
understand what is going on in that passage, we're going to
talk about sheep for a little bit.
Sheep are strange creatures. If you've ever seen one, they're
very, very weird. They're cute and they're fluffy,
but they have weird habits. They drift and wonder if nobody
guides them. They hear a sharp sound and
they're startled. They have almost no defense
mechanism except when they huddle together and when they're
huddling together. If you're in the middle, you're
safe. If you're on the outskirts,
well, sorry, they can't clean themselves when they get stuck
in a place they need help to get out.
You put a sheep on its back, it's fallen and it can't get up.
It just can't. They are very vulnerable.
They need steady care. And yet this is the creature
that God, that Jesus chooses as a picture of his people.
That's not very flattering. Of course not.
But I think it gets to the part of the issue what Jesus is
looking for. Sheep have one strong trait.
They follow a leader. Once a sheep places his trust in
the shepherd, they will follow that sheep wherever that
shepherd, sorry, that shepherd, wherever he or she goes.
And they will be fully dependent on the shepherd for everything.
So Jesus says in John, my sheep hear my voice, I know them, and
they follow me. So he uses sheep because he
wants us to be people who follow him and depend on Him for every
little thing. And so Psalm 23 shows us how our
Lord leads us. He first of all leads us to
green pastures, the pastures of His Word.
True feed come to His Word. They feed on Scripture day after
day. They memorize it, they meditate
on it, they read it, they study, they feast on His Word to their
heart's content so that they can lie down with plenty all around
them. The Psalm also teaches us that
our Lord leads His sheep to restful waters, and that can
mean many things, but it certainly means the Holy Spirit.
Remember John Chapter 7, verse 37?
Jesus says if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.
Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his
heart will flow rivers of living water.
Now this he said about the Spirit whom those who believed
in Him were to receive, and the rest of that Psalm, Psalm 23
shows how the Lord provides abundantly for His sheep.
He guides us through difficult circumstances so that we are not
afraid. And like a generous host, He
sets a table before us with food and drink where we can eat in
safety even with our enemies nearby.
He anoints our head with the oil of gladness.
Our cup of wine just overflows with comfort and refreshments
and good things. Surely goodness and mercy track
US all our days, and we long to be in the House of the Lord from
day-to-day. You hear that and you want to
say Amen? Somebody give me an Amen.
Yes, yes, it's really, really good.
This is what Jesus provides for us.
And I'm constantly struck by believers who position
themselves where they can receive God's abundance like
this. And of course, I'm not saying
that they get everything right, but they show a tenacious
devotion to the things of the Lord.
I'm thinking, for example, of the early Quakers who gathered
for long stretches of silent prayer.
They're waiting on the Lord with open Bibles, and they wouldn't
leave till they heard God's voice.
I'm thinking about the people like the Amish, who structure
their whole lives around Scripture and worship and
community and food. And boy, do they know how to do
food well. They rise early, they pray
together, they read the word, they bear one another's burdens,
and they have very strict rules about how to engage with all the
novelties in the world. I think about the South Korean
brothers and sisters who rise at 4:00 PM every morning, 365 days
a year. They walk to church for an hour
of prayer. I think of what Bishop Andudu
told us here about his work in South South Sudan, southern
northern Sudan, where people walk for walk for hours just to
congregate together on a Sunday and have worship that lasts for
5 to 8 hours. May that happen here for 5 to 8
hours, just feasting and praying together and singing and
worshipping. There's an instance where that
was happening and Bishop Andudu was preaching to 2000 people.
And this was a time when the violence was much, much greater
than it is right now. And he saw a fighter jet that
usually that fighter jets that was coming and he know knew what
that meant, carpet bombing. They was going to shoot them.
And he didn't tell the people what was going to happen.
He simply prayed and kept preaching.
And for whatever reason, the guy didn't see them. 2000 people in
an open field, despite danger, they're coming to feast at the
table of the Lord. That kind of shames me when I
think about myself, you know. At the same time, I'm amazed by
the number of Christians I meet who say they have followed Jesus
for years and years and years, and they've never even read the
Bible cover to cover. They stop at Leviticus.
That is a hard book I give, I grant that.
But they stop there. This is their word for life, and
they don't feast on it. Their prayer life is stilted.
If it exists at all, it's very feeble and it's constantly
interrupted by, you know, cute cat videos or sports or whatever
distraction you can put in there.
Spiritual rhythms, not so much. They nibble at the edges of
Jesus feast and they wonder why their spiritual life feels so
thin, why their strength fails them, why they fall into
temptation, why their life is constantly full of struggle
after struggle without any joy or peace, Why their compassion
dries up. Which kind of sheep are you?
The type of feasts on Jesus's abundance are the 1 nibbling at
the edges. What does this have to do with
extending Jesus's righteousness and justice?
So in Matthew 25, verse 32 to 33, it tells us that when the
Son of Man comes in His glory, before Him will be gathered all
the nations, and He will separate people one from
another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
And He will place the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on
the left. The sheep here are the ones who
have heard Jesus's voice feasted at his stable, and he leads them
in paths of righteousness. And where does that take them?
It takes them to where Jesus Himself dwells among the hungry,
the poor, the naked, the stranger, the sick, the
imprisoned. And this list is not exhausted.
And the goodness and mercy and abundance that follow Jesus's
true sheep naturally flowed from them to the least of these
listed here. Now, whenever I look at
Scripture, I want to be faithful to what it's saying, and I want
to do that here. Jesus actually qualifies who the
hungry and the poor are in the passage verse 40.
Truly, I say to you as you did it to one of the least of these,
my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.
If you do a simple concordance search of this particular word,
you'll find that it the for brother and sister.
You'll find that it appears 31 times in Matthew and it has only
two meanings. One, it means either a physical
relative or Kingsman or a fellow believer, someone in the family
of faith. The word actually appears in
Matthew chapter 12 with both meanings in there.
Jesus is talking to his disciples and someone says, hey,
your brother, your mother, your sisters, they're waiting outside
for you, Jesus. And Jesus looks at the messenger
and then he looks back at his disciples, who are my brothers
and my sisters and my and my mother, etcetera.
It is you all, you all who hear my word, who do the will of the
Father. He uses that word and he changes
what it means to be family. Those who are my disciples are
brother, sister, mother. So when Jesus says the least of
these, my brothers and sisters, he's speaking primarily about
his disciples, his followers who are hungry, poor, sick,
strangers or in prison. That shouldn't surprise us.
Acts 9. Saul is going to Damascus that
arrests Christians, blinding life falls off the horse hears a
voice. The voice says, Saul, Saul, why
are you persecuting my church? That's not what it says.
Persecuting my disciples. That's not what it says.
Why are you persecuting me? Jesus identifies very closely
with his church because it's his body.
And he certainly identifies with the least of his disciples who
fit these categories. For example, like Pastor Ezra
Ezra Jin and the 30 believers who were detained in China.
We've been praying for them, detained for illegal
dissemination of religious information, like a Vietnamese
mother who became a Christian and immediately faced beatings
from her husband and the local police, and she and her children
had to flee to Thailand. And there they're being
supported by local missionaries ministries.
Jesus cares deeply about his people who are suffering the
least of these, and He wants us to show them love.
Now Scripture gives us several reasons for this, but one of
them actually comes directly from Jesus's own mouth.
He says in John 13, I give you a new commandment that you love
one another. By this everyone else will know
that you are my disciples if you love one another.
When the household of God shows love to itself, especially to
the least of these within it, the world sees it.
And when they do, our King Jesus says they will say, wow, those
Christians, they really love each other.
They must be true disciples. The gospel must be real.
And as far as Jesus is concerned, there's no virtue in
saying that you love non Christians and do good to them.
When you do not love your fellow Christians and do good to them,
there's no virtue in that. And so Galatians chapter 6 verse
10, it captures this with a good balance.
It says so then whenever you have an opportunity, let us work
for the good of all and especially for the household of
faith. Now it goes without saying, like
we just read from Galatians, this focus does not exclude love
to those who are not believers. Jesus has told us many instances
in Scripture to love and serve those outside the faith.
The epistles carry the same command.
If your enemy is hungry, feed them.
If your enemies thirsty, give them something to drink.
Our acts of love must extend to those outside the faith because
everybody bears the image of God.
And This is why Scripture often ties God's judgment.
Whoever said Amen to that, thank you.
This is why Scripture often ties God's judgment directly to how
his people treat the least of this, whether Christians or not.
And here's an example. Zechariah Chapter 7 says, Thus
says the Lord of hosts, render true judgments, yes, Show
kindness and mercy to one another.
Yes. Do not oppress the widow, the
fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you
device evil against another in your heart.
But they refused to pay attention, and turned a stubborn
shoulder and stopped their errors that they might not hear.
Therefore great anger came from the Lord of hosts, and I
scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations that they
had not known. God takes this very seriously,
and so should we. But it is so hard to do this
well because none of the things that Jesus names is easy for
convenient. Because back then feeding the
poor took a significant amount of time.
They did not have Uber Eats. They couldn't make an easy
grocery run and just simply get food ready made.
They didn't have Grubhub. And visiting someone in prison,
well, good luck. You could walk for hours to get
there and you had no guarantee that you'd be allowed to see the
person you're visiting. And there's always a chance of
guilt by association. Welcoming the stranger carried a
real risk, whether they were a believer or not.
You did not know the kind of person you were bringing into
your home. A stranger could drain what
little you had overstay the welcome of turn out to be
uncharitable. A friend of mine in Nigeria came
in contact with this couple who had two kids and they were
living in a very terrible apartment and he found out
around 7:00 PM that night that they needed food that had
nothing to eat. There were there are no food
banks that you can go to in Nigeria.
And so he scrolled through his phone and found who can I call
to help right now. Called about 10-15 people and
many of them said yes, I have this, just come and get it.
For the next 2 1/2 hours my friend was driving around the
city picking up food to take it to this person that he just met.
And he gave them food and then they became part of his life
such that when they were evicted from the home, they stayed with
him. And in staying with him he found
out there were so many things wrong.
They were believers but part of the problem was their lack of
wisdom put them in that situation.
And he tried to help and he kept helping and kept helping and it
drained him. And in the end that relationship
didn't end very well. But till date he was like, I did
the right thing. It was good that I did that no
matter how hard it was. These things aren't convenient.
Jesus's sheep do these things and they do them without
thinking. When Jesus commends them,
they're like, yo Jesus, what are you talking about?
When did we see you and did all do all these things to you?
They weren't doing it because they were looking for reward or
merit. No, that never crossed their
minds. They did these things because
Jesus's sheep overflow with the abundance he gives, and everyone
around them feels the impact of that overflow.
And apart from that abundance, efforts fall flat.
Anyone who tries to do these good deeds, apart from being a
faithful sheep, will miss the mark.
The help be muddied, incomplete, temporary, and often
ineffective. You will have no abundance to
give. You'll be exhausted.
You'll be tired, weighed down by the enormity of all the things
that have to get done. You will freeze under its size
or push yourself to do what only God can do.
I'm encouraged because our church community is filled with
people who do good things like this.
I truly commend you for that. Some of you work on a macro
level and agencies that tackle food security, economic
inequity, criminal justice reform, safeguarding and
protecting the vulnerable. Some of you serve at a micro
level. You're walking closely with
individuals, whether they're Christian or not, through acts
of mercy and just being with them.
Our benevolence fund is run by your generosity.
Thank you so much for giving you.
Continue to give to the church, to the mission of the church.
Do not grow weary of doing this, good friends.
In due time you will reap the reward.
You will hear Jesus say, Come, you who are blessed of my
Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world. Keep going, don't give up.
But then there are the goats, and for them there awaits an
unpleasant conclusion. I love goat meat.
It's one of my favorite meats. It's so tasty, so tasty.
I don't think Jesus is saying like goats are bad.
Completely certainly not. That's not what he's talking
about. In fact, goats are independent
creatures. They choose their own path.
They're bold and curious. They're always climbing,
exploring, and pushing boundaries.
They move well in difficult places.
They can claim space. And sometimes that's a really
good thing. These qualities in other places
in Scripture are praised. They're good things.
The problem here isn't goats in general.
It's this one trait that Jesus is honing in on.
Goats depend far less on a shepherd.
They are stubborn. They trust their own minds.
I mean, when you think of a goat, many of you might be
thinking of that situation where you have a goat and the
shepherd's trying to pull the goat and the ghost, like, I'm
not going, I'm not moving. That's what Jesus is getting at
when he's talking, when he's talking about goats, people who
refuse to follow him, they do what seems right in their own
eyes. They act from self will rather
than from the abundance of the shepherd provides.
And as a result, they don't attend to the least of these.
And the sad thing is this. Many of the goats, according to
verse 44, will call Jesus Lord. They will recognize that He's
king. He's just not their king.
They echo the people Jesus describes in Matthew 7.
On that day many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophecy
in your name and cast out demons in your name and perform all
sorts of miracles in your name? Jesus is going to look at them
and say, what are you talking about?
You have done evil. You have taken my teachings of
justice and mercy and grace and righteousness and holiness and
twisted them to your own ends. And by associating with Me, you
have put My name with your evil deeds.
You have used My name in vain. I don't know who you are if you
claim to be a sheep, the follower of Jesus Christ and
your life is not marked by a steady flow of his abundant
provision, the Word, the Spirit, the the table he sets before us,
and that abundance isn't flowing to others.
You are deceiving yourself and you need to repent.
You might be a goat. You cannot come here within the
community of God, week after week, hear the scriptures,
receive the Spirit, come to the table, and yet fail to extend
Jesus's righteousness and justice.
That is not true worship. It's a lie.
The fate of the goats in this passage is very sobering.
Jesus says it plainly. We can't avoid it.
Depart from me, you cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for
the devil and his angels. And these will go away into
eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
That should land hard. Is anyone here familiar with
Everybody Loves Raymond? Yeah, Yeah.
I'm not endorsing yet. That's not what's happening
here. It's a funny show.
Here's my point as you continue to watch it over and over this,
there's a there's a, there's a theme that keeps coming up, a
pattern, everything. Raymond's family is Italian.
Every single time he walks into his mother's kitchen, he always
asks, are you hungry? Some variation of that.
And whether he says no or yes, she's going to say, I'll make
you a sandwich or there's some leftover pasta.
She's going to set the table no matter what.
And Raymond's mom is like many mothers, like my mother and my
mother-in-law, certainly the way they say I love you is to say,
have you eaten? And then they feed you whether
or not you are actually hungry. And God help you if you try to
say no, I don't want anything. You're on your own.
And once the table is set, y'all, my mother's can can can
cook. The food is delicious.
And if they see that your plate is empty, they're like, Sul,
there's more food. Please let me go and fetch for
you. Let me get more for you.
And they'll take your plate and get more food for you.
And after you're all filled up, they'll say, please leave room
for dessert. I've made cake.
Do you want more, Zobo?
Truly, your cup runneth over at that table.
This is a picture of the table that Jesus sets before us.
He wants us to be filled to the overflowing so that out of our
abundance we can extend His righteousness and justice.
We can love mercy and walk humbly with Him.
So I invite you, come, eat, drink, and receive from Jesus
every single day. There is no lasting way to
extend His righteous reign apart from the abundance that He
provides. Let's feast with our Lord.
Let's pray. You have laid a table for us,
Lord God, and we pray that You would give us grace like sheep
to come to the table and eat from your table, that by the
power of Your Holy Spirit, what we receive from You will flow
into the world. It is in Your name we pray.
Amen.