If Jesus Was Serious | Week 2 | (4-19-26)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Hard Things."

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Transcript

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We're in the second week of a series called If Jesus Was Serious. And the premise is pretty straightforward. We're going through the Sermon on the Mount, and we are asking, what if Jesus was serious whenever he told us to do these things? Sometimes when we read the Sermon on the Mount, another parts of scripture, we couch it, we make it easier and more palatable. And we're like, well, this is what he really meant. And sometimes that's appropriate when you're contextualizing things that aren't easily translatable to modern sensibilities. But what if we read the Sermon on the Mount and we take Jesus at his word? Last week, Pastor Sherry helped us think about what does it mean if we are Saul and light? Not if we become Saul and Light. Jesus says you are Saul and Light. Today we're going to take a similar approach and ask what does Jesus expect of our relationships? What if he was serious when he said these things about how we're supposed to live together? Will you pray with me? Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, our strength and our Deemer. We thank you for your word. May always be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And all God's people said, Amen. This week I discovered the true purpose of spring break is not supposed to be just like a break from school for respite. It's preparation, right? It's like stretching before a long workout or run. Because uh spring break is a small dose of the chaos to remind us of what summer is gonna be like. Because it's right around the corner, and uh there's nothing quite like the experience of young kids with unstructured time. That is what my week has been filled with. Uh, you know, uh our house was spotless a week ago. Brianna did so much work getting ready to have pictures taken of the house and everything, and it looked the best it's ever looked since we we moved in. And today it looks like a bomb went off. And we weren't even home that much this week, right? Uh I I think I had my highest average heart rate for an entire week this past week, both in good ways and in not so good ways, right? Like uh I had my kids at work with me a lot this week, and we've got a great team, and we all kind of just kind of help out and support each other. And if you've got kids, they come to work with you sometimes summertime, and people they're still kind, but it's still it's not the most calming experience to be walking around the office yelling, Bradshaw, where are you? Right? I think I I screamed out more than anything this week. My my heart rate uh was was really high in a good way on Thursday at to the kids to the beach, August and Bradshaw, and I caught this nice redfish in the surf, and they were all excited, so that was fun. But but then it was elevated even more the next day uh when they were yelling in the car, and I tried to swerve to uh avoid uh some landscaping crew and and I blew out two tires on Brianna's minivan by hitting the curb. And then I don't I don't think it was higher though, my heart rate, my anxiety, my my my blood pressure than yesterday at a T-ball game. Right? I I uh I help out with August 8U softball team, but they I just if there's one of the coaches out, I'll jump in. But I'm the head coach for Bradshaw's T-ball team, as I I've told you before. And I've heard about municipal park t-ball parents and and how crazy it can get. And I thought it's been blown out of proportion because by and large, almost over two years, we haven't really had any controversies. It's all been pretty chill, especially in the fall. Fall ball is real. Like, we don't need to turn the scoreboard on. Everybody's just like supporting the four and five-year-olds, like you go, guy, you know, they they they're figuring things out. Um, and so I had not experienced what people had told me about until yesterday. Uh, it yesterday uh I experienced that spring ball can be a very different game. Uh you know, Brianna was running the scoreboard when you're the the home team, you do uh they prepare the field and the visitors run the scoreboard, and people were yelling at her that she was adding runs. Have y'all ever met Brianna? Brianna, if she had a cheated on a test in high school, like she'd have to go to the kit to confession like every day for a week, she'd feel so guilty. Like she's not, she's not, I mean, adding runs to the scoreboard, so yelling at her, uh, and and they'd be they would yell their score every time somebody like crossed the plate. There's one parent who's like yelling, 16, 17. And then uh one time uh they yelled, somebody yelled at the umpire because uh one of our kids got on base on third base. We stepped off, so the other kid tagged him, and it took the umpire too long to change his call from safe to out. And they they were concerned that he would have missed that point, right? And and there was this uh other moment where the umpire had to come talk to me uh because the other team was concerned that I was lining up our kids to hit the ball a certain direction, and you're not supposed to do that. And I said, I'm just trying to get them to stand in the box. Like I'm not smart enough to know which way to point them because there's no telling which way they're gonna hit this ball. I just how many when they don't run to third base or they go to first base. Um, but but the biggest commotion happened, you know, at the end of the game. We we ended up winning 1817. It's important for you to know that fact. Um, it's not actually that important. I just want to say it. Um, and and I'm sure that our parents weren't perfect either, right? Like I'm sure I didn't hear some of the things that that our team was saying. And so I I have no ill will towards the other side. I just I had there's this moment into the game. There's a bang bang play at home. We were up uh 18 to 17, there's two outs, and our pitcher apparently tagged the plate before the runner from third got there to tie it up, which ended the game. And let's just say their coaches, uh, some of them and the parents were very not happy about that experience. And I'd never seen somebody get so upset about T-ball in my entire life. And, you know, uh towards the end of that game, and then all day afterwards, last night, I was thinking about this sermon. Because, yes, as preachers, we're always thinking about this sermon. There's Sunday's always coming, so we've got to have something to say. And I'd written the rest of the sermon, but I didn't have my intro yet. I didn't have my beginning until that moment, until I felt the tension from their team, until I felt the ire from the coaches and the parents. And and it was in part directed at the umpire, but it was also directed at me, right? As the head coach, I'm like, I'm responsible for all of our shenanigans, intentional or unintentional. And I thought about in that moment how there's probably nothing I could do to reconcile with what they were feeling, to help us get over um the emotions. It didn't matter what I had to say, they were mad, right? And in that moment, I realized I was the other team. I was the other side. I was the enemy. And I knew how they saw me. I knew how I saw them. And for all the great things that sports and the print life principles of sports teach young people, I think one regrettable feature is that it also teaches us it's okay to be against another person or group for no other reason than they're on the other side of the field. We might have everything else in common with them, but for this moment, they're on the other team. And that makes it feel normal when we do it elsewhere. It makes it uh much more uh acceptable to pit ourselves against other people. There's a lot of places in our lives where we just naturally stack ourselves up against another person or group because we're used to that experience. It's natural in a way for relationships to break and for us not to seek to repair them. And when Jesus starts talking about relationships in Matthew 5, I think he's pointing to this exact thing. He's talking about the things in life that we would rather avoid, perhaps more than anything else. Jesus is pointing to the moments where we choose pride over peace. These are the moments where doing the right thing is also the hardest thing. Because relationships can be very hard, whether they're on the ball field, in the house, in the school, or even in the church. This section of the sermon it picks up by talking about murder, but that's not really what it's about, right? A few verses earlier, Jesus tells us how he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law, and now he's explaining to us what fulfillment looks like. He's taking a commandment that everybody knows, thou shalt not commit murder. And he presses deeper. He leans further into it, he goes beyond our behavior, and he looks into the interior. He's trying to talk uh past what we do with our hands, and he asks about the things that we carry in our hearts. He said, You've heard it said, you should not commit murder, but I tell you that anyone who is angry, with a brother or sister, will be subject to judgment. That's a pretty jarring sentence, right? That anger and murder, he holds it together, right? He he picks the harshest legal consequence that you know he can come up with murder. And he sets it next to something as uh ordinary and innocuous as being irritated by the person who cuts in front of you in line at the supermarket. Now, I I don't think Jesus is saying that angry is anger is literally the same as murder. I think what he's trying to help us see that murder is the worst possible consequence when anger is unattended, right? Murder is the final form of a broken relationship, it's the ultimate expression of brokenness. And so, uh, in any broken relationship, there is a road, there's a journey, there's a spectrum, and and most of us will not lead our lives or move to the worst things, but that doesn't mean that doing the right thing won't still be a hard thing. And so Jesus adds these details that the people will be very familiar with, and they're hearing this in the first century. He says, Don't say raca, which is is like calling somebody empty-headed or useless. Like you're so useless. And he goes even further. He says, And don't call somebody a fool. Like that's what you say if you're trying to make somebody feel small. Jesus is saying that the way that we talk to each other and the way that we hold each other in our hearts matters every bit as much as what we do with our hands. You don't have to punch somebody in the face to be hurting them, to be causing harm. And then Jesus, he says something really unexpected. Um, he says, if you're offering a gift at the altar, and then you remember that somebody has said something against you or that you have something against somebody, you need to leave your gift and go and make it right, and then come back, which is kind of nuts, right? The people have heard that who are hearing this, that this is like unthinkable instructions because think about it, they bring this sacrifice, this gift. Maybe it's a cow, maybe it's a sheep, maybe it's whatever, and they leave that they paid money for it. This is a religious ritual, there's ceremony, this is not happening very often. And Jesus is saying, just leave that in the middle of it and go fix what is broken elsewhere. You cannot come to the altar with your brother and sister's name on your conscience and pretend that you are whole. Worship and relationships, Jesus says the two go hand in hand. You cannot worship truly when you have unreconciled relationships. And then he gives us this image of a courtroom and he says, Settle your uh adversary, settle everything with your adversaries quickly while you're still on the way, because once you, if you wait too long, it's gonna be out of your hands, and there'll be nothing that you can do about it. You know, when we sit with this text, when we dig deeper, we see that it goes beyond just like don't murder, right? That's pretty easy. We we get that part, don't murder. But Jesus is actually asking something much deeper. He's taking us to a much more serious question for each of our lives, where he says, Do you really mean it? Are you serious when you call yourself mine? Because if so, if you do, then your relationships are gonna have to look different. And I think we all know what this looks like in our lives, right? This is not a hard text to apply, to think about where we see this in our world because everywhere is saturated with broken relationships. I mean, around here, it's as simple as T ball or college football, right? I mean, in Alabama, you got to pick a side when you come out of the womb. And I know people who will not wear their Auburn sweatshirt to the family Thanksgiving dinner because their uncle is gonna be wearing the crimson colors and they don't want to ruin their family get together. So we had these kind of like surface-level disagreements, but I think we all know that there's a places in our lives where it's much more serious, where we carry much heavier burdens due to ill will and brokenness, right? I think about how how fractured politically our country can be and how much I don't think any of us actually want it to be that way. I think about the families that have stopped speaking to each other because of offenses, both minor or major. I I think about the people who unfollow one another on Facebook as if it was like a resignation letter from your friendship. And it doesn't stop there. Someone at work takes credit for work that was not theirs, and then all of a sudden the the entire trust of the group has eroded, it's fractured, or friendship uh has felt uh unshakable in the past, uh, it quietly just kind of disappears. It's not even it's not like this big blow-up, it just slowly goes away because somebody can't say what needs to be said. I I think about the parent and the adult child who have it out, and now they haven't had a real conversation in over a year because nobody knows how to open that door again. There there are broken relationships all around us, but in every one of them, Jesus has something to say. And this is what he says leave your gift at the altar and go. The other things that you think matter in this moment don't matter as much as you trying to reconcile with a person that you have hurt or who has hurt you. And you know, Easter, this is like perhaps the best season to talk about these things, but to talk about what God wants for our relationships, because this is the season of resurrection, of miracle, of new life. This is the season where the Savior uh who laid out the ultimate pattern of reconciliation on the cross didn't stop there. I mean, on the cross, Jesus does exactly what Matthew 5 is talking about. He still chose to die for us while we were still carrying every offense that we'd ever collected and every sin we committed. Christ went first. Christ, he went before he had to. He made the first move in this relationship, even though we had no right to ask him to do so. That's what reconciliation is at its root, right? It's going first, even when no one is asking you to, even when the other person doesn't deserve it. So we call grace. Christ offers us grace as a way to reconcile his relationship with us. And then think about what Jesus did after the resurrection. Think about what he did for Peter. Peter messed up as publicly as anybody could mess up in history, right? Because we're still talking about it today. They wrote it down three times. He denies Jesus in front of everybody. And when Jesus comes back from the dead, what does he do? He didn't go rebuke Peter, he didn't go tell him, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, right? No, no, he made him breakfast. And then he he asked him three questions. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This wasn't to shame Peter, it wasn't to humiliate him, it was to give him a way back. It was to show him that the worst things don't have to be the last things. Even if the right thing is the hard thing. That's God's answer to broken relationships. Christ shows us that reconciliation begins by offering others what they might not deserve. By offering grace. But trust me when I say, I know none of this is easy. You're hearing this right now, and you can already feel the weight of what it's gonna take to do what we're talking about. Right? We all know why these are the hard things. It is hard to go to someone who has offended or harmed you, especially if the other person isn't sorry. In a way, sometimes going first feels like losing. But when we have the chance to try, Jesus does give us an example of what this looks like. Thankfully, in the Bible, we see just a couple of chapters later in Matthew, Matthew 18, Jesus gives us the pattern for how we can seek reconciliation. When it's appropriate, Jesus says, go talk to the person one-on-one. I think many of the conflicts in life, especially the minor ones, uh they can be healed if the two people will just face each other and speak. But I think one of the most common failures inside the family, inside the workplace, inside of any relationship is this thing called triangulation. I bet you've heard about it. I bet you've been maybe had to go to like courses on it for like getting ready for your job. If you don't know, triangulation, it's what it's so common, and it's what happens when you have a problem with somebody, and instead of talking to them about that problem, you talk to somebody else. You pull somebody else into the party, you turn into the situation. When we're upset, we find ourselves complaining to somebody who can't do anything about our problem, but it makes us feel better, right? You tell your coworker what your other coworker did, or you tell your sister what your mother said, or you tell your friend what your spouse did, and now the friend is carrying something that was never theirs to carry. Triangulation feels safer because it's lower stakes. Nothing actually has to change if you're just complaining. But it's also incredibly damaging. It might feel like, oh, we're just venting, you know, and then you get validated, and then your religion original relationship, it might not feel as heavy, but it's definitely not healed. Because the damage that triangulation does, I mean, it pits a third person against a second. It calcifies your versions of events and it doesn't allow you to hear the other person's side of the story. And it denies the other person the chance to apologize or to hear what you have to say. Jesus' instruction is to first go to your brother and sister and talk about it one-on-one. He says the conversation has to happen between the two of you before it happens anywhere else. But Jesus knows that that doesn't always work. That should be the first thing we try. But then he says, if that doesn't work, take one or two others. Not to gang up on, not to belittle, but as witnesses. Somebody who can help you articulate what you're trying to say, and he or the other person has to say. Somebody to help make sure that the conversation is healthy. I think this is what we can do for each other in the church, that we can be witnesses, we can come alongside. I also think this is what uh the profession of counselors provides for us, right? I'm so thankful that the counseling has so much less stigma than it once did, because sometimes what we need is somebody else to help us have a conversation with the people we love. Sometimes we need that third party to come alongside and say, I don't think you're hearing each other right. I think that can be just as much of this biblical witness as, you know, getting some of your friends together to go confront your other friend. And so, first, go talk to the person. Second, if that doesn't work, take somebody with you. But sometimes, even the best attempts might not land. This is the hard part to admit. But there are times when the person will not hear. There are times when they might not take responsibility, maybe they're not ready, and maybe they might not ever be. And this is where I want to be careful. Because Matthew 5 does not promise that reconciliation will always succeed. It tells us to go and it tells us to settle it quickly while we can. We're given this instruction, uh, but we can't control another person's response. Paul tells the church in Rome, he says, if it is possible as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you. That's very honest. It might not be possible, but you have to try. You have to go first. You have to offer grace. The relationships in life might not end up the way you want them to be. Those wounds might not be healed the way you hope. There are people who Might not come back. But as Christians, here's the good news. And here's the part where I find the most comfort. Even though there are some things in life that we cannot reconcile, we believe that God can. Either now or in eternity. We can do our part, we can go first, we can pursue the conversation, we can stay open. But if the other side stays closed, we still know we can place unfinished things in God's hands. And whether it's now or in heaven, God can reconcile things that we cannot. The cross itself is proof of that. When Christ, uh when he what he accomplished on the cross is something we can never do on our own. And so there are things that God can do that we just can't. And our work is to keep stepping towards each other, to keep walking, to keep doing the hard things until we can't anymore. Because it's something only God can do. You know, there's a thread that's starting to show up in this series. It's only two weeks in. But when you're reading through the Sermon on the Mount, we're starting to see last week we're talking about being salt and light. This week is about hard relationships. And we're seeing that Jesus is, he's not like running a moral improvement program, right? What he's trying to do is teach us what holiness looks like. Teach us how to have a posture open to others. And I believe if we start being able to let this shape our lives more seriously, not just in word, but in deed, then the world will start to notice. Because how the church changes the world is by doing what the world cannot. And the world is really good at breaking relationships, but not at reconciling them. Families fracture, workplaces have conflicts, politics polarize. But if we are willing, the church can be the place where somebody goes first, where we witness to the world what it looks like to offer and accept forgiveness. When somebody believes their gifts at the altar and they walk across the room and they say the hard thing with love. I mean, that's why we do the passing of the peace. It is this symbol that I might have beep with somebody in here. And I need to go apologize or ask for apology, or I need to go reconcile and make sure that they know that we are at peace so that we can worship together. That's what it looks like for it to be salt and light. So if Jesus was serious about these things, your life should show it. How you are in relationships with others should reflect this witness. And if we show it in our homes and in the sanctuary, in our schools, and in our workplace, then the world will start to see. The world will notice. People will wonder what kind of God could possibly produce a community like that. And then when the world asks, we have the greatest answer to give. Let me tell you about Jesus. So this week, some of us are gonna have to leave our gift at the altar and go first. You might have to make that phone call you've been putting up for years. It might be that you're gonna need to sit down in the kitchen with somebody you love and do the hard work to be able to become whole again. It's not gonna be easy, and it was never supposed to be. Jesus never said, Following me will always be easy, and you'll never have any problems no matter what. But if Jesus was serious about these things, we can believe that that is enough. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.