SPEAKER_00: To the Gospel of Matthew.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew twenty-two.
SPEAKER_00: Going through this gospel together, we're in Matthew twenty-two this morning.
Micah McCormick: And our text comes from the end of this chapter, the first book of our Christian New Testament, verses 41 to 46.
Micah McCormick: We'll be considering this portion this morning.
Micah McCormick: I'm going to read that for us.
Micah McCormick: Matthew 22, verse 41 down through verse 46.
Micah McCormick: This is God's word.
Micah McCormick: While the Pharisees were together, Jesus questioned them, What do you think about the Messiah?
Micah McCormick: Whose son is he?
Micah McCormick: They replied, David's.
Micah McCormick: He asked them, How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him Lord?
Micah McCormick: The Lord declared to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.
Micah McCormick: If David calls him Lord, how then can he be his son?
Micah McCormick: No one was able to answer him at all, and from that day no one dared to question him anymore.
Micah McCormick: Let's pray again.
Micah McCormick: Human power is nothing that can change a heart, but the Spirit's power does that.
Micah McCormick: We pray that Christ would be ruling in the midst of his people, even through his word, even through the text for this morning.
Micah McCormick: We thank you that your son has indeed been exalted, and we are longing to hear from him today.
Micah McCormick: So please, O Christ, speak through your word we ask.
Micah McCormick: In the name of the all-glorious one and for the Father's glory.
Micah McCormick: Amen.
Micah McCormick: Jesus loves to ask questions.
Micah McCormick: Have you noticed that in the Gospel of Matthew?
Micah McCormick: He's constantly asking questions.
Micah McCormick: He loves to ask questions that touch the heart.
Micah McCormick: What do you think about the Messiah?
Micah McCormick: That's a question that should grip our hearts.
Micah McCormick: We need a Messiah.
Micah McCormick: We should want to have an answer for that question.
Micah McCormick: We must grasp hold of God's Messiah.
Micah McCormick: We must do that.
Micah McCormick: This text this morning says, What do you think about the Messiah?
Micah McCormick: Or maybe you're looking at a translation that says, What do you think about the Christ?
Micah McCormick: Remember that that term Christ is not really so much a last name, it's more like a title.
Micah McCormick: That's why it says there the Christ or the Messiah.
Micah McCormick: That actually goes all the way back to the Old Testament and it speaks of an anointed one.
Micah McCormick: Both of those English words, Christ Messiah, speak of an anointed one.
Micah McCormick: Throughout the Old Testament, God had various people that were anointed for different tasks.
Micah McCormick: But there was coming a greater anointed one.
Micah McCormick: There was coming a greater anointed prophet, a greater anointed priest, a greater anointed king.
Micah McCormick: That was the anticipation and expectation.
Micah McCormick: And Jesus asks, What do you think about the Messiah?
Micah McCormick: Friends, what do you think about God's Messiah?
Micah McCormick: That's not a word that we use especially often in our own day and age.
Micah McCormick: You'll hear it used occasionally.
Micah McCormick: Sometimes you hear someone say they have a messiah complex.
Micah McCormick: It's a negative way of using that word.
Micah McCormick: I ran into someone online, I saw this, I had never heard of this person, Richard Bach, but he has a book from a number of years ago, and the title of his book is Messiah's Handbook, Reminders for the Advanced Soul.
Micah McCormick: Now you can tell by the subtitle, it's probably not going to be a book about humility.
Micah McCormick: I didn't read the book, but I saw one quote from it where he says this.
Micah McCormick: Being true to anyone else or anything else is the mark of a fake Messiah.
Micah McCormick: Who wants a fake Messiah, right?
Micah McCormick: I don't know if he works for Disney.
Micah McCormick: It sounds like he does.
Micah McCormick: Maybe not.
Micah McCormick: But that message of be true to yourself, we're constantly having that pushed on us.
Micah McCormick: And while the word messiah is not always used, that's kind of the upshot of all of that advice is you can be your own messiah.
Micah McCormick: The Bible says actually just the opposite.
Micah McCormick: If we want to really grasp hold of God's Messiah, we have to look away from ourselves and to God's provision of a Messiah.
Micah McCormick: If we want to address the question of who the Messiah is, if we want, and we should desperately want to grasp hold of the true Messiah, then according to our passage, we have to do two things.
Micah McCormick: We need to read the scripture carefully and receive the Savior completely.
Micah McCormick: Read the scripture carefully, receive the Savior completely.
Micah McCormick: Let's look first at how we're called from this text to read the scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: In verse number 42, Jesus asked this question about not only what do you think about the Messiah, but then Jesus asks more specifically, whose son is he?
Micah McCormick: And the Pharisees answer, David's son.
Micah McCormick: Where did they get that idea?
Micah McCormick: Do they get that from extra-rabbinic tradition?
Micah McCormick: No, they get that from the Old Testament itself.
Micah McCormick: It's actually there in the Old Testament.
Micah McCormick: Here's a few passages, Jeremiah 23, 5 and 6.
Micah McCormick: Look, the days are coming.
Micah McCormick: This is the Lord's declaration, when I will raise up a righteous branch for David.
Micah McCormick: He will reign wisely as king and administer justice and righteousness in the land.
Micah McCormick: In his days, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely.
Micah McCormick: This is the name he will be called.
Micah McCormick: The Lord is our righteousness.
Micah McCormick: Isaiah 11, 1 and 2.
Micah McCormick: A shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, a branch from his roots will bear fruit, the spirit of the Lord will rest on him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
Micah McCormick: All of these various prophetic expectations about a coming Messiah, a coming son of David, they're built on the backbone of God's promise to David, which Banu read from earlier today.
Micah McCormick: So I won't read that entire passage again, but you may want to mark it down and just look at it again later on this afternoon or this week.
Micah McCormick: 2 Samuel chapter 7, where God promises to raise up a son to sit on David's throne.
Micah McCormick: And then the prophets look back on that promise to David and they reflect on that and expand on that.
Micah McCormick: So the Pharisees got something right.
Micah McCormick: Mark it down in your calendars.
Micah McCormick: The Pharisees are not always wrong.
Micah McCormick: When Jesus asked whose son the Messiah is, and they answered David, they were a hundred percent correct.
Micah McCormick: But in order to know that, you have to know your Bible.
Micah McCormick: You have to read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: Hear ye, hear ye, a future Messiah is coming, and he will be a son of David.
Micah McCormick: It's not given with repeated directness like that.
Micah McCormick: Think about that passage I read in Jeremiah, the first one that I read there.
Micah McCormick: It says that God will raise up a righteous branch for David.
Micah McCormick: You've got to read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: When we think about raising up a branch, what does that mean?
Micah McCormick: Is it like putting up a Christmas tree?
Micah McCormick: You know?
Micah McCormick: Well, it says it's a righteous branch.
Micah McCormick: We don't really usually think of trees as righteous or unrighteous.
Micah McCormick: So there's a clue there.
Micah McCormick: And we have to use our imaginations.
Micah McCormick: I don't mean by that, just make up something and whatever you think it might mean, fill it in.
Micah McCormick: But God's given us a capacity to make comparisons, to take concrete things like a tree and learn an abstract lesson from something concrete.
Micah McCormick: In scripture, often trees and vines in the Old Testament are compared to people, to families, to kingdoms.
Micah McCormick: We don't speak a lot like that today.
Micah McCormick: I don't see James and Betty's newborn and say, oh, that's quite a branch you guys have there.
Micah McCormick: Well done.
Micah McCormick: But we do have the concept of a family tree that we still have today, right?
Micah McCormick: So there's a clue there that when God speaks about raising up a righteous branch, he's talking about a person, not some uh arboretum in David's palace courtyard.
Micah McCormick: And then you have to know, or reading scripture carefully, Jeremiah prophesied long after David was dead.
Micah McCormick: So he couldn't have been talking about a royal advisor in David's court or even David's own immediate son, Solomon, because this is years and years later.
Micah McCormick: And there's another clue there in Jeremiah: God will raise up a righteous branch.
Micah McCormick: That's the same exact term that God spoke through the prophet Nathan to David back in 2 Samuel 7.
Micah McCormick: God will raise up a king after you.
Micah McCormick: And you don't have to know Hebrew.
Micah McCormick: Most of our translations, they use the same phrase in 2 Samuel 7 that Jeremiah does in Jeremiah chapter 23.
Micah McCormick: And there's a common theme on top of that in the Old Testament of an unrighteous king and the need for a righteous king.
Micah McCormick: So that passage in Jeremiah about God raising up a righteous branch.
Micah McCormick: We have verbal clues, we have conceptual metaphors, we have running theological themes that all contribute to helping us understand Jeremiah's prophesying about a coming Messiah who will be a son of David.
Micah McCormick: And you say, Micah, that's a lot to put together for one passage.
Micah McCormick: It is.
Micah McCormick: So we have to read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: We want to read it thoughtfully and completely.
Micah McCormick: And yes, with all of our minds.
Micah McCormick: We don't need to brag about how little we know scripture.
Micah McCormick: There's nothing to brag about.
Micah McCormick: We want to, wherever we're at, we're at different places in our lives.
Micah McCormick: We don't all have the same amount of Bible knowledge or ability to read and think about and grasp things, but wherever we're at, let's just take that next step to long to read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: We'll find part of Christ if we don't read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: When we read scripture carefully, we'll see the glories of Christ expand and grow and these connections.
Micah McCormick: And we don't want to limit ourselves to the New Testament.
Micah McCormick: That's where Christ is most fully displayed in gospels like Matthew.
Micah McCormick: But the whole Old Testament builds towards who he is and helps to create an expectation for what he's going to do and accomplish.
Micah McCormick: Joshua 1.8, this book of instruction must not depart from your mouth.
Micah McCormick: You're to meditate on it day and night.
Micah McCormick: Jeremiah 15, 16, your words were found and I ate them.
Micah McCormick: Your words became a delight to me and the joy of my heart.
Micah McCormick: Read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: We put a lot of scripture in our services.
Micah McCormick: There's a call to worship, sometimes a confession of sin, an assurance.
Micah McCormick: We have a scripture reading that's separate from the text for the sermon.
Micah McCormick: We read both of those things.
Micah McCormick: We explain, we think about it.
Micah McCormick: And we're not looking to rush through that.
Micah McCormick: We want to linger over God's word because it's good and deep and profound.
Micah McCormick: Read scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: Here in Matthew 22, after the Pharisees correctly answer that the coming Messiah is David's son, Jesus asks a follow-up question in verse 43.
Micah McCormick: How is it then, he says, that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him Lord?
Micah McCormick: And then in verse 44, Jesus quotes from Psalm 110.
Micah McCormick: With most of your Bibles, you can see it's a quote because they either put it in bold or they set it off as a different paragraph.
Micah McCormick: So you can see that Jesus is actually quoting from the Old Testament.
Micah McCormick: So Jesus himself was a careful reader of scripture.
Micah McCormick: He wanted the Pharisees to look and think even more definitively about who this was and what he's going to accomplish.
Micah McCormick: And then in verse 46, it says no one was able to answer Jesus.
Micah McCormick: Why does that seem kind of strange to you?
Micah McCormick: So David called the Messiah Lord.
Micah McCormick: Don't we call the Messiah Lord?
Micah McCormick: Shouldn't we call the Messiah Lord?
Micah McCormick: What's so unusual about that?
Micah McCormick: Why would that be so perplexing for the people?
Micah McCormick: Well, that brings us to our next major heading for this morning.
Micah McCormick: If we're going to grasp the Messiah, we want to read scripture carefully, and we need to receive the Savior completely.
Micah McCormick: The Pharisees had a partially correct understanding of Messiah.
Micah McCormick: They did correctly grasp that he was going to be David's son.
Micah McCormick: They got the first part of the question, but then the second part, they weren't willing to respond.
Micah McCormick: So let's dig into this question for a moment.
Micah McCormick: Why did David call the Messiah Lord?
Micah McCormick: That does not sound provocative to us, but we have to understand that culture.
Micah McCormick: In the world of the Bible and Jewish culture, there's a definite family pecking order.
Micah McCormick: Dad's at the top.
Micah McCormick: And then when dad has a son, dad's still at the top.
Micah McCormick: And then when the son grows up and becomes a man, dad's still at the top.
Micah McCormick: You understand?
Micah McCormick: I have some family friends in South Carolina, and the dad owned a cabinet shop.
Micah McCormick: Beautiful wood cabinets he designs for homes.
Micah McCormick: And some years ago, his two sons had been working for him, and he turned the business over to one of his sons, but he still works for the business.
Micah McCormick: He wanted to give his son more responsibility.
Micah McCormick: And he's getting a little older and wanted to, you know, still work but have less responsibility.
Micah McCormick: Most of you hear that and you think, that's really nice.
Micah McCormick: If I had a time machine and I brought a Jewish person from the world of the Bible to today, and I was trying to explain that situation to them.
Micah McCormick: Well, the dad had a cabinetry shop, his son's worked for them, but now the son is the boss and the dad works for the son.
Micah McCormick: If I tried to explain that to them, they'd be mystified, offended.
Micah McCormick: Dad works for the son?
Micah McCormick: What kind of a messed up world do you live in?
Micah McCormick: Dad is working for the son?
Micah McCormick: Oh, oh, oh.
Micah McCormick: I want to go back.
Micah McCormick: And some of you might come from cultures more like that.
Micah McCormick: Dad's always the boss.
Micah McCormick: Even if he's at an age where he's only able to push the broom around the shop two times a day, he doesn't report to anyone.
Micah McCormick: He's still the boss.
Micah McCormick: Now, do you understand a little more the conundrum Jesus is proposing?
Micah McCormick: When you call someone Lord, you're calling them the boss.
Micah McCormick: So how could David call one of his descendants the boss, his son or a future son?
Micah McCormick: That's almost like abandoning his position as the patriarch.
Micah McCormick: If the Messiah is a son of David, how could David ever call him Lord?
Micah McCormick: Turn back to Psalm 110.
Micah McCormick: I want you to see this.
Micah McCormick: So hopefully you have your Bibles.
Micah McCormick: Hold your finger here in Matthew.
Micah McCormick: We'll definitely be back in Matthew.
Micah McCormick: Go to Psalm 110, because this Psalm is key to Jesus' whole argument here.
Micah McCormick: In fact, this Psalm, Psalm 110, is actually quoted more than any other passage in the Psalms in the New Testament.
Micah McCormick: It's quoted a number of different times in different places.
Micah McCormick: It's ascribed to David, and notice in Psalm 110 and verse number one, there's a declaration of the Lord to my Lord.
Micah McCormick: So we have Lord speaking to Lord.
Micah McCormick: Notice that in your Bibles, the first Lord is in all capital letters, and the second Lord is not in all capital letters.
Micah McCormick: That's a clue from the translators that here it's two different Hebrew words.
Micah McCormick: The first one in all capital letters is Yahweh.
Micah McCormick: That's a name exclusively for the one true God.
Micah McCormick: The second word that's not all capital letters, it has an L but then a lowercase O R D.
Micah McCormick: That's the Hebrew word Adonai.
Micah McCormick: It can be used for the one true God, but it can also be used for human authority figures.
Micah McCormick: For example, in the book of Ruth, Ruth calls Boaz at one point Adonai because he owns the field that she's gleaning in.
Micah McCormick: If you want to hear more about Ruth, come back tonight.
Micah McCormick: We'll hear more about Ruth.
Micah McCormick: Exciting.
Micah McCormick: So we have Yahweh speaking to Adonai.
Micah McCormick: Who is this Adonai then?
Micah McCormick: Is it a human Adonai?
Micah McCormick: Is it someone else?
Micah McCormick: Whoever he is, you see in verse one, David says he is my Lord, my Adonai.
Micah McCormick: So Yahweh is speaking to this Lord, David's Lord.
Micah McCormick: And as the psalm moves forward, we see that David's Lord is a messianic figure.
Micah McCormick: He's a conquering king.
Micah McCormick: But verse six says he will crush leaders over the entire world.
Micah McCormick: That's an incredibly expansive reign, more than what David himself had.
Micah McCormick: He's also, he's not only a king, he's a priest.
Micah McCormick: In verse 4, you see that.
Micah McCormick: How could Yahweh, the one true God, how could he declare anyone to be both a king and a priest?
Micah McCormick: That didn't happen in the Old Testament in merely human categories.
Micah McCormick: Priests and kings were two separate offices with different people.
Micah McCormick: So David is writing about God, Yahweh's words and declaration to a future Messiah.
Micah McCormick: And the Pharisees had read Psalm 110, but they hadn't grasped the true significance of all that was going on in Psalm 110.
Micah McCormick: And Jesus is trying to bring that out and expose that.
Micah McCormick: They hadn't received the Savior as he was intended to be completely.
Micah McCormick: They saw him as David's son, but this other aspect they were missing.
Micah McCormick: So turn back to Matthew 22, that's just a very brief look at Psalm 110.
Micah McCormick: It's a glorious Psalm.
Micah McCormick: As you're turning back to Matthew 22, just bear in mind Psalm 110 is a song.
Micah McCormick: That's what the Psalms are.
Micah McCormick: It's a glorious portrait of the Messiah.
Micah McCormick: One of the ways that we drive home great theology about the fullness of Messiah and his work is through singing.
Micah McCormick: We want to sing songs like this psalm that are just rich with the truth of Jesus Christ.
Micah McCormick: We teach one another through songs.
Micah McCormick: There is.
Micah McCormick: Some of the psalms are more simple and shorter, but we should also crave songs that are robust and give a fuller vision of the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Micah McCormick: If we just constantly sing I love you, Lord, and I'm not criticizing I love you, Lord, it's a nice song.
Micah McCormick: Happy to sing it.
Micah McCormick: It's a beautiful song.
Micah McCormick: But if nine out of 10 of our songs are just I love you, Lord songs, we're missing an opportunity to teach.
Micah McCormick: I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you.
Micah McCormick: Great.
Micah McCormick: What does it tell us about the Lord?
Micah McCormick: It says He's the King.
Micah McCormick: That's wonderful.
Micah McCormick: That's true.
Micah McCormick: Well, the Pharisees also thought of Christ as a king, but they were missing the fullness of all that he was as king.
Micah McCormick: Think about another song we sing, Jesus Messiah, and how that begins.
Micah McCormick: He became sin who knew no sin, that we might become his righteousness.
Micah McCormick: He humbled himself and carried the cross.
Micah McCormick: Jesus Messiah, and goes on to say, Blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel.
Micah McCormick: You hear that's expanding our vision of what the Messiah accomplishes and who he is.
Micah McCormick: He's Emmanuel, he's God with us.
Micah McCormick: Or another song that we sing, Ferris Lord Jesus, it says in those, in that song, beautiful Savior, Lord of the nations, Son of God, and Son of Man.
Micah McCormick: So he's the Lord, he's king, but he's king not just of us, he's king of all nations.
Micah McCormick: And he's not just a son of God, he's a son of man.
Micah McCormick: He's both of those things together.
Micah McCormick: So we're expanding our our understanding of who Christ is, and we got more fuel to praise him and to worship him.
Micah McCormick: Okay, theological advertisement for songs over.
Micah McCormick: Back in Matthew 22.
Micah McCormick: So we've seen in one in Psalm 110, David does indeed call this future Messiah his Lord.
Micah McCormick: And that's the conundrum that Jesus poses.
Micah McCormick: How could David, great king and patriarch that he was, how could he ever speak of one of his descendants as his authority, as his boss, as his lord?
SPEAKER_02: And they don't answer him.
SPEAKER_02: How would you answer that question?
Micah McCormick: Wow, David was pretty progressive for his time.
Micah McCormick: No, that's not the answer.
Micah McCormick: If you go away from this passage thinking, isn't it great that we live in a world where it's okay sometimes for the sun to be the boss?
Micah McCormick: No, that's not the point here.
Micah McCormick: The point is that David, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recognized that his future descendant was more than just merely a man.
Micah McCormick: He was more than just a son, a human descendant.
Micah McCormick: He was a Lord from heaven, a Lord of glory.
Micah McCormick: He was God Himself come down to humanity.
Micah McCormick: A merely human son couldn't be the true Messiah we need, because a merely human son can't be the Savior.
Micah McCormick: We're, as humanity, we're we're plagued with sinfulness, each and every one of us.
Micah McCormick: So we need a true human as our Messiah, yes.
Micah McCormick: But we need someone who's more than that.
Micah McCormick: We need the eternal God to rescue us.
Micah McCormick: And Psalm 10 gives us this majestic insight into the counsel of the divine Father and the Divine Son to bring about eternal salvation.
Micah McCormick: Christ has come to live a perfect life.
Micah McCormick: Only the Lord from heaven could do that.
Micah McCormick: Christ, the Messiah, came to offer an infinite sacrifice.
Micah McCormick: Only the infinite God of gods could lend an infinite quality to the sacrifice for sins.
Micah McCormick: And I suspect that one of the reasons that Jesus quoted Psalm 110 is that they might be poked and prodded and induced to consider Psalm 110 again.
Micah McCormick: And as I pointed out from Psalm 110, it speaks of the Messiah not only as king who's going to crush the enemies, but as a priest.
Micah McCormick: And as the messianic priest, Christ brings forgiveness from sin.
Micah McCormick: That's the true and great deliverance that we need.
Micah McCormick: The Pharisees had a part of the picture, but they were viewing Messiah through the lens of, like David, an earthly kingdom with earthly political priorities and get the Romans off of our back.
Micah McCormick: And they missed their fundamental need, their greatest need, not just for human deliverance from another empire, but forgiveness for the bondage of sin in their own hearts.
Micah McCormick: The Messiah is indeed David's son, but he is not merely David's son.
Micah McCormick: That's why when Christ is baptized, the Father's voice from heaven rings out, This is my beloved son.
Micah McCormick: At the transfiguration, when the curtain is pulled back and they see the glory of Christ resplendent and revealed, the voice from heaven again cries out and identifies, This is my beloved son.
Micah McCormick: Not only David's son, but the son of God.
Micah McCormick: Philip Brooks says that we find in Jesus Christ something astonishing and beautiful.
Micah McCormick: We find both the condescension of divinity and the exaltation of humanity all in one person.
Micah McCormick: That's how glorious he is.
Micah McCormick: And sadly for the Pharisees, their problem was not primarily an intellectual problem, but a moral problem.
Micah McCormick: They didn't want to receive the Savior.
Micah McCormick: It wasn't merely that they didn't understand all these things from the Old Testament.
Micah McCormick: When he's presented right before them, as Matthew has been presenting him already in this, they had that opportunity to hear him teach, to see his miracles.
Micah McCormick: They had an opportunity right there to see the Messiah, to understand and know he is the Lord from heaven, and they didn't grab hold of it.
Micah McCormick: We're going to see in the next chapter in Matthew 23 that Jesus is testing them here, and he's going to go on in Matthew 23 to speak very harsh words about the Pharisees, very confrontational words, and he doesn't accuse them of having an IQ problem.
Micah McCormick: He accuses them of having a heart problem.
Micah McCormick: What about us?
Micah McCormick: When we think about the Messiah, do we have only a partial view of Messiah?
Micah McCormick: Do we want a kind of Messiah that that fulfills certain needs we think we have, or are we ready to embrace all that he is as true Son of God and man?
Micah McCormick: Sadly, both Pastor Doug and I have books in our libraries of people that, in some sense, have read scripture carefully, but for some of those people, they haven't actually received the Savior.
Micah McCormick: They can offer profound insight into the Jewish culture and background of the Bible and Hebrew and Greek, but they haven't actually embraced Christ as the true God from heaven who is their Messiah.
Micah McCormick: And that's the important invitation for all of us today.
Micah McCormick: What will you do with him?
Micah McCormick: He's been exalted to God's right hand, Matthew tells us, and he's reigning until he puts all enemies under his feet.
Micah McCormick: The last enemy to be destroyed is death itself.
Micah McCormick: Are you afraid of death?
Micah McCormick: There should be a healthy kind of recognition that we're temporal people.
Micah McCormick: We can be as healthy as we want, but we're not going to live to be 150 or 200 years old.
Micah McCormick: We're going to die.
SPEAKER_02: And then what's going to happen?
SPEAKER_02: Fear of death is in some ways a good thing, but Christ gives us hope.
Micah McCormick: When we fast forward to the end of the story in the Gospel of Matthew, we see him risen and we see him speaking to his disciples.
Micah McCormick: We look into the book of Acts, we find Peter, when he preaches, he also quotes this same idea of Christ being resurrected, conquering death, being exalted to God's right hand.
Micah McCormick: And Peter says, Christ himself is pouring out the Holy Spirit.
Micah McCormick: He's pouring out the Spirit who brings conviction and transformation and heart change.
Micah McCormick: Even again, some of those things that Bana talked about last week that we desperately need a heart change to be able to recognize the Messiah.
Micah McCormick: Christ as the ruler is pouring that out.
Micah McCormick: He has poured that out.
Micah McCormick: He will pour that out.
Micah McCormick: And what that means also, when we grasp hold of God's true Messiah, He's not merely the Messiah for our own lives, although we must submit to Him as Lord, we must embrace and enjoy God.
Micah McCormick: He's the one that's right now reigning over all nations.
Micah McCormick: And so when we pray for people like the Kunis, we're not just praying for them and their strength, we're praying that the risen Christ would be at work through their word and testimony and work that people might see and hear, ah, true son of David, true son of God, true, true, perfect human man, true Lord from heaven.
Micah McCormick: That's what we want and desire.
Micah McCormick: That's what Christ is at.
Micah McCormick: That's what our heart should be excited about, the expansion of the gospel, not just from this church, but into our community, to Jerusalem, to Judea, to the very ends of the earth.
Micah McCormick: Read Scripture carefully.
Micah McCormick: Receive the Savior completely.
Micah McCormick: That's how we grab hold of God's true Messiah.
Micah McCormick: In conclusion today, I want us to think for a moment about the example of Mary.
Micah McCormick: So here's the earthly mother of Jesus, who also had the wisdom to know to call her son Lord.
Micah McCormick: Here's a woman not educated in the way some of the Pharisees would have been educated, not of great significance in the world's eyes.
Micah McCormick: She and Joseph stayed in a lowly place, not well off to have the most luxurious accommodations for that birth.
Micah McCormick: But she was someone who clearly read scripture carefully, perhaps had just heard it and remembered it and meditated on it day and night.
Micah McCormick: If you look at her prayer, you don't have to turn there, but Luke chapter 1 offers us her prayer.
Micah McCormick: And her prayer is full of language from the Old Testament, resonance there.
Micah McCormick: She speaks of God fulfilling his word and his promise to Abraham.
Micah McCormick: So she's someone who's who's reading scripture carefully, and she's in a position to receive the Messiah who happens to be her very son.
Micah McCormick: And she says this my soul magnifies the Lord.
Micah McCormick: My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.
Micah McCormick: There's a robust recognition that her true Son is yet the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings.
Micah McCormick: He is God the Savior.
Micah McCormick: And may we, like Mary, read scripture carefully and receive the Savior completely.
Micah McCormick: Let's pray.
Micah McCormick: Lord, we have this longing to know the Son.
Micah McCormick: We have this desire and awaken in us not just an occasional thought, but the regular reality of how much we need a Messiah, not ourselves as Messiah, but your Messiah.
Micah McCormick: We praise you that Christ has come to fulfill all the scripture.
Micah McCormick: He has come to meet every true, real need that we have.
Micah McCormick: So we we long to believe him more.
Micah McCormick: We long to share his fame with others, even amidst opposition, even against enemies that would mock the cross of Christ.
Micah McCormick: Yet we persevere through the testimony of who he is, through his work in our lives.
Micah McCormick: Oh Lord, give us a hunger to love Scripture, to know it intimately, to want to consider it carefully, slowly, to read it thoughtfully.
Micah McCormick: Lord, please keep us from the temptation to receive a half savior, to receive a savior who merely is in our minds affirming our identity or our culture or our whatever we could fill in the blank, but that we in turn would radically change our lives, that we would receive all of Christ for all that he is, ready to submit to him in every way, acknowledging that his yoke is easy, his burden is light.
Micah McCormick: He is a tender and gentle Savior.
Micah McCormick: He doesn't break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax, but he does send out judgment to victory.
Micah McCormick: So we're praying even now that you'd be sending out judgment and victory into places in the world like Indonesia, places in the world like Central Asia.
Micah McCormick: Oh Lord, we're longing to see this reign of Christ expand, that others might see and embrace your Messiah.
Micah McCormick: So please accomplish this purpose, we pray, for your own glory's sake.
Micah McCormick: Amen.