I bet you're mad about things right now. I don't know most of you, but I hear what a lot of people are saying right now. And at least as I turn on this microphone and I'm sitting here talking, it is 2020, and in my country, that means it's an election year. And election years in particular have been worse and worse for the last four or five cycles. Maybe the damn broke in 2000. I don't know. It's been bad for a long time. And it's like what we've done in my country is we've baked in hating and mistrusting and despising each other once every four years at this maximum level. And then I don't think the three years fallow time in between are enough for us to heal up and like each other again. And so this mistrust just keeps gaining momentum, and this disgust toward the dangerous, repugnant other just keeps gaining momentum. And I hear more and more good people from all different kinds of political persuasions reaching this point of despair mingled with anger. There are exceptions. And in all of us, I think there are exceptions even within each individual. I don't know anybody who's completely given over to despair and cynicism and anger, but almost everyone I know feels some degree of anger looking at the brokenness of the world. And there's a sense of frustration with the impotence of our inability to be heard or have other people understand, or to see things from another, in our minds, of course, better perspective. And I'm old enough to remember 20 years ago, there's still being this tone of compassion, not just for whatever people group is expedient for you to feel compassion toward because it helps achieve the political ends of your team, but compassion for your enemies. I remember a time where Democrats cared if a Republican got hurt, or Republicans cared if a Democrat got hurt. Or pick any two sides that you want to pick in any debate. There was this sense of shared humanity that I'm not seeing as much at this point. Again, there are exceptions, and you people who are exceptions, you dazzle me and encourage me, and I want to emulate you and rip off whatever it is that you're doing, because I don't want to give in to the cynicism. I want to feel compassion for other people. I want my heart to be soft, especially toward people I disagree with, especially toward people who disagree with me. But if you can picture how the world feels right now as I'm recording this, and maybe how it feels whenever it is that you're listening to this, I think you can understand quite a bit about the first century world in which Jesus was operating. This was not this naive, simple time when people were dumber and didn't think about things and had unity and peace as they lived their simpleton agrarian lives. This was maybe, on the contrary, the most complicated time we'd ever seen in history anywhere ever, period. I can't count the number of times in our conversations that I've run through all the reasons why, but to give you the very quick version once more, you just had a superpower rise up, throw off another superpower, conquer everything, including a bunch of independent states that did not want to be conquered. And now what you've got is a whole new idea about government and law and how the world ought to work, coming into conflict with a whole bunch of individual ideas about how the government and law and the world ought to work. And on top of that, you've got this religious element in the part of the world that is the intersection of the three known continents, the intersection of all the trade and all the culture coming and going, a place hotly contested and fought over back in those days as it is today. And Rome, the new occupier, is trying to keep its hands on the wheel and control what's going on. But there's stubborn resistance in all kinds of different factions from these occupied people. Some of them want war, some of them want appeasement, some of them want some kind of religious retreat. And the whole thing is a powder keg. And the powder keg gets lit only a few years after the material in the New Testament. So when we read this and we look at the passage we're about to look at in Matthew chapter 9, do not set this in your mind against the backdrop of a peaceful, easy-going time with simpletons. Instead, frame this up in the context of the most divisive, contrarian powder cake moment you can picture in your lifetimes. And at least where I live in my country, that moment that I would picture would be now, like right now, this exact moment. But notice how otherworldly Jesus' response is to that brokenness, to that yuck, to that division, to the mindless anger and dishonesty that he sees around him. Matthew 9 35. Then Jesus went to all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he felt compassion for them, because they were weary and worn out, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest. We'll look at that stuff that Jesus said about the harvest and workers and all of that next time around or whenever we get to it. But for now I just want to think about his response. He looks at the world, the crowds. He looks at Twitter. He looks at Facebook. You know, Facebook, the place where you stay on there just to stay in touch with old friends and to see pictures of other people's kids. It's totally not something we stay on because deep down we secretly love and are fueled by the drama of watching people we know cannibalize each other over ideas they know very little about and have only reasoned through very lightly. No, he looks at Twitter, he looks at Facebook, he looks at the insane masses, he looks at the crowds that are going to be cheering his execution in a couple of years, and he does not feel revulsion. He does not feel disgust. He does not feel everybody but me is an idiot. I'm the only one who makes any sense. He feels compassion, and he even knows why to feel compassion. Because you guys are weary and you're worn out and you're like sheep without a shepherd. That pause was intentional. Did you feel it? He's describing us. That's us. We're weary and we're worn out and we're leaderless. And no, that's not a dig at the president or a dig at the party that's out, it's not a dig at anybody. Everybody I know who's generally honest, regardless of their read on the world politically, would say that we are sheep without a shepherd right now, that we do not have a compass right now, that things like the principles that guide us and the things that bond us together are all disrupted and weird and screwy. And rather than saying, I wash my hands of all of your crap, you people sicken me. Jesus' response is to look at that anger that has recently been directed at him. Like two sentences ago, for example, he got told that he was in league with Satan. So Jesus is getting lit up on the Twitter as well here. He knows what it's like, and his response is compassion. That is the upside down kingdom value stuff that he's been articulating from the beginning. By world values, what you do when the world is crazy and broken and leaderless and destructive is you jump right in there and you burn it down too. World rules say that when you've got chaos and the order of things that kind of held stuff together is in flux, hey, nobody's gonna behave well. What you gotta do instead of reasoning and being decent in that moment is acknowledge, hey, this is a crazy moment. There's one gun spinning around loose on the deck there. We gotta slide over and make sure we're the ones who get our hands on that gun so we can dictate to everybody else how it's gonna be. When things get crazy and principles break down, world values say, go with power. Dominate other people because otherwise other people are gonna dominate you. Kingdom values say feel compassion for the people who are scrambling for that gun and walk right out into their midst and just do good. And that's what Jesus does. He went into the towns and villages teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness. What does he get for healing diseases and sicknesses? Oh, that's right. He gets told that he's in league with Satan, and not just told that by like one crazy, but by very influential people. The blue check marks tell him he's in league with Satan, and then they go out and tell everybody else that he's in league with Satan very publicly. They don't pull him aside privately and try to work it out. They try to burn him down for their own team's power, just like what we see people doing to each other now. But Jesus' response is a kingdom values response. It's completely other. It's a complete rejection of the game, of the fight, of the squabble, of the nonsense. And it is life-giving and beautiful to me as I read about it right here. He's gonna double down on that beautiful life-giving attitude and response to the broken insanity that he sees by trying to invite a bunch of people to adopt the same posture, the same kingdom value position that he's taking in response to the situation. And that is to go out and do the same, to imitate him, to do good, to fix stuff, to make things better, to be ambassadors of the kingdom, to be preservatives, salt, and light. And the way he puts out that very firm invitation to come and follow him in his impulse to redeem what is broken instead of burning down what is broken is very compelling. And we're gonna talk about that next time around. And Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.