Have you ever received a weird nebulous invitation where you feel socially like you probably ought to go to the thing, but you you really wish it was a bit more clear. And then you get to the thing and you feel a little bit bait and switched. Like, I don't know. I thought we were doing something else. And I find that if you get bait and switched into a thing, you kind of don't tend to jump in with both feet and really take ownership of that event or that club or whatever. It always feels a little bit dirty and gross. And I would argue that that's the exact same thing with Christianity. I find that if somebody gets roped into Christianity with kind of an always-be closing, high pressure, don't mention the bad stuff, highlight all the good stuff sales pitch. It tends to not play out very well for them when they actually go to church, because people will feel a little bit cheated or manipulated into the thing. And of course, sometimes people grow past it and they see the beauty of it. But in general, I think this principle is true. What you win someone with to your thing, in this case Christianity, is what you win someone to. So if you use the force of government, the force of law, if you use physical force or violence in olden days when that was a valid way to try to convert people to different religions, if you use dirty, cheap manipulation, if you use emotional gimmicks, if you use social pressure from other people, then well, you might get somebody to sign up through those pressures, but they're not going to flip around and then exhibit these noble, beautiful virtues as they participate in your thing, they're going to duplicate the virtues that were used to get them into the thing. But the converse is absolutely just as true in church. I find that when people become Christians because somebody explained the Jesus thing to them slowly and patiently, and then they thought about it. And that person was like, hmm, yeah, that makes sense. And that seems to smack of the real to me. And I understand this and I'm in. Those people tend to be pretty awesome Christians. They tend to be great at church if they are won over by a message of grace and peace and love and an understanding of our own frailty and failure and the justice of God mingled with the mercy of God at the cross. And they receive an honest explanation of the outward impulse of Christianity. And then somebody's like, Yeah, okay, I'll do that. I'm in. They're just wonderful. They're a delight to be around because they duplicate all of those things. So one of the things is really important to understand when we're looking at a single verse, like, I'm going to make you fishers of men in Matthew chapter four during the calling of the first disciples. One of the really important things to understand is what actually is the message. And last time around, we spent a little time shooting down some of the competing popular messages, but I want to be a little more thorough here. You will at times see misguided, but I'm sure well-intentioned Christians over the centuries bust out messages regarding Jesus that go something like this. The world is falling apart, it's a giant mess, but a government ruled by Christians with vaguely Christian ideas is how we're going to bring healing to this land. And so we are going to get people to sign up and become a part of our power block. And in doing so, we will bring about transformation through the force of law, the rule of government, and people who don't participate will obviously be physically punished. That's kind of implicit when you talk about the role of the state, but that's how it works. Every time we've tried this, total dumpster fire. Totoll dumpster fire. And it's a kind of dumpster fire where the dumpster is filled with blood and you keep dumping more blood in, and then it smells like burning blood because people always die when the church gets the sword. We should not have the sword. We are not qualified to have the sword. We are awful, awful, awful when we have the power of life and death in our hands. And that ain't just a dig at Catholics, that's a dig at everybody. Look, this is not a your group has a problem and my group doesn't kind of thing. We just don't handle power well. And when people just go out and for a secular reason say we should have power and be able to use violence on other people, that tends to be a mess. But when you put thus, saith the Lord, behind an impulse toward violence, oh, yuck. This version of the gospel, this perversion of the gospel, I should say, was condemned explicitly and implicitly by Jesus Christ Himself. James and John come up to this village and they're like, hey, we should go there and tell people about Jesus. And people come out and they're like, we're not into it at all. Just pass by. And James and John are like, we should burn them to the ground with Jesus' napalm. Jesus, do the napalm thing. You haven't demonstrated it yet, but we know you have that kind of power. Burn them. And Jesus is like, I don't know. I don't, nope, that seems bad. I that's not what we're doing here. Then Peter later on is like, I need to cut off people's body parts to defend Jesus because I need the Jesus thing to win. We can't be wrong. We have to win, and Jesus needs my help. And so he cuts off a guy's ear, and Jesus is like, No, well, what are you doing? And he puts the guy's ear back on and heals it. And it's like, we're not stabbing anybody over this kingdom thing. And that's that. Now, Jesus has the right to engage in violence, I guess, if he wanted to. He didn't. I mean, he's different though. He's other. We don't get to make that call. So the gospel of violence, unfortunately, has been tried and it's been found wanting, but that shouldn't be a surprise because that's not the gospel that Jesus put forward. You got another version of the gospel that people try to put in front of people because it's an easier sell. And that is the gospel of comfort. If you just want to feel better about everything, if you want to unlock the mysteries of the universe and the key to getting the things you want, you follow Jesus, you make donations to some kind of church. Then that church, I guess, uses their binding and loosing powers. It's funny, this is a place where Protestantism and Catholicism on our worst days really actually look quite a bit alike. Then we can do some clerical maneuvering. And whether I am a sweaty televangelist or a medieval pope, I will perform this spiritual clerical maneuver and you will get less time in purgatory, or you will receive financial blessings in your life, my brother. And it's a fraud. The whole thing's a fraud. That's not what Jesus promised. The rain falls on the righteous and it falls on the wicked. The whole book of Job reveals that even someone who's godly and doing everything right and refuses under the worst of circumstances to curse God still is in a situation where awful bad things might happen. We don't get to really know why. The equation of salvation has nothing to do with now you get physical comfort or you get more stuff or things go better. In the first 300 years of Christianity, things usually went worse for people who followed Jesus, but they just couldn't help it. They felt the same feeling that the disciples felt when it was like, well, you guys going away from me. And I think it's Peter, right? It's Peter who says, Well, to whom else would we turn? You alone have the words of life. The truth is that Christians have usually paid a price to follow Jesus, especially in the early church. So this self-focused version of the gospel is a great one. But again, you win somebody with that, you've won them to something that's going to be a disappointment because Christians get cancer and die just like everybody else. In addition to that, you have got the version of the gospel that is self-medication, it's therapy-oriented. This is a self-actualization process where Jesus, we look at his example, we look at his reputed or purported rather teachings, we emulate some of that stuff in our lives, and as a result, our lives improve as we have a better sense of who we are and what we've gone through. We can process our past, plan, and make goals for our future, but that isn't the gospel either. The gospel, as best as I can tell, seems to be this: God is perfect and flawless in every way. Humanity is not. That decision was made once by the first people, and that decision has been re-upped by every single person individually who has lived since. So we have a problem. We cannot break the laws of time and space to undo previous missteps. But even if we did, we're just flawed. The scriptures teach, and whether you agree with this or not, it's up to you. But the scriptures teach and describe a humanity that is broken, that can't help itself. And there are elements of our maker on us, and we might be a part of redemptive things, but we we cannot help but be a part of the fallenness of the fallen world in which we live. There's no solution for this. The imperfect cannot make itself perfect, since perfect and imperfect is a zero and a one, it's an on or an off. So only something that is outside the system, in this case God, could step into the system to do something about that imperfection. Only the perfect, acting on the imperfect, can fix the imperfect. So Jesus comes along. He's the culmination of all of these promises, all of this redemptive work that God has done that points to him. We get to Jesus and we see that he lives a perfect life. That's what's described in the Bible at least, and that unjustly he goes to the cross. And then it is laid out very clearly, both before and after the cross. This was not a meaning assigned to it after the fact that what Jesus did on the cross was resolve human failure. He resolved guilt, that that guilt is, there's a few different theories of it, but effectively it's transferred off of the individual, and people are made right in the eyes of God. Thus, God's mercy is satisfied. There's the possibility for people being made right with God, even though we can't do that on our own. And God's justice is satisfied, and that he did not throw out his own standards of who he is and what he is, and his own standards of perfection. He just resolved it in the only way it could be resolved by effectively taking on that penalty himself or or through his son. That is a lot of oversimplification, but the Jesus kingdom-centric version is the gist. And most of what I just described there is at the individual level, but the bigger picture here is that it's a gospel of the kingdom. You have a broken, fallen, failed system in this world that God still sustains, but there is this greater, truer, realer, better, more moral, more sustainable, perfect system over which God is king. Jesus is king. This kingdom has a different set of values. This kingdom has a different set of currency. Different things matter in this kingdom. But right now, these two kingdoms are growing up alongside each other. And when someone decides to follow Jesus, they become a son, a child, an heir, a participant in this greater kingdom, and they gain a kind of dual citizenship that eventually becomes a singular citizenship following Jesus. And I think having some sense of what that message actually is as we move forward in this document is just absolutely vital so we can keep our antenna out for what Jesus is actually commissioning the people to go and say. Otherwise, I think our 21st century brains are going to default back to dumber, lesser stuff that, frankly, isn't worth knocking on a door over, that frankly isn't worth trying to work over somebody at work who we want to get to sign up for. But this message of the kingdom, it's worth being shrewd and innocent. It's worth being intentional for because it is the truest, realist thing ever. And the God who's in charge of it said that no matter how weird it feels, to be a part of the kingdom is to have an evangelistic outward impulse. We're nowhere close to done processing this. All right, let's just stretch it into tomorrow and keep after it. Quick thing on the way out the door my buddy Shane Heilman lives in the same neck of the woods that I do. He's this great musician. I love what he is doing. He's got this thing called the Psalms Project. And you can get it on Spotify or wherever. I'll get a link and put it down there below. So if you want more Bible in your life and you'd like it put to amazing music, he's doing all the psalms, like all the words. It's just straight up Bible, beautifully musicified. And I kind of wondered why nobody had really done that yet or done it with this level of excellence. So it's linked below. Again, it's called the Psalms Project, and I super like it. And I don't really have a call to action other than it's on Spotify. You probably have Spotify. Go listen to it. I think you'll dig it. Okay. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. We'll catch you soon.