Jesus Changes His Accent – Part 1 Series

Jesus Changes His Accent – Part 1

Four Calls Of Christ – Part 1

Matthew 11:16-30

There are a lot of areas of Bible knowledge where I am very settled in my views – perhaps too much so. It’s so easy to get comfortable with what I think I know about something or someone in the Bible. Once in a while, God brings me to the place where he shakes me up; He makes me feel totally unsettled about something and gets me to rethink everything I assume I know about a subject.

Sometimes I run across something in the Scriptures that rocks me back a bit. This week, that happened to me again.

Have you ever had that happen? Do you ever read something in the Bible, maybe something you have read many times before, that makes you come to a complete stop and say, “Whoa! Wait a minute! This sounds a lot different than it should. I really need to think about this for a minute!”

Does that happen to you? Do you have those times when it’s almost a smack on the head to get your brain recalibrated? This section of Scripture did that to me this week. Feel like sharing one of those times with me today?

There were two main things I saw in our text for this week as I was studying and preparing for our time together today.

The first one is that there are Four Calls Of Christ in this passage. Not so different; maybe just opened my eyes to something more that I’d missed before.

The second is that Jesus seems to go through a change here, a change in tone, a change in attitude; one that rocked my world and made me really rethink the picture I had of Jesus in my head.

First, let me summarize the four “calls”. We’ll talk about them as we go through the passage, but here they are for now. They are: A call to remember; a call to realize; a call to repent; and a call to rest.

The second thing I want to look at is what I have been thinking of as Jesus changing His “accent”.

Have you ever known anyone who went away to another area of the country and, when they came back or the next time you spoke to them, they didn’t sound like themselves anymore but like one of the people from where they had gone?

I have two cousins who moved around a lot, just like my family did when my sisters and I were young. They were gone for a couple of years when I was about 5 or 6, or so. They were pretty close to me in age – within a couple of years.

I was probably 8 or 9 when they came back from North Carolina and stayed with us for a couple of months, and I couldn’t understand most of what they said! They both had a twang and an accent, and words and phrases, “the like a’witch I-ent aherd afore”.

One Sunday, we were all getting ready to go to “chyuch”. My younger male cousin was looking for his older sister. He turned to his mother and asked, “Sissy gettin’ huh dudz own?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and it took a little while to get anyone to explain it to me in a way I could understand.

We laugh about it now, but it was confusing and not a little bit intimidating for me. There was a lot of confusion for quite a while.

Well, this week while I was reading and rereading this text, I got the sense of a new accent to Jesus’ voice – and this one isn’t a bit funny! The process has been a little confusing and somewhat intimidating for me. I’ve seen glimpses of this before – even talked about it before. But, this week it really crashed into my way of thinking. This all started to get kicked loose for me when I prepared last week’s message about, “Listen up!” without me even realizing it.

If you remember back that far, maybe you got a bit of an unsettled feeling about the strong sense of force and warning that was in Jesus’ tone in that message. This week, it gets even stronger.

Matthew 11:16-30, is a call to remember His life and His deeds and His words, a call to remember the mercy of God, the prophets of God, the heart of God.

It is a call to realize who He really is and what that really means to us and to the world and that it is our tendency to resist and distort the truth to suit ourselves.

It is a call to repent that is stronger than any other warning from Jesus recorded so far.