Peoples Needs Trump Rules, Regulations, And Traditions

Title: Flipped

Text: Mark 3:1-6

Bottom Line: Our love for God is shown in our love of each other.

Intro

Good morning Real Life… My name is Curtis and I’m the connections director here. It’s great to be here with you all on this holiday weekend. Just a reminder this is our LAST Sunday meeting at this location. So if you show up here next week you will be very lonely…

I’m not sure if you can remember back to before the tornado. But we started this series called flipped. Where we were looking at the exceptions people had of Jesus and how he flipped them.

Well two weeks into the series we quiet literally got flipped when that tornado tore through our building… So I thought it would be cool to look back at the message I was supposed to give the Sunday after the tornado…

?Now I’m not saying this is a good message. I’m just saying the last time I was supposed to give this message we got a tornado… So i’m excited to see what happens this time!

I think this is a good topic to look back on, especially in light of all the current events of the past month or so.

If you were to read the Gospels you would see over and over again people thought the Messiah, Jesus, would be this way, but Jesus showed them over and over again that they had it wrong. This is still true today. We all have our own expectations of Jesus. We expect him to act a certain way. But he has this habit of flipping our expectations.

You back in Jesus’ day there was this group called the Pharisees. And they were the religious leaders of the day. And they had this habit of drawing lines and telling people who was in and who was out. If you didn’t look like them, act like them, and believe what they believed they would cast you aside.

And to be honest… I think the American church is not much different. We still like to draw lines and tell people who’s in and who’s out. But the problem is Jesus came and flipped their expectations. He came in and said you know what, I’m here for everyone. Not just the people that look, act, and believe what you do. But the people that are drastically different. The needy, the poor, the ones that you casted aside. Those people are the ones that I’m here for.

Jesus would get frustrated because his people, the people that were supposed to be following him. Didn’t get it. So he had to come in and flip their expectations.

We today have things that are keeping us from loving the people that God wants us to love.

Tension

So we are going to take this idea and see what keeps us from living it out. Here’s the reality that we live in, we all have things in our lives that are keeping us from living the life God has intended for us to live.

Some of those distractions are bad things, in other words sin. But a lot of us are distracted by good things. We’ve let something good in our lives, something God intended to be blessing and we make that the ultimate thing. We worship the gift rather than the giver.

When a good things becomes an ultimate thing, ultimately that good thing becomes destructive.

This happens all the time in our lives, in our relationships, our finances, our families, our jobs… All good things. But sometimes those can distract us from the most important thing.

Look at the Pharisees… They had taken God’s law, which was a good thing, and made it an ultimate thing. They used to ostracize people and beat them down. The law was good thing, but only God is an ultimate thing.

And we are going to be looking at an interaction Jesus had with the Pharisees and these guys were distracted by a good thing. And we are going to see how Jesus flipped their expectations…

Truth

Go ahead and turn over too Mark 3… As you do that let me explain a little of what is going on here… The Pharisees were one group of people that could just not seem to get along with Jesus. The Pharisees pursued righteousness through works. In other words they tried to do enough good deeds to outweigh their bad deeds. They followed the law, what the Bible says, better than anyone else could, which is a good thing. But when Jesus entered the picture he pointed out that in their pursuit of righteousness they had become distracting. They put their adherence to the rules over caring for people. They cared more about following the rules (which is good) than they cared about caring for and loving people (Which is better)