When they pick and choose what from God’s word they will apply and what they will put behind their back.  That’s true in Israel as Jesus faces trial.  It’s true in the church today.  Every leadership scandal in the church is not because God’s word fails, it’s because leaders fail to be godly by leading under God and by his word.  It’s when leaders decide right and wrong for themselves, when they pick and choose what from God’s word they live by and what they ignore. Pray for your church leaders that they never fall into that trap.  

What were Israel supposed to be?  What was God’s design for them, God’s purpose in redeeming them and calling them?  They were supposed to be God’s people, in God’s place, enjoying life under God’s rule.  As they did that they’d be a beacon to the nations, standing out from them like a brightly lit city on a hill.  They were to be a nation that under God’s law were marked by justice, generous care for the oppressed and marginalised, and love for God shown in love for humanity made in his image.  They were to be a just, generous, gracious, holy people in the image of the God who dwelt among them.
As Jesus (Matthew 26v57)is led mob handed to Caiaphas the High priest we see all the leaders of Israel gathered together.  Just think about who’s there.  The High Priest whose privileged position made him overseer of the work of the all the priests who served God, maintained the temple and performed sacrifices.  The High Priest alone could enter the holy of holies once a year and offer atonement sacrifices for himself and for the people, so they could be forgiven for their sin and be right with God.
The teachers of the law were exactly that.  They studied God’s law.  They maintained it and taught it to the people.  And the elders were older men who represented the people and exercised authority and leadership over them.
Why does Matthew list them as they gather?  Because you’d expect the leaders of God’s people to be godly.  To lead according to God’s law.  God is a God of justice and righteousness so the leaders of his people should pursue justice and righteousness.  Their authority comes not from themselves but from God’s word applied to the situations they see.
But (59)highlights the corruption of Israel.  What were they doing as they gathered?  “looking for false evidence against Jesus so they could be him to death.”  The verdict has been decided the only question is can they find evidence to support their conviction?
That verse throws a floodlight onto the hypocrisy of the leaders of God’s people, the depths to which they’ve sunk.
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Jesus knows temptation and testing.  Jesus fights to obey his Father’s will.  And so when we’re struggling to obey we can run to him for help in prayer because he knows what it is to fight to obey. Because Jesus knows and overcomes temptation and testing we can let go of our pretended heroism and run to him which wins for us. It is liberating. It is where rest is found.

One of the things that always strikes me as I read the passion narratives in any of the gospel is the extent to which Jesus knows what he’s facing that week.  He’s repeatedly told his disciples what is coming in more and more detail.
And as he leads them to that garden again, a place they and Judas are familiar with, Jesus enters into a cosmic spiritual battle.  This is a battle on an epic scale – this is Jesus’ Marathon, Waterloo, Stalingrad, and D-Day.  In the garden Jesus fights for the salvation of every believer throughout all of time and for the kingdom of God and the faithfulness of God to his promises.
In an echo of Eden the Son of God enters a garden where he’s tempted to turn his back on sonship and doubt and disobey his Father’s will.  The consequences of this battle will be just as cataclysmic as the first.  But it isn’t a battle fought with sword and clubs, it’s not a battle fought, with joysticks or drone, with wealth or influence. This is a battle fought on his knees in prayer wrestling to obey his Father.
Of all the ways we think of prayer I think this is the one we miss most.  Prayer is a vital part of waging the war to obey God, it is a vital weapon in our arsenal for fighting temptation. Sometimes prayer is war! .
And as Jesus goes to battle he doesn’t want to go alone.  He takes all 11 into the garden, and then Peter, James and John a little further and begins to be sorrowful and troubled.
There are lots of good things that have flowed out of the focus in the last 30 years on personal times of reading the bible and prayer.  But one of the negatives is that we’ve lost the importance of praying together.  If you read the Bible with an eye to it I think you’ll find people praying together more than individually, especially in the early church.
Here Jesus in his hour of greatest weakness, when he feels the burden of what he is about to do most keenly, doesn’t withdraw alone to a mountain top, he takes his disciples with him.  When we’re fighting to obey God, when we’re in the white-hot heat of battle with sin, when we are feeling weighed down with the burden God has laid on us, we need brothers and sisters around us.  When we’re struggling to pray that’s not the time to withdraw from others but be with and around others.  Do you see that need?  If Jesus has it we have it to, it’s not a sign of weakness but how we are live as God’s people together.
But this is a prayer like no other.  (38)Jesus tells his 3 friends that he’s overwhelmed with sorrow.  Have you ever got in trouble swimming in the sea?
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We’re so tied to that hero complex that we react badly when something or someone challenges it.  When we can’t do something or fail to achieve what we set out to, or even just don’t do something very well, we can’t handle our hero narrative being challenged so we excuse it – it was someone else’s fault, it was the impossible task, things conspired against, I wasn’t feeling great. The litany of excuses flow because we want to be the hero.

Who is the hero of your life story?  Be honest, it’s you isn’t it?  We tie so much of our identity, our self-esteem into being the hero, and being recognised and affirmed as such – being the best at work, doing what no one else can, making a difference, achieving success, having a good reputation.  All because we have a hero complex. Maybe your instant reaction is to refute that. Why do I think you have a hero complex? Because I have one and I think you just like me show it a number of different ways.
We see it in our reaction to being put in our place. Don’t you find yourself secretly running the scenario back through you head plotting all the snappy zinging come backs you could have made, and would do if the situation was re-run, that would show who you really are. Confirm you in your hero status. We see it in wanting affirmation and recognition for everything, even increasingly for things which should just be expected of us (seriously graduations from Primary school, copious praise for doing what you are paid to do – surely already enough recognition).
We’re so tied to that hero complex that we react badly when something or someone challenges it.  When we can’t do something or fail to achieve what we set out to, or even just don’t do something very well, we can’t handle our hero narrative being challenged so we excuse it –
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There has definitely been an acceleration in the trend towards individualised discipleship.  Some people simply feel like they don’t need others, they are flock-less sheep, and there is a danger that as churches and church leaders we’ve fed this as we have taught God’s word unawares through the lens of individualism, through individualistic application of corporate passages, through underplaying the role of the church and discipleship that is corporate not privatised. But that has profound consequences for how we live and how we relate to the bible. 

Over the last century or so a force has arisen that has been so significant that it now holds us all in its grip and we’re largely unaware of it.  It is so hardwired into our brains that it’s the natural way we think and view everything, it even impacts how we read the bible, teach and apply the Bible.  That force is radical individualism and its legacies are legion.  But I just want to focus on the way this is playing out in the way we approach lost sheep – those who drift from church having professed faith but who would still maintain they are Christians. That spiritually they are fine because they read their bible and pray without being part of a church.
In Matthew 18v12-14 Jesus tells the well-known story of a shepherd who has 100 sheep but realises there are only 99 in the flock; one is missing.  This is where illustrators and storytellers and pastors have not helped us with what Jesus is teaching.   How do you picture the lost sheep?  He’s tangled in thorn bushes, wandering unawares towards a cliff, or oblivious to the wolves with glowering hungry yellow eyes and slathering jaws gathering in the woods in the background isn’t he?  But none of that is in the story – the sheep is just lost.  And that’s the point Jesus is making; it’s being lost that is the greatest peril.   The greatest danger is our lostness. 
Unlike in Luke where the focus of a similar story in a different context is used evangelistically to show God’s joy in the lost found, here in Matthew it’s used in the context of the church Christ inaugurates.  It is separation from the flock and the safety of the shepherd’s care that is the danger.  For believers there is danger in being separate from the flock, there doesn’t need to be any additional dangers, bring isolated from the church is enough of a danger that it ought to be sounding alarms.
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God doesn’t exempt his people from his standards. An “us and them” mentality that’s quick to condemn the world and slow to examine our own hearts and see and confess and repent of our own sins invites God’s judgment.  God is a holy God, he judges all.  We need to examine ourselves and check we don’t fall into that. But secondly an “us and them” attitude misses the missional heart of God.  God’s longing is for the sinner to be saved; he’s slow to anger, rich in love, compassionate and gracious. 

Us and them.  That’s how we divide society.  Those who are like us and those who aren’t.  The good guys and the bad guys.  Those who are for us and those who are against us.  Those who think and live like us and those who don’t.  Us and them.  It’s true of sport, of the playground, of the staffroom, of the family, of the neighbourhood, of the country, of the world. The ‘us’ is always right and defines itself against the ‘them’ who is always wrong.  The ‘us’ is good or better, the ‘them’ is bad or lesser.
Have you got some of your ‘us and them’s’ in your head?  The ways you’ve divided society, family, community, and the world.
Amos speaks God’s word into an us and them culture.  ‘Us’ is Israel, they’re God’s people surrounded by nations who are not.  There’s Judah just to the south, the nation they split from, and there’s a different division there, though it’s still an us and them division.  But Israel ‘us’ leads them to be are proud of being God’s people; God is on their side, as opposed to the other nations.  Yet the irony is that Israel is just as riddled with injustice and idolatry; just as riven by ‘us and them’, haves and have nots, oppressor and oppressed as the nations around them.
And so God sends a ‘them’, an outsider, to Israel with his word.  Amos isn’t a priest or a prophet, (1)he’s a shepherd farmer.  He isn’t even from Israel; he’s from Tekoa in Judah their brotherly rival.  Not only is the messenger a shock but so is the message,
“The LORD roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem”
and what’s the result of that?
“the pastures of the shepherds dry up, and the top of Carmel withers.”
God’s not tame!  God’s not indifferent!  God’s not weak and anaemic and unable to act!  God sees and like a lion coming out to hunt he roars judgment against his people.
One of the dangers for the church, and for us as disciples, is ‘us and them’ thinking.  It’s looking at the world and condemning it’s sin and missing our own.  We can be like the man Jesus talks of who sees the speck in his friend’s eye and misses the plank in his own.  We look at the world and see all it’s godlessness and idolatry and sin and then look at ourselves and think we’re not too bad.  And we settle for being a nicer shade of good rather than being what God calls us to be, which is his holy people, totally set apart for him with a completely renewed way of thinking and acting.
It’s so easy to slip into that ‘us and them’ way of thinking.  We can even do it within church as we’re listening to a sermon.
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Church planting is all about dying to self. It means leaving something comfortable and which we love [don’t plant a church, or join a plant, because you are unhappy with where you are] to start something new. It means labouring with a smaller team, a smaller budget, a smaller leadership, and having to establish all the things that already existed in the established church. Planting is all about dying to self not just for the planted church but for the planting church, it ought to experience the same dying to self. And yet so many churches who are planning to plant seem to want to do so without dying to self. 

I’ve tried to bite my fingertips to stop me from writing this but I can do it no longer. I’ve tried to restrain the overwhelming tide, tried to stem the pent up frustration, sought to pray it all through with a view to not posting this, but it just has to be said. We, the UK church, have a problem. I don’t mean the church nationally (it does but that’s beyond my purview) but the evangelical church in the UK.
Our strategies are in danger of killing the gospel. Our kingdom building is in danger of obscuring his kingdom because we haven’t built on gospel rich, early church, dynamics. We don’t give away we hoard. We don’t give to where we see need, we give to where we think need is based on our blinkered models and strategy. And the lost in the UK are suffering for it. What a tragedy it will be if it is not Jesus kingdom we build but our own, limited not by his riches and desire to bless his praying dependent people who ask for things beyond our imagination, but by our stunted sight based strategy.
Jesus kingdom has a shape to it, a shape he exemplifies. It’s a kingdom that’s exemplified in his life. It’s marked by a overwhelming concern for the glory of the Father at cost to self because of a conviction that his will is best and his glory matters more than anything else for the whole cosmos. It is marked therefore by a dying to self, a descent into death, that others might be raised to life in him as they are snatched from the very jaws of hell and reconciled to God as his Spirit-filled sons and daughters. It’s a kingdom exemplified by the risen Jesus sending out his disciples to do what he did in dying to self in order to go to the world dependent on the Father and filled with the Spirit. It’s further exemplified by his using the persecution of a rapidly growing church in Jerusalem so that they die to themselves and are flung out into areas of Judea and Samaria; who are needy and thirsty for the life giving water of Jesus Christ in the gospel.
As I look at the church in the UK I don’t see masses of dying to self, as I look at myself I see a reluctance to do so too, or at least a desire to set a limit on how far Christ can ask me to go down into his death with him. So as I write this I’m wrestling with it too. Let me give you some examples of where I see this problem at play.
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The gospel will mean we’re compelled to love and reach out to the lost, both the good and the bad, no matter where people put themselves on that ladder we reach out to them.  We seek the lost as Jesus did.  We live our life out in front of them. There are times when we may have fewer non-believing friends as maybe some come to faith, as maybe others move away, as things change.  But we’ll always be looking to build friendships, to live out the gospel, to share Jesus.

Luke again shows us Jesus passion for the lost and his expansive grasp and grip on the grace of God and the reach of the gospel.  It’s worth noticing where Jesus is, in ch5 he’s eating with tax collectors and sinners, but now he’s eating with the religious, the good people.  Why?  Because everybody needs salvation and the gospel can reach anyone as Jesus makes clear to Simon.
Jesus has a reputation for welcoming sinners, this woman(37), notorious though she is, knows she can go to Jesus for forgiveness.  It would be great wouldn’t it if that could be said of our churches?
We had a lady come to church, until her family were evicted and relocated.  She had a bit of a reputation, when her neighbours heard she and her family came, and were accepted, welcomed and loved, their response was, ‘Well if she can come, so can we.’  That ought to be the norm.  Church is where no perfect people are allowed, and no pretence at perfection is allowed either.
Jesus doesn’t turn this lady away.  He knows the depth of her sin in a way Simon doesn’t, he also knew what it would cost him to forgive her in a way Simon didn’t and yet he knows the gospel is a call for all those who repent to come and find forgiveness.
(41-47)We see Jesus understanding of the gospel as he tells this story to Simon.  What do you notice about the two men?  They both owed money and neither could repay it – they are the facts.  Both are debtors both incapable of paying the debt they owe.  These aren’t insignificant sums of money a Denarii was about a days wage – so one man owes two months wages and another about a year and three quarters.
The shock in the story is in how the money lender reacts. You didn’t just write off debts, yet these two men are forgiven their un-payable debts.  The story is a shock story, it’s unbelievable!  But what’s Jesus point?
We live in a society that loves to compare don’t we.  We compare exam results, we compare achievements, what you’ve read, who you know, there’s even a website where you can compare salaries with other people.  But we also do it with morality.
It’s a bit like a ladder we put people like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King near the top, then at the bottom are people like terrorists, murderers…
Where would you put yourself?  When we think about that, we go through a process like this; I’m better than so and so, but not as good as them.
That’s exactly how Simon is operating here.  He’d be up here and she’d be down there.  But do you see what the biggest shock is? Jesus says wherever you are the debt is un-payable – “neither could pay him back.”  Simon’s little sin, as he sees it, leaves him just as lost as the woman’s big sin, just as incapable of rebalancing the scales.
Jesus words were shocking then and they still shock now, it tells us we owe a debt we can’t repay, that being right with God isn’t comparative with one another.  You and I were never nice.  We didn’t just need a bit of tidying up round the edges, a quick make over.
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Making preaching and teaching a priority doesn’t mean devoting hours and hours to the study, it will mean some of that, but it also means meeting with the people, knowing them, knowing the pressures that they face, the temptations and pressures they feel and their spiritual temperature, so that preaching can be done well and relevantly and applicably to those God has called me to preach to, It’s not being an academic, it’s not being hidden behind a towering pile of commentaries. It is working hard to exegete both the word of God and the people of God.

I try to use the summer time to stop and take stock of where I am and where we are. As I do it’s always helpful to return to first things. Specifically what need to be the first things in my diary on a week to week basis, what are the priorities that we determine the reality of day to day ministry.
There is always lots to do and the good is often the enemy of the best. And so it’s been helpful to sit and try to weigh up this week does my diary reflect what ought to be my priorities in ministry. Acts 6 gives us a bit of a template when we look at the Apostles priorities when faced with the danger of distraction with good ministry but not the most necessary ministry.
There twin priorities were prayer and the teaching of the word. And they acted wisely in engaging others to take on the serving of tables – a good and necessary outworking of the gospel.
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The church needs a growing number guardians of the gospel who, strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, recognise false teaching and teach the truth empowered by grace to one another.  Is that you?  Not a heresy hunter, but a gospel of grace teacher.  Taught so that you can teach others in whatever context that is.

Paul’s second call that flows from the first, is to multiply guardians of the gospel. Those who know grace and strengthened by grace contend for and teach the gospel.
It’s not good to be alone.  That’s a universal truth of the human condition, it’s the way God has made us.  It’s true for Adam in the garden and it’s true for us today.  But it’s also true for us in serving Jesus in the church. It’s true for ministers and for ministry leaders. A sense of loneliness in ministry, of bearing the burden and responsibility alone is incredibly isolating and weighty.
Whose job is it to guard the gospel?  Be honest, what’s your first answer?  We live in an age of professionalism, where we pay people to do jobs, take responsibilities, so we don’t have to.  And so in many churches the answer, not in words but in reality, would be it’s the pastor’s job to guard the gospel.  Or maybe the elders job.  And there is some truth in that.  They do have a particular responsibility to do that.  But it’s not solely their responsibility.
In 2 Timothy 2v8 Paul tells Timothy that he must train up others who will teach others.  Timothy needs to train up guardians of the gospel there in Ephesus, how?
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