Distinguishing Truth | Luke 6:1-11
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All right, John David played his first tee ball game this year. There he is. Thank you, you can clap for him. There we go. It's coaches here. He plays for the Cubs. And it's T ball. So he's still batting 1000. Right now a two for two. And you can't get out if you don't make it to the basement in time. But he's batting 1000. In a few years, he'll be playing coaches pitch, I'm guessing, and they'll get into kids pitch. And that's when they start calling balls and strikes. And if you are a a masochist, or a sucker for punishment, then you should sign up to be an umpire. That way, whenever you make a call, that a coach or a parent thinks is not a ball, or is a strong as strike or whatever, then you can be cussed at and verbally abused, that's for you, you should be an umpire. And that's the interesting thing about baseball is it has a strike zone. And at every level of baseball, the strike zone is supposedly that the chest down to the middle of the chest down to the knees, and over the plate, you know, and so based on a player's height, based on the location of the ball, the umpires preference, even the strike zone can move. Now, baseball fans know this. And so all they really asked for in the game is for consistency. So if a pitch has been a ball, the whole game, they don't want it automatically change to strike in the eighth inning. If a certain pitch has been a strike, they don't want it to change to a ball. And if it does, if there's inconsistency, then you better watch out because here comes the criticism, here comes the boos from the crowd. And so who knew it could be so hard to distinguish and so dangerous to distinguish balls and strikes? Today we're looking at a passage of scripture where there was much disagreement over it. But it wasn't over balls and strikes. It was over truth. It was over sin and not sin. It was over what is right, and what is wrong. It is over what is appropriate, and what was inappropriate. And it was also over who even has the authority to decide such matters, to speak on such truth, as you're going to see the authority lies in Jesus. Luke, chapter six, starting in verse one is where we are today. On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus answered them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any of the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him. And he said to them, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath, He entered the synagogue, and it was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath so that they might find a reason to accuse him. But he knew their thoughts. And he said to the man with the withered hand, come and stand here, and he rose and stood there. And Jesus said to them, I asked you, Is it lawful on the Sabbath, to do good, or to do harm, to save life, or to destroy it? And after looking around at them all, he said to them, Stretch out your hand. And he did so. And his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and disgust with one other what they might do to Jesus. Father in heaven, we thank You for this passage of Scripture that you've given us. pray, Lord, that today you would show us what we need to learn from it. How it can teach us to know truth in our lives and distinct Wish, right from wrong and things that might seem confusing to us as we seek to follow you, when we come across things that we're not sure is sin or not, or maybe someone's told us is, and we don't see it in the Bible, and we have a hard time distinguishing that. And you would give us wisdom as we follow your spirit on this Lord. Lord, I pray that, that my words would reflect your heart, as you've given it in your word, that you would fill me with your Spirit and preaching today and that your spirit would be here in this place, that people hearing this today would receive it. We ask these things in Jesus name, amen. Today, I want to give us three things that we can distinguish. As we follow our Lord and Savior, three, three types of truth, we can distinguish number one, as we follow Jesus, we can distinguish sin. We can distinguish at what is sin, verse one, on a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. Now, most of us, I would say, maybe some of you have probably never walked through a Greenfield, specially one in the Middle East. So why are we given this detail about Jesus's disciples plucking heads of grain? And what's the problem with it? Well, for one, this was an act that was permissible and given in Jewish law it was set up to to help the poor, to help the needy of the community. Look at Deuteronomy 23. It says, if you go into your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your bag. In other words, you can pass through and eat, but you can't get it to go box. I mean, you can't you can't bring it home. You can't hoard it, you can eat it, it's there to the first service like that job much better. And you did. I don't know what's wrong with y'all today. But y'all gotta help me out here. Okay, anyway. But you can eat it there, but you couldn't take it home, you couldn't bring it home. Okay, verse 25, if you go into your neighbor standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand. But you shall not put a signal to your neighbor standing great again, you can't bring it home, you can eat there, she can't take it with you. So God had set up a system of welfare where if you owned a field, you were to leave the corners of that field, on harvested that way, a passing person through the community who is poor, needy, could eat something not harvested, but eat something. The disciples for this description now. They had left their jobs. They had left their careers to follow Jesus. They were hungry. And God had provided them for him through this law. So what's the verse to tell us? The some of the Pharisees said, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? Not all, but some of the Pharisees, the teachers in the law, the religious leaders, they took exception to this. And they didn't take exception to the disciples partaking in this display of welfare. They didn't say, you know, you need to get a job or something, are you? Why are you doing that? Why are you bumming off the grainfields? That's not what they had a problem with. They took exception that they did this on the Sabbath. Well, what was the Sabbath? Well, the Sabbath was simply the seventh day of the week Saturday. And they were called on Jews were called to honor the Sabbath. It was one of the 10 commandments. Exodus chapter 20. It says, To Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor work, do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter or your male servant, or your female servant or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. Even someone who comes to your house, they can't work either. They're visiting. For in six days, verse 11, the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea and all that's in them, and rested on the seventh thing. Therefore, the Lord blessed the seven, the Sabbath day made it holy. So what exactly is the problem here? Disciples are not working. They're walking through the grainfields. Walking, they're picking their plucking, and they're eating. Let's see if some of the Pharisees had defined the simple act of moving your arm and plucking and walking more than three quarters of a mile work. God didn't. But the religious establishment had created this law. And so we have a manmade tradition that's being broken a cultural expectation that the Pharisees were holding Jesus and his disciples. Jesus was not leading his disciples to sin, plucking the grain in the grain field was not greeting the heart of God. It wasn't causing each other to stumble. It wasn't keeping them in their relationship to follow the Lord. They had broken no law of God, they had broken the law of man. And there's two different things. They had not grieved the heart of God. But he had fallen victim to the Pharisees. Expectations. We all have these in our, in our lives, and in our areas now that we live in, when I was young, and was going to church as a little child, always in the church. You know, I've told this joke before, and it's not mine. But I had a drug problem. I was drugged to church Sundays and Wednesdays, right? Parents drugged me there. When I was young, I wouldn't have been caught dead. Running through the hallways of the church building, I would not have been called Dead doing that. Now, nowhere in Scripture, does it say, Thou shall not run in the hallways of the church building. You can talk about honoring God. You can talk about proper behavior. That's all well and good. But it's not sin. It's not sin. Now it's more of a cultural expectation. It's a tradition of, of you shouldn't do such a thing. And as parents, sometimes we have to make sure that we don't give extra laws for our children not to follow, and that we're harder on them on things that aren't sin than things that are sin. That's backwards. But that's the way the expectations is in culture sometimes. Now I only have one little child. Now the mother three were little, they're a little the same time. And I will tell them, you don't run through the halls of a church and I gave them two reasons why. I said, Hey, you might knock over senior adult. Sometimes they have bad hips and things like that. So I explained to him be I just didn't think is respectful. Walk in church, but I couldn't take them to a biblical passage. But since I was a father, if they disobey me, which is in the Bible, then they've sinned. Oh, dads are like Amen. Right, amen. But the running isn't a sin. There's no sin in running. And we think running is a sin. Because so many of us are out of shape, we avoid running right. But it's not a sin, sin to run. And this is the kind of thing Jesus is dealing with. Now he doesn't debate them, he could he doesn't go back and forth with them in this debate. He takes him to Scripture, and takes them to a passage they should be very familiar with verse three. Jesus said this, have you not read and they had read this, but he's come and call us like, Have you not read this right? What David Did, when he was hungry, King David, he and those who are with him, how we entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for anybody to precede, but also gave it to those with them. King David was on the run, he was hungry, he was hiding. He comes to the temple comes to this area. And he eats bread that's only for the priests to eat. But he was hungry. So ate it. And he gave it to the others. This you could argue is worse than what Jesus was doing. He's just going through a Greenfield. He's doing something in the temple. He shouldn't be doing King David. So he's saying if King David did something similar, if not worse, what is the problem? If King David could break a law of God that God had actually given out of necessity? What are we even talking about? Is what Jesus is saying, he ate the holy bread in the temple. But Jesus is saying that even in that instance of David, breaking God's law, the ceremonial law about who can be in the temple, who can eat who cannot, even though he broke it, Jesus is saying, this was not sin. That's hard for us to reconcile because we have we have God's Word. We have the law, but Jesus is now telling his religious teachers, that is not a problem. And he could say this, because He was God says we follow Jesus. And we get to know him better. We can better distinguish between actual sin and just breaking people's expectations? or man made rules. And we can do this because number two, as we follow Jesus we can distinguish lords. Lords. And verse five says, He said to them, the Son of Man me, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus says, I decide what's sin. Sometimes when I tell my little five year old, what he's doing wrong, sometimes he says that to me, I decide what's right or wrong. Like, no, you don't. But when Jesus says it, he does decide it. He says that he as God Himself is the only one is the one who can properly interpret Scripture. And his answer is not just and he could have gone back and forth and said, Well, you know, technically, we know we weren't working. And we did this. And he could go in this debate back and forth, kind of like, you know, we like to do sometimes with people, like children are really good debaters. I don't know where they get it from the very good debaters, you know, and it will go back and forth on things. And sometimes I'll be like, No, I'm not debating you. I'm just telling you, here's what you're doing, right? This is what Jesus is saying, he doesn't even go there. He says, I am God. I am the Lord of the Sabbath. That's his reasoning. It wasn't let me debate this point with you. His reasoning was I'm, I'm God. I'm the Lord. What does it mean? To be in Lord, to have a lord, the Christian author, CS Lewis has a great illustration. I'm gonna read it to you. He says, I think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins, that were an obvious nuisance, we are inclined to feel that we're now good enough. What he's saying is, Christ comes into our life. And we, we make some changes, and we feel good about ourselves. Lewis says, he's not done, he has done all we wanted him to do. And we wouldn't be obliged if he would leave us alone. So Lewis says, but the question is not what we intended ourselves to be. But what he intended us to be when he made us. He then says, imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild your house. At first, you understand what he's doing. He gets the drains, right. He stops the leak on the roof. And you're like, oh, yeah, we need that done. You know, that these jobs needed to be done. You're not surprised. But then he starts doing more, he starts knocking the house in a way that doesn't make sense. And you're thinking, What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house than the one you thought of. He's putting a new wing over here. He's putting an extra floor over there. He's putting up towers, he's making courtyards, and you thought you're going to be made into a decent little cottage. But Jesus is building a palace and your life, amen. You thought you had him in your life for one thing, and he's making it more and better than you could ever imagine. He intends to come and live in it himself. And he can do this to your life because He is your Lord. God has complete control over your life, for your good for your betterment. Sometimes, as Lewis says, we wish we can just say, Okay, God, that's good enough. I don't know about this next part. Jesus says, It's not up to you. I am the Lord of the Sabbath. I am the Lord and I'm coming to your house and I'm living in your house. You get to live with me. Amen. He's the Lord. The Pharisees are not your Lord. Pastors praise the Lord or not your Lord. Christian teachers and church leaders are not your Lord. Parents are not your Lord. Family members, especially the high maintenance ones, which nobody has right. They're not your Lord. Political figures, parties are not your Lord. Jesus Christ is your Lord. And he has built you a house and he is living in it. His house is your life. That is what it means to follow Christ. That is what it means to have them be your Lord and Savior. He is not a Lord of convenience that you just call on whenever you need him. He's the guest who's never leaving. And he took the master bedroom. He is your Lord and Savior. He defines what sin is in your life. He tells you where you need to change. He tells you what you're doing is right or appropriate. He does. As we follow Jesus, we begin to more properly distinguish the Lord from other false lords, other false gods in our lives. And number three, as we follow Jesus, we can distinguish good, good from bad. Verse six, On another Sabbath, He entered the synagogue and was teaching and a man was there, his right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. So they could find a reason to accuse. Now, Jesus had just verbalized told the Pharisees that he was Lord of the Sabbath. And now he's going to demonstrate it. He said it. And now he's gonna demonstrate look at verse eight. But he knew their thoughts. I don't know if it's because he, he's God, and he knew literally their thoughts because he did become man, he didn't give up some of his divinity, in terms of how it works out on the on the on the, on the, on the world, earth, right? Could have known. But if sometimes you just know what people were thinking, amen. This is why I have a beard, because my wife says, when I have no beard, she knows every thought of mine. without a beard, because please, I don't wanna know your thoughts. Please Grow your beard back, right? He knows their thoughts. He knows what they're thinking, as I stare at him. He knows you're watching him, see if he's going to heal. Verse eight, and he said to the man with the withered hand, come here, stand here. And he rose and stood there. Jesus said to everyone, them. I asked you, Is it lawful on the Sabbath? To do good? Am I allowed to do good on the Sabbath? Is that work, or harm? To save life? Is it lawful to save life on the Sabbath, or destroy it. And after looking around at the mall, and I imagine it was very tense moment, looks at everybody in the room. said to him stretch out your hand, and he stretched out his hand. And it was no longer with it. It was restored. He demonstrates that he was the Messiah. He was God in the flesh. And he knew that to do good in this instance, was to heal. To seek the Pharisees approval would be to not do good. To not do good, was evil. He didn't even come, look, the wizard man didn't come up to him. When he came up to him and said, Jesus, please heal me. Jesus said, Hold on. There's people watching us go do it out back. I don't want to get in trouble with the establishment. He didn't even approached Jesus. Jesus saw the man he saw the hand and he took it as an opportunity to do good, and to show the Pharisees that he's the Lord of the Sabbath. Look, James for 17. Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it. For him, it is sin. When Jesus saw the man with a withered hand, he had to heal him. Because he knew it was the right thing to do, and the good thing to do, and to not do it would be sin. And we know Jesus can't sin, amen. So he had a moral obligation at that point, to heal this man's hand, because he's not going to sin, and He sees it. And he healed him. And he knew because he's perfect and he's God that he had to heal in that moment one because it was the right thing to do the good thing to do and to to let the people know that he was the Lord. As we follow Jesus us, we might find ourselves with an opportunity to do something that's good. But it may make us look bad. When you have the courage to do good, even when it may not meet the expectations of your little subculture you run with or whoever's in your life. Maybe you have a lost friend. They're lost as the day is long. Don't know, Jesus, you're trying to witness to them. You hang out with them to try to get them to maybe come to church or tell them about Jesus and you're trying to be a good influence. Maybe you like him as a person, you just hang out with them. Right? Then maybe they have a bad reputation. Maybe the whole town knows the center they are. You hang out with them and people are concerned. What do you do? Do you say, Well, if I hang out with this person, I might get a bad reputation too. No, no, no, you get a bad reputation when you do bad things. Amen. As long as you're not joining them in it, is your longest shot sitting with them. And you're hanging out with them. So they would know Jesus, what you're doing is good. And to not do it would be sin. If you know that you're the only person that can reach this person that God has put this person in your life. Listen, when someone's lost, we don't expect them to act like Christians. Expect them act like lost people. They don't have the Holy Spirit in their life. They've not been born again. And you might be the only little Christ Christian that they have in their life that they see. So who is your Lord? It's an important reminder. Verse 11, check this out. After he did this, they The Pharisees were filled with fury in disgust with one another what they might do to Jesus. When we follow Jesus, we need to remember that when we become better able to discern what is good, from bad right from wrong and most of us in our scripture, as we know, you get these situations where you wonder sometimes the more we do this, when we know what's right and good than those who are not following Jesus. And these some of these Pharisees were not following Jesus, those whose expectations we're not living up too, may only get angrier. When we don't fit the box they want. The question is, Who is your Lord? As you follow Christ, you have a strike zone. That doesn't change, amen. It doesn't change. It's consistent. And you're going to have times where you might need to call the ball, or you might need to call the strike. And you might fear the crowd. I bet there's been some times where there's some umpires and some major league baseball situations, worlds or serious situations where they know that they could change that call when it's borderline, but they would hear about it escorted out by police booed. But they had to make the right call. And they did. There might be times as a Christian, where do you have to do that? What do you have to do what is right? Because if not do what is right when you know what's right. Bible tells us when you ever had a chance where you've had you've seen someone or been around someone you knew you could help them or do something and you just didn't do it. You come home you think, Gosh, I should have done this. I should have done that. It's because God gave you that opportunity. You didn't do it. God still loves you. Jesus still died on the cross for your sins. We need to pay attention to those times. And when you have to call a ball and you have to call a strike, you can do so. Because your Lord and Savior is the ultimate umpire. It's his game. It's his rules. And it's his call whether people like it or they don't like it. Is He your Lord? Who do you listen to as you follow Jesus? The crowd can be difficult. It can be hard. They can believe we all like to be validated. We all like to be liked on some level. Jesus didn't die, for you to be liked. He died for you to be made right with Him, to forgive your sins, to have the abundant life and the eternal life that only you can give. Heavenly Father, thank you so much what you've done for us in Christ Jesus, and we thank you for his death, and His burial, and His resurrection. We thank you that having you as our Lord and Savior. And you can lead us into that truth, that the more we know your word, the more we listen to your Holy Spirit guiding our lives, the more we can distinguish between right and wrong. The more we know the truth, and the more we can count on that. The Father, if there's one in here today, that's that's never placed their faith in you before that it's never turned from their sin. And said, Lord, I want you to save me, I want to be born again today. I need you that the day they would make that decision for those of us, Lord that are believers, as we leave here today, and we continue to follow you as we've been learning about in this series of to follow you as you would show us, and we would trust you when we get to make these choices, to distinguish between right and wrong between the balls and the strikes, tweens between the off sides and the on sides. Whatever metaphor we would have come up with that you would show us Lord would keep keep showing us as we continue to follow you. Father, we we love you. We ask these things in your name today. Amen.
