Matthew 2024

So Matthew chapter 9 verse 9.

Jesus went on from there. He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. Or Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house. Many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples.

When the pharisees saw this, they asked disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners on hearing this? Jesus said, it is not the healthy who need the doctor. But the sick. But go and learn what this what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Then John's disciples came and asked him. How is it that we and the pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? She just answered. How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?

The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, then they will fast. No 1 so is a patch of unshrunked cloth to an old garment. For the patch, we'll pull away from the garment making the tail worse. Either demand poured new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst.

The wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No. They pour new wine into new wineskins. And both are preserved. Great.

Thank you, Steve. Am I on? My muted? Am I on? Good.

I can never tell. I can never see this thing. It's difficult. Good evening. My name's, Chris Tilly.

There we go. Now I'm on My name's Chris Tilly. I'm 1 of the elders here. Let me pray, and then we'll we'll get into this passage. Father help us, help us as we come to this.

Help us to, to take your word, help us to concentrate, help us to, listen and, be honest and open with ourselves as to as to what you're preaching into our hearts, help us to examine ourselves, and and fall in line to be challenged, to be changed, where where that's necessary. Speaking to our attitudes, speaking to our behaviors, speaking to our lives, we pray, amen. Tradition and expectation are slightly funny things, aren't they? It's funny what people expect, when they hear that you're a Christian, for example. It amazes me how little frame of reference people often seem to have, or how the frame of reference that they do have is so, so wide of the mark.

It's it's sometimes a little odd. I've I've been with the company that I work with now for about 7 years or so. And, just recently, there's been this, this spate of, the amount of conversations I'm able to have about things like faith, and and Christianity. And and I'm able to spend a lot more time around people that that are kind of at the top of their professions or at the end of their careers, just just part of my role. And, and I don't know whether it's just that after 7 years, I care less about my job or what people think about me.

Or more likely it's got nothing to do with me and everything to do with god, but the conversations just seem to be able to be a bit more frank, nowadays. So earlier this week, for example, I was, I was out. I was at an awards night, It's that time of year. There's all these sorts of events going on. So you sort of see the same people over and over again on the circuit and the conversations sort of go on.

And a group of us met at a pub beforehand. So typically central London Pub rammed shoulder to shoulder. People are spilling beer on you, you're spilling beer on them, and and you can barely hear yourself think. So just picture that scene. And everyone was talking, we're standing around talking.

And so 1 of the people I was with said, oh, yeah, Chris. How's church going? Now we've had this conversation a few times. We've been sort of doing that dance for a little while. And while we were talking about it, every other people started to listen in.

And the and the question started coming, and it turned into this really interesting situation. And people were saying things, well, well, what's it like? I didn't expect you would go to church. What's it like? And, do you go to mass?

No. I'm not a Catholic. Well, so what how how many nuns and priests are there? No. I'm not I'm not a Catholic.

Well, I love going to midnight mass. That's really just a great thing to do on Christmas evenings. I'm not a Catholic. Okay. But then they stuck around, well, I love church.

You know, it's for me, it was so quiet and reflective. And I often just like, I pop into church buildings every now and again just to sit there. You know, I think they've got like some weird movie scene in their head, you know, where they, like, sit in this church and the priest sort of cuffles over to them or totally ignores them. And they just take in the atmosphere. And then there's other things like, well, what are you doing here?

Like, why are you drinking alcohol? You're not supposed to be doing this sort of stuff and so on and so forth. I guess what I'm driving at is that there are a lot of preconceived ideas when it comes to church, and there are a lot of traditions that actually do run quite deep, when, people think, about what being a Christian is, and they think it's all to do with quiet reflection, taking mass. I gave up on the Catholic thing after a while. That's fine.

If that's what you want to think, quite hard to explain that. It's all about atmospheric buildings and, you know, lighting candles and abstaining from this world and not living like a monk. That's what people seem to think. So when I told them, no, actually, my church more like this pub, they were like, really? Well, hey, sign me up.

I'm up for that. And when you start to then dig down a layer to the next level of conversation, it's interesting what people then start to say about why they don't go to church or why they don't believe or you know, you know, where they're at. And if I'm going to boil it down to to really, 1 thing, it's about being and being seen to be a good person. That's really what you kind of get back from them. That's where they're going with it.

So they say things like, you know, like I just try to be pretty decent towards people. I I try and treat everyone fairly and respectfully. You know, I work really, really hard. You know, and that's a good thing because it means that I earn lots of money. I provide for my family.

I can get back to society. I don't sponge. You know, I'm, I don't engage in any kind of, like, criminal behavior or anything like that. I'm just sort of I try and be a generally good, upstanding citizen. I work really hard to make sure that that's what I do with my life.

And I give back, you know, I do things like, a local counselor, and some of them are like magistrates and, you know, stuff like that. So they, you know, they give their time back into society. Good, upstanding citizens. Essentially, I'm better than most, and most of what I do is good. And it's positive, and it's healthy for me, for my family, for my neighbors, society in general.

And interestingly, a lot of them say, if it turns out there is a god, if it turns out there is a god, then I'm hedging my bets that he's probably going to accept me with open arms. And really what that means is I would rather do this my way. I don't want to do it anybody else's way. I want to do it my way. If you really start to push me with talk of things like Jesus, because that's when the conversation always takes a funny turn.

You drop that name and the conversation's suddenly a very different conversation. I'm gonna start pushing back on you a little bit. I'm better than most and most of all I do is good. That seemed to be the prevailing attitude. So What's the relevance of me telling you about all of that?

It's relevant because that way of thinking shows that people now really are no different to the people in this passage in in many ways. People have the sort of a notion of religion of spiritual things, but then they they take that and they apply it in ways that just completely block god out, and certainly Jesus. And it becomes about how they make themselves good. Whether god exists or not, and rather than letting god in and allowing him to make them good for himself. It's very different.

It becomes a moral code of sorts for upstanding living. And and that's just no difference to the Farah season Jesus' time. People haven't changed. People haven't changed. So that leads us to our first point.

And if we zoom out of a London pub in 20 24 for a moment and transport ourselves back 2000 years, We find a very different scene with a different conversation, different characters, but I want to argue that really in many, many ways, exactly the same kind of thinking is is going on here. So the first point is this fervent fasteners. I've tried to keep some sort of rhyming going. It gets worse as it goes. I've ran out of ideas, but just go with it.

Fervent fasteners. Verse 14. How is it that we and the pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast? So what we walk into in this in this particular encounter in this part of Matthew is a conversation between John the Baptist's disciples and Jesus. And it appears on the face of it that they've been put up to this by the varices.

But their motives seem to be a little bit unclear. They may just have been truly confused and seeking clarity. They may be trying to trick Jesus out. They may be annoyed. They might have an extra gram.

We're not quite sure, but the fact that they mention we and the pharisees does imply there's some kind of collusion between them going on here. And it's it's worth making this point upfront. This should make anyone in this room sit up and pay attention if they call themselves a Christian. It should. The reason it should?

Because John the Baptist's entire ministry was about preparing the way for Jesus. It's not that dissimilar to our ministry now, is it? And as soon as Jesus enters the scene, John hands over the reins, says, I must diminish Here you go, Jesus, off to you. And so if John's disciples are confused and potentially even have their heads turned by outside forces, then there's every reason to think and expect that the same can and will happen to us. So pay attention.

Now the crux of their beef with Jesus seems, and the, with Jesus is that the pharisees and us are doing a lot. Faracies and us are doing a lot. And your disciples are doing nothing. So you see they're comparing, they're comparing themselves already. Why Jesus?

Why are we doing a lot and your disciples are doing nothing with regards to this specific issue of fasting? Why is that? What is so special about you? That they don't have to do what we do? Well, to understand what's what's going on here, you need a bit of context.

You need to understand a little bit about what they were actually doing. So the pharisees were well known for fasting twice a week. Twice a week. You know, that's like half a week, not eating. And they were well known for doing this because they made, a point of allowing themselves to look rundown, disheveled, hungry, gaunt, whilst they were going about their fasting, something that Jesus on, you know, says specifically not to do.

He says, you know, when you fast, you know, put on your makeup, basically, make you, you know, make yourself a good put oil on oil on your head, have a wash, you know, just don't don't let people know. They weren't doing that. Quite what John's disciples were doing, with regards to fasting is is a bit more unclear. We don't really know what, you know, how much or how little they were doing. But what we do know about John is that he lived a pretty extreme lifestyle to say the least.

He was pretty frugal. He didn't have a home. He ate very little and what he did eat was weird. And the Clothesy War were weird. So John was quite an extreme character in in the bible.

So it's it's probably likely that his disciples that they're mimicking him or or maybe they're even going to even further extremes. To try and sort of be on a level with John or surpass him. Now the thing about fasting in and of itself is that it's only commanded by god once a year in the Bible on the day of atonement. Now I was thinking about reading that, but that's a heavy passage. And you can go and read all about that in leviticus chapter 16.

And it's well worth doing because you can't talk about fasting without really talking about the day of atonement as it's as 1 of its main reference points. So I'm going to refer to it, but I encourage you to read it another time. Or if you can read it and listen to me and do 2 things at once, I can't do that. But if you think you can, then by all means go for it. So in their minds, these guys doing fasting twice a week What they're doing, it's like elite level discipleship, isn't it?

It's like elite level because they're fasting over 100 times more than they need to. Like, I'm a hundred times above the requirement for this for this thing. And the problem with that is that it's not in and of itself that much of an issue, really, but the problem with it is it appears to have bred a kind of disdain and judgmental attitude to those who are unwilling or unable to do the same as them. It's bred this comparison syndrome. And the point is this.

The reason why we read out last week's passage is because the point is kind of this. Jesus has just said go and learn what this means. I desire mercy not sacrifice. And what else is fasting other than a form of sacrifice? It is a sacrificial demonstration of your devotion to god in many ways, at least that's kind of what it's supposed to be.

And yet the pharisees were using it as a way of drawing people's attention to themselves rather than drawing their own attention to god. That's what fasting is supposed to be about. So not only are they stuck in this kind of like old way of doing things in this sacrificial system, they're not even really doing it right. They've over complicated, misapplied, and misused it. If you look at what Hebrews 10 says about the sacrificial system, it's just it's totally defunct anyway.

You know, it's not, it's not about sacrificing animals. The blood of a bull, the blood of a goat, the blood of any animal is not enough. It never worked. It never paid for sin. It was supposed to draw you towards the 1 who does.

But they've just taken the old testament, the law, twisted it into something else. So 1 day a year somehow becomes twice a week, and that becomes about them, and it becomes about comparison. And they lose the point. They just completely lose the point. It's supposed to show them their need for god, particularly the day of atonement, which is where fasting takes you like just so quickly because that is all about the ultimate sacrifice that pays for the people's sins, and they've turned it into something that shows god's need for them.

Weird, isn't it? How can god need them? But that's what they've turned it into. They must think on some level that god looks at them and goes, yeah, basically, good bunch of blokes. Actually, you know what?

I think I need them in my kingdom. I think I need them in my kingdom. They're so good. They're hedging their bets just like my friends in the pub. They're hedging their bets that god, if he exists, we'll just welcome them with open arms 1 day.

And the irony of it all is that the person they're fasting is supposed to point them towards is the person that they are asking this question of, right in front of them. So preoccupied are they with doing what they think is good that they obscure Jesus completely? Again, like my friends in the pub, working so hard to be a good, upstanding person, and citizen, don't want anything to do with Jesus. Why do I need him? Now we've got to be careful here, don't we?

We've got to be careful here. We have got to be careful here because we might not be doing this exactly, like as they are doing in the passage around fasting, but those of us who do a lot in and around church, who serve on multiple ministries. Isn't it easy for us to start thinking of ourselves in similar terms? Is it not? If you're gonna be honest with yourself, that we are somehow better Christians or on some elite level, And we can even find ourselves looking down on brothers and sisters, can't we?

Like, well, I'm doing x y and zed. What are they doing? Why are they not, you know, picking up the chairs? I'm up here preaching on welcome and doing this and that and they're not even putting chairs out. Like, come on, what's going on?

You know? Do we not feel like that? Do we not get grumpy like this? Do we not compare ourselves? Do we not start thinking that what we are doing is somehow good?

We do. Right? We do. Whether we like it or not, we end up we end up just falling back into this this way of thinking, whether we're church members, whether we're elders, staff. It doesn't matter.

Gotta check ourselves on this sort of thing constantly, because it's got nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with us, that way you're thinking. I'm better than most, and most of what I do who's good. Right. Okay. So what's Jesus' response to this?

Point number 2, a woeful wedding, fervent fasteners, a woeful wedding. They they they're not good by the end. They're not even good at the start. First 15, Jesus answered How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, then they will fast.

What are you mourning? What are you doing? I'm here. What are you going on about? Jesus is saying, it's mad.

It's absolutely mad. Now talk about mourning because fasting and mourning are closely linked in the bible. Like 1 of the 1 of the reasons they fasted on the day of atonement was because they mourned. They were mourning that a sacrifice had to be made for their sins. Something had to die to pay for their wrongdoing.

That's worth mourning. And so on the day of atonement, they deny themselves. That's that's a phrase, another way of saying fasting in the Bible. They denied themselves on that day. They mourned their sin.

Right. Okay. But All of that, of course, is just a picture of the Messiah who would come 1 day and rescue his people by dying for them. A perfect sacrifice to pay for the sins of his people. But for now, In this passage right here here, Jesus is literally with them in full flesh.

They can reach out and they can touch him. They can shake his hand. They can give him a hug. They can punch him if they want to. He's there.

Like someone punched our brother pim the other day. He's there. Like, it's physical. It's real. Like you can do it.

He's he's right in front of you. It's great. Why are you mourning? Why are you fasting? What are you talking about?

They're carrying on like he's already dead or hasn't even arrived. So to illustrate it, Jesus puts himself He he puts himself in the character of a bridegroom at a wedding. He's the bridegroom, and then he says his disciples, who they're having to go at for not fasting are in the place of the Groomsman, the bridegroom's guests. And he makes a very good point. He says, can you imagine a bunch of guests at a wedding refusing to eat any food?

Refusing to celebrate going around like someone had just died, they basically turned a wedding into a funeral is is what he's saying. And not only that. They're also working really, really, really hard at this. So they've all brought their laptops with them. They got them out in the middle of the wedding.

They're tapping away answering emails. Like the wedding isn't even happening at all. It's completely ridiculous. And not only that. It's highly offensive to the groom.

Imagine if that was your wedding and people were going, should we do this at Brad's wedding next year? We'll we'll just, you know, we're not gonna eat any of your food mates, so don't bother ordering it. Don't worry about the songs because we ain't gonna sing them. We may not even bother turning up, and I'm just gonna loudly talk on my phone at the back and answer of answering work calls and emails. How do you feel about that?

Angry yet. I can carry on going. I'm sure I can make you angry. It's a time for feasting. Not fasting, joy, not sadness, living, not mourning.

Come on. But the day is coming. A day is coming, says Jesus, when I will be taken from my people, and then then they will fast. There is a day in my few day in the future where my people will fast. So Right.

When is that day? Like, we've got to tackle this question. When is that day? There's essentially 2 ways of taking this. Argument number 1, you could say that Jesus died on the cross and his disciples watching him die, mourned and fasted.

And then 3 days later, Jesus came back to life and rose again, and now there's no longer any need to fast. He was taken, but then he was given back to them. Now they don't need to fast anymore. Problem with that is he then ascended into heaven. So in a sense, he was taken from them again in the physical sense.

Now it's been argued that because we have his holy spirit, and Jesus says to us, I am with you always until the end of the age, that, well, he's still with us, which is true in a sense, isn't it? It's true in a sense, like the Holy Spirit dwells in us. The spirit of Jesus Christ dwells in his people. The church is his physical manifestation on this earth. So there's a sense in which is in which that's true.

And it's a tempting route to take because it lets us off the hook on all sorts of things. You know, it means we don't have to even think about fasting, really. But whilst it's tempting, I don't think it actually fits too well with either church history or with the rest of scripture, actually. The apostles themselves certainly didn't hold this view. Paul fasted acts 13, and that's after Jesus ascends.

There are various accounts in very early church history of people fasting. So if the very early church, if the apostles didn't take it this way, then we should be very wary of saying anything that contradicts that right. Scripture points us to a day when Jesus returns. Like the whole of scripture is is singularly focused on this day of Christ's return, right? This day, this future is pictured as a wedding.

Over and over again in scripture, it's this wedding day picture of god and his people with Christ as the bridegroom, and and and the church, his followers, as as the bride. And in Matthew, in the book that we're in tonight, the only other time a bridegroom illustration is used is when is when the virgins are there tending to the lamps, trimming the wicks, waiting, waiting for who, waiting for the bridegroom to come. They're being vigilant, and they deny themselves all sorts of distracting pleasures along the way to ensure that they're ready to go at the drop of a hat when the bridegroom comes. We're waiting. We're waiting.

You see, this is a type of fasting, a type of sacrifice that you see in in in in those passages that is Jesus centered. It's different. It's Jesus centered with him as the focus, the hope, and the goal. Yeah. Very different way of doing it.

A new way, if you like. Now please don't think that by saying all of that, I'm demeaning the role of the Holy Spirit in any way, shape or form. Because Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to us. So we are indwelt by him. Through him, we understand scripture.

Through him, we have the gift of faith it's sealed, our our our position as sons and daughters is sealed in the Holy Spirit. And and through him we know the mind of Christ, we're part of the body of Christ. We're part of his church. But in 2 Corinthians 5 8, Paul says these words, we prefer to be apart from the body but at home in the lord. So yes, we have the Holy Spirit.

Yes, we are part of Christ's body on earth. But I'll tell you what, I would rather not be here with any of you if it meant I could be with him because he is not here. He is in heaven. And he is coming back. So whether Christ returns or I fall asleep in the lord, I love many of you dearly, many of you dearly, but frankly, I'd rather not be with you.

Thanks, Dan. I think I sort of already knew that. We're not at home yet. We're not at home yet, so don't make a home here. We are not with Jesus because he is home.

Now I could just end the sermon there, and that could be the end of it, but there are 2 great illustrations that you just can't not speak about that Jesus that Jesus gives to to rub the point in. So here's the next point. A troubled tailor. I couldn't think of anything else. That's that's what we've gone with.

A troubled tailor. Jesus says this in verse 16. No 1 sows a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garments. For the patch will pull away from the garment making the tear worse. So the thing about old garments is when you put them in the wash a few times, they shrink Right?

Or rather new garments do this. They shrink once you put them in the wash. I'm sure at some point, you've pulled out a beloved jumper from the wash and you put it on. I need to find the sleeves come up to your elbows and your bellies hanging out. And you're like, oh, I should put it on too warm in the wash.

I told her not to do that. It happens, doesn't it? It happens. Yeah. Yeah.

It's me judging. Yeah. Exactly. Now you see it coming out. Well, back then, when they repaired clothes in Jesus' time, you would only use patches from pieces of cloth that had been shrunk beforehand through the process of washing.

Right? Otherwise, when you patch up an old garment with a tear that's already shrunk down with a new piece of cloth that hasn't shrunk down yet, guess what happens when you put that in the wash. The patch shrinks and pulls the threads away and the tear gets worse and you've completely ruined the garment making it worse than it was before. What Jesus is saying here is we need a whole new garment. Why are you walking around in that tattered old rag?

What's what's with that old rag? I know it's comfortable. I know you know it. I know you like it, but it's not fit for purpose. And I can't just patch it up because what I'm gonna give you is new.

I can't just put a new patch on your filthy old rag. You need a whole new garment. In fact, to tell you what, take mine. You take mine. It doesn't even need patches, and I'll take yours.

How about we just do a switch? You need to throw it off and put new garments, says Jesus. And the next illustration is, gosh, this was I didn't have anything. I was empty by this point, a wobbly wine maker. Kind of works.

So similarly, Jesus says neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No. They pour new wine into new wineskins and both are preserved. Now this one's, this one's slightly more difficult to understand.

Has anyone ever watched black books? Anyone ever a few hands going up? Have you seen the episode where they house it This is gonna be lost on most of you, but it's but for those who know it's gonna be great, to reminisce for a second. I'll I'll explain it. It's based on secondhand bookshop, Dylan Moran, drunk and Irish, just so and so.

Bill Bailey, total idiot, come together and they run this bookshop. And in this 1 episode, they have to house sit for lord so and so. They know through somehow or other. I can't remember. It's got this big mansion in central London, and and they're you know, Dylan Moran drinks a lot of wine.

He's always drinking wine, smoking, and just generally abusing his customers. Anyway, they go into the house, and Bill Bailey goes down into the wine cellar with Lord, whoever, and says, you can drink any of these new wines over here. All of them, you they're yours. You can drink, and they're in pristine bottles, and they're all great. Fantastic.

You cannot touch these 10 bottles of dusty old wine. So you can drink the new 1. Don't touch the old 1. Bill Bailey goes back upstairs and says, right. There's 10 bottles of dusty old wine that we can have down there, but we can't touch any of the rest of it.

So they go down, Dylan Moran's like, You sure, because I I really would have thought this was the other way around because Old wine is goodder. Yeah. Old wine is the goodest. It's the best. That's what that's why, you know, we'd go for Old wine in dusty old But if you say so, then, you know, we'll leave all of this wine over here over, and we'll just drink this old dusty wine.

Maybe it's just old and he wants to get rid of it. Turns out the bottle they go for is like grapes grown on a rose vine and it was it was destined for the pope. To drink at his inauguration or or or whatever, and it runs into millions of pounds worth of wine. Anyway, the point is it's confusing because we think, oh, old wine. Good.

Old wine is always better, right? New wine is usually a little bit. It's, it's a bit fresh. It's a bit sharp. But Jesus isn't commenting on the quality of the wine here.

That's not the point. He's making a he's making a comparison between old and new, and really focusing on the wineskins. So essentially, what happens because we don't use wineskins anymore, so we have no idea what this is all about. So apparently, what happens to a wineskin is it gets older. It's made from animal skin.

It it ages, and it becomes brittle and hard. And that means that it's liable to crack at some point. Now that's fine if you're gonna put old wine into it because old wines stopped fermenting. It's not expanding anymore. There's minimal chemical reactions going on in there.

But if you put new wine into an old wineskin and the new wine is still fermenting and expanding and producing gases and all sorts of stuff, guess what happens to the old brittle wineskin? And everything's ruined. It bursts. So, no, you put new wine into nice stretchy new wineskins, and you avoid disaster in that way. Are you a brittle crusty old sack of wine?

I I I was really looking forward to saying that line. So I've been asking myself it all week, am I a bristy, a brittle crusty old sack of wine? Yeah. In a lot of ways, Do you wanna be like a fresh wineskin containing a living message, though? Isn't that what we wanna be?

A fresh wineskin with a living message. It's literally alive. It's growing in you. It's maturing in you. You see, if you haven't adapted your life upon hearing the gospel, then eventually you're gonna split a part of the scenes.

If you sat here and you haven't given your life to Jesus, you haven't traded your brittle old wineskin of a life for a new 1 and filled it with his message, then ultimately the gospel in a sense is wasted on you in the end. It's gonna run to nothing, and you'll be wasted with it. Be better for you to not have heard it, actually. The point Jesus is making in both of these illustrations is that the old cannot handle the new. Jesus's message is radically different from the traditions of Judaism, and you can substitute that with the the traditions of today.

And people's way of making themselves good and and doing it on their own. Jesus says the 2 are not compatible, not compatible at all. And that's not to say that Jesus' messages at odds with the old testament and god's law. Jesus himself said I didn't come to abolish it. I came to fulfill it.

These are odds with the fact that the pharisees and John's disciples are trying to keep the law by their own means. A purpose for which it was never intended, an impossible task. His issue is they're trying to do it without him. Jesus' message the new If you like, requires a change in attitudes and behaviors from the old. The old ways of Judaism are old lives.

So they don't need to be fasting twice a week. They never needed to be fasting twice a week or anything that they think makes them look good to god. They simply simply need to rely on Jesus to do it for them. That's what he's saying. And I'm right here.

So what that means for us is that, yes, we may we may deny ourselves and fast from all sorts of things while we wait for Jesus' return. I mean, we do a media fast once a year. You know, this this it's not for me to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. That's, that's that's your own conscience. Jesus expects his people to fast.

Look, don't take it up with me, take it up with him. You know, you're gonna have to explain to him 1 day about this this topic. But whatever the case, there's no written requirement, There's no written requirement. And in a sense, our entire lives as Christians are about denying ourselves from this world that we live in. There's a sense in which we're we're sort of fasting in all sorts of ways all the time because We love the lord Jesus Christ, and we wanna honor him.

So we are, we're in between. We're in between times, aren't we? We're we're in the now, but not yet. We've had a taste and a glimpse at what the future holds, but we're not physically with him yet. We have so much of Jesus, but we're not with him physically in his physical presence in heaven with him.

That's where we wanna be. We're in this time of feasting and fasting of joy and sadness, sorrowful yet always rejoicing, says Paul, living and mourning. We're doing it all in a sense. Again, I think Corinthians 2 5 explains this perfectly, and I think, I think it'll come up. Let me just go through this and this sort of draws us really close to the to the end.

Paul says this, for we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from god, an eternal house in heaven not built by human hands. Meanwhile, we groan. See, we groan. We mourn. Longing to be clothed, new garment clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling.

Because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we were in this tent, down here on earth, in this body, we groan and are burdened. We're burdened with our sin. We're burdened with the just all kinds of things because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the 1 who has fashioned us for this very purpose is god who has given us The spirit is a deposit guaranteeing what is to come.

Therefore, we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body, we are away from the lord. We're at home in the body here, but we're away from the lord in a sense. For we live by faith, not by sight, 1 day we will see him face to face until then we live by faith. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the lord. That's how we should all feel tonight.

We wanna not be here in a sense. I love that we're here, but I don't wanna be here. So we make it our goal to please him. Whether we're at home in the body or away from it, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body whether good or bad. I wish I could have just said that in the pub on Monday night.

Don't know how that would have gone down, but I wish that's what I could have said. Christianity isn't what you think it is. It's not about you trying to be good on your own terms. That's an old, old way of trying to tackle the issue that is your simple rottenness, and it's never worked out for anyone. So why is it gonna work out for you?

The new message of Jesus says, let me do it for you. And in a sense, it's not even the new message. It's the old message. It's always been the message. It's just that Jesus comes and clarifies it and says, yeah, and that's all about me.

All that stuff, that's all about me. Here is a new garment to wear. Won't you come to the wedding with me? Let's pray. Father we, we come before you as, as very broken people, as we were hearing this morning in this morning's sermon that we are we are the pinnacle of your creation, made in your image, image bearers, and yet we had a very insightful comment at the start that we are self destructive.

We are completely riddled with sin, and that means that we turn away from you and we go it alone. We go on our own terms. And if we come to you on our own terms, it's not gonna be good enough. We're never gonna meet your standard. So we praise you that you sent your son who does meet your standard, and you substituted us with him.

There's no other way. So please, please, please, help us tonight to reaffirm, to be challenged, to to to base our lives around that truth again. And if we don't know you, if there's anyone here that doesn't know you, or maybe maybe just tonight is the night that that clicks into place. We do pray these things in your name, amen.