Life

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So welcome to Thrive. We're in a series called Fearful Faith during this season called Lent, Lent for the Lengthening of Days. I know it's kind of, I just grew up with going to Lent and didn't understand where that word comes from. But Lent for the Lengthening of Days, the days that come before Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and the 40 days that appear before that was set aside in the early church as a time of reflection and renewal to focus on the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For the 40 days he was in the wilderness, tempted, without food. We don't have to go without food and water ourselves. I guess he had water probably, but no food. So he was fasting and he was tempted for 40 days, and so we use this season to do that. And our series is called Fearful Faith. And you might wonder, how does fear and faith fit together? A lot of people think faith and fear should be the opposites. They're not. As we brought up for the first commandment a couple weeks back, one of the explanations Martin Luther used for that commandment is, we are to fear and love God so that, right, we put no one else above God. Fear, awesome, reverence, respect, honor, that's a part of what faith can be about. And sometimes that's missing today as we almost got a too chummy of a relationship with God as if we and God are like this, and we are, but not on the basis of we're so naturally inclined to be in this position. And so in this series, we're exploring the 10 commandments, yes, not in 10 weeks, but in seven. So we've combined some, but today we're on the commandment of Exodus 20 verse 12, you shall not murder. Pretty straightforward, right? Pretty easy. Anybody, you know, I guess we could just say, okay, haven't killed anybody lately, so I'm doing good on this one. Not so fast, Jesus would say. It's amazing how he speaks about God's reverence for, well, God's desire for life, for human thriving, for human flourishing. From the beginning in the garden, when he got down on his hands and knees, according to Genesis 2, and breathed into Adam the breath of life, throughout the times where the first, you know, when Cain and Abel were at, you know, and Cain kills Abel and how the blood of Abel cries out, God has such a compassion, such a desire, such a passion for life and the fullness of what he has given, Jesus says, it's not just about, you haven't killed anybody lately, okay? In fact, in his sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, you've heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother, uh-uh, will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother, oops, will be liable to the council. And whoever says you fool, I've said a lot worse than that, will be liable to the hell of fire. All of a sudden now, we're in some deep water here and I'm not swimming too well in it. In 1958, one of, a scholar published an article kind of critiquing C.S. Lewis and his version of Christianity. And among the criticisms that this scholar made of C.S. Lewis, I don't know if you know who he is, he wrote the Screwtape Letters, he wrote Mere Christianity, the Chronicles of Narnia, things like that. A scholar at Oxford and Cambridge, he, um, this, he accused C.S. Lewis of not caring much for the Sermon on the Mount. And C.S. Lewis responded to that critique and he said this, and to, as to caring for the Sermon on the Mount, if caring for means liking or enjoying, I suppose no one cares for it. Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledgehammer? I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of a man who can read this, that passage with tranquil pleasure. Make sense? It's hard to read these passages in the Sermon on the Mount because they're very convicting. They take away a lot of my self-justifications, my validations. All of a sudden, um, when I would rather wish ill of anyone in any form, hate, um, boy, I'll tell you. How many times am I breaking this commandment when I'm on the road in southwest Florida? If you have, have you seen, you wait. During the week, you will see, we've got an extra half a million people down here right now, and everybody's from somewhere else, and they don't know how to drive by our rules. Oh, see, all of a sudden you're probably breaking that commandment in this direction, right? I know. I know. It's, that's the thing about it. It's not like I can stand here and go like, yeah, this one, no problem, I've, I'm not, I'm good with this one. Not at all. Jesus is taking a sledgehammer to our sense of self-righteousness. We so cheapen human life with the way that we treat each other. You know, whatever your group is, the in-group, the out-group, it's amazing what we can say about them. The tribalism that we have seen, the nationalism that w...