Surprise

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. Maybe this is a good time to be in a series called The Emotional Jesus, because He is. He gets it. He feels what you're feeling. In fact, maybe more deeply and more fully than I can understand. And I love that, that maybe my feelings are a little out of whack, but Jesus exactly knows. He's got a pulse on the whole situation. He's feeling it. He's experiencing it. He understands it. And so we're in this week. You might wonder why we're talking about emotions. It's because we are emotional beings. Growing up, I was told you should be making your decisions based on logic. Were you ever taught that? You should put the pros and the cons together. You should figure it all out. You should weigh your decisions and logically deduce what's the best option. Well, that's great, but good luck if that's what people do, because we are emotional beings. God created our emotions. That's part of it. Jonathan Haidt, I think, says it well. He wrote a book called The Righteous Mind. And he says, if you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll constantly be frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. Of course, when they disagree with you, that's when they're being illogical. But I'm always logical, right? That's kind of what we think. But if you think about our moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas to justify our own actions and defend the teams we belong to, then things will make a lot more sense. They're mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives. So we need to deal with emotions because emotions are powerful movers of why we do things. We are desiring beings. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, Jesus said. St. Augustine understood we are desiring beings and that we need to have our desires aligned to God and his will, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And that's not who I am in my fallen, broken nature. And so we have to deal with the emotional side of things. In fact, maybe more so. This is how Jonathan Haidt puts it. He says, the mind is divided like a rider on an elephant. And the rider's job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning, the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99% of our mental processes, the ones that occur outside of awareness but actually govern most of our behavior. So if you really want to know someone well, get to know them emotionally. If you really want to know Jesus really well, this is what's fascinating. You get to see his emotions. You understand what makes him tick, what ticks him off, how he works, why he works. You get to the whys when you deal with emotions. You get to what's the real reason behind the reasons. And today we're looking at another one of the emotions that Jesus has experienced. Last week we started with one that happens 15 times in the Gospels, that this word that he had compassion, he was moved with compassion. And emotions are energy in motion. They move us to do things. And so we saw how Jesus moved with compassion, touched lepers, fed the crowds, taught people, forgave sins. He was moved with compassion and he did all sorts of different things as a result. And it's amazing, God was so moved with compassion that he came to rescue us in the first place. The compassion of God is at the heart of the most repeated Bible verse in the Old Testament that God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. That's who God is at his heart and we see that heart in Jesus Christ and how he lived, who he was around, how he hung out with people, everything. Compassion ran through it. Today, we're kind of going to the other extreme. This is an emotion that is recorded twice, two times only, that Jesus had. And there are many times it's talked about the crowds and the people around him. They're surprised, they're amazed. But only two times does it say Jesus was surprised or it can be the word amazed or astounded. So we're going to be reading one of those instances today. It's Matthew chapter 8 verses 5 to 13. Here's a story and you'll see in this context what Jesus amazed, and by the way, you can amaze Jesus. In fact, I think you do amaze Jesus. Okay, is that great? You do amaze Jesus. Just like this Roman centurion. When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him appealing to him, Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home suffering terribly. And he said to him, and I think this is where we have to make a, this should be a question. Am I to come and heal him? You know, like, do you want me to go with you to heal him? Because you realize he's a Jewish rabbi, to enter a Roman centurion's house, not the thin...