Sermon Tone Analysis
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It is interesting how life works.
As a high school and college student, I loved to dig deep into thinking about profound truths.
I remember lying awake in my bed for hours, staring at the ceiling as I pondered the great mysteries of life.
I used to go out and look at the stars, trying to get a sense of the depth of space.
I don’t do that much anymore.
Do you?
Life gets busy.
We have jobs, school, families, Netflix, and Facebook to keep us distracted.
Most days, we collapse into our beds and fall quickly to sleep, only to get up the next day and keep running.
I want to invite you this morning to focus in with me on an incredibly important question.
It is one that may make you uncomfortable, and when that discomfort hits, you’re going to be tempted to pull out your phone and check Snapchat or use the space in your bulletin to plan out your week.
Can I encourage you to resist that this morning?
I believe that what God has for us today from his word is so critical that we need to lean into the discomfort and allow him to shine his light into the corners of our hearts.
Here’s the question we want to answer today: What is the center point of your life?
At your core, at the very heart of who you are, what is your life based upon?
You’re in church, and if you’ve been around church for long, you know the right answer to that is “Jesus”.
However, I’m not looking for the right answer; I’m looking for the honest one.
As we look this morning at a parable Jesus told, we are going to hear him make a case that he must be at the center of our lives.
If you are here this morning and still investigating Christianity, let me first say that I am glad you are here.
I know you may not be ready to acknowledge these truths, but I want you to have a full understanding of what you are looking into.
Following Jesus, being a Christian, isn’t just a Sunday thing.
It isn’t simply a part of what we do; it is the core reality of who we are.
Christ at the core means that he is both the most central element in our life and that he permeates every single aspect of who we are and what we do.
We are going to try to unpack that this morning as we look at Mark 12:1-12.
The parable Jesus tells here is one of the most direct and confrontational parables he tells.
Here, only days before his arrest and execution, Jesus is confronting the religious leaders of Israel.
In the verses just before this, they have once again challenged Jesus’ authority, and he has proven that he is in the right and they are in the wrong.
He is sent from God the Father, as God the Son, to be the Messiah that has been promised for thousands of years.
The religious leaders, called Sadducees and Pharisees, are rejecting him.
The story he is about to tell highlights their ongoing rejection of God throughout their history, with their rejection of Jesus as the pinnacle.
As he does that, Jesus is demonstrating that he must be the center of our lives as well.
He cannot be pushed aside.
Although we aren’t direct descendants of the Pharisees and Sadducees Jesus is condemning here, our human hearts are defective in the same way theirs were.
So, as we read this story, we are going to explain what it meant to those who heard it when Jesus first told it, and then we are going to draw three main principles for us from what we see.
Read it with me...
Strange story, right?
It made more sense to the first hearers than it does to us at first glance.
Verse 12 makes it clear that they got the point.
We can see the central idea in verse 11, but it is going to take some more explanation to catch the nuances.
Let’s do that, then.
First, let’s...
1) Realize what God has done.
Start back in verse 1.
Remember, Jesus is telling a parable.
In a parable, you are telling an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
It is impossible to say that every detail is symbolic of something, although this one has more and clearer symbolism than many.
The man planting and developing the vineyard represents God.
Here, the vineyard represents the nation of Israel.
As the man builds the vineyard, he takes great care to make sure it is given every advantage.
He puts a wall around the vineyard to keep wild animals and robbers out.
He digs out a trench so they can collect the wine after it is pressed, and he builds a tower to overlook the fields, again watching over it to make sure no one breaks in to disturb the vineyard.
All this is a picture of what God has done for Israel throughout their history as a nation.
The nation was born when God gave a man named Abraham a son named Isaac.
That family grew and grew into the nation of Israel.
God often protected and provided for them.
When there was a famine in the land where they lived, God moved the family to Egypt in an incredible way, putting them geographically away from the rest of Egypt so they could grow larger and stronger.
When the Egyptians began to oppress the Israelites, God miraculously and powerfully delivered them, eventually bringing them back to the land they started in 400 years before.
Throughout the Old Testament, you see time and time again where God worked in truly miraculous ways to defend and protect his people.
However, as Jesus pointed out, God’s people rejected him.
All of this language is taken directly out of something God said through the prophet Isaiah:
Jesus took the picture from Isaiah and tweaked it some.
Instead of focusing on the fruit the nation was supposed to bear, he focused on the farmers who were supposed to take care of it.
The religious leaders, who knew their Scriptures, would have immediately known what Jesus was referring to.
God’s special people, his vineyard, had every advantage in the world, and yet they rejected him, starting with the leaders.
He expected them to honor him for all he had done for them, and rightly so!
Instead, they continued to do their own thing time and time again.
Great, but we aren’t Israel, right?
Maybe you have a family genealogy, or you have done one of those DNA checks that tells you your heritage, and you don’t have any Jewish blood in you.
What, then does this have to do with you?
God has done more for you than you may realize.
Although you may not physically be a part of Israel, you have the opportunity to inherit the spiritual blessings they did.
You see, when God called Abraham to himself, God said that all the nations of the earth would be blessed by what God was going to do through Abraham’s family.
That promise was referring to Jesus.
Jesus came not only to offer salvation to the Jews, but to offer salvation to every person in the entire world!
Listen again to a verse that may be familiar to you:
God shows his love to every person in the world by extending the hope of salvation to them, without them doing anything to deserve it!
Just like Abraham didn’t deserve for God to make him into this incredible nation, we don’t deserve for God to save us, and yet he does!
It’s only reasonable to expect, then, that we should honor him with the way we live, isn’t it?
That’s what we see in the New Testament:
Your salvation is not dependent on you in any way shape or form.
God planted the vineyard, put the wall around it, dug the winepress, and put up the tower.
However, like Israel, the outcome of what God has done in your life should be an orientation around Jesus.
You should do what Jesus condemned the religious leaders for not doing:
We see that more clearly as we work through the rest of the story.
Not only must we recognize what God has done, we must also...
2) Receive what God has said.
Look at verses 2-5 again.
When you look at Israel’s history, you see that it didn’t take much to get them off track.
Within a matter of days of God miraculously delivering them from Egypt, the most powerful nation in the world at the time, they are griping that God led them into the desert to die.
Once God gives them the land he had promised them, they almost immediately begin to serve other gods.
Throughout their history, there is a constant ebb and flow of their relationship with God.
They would get away from God, they would get in trouble, God would deliver them, they’d get excited, and then they would fall away again.
The cycle was a downward spiral.
As time went on, the dark periods got worse and lasted longer.
During those times, God would send prophets to warn them.
Those are the servants who were beaten and rejected that Jesus is referring to in our parable.
Their job was to help God’s people see where they had fallen short, how they needed to come back, and what would happen if they didn’t.
The leaders of Israel rejected many of them and even put a number of them to death.
They refused to listen to what God was trying to tell them.
Don’t we do the same thing today?
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