Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Good morning and welcome back!

If you would start turning in your Bibles to .

Last week we finished up Jesus’ teaching, rebuke, preaching; or however you would like to term it, on the subject of the “First being last and the last being First.”

The last part of that was an education and rebuke to two of his disciples and their mother who had brought them to Jesus asking for them to essentially be #1 and #2 in the Kingdom of Heaven.

And Jesus followed this up with just as strong a rebuke to the other 10 of his disciples for their act of jealously and anger with the two over their misguided intents on “getting ahead” of everybody else.

The most important part of all of that though was Jesus’ teaching about servanthood to us all.

Just to recap, in verse 26-28, Jesus tells them . . . .

And we didn’t have time to go into this a whole lot last week, but listen to what Jesus is telling them.

They are all concerned about greatness and being #1 in the Kingdom of Heaven, just like everyone was and is concerned with being #1 here on earth today.

And Jesus tells them that if they want to achieve “greatness” in God’s eyes, they must become servants.

But, servants of who?

Servants of everyone else.

Actually consider others, their feelings and their needs.

And not only consider their feelings and needs, but to do something to help meet those needs and expose them to the love of God.

And the problem we have run into over the years in the Church world is that too many people have decided that instead of developing a servants hear to help others and coming to church to learn and practice the development of this servants heart, they come to simply be served.

They come to hear a catchy song or snazzy easy on the ears sermon that makes them feel good for the moment but has no substance.

They do not like to be challenged to step outside their comfort zone and actually develop the mentality and the skills to be servants.

And the result is the statistics we hear that 20% of the people do 80% of the work in the church.

And honestly our percentages are better than that here.

We probably average around 40-50% of people doing something.

But we can do better.

God’s intention is for 100% of his people to be involved someway.

So we cannot let up.

And the first step is doing just what Jesus is saying here, becoming a servant…being a slave.

And not a slave to people, but a slave to God.

Following God’s commands and God’s directions.

Serving God, by serving others.

And doing it in the way that Jesus did . . .

And Jesus is not telling us to all go out and get killed, but rather for us to die to self so that we may live for God.

To put God’s way and God’s will first and then let everything else fall into place behind it.

Which is tough in our world and our society.

There are so many things pulling us in every single direction.

But Jesus says, this is what it takes.

So, armed with this Jesus is going to now demonstrate that for his disciples and everybody else around them.

Which is where our passage this morning will be picking up.

So, if you have found in your Bibles, I’d invite you to stand with me as we begin reading in verse 29, looking at the subject of Do you want to see?

Matthew writes . . . .

Scripture Focus

Matthew 20:29-

Lord Have Mercy on Us! (vs 29-30)

So, lets set the scene up a bit here.

Jesus and his disciples had been in Jericho for a little while now.

And while there, Jesus not only spent time teaching but also healing people, performing miracles, and dealing with rowdy Jews a bit.

And it came time for him and the disciples to leave and move on to the next stop in their “tour.”

However, Jesus, as he always did everywhere he went, had amassed a large following of people and here is no different.

As they were leaving this large crowd began to follow them out of the city.

And we can only imagine the noise and the hustle and bustle of a huge crowd of people trying to move about following behind Jesus and his disciples.

But on their way out of the city though they were going to encounter some new people who were waiting on them.

Again verse 30 tell us that . . .

Now, these blind guys couldn’t get to Jesus because, well, they were blind.

They couldn’t see him or even see where to go for that matter.

To be honest, they were probably like many people who were trying to get near Jesus, they couldn’t because they didn’t have anybody to help them get there.

And their idea was to sit down at the city gate, where they knew Jesus was going to have to pass through and wait on him to get there.

So, this is what they did.

They found a spot on the roadside and they waited on Jesus to come by.

Waited on God to move, if you will.

Which is really the first lesson we need to learn.

Many times we want to get whatever the problem we have fixed immediately and fixed the way we want it.

And we forget that everything is done in God’s will, on God’s timeline.

We many times lack the patience to wait on God to move.

And when we do that enough (and I know by experience), sometimes God slows us down and forces us to wait, because we have no other options.

And I am not saying that God struck these men with blindness to make them wait on Jesus.

What I’m saying is sometimes God is silent while we run around trying all the options and things play out until we realize we can’t do anything else but wait.

Which is difficult to do.

Especially when things are not going good at all.

But these guys didn’t have a choice but to wait.

So, that’s what they did.

They waited on Jesus to come by, which also demonstrates the actual faith they had in Jesus to help them.

Which brings us to another point.

Sometimes God tells us to wait and what we do is say, “okay God, I got the message, I’ll wait” and then we try to fix things while we wait.

We try to hurry it up a bit by trying to do an end-around God.

And, this never works.

This is particularly true when we have some sort of decision to make or we are waiting on a decision of something that impacts us.

We wait, but we try to do everything we can to influence the decision or reduce the wait.

These guys didn’t.

They simply waited.

And when they heard that Jesus was going by, they shouted, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!”

This was their chance.

Things were lined up and now it was time to get Jesus’ attention.

And notice what they asked.

They didn’t ask for a million dollars.

They didn’t ask for a new house.

A new donkey.

They didn’t even ask for their sight to be restored at that point.

All they asked for was for Jesus to have mercy on them.

To show them some love and some compassion.

That was it.

Which is really what most people need.

Just some compassion, some love, some support.

Never Give Up! (vs 31-32)

But, by the reaction of the crowd it was obvious that these guys were not used to very much compassion on the part of others.

Basically, “shut up, go away, leave Jesus alone....He has too much more important work to do than to deal with you two.”

And the crowd reacted this way because these two were blind and in societies view they were worthless.

They couldn’t get jobs and couldn’t support themselves.

They were probably dirty, they were beggars, living only off what others would give them.

The attitude of the people was that they were disabled because God was punishing them for something, so they were “throw away people.”

And we look at that and think “that is awful,” but how similar is our society today.

Now, we do have people who are professional panhandlers who are fakes, but how dismissive are we to the disabled in our society.

How close do we want to get to the homeless, the dirty?