Today we're going to be looking in the Gospel of Matthew in Matthew, chapter 21, by the way. And most of the time, anybody's probably flipped to this chapter. If you weren't just reading there, if you were in a church service or something, it was probably because it was Palm Sunday and you were reading, you know, that passage where Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem, which is where the temple was. And the temple was essentially, if it fulfilled a couple things, one of them was God had prescribed sacrifices that the people were to offer on behalf of their sin. Now, Jesus came to be that ultimate sacrifice for our sin, for yours and mine.

He died so that your sins could be not just cleansed or removed and forgiven, but so that you could have a new life. And Jesus offers you that new life today. And so what the temple was, though, prior to the time of Jesus death, was the Temple was a place where people could come and meet God. Now, certainly, you can meet God anywhere, right? I mean, you can be at any old place and talk with God, and he's there to listen to you.

He's there to hear from you. But there's something special. And we come to church, you know, church buildings, this isn't the church. We are the church. The people is the church.

But as we come to the church building, there's something special about that is kind of like a standing weekly appointment that you have to say, okay, God, I've had my mind in all these other things throughout the week, but here today I'm here for one focus and one purpose, and that's to meet with God. Now, certainly, we enjoy talking with one another and catching up a little bit. Certainly there's other things that are a benefit to being in church. But that is the core reason that we are here, is to meet with God. It's that kind of weekly state standing appointment that we set.

Now, what God had designed or designated his temple to be was a place where people of especially the Jewish faith, but people of any nation could come and they could meet with God there. They could worship God there. You see, in those old times, they had this belief that there were people that didn't believe in the God of Israel, the God that we worship, God the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. God Jesus, Son. We don't have this idea that they're local to one spot, but people had this idea that all these other gods were local to one country or region or another.

And they believed you had to go to a specific location to meet with that God. Now, when they had originally Built the temple. Solomon. King Solomon, the son of King David in Israel, Solomon built this temple. It was destroyed, and another one is built at the time of Jesus.

But. But it was built on the same place. And Solomon had built this temple as a way to say, hey, listen, God, I know. And Solomon tells God this. He says, God, I know that this building can't contain you.

He says, the earth, the heavens, even the highest of heavens, can't contain you. You're bigger than all of that. In other words, you're not just local to this one area. You're bigger than the universe itself. And so he says, I know you can't be contained, but what Solomon hoped for and wished was that that temple would be some type of a physical place that we who have physical bodies could just kind of come and say, okay, God, I'm here in this building that's supposed to have some semblance of your presence here.

So they had this. This. This dedication of the temple, and it says that God came down in a cloud. And there was like, just. It was like.

It was like a big rock show almost. There was lights and thunder and smoke. It was. It was booming in there. And God said, I will choose to put my name on this place.

In other words, God didn't have to be there, but he chose to be there. He chose to be in that temple. Now, he did give them a lot of rules and guidelines for how to adorn the temple, how to have services in the temple, what they were supposed to do when they gathered there. Part of it was bringing offerings and sacrifices. Part of it was.

Some of it was offerings and sacrifices for sins that the people had committed. And some of it was simply as a joy, a rejoicing in what God had given to them and blessed them. And if God had blessed them as an outflow or an overflow of the experience, the blessing that they had, they would give back to God. And you know what's really interesting about some of these sacrifices? They would bring an animal, they would offer it to God.

It would be dressed and prepared, and it would be roasted over the altar. You know what they were doing? They were. They were barbecuing it. It's great.

God would have these religious barbecues, basically. I mean, I love this. This is fantastic. I don't like that he didn't let them eat bacon. I understand why, but I just.

I feel like that was kind of, you know, that would have been great. That's just my own take. So I'm glad we live today. You know, there's a verse where it says. I think it's in Mark 8 somewhere, 8 or 9, where it says that Jesus made all foods clean, so they were allowed to even eat bacon now.

And I think that that's just one of the best verses in the Bible, aside from, like, our sins being forgiven. And so you've got these animals you would bring, and they would roast them there, but then the people, the person, the worshiper that brought this animal was allowed to partake in it. It wasn't an animal that was consumed on the altar. It was actually roasted on the altar. And now you take that back and you celebrate with your family, with your relatives, and you're allowed to partake in this sacrifice.

Even though God bless you with it, you return it back to God and he still returns it back to you. We understand that when we give to God, we're not actually giving of our own money. We're just giving something that God had blessed us with. God blesses you with that provision, you offer it back to him as an offering, and then he continues to keep blessing you. It doesn't.

I'm not like being like one of those guys on TV that says, oh, if you sow $1,000 into this ministry. And isn't it funny how they always say, my ministry? Oh, those guys make me anyway, but they say, oh, if you sow a thousand dollars, God's going to bless it tenfold. No, God never actually says it like that. That's not the way it works.

See, the way it works is in our understanding of saying, God's blessed me. I give an offering back, and in return, he blesses me more than I can handle or understand or imagine. And many of us have that testimony to say, God has blessed me in ways that I never could have seen coming. Well, anyway, Jesus steps into this setting and what had happened in the time of his day, where there's this temple. Now, this temple, by the way, isn't the one Solomon built.

This is a temple that King Herod, who was half Jewish and half not the first Herod, was a real bad dude, and he had died when Jesus was a baby. He'd actually tried to have Jesus killed because he had heard that there was a king of the Jews that was born. And he said, well, I'm the king of the Jews. I don't like a rival and I want to get rid of him. But now his son is reigning and ruling, and his son has carried on the work of building this temple.

It's a building project that's been going on for 46 years. I think sometimes maybe the same people that were doing that is just kind of their. Like, through their bloodline is passed down. And now they're the ones that build roads. You know, some of these roads, it's like it's been going on for 46 years, but it was going on for 46 years, and they just kept making it more and more grandiose.

And the temple of God became this thing that it was almost like they worshiped it. In fact, the disciples. One time, Jesus has his 12 disciples, and they. They're walking around the temple one time when they visited Jerusalem, and they're like, master, look at these big stones. They're massive.

I mean, some of them were like 20 tons. And they had. They. When they quarried them out of the place where it was hundreds of or, you know, dozens or hundreds of miles away. When they quarried these rocks that they built the temple with, they actually measured and marked each one for what place it would go in the blueprint for this temple, for the walls that would build it.

And they cut them so perfectly that there's places where you can't even stick a card in between them. To this day, some of those stones still stand. Not the stones that the temple was built with, but the ones that the wall was built with. You've seen it on tv, probably. They call it the Wailing Wall on one part of it.

And people will go and try to stick cards in there, some kind of a token or a prayer or something, and they have to struggle to find a place, even 2,000 years later, to find a gap that's big enough to shove a piece of paper in. Because those stones were machined so well. They were. They were hewn out so well that they would fit in there. There's also one little bit of interesting thing.

This has nothing to do with it, but Jesus quoted one of the psalms that said, the stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. There was one stone that they had quarried and they cut and they said, where does this one go? We don't even know where it fits. And they had tossed it aside. Brush started growing up around it.

Other bits and chips of building material were thrown out around it. And then finally they're looking for this stone that caps the whole thing off, and they can't figure it out. And finally somebody says, hey, what about that one down there that we threw away? And they measure it and they say, that was where this one was. They had cut it out early in the process.

From the quarry shipped it in too early, and they weren't ready for it yet. They said the stone that the builders had rejected is the one that mattered about everything. Jesus says, I am that chief cornerstone. He says, I'm the one that. That the people are rejecting and the chief priests and the leaders are rejecting the.

The ones that everybody's trusting. Their religious guidance has rejected him. And yet he says, I'm the one that holds all of it together. So as Jesus walks up to the temple, we had this thing called the triumphal entry. And we talk about that on Palm Sunday a lot where he rides up and he's on a donkey and they're waving palm branches at him and they're saying, hosanna blessing.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Right after that is where we pick up in Matthew, chapter 21, starting in verse 12, down through verse 17, says, Then Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all those people who were selling and buying in the temple courts. And he turned over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those that were selling doves. And he said to them, it is written, my house will be called a house of prayer for the nations, but you are turning it into a den of robbers. The blind and the lame came to him in the temple courts, and he healed them.

But when the chief priests and the experts in the law saw the wonderful things he did, and they heard the children crying out in the temple courts, hosanna to the Son of David, they became indignant. And they said to him, do you hear what they are saying? Jesus responded to them. Yes. Have you never read in the Scriptures that out of the mouths of children and nursing infants, you have prepared praise for yourself?

And then he left them, and he went out of the city to the village called Bethany. And he spent the night there. Let's pray. God, I thank you for your scriptures. I thank you for your word that you've passed down to us, that you have blessed us with, that you have provided for us and.

And preserved for us. Lord, I pray that you would help us to focus only on the details here that are important, that those things that we need to know would stick in our minds. So, Lord, I pray that you would give me the words to say here. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

There's four gospels in the Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We read the story from Matthew and all four of the gospels tell some version of this story where Jesus cleanses the temple. Now, the temple, by the way, was somewhere on the order of the size of about 36 football fields. Not the temple building itself, but what they call the Temple Mount.

And it's still in Jerusalem to this day. Now, the temple building that Herod had built, the one that they were going on for 46 years and counting, that building is gone. In fact, when Jesus disciples had said, look at these stones, he said, these stones, one won't remain on another. There's a day where they will all be thrown down. That day happened in the year 70, which is about 37 to 39 years after Jesus had said those words.

And so the temple was eventually torn down. And it was because of the unbelief of the people. They refused to see and hear what God had done in their midst. But the Temple Mount, that big flat, is actually a building. It looks like a flat place, like a pavement of stones, but it's actually a gigantic building.

It's actually one of the, the largest buildings in the world. And parts of it are about four stories tall because it's built on top of a mountain. And rather than flattening the mountain, they decided to raise part of it up. But they raised it up with a system of columns and arches that are supporting multiple layers underneath of it. And so somebody that's bringing a sacrificial animal might come in through what's called the sheep gate.

And they would come in through there and they would go up a series of stairways and things inside of there and eventually come out inside. So some outer courtyards in the temple. But if you didn't bring an animal for these festivals, there was at least there were seven main festivals, but there were three big ones that you were supposed to come to every year for sure. The rest were kind of optional. And as you would, if you traveled from far away, you might not bring an animal with you for a sacrifice.

You might come and buy one there that was kind of like approved. If you buy a car from a car lot, you know, some of these brand new car dealers, they'll have a, a used car lot, but then they'll have like the certified pre owned. You know, somehow they claim that that car is better than the others. It kind of makes you wonder what was wrong with the other ones that they're selling that aren't certified, you know, but anyway, they had these certified animals, you know, they were certified to be clean and pure and not have any blemishes on them to be used as a sacrificial animal. Now they may have taken advantage of people in all of my reading and research, I can't get you a clear answer on whether or not these people were taking advantage of travelers that came in.

Certainly, you don't want to be taken advantage of as a traveler. I've been times where I was traveling, and I wanted to look for a hotel, and I find that a hotel, Instead of being 110 or $20, all of a sudden, they're 200 and something in one area. And I wonder what's going on in that city that they say it's okay for us to charge this much for a room or if there's some kind of a storm. We have our hurricanes here, and all of a sudden, you know, people are trying to get out of town, and you're expecting that the gas stations won't raise the prices, headed north to gouge everybody on the way out of here. You would hope that when you travel, you won't be taken advantage of simply because you have no other options.

They do this in the airport, don't they? You know, you get behind that security checkpoint where the TSA does everything to you and make sure that you're a good person, and you get through there, and. And then you say, I'm hungry or I'm thirsty. They made me dump my water out. Now I want more water.

And then you realize water is $5, and you're like, what does it have? Like, does it heal people that are sick? Like, what, has it got a cancer cure? What's going on with this water? You know?

And so the smart travelers bring a carry bottle or a cup, and there's these drinking fountains that have the filtered water thing. And I was traveling recently, and I went to use that, and that water was nasty. And I realized there's a light that says, like, if the filter's green, yellow, or red, and it was on red. I said, I'm getting scammed even on the drinking fountain, you know, like, I'm not even getting good water here. So people might have been taking advantage of these travelers that were coming to worship at the temple.

They wanted to connect with God the way God had set forth in the law of Moses. Tom, in Leviticus. We were talking about Leviticus earlier, and he was listening to somebody that said, don't start. If you start reading the Bible, just don't start in Leviticus. He's like, tell me why that's funny.

I'm like, here's why it's funny. You know, it's just so many rules, and, like, don't start reading there. But so you Go there, you know, and Leviticus tells you how to bring your sacrifice and your offering and all these things. So these people might have been getting taken advantage of. They were supposed to pay what was called a temple tax.

It sounds bad. It's not really a tax. It's just saying like, I'm coming here to worship, but I want to help keep this, this house of worship, this temple going. There's, there's people that work here, the priests and the Levites and that are ministering in the temple and they, that's where they, that's their full time jobs, their livelihood comes from that. And so you would pay this temple tax, but you weren't allowed to bring a Roman coin because those had graven images of people like Caesar on them.

And, and they treated Caesar like he's a God. And well, if you're a good Jew, you believe that there's only one true God. And so you're not going to, to have money like that. Well, the people use that money because it was the currency of the day, but you're not allowed to bring it into the temple. So you would come to these money changers, as it were, and you would bring your coins and you would get this exchange rate for good, like acceptable temple money that didn't have these graven images on it.

And they might have been charging an exorbitant exchange rate on that too. So we're not too sure. But the interesting thing is Jesus came there and he says that he starts turning over their tables. Now, like I mentioned, the different gospels all tell a little bit of a different story. For instance, the Gospel of John talks about Jesus coming and doing this early in his ministry, like one of the first few big things that he did.

And then the other gospels talk about it as one of the last things that he did before he was crucified on a Roman cross. But whichever happened, maybe it happened twice. Maybe John just moved the story around in his story, in his gospel so that it fit some other details better. And that was okay. Like, we like to tell things chronologically, but they told things to make a point.

So that might be what happened. But in John it says that Jesus actually made a, a whip out of leather cords. It says he used it on the animals, like says there was cattle and sheep. Here. In Matthew, it only talked about doves that were in there and money changers.

But in, in these, some of these other gospels, it talks about all these other animals and it says that he used the whip on the animals. I've always said Maybe like on the backstroke, he caught some of the. The sellers, you know, of the animals. Like. Like, oops, sorry about that.

You know, like, that's a good joke. I'm sorry. So anyway, he drives them out of there. Now, we can get into a whole bunch of details or get into the weeds about why they were there and why he was doing all that. And which Gospel account is telling us, like, the best picture of the story.

I'm not too certain, and it'd be easy for me to get in. In fact, I did get into the weeds on that. I spent so much time trying to figure it all out. And the more I tried to figure it out, the less it all made sense. Like, there were so many differing opinions that I just don't know.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's not the detail to focus on. So I keep reading and I look at what happens next. Did you. Did you notice what happens after Jesus drives them out of there, by the way?

It doesn't just say that he drives out those that are selling things or those that are changing and exchanging money. Did you notice the other group of people that got driven out? The consumers, the buyers? He drives them away, too. He drives them out of this temple area.

Now, this wasn't in the main, like the worship center of the temple. This was in these outer courts. It was called the Court of the Gentiles. It was where anybody that wasn't a Jew was invited to come if they wanted to find out more about the Jewish faith and the God of Israel, they could learn more about him there. Some of the leading.

The chief priests or the other priests or the teachers of the law or the Pharisees, some of these religious leaders might come out there very frequently, especially at a pilgrimage festival like they had, and they might come out there and interact with the people and teach them. These are people that are seeking to know more about God, and they're supposed to meet them there and do this. But instead, what did these travelers come and find? A festival, A flea market. They had a flea market downtown in Zephyrhills.

We didn't go. We talked about it, and then we just didn't because it's so much easier to not do something than it is to do something, right? And so we just didn't go. But anyway, you know, they have these things, and you can go to them and do all this stuff, but you kind of say if you had gone downtown to go interact with one of the businesses and you find out the road's blocked, you can't park on the street anywhere. And you say, oh, I just wanted to go to the shipping center or to get a haircut or go down here to this antique shop or something.

And I can't even get to it. It's because it's been all blocked off by all these booths that are set up. The travelers in Jesus day had experienced something like that. They came to meet with God, and instead all they met was people buying and selling. Can you imagine the imagery they get?

Is this what God's about? Did I travel here just for this? It's not what I came to do. That's not what I came here for. So what does Jesus say?

What does Jesus start doing? He drives them out and he quotes two scriptures from the prophets. He quotes from them and he Sundays. He says two things. He says, my house, speaking of the Lord's house, my house will be called a house of prayer for the nations.

And then he says, you have turned it into a den of thieves. Now, Jesus is upset about that because people are supposed to come there and pray. Prayer is our connection with God, right? Prayer is how you connect with God. And he said, people came here to connect with God, but you started robbing them, not only their money, but of that experience.

You. You've gotten your. Your systems in place so well that you've robbed people of their experience with God. I should pause right there and talk about us. Like, how many people want to connect with God, whether they've said it that way or not?

Seriously, how many people in the world really do want to connect with God? I mean, we can raise our hands. Hopefully we all are that way. But I mean, like, people that didn't show up in the. In a church building today or something like that.

How many people out there do you think actually do want to connect with God, but they haven't figured out a way into that a lot. Almost everyone. I mean, seriously, they might not say it in this way, but so many people think, I'd like to know God if he's real, but I'd like somebody to show me that he's real. I mean, I'd like to know God if he's real, but I've prayed that God would send somebody my way to help me, and nobody showed up. So many times I wonder if we're guilty of not being the answer to prayer for somebody that we are supposed to be.

Like God was saying, like he did to some people in the Bible, where he says to them, get up and go. And then they start going and they don't know why, but they just go. And they're obedient to what God says to them. And then finally they show up somewhere and he says, now go talk to that person. Now go do that thing.

And they are the answer to prayer that somebody was looking for, that they were praying about. You don't know that when you start out. But if you're in a spirit of total submission to God and you say, God, I just want to do whatever it is you want me to do every day, every morning when I wake up, all I want to do is submit to you and to your leadership in my life. Then you're willing to hear God when he says, get up and go. These people had come to have a meeting with God, and yet all they found was a den of robbers.

But then after Jesus cleanses this out, look at what happens. The blind and the lame came to him. You know, people that usually hide out, like, in society, they don't find an open place for them in society. They find that they're not well received or accepted. So they just kind of hide off in the shadows, maybe not coming into the light.

Those people start showing up. Now, they were the ones that the scriptures in Leviticus actually forbade from coming into the inner, the holy parts of the temple. Now we can get into a whole long thing about why God would say that the blind and the lame weren't allowed to come in. That's a good lesson for another time. But what I want to tell you right now is that Jesus began welcoming them in.

Now he's not having this internal struggle with his Father. He's not arguing with God the Father saying, no. You said, no, but I'm letting them in. God had a point and a purpose for why certain people were excluded. But he begins welcoming them in and saying, here, let me heal you.

See, there was another guy that Jesus healed one time. He'd been laying paralyzed his whole life, 38 years. He's laying on a mat, and Jesus heals him. On the Sabbath day, when you're not supposed to do any work, he says, hey, roll up your mat, pick it up and carry it, and be on your way. So the first place the guy goes, he's laying right outside the temple.

So he goes into the temple area where he's never been allowed to be before. And you know what the first thing that happens to him is? Some religious leaders say, whoa, hold up, Hoss. Why are you doing what's unlawful on the Sabbath? You're carrying something that's.

That's Considered work. Like they cared more about following the letter of the law on the Sabbath than they did about recognizing that the first time ever a man was welcomed into a place where he had not been legally allowed to be before. He's allowed into the temple now for the first time in his life. And he's just, like, thanking God for everything. And the first thing he gets hit with is some religious guy saying, hey, hold up, you're doing it wrong.

Jesus talked to the Pharisees, these religious leaders in the group, and he says, you guys, look at you, hypocrites. He's like, you'll travel all over the earth, land and sea. You'll go all over the whole thing to try to find one person that you can make a disciple of, somebody that you can teach or train to be a follower of God. And you'll take that one person and then you'll bring them back to be your follower, your disciple. And you know what you end up doing with them?

You turn them into twice as much a son of hell as you are. He calls the religious leaders sons of hell. Like Satan is your father, is what he's telling them. I mean, another time he said, you're a brood of snakes, like a pit of vipers. You're, you know, Satan was the original serpent in the tree, in the garden.

And he's saying, you know, your, your lineage, your bloodline goes all the way back to that, all the way back to Satan. No, I don't think he's saying they're actually like snake people or lizard people or something like that. There's, like, conspiracies out there. It's not what I mean. What I mean is he's saying, you're.

You're. You're more like Satan than you are like God. Now Jesus is saying that to the best religious leaders that are out there, these were the people that were following the law. These were the people that had it so memorized and so studied that they could answer any question you had about how to worship God properly in air quotes. And yet they missed out on the biggest thing.

You see, throughout the Scriptures, God would talk through the mouths of his prophets and say things like, you know what I want? You know what I want most? I mean, he says it in the Psalms. He says, I don't want sacrifices. I want a broken heart, a broken and contrite heart and a contrite spirit.

I want your heart and your spirit within you to be broken over the condition of the world, broken over your own sin, so that you can Properly focus on what God can do for you and what God wants to do for you. But instead you've just made it all about checking off the list and the boxes and following all the rules. And as a consequence of that, nobody wants to join you. Nobody wants to come in and be among you. So Jesus, he focuses on those things and he draws their mind to these scriptures.

And in one of these scriptures where he talks about how they've made it a den of robbers, what ends up happening throughout these scriptures is that the prophets in the Old Testament started sharing that in a certain number of years. It ended up being 39 years later. Did you remember that number from earlier? They talked about how the temple in that day, the original temple that David or Solomon had built, that that temple would be destroyed because of their misplaced worship. Jesus quotes that as a way of reminding them that God might do the same thing again.

And he did. Now, I don't know that God is telling us today, I'm not trying to say that God is telling us today that he's going to tear down the church. You see, he said he never do that. He says his church will be built on, on, on, on the rock of the confession of faith in Christ. And that, that even the, the, the pagans and the people that are viewed as the worst, that, that on top of those people, he can build his church and his kingdom.

He says the powers of hell, the gates of hell won't stand against it. He didn't mean like gates don't advance. Gates are not something that moves. Gates are stationary. Gates are meant to keep an invading force out.

And what Jesus was saying was the gates of hell won't be able to withstand the brute force attack of his kingdom against hell. Yes, you see, he's saying we can tear down the gates of hell and drag people out of there. We can bring people to salvation in Christ. And yet the thing that threatens the church today the most is not the lack of power of God. It's not the lack of God being able to do something, is that we get too tied up in, oh, maybe we're not so tied up into legalism and rules, but we're so tied up in doing things a certain way.

We're so tied up in making sure that everything is always kind of similar to the way it has been before. And we say, you know what if we mess this up, if we deviate from this too much, then it might all fall apart. We say, well, this person, you know, there's some of these people, but if we bring them in, then things might change a little bit. What if we bring the wrong people in to be leaders in the church and to start making decisions and they start doing things that I'm uncomfortable with? That's the spirit that these chief priests, these Pharisees had.

And not only that, but people that are truthfully coming to meet God, they end up finding out that all they have is people that are just robbing them of that opportunity. And Jesus stands there and he says, no, that's not going to fly with me. One of the biggest complaints they had, if you notice, was as he was healing people, it says, the children came up and began crying out in the temple courts. They're ringing through this whole area and they're just saying because they're excited. They just had this parade where Jesus came in, remember on the donkey, and they say, hosanna to the son of David.

Now, when they called somebody the son of David, they were referring to direct prophecy that the son of David would be the Messiah over the people of Israel. You see, the Pharisees didn't like that the children were saying this, and they said, can you make them shut up? Has anybody ever tried to make a kid shut up? I did, like, yesterday. You know, like, can you please just.

Just you're. I don't mean like, kids should be seen and not heard. I mean, like, yelling and screaming about something, little, nothing. And it's like, please just stop yelling. You know, like, it's not going to change anything.

You just can't. You can't make a kid shut up. I know some of you tried, like, kids are different today. I just. I promise you, some of you will say no.

They're parented different. Both of these things are true. Can we just admit that both things are true? Like, people parent differently because kids are different. Kids might be different because people parent different.

I don't know. I do know that everybody says, oh, these kids that get a participation trophy, it's like, who gave them those trophies? Okay, so anyway, we can start throwing stuff back and forth at each other. All I'm getting at is Jesus is like, not only can I not shut them up, I won't. Because if they stop talking and singing my praises, the rocks will start doing it.

I'd like to see that. I think it'd be hilarious to see rocks crying out, like, about Jesus. But I don't want to get to that point where that has to happen. See, what this message is really about is what's the kind of following God. Well, what's the kind of worship of God that he cares about the most.

It seems like he enjoys the praises of the children more than observing any rules or laws or any of that stuff. And he even quotes this scripture to them about it. And then it says he just left. It's almost as if he got tired of trying to fight against the big religious machine. And he just says, done for the day.

I'm just going out. I'm going to go to the place where I'm staying. To my friend's house in Bethany is two miles away. I'm just, I'm just going to go to my friend's house and I'm just going to breathe for a little bit. You guys have worn me out now.

That's what Jesus was doing there. That's what Jesus was doing in this whole thing here. And he'll spend the rest of this week caring for people every day. He comes back to the temple area for the next few days in this story, and he goes and he spends time there teaching people. He spends time healing people.

He spends time with them on a, on a basis, whatever they need, one to one, or him with a group of people, whatever it is. He does this because he loves people and he cares about them. See, the thing that I recognize through this story is that true people who are truly seeking Jesus Christ, people that are truly coming to this house of worship, that they're looking to connect with God, to pray with God. He'll never turn them away. He never rejects them.

He says, whether it's kids, blind and lame, lepers, whatever it might be, he's going to connect with them.

I guess to wrap this up, what I'm looking at is that sometimes Jesus wants to upset our entire system that we've built. Sometimes I wonder what Jesus would do if he came into a local church and said, uh, we're not doing it that way. I don't know. I try to focus on that a lot. I spend more time thinking about that maybe than I should.

I spend time thinking about why do I get up and preach? What's the point of it? What's the goal of it? The goal, at least that I have today for you. I always want to be helpful.

Sometimes that might mean that I step on some toes, but really what I want to do is I want to be helpful for your life. As I study the Scriptures and I study about what's going on, what I, what I, what I prepare to say is to, to come before you and just say a few things. God is for you that that God loves you and what he wants more than anything is to connect with you. Some of you don't know that, that relationship with Christ yet. You haven't stepped across what we call that line of salvation where you trust God with your entire life and you say, jesus, I recognize that you died for me, that something you did is for me, and that your death somehow means something to my life, that your death makes a difference in my eternity.

Some of you haven't stepped across that line of faith yet. You're kind of okay with it. You're familiar with that, but you haven't really gotten to that point. Some of you did that a long time ago. Some of you might have said, I never really did that.

I just always thought God and I were okay. But you never actually said, God, I want to entrust my life to you. Some of you have been living that life for a long time. We call it that reborn life where you're born again. Jesus was talking with one religious leader who actually started to get it, a guy named Nicodemus.

It's in John chapter three. And in that conversation is where we get that famous John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. They won't perish, but have eternal life. So you see, Jesus is talking with Nicodemus, and Nicodemus doesn't get it.

And he says, what do I need to do? What? I don't understand this whole thing that you're doing, Jesus. And Jesus says, you must be born again. Born anew, born afresh, born from above.

It's a spiritual rebirth. When you're spiritually reborn, what God's doing is he's taking you as you are. He doesn't reject you. He receives you. And he says, I want to give you new life.

That doesn't mean everything's going to be perfect. By the way, troubles and trials will still come. Many of us can testify to that. We'll still go through those problems. And yet when you.

When you submit your life in faith to God, he begins to do something in you, something that you could never accomplish on your own. He makes you into the person he created you to be, the person that, that. That you. You were created to be. That sin had gotten into your life and messed it up.

He says, no, I'm going to cleanse you of that sin. Because Christ died and he carried that sin to the cross so that sin is dead and can harm you no more. And now you're made new in Jesus Christ. See, the Scriptures tell us that today is the day of salvation, and today is the day to receive that. So I want to pray over you right now and then offer a closing benediction.

My prayer for you is that you would be walking in that faith, in that newness of life, and that if you haven't, that you would spend time talking to God about that today. And that if.