Text: Matthew 10:32–40
Topic: The shocking nature of Christ

• Illustration: Quicke describes students coming to chapel from a more spiritual perspective (i.e. carrying swords). 
• Matthew 10:32–40

• This is not the Jesus we know and love—the Jesus who speaks of family and of peace.
• How can such stern and horrid things come out of the mouth of Jesus?
• Is this a Semitic idiom—an overstatement or exaggerated language?
• Surely nobody should take swords and division and this kind of tension that seriously.
• If Jesus says this sort of thing, it means going to chapel is profoundly uncomfortable, and that's not right.
• But Jesus has the right to shock disciples with teaching we don't like to hear, because he's Lord.
• These words come in a challenge to disciples in Matthew 10 as they are being sent out into the world on a mission.
• This is Jesus uncensored.
• I think it's possible that we can construct a Christian faith that has become so comfortable, that it's a very long time since we've heard anything Jesus say that we disagreed with.
• But Jesus has the right to shock disciples with teaching they don't like to hear, because he is Lord.

• This passages contains the shock of peace.
• Jesus does not want, with this talk of swords, for you and me to be involved in creating conflict.
  • Matthew 5:39; Matthew 26:52
• Jesus isn't into sword swords, but he brings his peace into a hostile world.
• Whenever a great cause enters the world, people are divided for and against it.
• The greatest cause in the world is the Cross, and ever since that point where people understood that God calls them to account and provides a way for them in judgment in Christ, the world has been divided and has wanted to shut up that message—to shut it up and shut it down and shut it out!
• When Jesus calls people to seriously be disciples, he wants us—in the words of the apostle—to wear a helmet of salvation and wield the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
• We are called not to shut up and shut down and shut out, but to be a people who speak and stand for him.
  • Illustration: In Why Men Hate Going To Church, author David Murrow describes how the church has become bored because it's lost its sense of adventure.
  • Illustration: Quicke tells a story of his own realization that he had lost a sense of adventure in his witness.
• In a world that puts us on the defensive and would quiet us and shut us up and shut us out, Jesus calls for men and women to boldly take the sword.
• Jesus has the right to shock disciples with teaching they don't like to hear, because he is Lord.

• Jesus offers the shock of family, too.
• When he speaks about division, it's not that he will ever allow us to neglect our family.
  • Mark 7:9–13; 1 Timothy 5:18
• Jesus doesn't support the neglect of family, but he does speak out against people who have allowed the family to become so important that it has obscured who he is and what his kingdom is about.
  • Illustration: Quicke tells the story of Phillip, a convert who left his faith because of his mother's objections.
• Jesus is real, and other people don't seem to treat him as real, having other agendas and other suggestions and other priorities.
• But Jesus has the right to shock disciples with teaching they don't like to hear, because he is Lord.

• The shock of peace and the shock of family are both set in the context of a great shock about the end.
• When it comes to the end of the end—when it comes to speaking of heaven—we do find that language runs out.
• There will come a moment when all that we think is important will stop, and all the stuff about me that I really value will be as nothing.
• This relationship we have with Christ for eternity is impossible to describe; it's a place of greater reality than we've ever known before.
• It will turn out to be what it's all been about.
• In that intensity of holiness and glory, where you don't have to explain yourself anymore, somebody knows you through and through, and they love you in spite of that, because Jesus is Lord.
• Jesus will speak: Father, this is Michael, who acknowledged me before people. Father, I know him, and I love him.
• There is nothing else in all my life that is more important than that relationship and that acknowledgement.