GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD | Easter | Ben Anderson

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, good morning, everyone, and happy Easter. If we haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Ben Anderson, and I'm one of the pastors here, and it's so great to spend a little time with you this morning. Well, today we are going to bring our latest sermon series to a close, The Greatest Stories Ever Told. This is something we have been traveling through throughout Lent as we have been exploring these great stories, the parables of Jesus Christ, the greatest stories ever told by the greatest storyteller to ever walk the face of the earth. Now, the bad news is this is the last Sunday we're having this conversation. The good news is this once this service is done, it means that all of these sermons are available on demand for you. And so if you have a good time today and you're thinking, I feel like I missed out, don't worry. We have it available on our website. You can watch it on YouTube, pull it up on your big screen, just sit there and just binge watch just me for like hours, it'll be great. But truly, if you if you love this series, go ahead and uh use that as a resource for you. But today, for one last time, we are gonna step into one of these parables of Christ. And we're gonna find it in Luke 15. This is how it begins. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, This man welcomes sinners and eats with them. So before we get to the parable or the story that Christ taught, we step into the context of what he was experiencing in this moment of history. And we see two separate groups. We have the tax collectors and the sinners, and we have the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. So let me give you a feel for what these people were like. So, first of all, we have the tax collectors. Now, this is not like the IRS, even though I know that when I say the IRS, maybe some of you are like, ugh, especially during tax season, not big fans. The tax collectors were so much worse in the first century. You see, these were people, Jewish people, taking money from their very own people, the Jewish people, taking that money and bringing it to Rome, the subjugating nation, which of course empowered them financially to keep their boot on the throat of these people, which is bad. But it gets worse. You see, these people weren't forced into this role. They actually bid on the right to receive this opportunity, which is bad, but it gets worse. The reason why they did this is because Rome gave them the authority to charge above and beyond the taxes, and they could line their own pockets with it, which means they were getting rich off the backs of their brothers and sisters who are already subjugated by a nation, which is bad, but it gets okay, it doesn't get worse. Like that's is that's pretty bad though, right? And then we have the sinners. Now, these aren't just people who sin, like every single person in this room, of course, including myself. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the people who are actively engaging in sin, and not just any sin, but sin that even in that day was socially unacceptable. These were people like the public drunks, these were people like the prostitutes, these are people who are caught in adultery and just blew up their marriage. Right? This was socially unacceptable behavior. Now, to modernize this, this is the easy way to grab hold of this, is just think of all the people that you don't want around your kids, influencing your kids. All the types of people that you hope your kids never become. This is this category of people. But here's what's so amazing about this group of people. Where are they? It says they're gathering around Jesus. Which is so shocking. Because in my experience, and probably in your experience, when people are actively living in sin and counter to the ways of Christ, where do you typically not find them? In a church, near a pastor, or drawing near to Jesus. In fact, as a person who is a pastor, guess what I don't do? I don't go into the community, and when I introduce myself, my first thing is not to say, I'm Ben, I'm a pastor. Now, why don't I do that? Because right away I see people like they get very nervous, they bristle up, they put on this false veneer of who they are. They normally tell me the last time they've been to church for some reason. Like, I don't want that. I want the authentic version of who these people are. In fact, I see this most prominently when I do a wedding. Sometimes I'll say afterwards, I'll go to the reception, I get assigned to some poor table who doesn't know the pastor's gonna sit with them. And I'm sitting there and I see them walking up, they've got like two mixed drinks in their hands, they're all excited to celebrate. They look at me and they're thinking, this guy looks familiar. And I can just watch their mind working. They're like, is it a family member? Is it a friend? It's the pastor. And they're like, they're like tucking their drinks behind, we're sitting at the table, they're like holding their coat out, drinking like this, I'm like, like I care, you know, it's like doesn't bother me, but people who are falling into things or behaving in ways that they feel like is not acceptable to Jesus tend to avoid Jesus. So why are these people who are doing these things that even the world says are not acceptable, why are they drawing near to Christ? What makes him so magnetic? Well, first of all, he gives them value. He treated them as people who were people of value when the rest of the world was not. Because that's how that's how Christ sees every single person as somebody with value. No matter what you've done, what you're doing, what you're gonna do in the future, no matter what other people think about you, he sees you as somebody with value. And they drew near to near to him because not only that, but because he showed them love. Now, what this doesn't mean is blind acceptance to their behavior. He loved them too much to leave them in their mess. He loved them enough to tell them the truth. In fact, he would draw the people who are struggling with alcoholism, right? The drunks, he would draw them in and say, Look, I get it, I get how you got here. Your life has been hard, and this is your coping mechanism. This is how you take the edge off, right? I get all that, but if you keep doing this, if you keep behaving in this way, this is what's gonna happen. You're gonna destroy your health, you're gonna destroy your liver, you're gonna blow up your marriage, you're gonna blow up your job, you're gonna get your license taken away. I want to invite you into something better. Or the prostitutes. I get it, right? You need to make some money, and maybe you're making some good money behaving in this way, but if you keep doing this, you're gonna find nothing but emptiness, anxiety, depression. You might end up with a disease that you cannot come back from. I want to invite you into something better. These were people who were drawing near to Jesus because they knew they had messed up their life and they would do anything, anything to go back in time and undo their choices. So they hung on his every word. Then there's the other group of people, the Pharisees and the teachers. Now, to quickly modernize this, these are all the people that you wish your kids would hang out with, be mentored by, be coached by, and hopefully become. In fact, the term Pharisee came from a phrase meaning separated ones. These were people who avoided sinful behavior, and they avoided people who were sinful. They did not even hang out with these people. And we see them drawing near Jesus, but it's shocking how they respond to Christ. They don't draw near to learn. What do they draw near to do? Well, they draw near to criticize. It says this this man, this is their statement, this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. You see, they didn't understand what Christ was doing, why Christ would associate with these people. Now, to be fair, in that culture, if you would eat with somebody or dine with somebody or welcome somebody into your home, the implication was that you approved of everything that they did. But is that what Jesus is doing? Of course not. Of course he's not approving of all this behavior. In fact, you guys remember Zacchaeus? He was a tax collector. If you grew up in church, you know the song? Zacchaeus was uh You said it, I didn't say it. I didn't say that. It's 2026, guys. We can't say that anymore. I grew up in the 90s, we sung that song. Zacchaeus was a wee little man. But the story of Zacchaeus is amazing. Shorter gentleman, climbs up a tree, wants to see Jesus. He makes his way through, hoping to catch a glimpse of this rabbi. But he gets so much more. Jesus looks up and says, I'm coming to your house tonight and we're gonna have dinner. This massive honor, this massive scandal. He makes his way into Zacchaeus' house, and in the end, what is the response of this tax collector? Well, he says, I'm gonna give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I've ever cheated somebody, I'm gonna give them back four times more than what I ever took from them. You see, Jesus is so clear about sin. He's so clear about the consequences of sin. He's clear on how to get out of the mess of sin. And he wants to be clear on how he treats people who are caught in sin. And so he told this story. Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn't he leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? Now, a couple of things. If your mind works like mine, you're probably caught on a couple details of the story, and I want to just kind of get over that really quickly. When we see the open field, it doesn't mean that the shepherd left and left 99 sheep unattended in the open wilderness to be attacked by wolves, to be stolen. That's not what's happening. They're in a safe, protected pasture. Also, when the story was told, there's an implication that the shepherd lost the sheep. Of course, that's not what's happening. It's not because the shepherd was incompetent or failed. That's not what's taking place. The sheep, well, it runs away. Kind of like when I come home and I lay my keys at some random spot.

unknown 11:17

Right?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

My keys are not running away. I have lost my keys. Oftentimes I wake up in the morning and I blame everyone in my family for moving my keys, which they didn't. Right? That's me losing my keys, but that's not what's happening here. This is something else. This is like me going to my kids and saying, You can't go to the park unless I'm with you, unless I give you permission, unless you're with somebody I trust. But yet they open up the garage door, they walk out of my house, and they go and play in the park because their friend is there and their parents, you know, they didn't care, and so they went off. Like, this is what is happening here. The sheep ran away from the shepherd. So let's talk about sheep. Actually, let's not do that because I don't know anything about sheep. And likely you don't either, but I bet you know uh a thing or two about pets. Maybe we have some cat people here or some dog people here. Now I'll tell you I'm a dog person. If you're a cat person that upsets you, just take my story and turn it into a cat. Like we're we'll be okay. Now, when my wife and I first got married, we actually had three dogs. Now, I know what you're thinking, that's not a big deal. Like over the course of a lifetime, three dogs. No, we had three dogs at one time. Now, how do we get here? How do we get to this obviously unwise decision of having so many dogs at the same time? Well, when we first got married, my wife and I didn't have a lot of money, and so we were always looking for creative ways to have cheap dates, and so we'd make our way to McDonald's. And this is back in the day when you could go to McDonald's to get any size fountain drink for a dollar. You guys remember these days? These were good days. And that was super cheap, so I wouldn't even put ice in it. I didn't want to water it down. We would share one soda, and then we'd go to the Humane Society, and we'd just look at the dogs. This is our free date. Well, apparently we did this a lot because at one point in time someone came up to us and said, Hey, little secret, we're gonna have some baby Australian shepherds that are about to be born and they need a home. If you want one of them, this is the date they're gonna show up. This is when we open, come an hour early and wait in line. So we put it on our calendar. We were very excited to get our very own happy Australian shepherd, so cute. So we waited and we waited and we waited. We got there an hour early, the doors opened, we walked inside, we asked about these Australian shepherds, and they said, sorry, we released them early, they're all gone. We were devastated. So we walked around all the kennels looking to see if there was a dog that could fill that void in our heart, and we found this tiny little what we thought was a little baby black lab. And so we took it out, it was so cute, climbed up my arm, sat on my shoulders, I mean, won my heart instantly. We brought it home, we named it Alexi, found out later it wasn't a little black lab, it was a chihoueni, which is a combination of a chihuahua and a wiener dog. Little surprise. And we treated that dog like it was our child. We brought it everywhere. But something we learned about that dog right away is that it loved to run away. I mean, it did not want to stay with us, it wanted to run. We would put it in the kennel, we would leave for the day. One day it broke out of the kennel and tried to dig its way out of my bedroom. My landlord, not super pleased about that. Another day we were bringing it with us, and we went to Target, it got out of the car, ran around the parking lot for over an hour, finally made its way into Target. Of course, you know what it did. Ran to a complete stranger that does not love it, picked it up, handed it back to us. Another day, my wife was taking our dog on a walk, broke free from its leash, ran into a football game. Not like a backyard with your family on Thanksgiving. No. Big people, in pads, referees, official field, scoreboard, fans, there's my dog darting in and out of this. Now, luckily, I was not there. My wife had to deal with this embarrassment by herself. But our dog would run away and run away and run away until one magical day. We were visiting my dad, and he has this little ranch where he has some horses and some cattle. And of course, if you want to keep them at bay, you've got to have electrical fences. My dog got loose, ran out, thought the horses would be fun to play with, ran into the electrical fence. Instantly, we had the best dog on the world. Never misbehaved, never ran away again. In fact, so good that we thought it needs a friend. We went back to the Humane Society, walked around, found one that looked just like our dog, but a different color, brought it home, named it Ricky. That dog loved to play, fetch. It was a fighter, and every once in a while it also liked to flee. Well, after you have two, you kind of sit down and you're like, well, we're good, right? There's no way we will get another dog. But we still love to go to the main society, and so we made our way in there. Of course, beforehand, we did the talk. No dogs, no more dogs, no more dogs. Walked in, inside this kennel was this brand new little white chihuahua puppy, so cute. Its name was Ashley. Now, a little backstory. My wife's name is Ashley. Then we looked at the birth date, January 26th. More backstory. My wife's birthday is January 26th. It felt like God was shining a light from heaven on this kennel saying, This is the this is the only option you have, you gotta bring it home. We brought it home. Now, to be clear, we did change the name. That'd be super weird to say Ashley and not know if my dog was gonna show up or my wife. But we brought that dog home and we loved all three dogs. But you know what? Never one time when one of them would run away, did we sit down and say, We still have two? We're good. We'll just let it go. I mean, it's fine. Every single time, what do we do? We chased that dog down because we loved those dogs. Which brings us to Easter. What is the story of Easter? Jesus Christ coming to the earth, not because of a lost sheep, not because of a lost dog, but because of lost souls. He got into the muck and grime of our lives, our realities, living with us, living the perfect life, dying on the cross for our sins, and then overcoming death and the grave. So we could trust in every single thing that he said and that he taught. Because he proved himself by overcoming something that grabs every one of us the power of death. See, Christ died on the cross for you and for me. Knowing what we've done in the past, knowing what we're currently doing, knowing what we'll do in the future. He died on the cross for you and for me, knowing how we've responded to him in the past, knowing how we've responded to him in the present, and how we'll respond to him in the future. The Bible says it this way, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Now notice this. What does this Bible verse say? Who did God love? It's the world. Pharisees, the teachers of the law, tax collectors, sinners, every single person is given value and loved no matter what they've done, no matter what they're doing, no matter what they're going to do. And what does he want to give to these people? It says eternal life. If you believe in Christ, if you trust in Christ, if you follow Christ, that changes your life and it will change your eternity. He will lead you exactly where you are supposed to go. So let's take this Easter story and let's take this parable and bring them together by asking a couple questions this morning. One is, who are you in the story? Who are you in the story that Christ has told? Are you the shepherd? Are you the 99? Or are you the one? And I hate to break it to you, but every single person in this room, we are the one. Every single person in this room, of course, including myself, has walked away from the pasture of our shepherd. But despite this, what is the message of the story? Every single time that we do that, have done that, that we've done that in the past, the shepherd will chase us down. So the question is this how can we be found? And the answer is simple. Stop running. For anyone who's had a dog, run away. You kind of know how frustrating this is. Because they're agile and they're quick and they're fast, they're far faster than us. You cannot catch them. In fact, if you've ever lost a dog, you know once you get close and you think you're about to catch them, they just keep going. They think they're playing the game. The only way that you can catch a dog is by waiting for them to stop running. And for some of you today, it's time to stop running. I don't know what's holding you back. Maybe it's a fear of punishment. You've bought into this false idea that if God catches me, he's gonna punish me for everything that I've done, but that's not what the story says. That's not what the shepherd does. Maybe it's a fear of giving up control. After all, you figure it out. If I follow Jesus, if I go here, then I'm gonna leave some stuff behind. A lot of stuff that I've enjoyed, a lot of stuff. That for most of my life has given me comfort and security. Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a lifestyle, maybe it's an addiction. Stuff that in the moment it felt good, but now you're starting to feel because it always ends up this way. You're feeling the messiness of those choices. Or maybe it's lingering doubts about Jesus. Because you had that thing go on in your life, and you prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed that God would show up, and He didn't show up, at least in the way that you expected. And now you have these lingering doubts. Or maybe you went to college and you had that professor and he was so smart and so brilliant. And you wanted to be just like him. And as the semester went on, you learned quickly that he didn't believe in God. And if he's the smartest person that you've ever encountered, and he didn't believe in God, well then maybe you shouldn't believe in God. Or maybe it's just this. When you look at the story of Easter of Christ coming back from the dead, proving he was who he said he was, giving you the opportunity to live forever, you think, well, it's just it's just too good to be true. And if that's the case, well then it must not be true. But here's the reality just because something is good doesn't mean that it's not true. In fact, if something is good, isn't it worth pursuing to see if maybe it's true? In fact, people have been doing this for thousands of years, pursuing truth wherever it leads, and in the end, they find Jesus. One of those people was a gentleman by the name of Josh Timman. And Josh was raised in the Christian faith, but as he stepped into being a young adult, he got exposed to the writings of Richard Dawkins. Now, if you're not familiar with Richard Dawkins, he's a famous, famous atheist. He's written a number of books, and his life mission is to eradicate the earth in his mind of the false belief of God and ultimately religion. Well, Josh was so impacted by him, he started researching him and learning more about him. In fact, he he saw that Richard did not have a website, and so he emailed him and said, Hey, would you be open to me building you a website? And he got a shocking response.

unknown 24:32

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Dawkins said, Yeah, that would be great. He started building this relationship and partnership with him. He built the websites, he manufactured the documentaries for him, and he partnered with him to travel the world, spreading the message that there is no God and that all religions are false. Well, as the years went on, Josh felt this emptiness. There was something in his new worldview that just couldn't answer the questions about life that he was experiencing, and he got to this point of desperation when they were traveling in Texas for one of their conferences. He made his way to a cowboy church, which, by the way, sounds awesome. He walked into this cowboy church, he encountered Christ, he started re-examining his faith, testing the historicity of Jesus Christ to see if it was true. And after all that, what did he do? He stopped running and he got scooped up by the shepherd. Which brings us to the end of Christ's story. This is what it says. And when he, the shepherd, finds it, the sheep, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, Rejoice with me. I have found my lost sheep. I tell you that in the same way, there'll be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to repent. When the shepherd finds the sheep, what does he do? Does he hit it? Say, Don't ever do that again? Does he scold it? Say, What is wrong with you? Does he wrap a rope around his neck and drag it back to where he's supposed to be so it can feel the pain along the way and never do that again? That's not what happens at all. The shepherd reaches down, picks up the sheep that's finally stopped running, puts it on his shoulders, and walks it back home. But it doesn't end there. What does he do? He throws a huge party. Because what was lost has now been found. I believe today that God wants to throw a party for everyone in this room. Maybe it's stepping back in line with what Christ wants for your life. Maybe it's re-engaging with faith. Maybe it's beginning that relationship with God for the first time today. And if you do any of those things, guess what's going to happen in heaven? They're going to throw the best party that we have ever seen. But if you're not ready for that, maybe for you today, it's just a matter of finally thinking, you know, it's this is actually good news. And just because it's good doesn't mean it's not true. And so I'm going to begin at least examining it, thinking about it, talking with somebody about it. Maybe that person that invited you here today. And I'm telling you, even when you do that, begin to open yourself up to Christ, they start prepping the party for you. You see, that shepherd in the story is Jesus. The one who died on the cross for your sins, who overcame death and the grave, he rose back to life. And that, that moment, that life that he lived for each and every person in here, the story of Christ, that is the greatest story ever told. And he wants you to be a part of that story. And all you have to do is stop running. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this time to gather, to celebrate something that feels too good to be true. That God would get in the mess and the muck with us because he loved us, because he valued us so much, no matter what we've done, what we're doing, what we're going to, would die on the cross for our sins and ultimately come back to life, proving that everything that he said was true and points to the fact that he can bring us back to life as well when that day comes to be a part of his kingdom, to be in a relationship with him forever. So, Lord, for everyone in this room, I pray that every one of us just simply stop running and experience the loving embrace of our Savior. Praise in Christ's mighty name. Amen.