Pastor Ralph Douglas West - As One With Authority - Matthew 21:23-27

0:23 Matthew 23 is a continuation of our Lord as he reveals himself as the royal king and king of kings. Thank you. You're there? Matthew 21. Somebody was at 8 o'clock trying to act like that got insight on something.

1:29 You know, it doesn't matter, some guys are gonna always try to act like they know more than you. You want the Bible to preach the thing too? Commencing at verse 23 in Matthew 21, it's one of the great encounters that Jesus will have. Hear what our Lord says to a group of people that wanted to interrogate him. Jesus entered the temple courts and while he was teaching, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him.

2:29 by what authority are you doing these things? They ask him. Or who gave you this authority? Jesus replied, I will also ask you one question. If you answer me, I'll tell you by what authority I'm doing these things.

2:55 John's baptism. where did it come from was it from heaven or was it from human origin They discussed in among themselves and said, if we say from heaven, he'll ask, then why didn't you believe John? But if we say of human origin, we are afraid of the people, for they all hold that John was a prophet.

3:36 They answered Jesus. We all know. And he said, neither will I tell you what authority I am doing these things. This is the word of God. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. as one with authority She had been battling this whole call that she had heard almost all of her life. the great, great, great granddaughter of a Virginian Baptist preacher deep in the South at the early years of the turn of the 20th century.

4:42 But women are not supposed to preach are the words that Annie Davis muttered to herself and grappled with that very issue for more than 40 years of her life until she ran up against a sickness that pinned her to the bed and she said at a point of desperation, Lord, if you get me up, I will do what you called me to do. She enrolled in Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. She then would become a member of Watts Church where she was instructed to go on August 9, 1967.

5:33 Watts Baptist Church invited her to come and stand in the pulpit and she became the first ordained woman of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is 1967. Watts would also be one of the few white churches

5:55 that would be heavily involved in the civil rights issues. 1967, in North Carolina, hot bedded time, SNCC is on the move in Mississippi, freedom rides, rights, rights for black men and women who have been marginalized. King's popularity is waning. Black power is on the rise. SNCC is in control. It's a time with a lot of issues. So why would anybody be worried about who was going to preach God's gospel In a time where there was so much turbulence in the world Well, I guess by your response, it's because you too don't believe that certain people have a certain right to answer God's call.

7:05 Here's the problem with call. All your life, if you're a Christian, and if you grow up Baptist, nobody can out-call Baptist. Baptists call you to everything It is one of the characteristic distinctions Of what it means to be denominational A Baptist called And then when you say God has called me It causes a conflict Yeah, I really thought that you were further along than you are this morning. So this is going to be a hard sermon to preach. I see now why you sisters have a rough time in this church, because our congregation don't believe that you've been called.

8:08 Well, that's how it is when you answer God's call. Very few people believe it. And that's what happened in Matthew 21. When Jesus had gone to the temple a couple of days after he had rolled into Jerusalem and he was standing where Sly Stone said with the everyday people and talking to them about these things. You don't have to be a deep thinker to know what these things are if you're a careful reader of the scripture. The things that Jesus was talking about are the things that Jesus had been talking about since you first met him on the first pages of the gospel.

9:03 Namely, he had been discussing the content of the kingdom of God. And how God had come into the world through Jesus Christ to set those who were broken and those who were blind to give them vision and to set the captives free. But what he was preaching was not as troubling to them at this moment as who gave him the right to do it. Do you ever think about that? Versus just taking it at surface value. How did Jesus come to this moment in history where he would go into the temple courts with the everyday people? Where the women would be? Where the people who would be merchandising their wares would be? I think about it sometimes how he got there.

9:58 And I think he may have arrived at this place in chapter 21 When you look back on a day, his bar mitzvah His mom and daddy had taken him to Jerusalem He was going to be presented, he had been catechized He was going to be presented as a young man He was going to enter into society His mother and father were heading back to the ghettos of Nazareth And they finally looked up and said, that boy is not with us They would turn around and go back to Jerusalem And of all the places he would be He would be sitting down talking to the religious thinkers They were impressed by how much he knew He knew much more than they did They just accredited that he is one of those prodigies A kid who has a high IQ A genius His mother said, Jesus, we got to get home You know your daddy got to get up early in the morning got to work in the carpenter's shop, and Jesus said something, Mama, I must be about my father's business.

11:04 She said, Barth, you don't get yourself over here. and they made their way back home. Those of you who have experienced God's call, not to preach, maybe to teach,

11:26 maybe to be an usher, a greeter, or maybe a call that's not in the traditional sense, but you've been called to care for young men, young women, to mentor them, to shape them. You know something about call.

11:47 A school teacher and I were in conversation recently. She said to me, ooh, I don't know if I could do what you do. I don't know. I said, what do you do? I knew what she did. she said, I'm a teacher. She said, woo, uh-uh. You have to referee too much between eight and three in the afternoon. I said, why do you do it? She said, I feel like it's a calling. That's what I mean. Something that is so arresting that you have to do it. And if you don't do it, then you know that you're not fulfilling what God has called you to be. and that's not always on a big stage. That's not always being the preacher. That's not always directing the choir.

12:41 Sometimes it's blending your voice in to the chorus. Calling. And Jesus is there and I don't think he ever got that out of his head. I must be about my father's business. That's another way of saying that one day you're going to speak in this temple. and then Jesus 18 years later we see him in his itinerant ministry just moving around and he's teaching and I think periodically whether he's on the hillside giving a sermon on the mount or maybe down in the valley giving his sermon on the plain that kept coming to him one day you're going to preach in the temple on a boat in the distant horizon.

13:39 That's the direction of Jerusalem. One day you're going to preach in the temple. I don't think it ever got away from him that one day you're going to be in the temple preaching. He opens his ministry coming to the temple. He closes his ministry at the temple and he never gets it out of his conscience that one day you'll be in the temple preaching. and he's doing that now. And now that he's fulfilling his call, call, that is, that's what they call us. We are the call of God. For those of you who are not familiar with Bible language, church language, that's not old time. It has not tradition. That ain't the stuff where you say, well, that's why I don't go to church because they use no more words. That's a word that if you don't know, if you don't know that word, then you don't know who you are by Christian identity.

14:32 You are called, maybe not to preach or teach, but you are called into fellowship, called into relationship, called into life with God, called to God. And Jesus is called to do what he's doing. And the first thing that these people are questioning is the question of authority. and so when they see Jesus, this delegation of religionists come to him, so when you read verse 23, and you see he's in the temple courts, and he's teaching, he's preaching, in that same verse, it describes the people who come to him, they are the professional religionists, that's not a bad word, you need them, we depend on them for many things, to help us to grow properly as a Christian.

15:31 We need that. Stop letting people make you feel bad. Some of you drop out of church. Oh, y'all go to church. Where the, where the, where, where? You know Well, your pastor got good sense.

15:55 Don't feel bad. I do what I do out of my calling but also because of them old people in my old home church that put their nickels and dimes together to help send me to school and they said now you go get an education and don't you get too big that you forget where you come from and once you learn what you learn you come back and tell us what you learned so we can know better. Stop letting people make you feel bad because you got good sense. My grandson wants to play football. I said, it's more to catching and running.

16:49 You have to learn the game. You have to learn the rules of the game. If you can learn the rules of baseball and basketball and learn the rules of volleyball and table tennis, Don't you want to learn the rules of Christian life so you can be more productive as being a believer in Jesus Christ?

17:14 That's what Jesus was doing that day. He's in the courtyard and he's teaching. And that disturbed the religious professionals. This is not slight on them. Because again, they are religious professionalists. They are religious aristocrats. Aristocrats, that might be a little off-putting. They're formulists. They're structuring how we're supposed to grow. These are good words.

17:45 But you have to be careful because sometimes you can allow good to get in the way of the best. They have been missing all along for three years the whole purpose of Jesus coming on the planet Earth. So when you read the Bible and you meet Jesus early in his ministry, crowds of people around him. Crowds of people around him now because this is Passover feast. But like Martin Luther King, when he got into like 1967, all the people that used to be around him, they start shying away. Now that he's been assassinated and memorialized Everybody was on the train now because nobody can fact check you. But at that time, people had walked away.

18:42 And so now people walked away from Jesus. But a crowd is there. This is Passover. This is Easter Sunday. Everybody's showing up. You get the point. And they had only one question. And they asked him, by what authority do you do these things? What things are they asking?

19:06 By what authority do you ride in on the back of a donkey? And the children parade around you in this strange parade and they say, Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna. Hosanna in the name of the Lord, of he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna. They knew what that meant. You know what it means now. save now Lord. They said, are they giving him kingly honor or are they calling him something more than a king? who gave you the authority to teach on these things? You know what things they are.

19:50 The things that he did when he came to Jerusalem that day and he went over to the temple and he walked into the temple and turned tables upside down in the temple and said, and listen to what the language he used. He said, this is the Lord's house. This is supposed to be a house of prayer. You turn my house, don't miss that, into a dinner thing. My house? And in the Greek New Testament, when you read this, the word authority in this verse 23 implies that Jesus was operating in the temple as if the temple actually was his house to do in it whatever he wanted to do. And so he's running around in his house.

20:47 Come here for a minute Because you know more about this than what I That you let on to You're saying this doesn't relate to me Yes it does How many of you have finally got your own house or apartment Just hold your hand I'm just asking Okay good How many of you have furnished that thing Good good How many of you still paying for some of the stuff you furnished in it Alright Now the point is is that imagine somebody just show up at your house and apartment, your condominium, where you have paid for the furniture, and this is your first month free to celebrate that I do not owe a payment on this furniture.

21:48 And somebody comes in that you're trying to get a security system put in your house, and while they're talking they just put their big dusty feet on your table. Oh, I can tell you'll just say that's all right. Well, you nicer than me. I'm going to say, if you don't get your... When Jesus came to the temple and started turning tables over and pigeons are flying and doves are all over the place and he's kicking things around and he says, how dare you do my house like this? Wait a minute. We know you're a carpenter. we understand that you know about working with brick and stone, but you wasn't here when we were building this temple.

22:48 Jesus said, better than that, I'm going to destroy the temple, and in three days, I'm going to build a temple over there. He said, he's out of his mind. He's using metaphor now.

23:08 The temple he's speaking of. I'm going to tear down, die on the cross. But in three days, Friday, Saturday, I'm going to get up. and so he says that's my house that you desecrated and dishonored that's my house children be thankful you got modern family you didn't grow up like some of these people in here because they can tell you touching the wrong piece of furniture in a church could cost you arm and leg

24:00 I remember preaching at Little Union Missionary Baptist Church. That's Sherita's home church. They down in the hood. And I went to the sophisticated church in Fifth Ward.

24:22 And so we were there for an afternoon program. and Ralph was leaning on the Lord's table one of them mothers came over there if you don't get yourself so he's looking at me I said what happened what did he do that boy had his hand on the Lord's I get boy if you don't get yourself I joined here and started beating it myself I don't know. By what authority do you have to do this? that's the nature of authority they just wanted to know but but it moves to another level and they wanted to know the source of the thought where did it come from how did you gain it And that's a hard question for you and I to answer when you think about authority and where it comes from.

25:44 C.S. Lewis was a great 20th century Christian thinker and Lewis comes to Jesus late in life. He knew of Christ early and when he watched the death of his mother dying of cancer it so shattered him that he became an atheist.

26:18 And he became friends with Charles Williams and another one, J.R.R. Tolkien. They became the Inklings. They wrote together at Oxford. And one night, Tolkien and Williams just told him to read the scriptures. And he's reading through the scriptures. The next morning, he goes to the park to walk around. He goes one way going, but he comes back a brand new creature. and all the way he could describe what happened to him was the word surprised by joy some of you know exactly that you didn't have a dramatic experience no lights were flashing no lightning but when you truly met christ in conversion or reconversion or recommitment something was so altered in your life that you knew that you were different now than you were when you got up that morning calling.

27:32 Call! Lewis goes on to help us on how does that explain the source of authority? There are some things that you know because you know. One of the first big words I learned as a religion student in college was epistemology. I like that word. Epistemological. This is an epistemological argument. And so I described this because I told you,

28:21 my home church told me, now you go get education, don't you get beside yourself, that you come back home and you teach us what you learned at that school. So I thought this would be a good day to use epistemology. And so they asked me, I said, that sounds like an epistemological argument. And so I described it, and a mother at the church, she said, well, you might say, well, I didn't get it. She said, oh, I know exactly what he's saying. That word means, I know that I know that I know, because I know it.

29:18 And for those of you that don't know it, that's exactly what it means. I could have just stayed right there at the church and learned that and didn't have to say anything of epistemology because she summed it up. It's when you have encountered God in such a way that when people are asking you to describe your experience with God, you say, I can't explain it. I just know that I know that I know that I know that I've been born again. I'm almost three. Jesus says, let me take that further then. And so he takes that question of nature and source and asks, how do you know? Jesus said, well, I'll tell you that.

30:14 Now, I didn't say this. This is, you got to watch these people who are around you. Because I wouldn't say something like this about Jesus. but Mike Mitchell, my security, and Jewel, after the sermon, called Jesus petty. Yeah, they did. You know Jewel, didn't they?

30:39 And Jewel said, that's right. Jesus is being petty. Well, I hate to give them credit this morning, but if you can say it in a sanctified way, Jesus has been pretty persnicketing. at this moment. And this is all he says, John's baptism.

31:06 Where did it come from? And these religionists, because remember they're professionals, they're smart. They said, don't you jump into that. how we answer, we're determined. How the people look at us. If we say, well, John's baptism, is it from heaven or is it from human origin? And if we say, well, it's from heaven, then we call down self-condemnation on ourselves because when John came, we didn't receive his message. He said, I prepare the way of the one who comes. I make the road plain. I bring down the mountains and the crooked ways. I made straight and he who comes in the name of the Lord is coming to you and if we reject that then we'll say to them that we don't believe don't say that He said, well, let's say that it's of human origin.

32:03 Oh, don't do that. Because if we reject that the message comes from heaven, we say it's of human origin. You see these people here? These are people that recognize that John was God's voice, that it had been silenced for 400 years at the end of Malachi, and it opens up again publicly in the waters of Jordan. And John announced, he says, I heard that the wilderness is crying for a voice. And I am the voice that is crying in the wilderness. And if we say to them today, it is of human origin, they are going to stone us to death. So if you don't know how to answer, what do you do? Be quiet. But that's trouble too. So all of you here this morning that when the question of authority come up and you're trying to sneak out of it, but I'm not going to say nothing, condemn on you anyway.

33:07 That's what Jesus would say. They said, if we say nothing, then we reveal our incompetence, our ignorance. We got to say something. And this is what they said.

33:28 Let me see if I can find that right here. In this verse, sound like that's something they, that's what they said. We don't know. And you know what Jesus said? Neither will I tell you by what authority. Oh my goodness. Can I wrap this up? In verse 28 to verse 32, you notice in your Bibles that there is a story that Jesus tells a parable.

34:17 I always wanted to know how this parable worked. And that's why I was late coming in today. I said, how does this parable work? I can't get it. the parable is told in response to the questions.

34:40 And it's just simply this. It's one of those parables that just smacks you. There's a father, he had two sons. He's sending his sons out and they're going to go out and work in the field. So he says, you know, will you go out and work in the field? And the first son says what? I will not I will not matter of factly I will not I know every mother in here just said that's what you said so you got to put all yourself in the reading the scripture the only reason why the scripture boring to a lot of y'all because you're trying to read it as isolation you got to get in the story you got to say they better be glad that he's telling the story and you're reading this to your children and you say I want to get this clear so you don't never come to me say well mama the boy in the story told his bombing dad, I will not say that's in that story.

35:51 In this house when I say go, you better get up and go. You get in the feel of the texture now. Wait. So he says, I will not. But then he changed his mind and he says, I'll go. the father says to the second son who's reverent and loving and mannerable even uses those words sir, yes sir yes sir, I'll go but he doesn't go and the big issue is which one is the son? which one of these that goes down there? He said, which of the two did what the father wanted? They said, the first thing answered.

36:42 And Jesus says, you see, my teaching in the temple, don't miss, everything else rests on this last statement. My teaching in the temple is how you, you've been waiting as religious scholars, You've been preaching and writing and scribing for people, saying when the Messiah come, when the deliverer come, when the Savior come, you say, I'm going to do it.

37:12 Because you initially said, no, no, no, it's not this bull. It is not this calf. It is not, not, not. And now you're going to say, oh, I will. They said, but here's the strange thing. You function just like the second son. you would manner said yes Lord yes Lord whatever you want me to do you came down now you join church you said I give I give God my heart and a very moment that I asked you to do anything You said no. And then you criticize these people who come here with bad backgrounds. They come with baggage. You know something about them.

38:06 They used to dance at this club. And they used to be in this group. And they used to do this. And initially they said, God wouldn't want to do anything with a person like me. And then they turn around and say, Lord, I will. That's the authority I have. I have the authority, hear me now, because whoever in your ear can't help you now, they don't want you to know what it means to be free. Tell them we can talk about the game later. That ain't important. At last, I see my life that I have been told has been broken and ragged and distorted and not worth nothing and ain't nothing and all that because of what I am, what I believe, what I hold to.

39:08 And I'm hearing about a God that says, but I have come that you might have life and that you might have life and have it abundantly in me. I didn't ask you to do anything but to hear my call. I need a God like that.

39:30 And some of your children need a God like that. And some of your brothers and sisters need a God like that. And some of your husbands and wives and mothers and fathers need a God like that. I got to go back to it because I see you. You don't want to believe what I said. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just want to read it to you so you don't think I made it up. Because I'm looking at some of you saying that's too good to be true. There's no way. So let me just read it to you. This is my clothes. This is my hoop. I was going to back up and start hollering, but you started reading. So let me show you that I didn't make this up.

40:12 I'm done. This is my clothes. This is my invitation to. In fact, if y'all want to, as soon as I'm through reading, you can stand here and wait on the people. Here it is. What do you think? Two sons. You see it in verse 28. I didn't make it up. And then he says, which of these, verse 31, that the father wanted? Which of the two did what the father wanted him to do? What did it say? The first.

40:40 And here's my part. This was what I was saying. Jesus said to them, in fact, you might want to read this with me. especially those of you who say, Pastor Wes, I don't believe God could love me like that. You don't know what people have assigned to me. I want you to hear what God says from his word. We don't have to yell it out. Just read it with me so you can hear it yourself and not just my voice. Let's read it together. Jesus said to them, truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

41:39 Don't be the group. Hang around the church and the temple all your life and always looking for an excuse not to repent and to believe. Accept God's grace today and just simply say, Lord, I don't know how you're going to do it, but I thank you that you love me enough that you sent Jesus Christ.