Wild Obedience

Amen.

You can be seated. Well, good morning. My name is James Sutton. I am the aforementioned geeky pastor. The force be with you? I don't know. It is a joy to gather on this Sunday after Christmas and I'm very excited to be preaching this morning.

Several months ago we began a new series. You may not know this if you're visiting. I'll just explain it real briefly. Jeff has his sermon series and I have mine. We kind of came to this arrangement about a year ago. I did a series called James on James—cause I'm James—and it was on the book of James. Jeff does his series. Jeff's been in Deuteronomy preaching through Deuteronomy and I started a series a couple months ago called Prophets Gone Wild. Do you remember that? Some of you might have been here. You'd remember that. It's a memorable title.

I mentioned in the introduction of the first sermon—which has been a while—we looked at Isaiah 6, Isaiah's calling. I was concerned that this might be the sermon series that gets me fired. Because the premise is essentially this: I think that we as evangelical Christians in America struggle with knowing how to speak prophetically into our world, into the context that we find ourselves in. There's debate amongst Christians right now about exactly how to do that. Should we be really bold in speaking truth or should we be winsome and reconciliatory? And spoiler alert, I'm not going to say that we should be either one or the other. I think we should be both of those things. But I do think that looking at the Old Testament prophets helps us to understand our prophetic calling.

Understanding the Prophetic Calling

The Old Testament and the New Testament are clear that if you are in Jesus Christ, you are a prophet. That's one thing that I think we often forget as Christians.

Joel chapter two talks about a time when all of God's people, men, women, young and old, would speak God's word. They would dream dreams and have visions and proclaim the truth of God.

And then in Acts chapter two, we saw the realization of that. Peter—Pentecost had happened—he goes out to the people. They start speaking in tongues. Everybody thinks they're drunk. And Peter says, "Hey, just so you know, we're not drunk. This is the fulfillment of Joel 2. We are actually now proclaiming God's word. We are all prophets."

And we who are followers of Christ are all prophets. That's one thing that I think we forget—we forget that we have a prophetic calling as believers. We are meant to be prophets to this world. All of us. Not just Jeff or James, the geeky pastor. All of us are.

Another thing that I think we forget is that we misunderstand what the prophetic role is. We tend to think of prophets as fortune tellers or those who tell the future. But prophets are covenantal lawyers. They represent God to his people. When you read the Old Testament, the prophets are always coming to God's people, particularly to the kings of God's people, asking them to repent and warning them of their covenant unfaithfulness and the impacts of that.

So they are predicting the future in some regard. In the same way that an attorney who shows up at your house that you're renting—right, after you haven't paid rent for months—predicts that you will be evicted if you don't return to your side of the bargain and start paying for your rent. So that's what a prophet is: someone who represents God in his covenant to his people. They're not just fortune tellers. They're not just future tellers. And so I think Christians are confused about that.

I think there are some Christians that's what they think they're called to do. They go out and make these wild bold predictions about the future that they have no business making, which of course ultimately reveal themselves to not be from God because they don't come true. Christians have a long history of doing that. But that's another confusion that we have about prophecy.

A few months ago, we looked at Isaiah's calling and I made the point that in Isaiah's call, he had this incredible encounter with God. He was overwhelmed and entered into this kind of majestic situation of worship. And he thought, "Woe is me for I'm a man of unclean lips and here I am in the throne room of God. I should be killed, right, for being here."

And then God brings an angel to put coal on his lips, cauterizes his mouth, cleanses him, and allows him to stay. And he's so excited about that.

And then God says, "Hey, who am I gonna send as a messenger?" And Isaiah is so excited, says, "Send me. I'll go." And he says, "Great. You're in. Get out there and go tell them. Go tell them all of the things that I want you to tell them, but guess what? None of them are gonna listen to you. None of them are gonna listen to you."

I think another misconception that we have about prophecy is that it's about our effectiveness. Are we actually going to get people to listen to us? Is the goal really to achieve some number? Is that what we're trying to do? No. It's very clear. God isn't so concerned with that. He's concerned with Isaiah's heart. And Isaiah's proclamation of a message that no one would hear was ultimately an act of worship. He stayed in the throne room. He was overwhelmed by the majesty of who God was and even though no one listened to him, he didn't care because he was caught up in the glory of what that looked like.

From that encounter, that sermon was called the wild calling. I now wanna talk about wild embodiment. What it looks like to live as a prophet. And our text today, it's not very Christmassy and I apologize, but you know, that's not our style. Comes from Ezekiel chapter four.

And so we're gonna look at Ezekiel, a prophet who very similar to Isaiah had an amazing encounter with God. If you wanna read it, it's in Ezekiel one. I think Journey wrote a song about it, "Wheel in the Sky." But that's not our text. We're going to look instead at how Ezekiel came with his message.

So this is Ezekiel four. Rather than all of you reading it with me, I'm just gonna read it this morning if that's okay. This is a long text, and I think that'll just be easier. And I think it's interesting enough to hold your attention. So here we go.

Now you, son of man, take a brick, set it in front of you, and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege against it. Construct a siege wall, build a ramp, pitch military camps, and place battering rams against it on all sides. Take an iron plate and set it up as an iron wall between yourself and the city. Face it so that it is under siege and besiege it and this will be a sign to the house of Israel. Then lie down on your left side and place the iniquity of the house of Israel on it. You will bear their iniquity for the number of days you lie on your side. For I have assigned for you the years of their iniquity according to the number of days you lie down, three hundred and ninety days. So you'll bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. When you have completed these days, lie down again on your right side and bear the iniquity of the house of Judah. I have assigned you forty days a day for each year. Face the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared and prophesy against it. Be aware that I will put cords on you so that you cannot turn from side to side until you have finished the days of your siege. Also, take wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet, and spelt. Put them in a single container and make them into bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the number of days you lie on your side, three ninety days. The food you eat each day will weigh eight ounces. You will eat it at set times. You will also drink a ration of water, a sixth of a gallon, which you will drink at set times. You will eat it as you would a barley cake and bake it over dried human excrement in their sight. The Lord said, this is how the Israelites will eat their bread, ceremonially unclean among the nations where I will banish them. But I said, "Oh Lord God, I've never been defiled from my youth until now. I have not eaten anything that died naturally or was mauled by wild beasts and impure meat has never entered my mouth." He replied to me, "Look, I'll let you use cow dung instead of human excrement. And you can make your bread over that." And he said to me, "Son of man, I'm going to cut off the supply of bread to Jerusalem. They will anxiously eat their food. They have weighed out and in dread drink rationed water. For lack of bread and water, everyone will be devastated and waste away because of their iniquity." — Ezekiel 4

Merry Christmas. Let's pray.

Lord God, this is perhaps a difficult passage for us to consider, especially today. And I pray that you would give us attentive minds and hearts, and that you would speak through this, that you would use this passage to reveal your truth to us. And Lord, you would bring us face to face with Jesus who is very much in this passage. And that Lord, through that encounter, we like Isaiah and like Ezekiel and like all of your prophets would be changed and transformed and empowered to go out and be prophets in your name. We pray this. Amen.

Alright. I have three points that I wanna consider. I wanna look at Ezekiel. I wanna look at Christ, and then I wanna bring all of that to bear on us. So it's a pretty simple outline. We'll start with Ezekiel, then we're gonna go to Jesus, and then we're going to talk about us.

The first two points will largely be us building some understanding, and then the third point will be the payoff of application for us to consider as we go forth. So first of all, one of the reasons that I think it's kind of crazy what we're doing with this series is essentially I'm saying you should be like this guy, Ezekiel. Think about how crazy he was. Just imagine if you showed up for church for over a year and I'm out there laying on my side with some sort of fortress that I've built out of brick laying siege to it like it's GI Joe characters. And not just like I'm doing it one time. Jeff and I have both done crazy things one time in a sermon. But for over a year to be doing that, like you'd all be calling the mental hospital. Someone would carry me away.

In fact, all of the prophets are full of stories like this of really intense action that they did that backed up the message that they were called to deliver. Ezekiel knew because God had told him that judgment was coming for his people. He would stop at nothing in order to warn them. He would stop at nothing in order to warn them and to tell them of the goodness of who God was. But they had gone too far.

Historical Context

Let me give you some historical context of where we are in Israel's history when Ezekiel shows up. You'll recall probably because we've talked about this a bunch that Israel divided into two nations, Israel and Judah. I famously compared you guys up in the balcony to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, because you all are rowdy. And the Northern Kingdom was the worst. That's why Ezekiel has to lay for more than a year just for the Northern Kingdom. That's forty days for the civilized people down here in the Southern Kingdom in Judah.

The two nations were different in regards to the extent of their disobedience to God, but they were the same in the substance of their disobedience to God. Israel was the first to turn away from God, to foreign gods, to worship them, to basically trust in them instead of in the Lord God. And then Judah did it. Judah followed exactly in Israel's footsteps, worshiping other gods. And instead of putting their trust in God for deliverance, they trusted other gods and they kept worshiping them in spite of prophets coming again and again and saying, stop it.

This world is full of chaos and death. If you worship the gods of this world, if you follow after the things that the other nations follow after, you're going to wind up like them. Instead, you should stay with God who has delivered you out of Egypt. The deliverance that you experienced out of Egypt, that was other worldly. That's a different kind of kingdom. That's the kingdom you're called to be and you're supposed to be light to the other nations pointing them to the fact that reconciliation with God brings about a kingdom of peace and hope and joy and love instead of a kingdom of chaos and constantly nations invading other nations and carrying them off into captivity and subjugating them and using them for their own benefit. That's not the kind of kingdom you're called to be, and that's not the kind of God you have. So stop worshiping these false gods that lead to that and turn and worship the true God.

But Israel and Judah were resolute, and they did it over and over again not just once, not just occasionally but for years. And now I want you to notice something. The prophets went to Israel and Judah primarily. They did speak to other nations at different times. But primarily they came and warned Israel and Judah. Why was that? Well, because God had a covenant with them. God had promised to be their God and them to be his people. And even though they were being faithless, it was absolutely covenantally appropriate for God to come and say, hey, calling them back.

We just heard in Deuteronomy about the forgiveness of God that he offered them in the law should they turn. He said, hey, when you break this, just turn back and I will be forgiving. And so that was part of the deal. And the prophets in their calling, they were doing something that was incredibly gracious on God's behalf in coming and warning the people. Don't follow after these other nations. Don't be like other nations. But at this point, it had been too late. And so Ezekiel is coming and warning the people of what is coming.

Notice the different aspects of his very dramatic life—his kind of performance art declaration of this coming judgment. There's three parts. First, there's the siege play. The brick with the siege that when I was a kid, I had GI Joe figures. I mentioned them earlier. I don't know what kids play with these days. I imagine it's all on video games. But I used to go out into my garage and I had a big GI Joe fort.

And I had all the figures and all the cobra, the bad guys. The cobra figures. And the GI Joe Fort was the bastion of goodness in the garage as far as I was concerned. Those were the good guys and they were fighting for freedom and other things. I don't remember. Anyway, they're fighting and I would lay siege to the GI Joe Fort with the cobra guys. Right? But the GI Joe guys would always win because they were the good guys.

Well, this case, the good guys are not winning. Ezekiel's coming with his GI Joe men and he's setting this up as a display to everybody showing that, hey, you guys, you think you're the good guys but you're not. And because of that, you're gonna lose. So the bad GI guys are winning over the other bad GI guys who think they're good. You see? That's what Ezekiel is doing and that's a sign to the people. You think you're GI Joe, but you're really cobra. You're the bad guys. And God is coming in judgment upon you.

And then there's this curious thing where he sets up this big metal kind of wall essentially between himself and the people. And he's there kind of acting as God. And he's showing the people that there is no way that God can turn his face towards his people in this, that his decision to judge them is resolute. It's permanent. It's final. And in fact, all of this happens. Right? The Babylonians sweep in and they lay siege to Jerusalem and they carry them off and God doesn't defend his people because God is the one orchestrating it as judgment against them.

Notice the second thing, the lying down and binding. God is showing the people the extent of their sin. This isn't just a one day kind of slip up. This is decades, hundreds of years of misapplying the covenant, of basically turning away from God, of doing the absolute thing that they were not supposed to do. He says showing them the extent of their sin and how deep it goes by essentially having to spend one day lying on one side for each year. That's quite a display of their sinfulness.

And then the last picture of course is the meal. That's the one that caught all of your attention. Right? The rationed food, you know, that's bad enough, but then they have to cook it over human excrement. But God was gracious and allowed him to cook it over cow excrement. Right? Which is significant but the bottom line here is of course, right, Ezekiel is saying to the people like, look, this is what's coming for you. It's not years of plenty. It's years of scraping by and having to eat whatever you can find and cook it however you can cook it because a siege is coming and you're gonna be carried off into captivity and subjugated back into slavery and this is not going to be fun times.

All of that, of course, did happen. Israel and then eventually Judah were carried off into captivity. And they did have to eat rationed food and they were subjugated and they were punished for many years. But here's what I want you to see for now from this: A prophet's message is always backed up by his life. You cannot argue that Ezekiel didn't believe that this stuff was gonna happen. If he didn't believe it, he wouldn't have wasted his time. The way in which he went about this, the fervor, the degree to which he went about displaying his message through his life was intense and complete. It was all in.

He was less concerned with people's response than he was with being faithful to God. He did exactly what God said he should do even though everyone would have looked at that and said, that's harsh. That's crazy. You're nuts. Okay? That's important for us because we have a message and we should be equally all in on it. The good news is our message is different.

Christ's Coming Changes Everything

Let's look now at Christ because Christ's coming changes everything for us. Ezekiel's prophetic ministry is only properly understood in light of Christ's ministry because what Ezekiel was doing was, yes, predicting an actual physical geopolitical event where Babylon came in and took Israel captive. But that event, and in fact all of Israel's history, was prophetically symbolic of something bigger and more spiritual that God was doing through the nation of Israel and that isn't made clear until Christ comes.

So Ezekiel could only warn of coming judgment, and he could only tell the people that he was covenantally representing God to of the things that God was telling them about that specific manifestation of the covenant. But Jesus came not just as a prophet, but also as a priest. And we can actually trace and see that all of the punishments that Ezekiel predicted fell upon Christ. And Christ who was not just a prophet who represents God to the people, but also a priest who represents the people back to God was able to absorb upon himself all of the penalty and punishment that Ezekiel spoke about.

Let me walk you through it.

Let's start with the siege play. This picture of a brick with Jerusalem drawn on it. Jesus is referred to as the new Israel. He is in and of himself representative of God's people. He's the perfect representation of God's people. And so he became the city essentially, and his body, his life was laid siege upon as he was basically handed over to a foreign government, the Romans, and tortured and brutally killed. He took on the punishment that Ezekiel was forecasting—even beyond what he was forecasting, a more intense version of what Ezekiel was forecasting.

And remember the siege imagery where Ezekiel had the metal shield essentially that prevented God's face from being turned to his people? Christ experienced that. You remember? On the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — Matthew 27:46

The complete forsaking of the father to the son was punishment for all of Israel's and all of the world's sin. What Ezekiel was predicting was foreshadowing what Christ would resolve. He as the priest offered himself as a sacrifice on the cross, bore the wrath of God and the rejection of the father on behalf of the people. Ezekiel was not just foreshadowing judgment, he was foreshadowing the judgment that would fall on Christ.

But Christ himself is a prophet. He's not just a priest. And so the cross is not just the people's response back to God. It's also a message from God to us. What does the cross display? Not a message of judgment, but a message of reconciliation and love.

Have you spent time meditating on the cross? I'm sure you have. We don't typically do that around Christmas. We do that more around Easter. But there is no deeper display or sign of God's love than Christ offering himself as a sacrifice in place of people who deserved punishment so that they might have redemption.

It ushered in all kinds of new things. It changed everything. It changed the covenant that we operate under. Jeremiah predicted this, but there's a new covenant now. We no longer have a national covenant that exists with a nation. We have a covenant that exists with all who would put their hope in Christ. That's the new nation. And that's a significant point to remember as we're thinking about what it looks like to be a prophet in this age.

Jesus in his death on the cross, he brought a new message in the same way that Ezekiel showed up day after day after day in front of the people laying on his side. Jesus shows up and he takes on the iniquity of the people. And in the cross, shows up through his life in a performance art kind of way. This is how much God loves you. He was willing to take all of this on for you so that you might have forgiveness and hope.

Notice also the laying and the binding. That's essentially Jesus instead of just representing the sin that the people had back to them and saying, "Hey, this is what you've done. Remember and reflect on your iniquity"—he bore the sin onto himself. The suffering and death that he did on the cross was essentially also a display of the depth of our sin. You realize how much your sin cost? It cost Jesus everything. And not just a man, but the Son of God had to die in order for your sins to be forgiven.

Ezekiel just scratched the surface of revealing the sins of the people to them. Jesus reveals it on an even deeper level. He reveals God's love and he reveals the depths of our sin. And then finally, the meal—the scarcity rations during the siege. Christ drinks vinegar on the cross. He was laid waste on the cross, was not allowed to eat. He was essentially tortured in the way that Ezekiel was predicting.

And yet he calls us to a table that predicts a feast. Christ in his priestly role absorbs and takes all of the punishment that Ezekiel predicted. And in his prophetic role, instead replaces that message with a message of hope, reconciliation, God's deep love overpowering our deep sin, and predicts that one day we will feast with him in heaven—something that we remember every week in communion.

Do you see how Jesus changes everything about what it means to be a prophet?

What It Means to Be a Prophet Now

Let's look at that now. Let's look in conclusion. Just talk a little bit about what it looks like for us to be prophets in light of how Jesus changed everything.

First of all, think about this. This is the crux of this question. I really want you to think about this. Why are you here? Not in church. Why are you here on this earth?

If everything that I just said is true—if Jesus has paid all the penalty for your sin, if he has shown the deep love of God and predicted that deep love will manifest itself in some heavenly glory someday where you will feast with him and rule with him for eternity—why would you be here? Why not just whisk you up there and experience it now?

Here's why. Because God has left us here for a time to be prophets.

We are meant to embody in our lives the prophetic hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ in everything that we do in the same way that Ezekiel personified and embodied his judgment in his administration of God's law and covenant in his time. We are meant to embody the cross in everything that we do in our life and the hope of the resurrection. That's why you're here.

Now I think we get confused a lot of times. I think we believe we're here for our kids or we're here for our spouses. And yeah, there's something to that. Or we're here to enjoy life and go to Disney World or to the beach or to accomplish great things at our job. All of those things are fine, and in all of those things, we can do what God has called us to do. But ultimately, the reason we are here is to personify and embody that message of hope to those who have not yet received it.

Do you know how great it is that we have that instead of the message that Ezekiel had? Our job isn't to come and personify the judgment and anger and wrath of God. Our job is to personify the hope and love and reconciliation that's offered in the gospel. If I need to back that up, Paul says it exactly this way in Second Corinthians:

Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ. God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for you so that you might have the righteousness of Christ. — 2 Corinthians 5:20-21

That's the hope that we embody.

A New Scope to This Message

Now a couple of adjustments. There's a new scope to this message. We don't deliver this to a nation. And this is where I think a lot of Americans get confused. You see in the Old Testament prophets going to kings and we think, okay, our job is to be prophetic to our government. Now I want you to not miss my nuance here. We have a lot of things that we should and can say and be engaged with in our government. But the American government does not have a covenant with God the way that the kings of Israel had a covenant with God. Our covenant king is Jesus Christ. And our covenant relationship is secured by him and his spirit at work within us. We have a secure covenant. We do not need to go to our leaders and ask them to secure our spiritual future. It has been secured in Jesus Christ.

Now there is a lot of fear that operates underneath a lot of our politics. That should make us immune to that as Christians because we don't need to worry about our future. Our future is presented to us every week. We know where our hope is and we know that hope is glorious. That's not to say that politics aren't important or that policy isn't important and that we shouldn't pursue that. Trust me, I want that. But we don't operate out of fear. We operate out of the place of security knowing that we have a king who sacrificed himself on a cross and rose from the dead on our behalf and has promised us everything. Everything.

Another adjustment in thinking about the scope is that we need to think more about approaching who are the kings. Who are the kings that we're called to prophesy to and engage? Here's who: the entire human race—the image bearers of God—because they are kings. All of the image bearers in this room, all of the image bearers out there are in and of themselves kings by virtue of their being created in God's image. And so when we go and we plead with individuals, we are pleading with kings. They're kings of their own world, their own life, and we're pleading with them: don't be like Israel and Judah and make your world be about the same things that this world is about—chaos and hate and subjugation. Instead, submit yourself to the high king Jesus and rule and reign with him for eternity. Submit yourself. Toss your crown at his feet, and he will elevate you to rule and reign with him for eternity. That's the appeal that we're making. Those are the kings that we approach.

I think so often we are so concerned with the politics of our country and speaking into that, that we miss the kings that are living next door—our neighbors. If we spent half as much time thinking about how to reach our neighbors and those whom the Lord has brought into our life, or even better, if we thought about the world globally—if we thought about what it would look like to reach the lost halfway around the world who've never heard of Christ—if we put as much energy as we did into our political commentary on social media into reaching the lost around the world, that would make a tremendous difference.

A New Message

Another adjustment is the new covenant brings a new message. We're not here to promote or to pronounce judgment primarily. Now let me also caveat that. There's some nuance there. There is judgment that we warn against, isn't there? Christ is clear that there is a coming judgment for those who are not in him.

Christ is clear about judgment for those who are unjust. There are people who claim to be followers of his who aren't. So there are warnings in the New Testament that we are called to faithfully reproduce. But primarily the message is one of hope. And even to those people, we go to them and we say, even though you are sinful, the depth of your sin is displayed on the cross. It doesn't matter how greatly you have sinned. You have hope if you put your trust in Jesus Christ.

So we always proclaim judgment from the position of there is hope. There is hope in Christ. We do it from the cross, not to the cross. In other words, we're not saying to them, you're gonna die on a cross. We're saying Christ died on a cross so that you don't have to. Put your faith in him. Our message is primarily one of reconciliation.

Think of what that means. The person that you are most frustrated with in this world, the person that drives you crazy, the one who sins in all the ways that just push your buttons—that's the person you're called to go to and be honest with them about their sin, but be transparent with them about yours and offer reconciliation with Christ. There are people you've given up on. You've decided that God's written them off, but he hasn't. If he's written them off, you'd be in heaven and they would be in hell. But we're all here, which means that they have hope and you have hope to offer them. That's what it means to be a New Testament prophet.

Living Out the Message

And so what does it look like to live all of this out? If we were to embody this the way that Ezekiel embodied his message, how would that go? Overall, we live visible lives of expectation of God's mercy and ultimate triumph over sin and death.

We had a meeting recently with Temple Baptist Church in which we were all kind of nervous because there were some things that were not going as well as we would have liked with the sale of our property next door. All of that has since resolved itself or is in process of resolving itself. But we met with the temple folks and we were nervous that they would be nervous. They've generously offered this building and now we're delaying the sale. We may not be able to make good on our promises to fix this place in all the ways that we've promised to do that. And so we went over and over with them again and again and we were really nervous like, oh gosh, guys, just don't give up on us. We're gonna get there.

They were as calm as could be. And my favorite thing that maybe has happened in my life in the last ten years is Mike Parnell, an Armenian Baptist, says to us, "Well y'all are the Calvinists. I don't know what your problem is." I love it when people use our theology against us. But seriously, what he was doing was he was saying you say you believe this stuff, live like it. We should live like it, brothers and sisters. We should live like this is true. That our hope is real because when we live like it's not true, we're failing to preach the gospel to a watching world because they see us as nervous as they are and they say, they don't have any hope.

Every day we should approach our life living in the light of this truth and try to embody it in terms of both how we engage emotionally, physically, conversationally. All of it should be a part of how we live.

Also, prayer. We have this Daniel fast coming up. I'm gonna confess to you—I think I'm the worst pastor I know as far as prayer is concerned. But I'll tell you one thing that gives me a shot in the arm every year is when we do this Daniel fast because the people that I know that pray the best are Mount Pleasant. Those saints, they get it. They're like, we're getting up at 5:30 in the morning. We don't care and we're not eating anything except for like nuts made into meatballs somehow. And we're gonna pray like Jesus is actually gonna do something. And when you pray with them, that's how they pray and you know it.

Well, here's the thing. When they pray that way, they're revealing that Jesus Christ—when God turned his back on Jesus, that metal shield that prevented God from being with his people, that really was the veil in the holy of holies and it was ripped in half. We have access to the throne room of God, brothers and sisters. We should be praying with and for people on the regular. Like when crisis has come, we should get on our knees and we should act like God is going to do something because he will. Prayer is a way that we embody it.

I think we think of prayer more as a chore than our blessing. I think if we started to shift that, our prophetic witness would start to become a little bit more powerful.

Cruciform Love

Secondly, cruciform love. Jesus Christ in dying on the cross embodied the love of God. What does it look like for us to do that? We who are called Christians, little Christs. We who were called by Jesus who said if you wanna follow me pick up your cross daily and follow me.

There are daily ways in which we can show cruciform love. There are daily ways in which you already are. So praise God for that. But there are many ways that we could do it that we're not. Think about all of the little things that you can do.

Choosing relational presence over self protection. Showing up and being transparent with people about the hope you have in Christ, about loving them, staying in hard conversations, refusing to ghost people or withdraw or retaliate when you're misunderstood. Bearing with difficult people rather than writing them off. Unglamorous self denial. Adjusting your schedule. Giving up comfort. Spending money that you could have saved and spent on yourself on other people. Not because you're trying to prove something or show how righteous you are, but because love always costs something and when you display that cost, you display God's love. You embody it in how you're interacting with him.

I was doing some marriage counseling with Katie this last year and our counselor was really pressing on us about how often we tried to make one another into Jesus. I wanted Katie to be Jesus. She wanted me to be Jesus. And he said that you can't really do that in marriage because that leads to codependency and bad things. I trust him. He's a good counselor. But it sounded wrong. It feels like a direct contradiction of Ephesians where I'm supposed to be Jesus to my wife.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church — Ephesians 5

And he said, yeah. The thing is though, Jesus needs to be Jesus for your wife. And you need to find Jesus through other relationships in addition to just your wife. If you put all of that on her then she's gonna crumble. If she puts all of that on you, you're gonna crumble.

So brothers and sisters, what he was saying is, we all need to be Jesus to one another. We need each of us to embody Christ to one another. And that when we do that, we create a greater foundation.

And I said, can I just spiritualize my way through that? I know Jesus. I can interact with him directly. And the counselor said this: here's the problem. I don't know of any other way in which people know about Jesus other than through the encounters that they have with other people who know him. Well said counselor. Touche.

Feasting at the Lord's Table

Last thing that we do besides prayer and cruciform love is this. We feast at the Lord's table. I know that we come to this every week and it can get to the point where it just becomes the thing that we do at the end of the service. But this to a watching world, this is a proclamation that a feast is coming.

In the same way that Ezekiel's prophecy was the prophecy of a siege coming, this predicts the heavenly glory that we are given in Jesus Christ.

So brothers and sisters, I'm gonna close in prayer. We're gonna sing a song. And then we're gonna feast at this Lord's table. And I wanna invite you this morning, this Sunday after Christmas, feast like you mean it. Because the promise behind this table is real. And you know it is real because the greatest prophet has promised this to you. Jesus Christ in his sacrifice on the cross.

Paul put it this way:

Did the Lord God who gave us his son, would he not also give us all things? — Romans 8:32

This is a glimpse of the all things. Come and receive it and feast and rejoice so that the world may know where we're going.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are the great prophet, priest, and king. And Lord that in your work on the cross, you changed everything for us. You took a message that was hopeless, that was judgment, and you transformed it into a message about how deeply you loved us even deeper than our sin which was so deep.

Lord, would you allow us the joy of continuing your work here in this world? Could we be many prophets like that that echo the prophetic glory that you rang out in your life? Could our lives look and smell and taste a little bit more like yours?

Lord allow us as we partake of this supper to be nourished in our souls, our hearts to be filled so that we can be transformed and fulfill that calling. Lord it is such a gift. It is all gifts what you have given us. Lord help us to share that with others. There's plenty to go around. Lord, work through us we pray in Jesus name. Amen.