Legalism vs. Freedom — Luke 6

0:00 Open with a word of prayer. Dear lord, we thank you for this day and for this time that we have to come together as saints and remember, your work on the cross and how far you separated our sins from us and our sins and lawless deeds you remember no more, and we thank you for this. Thank you that we have the opportunity to preach your word freely. I pray that you would give me wisdom in my words that the things that I have to say today, that people would hear and understand, and that they would be from you and that they would find something that is applicable in their own life and we thank you for your blessings for us and we pray this in your name. Amen.

0:36 Amen. Today, I will be preaching on Luke six and it will be verses one through 16. So I'm going to start off by going ahead and reading the passage. Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that he went through the grain fields, and his disciples plucked the heads of the grain, and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?

1:05 But Jesus answering them said, have you not even read this? What David did when he was hungry? He and those who are with him. How he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those who were with him, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And he said to them, the son of man is also lord of the Sabbath.

1:27 Now it happened on another Sabbath also that he entered the synagogue and taught, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. So the scribes and the Pharisees watched him closely. Whether he would heal on the Sabbath, that they might find an accusation against him. But he knew their thoughts and said to the man who had the withered hand, arise and stand here. And he arose and stood.

1:51 Then Jesus said to them, I will ask you one thing. Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil? To save life or to destroy? And when he had looked around at them, he said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he did so, and his hand was restored as whole as the other.

2:10 But they were filled with rage, and discussed with one another, what they might do to Jesus. Now it came to pass in those days, that he went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, he called his disciples to himself. And from them, he chose 12 whom he also named apostles. Simon, who he also named Peter, and Andrew his brother.

2:34 James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, then James the son of Alpheus and Simon the Zealot, Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot who also became a traitor. So the first 11 verses of this passage, we see how Jesus is declaring himself the lord of the Sabbath. And the first instance where that happens is the second Sabbath after the first, which sounds a little bit confusing, but generally, it is understood to mean that they had Passover, and then there's the first Sabbath after Passover, and this would have been the second Sabbath after Passover. And I wanna set the scene for you here. So you have Jesus with his disciples.

3:19 We don't know if it would... It probably would have been more than the 12, seeing as he had not picked his apostles yet. And they're walking through the fields. Don't necessarily know where they're going, but as they are going, they start picking some of the grain and eating it to satisfy their hunger. And some of the Pharisees took offense to this and asked them why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?

3:42 And this raises an interesting question. What are the Pharisees doing out in the fields? How did they see the disciples and Jesus do this? And I would pause it. It's because they were watching closely.

3:57 I don't know how many people here are familiar with pig showing at the fair. It's a pretty interesting event. You have these little... You have the pigs, they're not very little, and you you have a little whip in your hand, and you show the pigs to a judge that's in the center of the ring. And you take them around the ring, and you're trying to show off your pig on all sides to good advantage so that the judge will mark you and give you first place.

4:23 But an interesting twist that I'm still not sure about whether it's in there, and I'm actually gonna show you a video of this. And you guys can see if you can pick up the twist. Now the first video is one I took last summer. I had the pleasure of seeing it firsthand for myself. If Sam if you could pull it up on the screen, we'll look at it real quick.

4:42 This one is cute, it's fun. Sam if play. You see a young girl showing maybe her first pig, very adorable. Couple other kids. It's fun.

4:53 It's cute, but as the kids get older, they get better at showing the pigs. And now we're gonna get to the next video. Samuel, can you pull that up? And things get more competitive, and I think you'll start to see where the competitive advantage lies in this video here. You see this young girl, she is lasered in, focused.

5:14 And the thing that makes pig showing the competitive difference is you have to maintain eye contact with the judge while you're showing your pig. And so you see these kids, they're they're dialed in. And this is how I imagine that the Pharisees were watching Jesus, is they are locked on to seeing what he's trying to do. And that's how they saw him in the fields on the Sabbath day when... What are they doing out in the fields by their own works?

5:39 They should have no reason to be out there. They shouldn't be harvesting. They shouldn't be plucking grain. None of these things. But yet they're keeping their eyes locked on him.

5:46 And we'll get to it later, but somewhat similar to the pig showing, the eye contact is superficial. There's no real meaning there. And you see that even though the Pharisees were watching Jesus so closely, they missed all of the meaning, and it was very superficial superficial contact. The disciples weren't guilty of stealing, when they broke the Sabbath according to the Pharisees. What they were guilty of was four rules that the Pharisees had prescribed after the law of Moses was established.

6:48 No manner of work shall be done on them, but that which everyone must eat, that only may be prepared by you. So here we see an exception made for people. They can prepare food for themselves to eat on the Sabbath. They weren't supposed to be cooking for the rest of the week. They weren't supposed to be harvesting a bunch of food, but they could prepare food for themselves to eat.

7:06 And the disciples fall inside this bound of the law. And, also, we see in Deuteronomy 23 verses 25, this is where the laws of gleaning were set forth, where you could pass through another man's field and pick up some of the grain and legally eat it to satisfy your hunger. And so based on these two laws, they weren't breaking any of the rules, but these pharisees set extra laws in place that they still follow to this day. And some of these laws seem kind of ridiculous when you think about it. I was in Israel last last year, and they have these laws where you're not supposed to start a fire on the Sabbath, and they view as completing an electrical circuit as starting a fire because it requires a spark.

7:47 And so you're not allowed to use light switches and things of that nature, so they have what's called the Sabbath elevators. And on the Sabbath, the elevator, since they're not allowed to press the button to open and close it and then press the button to go to their floor, the elevator's open and close on every single floor, and you just have to ride it out till you get to where you wanna go. Thankfully, they also keep one elevator functioning normally so people who are not following Sabbath law can still get to where they need to go. But we see how they were applying these rules not necessarily to keep the Sabbath, but to exist as a form of power in their hand. And to really understand why his disciples were fine in this area, we also need to look at how Jesus transformed the Sabbath.

8:30 And we also wanna look at the original purpose of the Sabbath. And the first Sabbath, well, we're gonna go look at Exodus 20, verses eight and eleven where God gave the the 10 commandments, specifically remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And it says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it, yes, you shall do no work, nor your son, your daughters, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who was within your gates.

9:06 For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea that is in all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. So even in this giving of the law, we see that there was a first Sabbath day, which is the Lord after creation. And that comes from Genesis two verses two through three. And we're gonna go ahead and read that as well.

9:29 And it says, on the seventh day, God ended his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all the work which he had created and made. Here we see that the Sabbath day for the Lord was a rest from a completed work. He had finished creation. He had saw that it was very good.

9:53 When Jesus was here on earth, his work was not complete. He still had to be going about his father's business, which is why you see him going with his disciples on the Sabbath Sabbath day, going to synagogues, performing these healing miracles, which we'll talk about later. It's also really cool to consider the fact that as humans, we have physical needs for rest. Our body demands it. And God so intimately is aware of our needs because he created us, but he instituted this this day of rest for us because he cares so deeply about even just our human needs as well that we need this time to be resting.

10:29 We also see that Jesus was a fulfillment of the Sabbath, And we see this in Colossians two verses 16 through 17 where it says, so let no one judge you in food or drink or regarding festival or new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is Christ. We see that the shadow or the Sabbath was a shadow of things to come, and the substance of that thing to come is fulfilled in Christ. People needed this this separate day of riot... Rest, but Jesus was the fulfillment of this, and we have our rest in him now through his work on the cross. And he stated this to the Pharisees in verse five when he said that he was the Lord of the Sabbath.

11:41 We also see it in Psalms fifty one sixteen through 17 where he says, you do not desire sacrifice or else I would give it. You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart. These, oh God, you will not despise. So in these first couple verses, we see how the Pharisees get so caught up in the act of following these rules that they miss the point of human need.

12:09 They see the behavior as completely separate from the attitude of the heart, and they miss the purpose of the Sabbath. This is something that we need to be careful about in our own lives. Are we performing these rituals and rules because we have to? It's because it's out of an attitude that we want to serve. And we see this clearly later on in the gospels with the example of the widow with her two mites and the Pharisee who gave a lot.

12:35 Technically, the Pharisee was giving more, which in their eyes was a better thing. But the Pharisee was giving out of a place of security and abundance, whereas the widow was giving out of a place of sacrifice and a dependence on God. So we need to make sure that when we are performing religious acts, which is what the Sabbath was set forth as a day of rest, that we are doing it from a place of service and sacrifice to the Lord instead of looking good or out of our own abundance and security. Now in the next couple verses, we see how Jesus provides an example to the Pharisees of David eating the showbread, which was technically a much more worse offense than plucking grain on the Sabbath. And I find it ironic.

13:24 There's a couple ways to interpret the passage, but it's funny that Jesus asked them if he had... They had read this part of the Old Testament. Because these were, if you look at it from their perspective, the scribes and Pharisees, the rulers of the day. They had memorized much of the Old Testament. They were thoroughly familiar with all of it and in their mind, Jesus was a carpenter who had no formal training, should not have known any of this And yet he's asking them, guys, haven't you read this passage where it talks about how David was in need and he needed to eat the showbread and God allowed it because of this human need?

13:54 And the Pharisees were putting this ceremonial law above human need, which should never never be happening in the word of God. And the Lord was showing them this through that example. And then in verse five, we have this verse where Jesus said to them, the son of man is also lord of the Sabbath. And through this, he was effectively declaring himself god and declaring himself having authority over the Sabbath. And this is what we see from Colossians two six where he is the substance that is replacing the Sabbath.

14:23 Jesus only ever referred to himself as the son of man. Nobody else in the Bible referred to himself as the son of man or referred to him as the son of man, and he did this about 80 times throughout the gospels. We saw this in the previous chapter that Ray was talking about with the cripple. The son of man had the power to forgive sins. And he said this very clearly when he said to the to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven you, identifying himself as God in the situation and also the son of man.

14:50 And this was done in the parallel passage. JC was talking about looking at the the books vertically versus horizontally. So if we do a quick horizontal look, we see that this happened in Mark two as well, the the story of the paralytic, which, again, looking at JC's, historical breakdown, we see how these histories, it was very on... Early on in his career where Jesus is doing these miracles, declaring himself the son of man and having the power to forgive sins. We also see how both, Jeremy and JC gave the key verse of Luke nineteen ten as the key verse of Luke, which says that the son of man has come to seek and to save that which is lost.

15:28 So this term has a lot of significance in this passage and a lot of significance to us. We also see how Jesus used it to reference himself at some of the most important times of his ministry. Some of his lowest points humanly speaking and also some of his highest points. And we see this in Mark eight verse 31 where he teaches them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. We also see this where he references himself in Matthew 25 verse 31 where he says, the son of man comes in glory and the holy angels with him.

16:12 Then he will sit on the throne of glory. And also, the Pharisees should have known that who the son of man was. And we saw this two weeks ago, I think it was, when Ray talked about Daniel seven verse 13, where back in Daniel seven, hundreds of years before Jesus came, it references the son of man, where it says in verse 13, and behold, one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. He came to the ancients of days, and they brought him near to them. And it's interesting because the Pharisees were so fixated on disproving that this was not God and that this was just a regular man.

16:52 When they, with their knowledge of the Old Testament, should have recognized the signs, recognized himself declaring himself as the son of man, and then the ones as the keepers of the law in the Old Testament, declare his divinity to the people. They should have been the ones most aware of this comment about himself. But because of their spiritual blindness, they were not able to do this. I also found the term son of man very interesting because if you think about it, there's a... It makes sense why Jesus would only reference himself as this and not other people.

17:25 Because from their perspective, he is a man. This would have been their natural assumption. That he is the man and calling him the son of God would have been the mind blowing aspect of their life. Because obviously to man he has parents, we know we are where he grew up, he came out of Nazareth, all these different things. So why would we bother to call him the son of man?

17:43 But for Jesus who is fully God, him coming to earth and becoming fully man would have been the separating factor which is why he references it's the identifying aspect, I was fully God, but now I am also fully man. And we see why this is why Jesus would reference himself as the son of man as opposed to other people calling him that. Now we are going to move on to the next part of this story and it's on a different Sabbath day, where Jesus was in the synagogue. Jesus went to the synagogues to teach pretty much every Sabbath. There is a time to gather with the Lord's people and Jesus was aware of this and so he would go to the Sabbath to teach and preach because it was also a natural gathering of the people.

18:42 Maybe they knew the the compassion of Jesus and his willingness to heal, and they wanted to see if Jesus would break the Sabbath even in the synagogue and heal this man. Because according to this rabbinical tradition, it was okay to heal on the Sabbath, but only in the case of saving a life, which in a withered hand, not technically saving a life. Luke is gracious enough with his detail as a doctor to recognize that it was the withered right hand. And I don't know if this man was born right handed, that would have been especially unfortunate with him. Maybe he had the fortune to be left handed.

19:15 I would hope so for his sake. But, again, we see in verse seven that the Pharisees were watching closely. We see, again, this this locked in perspective. They're really eyeing him down to see what he's gonna do. And again, they're completely missing the point of what's happening.

19:30 They want so badly to see him break their law. They were looking for accusations, but not what they might learn from him. They were looking for him to heal somebody, which by their very actions is pretty incriminating because they are granting him the... They they were like, he has the power to heal by looking to see if he would heal, which should have separated him in their mind, but yet they're still looking to accuse him even though they're admitting he has the power to heal people and perform these miracles. But Jesus in his omnipotence know the thoughts of their hearts and their minds.

20:04 And in verse eight, it says this where he knew their thoughts and he's going to get around them. He's going to not trick them, but he's going to escape their trick and push it back onto them. And we'll see this in the next couple verses. He asked the man to stand up in the midst of the assembly, which takes courage and faith. It takes courage to stand out from the crowd, to separate yourself, and be willing to be used by Jesus.

20:31 But this man does not hesitate. He stands up. We see later in the gospels in John chapter nine how the blind man was healed on the Sabbath. And because of this, the Pharisees were very angry. Maybe they wanted to make an example of him after the man with the withered hand was healed, and they excommunicated him from the synagogue.

20:47 So it did take courage to stand up in the midst of the the gathering and to be used by Jesus in this sense. And then in verse nine, Jesus asked some questions. He says, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil? To save life or to destroy it? And by asking these questions, he effectively nullified the the Pharisees' position because they couldn't answer because in this situation, they were planning evil on the Sabbath.

21:15 And so if they admitted one way, then they would say that the other way is wrong, which would have accused themselves. And so they're caught in their own trap, and Jesus is free to perform this miracle. You see, like, the contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees here because they give no thought or concern for the man with the withered hand, which is a fun phrase to say you can try later at home. It rolls off the tongue very smoothly. But you see in the gospels how Jesus has compassion on so many different people.

21:46 And the pharisees, instead of having compassion on this man, which they were the rulers, they were the religious teachers, they should have been one of their member of the gathering and they should be looking out for him, but instead they're looking how they can use him to get at somebody else. They have no compassion. And they're ignoring the good works and strictly following the letter of the law and ignoring the spirit. Jesus looked around after he asked these questions, really just making sure that his point had settled in with the affairs. You can just see him asking the question, letting the silence hang in, making eye contact with them because he can know what they're thinking, he knows their thoughts, and he's letting them know that he knows that they know.

22:55 His hand wasn't healed at his side. He had to stretch out his hand to Jesus. He had to to obey his command, and he trusted Jesus that Jesus would give him the ability to do this, and he had faith. And because of this faith, his hand was restored as whole as the other. And what an amazing example for us.

23:14 Because sometimes Jesus gives us a command and we say, Lord, that is impossible for us to do. He is giving us direction in our life, but we choose to ignore it. We say, that's not for us. I'm not capable of that. But whenever Jesus gives us guidance, he gives us the direction, he always gives us the ability to follow through on that directive.

23:32 What is a command or something in our life that we're not following through? We're not trusting that Jesus will give us the strength to carry it out and to perform it. And when he gives us this command, do we hesitate? Do we refuse to stand up in the midst of the crowd? Or do we stand up without hesitation, willing to separate ourselves, be an example, and be a willing servant of the Lord and be used by him mightily?

23:55 Now after this miracle, it should have been a happy day, but not for the Pharisees. Not for the Pharisees. They were senseless with rage. They were out of their minds because they were so livid with anger. And there could be a couple motivations.

24:10 I could be generous to the Pharisees here. I could be. I could say they were so angry because they believed the law so passionately. They cared about the people in the synagogue, and Jesus is leading them astray. They have the truth, but I doubt that that is why they were angry.

24:23 I would hesitate to guess, but I would guess that they're angry because Jesus is undermining the power and authority amongst the people. Jesus is effectively taking this position that they've held for hundreds of years and saying, there is a new and better way. And it's clearly stated in the gospels that you cannot serve two masters. In the sermon on the mountain, he says, you cannot serve God and money. You can also not serve God and a crippling desire for power, which is what the Pharisees had.

24:49 And not to do a throwback, but it's similar similar to how they had tied their identity to this, similar to Jonah, of how they had falsely placed their identity in something that was not the Lord, that was a stumbling block for them. And when Jesus is pointing this out through his actions and through his words, they become senseless with rage because they realize their own. They realize that they have been been duped, they realize that Jesus is undermining their authority. And their immediate thought is to how do we kill this man? Which I think the hypocrisy was lost on them in this situation of going from trying to pin a man for doing evil on the Sabbath to plotting murder on the Sabbath, which by any stretch of the imagination was probably more wrong than healing somebody on the Sabbath.

25:34 And then it it does also raise the question for us. What in our life is holding us back from obedience? What do we get angry about when God asks us to let it go? Because he gives us the command, he gives us the strength to do it, but sometimes it requires giving something up on our part. And you can see what is holding you back in your life by what you're most reluctant to give up.

25:58 What are you most least willing to sacrifice for the Lord? And this is something that you should consider because their desire for power and their position and authority was holding them back from understanding the word of the Lord. And sometimes things in our own life can hold us back from fulfilling our calling and fulfilling what we should have done. And then we move on to the to the last couple verses in the chapter where Jesus is picking the the 12 apostles. Jesus had offended the religious and political leaders.

26:49 They followed a person. They were disciples of Jesus. And so at this point, he decides that it's time to choose 12 apostles. And he was omnipotent. He was fully God.

26:59 He could have just said, you, you, you, you, and you, 12 times. But what he chose to do is he chose to go up to a mountain alone all night and pray to the Lord and seek his father's will in this decision. He's recognizing his position as the son of man. He is seeking his father's will before important decisions are being made, and he is setting aside a night in prayer to seek the will of his father in these decisions. I know that it's it's a struggle for me personally just to devote even maybe five or ten minutes in prayer, But devoting a whole night in prayer is sometimes necessary for making these big decisions.

27:35 And he wanted to make sure that he was getting the Lord's guidance, getting his input, and and communing with the father. Then in verse 13, he's... He starts choosing the 12 who he would name apostles. We don't know how many exactly disciples he had following him total. We know that in acts one I believe it was, when the disciples were gathered in Jerusalem there was a 120 of them.

28:04 I would guess there's probably not more than a couple 100 at most who are following him at this time. And so he has this close gathering of people and from these he's selecting his 12 apostles. And the word apostle means sent ones. These are the ones that are going to go out and preach the word of the Lord as his extension of him, as the the apostles going forth. And you can see some symbolism here between the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles.

28:29 We see how the 12 tribes were the foundation of the king or the the the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. And we see how the 12 apostles would be the foundation, the the means of spreading the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth. They hold a special place, and they had a special role to fill. The apostles are listed in the Bible three times. The first list is found here in in Luke six.

28:55 The other ones are in Mark three and Acts one. And in the apostles that he chose all came from different walks of life, and none was rated more highly than the other based on their background and status. When the apostles are listed, they're always broken down into three groups of four. It's called tetrads. In the first list, always have it started by Peter, and it also includes James, John, and Andrew.

29:20 Andrew and Peter were brothers, and Philip fishermen, coworkers with the brothers James and John. Philip is the fifth one in every list. And then Matthew, Bartholomew, and Thomas. Bartholomew could have been a last name because in other lists he's listed as Nathaniel, which would make sense because Nathaniel is the one who also brought Philip to see the Lord. And then the last group is headed by James, the son of Elpheus, and includes Judas, aka Thaddeus, aka Labaeus, Simon the Zealot, and then last in every list is Judas Iscariot.

29:52 They represented all different walks of life, all different subsets of humanity. And I don't know the significance behind this. I didn't include it today. I didn't have time. But Judas was the only one that was not from Galilee.

30:04 He was from Judah, from the city of Karioth, which is where the term Iscariot comes from. It means a man from Karioth. It was a very unlikely group of people that are assembled as the 12 apostles. They should not have gotten along well together. We see Matthew was a Roman friendly tax collector, and Simon was a Roman hating zealot.

30:24 Two people that should never have been together in the same room based on vows that they had sworn and things that they had done. And yet we see how the Lord brings them together. We also know that Peter had a pretty strong personality, said some pretty bold and brash things. Sometimes to his credit, when he declared that Jesus was in fact the son of God, and other times they're not recorded but maybe the other way. We also see how James and John, the son of thunder, had their own mishaps when they asked their mother to ask the Lord if they could sit at his right and left hand in heaven.

30:54 And so we see a group of people who were young men, some of them might have been as young as their early twenties, who were not perfect, who made mistakes, but they were full of zeal. They had a mission, and they had a passion and a desire to follow the Lord and to preach his word. And Jesus asked a lot of these young men, and some of them might have been uniquely positioned by their their ability as young men to have more freedom to forsake all and follow him. I know that as a young man myself, don't have a lot of attachments right now. I have a freedom to go places that maybe Justin wouldn't because he has a wife and four kids at home.

31:32 Peter still managed it with a wife at home. I'm sure he did great. Maybe he took her around the road with him. That's... They never really talk about that.

31:39 I would be interested to know how that worked out for a couple years, but I'm sure it worked out well. And then another question I have is why did Jesus pick Judas Iscariot as one of the apostles? And the reason I can come up with, which I again didn't do a ton of study, it's a it's a long question that requires further studying, but I would say it's because it was to fulfill prophecy. We saw in the prophecy, it was prophesied that Jesus would be betrayed by one who called him a friend. There could have been other reasons, we don't know, I don't know for sure.

32:12 It could be known, I don't know for sure. Maybe ask somebody else who would know more. Maybe Mr. Morris or Mr. Gonzales or somebody would know.

32:38 We are separated from the Lord by our sins. However, we have a common unifying factor that also unified the apostles that made this group of unlikely men join together, fulfill a common mission, and fulfill the service for the Lord of spreading the kingdom of God. And that is that we are all... That is... That we as Christians have been washed clean with the blood of the lamb.

33:01 We have this unifying factor that unites as members of the church as well. Because again, as a church, there's a lot of different people here, a lot of different personalities. Maybe some people get along better with others. Maybe maybe different things would separate us naturally. But we have a unifying factor that is our love for the Lord, our desire to serve him.

33:21 And even though we have different roles in the body, we can all fulfill those roles and be a member of the same body because we have a love for the head that is Christ. So I'm going to do a quick recap of what we have looked at today, and then I'll be wrapping up shortly. And this is that in the first point, and I did a more gold panning approach to preaching today as opposed to mining. I hope you were able to find some nuggets that you can take with you and that were able to spark thoughts in your mind of maybe this is something to think about. But in the first part with the the Pharisees, we see the the legalism of the law as composed to the freedom in Christ, How they were so restricted by all their little rules that they were not even looking to help others.

34:07 They were so focused on themselves. They were so focused on obeying these rules that they didn't have the freedom of Christ to look out for the needs of others, to look out for human needs, and to have this compassion. But we have this freedom in Christ. We also see that we can perform good works not to be seen, but to serve others. We saw in verse five about how he is the son of man, the son of God, and Lord of the Sabbath.

34:33 About how he took the Sabbath as it was a day of rest and has replaced it as he is the substance of things to come, and we now have our rest in the Lord Jesus Christ and his saving work on the cross. We have the example of the man with the withered hand. Are we are we standing up and obeying Jesus' commands? Are we reaching out without hesitation and obeying the Lord? Are we hesitating?

34:57 Are we afraid to separate ourselves and to be an example? And then we have the example of the Lord pick... Or the the the the pharisees who are angry about giving up this power. Are we angry about something in our own life? Is there something that God has asked us to give up that we are holding back from him?

35:18 And then we see with the 12 apostles, the choosing of them, that not everything is going to be easy getting along with people in our life, the church, in the body of Christ, but we have a unifying factor that is above all human identities, above all human concerns, and we can look to him and see that there is a reason to look beyond these human identities and to serve the Lord. So we see that there's a life of freedom in Christ that is different from the life of legalism that the Pharisees were living. They were living this dead... Following the law, which similar to the withered hand is dead. It's there.

35:56 It it looks like a hand kind of, but it does perform no useful service. And they were focused on this. It's sick. It's dead. But with Jesus in the new covenant, we have a hand that is restored, that is useful, that is able to carry out the works of the Lord, that is able to serve him effectively.

36:38 Pray that you would help us to be obedient to you. They would be willing to separate ourselves out of the midst that we would stand up boldly and be an example for you. And, we thank you for your work in our life and saving us through your death on the cross. We thank you in your name. Amen.