There is no time clock to tell us when the last day is coming. Being prepared is the goal--knowing that when the time comes, our faith in Jesus will save us. When the time is up, when the game is over, the right team will be those who trust Jesus Christ as Savior.
Sin interrupts God's plans for the world and so God interrupts sin by becoming a human being who lives among us filled with grace and truth and dies for us.
The Jewish people were forced to scatter to the four winds. They would be without a homeland for nineteen hundred years – until 1947, to be exact – when the United Nations partitioned a small sliver of land to create the nation of Israel. Yet, they survived.
Great Lakes Crossing is a temple--if we give our hearts to it. If shopping and entertainment are our summit, then this is our holy site, our Midwest Jerusalem, our Babylon with plenty of parking. Scripture promises the eventual overthrow of every such place and its ideology.
Jesus is in the temple and things are starting to heat up. In parable after parable, he is trying to slap the religious leaders awake. They are the problem not the solution.
In the midst of the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry said, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Some 150 years later, Walt Kelly's possum, Pogo turned it into, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I love the last line of the text. “When the Pharisees realized that Jesus was speaking of them, they wanted to arrest him and made plans to kill him. ‘He was speaking of us’ they said.” Well, duh!
At the heart of your computer is the central operating system. It determines how everything runs on your computer. This text says that Jesus is to be the central operating system of our lives.
Looking back to the Old Testament, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants is similar in many ways to Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard. (See Isaiah 5:1-7)
Jesus is the new sheriff in town, sent by his Father. And he doesn't like what he sees. The Pharisees had argued the life right out of God's covenant. Endless debate and ritual had replaced the purity of devotion.