Matthew 21:28-32

In this sermon Josh Turansky teaches from Matthew 21:28-32. He explains the parable of the two sons, contrasting the son who says "no" but obeys with the son who says "yes" but fails to act, emphasizing the importance of follow-through and genuine obedience to God's will. Jesus applies this by stating that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before the religious elites because they changed their minds and believed John's message, whereas the elites gave only lip service.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Matthew 21, 28 through 32. As a church, we're reading through Matthew. It's a biography about Jesus. Alright, if you're new to the Bible, the book of Matthew, it's one of 66 books in your Bible, and it's all about Jesus, the life of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus, and the story of Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead and then ascending back up to the Father. And so 2,000 years after that historic event, we're now reading Matthew's account of the life of Jesus. It was written in that first century within just a couple of decades of Jesus' life. And what we want to know is how do we follow Jesus based on the material that we're reading there? How do we assimilate it? Because it wasn't just for the people that when you think of Matthew, who was a tax collector, he sat down at some point to write this letter so that Jewish people who became followers of Jesus, he wanted to help them understand how Jesus was like the fulfillment of their historic faith, how Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. And just to inform them. But it was for more than just that first century set of Jewish Christians that the church kept saving and making copies of the book of Matthew over the centuries, and it was included in our canon, our 66 books, and it's considered scripture. That means that we believe the Holy Spirit led Matthew to write this book, and every word he wrote on that page was guided by the Holy Spirit. It was originally written in Greek and then for us translated into English by men and women who deeply understand Greek syntax and language. And so we're reading through it as a church, trying to understand Jesus. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? And so each week we're taking a section out of Matthew, just one section after another, just unpacking it, reading it together, and thinking, how do we apply this in our life? To set the stage, I want you to imagine that you're going to move next week. And you ask your friend, hey, could you come and help me with my move? And they enthusiastically volunteer to help you. They say, I'll be there first thing in the morning. And you're counting on their word for help. You rearrange your plans and you wait. But as the hours progress, there's no call, no text, certainly no help lifting boxes. What would you call that? Left high and dry? There are no show? Yeah. What?

unknown 3:14

No call, shows, no call.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

That's right, no show, no call. You've been in that place before, right? Where somebody said they would be there and yet they didn't keep their word. And um different cultures handle this in different ways. In our culture, we prize this quality of being a person of your word. What do we say to kids? When we're training this character quality, what is the language that we use to teach them? You say you want to be a person of your word, right? You want to follow through. Somebody that keeps their word, but how would we describe them? What would we say about them? They're dependable. What else? Reliable, they're honest, they're uh trustworthy, right? They're sincere. They're not just giving you lip service, but they're actually doing it. I I worked with this one guy when I was in my 20s who was the opposite. And he seemed like such a friendly guy when he was brought on staff to work, you know, with me. I was I was working at a college. And so friendly. Hey Josh, how's it going? Let's get coffee sometime. But as the weeks and months and years progressed, and there was actually no coffee date, I realized this guy knows how to talk, but he has no follow-through, right? And what does that tell you about a person's character, right? It means that they are they're using their mouth, but their mouth and what they're saying is divorced from their life. Well, Jesus is going to tell a story which I want to read to you. But before we do that, I want to ask this question. How often do we as Christians say yes to God but fail to act in accordance with his will?

unknown 5:27

All the time.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

All the time. That's right. That's right. And we do this to God, but don't we also do this to ourselves? We do this January 1st. We make what we call resolutions, and then we fail to carry out our resolutions. We even lie to ourselves, right? Which is one of the worst. I mean, that's one of the things that I hate the most in my own life, is like when I make a commitment to myself and I don't keep it. I hate that. Like I just feel like, ah, why did I do that? You know? Well, Jesus kind of dips into that this space, and we're gonna see how he talks about this idea. Um we call it like the follow-through. Um, but he's gonna talk about it in terms of um your salvation, justification. We're also gonna apply it to the arena of sanctification and our growth or our maturing in our relationship with Christ. Let me read you the text and then we'll unpack it. Starting in verse 28, he says, What do you think? A man had two sons. He went to the first and he said, My son, go work in the vineyard today. He answered, I don't want to. But later he changed his mind and went. Then the man went to the other and he said the same thing. And the son said, I will, sir. He answered, but he didn't go. Which of the two did his father's will? And they said, The first. And Jesus said to them, Truly I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn't believe him. Tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him, but you, when you saw it, didn't even change your minds then and believe him. Let's pray. Father, as we look at this text, we want to open up our hearts so that we're we're listening from this posture where we're ready to obey, where we're we're ready to receive what you have for us. And we know that we don't have to be braced. You're not mean when you talk to us. You're not like an abusive parent or an abusive friend where we have to brace ourselves, but we can in a safe way let down our guard and listen to you. And so, Lord, would you find in us, help us to have this ready response where we say, Yep, God, I'll obey you. I receive it. I'm ready to listen. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. And so let's look and walk through this text, starting back in verse 28. The context, you'll remember last week that Jesus is on the Temple Mount in the last year, and last week leading up to his crucifixion. He's had ongoing conflicts and fights with the chief priests and the Pharisees, but it's coming to a head. There's a lot of conflict in the last week, that holy week, between Jesus and these religious elites. Imagine a society where the most important, the people who kind of are the heroes of society, are the ones who are these Pharisees and chief priests. They are spiritual elites. They're looked up to. And they're the ones who feel threatened by Jesus, they're challenging Jesus, they're trying to catch Jesus in what he's saying. And last week we closed with this question that they posed to Jesus, and they asked him, who gave you the authority to do what you're doing? And Jesus asked them a question, and he said, Well, I'll ask you, and if you answer my question, I'll answer your question. Who gave authority or where was John's ministry from? Was it from heaven or from men? In other words, did God send John the Baptist, or did John just kind of come up with this ministry idea on his own? And this stumped the Pharisees because they were like, well, if we answer the question and say that John came from God, then everybody's gonna be like, well, why didn't you believe him? But if we say that John is from earth and he had an earthly ministry that he just came up with, well then the crowd's gonna be against us. Everybody here is celebrating Passover, because the crowd did believe John. And so Jesus is basically continuing that thought into the text we're looking at here this morning. And he asks them, what do you think? That's the opening question. Now, some of you are on a spiritual journey, and I want you to see how approachable the Jesus of the Bible is. Look at this for a second. Do you see it? What's the question? What do you think? What do you think? You see, the God of the Bible values your intellectual capacity. He wants to engage your brain. He wants you to use your brain as he's presenting ideas. He doesn't just come like Zeus and be like, I'm gonna strike you with lightning if you don't believe this. He says, No, what do you think? That is goes back to the garden and how God created humanity. He gave you autonomy, he gave you independence. He says, Here's my plan, my my good plan for you and my love. But you have freedom of choice. So here he says to his enemies, essentially, he says, What do you think? Let me tell you a story. A man has two sons, and he goes to the first, he says, Go work in the vineyard today. So obviously, this is a guy that owns a vineyard with grapes. He owns a winery, essentially. And he asks his first son to go and work. And um, we'll stop there for just a second before we get to the second son. Go work in the vineyard today. We're gonna see that there's this first son, then we're gonna see that there's a second son, and we'll see the response from both, and then the last two verses is really Jesus applying the story. So we get the parable. A parable is just a story that's meant to teach a spiritual truth, right? So we get first son, second son, and then Jesus on this one, he's gonna bring it back around, he's gonna make a point out of it. So we see the first son, and here's what happens. Once he says this, the first son says, I don't want to. You ever had a kid where you told him to go and do something, and they say, I don't want to. That's a pretty easy to relate to, right? But it says later, he changed his mind and went. Then the man went to the other son and he said the same thing. The other son responds and says, Yes, sir, I will. Right? Lip service. He answered, but he didn't do it. He didn't go and do it. So we end up with two people, two sons, and we have this contrast between words and actions. The first son has the words, I will not, but then changes his mind and does it. The second one says, I will, and he doesn't do it. Both are saying one thing and doing the opposite of what they said. I I want to, for a second, show you this. Well, this is a vineyard, just in case you were wondering. This is maybe what it looked like for the sons. Um I want to look at this phrase because I'm gonna put some pieces together. So I need to kind of deposit for you for a second some pieces, some words that Jesus uses when he tells the story, and it'll come together. We'll tie a bow on it on the end. So the first son, he answered, I don't want to, but then later he changed his mind. That word, he changed his mind, is a single Greek word to change your mind. And it isn't just about changing your thinking, but other places it's translated regret, uh feeling sorry, uh, feeling remorseful. And um the idea is that um there's an internal change. You gotta remember that Jesus is dealing with people's hearts all the time. So with this, with these sons and with your kids when you've talked to them, or your employees, or your friends, you know that the the real human, the good human experiences, is when their actions flow from their hearts, right? That's that's what um Jesus wants for you and I, and that's um what we prize in our friendships. The word is closely related to the idea of repent. It's important because when we get to verse 32, the word is gonna be used again, and um what it's gonna say of the Pharisees is that they didn't change their minds and believe. So this word is used twice within the same context. Let's go to this next section. This question Which of the two did his father's will? And we know which one was it, first or second son? The first son, right? The son who said, I don't want to work in the vineyard today, is the one who changes his mind and does the father's will. There is here this establishing, in asking this question, Jesus is establishing with these Pharisees a baseline truth of who's obedient. It's the first son who actually does the will of the Father. If we go a little bit further, to verse further in verse 31, Jesus says to them, Truly I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. So he's told a story, he's got an agreement from the crowd on the story, having set that foundation, that logical foundation, he now turns a corner and applies it to his audience. Do you see what he's doing? It's a great communication technique. We can agree on the story of the sons, since we believe that's true. Now we can move into this kingdom of heaven conversation. So he says, here's what's true. That's what truly means. Here's what's true. I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God. When he talks about tax collectors and prostitutes, in that day, what's he talking about? Were tax collectors and prostitutes the heroes of society? No, they weren't, right? These are the people who we all collectively agree that these are the people who are kind of bad for society. What would the modern day like tax collectors and prostitutes be? What? Crooks, okay, so we are uh thieves, loan sharks, what loan sharks? Lowlifes. Yeah, yeah, totally. People that are doing things that don't contribute to the well-being of society, right? And they're kind of everybody looks at them, right? So, um if you walk over to Broadway, there's, you know, like a pimp that is kind of known on the street. And and you walk up to Joe Schmoe, and he lives in the neighborhood, and he knows that that guy is a pimp. There's gonna be an agreement of like that person is bad for our neighborhood. That that person is just not a good is a low life, right? They're not contributing to society. And yet Jesus here is taking the low lives of society and is saying, they're gonna enter the kingdom of God before you Pharisees. Well, that kind of blows the paradigm. So the heroes of society, the being the Pharisees and chief priests, are getting second place, second entrance into the kingdom. And here's now what is what's going on here? Does this is this mean that Jesus approves of the behavior of tax collectors and prostitutes? No, right? We got to go a little bit further into the next verse to see that. But I before we get there, I just wanted you to see that there's some fundamental concepts in this verse, right? There is, and it's it's here, entering the kingdom of God. How many of you ever have gone to church and heard the saying, you've got to get saved? You ever heard that saying before? You ever heard the saying, you must be born again? Yeah. Um, or you have you heard somebody say, I became a Christian? Yes, you've heard that, right? Have you ever heard somebody say, I entered the kingdom of God? It's the same thing. It's the same, it's synonymous, it's the same idea. I entered the kingdom of God. This is what Jesus is talking about this entrance into the kingdom. We talk about, in our culture, we've been so heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation, Billy Graham. We talk a lot about having a personal relationship with Jesus. I'm going to ask you at the end of this service to make a personal decision in your life, if you have not already, that you need to personally decide if you want to be a follower of Jesus. But here is Jesus laying out the same idea using this language, entering the kingdom of God. And what you need to understand is that not only are you invited to have a friendship with God, which is a beautiful conversation, and it is absolutely true, you are also invited not just individually to have that relationship, but when you become a Christian, you're born again, you're saved, you enter into the kingdom of God. Did you know that?

unknown 23:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Your lifestyle changes, yes. We're going to talk about, we're going to close with that. We're going to talk about what happens, right? But here we're talking about entering into the kingdom of God. And what's the order? Who's getting in first? Tax collectors and prostitutes. Wow, we better keep going because it almost sounds like Jesus is prioritizing the tax collectors and prostitutes. So he says in verse 32, for John, who's John? The Baptist. We were talking about him last week, and if we just kept reading, we would run into this a couple verses later. He says, For John came to you in the way of righteousness. He came to you in the way. That hearkens back to Isaiah 40, you know, to make way for the Messiah. That's what John's job was. He came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn't believe him. So Jesus here, he's now hammering the Pharisees. These are people, these Pharisees have rejected Jesus outright, and Jesus is coming down hard on them, and he's saying, You didn't believe John when he came to you. But tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him. But you, when you saw it, you didn't even change your minds. That's this idea of you are not remorseful leading to a change. You didn't change your minds, then believe in him. So that's the that is the dynamic that Jesus is laying out here. Just a few simple verses, but but um very clear that Jesus is trying to appeal to these Pharisees, and it ends up he's kind of successful with a handful of them. There's a few Pharisees that actually do receive what Jesus is saying and they change their minds and they believe. But do you see the working components here? Here's the tax collectors. They're entering in because they believed. They changed their minds and believed in the message that John brought. And John's message was about Jesus, and they received Jesus. And because they received Jesus, there's changes occurring in their lives. They are like the first sons who were rebellious, who rejected, but then they changed their minds and they went and they did what the Father asked them. And so Jesus is saying, it's not good enough to be like the second son giving lip service to the request of your father. That's not good enough. You need to respond with a change of mind and an action. What's the action? I'm going to believe. You see, Jesus and James, his brother, and the New Testament church, like, believe is a packaged idea. That your life of, that your life of obedience flows out of that belief. Like you don't get to say, yeah, oh yeah, I believe in Jesus, but you keep doing the low life stuff. It results in change. So in closing, let's just talk about this from a justification point. Justification is a theological term that refers to being saved, being born again, entering the kingdom of God. We call that justification. You only need to be justified once, in the sense that you make a decision, you're going to follow Jesus, and your life, it says, goes from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. You get translated, converted over to God's kingdom. You enter into it. And the way that this text talks about that is it says that John started the ministry, Jesus is the fulfillment of that ministry, and you can respond to God's work and enter into God's kingdom by changing your mind. But what's not good enough to get saved? What's not good enough for these Pharisees? What? Not to believe him. But what's the lesson? The second son in this story, he's told what is the right way to do it, and how does he respond? He says, Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. He gives lip service, but that's not good enough, right? Because Jesus asked the question, who did the will of the Father? It was not good enough to say, Dad, I'll go and do it, but then not do it. Right? And that's not good enough in your friendships, right? When you need to go and move and you're like, hey, could you help me? And the guy's like, yeah, yeah, I'll help you. That's not good enough. You need them to show up Saturday morning with their sweatband on, ready to haul boxes to that truck, right? Otherwise, they're no good. And Jesus is driving this home with people who think they're good. They think they are the stuff. They think they are the spiritual stuff of Israel. They're the spiritual elites, and Jesus is peeling back their hypocrisy and saying, see, you rejected John. You rejected John, and now you're rejecting me. You are way far away from the kingdom of God. And meanwhile, who's passing you by? Whoops, there goes the tax collector right in the kingdom. Whoa, there goes the prostitute, right into the kingdom, passing you by. Can you believe that there he goes? There's that other low life. The one, oh, he just got in behind before you did. What's going on? Shocking. It's a shocking moment. These outcasts of society, the people we're looking at, they're just flying by right into the kingdom. And meanwhile, these spiritual elites are rejecting the work of God. So the first thing that this text says to you and I is listen, if you're not yet saved, if you're not yet justified, if you're not yet born again, you need to change your mind about the direction you're going and believe in Jesus. Because this Bible verses tells us you'll enter the kingdom of God if you do that. Super simple. So today is a good day to decide that you're ready to change your mind and believe in your heart that Jesus is the Lord and that you're not. Right? That's the first thing. But a lot of us have already been justified. We're already followers of Jesus. This idea doesn't stop because Jesus doesn't just give us instructions about entering the kingdom. He gives us instructions about living in the kingdom. And he expects us not to just come to church and be like Jesus, that is such a great thing you said. You're so smart, and then we go out and live the opposite. Instead, he wants us to live as a people of the kingdom who are hearing it. In fact, James says it's like this: you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror, and you've got like just this big hair piece just like sticking up this direction. Now, none of you have that. Now, maybe you woke up like that, but none of you came to church like that. What do you do? You look in the mirror and you fix it. James, in chapter one of James, who happened to be Jesus' brother, he said, listen, that's like reading the Bible. You go read the Bible, it's like looking in the mirror, and it shows you what needs to happen. If you read it and you don't do it, it's no good. It doesn't translate into your life. We're only reading these things so that we can be an obedient people. Those that so we constantly, in Romans 12, it says that we have our minds transformed. That God's working in us to transform our thinking. So part of what we're going to talk about next week with this launching of like a growth track for our church is that we constantly need the Holy Spirit to change the way that we think about life. And it needs to translate not just in our minds, but it deals with our hearts that there's remorse over, like, man, I'm remorseful about how I thought like that. I'm ready to change. Yeah. Yeah, it's good to stay on the path. I just want to show you one real basic example of this in the life of Paul. Paul was an apostle, and he would travel all over southern Europe and uh Asia Minor, Turkey, modern-day Turkey, planting churches. He would start churches. And then he would write letters back to those churches to check in with them, to help correct them, to teach them more stuff, uh, to figure out disputes. But he wrote this letter to the Corinthian church. This was the third letter, actually, but we call it Second Corinthians, because we only have the first letter and we have, I think, the third letter, uh, or we have the second and the third. So we call them first and second. Okay? You don't need to know that. He writes at the end of chapter one these things. Now you need to know that he's laying out his travel plans, and they're in the southern tip of Greece, and one of the things that has to happen is that he wants to visit them, and he said he's gonna visit them. But meanwhile, in this church, there's some bad Christian leaders that have come to town and they're trying to undermine and belittle Paul the Apostle that started the church. They're trying to trash talk Paul. And Paul knows this, and one of the things that his these guys are trash talking about is like Paul doesn't keep his word. Because Paul said he was going to come here. Look, he's not here yet. He didn't show up. And so Paul, in his letter to the church, he says this because of this confidence, I planned to come to you first. So he's making a plan. Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, a Jesus-filled man, the greatest missionary ever to live, is making plans. So don't ever think that being filled with the Holy Spirit is in conflict with making plans. He planned to come to that church first, and it had a purpose, so that you could see a second benefit. You could be benefited from me coming to you again. And to visit you on my way in the Macedonia. In other words, I'm going to pass through you to Macedonia and then to come back again from Macedonia and to be helped by you on my journey. So I'm going to pass through and then I'm going to come back again. Look what happens though. Now, when I made this plan, was I double-minded? Oh, that's another good word for these people that say one thing and do something else. Double-minded, okay? He says this was I of two minds, or what I plan, do I plan it in a pure humanly way? Like, am I just pulling stuff out of my brain, you know, for ideas? Are my brain, are my plans just like something that I came up with in the shower? Or was it like this is the Holy Spirit that was leading me? That's his question to the church, yes.

unknown 36:08

God is merciful, but if you don't go by his plan in the Bible, he's not.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

You're gonna have problems, right? Exactly. So here Paul is talking about how he is planning, he's asking the question: do I come up with human plans or spirit-filled plans? What do you think is the case? Spirit-filled plans, right? Do I plan in a purely human way so that when I say yes, yes, and then no, no at the same time? Do you see he's characterizing human plans? When people make human plans, they tend to be two-minded, double-minded, they tend to not follow through because they're not doing their life based off of God. Right? They're just coming up with their purely human plans. And Paul's like, when I wrote this to you, did I write this as a plan that was human or was it from God? Characterized in that way. As God is faithful. So he's gonna answer his own question. He says, as God is faithful, our message to you is not yes and then no. Right? Do you see he's saying, I didn't just give you my plans, but the importance of Christian communication. You don't just make plans and then renege on your plans because Paul's job is to communicate the message of the gospel. But what if you're taking God's message to people, but then your life is characterized by being double-minded and you never follow through. Who's gonna listen to you? Nobody's gonna listen to you, right? Do you rely on your friends that talk a lot and never show up? No, they may be fun for the barbecue, but you don't make your plans based on them, right? No. And so Paul is telling this church, listen, I don't make double-minded plans. That's a characteristic of human-led people, purely human people. No, a follower of Jesus, somebody who's making plans based on the Holy Spirit, it is yes and yes. So he says, as God is faithful, because is God say yes and then no? Does God say one thing and then change his mind? Nah. No, that's it's impossible for God to do that because he's absolutely true infinitely. He cannot take and change his words. He keeps going, he says, this for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaim among you, Sylvanus, Timothy, and I, that's his teaching team. We did not become, or did not be uh be, I did not become yes and no. On the contrary, in him, it is always yes. It is always yes. The message is consistently yes. It's not this going back and forth. For every one of God's promises is yes in him. Have you ever heard that before? You're familiar with that verse, right? Everything that God says he's going to do. He cannot make a promise and then not keep it. Therefore, through him we also say amen to the glory of God. Now it is God who strengthens us together with you in Christ and who has anointed us. You see, for those of us that are followers of Jesus, one of the things that characterizes our life is that we're careful about our words, we're careful about what comes out of our mouths, and then we keep what we say. We do, we follow through. In fact, there's a proverb that says, Blessed is the one who swears to his own hurt. Sometimes we say stuff and make promises where for us to follow through on that promise, it's gonna actually hurt us. But there is, for some reason, in the Proverbs, this idea of like, listen, there is a blessedness to you keeping your word. There's a life of faith. Like when you say something and you keep your word, that's the idea of vows in the Old Testament. The people of God are a people who are careful with their words and then they follow through on what they say. And so this week, we we said at the beginning, what does it mean for us to follow Jesus? This week it means that we're thinking about the words we use and we're following through. We're keeping our commitments to people. Maybe do an audit this afternoon. Just think through. Am I have I promised anybody anything and not followed through? I need to go do that. I need to take care of it. Okay, Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for being the third son who said yes and did it. And we're gonna celebrate that this morning at the table here. We're grateful for the work that you accomplished on our behalf, your obedience to the Father. Thank you for going into the vineyard and doing the work. Thank you for redeeming us, bringing us back to yourself. Lord, would you work in those that don't know you this morning a change of mind and a belief in you? And for those of us that are following you and have made that commitment to you that we're saved, we want to live as a people with our minds being changed, believing in you. That we are doing what we say. Help us, Lord. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.