An introduction to the sermon and background information about the disciples.

Introduction and Background

Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven as a net gathering all kinds of fish, and the separation of the wicked from the righteous at the end of the age.

Parable of the Net

Jesus compares a scribe or teacher of the law who becomes a disciple in the kingdom of heaven to the owner of a house with old and new treasures in the storeroom, emphasizing the need for righteousness through faith in Jesus.

Parable of the Homeowner

Jesus calls for followers willing to sacrifice everything to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Call to Sacrifice

The Kingdom of Heaven is open to everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, or past sins, based on genuine faith in Jesus Christ.

Inclusive Kingdom of Heaven

The disciples begin to understand how Jesus fulfills the Jewish law and prophets, with the light bulb starting to brighten.

Understanding the Fulfillment

Jesus connects the disciples' understanding to the teaching of the parable, emphasizing the responsibility of discipleship.

The Parable of the Householder

Disciples are compared to homeowners who bring out treasures to share with others, emphasizing the responsibility to use their treasures to share with everyone.

Bringing Out Old and New Treasures

As followers of Jesus, disciples are called to be salt and light, showing mercy, love, and forgiveness to everyone they encounter.

The Mandate for Disciples

Disciples are called to resemble Jesus and bring the Kingdom of Heaven into the world, despite the resistance of some to accept it.

The Family Resemblance

The teaching emphasizes the need to do the will of the Lord Jesus and his Father, accepting salvation with faith and committing to following Jesus wholeheartedly.

The Difficult Teaching

- The speaker greets the audience and expresses gratitude for the opportunity to preach at RBC
- Last week, they studied the parables of the kingdom and imagined themselves by the Sea of Galilee
- Discussed the first 2 parables about the kingdom of heaven being like a hidden treasure and a merchant seeking a pearl of great value
- Today, they will discuss the other 2 parables about gathering and separating fish and a homeowner with old and new treasures
- Jesus wants his disciples to understand that the kingdom of heaven will be open to everyone, but not everyone will be open to it
- The disciples are ordinary people being prepared by Jesus to do great things
- Jesus tells the disciples a parable about a net catching all kinds of fish and separating the good from the bad
- He also tells a parable about a homeowner bringing out old and new treasures from his store room
- Jesus finishes the parables and moves on from there

- Jesus teaches a parable about the end of the age and the judgment of humankind
- The parable describes a sorting of righteous and wicked people
- Another parable describes a disciple in the kingdom of heaven as a homeowner with old and new treasures in their heart
- The message is that God's kingdom will be open to everyone, but not everyone will be open to God's kingdom
- The quality of God's reign includes flourishing, protection, redemption, and restoration, but sin and evil must be purged for it to be fully realized

- Jesus taught that righteousness is only something that God can give a person by his grace if they believe and follow his son Jesus Christ
- Believing in Jesus is not a question of believing that he exists, but about following him and producing spiritual fruit
- Jesus' teaching reshapes the disciples' understanding of righteousness and expands it beyond Jewish identity and religious practices
- Understanding Jesus' teachings will be fundamental for the disciples as they go out to spread the message and invite others to participate in the church

- Jesus is looking for followers who are willing to sacrifice everything to be his disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven
- The Kingdom of Heaven is open to everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, culture, economic status, or intelligence
- Righteousness can only be given by God through genuine faith in Jesus Christ
- Disciples are meant to share the treasures of the Kingdom with others and be salt and light in their communities
- Not everyone will be open to the Kingdom of Heaven, and it is important to assess oneself by God's standard

- The speaker urges listeners to do the will of Jesus and his Father in heaven
- They emphasize the importance of faith in Jesus and following him
- The message is challenging but the speaker prays for open hearts to accept it
- The prayer asks for God's guidance and willingness to accept Jesus as the way to the kingdom of heaven

- Speaker expresses gratitude for preaching at RBC
- Last week, they studied parables of the kingdom by the Sea of Galilee
- Discussed parables about hidden treasure, a merchant seeking a pearl, gathering and separating fish, and old and new treasures
- Jesus wants disciples to understand the kingdom will be open to everyone, but not everyone will be open to it
- Emphasizes the importance of faith in Jesus and following him
- Urges listeners to do the will of Jesus and his Father in heaven
- Prays for open hearts to accept the challenging message

Today is the day that the Lord has made, so let's rejoice and be glad in it.

And if you're watching us online, either right now in real time or sometime later in the future, we're glad that you're with us.

And with the grace that the elders have showed me, they've allowed me great latitude in studying with them and being able to preach here at RBC and I appreciate it very much.

And last week We were here together studying through the parables of the kingdom.

And I did a little thought exercise with those of you who were here with me.

We imagined ourselves together by the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee.

And just nearby that shore was a small modest house.

And that house had a little kind of hole cut into the exterior wall.

But remember, they didn't have glass back then.

It was just to let air and light pass through.

And we took advantage of that hole because we looked through that hole into the house.

And inside the house, we saw Jesus with his 12 disciples.

And we also saw the homeowner, the host at that host, that was hosting Jesus and the disciples while they were ministering in that area of Galilee.

Inside, Jesus had been teaching his disciples 4 parables about the kingdom of heaven.

It was a four-part lesson that he was teaching them.

In the first 2 parables that we saw last week, Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven was like a hidden treasure, and again that it was like a merchant looking for a pearl of great value.

Each man encountered their treasure in different ways, and both of them sold everything that they had in order to possess that treasure.

Jesus was teaching his disciples there that the kingdom of heaven deserves to be his disciples greatest pursuit in life.

He wants his followers to be willing to sacrifice everything that they have and everything that they hold dear to be disciples in the kingdom of heaven.

This morning we're going to look at the other 2 parables in this four-part lesson.

The third parable will be about gathering and separating fish.

And the fourth 1 will be about a homeowner with a storage room full of both old treasures and new treasures.

The big idea in these parables, what Jesus wants his disciples to understand And what he wants us to understand as well is that God's kingdom will be open to everyone.

But unfortunately, not everyone will be open to God's kingdom.

These will prove to be very important lessons for Jesus' disciples, who don't realize yet that they will be called to establish Jesus' new church.

They will be called to preach a brand new gospel to all people, inviting everyone to participate in the kingdom of heaven.

And ultimately they will be called to give up their lives in testimony to Jesus' name.

But they will also be important lessons to you and to me, as we ourselves have to count the cost of what it means to be a disciple in the King of Heaven.

They seem to be such important lessons that in the very middle of his teaching, the passage we're going to read today, Jesus asks his disciples his own question.

To me, this is 1 of the funniest verses in the Bible.

Because of how I imagine it in my mind, because of how I play the movie version of what the passage says, Jesus checks in with his disciples between the third and fourth parable.

And he asked them the question, have you understood all these things?

And I can picture the 12 disciples in that room, everyone's checking the other 1 out, and they're looking, Are you going to answer him first?

But I know there's no punctuation in ancient Greek, in the language that the New Testament was written in.

And I wonder if just maybe there was a question mark after the yes, the way our teenagers answer questions.

They understood, I believe, that they understood as much as they could understand in the middle of that lesson, just like we understand as much as we can.

The prophet Isaiah says that the servant of the kingdom, Jesus, will speak in parables, and he will do this for 2 reasons.

1 is to reveal God's truth to those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness.

The other reason is to hide the truth of the parables, to hide the truth that the parables are revealing to those who are stubborn-minded, whose hearts are hard against the Lord God.

So let's be faithful and willing listeners this morning.

Let's be eager to hear what our great teacher Jesus has to tell us about the Kingdom of Heaven.

I have faith that if we approach it with soft hearts, with ears that are willing to hear, that the Holy Spirit will reveal to us everything that he believes we need.

Now we spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time on context last week.

And I appreciate your patience as I did that.

So I'm going to recap very briefly here the 3 things that I think are important to consider in this passage about the disciples.

Context that's important about the disciples because this is to whom Jesus is giving this message in this home.

The first thing is that the disciples are ordinary people, 12 ordinary men.

They're not scholars, they're not experts in anything except maybe fishing.

They're not wise men, professional teachers.

The second thing that's important to know is that they are culturally and religiously Jewish.

This informs how they have been raised, the understanding that they have about God, and the law and the prophets that have been taught to them.

And it understands how they perceive the world around them now.

It's the lens through which they understand everything and interpret everything that's taught to them.

The last thing that's important to note, which I've mentioned at the beginning of this message, is that they are being prepared by Jesus to do incredible things that they don't realize yet.

So far, they've pretty much just been following him.

I'm told that I've been struggling with this thing.

I knew I was going to have trouble with this.

They're culturally and religiously Jewish and it's important for us to remember as Jesus is teaching them these things that he's preparing them to do great things.

With that in mind, let's look at the text and see what Jesus has to say to them today.

Remember we've read the first 2 parables, now we're starting the last 2.

So Jesus says once again, because this is the third parable now, once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and that caught all kinds of fish.

When that net was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore.

Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but they threw the bad fish away.

This is how it will be at the end of the age.

The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace where they will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Guys, have you understood all these things?

So Jesus said to them, therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his store room new treasures as well as old treasures.

When Jesus had finished these parables, he moved on from there.

In this third of Jesus' 4 parables to his disciples, Jesus paints a picture of a massing fishing operation.

There are no fishing poles here, and there's no rinky-dinky little hand-held nets you pull up 1 or 2 fish with.

We're talking about a proper professional fishing drag net.

It's called a drag net because this thing is massive.

It's lowered into, in this case, the lake, the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a lake, and it's dragged along the floor, the ocean, lake floor, and it gathers up everything that's there.

It gathers up fish, seaweed, coral, rocks, sand, whatever.

Nothing that passes through that net doesn't get caught up.

Nothing can escape the net's grasp, Nothing.

And hauling this impressive catch to shore, the fishermen carry out the work of separating the good fish from the bad fish.

Now sometimes these parables of Jesus can be very tricky to interpret.

I said already that the prophet Isaiah prophesied this.

You can't imagine, folks, how many books have been written about the parables by pastors, by theologians, by people with PhDs, through centuries.

They're still writing books about these parables, trying to figure out what do they mean?

But some parables, like this 1, we have the benefit that Jesus himself tells us what it means.

We don't need to write, well we can write books if we want, but Jesus explains it black and white, super clear.

The first thing that Jesus makes clear is that this parable is talking about the end of the age.

We've been talking about the kingdom of heaven pretty much all year here at Rosemount Bible Church.

We did a sermon series, a long sermon series, about the Sermon on the Mount, which is largely about the Kingdom of Heaven.

We talked about how the Kingdom of Heaven is the 1 thing that Jesus teaches so much about, more than any other topic, and now we're going through the parables of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven, we've described, is something that Jesus has started.

He said it's coming, it's near, and it started, but it's not fully here yet.

It's not fully, things are not fully operating under those characteristics of what the kingdom of heaven will be like.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven will be only fully realized at the end of the age, after a time of judgment, a time about which this very parable speaks.

The second thing that Jesus makes clear to his disciples, the same disciples that he called to be fishers of men, is that there will be a time at the end of this age when all of humankind will be gathered together for judgment.

Like the giant dragnet that's lowered into the bottom of the lake that catches all the fish that are in its grasp, Jesus says that God's angels will somehow be involved in gathering all the people.

You and me, our neighbors, our co-workers, our moms and our dads, our grandchildren, everybody.

And the third thing that Jesus made clear is that once all the people are gathered at the end of the age, There will be a judgment and a sorting.

They will be separated from the righteous And the Bible says that they will be cast away.

We're going to come back to this parable later.

We're going to unpack what this means, how this affects us, what changes should occur in our lives.

But before I do that, Let's jump for a quick review of what the fourth parable is about, that Jesus taught his disciples.

This is a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven, like the others, and yet, it's different from many of the parables, which begin with those classic words, the kingdom of heaven is like.

Here Jesus describes how a very particular type of disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house.

And The type of disciple that he's referring to is 1 who has been a scribe, or a teacher of the law, or a scholar.

Jesus says that the scribe or teacher of the law who becomes a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house.

And in this homeowner's house is a storage room, a storeroom, a place where the homeowner keeps their valuables.

And interestingly enough, the Greek word for storeroom is theisauros.

That's the word that we get the English word thesaurus from, that book that gives you other words that you could say instead of the word that you want, thesaurus.

In the first century, the thesaurus or the storehouse was often used in Jewish and Greek literature as a metaphor for the heart or the mind, as a place where we find inner treasures and inner wisdom.

In fact, Jesus uses this word, the stavros or thesaurus, in the Sermon on the Mount.

In Matthew chapter 6, verses 19 to 21, Jesus says, do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart or your thesaurus will be also." You see to Jesus, The heart is the storage room in which we keep our treasures.

This parable describes a homeowner bringing out of their storage room both treasures that are old and treasures that are new.

What Jesus is saying here is that this type of disciple in the kingdom of heaven possesses 2 types of treasures in their hearts, in their minds.

Both are valuable, both are a blessing, but 1 is somehow of an older type and the other somehow of a newer type.

Bearing in mind that Jesus is giving both of these parables as part of a larger four-part lesson to his disciples, a question today, my question for today is twofold.

First question, what's Jesus trying to teach them in this private four-part lesson?

And what lessons or choices might this impose on us here today?

Firstly, bringing back the idea, the big idea for today's message, Jesus wants his disciples to understand that God's kingdom will be open to everyone, but not everyone is going to be open to God's kingdom.

This can be a very hard message for the disciples to hear.

And as I've been preparing for this, both my studies and my prayers, my heart, I'm learning that it's a very difficult message for me to give, too.

But I wouldn't be a faithful student or teacher of God's Word if I didn't share His full Word with everybody.

If I only shared the great things and held back or hid the other things.

You've likely heard me teach in the past that the kingdom of God is best described not by where the kingdom is, but by what the quality of God's reign is like.

It's a reign in which everything flourishes, in which everyone is protected, in which everyone can be redeemed, and in which everything that's redeemed is restored.

That's what the kingdom of heaven is like.

The whole truth is that in order for God's reign to be fully realized, for us to experience that here and now, because let's face it, we do not experience that here and now right the world that we live in is not fantastic there's some flourishing but often at the expense of others some people seem to get justice other people seem to get away with it.

And not an awful lot in this world is getting restored.

We see sickness, we see the ravages of age and time, we see things falling apart.

For God's reign to be fully realized, for God's reign to not be challenged, sin has to be purged.

In order for God's perfect reign to come about with all those qualities that every single 1 of us desires, evil has to be removed.

And this removal of sin, this removal of evil, is not something that any human being can accomplish.

If we live as a people for thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we will never get to a point where we are civilized enough to have this perfect world on our own.

It doesn't matter how much technology or evolution or philosophy or education we have.

Jesus clearly explained in his teaching that 1 aspect, 1 characteristic of the kingdom of heaven, will be the gathering, the sorting, and the separating at the end of the age.

So now I'm curious, what makes a fish good?

I'll eat it at a restaurant, but even then I usually leave disappointed.

I don't like playing with the worm on the hook.

I don't like sitting there and doing nothing.

I can tell you, however, I can tell you how Jesus diagnosed the human heart throughout the entire Gospels, throughout His entire ministry.

I'm going to throw a lot of verses at you.

So I'll ask you to just focus on the words because you won't see them on the screen.

My point here is to show you the overwhelming evidence of Jesus' own teaching, the teaching from Jesus' own mouth, about what the condition of the human heart is, who is a good fish or a righteous person, and why they're righteous, and what it all means.

First, Jesus taught that nobody is righteous except God alone.

In Mark chapter 10, Jesus said no 1 is good, no 1 is good except God alone.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus said unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus gave this lesson knowing that to the Jewish listeners the best examples that they had of the most righteous people, the people that they observed to be the most scholarly, the most aware of God's law, the most practicing on the outside, Jesus set the bar higher than those people.

He made it clear to his listeners that nobody can possibly be righteous on their own.

There's nothing they can know, there's nothing they can study, there's no behavior or set of things they could do to be okay somehow.

Second, Jesus also taught that righteousness is only something that God can give a person by his grace if they believe and follow his son Jesus Christ.

I'm going to spit a lot of verses out at you.

They're all from John, the Gospel of John.

John chapter 8, Jesus said, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but have the light of life.

In John chapter 10 Jesus said, I'm the gate.

Again in John chapter 11 Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.

The 1 who believes in me will live even though they die.

And whoever lives by believing in me will never die.

And in John chapter 14 Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life.

No 1 comes to the Father except through me.

Even this morning during worship, I don't know if any of you remember the, it was 1st John chapter 4 I think that Marie was reading from.

Finally, Jesus taught that believing in him is not a question of believing that he exists, like whether you believe in Santa Claus or not.

I'm not going to open up that can of worms.

But it's not a question of whether you believe that he exists or not.

It's not a question of even intellectually agreeing with his teaching or not.

Yeah, I believe that he was a real person and his teachings were great.

He wants people who follow him, who produce spiritual fruit.

In Matthew chapter 7, Jesus said, and you preached on this last, this is the last message in the Sermon on the Mount series, you preached on Matthew chapter 7 this verse.

Jesus said, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

But only the 1 who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

And many will say to me on that day, and I believe the day that Jesus is talking about is this end of the age day that we're reading through in Matthew chapter 13 now.

Many will say to me, Jesus says, on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles.

Jesus said then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you.

John chapter 3, we all know, or many people, many Christians know John chapter 3 verse 16.

I don't know as many people who quote to me John chapter 3 verses 17 and 18 and 19, but let's read it together and see the whole picture, the whole truth.

Yes, for God so loved the world that he gave his 1 and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

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Parables of Jesus: Parables of the Net and the Homeowner