Sermon: Playing the Long Game
Scripture Text: Luke 20:19-26
Quotes for Reflection
Augustine, The City of God
What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.
Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?”, 08/16/1967
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power. And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future….
N.T. Wright, The Gospel of Luke
The challenge to Jerusalem, the Temple, its rulers, and their hypocritical underlings, are all concentrated in the second half of the command: give God back what belongs to him. Jesus’ own accusation against his contemporaries is that they have consistently failed to worship their true and living God, and to live as his people before the world. The very Temple itself, the place where Israel was supposed to come and give to God what was his own, in worship, prayer, holiness and sacrifice – the Temple had become a brigands’ lair. Put that right, and the question of Caesar will in the long run sort itself out.
Application Questions
1. How are you experiencing a power that feels overwhelming?
2. What is one area of your life that needs to be aligned with the permanence of God’s kingdom?
3. How can the gospel save you in playing the long game on a particular issue?