Worth More than Sheep

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Well, I want you to imagine for just a moment waking up one morning and realizing that your spouse is not at all who you thought they were. And some of you, I knew there was going to be a laugh there. Some of you may be thinking, yeah, I’ve been there.

There was exactly that same awakening for a bunch of people in Germany in the late 80s and early 90s. You see, up to that point, the country had been separated by the Berlin Wall for 40 years. Well, actually, the wall hadn’t been up for 40 years, but the country had been separated for 40 years, much of that by the Berlin Wall.

And in East Germany, under the communist government, there was a group of people called the Stasi who were the secret police, and they were there to maintain order. Now, every communist country had its own secret police. That was nothing unusual. But what was unusual about the Stasi was how many people they had on the payroll, how many informants they had.

I’ve seen some numbers that say as many as one out of seven or one out of eight people in East Germany were on the payroll of the Stasi. Now, if you’re familiar with the history at all, you know the Berlin Wall fell, 1989. We just experienced the 30th anniversary of that a few months ago.

The Berlin Wall film, suddenly people overthrow the East German communist government, they reunite the country, and a bunch of people go into the Stasi archives because they know that the government has been keeping incredible tabs on the people. And what they found in the Stasi archives was they had so much information about everybody’s personal life. They had collected more information than all the other communist bloc countries combined.

And what some people realized when they opened the final, because see, the Stasi were there to keep order, make sure nobody challenged the government, make sure everybody was following the rules. That was their role. And so you had neighbors informing on neighbors.

You had children being taught in school to inform on their parents. You had sometimes even the clergy being led to inform on members of their congregations. But one of the most troubling aspects of all of this is that when some people went into the Stasi archives and they pulled their files to see what does the government have written about me, they realized that their spouses, some of them, were Stasi agents.

Not that they were recruited, hey, can you tell us a little bit about your husband or wife, but they were agents sent to woo those people for the purpose of getting them to fall in love with them in some cases and marry them so that they could keep tabs on them. There were people who in 1989, 1990, 1991, woke up and realized their entire relationship was based on a lie. See, they thought they had a relationship with this person.

They thought they’d met and fell in love and it was like a romantic comedy movie. And they realized instead that these people were spies by the government sent to pretend that they were in love with them. But really, their job, their role there, the whole reason for all of this was to make sure they were following the rules.

Wouldn’t that be terrifying to wake up and realize that you’ve built a life with this person, and they’re just a government agent there to make sure you follow the rules. Now, the reason I bring this up is because for a lot of people, they think that’s how it works with God. They think, and maybe some of you are in that same boat, that for you this morning, your picture of God is that He’s in this relationship with you just to make sure you’re following the rules.

That He’s in your life, that He’s watching over you just to make sure you’re abiding by the rules. A lot of people feel that way about God. That God may or may not care about them, but man, God sure cares about the rules, If you step out of line, he’s just what, you know, sometimes the kids get defiant, and I tell them, go ahead, I’m looking for a reason.

Just give me a reason to spank him. Nobody else ever been in that frame of mind, just give me a reason. We think sometimes God’s up there looking at us, just waiting for us to break a rule, saying, I’m ready to crush you, just give me a reason.

Right? We look at God the same way people understand those Stasi agents. They’re just there to make sure I follow the rules.

I have probably felt that way at times, and I know other people have felt that way because they’ve told me that. I’ve never heard anybody compare God to a Stasi agent, but that was certainly their idea that God only cares about the rules. But this morning, we’re going to look at a story out of Matthew chapter 12, if you’ll turn there with me.

A story out of Matthew chapter 12 that tells us the exact opposite. See, a lot of people think that God only cares about the rules. And I want to be clear, God’s rules matter.

God’s rules matter. They are there for our good. But at the same time, we need to understand that God cares more about sanctifying us, about making us holy and restoring us into a relationship with Himself.

He cares more about bringing us back to Him than He does about simple outward adherence to the rules. So if you’ll turn there with me to Matthew chapter 12. We’re going to look at another biblical story involving sheep.

As I told you last week, we were going to start a series of messages looking at some of these instances where the Bible talks about sheep. Because especially when Jesus talks about sheep and talks about the shepherd, it gives us a lot of insight into the relationship with God that we were created to have. And that’s what I want us to understand.

I’m not just pulling random things out here and saying, well, okay, let’s talk about donkey stories next. No, that’s not what this is. We’re looking at sheep because the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd helps us to understand something about our relationship with God.

So we’re going to look at this in Matthew chapter 12, and it explains to us how God really feels about us and how God really feels about the rules. So Matthew chapter 12, starting in verse 1, we’re going to look at verses 1 through 14 this morning. It says, At that time Jesus passed through the grain fields on the Sabbath.

His disciples were hungry and began to pick and eat some heads of grain. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, See, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. He said to them, Haven’t you read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry?

How he entered the house of God and they ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for him or for those with him to eat, but only for the priests? Or haven’t you read in the law that on the Sabbath days, the priests in the temple violate the Sabbath and are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here.

If you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. And we’ll pick up again in verse 9 in just a minute.

But just to make sure we understand, Jesus and the disciples are walking through a grain field one Sabbath day. They are hungry. And we can tell from Him comparing this to a necessity of David and a necessity of the priests in the temple, they’re not just hungry like, oh, I just had a little bit of.

. . You know, right now, I had black-eyed peas for breakfast. I’ve been on a black-eyed pea kick ever since New Year’s Day.

I just keep making them because they’re really hitting the spot. But I just had some black-eyed peas for breakfast. I know you hate them, but I’ve had some black-eyed peas for breakfast, and I’m a little hungry standing up here. I could go for a snack if I weren’t standing in front of y’all talking.

I’m a little hungry. That’s not what he’s talking about. The disciples, they’ve been out doing ministry, they’ve been out on the road, they are starving.

They are in a, it’s a necessity. They need to eat now. And so the Old Testament law allowed them to pick some grain, not go out there and cut grain with a sickle, but they could go out and pluck a few heads of grain and they could eat them.

They were allowed to do that in somebody else’s field. It was not considered theft under the law of Moses. But the Pharisees came and said, they’re harvesting grain on the Sabbath.

How dare they? Not harvesting grain. Shut up.

They’re out there harvesting. Jesus, don’t you know that they’re doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? I’ve told a few of you that my kids and I have this running joke when we’re going through the Bible stories of Jesus interacting with the Pharisees.

They often have this attitude that reminds me, please don’t think I’m making fun of a child, I’m not trying to, but that little girl from Sweden who was yelling at everybody at the UN about climate change, how dare you? That’s sort of how I see the Pharisees with Jesus all the time. They just, how dare you?

And the kids and I joke about that all the time. But that’s sort of their attitude toward Jesus. Do you not realize that they’re violating the Sabbath?

Jesus said, they are not. He said, don’t you remember what you read in the scriptures, how David and his men, when they were running from Saul and they were starving, they went into the tabernacle and they ate the bread of the presence. They ate the showbread that was there on offer to God and was only supposed to be eaten by the priests, and yet God allowed that to happen out of necessity.

And he said, or the priests, how they work on the Sabbath. You know, you’re upset about them working on the Sabbath. The priests are working.

They’re doing much of their work on the Sabbath. And they’re doing that out of necessity because God’s people need an intercessor. So you’ve got to understand here, he’s teaching them that they’ve got to understand the motivation behind God’s rules and that his motivation here is relationship and taking care of the needs of his people.

And he said, and if you understood these things, if you understood what it says, I believe in the book of Hosea, where it says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. If you understood that God desired through all these things to bring people into a relationship with him rather than just have them blindly adhere to the rules on the outside, it’s more about on the inside bringing them back to him. If you understood this, you’d quit going around trying to condemn everybody.

Now, when we get to verse 9, it says, moving on from there, he entered their synagogue. Now, I believe that means moving on in the story because Luke makes it clear that it’s on the next Sabbath after this. So a week later, Jesus shut the Pharisees down for now, but the Pharisees were stubborn.

They were like those yapping little dogs who stay right on your heels and they’re not going anywhere. This was not over. So seven days later on the next Sabbath, we move on to the next part of the story and the Pharisees are there waiting for Jesus at the synagogue.

It says, moving on from there he entered their synagogue. In verse 10, there he saw a man who had a shriveled hand, and in order to accuse him, they asked him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Now, if you read this account in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you’ll notice a few different details.

And the way I understand this is he walked in, and the Pharisees have set a trap for Jesus. They know that the man with the shriveled hand, the withered hand, is there. I don’t know if he’s in on their plot or not, But we know the Pharisees have said, yes, that man’s in place.

Jesus is coming. He won’t be able to resist healing this man. And in their minds, they’re laying a trap.

In one of the gospel accounts, Jesus knows what it says, that Jesus knew what was in their heart before they even asked. And yet at some point they did ask. I’m just telling you this because I had to do a lot of digging saying, Wait, it says here he knew without them asking.

Here it says they asked. Both of those things can be true, by the way. He knew, and then they asked, and then he answered.

He knew that the question on their minds was, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? And so he begins to confront them, and they ask him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Jesus has the man stand up in front of them and says, is it lawful to do good or is it lawful to do evil?

Is it lawful to heal or is it lawful to kill on the Sabbath? Because the implication is if you can do good and you’re refusing to do good, then you’re doing wrong. Well, the Pharisees, of course, aren’t going to say it’s lawful to do wrong on the Sabbath.

And so the Pharisees, Jesus has turned the table on them and suddenly they’re stuck. They’re trapped between the two answers. Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?

Verse 11, he replied to them, Who among you, if he had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t take hold of it and lift it out? He asked them that question. That’s an important question.

The Pharisees themselves, the ones who are complaining because his disciples are eating on the Sabbath, basically, because they’re starving and they picked a few heads of grain, and these small-minded people are acting like they’re out there with their tractors bringing in the harvest. Because they’re complaining about that, and because they’re complaining about healing, Jesus healing somebody who needs to be healed. He says, if you had a sheep that fell into a pit, I know that every single one of you would pull that sheep out of the pit on the Sabbath. Sabbath or not, you’d go rescue them because it was a necessity to do good.

And then he says in verse 12, this is key to all of it, where he’s talking about the sheep and what it teaches us. He says in verse 12, a person is worth far more than a sheep. So it is lawful to do what is good on the Sabbath.

And as he let that thought sink in for a moment with the Pharisees, when they realized, and I’m sure their consciences convicted them, which they didn’t take very well, but as their consciences convicted them that, yes, every one of them would rescue his sheep if it fell into a pit on the Sabbath. And yes, God does see men as more valuable than sheep. As he let that truth sink in, we get to verse 13, where it says, Then he told the man, Stretch out your hand.

And so he stretched it out, and it was restored as good as the other. This was the thing he could not do because his hand was shriveled up, it was withered, he couldn’t stretch it out. And yet Jesus, standing there on the Sabbath, says stretch it out and suddenly the man’s able to stretch it out again I don’t know if he was part of the pharisees plot or not but I know that when jesus said stretch out your hand he believed that he could do it because jesus said so and he did it and jesus healed him right there as he exercised faith in jesus he stretched it out and it was restored not just that he can stretch it out but his whole hand now is just as good as the other one was verse 14 says but the pharisees went out and plotted against him how they might kill him.

Now, I’ve already gone over some of the background of the text here, some of the things that had happened. We know that they were allowed. What they were doing in the first place was not against God’s law because it was not considered.

I see nothing in God’s law. I see nothing in the Old Testament that would indicate that what they were doing was work, that was harvesting grain. It was something that it was legal for them to do any other day of the week.

And it was something that they were doing out of necessity because the men were starving. And so they picked a few heads of grain so that they could continue on their way, so that they didn’t keel over from hunger, where the Pharisees would have had them wait until the next day. Sorry, just have to lay there and be hungry until tomorrow.

You know, then God will let you eat. Now, it is true. It is true that God had said people weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath.

and here we don’t see Jesus saying, oh no, get rid of all the rules because Jesus himself observed the Sabbath. The question was not whether or not we should do away with the rules. The question was, is this how the rules apply?

So we don’t see Jesus getting rid of the Sabbath. They weren’t supposed to work and it’s not that God was trying to be mean by saying you have to set this day aside and no work, just worship and just rest. It wasn’t God being mean. It was God recognizing that we needed that time.

We need that time. Sometimes we need some rest, physically and spiritually. Amen?

We need it. And so God made us take it because it was for our good. But it wasn’t God saying, okay, I just want you following all these rules because I like the rules.

It was God saying, you need this, and so we’re going to set this time aside, not as a time for you to focus on what rules you can and can’t do. It’s a time for you to set aside and focus on spending that time with me and enjoying that rest and enjoying that worship. Basically, the Sabbath was meant to be treated differently from every other day, that it was supposed to be for spiritual reason.

God never told them, but you have to stop living. I’m sorry if all the food ran out in the house. You’re not allowed to walk out and get some.

I don’t care that the babies are screaming. You just have to listen to that sound until tomorrow. No, I’m.

. . God never told them stop living.

The Sabbath was there for their good, not for them. They didn’t, as Jesus said, they didn’t exist to serve the Sabbath. The Sabbath existed to serve them.

And so what the Pharisees were doing, they were basing these accusations not on what God’s Word said, not on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Pharisees were basing this on something they had called the Oral Torah. Now, the written Torah is those first five books of the Old Testament.

The Oral Torah is a collection of traditions and interpretations handed down by religious authorities. And the Pharisees, unfortunately, had gotten to the point. There’s nothing wrong with being taught.

There’s nothing wrong with traditions as long as they don’t go against the Word of God. The problem is when you take somebody’s interpretation and somebody’s tradition and you say, that’s as authoritative as God’s word. That if I were to hand you down a suggestion about how you ought to do something, and then hundreds of years from now, people have written it down and they’re saying, but what Jared said, that came from God.

Okay, that’s when it becomes a problem. And that’s what they were doing. They were taking this oral Torah, these traditions and these interpretations, and they were putting them right up there on par with what God said, and they were holding everybody to them.

That business about not being able to pluck grain did not come from the written word of God. It came from these traditions. And they wanted people to abide by their traditions as much as they wanted people to abide by the word of God.

And so Jesus defended his disciples by going back to Scripture, where they should have been looking. He gave them a couple of scriptural examples. He didn’t tell them turn to such and such chapter and verse, but he took them to 1 Samuel chapter 21, where it tells the story of how David and his men were starving.

They were on the run. Saul was after them. They were doing battle.

David was serving the Lord. David was trying to keep himself alive long enough to become the king of Israel as God had called him and anointed him to be. But they were starving, and there was no food, and they ended up at the tabernacle where there was this bread that was baked according to a special recipe, and it was reserved.

It was set out there as an offering to God, and it was only allowed to be eaten by the priests, and even that was after it was taken off of the tables in the tabernacle because they would put out new bread. David comes to the tabernacle. He’s starving.

His men are starving. It’s a life and death situation. There’s this rule that says it’s only for the priests, but there’s also the fact that this man who’s out serving God is about to die, could potentially die of hunger.

And the high priest gives David the bread of the presence, gives him the showbread, and he’s allowed to eat it. And Scripture records that God allowed that. And David went on and continued to fight and continued to serve the Lord.

Now, he’s not a perfect servant of the Lord, but he went out and continued to serve the Lord. Now, technically, it was against the rules, but God allowed it. It was against the ceremonial law, but God allowed it.

And then Jesus described the work of the priests in the temple. And I’ve already told you this. They worked their hardest on the Sabbath.

That time from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night when nobody’s supposed to be working, the priests are working hard, they’re making sacrifices and they’re putting out the bread, they’re doing all these things. We could look at that and say, well, weren’t they breaking the Sabbath? And yet they were being obedient to God, they were doing what was necessary.

David didn’t come into this with an attitude of, I don’t have to listen to what God says, if I want that bread, I can have it. No, David came at it very prayerfully. The priests are not rebelliously saying, we can work on the Sabbath if we want to.

They’re just being obedient to what God’s called them to do. And God allows this out of necessity for his people. Now, I want to be very clear.

These stories and Jesus’ response, they don’t show that God discards his law. They don’t show that Jesus did away with the law. He said he came to fulfill the law, not to abolish the law.

And this is not to say that God looks at sin and says, well, it’s okay in this case because you had a really good reason. Instead, what this shows is that God operates according to mercy. The law of God is the law of God, but God is merciful.

Jesus called himself in verse 8 here the Lord of the Sabbath. And in verse 6, he said that he was greater than the temple. And what that means is that while these Pharisees didn’t even understand the real meaning of these things, the Pharisees didn’t understand why the priests worked the Pharisees didn’t understand the reason for the Sabbath the Pharisees didn’t understand the the reason that God had behind any of it and yet they were challenging Jesus who was calling himself out as the one who instituted those things and presided over them he said you’re calling me out on the Sabbath and you’re calling me out on the law and the things that go on in the temple you don’t even understand those things I made those things.

They were so hung up on the rules, they didn’t realize he was the one who wrote the rules. I don’t want to be confusing to anybody here about the role of Jesus. Jesus is the Son.

There’s also the Father who’s referred to. I think that’s who they’re talking about a lot of times in the Old Testament when they refer to God. But there are plenty of scriptures that make it clear that whatever the Father was doing in eternity past, the Son was doing as well.

Jesus was just as much involved in the creation of the universe as the Father was. Jesus was just as involved in interaction with man and interaction with Israel as the Father was. Jesus was the Lord of the Sabbath, and Jesus was greater than the temple because those things were there by him and for him.

And he told them, he was telling them, these things are mine. You don’t get to tell me what they’re about. I’m telling you what they’re about.

And if you understood what these things were, he told them if they understood these things the way he did, if they understood this whole matter of the law and mercy and sacrifice and the Sabbath and why all of this was done, if they understood it the way he did, they would know that that God’s goal was to show people mercy. It was not for them to just offer sacrifices all the time, never-ending sacrifices, never being reconciled to Him, just following the law outwardly. It was for them inwardly to be drawn back to Him.

If they understood that, then they would stop going around trying to condemn everybody because they’d realize they were in the same boat as the people that they considered to be the worst sinners. So this verse where he says, where he quotes the Old Testament and says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. That means that God’s mercy is God’s desired end for us.

That’s God’s goal for us. It’s the sacrifices and the law and the temple. Those things are only a means toward that end.

That’s something God uses to move us in that direction. So we go the next week to the synagogue. They’ve laid the trap that I’ve already talked to you about.

They get into this discussion about whether it’s lawful or not to heal on the Sabbath. Jesus wants to know whether or not it’s lawful to do good or to do evil. Now if they say good, it’s lawful to do good, well then they have a problem because they’re getting upset about him doing good.

Of course they’re not going to say it’s lawful to do evil because it’s never lawful to do evil, And yet they know somehow that if they say it’s lawful, it’s not lawful to do evil, Jesus’ response is that if they know the good that God has equipped them to do and they refuse to do it, they’re actively doing harm. If God’s given you the ability to heal and you refuse because of the rules, then you’re harming someone. If you have the ability to feed someone and you refuse to because of the rules, you’re starving someone.

and so they realized there’s not an answer they can give and so when they failed to answer when they failed to answer Jesus called the man to stretch out his hand and as I told you he believed and he obeyed and he was healed and so Jesus told them the story about the sheep that any one of them would rescue their sheep on the Sabbath and in God’s eyes people are worth more than sheep now what we need to understand from all of this the main point of this message, is that God cares more about our restored relationship than our religious rituals. Do you know that? God cares more about our restored relationship with him than he does about our religious rituals.

Now David technically wasn’t supposed to eat the bread of the presence, but God allowed it because there was a genuine need there, and he cared more about David than he did about the bread. The observant Jews weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, But God allowed it for the priests because somebody needed to intercede on behalf of the people to bring the people close to God. And God cared more about the people than he did about the Sabbath.

And Jesus obviously cared more about the man with the shriveled hand than he did about the religious interpretations and traditions of the Pharisees. He cared more about that man than he did about the rules. Now, I want to be very clear, because there’s an old heresy that sometimes attaches itself to Christianity called antinomianism, meaning against the law.

That’s the idea. We can just go out and sin as much as we want, because Jesus did away with the law. That is not what I’m preaching.

That is not what this passage teaches. This doesn’t teach that we can go out and just do whatever we want, and it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that God’s done away with the rules.

Jesus said he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Because we couldn’t be righteous enough to keep it on our own, so he came to keep it and fulfill it for us. David only ate the bread when he was faced with a life and death need as he was out serving the Lord.

The priests only worked on the Sabbath because there was a serious spiritual need of the people, and they were serving the Lord in working on the Sabbath. And even Jesus, as I pointed out already, even Jesus observed the Sabbath. Even Jesus was obedient to that part of God’s Word.

and yet he pointed out that it was still lawful to do that which was good on the Sabbath. So the point here is not that it’s okay with God to sin. The point is that the rules are there to point us to him.

The rules are there to point us to our need for Christ. Galatians says the law is a schoolmaster. In other words, the rules are there so we understand the holiness of God and we understand our sin and it’s there to point us to our need for Jesus Christ. The rules are there to point us to him, God’s ultimate goal is not simply that we follow the rules. God’s ultimate goal is that we come back to him.

Because think about this. You can outwardly follow the rules and still be distant from God inwardly. Right?

How many of you were children at one point? Do we remember this? Did you ever have a time where you were told to do something and you did it, but you weren’t happy about it?

Fine, mom, I’ll clean my room. and I cleaned my room, but inwardly was I on board with what mom said? If that’s too far back to remember, it’s tax season.

I only say far back because I asked for some of you kids, and some of you looked at me like, no, that never happened. Tax season, we’re in tax season. How many of you are going to write that check on April 15th and not be happy about it?

Right? We can outwardly follow the rules and inwardly not be happy about it. we can outwardly do religious things.

We can outwardly keep the Sabbath. We can outwardly attend the sacrifices. We can outwardly do this and that.

And inwardly our hearts be far from God, case in point, the Pharisees. Jesus told them on occasion, they look good on the outside. They were like whitewashed tombs.

They look good and clean outside, but they were full of dead men’s bones. We can be religious on the outside. We can stick to the rules on the outside and be far from God.

God’s goal for us is not just that we follow the rules. God’s goal for us is that we come into a relationship with him. And he cares far more about the opportunity to show mercy than he does about the sacrifices that he receives.

So the lesson that we need to take away from this passage is that God cares about us, th