Who’s In Charge Here?
Kingdom Citizenship - Part 2
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Matthew 21:33-46
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
Matthew 21:38-39
“Let us kill him and get his inheritance.”
Strong words that immediately make us feel better about ourselves, for who among us would actually think of killing somebody to gain some land. And yet these words remind us of another familiar parable to which most of us can relate. Remember the Prodigal Son. His first words in the parable appear in Luke 15:12…
The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’
While it doesn’t sound quite as harsh, remember that an inheritance, or “the son’s share of the property” is something he gets after the father is dead. Essentially this son would rather have his father’s money and property than to actually have his father present and alive.
We may not think of ourselves as the kind of people who would want to kill Jesus to gain our heavenly inheritance, but how often do we think of salvation in these terms. We pray a prayer asking God to forgive us and thanking our Heavenly Father that through the gift of his son, we can receive the inheritance of eternal life. And then we take our “inheritance check” and go on about our lives, knowing it is safely tucked away in our spiritual bank account so that we can cash it in when we die.
Essentially we have done what both the prodigal son and these tenant farmers have done. We have valued the gift more than the giver and the inheritance more than the father / landowner. We forget that “the land” is not ours. Everything we have and everything we will have, in this life and the next, belongs to God. We are not the landowners protecting our property. We are the tenants who have been given the responsibility of caring for all the landowner has given us. How much evil has been done in the world because we as human beings get these roles confused. How much bloodshed and injustice has been poured out in the name of protecting what is ours and trying to get even more.
Only when we realize that we have nothing can we truly appreciate the gift of the landowner. How many times has God sent messengers and even his own son to remind us of both our value and our responsibility? And how many times have we tuned out the message so that we could run the vineyard our own way, for our own benefit and the benefit of our loved ones with little or no consideration for anyone else.
When we live as children of God, caring for the vineyard he has given us, we will indeed become “heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). But if we deceive ourselves thinking everything we have is our own, we become nothing more than squatters who will ultimately do anything to prevent the landowner from running us off, even if it means killing his own son.
The vineyard was never ours to begin with. Let us quit scheming to own what is not ours and instead live in gratitude for the gift which we have been given.
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
Video of the complete worship service available at http://asburyumc-huntersville.com/live