The Stories Jesus Told #6 - The Net
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the "Stories Jesus Told" message series teaching out of the gospel of Matthew sharing the parable of the net and the house manager on Mother's Day weekend.
Message Transcript
Happy Mother's Day weekend! This is one of those weekends that I believe was created by the card industry to produce card sales. And yet it doesn't make it any less significant to recognize moms and talk about moms in the significant role that they've played in many of our lives. All of our lives, really.
I saw a meme recently. It was of a little boy who was in a time out chair, obviously, and the little bubble that was coming out of his mouth like he was speaking said, if you're doing such a good job raising me, why am I in trouble all the time?
One mom wrote these words as a reflection on her parents, and she said, if I had my child to raise over again, I would build self-esteem first and the house later. I would finger paint more and point the finger less. I would do less correcting and more connecting. I'd take my eyes off my watch and watch with my eyes. I would care to know less and know to care more. I'd take more hikes and fly more kites. I'd stop playing serious and seriously play. I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars. I'd do more hugging and less tugging. I'd see the oak tree in the acorn more often. I'd be firm less often and affirm much more. I'd model less about the love of power and more about the power of love.
I don't know where you are in your parenting journey. Obviously, there are those of us who are gathered, who are students or young adults and say that seems far removed, but you certainly have a mom. There are those who are in the early stages of raising kids, and it feels like your greatest goal is simply to keep them from hurting themselves. Then there are those who are maybe with kids who are in their teen years and some of those challenges. Or maybe you're on the other side and your kids are grown and out of the house. Maybe you’re even a grandparent. So there are a lot of different experiences that we bring to parenting.
But one thing I am almost certain of if you're a follower of Jesus, in other words, you're a person of faith, one of the things that's important to you is that your kids come to embrace faith. And one of your questions isn't just how do I help my kids get on in this world in a good way and become responsible, loving people but will they be people of faith?
Today we're looking at a story that's in Matthew 13 verses 47 through 52. It's often called “The Parable of the Net.” We've been in a series on The Stories Jesus Told. And if you wonder why we're dropping into Matthew 13 verse 47 and not doing all of the stories in Matthew 13, the reason is we did a series on the parables in 2016 that we called The Stories Jesus Told. We did about 17 of the different stories Jesus told at that time, and we're doing about 13 of them now. And so, there's a little gap there. But we're choosing the stories now that we didn't do then. That's why we're in this story without doing all of the other stories. All of that's still available online if you're interested in any of the other things.
But here's the story of the net, and there's really two stories here. In a sense, there's the story of the net, which is how this is titled in our Bibles. It says “The Parable of the Net,” and then in verse 52, it says, he said to them, therefore, every teacher of the law. Maybe “story” is too strong a word, but there's this account of a teacher of the law who becomes a disciple and is compared to a household leader or manager.
And so, here's what the story of the net is about. You just heard the scripture read, and the video behind it had a fisherman throwing a net out. That's actually a poor portrayal of this because the word for net that's used in the text is a different net. There are two kinds of nets that were used in ancient fishing. There was the net like you saw which an individual fisherman would take out and throw into the sea. Usually they would bait the area so that they could attract the fish that they wanted. Then they would just throw the net out, pull it in, and they would have a catch of good fish. But it wouldn't be very large because you'd just get a couple of fish.
The other word that's used for that is the word that's used here in this text, and it's the word for a dragnet. It's a net that would be used between two boats. So, two boats would go out and what they would do is put a net between them, weigh the net down, scrape the entire bottom of the sea where they were, and take everything that was there. Then they would bring it on shore and divide the good from the bad. Or it was used by anchoring a net to the shore, and then doing the same thing with a boat that would go out and go all the way around again and collect everything.
And so, Jesus takes this common fishing imagery from his day that the people would have known. He says, the Kingdom of Heaven is like this dragnet, where all kinds of fish are collected, and then the fishermen take it and divide the good from the bad or the worthless, is what it says. Jesus’ exact choice of words here is “striking.” He says, “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 there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And so, this is clearly a story about the eternal destiny of people.
We talked two weeks ago about this idea of weeping and gnashing of teeth and the idea of punishment. I'm not going to take the time to go into that again. That is something you can see again online two weeks ago. But what is significant here is that Jesus’ point is that there is coming a day in which the wicked and the righteous will be discerned and there will be a sifting. Those are Jesus’ words. They're not mine.
I know there are people today who will say, well, you know, everybody just does their thing and eternity is just eternity, and there is no destiny kind of component to it. It's just what it is. But Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like this. This big net collects it all, and then there will be some kind of of a reckoning.
Then he tells the second little story where he says that the scribe, who basically becomes a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven, is like a household manager. And his point here is that the household manager treasures the old and the new, probably a reference to the Old Testament law and then the Kingdom of God, how it works in grace, and then is saying that there's a treasuring and a speaking of this kingdom in terms of how it goes.
So, what does this have to do with you or me or Mother's Day? Well, these stories are straightforward, but I think we can see that there's a personal application, there's a communal application, and that there is a parental application. We'll start with just the personal application. And the first question is really this, and that is, can you know your destiny? How do you know?
Again, there are people who may look at this and say, well, if all the fish are just collected and they all are judged in the future, then there's no way to know today. And so, it feels a little dark, a little hopeless. But in First John, chapter 5, verse 13, we read this. He says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” It is not God's desire for you or for me that you would live in fear of that coming day or without a sense of knowledge. His desire is that you would know that you can face that coming day with certainty.
And this is found in this little phrase in the parable, the righteous and the wicked. Now, you may hear that and say, okay, righteous and wicked. Well, I can be either of those at times. But the word righteous in the New Testament is used in at least two ways. One is sometimes used for an actual ethical righteousness or goodness of behavior, but it's also used positionally. And here, I believe that this is ultimately pointing to us positionally, because what it's saying is that those who are righteous, and again the preponderance of evidence in the New Testament is that our righteousness is positional, it's given to us from Jesus Christ. Based on our belief, it doesn't mean that there isn't actual righteousness, but it means that it isn't because of our righteousness that we gain the standing. Therefore, I don't have to look at my life and say, how righteous is righteous enough in order to be one who has confidence? I can have confidence because my righteousness is based on the perfect righteousness of Jesus, not on my own.
You see this relationship in the book of Romans chapter 1, verse 5. There's a verse that gives a little window into this. Here's what it says. “Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake.” And this phrase “obedience that comes from faith” translates what's known in the original language as the genitive. So, it would be the obedience of faith and a genitive is a construct that has a lot of different ways that it can be passed out.
And in Daniel Wallace’s Greek Grammar of the New Testament, which is probably the seminal work on Greek Grammar, he says that this should be rendered as obedience produced by faith, as an example of that kind of a rendering. In other words, it is our faith that produces our obedience or our righteousness. It is in our righteousness that produces faith.
The stories, again, taken together, kind of the story of the net and the story of the household manager. The household manager treasures these things, brings a treasure out of the storehouse. And the idea is that they share it. So, the question is, what do you treasure personally? If you find that you care about what God wants, you begin to treasure those things and you grow in your treasuring of them. Then there's a sense in which the idea of Jesus’ righteousness for you has become sweet, and you can live with a sense of saying, when that great day comes, I can be confident because it's on what Jesus has done, not on what I've done.
So, there's a personal application, but there's also a communal application. In a way, it's the same question, how do you know? If you're given this idea of righteousness imputed from Jesus for your standing that you can know, then how do you know about other people? How do you know about people around you? Maybe your kids, friends, everybody?
The answer at least here, I believe, is that you can't. Now, certainly in other parts in the Bible, you may say, well, we'll know a tree by its fruit. Therefore, since that's a biblical concept, doesn't that mean that we kind of know and there's an element of that? But Jesus’ point here seems to be that you're going to gather all of these fish that all look the same together for that day and you don't know ahead of time.
William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on the New Testament, says this. He says, “There's always been two views of the church, the exclusive and the inclusive. The exclusive view holds that the church is for people who are good people, who are really, fully committed, people who are quite different from the world. There is an attraction in that view, but it's not the New Testament view because apart from anything else, who is to do the judging when we are told that we must not judge (Matthew 7:1) It is not the place of any one of us to say who's committed to Christ and who is not. The inclusive view feels instinctively that the church must be open to all and that like the dragnet, as long as it is a human institution, it is bound to be a mixture.” That is exactly what this parable teaches.
Now, I'm not suggesting that there isn't a need for church discipline or boundaries or insistence upon certain beliefs or practices within the church. But what I'm saying is that there's a human tendency sometimes to say, we want to restrict whose part of what God is doing to people who believe like us, behave like us, and think like us in every way.
The New Testament view is much more inclusive, much more broad in that it's a dragnet. And if you aren't convinced of this, there's a parable told just a little earlier in Matthew 13 about “The Wheat and The Tares.” The idea here is that the wheat has been planted, it's growing, and it is also like the kingdom of God. Then the enemy has come and sown some weeds into the field. The workers come along and they say, shouldn't we go in and root out these weeds, get them out of this field so that we have a better harvest? And what's the response that's there? The response is no, because you're going to do damage to the wheat.
The idea is when you try to exclude, what you end up doing is you do damage to people who are taking steps toward faith. And the dragnet will ultimately collect what it will collect. The judgment or the the accounting comes at the end of time. And here's what this also means communally. Again, the tie here this seemingly random statement about the household owner that comes right after this, is about treasuring and pointing others in the same direction.
In Romans chapter 12, verse 5, we're told that if you're a follower of Jesus, you are part of basically a membership of people. Here's what it says. “... so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” One of the communal implications of the story of the net is that if you are confident that you are part of God's kingdom, that you treasure the things of God, speak of the things of God, so that other people who are caught in the net are also drawn to God.
Here's one of the downsides to virtual church in our day and age. And don't get me wrong, I like virtual church. I wanted to do it today myself. But here's the challenge. And that is, yes, you can watch the music and go, I like that song. Don't like that song. What's he wearing? You can do all of that and get the message through the virtual church. I get it. But here's what you don't do. You don't show up to a community of people and show in your presence, worship, and demeanor that you treasure the things of God that helps other people say there's something about this that I want to be a part of as well. You don't speak to it.
Now, again, don't get me wrong, I'm not against virtual church. If you're shut in, you're sick, your schedule, you're traveling, there are times that it makes a lot of sense. But what I'm saying is it misses this communal element because every time you show up to public worship, every time you're part of a group, every time you're part of a study, what you're doing is you're saying, I'm treasuring this, and I'm hoping to include and bring other people along as well.
So, there's a personal application. There's a communal application, but there's also a parental application. And I say this because, again, in verse 52, where it says this idea about an owner of a house, the phrase is used of one who manages the affairs of a house. And it could have been somebody who managed the affairs of their own house. It was often a position that somebody had to come into a house and manage it. But certainly, when we think about the role that moms and dads play, they manage the affairs of a house.
Do you know that in the New Testament there are really only two instructions to parents? Sometimes you might think there's a lot. There's some more in the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, there's really just two. I mean, you could debate that. But here's why I say this. And this is the primary teaching in the New Testament about parenting. This is Ephesians 6:4. Fathers here is a placeholder probably for leading a household, head of a household, certainly you could say that this could apply to parents. But it says, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” There's a parallel in Colossians that says, Fathers don't provoke your children. And so, what The New Testament says about parenting is really simple. Don't exasperate your children and bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Very straightforward. That's what we're told.
To not exasperate or provoke is the idea of keeping relationship alive, keeping their heart open to you as a parent. And the idea of training is the idea of pointing them in some direction. And so, I'd just like to talk for a moment about three approaches to parenting, especially in the spiritual arena with your kids, because every parent asks the question, how am I doing in terms of just raising my kids? And then ultimately, I want them to embrace the God that I've embraced, if that's true for you.
So, the first approach is what I'm going to call force feed, barricade, and punish. Now, this is the approach that says there's a barricade. The world out there is full of bad things. You're going to stay behind the barricade because I can't let anything bad happen out here. I'm going to force feed you the view that I want and punish you if you step out of line. Now, you can tell, obviously, by the way that I phrase that, that's probably not what I believe is the best approach.
And you may say, well, doesn't Proverbs teach us in Proverbs 22: 6 to train up a child in the way that he should go and when he's old, he won't depart from it. And you're right. But that verse has been misunderstood, I believe, in two ways. One, it's been misunderstood as a promise rather than a proverb, meaning that people go, well, just do the right thing, and then you're guaranteed an outcome. The other way that I think it's been misunderstood is people will then say, well, maybe it doesn't mean exactly that, but it's about our bents, about your kid's bents, finding your kid’s bents, and raising them according to their own predisposition. As if that's what it's all about. But the idea of training a child in the way that he should go was to put a date on a child's tongue so that they had a thirst for something.
And the idea really is to say, as a parent, yes, there's a need for a barricade. I mean, literally, when your kids are little, if you live near a road, you build a literal sense, a barricade to keep them from a road. And when they get older, you have figurative barricades. But there comes a time to say, okay, you know, you're 27, it's time for you to move beyond the fence. And to try to say, instead of force feeding. In other words, when they're not interested in what you have to say about any topic, you don't get out the fire hose and say, well, a little more, we'll influence, but you create thirst.
I think it was Mark Twain who once quipped that when he was 18, he thought his dad was a complete fool. And he was amazed when he was 25 how much his dad had learned. But the idea is to create thirst, especially spiritual thirst, and to say, I want to lead them toward something. And again, this comes back to the stories we're looking at today, this idea of treasuring. What is it you treasure? Because ultimately kids will be drawn to what you treasure.
You know how this works. What's the last restaurant that somebody told you about that you hadn't tried and you just had to try? One of my sons told me about a place that did Mexican food, and he just went on and on about how great it was. It was a complete hole in the wall, but I had to go try their burrito because he treasured it. What you treasure translates. Now you may say, well, okay, you're saying that maybe this isn't the best approach but doesn't Proverbs 13, verse 24 say if you spare the rod, you hate the child. The implication being that you need to discipline your child. Yes, it does.
But here's a second approach. And this is one that I also, by the way, you can probably tell I don't think is ideal. And that is little input, no boundaries, and mattresses. Now, a little input, what I'm talking about here is where you don't see it as your job to point your child in any direction. You say, here are the options, you figure it out. All of these options, especially spiritually, this becomes in vogue. We want to expose them to a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and then they can choose. But that is not the biblical idea of training your child. And to not give your kids boundaries that are age appropriate does not make sense in any day and age, but especially in our day and age.
Now, I'm going to sound like an old guy here for just a moment. Not that I don't anyway, but here's what has happened. And if you're parenting right now, chances are you understand this because you did not grow up with the same access to smartphones as your kids are. But when I was 12 or 13, if you had given me the Internet in the palm of my hand and 24 seven access to it, I can guarantee you it would not have been good for me because I would have gone places and done things with that little phone as a guide that would not have been good for my soul. But it isn't just the content that's on our phones. There's also a sense of social pressure that comes from our phones to our kids that is intense. And here's what I'm talking about.
Again, when I was a kid, I'd go to school, and when school was done, I would leave, I would go home. And if I wanted to talk to somebody from school, I had to get on this thing called a phone. It had this big cord that I could walk around inside the house about ten feet away from anybody else and talk on the phone. What it meant was that my parents and my sibling could hear the conversation that I was having, and it wasn't detached from the family. What we've done with our kids now is we let them take their phones into their bedrooms at night and the texting and the pressure continues 24-7. In other words, no boundaries isn't a good idea.
Then there's this mattress idea. And here's what a mattress approach is. And that is, if your kids start to experience any negative consequence, what do you do? You throw a mattress in the pit to make it easier. This is the kind of parenting that says the teachers always wrong. The coach is always wrong. Everybody else is out to get my kid.
Well, let me just share something with you about coaches and youth sports coaches. Don't get me started on youth sports, but here's the deal. Coaches want to win even in little goofy leagues. They're not out to politically do your child in. Now, what I'm saying is this. What we do is we say, well, if you don't get the opportunity I think you should get, instead of saying work harder, decide if the sport is for you, we take them out of the school, and we put them in another school. If they don't get the band props that we think they should get, we go talk to the teacher. And what we're doing is we're throwing mattresses in the pit, and we continue to sometimes do it economically in other ways when our kids get older.
What we need to do is let logical, natural consequences teach the lessons that they're intended to teach because consequences are what mature people. When you throw mattresses in the pit, what you're doing is you're keeping your child from experiencing the reality of their choices, and the reality that maybe God wants them to learn along the way.
And that leads to one last approach. And this is what I believe is probably a better approach. No parent does it perfectly consistently, but this is what I'd say instruct, interpret, and give logical consequences. I mentioned that the New Testament doesn't give a lot of direct instruction. There's some instruction in Proverbs. Deuteronomy 6, we're told this. This is verse 6 and following, "These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
The idea here is that your instruction is integrated into your life. In other words, it isn't simply take them somewhere else so that they can learn. But it's part of your day-to-day life. In other words, when you're having dinner, you're saying, what happened today? How do you feel about that? What do you think is God's perspective? What did your friends say? What was the teacher's position on that? Because instruction is integrated, you're helping to interpret the world for them and then to give logical consequences or let natural consequences teach all of that. Just to say that doesn't negate the importance of modeling or prayer or community, all of which matter, but it's to say that there is hope in parenting, that you can help your kids be on the path that God has for them.
Now, I recognize that even in talking about this today, that some of us are here and this is not necessarily very helpful because our kids are older and right now, we're not sure of the direction of their lives. We feel like maybe we've blown some things along the way. And all I would love to say to you is this, and that is you can be the perfect parent and your kids may still not get on the track that you want. And I know this because in Isaiah chapter 1, verse 3, we're told that God has raised children, and his children have rebelled against him. Well, who's got a perfect parent? And what happens? Children still rebel. But even more there's still hope. Because what does the story say, at the end of the age. And so there's still time for you to show what you treasure and to speak of it in such a way that your kids, even your adult children, will come to say there's something about what mom and dad treasure and the things that that you treasure become palpable to the people in your life. And so, it's an opportunity still for you.
If you're here today and you're saying, well, okay, maybe someday I'll have kids, that feels far removed, this story still speaks to the importance of community and personal assurance for you. In other words, to say, have I begun to treasure the things of God in my own life and made that what drives me? Because to the degree that it does, you can live with that confidence, and you can point others in the same direction.
I would also hope that if you're here today and you have a mom or a dad that did some of this parenting stuff well in your life and they're still alive and you have the opportunity to honor them that even maybe today, just with a few words, you'd be able to say thank you for part of what you've done in my life. Because the truth is, if you're a parent, there's a lot of doubt about whether you went too hard, too soft, what you did right, or what you did wrong. And if you're able to just honor your mom by saying thank you for how you did this piece of parenting, that can be part of just honoring your mom on this Mother's Day.
Let's pray. God, I don't know the journeys of all who are gathered in terms of their journey with their moms or as parents. But, Lord, I know that this can be a very painful area in many of our lives, as well as a joyful area. And God, more than anything, I pray that just the simple story of the net would remind us to prioritize our own personal treasuring of you, obeying you, believing, but also is a communal application just to treasure you and as parents to do the same. Father, we thank you for those of us who had parents who did this well for us and even where maybe that wasn't done well for those who came around us in other ways to do it for us. And we pray this all in Jesus’ name. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great day.