We're continuing in our journey through the Gospel according to Mark. We're in chapter 12 and we're going to look at three, I don't know, vignettes, three sections of Mark that aren't really connected to each other, but they're short little sections. I thought one wouldn't be enough for us to really study, so I've got three put together here. And the first is Jesus teaching about the Messiah being David's greater son. And before I read that, let me pray for the word. Our Father and our God, we pause before the reading of your word to acknowledge and remind ourselves that we're handling reverently the very word of God. So Lord, your word is powerful and mighty and true, and Lord, we need to be calibrated to it. So Father, we pray that you do that work of opening our ears and our hearts and our minds, Lord, that your word can have that positive effect in our souls. And Lord, we thank you for that in Jesus' name. Amen. So let me read Mark 12 from 35 down to 37, and we'll unpack that a little bit. It says, Then Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How is it that the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? For David himself said, by the Holy Spirit, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Therefore David calls, I'm sorry, therefore David himself calls him Lord. How is he then his son? And the common people heard him gladly. Now this is coming on the heels of Jesus being barraged with questions. Remember the Herodians came, the Pharisees came, the Sadducees came, and we looked last week at a scribe who came. And now it's Jesus' turn to ask the questions. And he's expounding on here, Psalm 110, that we'll look at a little bit in a moment. And he's making the people think, is what he's really doing. If you'd noticed, the prior verse to where we launched today says, but after that no one dared question him. They were done asking their questions. And Jesus is challenging their thinking here of who do you think the Messiah is? Who do you think the Christ is? And it was common knowledge in that day, we see it throughout the Gospels, that the Messiah who was to come, the great expectation of that Messiah, was that he would be of the line of David. You see that with the people. They started to say that Jesus was the son of David. So there was some indication that the people started to think that, hey, we think this is the Messiah. And they had a misnomer, a misunderstanding of who Messiah was, what the messianic mission would be. And you see passages that we've looked at in the past where they try to take Jesus by force to make him king. They thought of Messiah as a man, a human being, not deity. And they also saw that Messiah that would arrive as a political figure that would take the throne itself in Jerusalem, oust Rome, and bring Israel back to its heyday that was under King David. So Jesus is challenging all that by going to the scripture. It's interesting here that, and I've talked about this before, People might say, and churches flounder because they don't have a high view of scripture. There's churches that have a very low view of scripture, and they think that the culture around is the interpreter of scripture. And really, if scripture doesn't line up with the culture, they'll say, well, that was good for that day. But now we live in 2022, or whatever year it is, and things have changed. Whereas we have a high view of scripture and we say, no, the scripture itself is the authority for all of life. It is the authority. Scripture doesn't change, it's the authority. And Jesus, if you noticed, when he teaches here, look at the high view of scripture he has in verse 36. He says, for David himself said by the Holy Spirit, He didn't just say, David said, or David wrote this down somewhere in one of the Psalms. He says, David said this by the Holy Spirit. Jesus's interpretation there is that David, as a man, wrote and had thoughts, and he penned them down and wrote songs. But he was superintended by the Holy Spirit. The ultimate author of Scripture is the Holy Ghost. It's God himself. And that's Jesus's high view. When you look in the Bible, and I'll take you there, at David's final words, You know, sometimes we'll see that. You're on the internet and you're scrolling around looking at stuff and you'll say, oh, this is so-and-so's last words. And we always kind of think, well, it's going to be kind of poignant. I mean, their family's gathered around. They know they're about to leave this life and head on to the next life. What do they want to say? And so we see great theologians and presidents. And what was their final words? Well, we have David's final words. And it's found in 2 Samuel chapter 23. I'm not going to read all of his final words. You can do that on your own. But this is what it says. Beginning in verse 1, it says, Now these are the last words of David. Thus says David, the son of Jesse, thus says the man raised up on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the sweet psalmist of Israel. And you think, well, what does he want to say? And he says, the spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and his word was on my tongue. The God of Israel said, the rock of Israel spoke to me. So David's own dying confession was that the Holy Spirit led him along and superintended what he put down as what we have in Scripture. It doesn't mean everything David ever said was carried along by the Holy Spirit, but what's been inscriptorated, what we have in our Bibles from David, and especially you think of all the Psalms, that was written under the superintendence of the Holy Ghost. And Jesus acknowledges that. So it's almost like, hey, listen up. What did David say by the Holy Spirit? This is God's truth. So the importance of Psalm 110. That psalm is, I believe, is quoted more than any other psalm in the New Testament. Within that psalm, and we don't have time to study it today, but within that psalm we find out who Messiah is. In that psalm we find out the Messiah will be high priest forever. We find out that the Messiah is not only high priest forever, he's high priest in the order of Melchizedek. The writer of Hebrews latches onto that and expounds on that to explain to us Jesus's ministry as priest, not in the order of Aaron, but in the order of Melchizedek. And so it's a very important psalm, and that's why Jesus turns to that psalm to teach about who Messiah is and what he would do. So he only quotes the first verse of Psalm 110, and I'll read it right from the psalm. It says, a psalm of David, The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Now in my translation, I don't know if yours all looks like mine does. I got the New King James here. And in my translation, it says the Lord capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, said to my Lord, capital L, lowercase o, lowercase r, lowercase d. That's telling me, hey, go look at the front of your Bible to see what that means when you spell Lord in two different ways. Does that mean something? It does. At least in my translation, it does. When it's all capitals, it is the word Yahweh. It's the covenantal name that God gave to Moses to say, I am that I am, right? When it's the capital L and everything else is lowercase, it's the word Adonai. So if we want to look at this and kind of read it in the original, it would be Yahweh said to my Adonai. Now why is Jesus picking up on that and saying, how is it that David says that? If this is one of David's descendants, then why did he write this? And everybody knew that this was a messianic psalm. Why did David say that Yahweh said to my, David says, my Adonai, sit while I make your enemies your footstool, or put your enemies beneath your feet, some translations will say. Why is that significant? Because for one, Adonai is used a lot in the Bible as a name for God himself. And if it's not used in that sense, it certainly has something to do with my sovereign. David's saying, Yahweh said to my sovereign. Well, David was the king. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. You could say, well, Solomon had all the wisdom. Yeah, well, Solomon wasn't so wise. He didn't let a bunch of foreign women wrap around his heart. And the next generation, Rehoboam and Jeroboam, it's a divided kingdom because of what happened with him. David, the great psalmist, but the great king of Israel, wouldn't bow his knee to his son. and say, well, this is my son, he's my Adonai, or his grandson, or his great-grandson, all the way down the line, because he's the son of David. He's of the lineage of David. Why is David calling this person and his descendant, why is he calling them Adonai? And they don't really understand the answer to that, but that's what Jesus is trying to teach here. David himself, if I can put it this way, must bend the knee to this descendant of his who would be Messiah that would come. That's His sovereign. He's going to bend His knee to Him as Lord. Why is that? And what Jesus is teaching in this, and what we can learn from this, is that Messiah indeed came. And He's standing there in their midst, and they don't accept that. They don't recognize Him. At least the leadership did not recognize Him as Messiah. But He's saying, I'm not the Messiah that you guys were expecting. I'm not just simply the Son of David. I'm the Lord of life. I'm his Adonai. Jesus is clearly teaching here his deity. He's God in the flesh. And they didn't understand that. I immediately, in my thinking with this, being, what was David thinking, you know, when he penned that psalm under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost? And there's two passages that came to my mind. And they're familiar to you, but I want to read them, thinking about the exaltation of Jesus Christ, who he is, not just simply a descendant of David, although he's a descendant of David, but he is the Lord of life. He's the eternal Son of God. In Ephesians, as one place my mind went, in chapter 1, beginning in verse 19, it says, Paul's expressing to the Ephesian church that he wants them to grasp something here. So I'm kind of picking up the thought midstream, but he says, And what is the exceeding greatness of his power towards us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead, and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places? far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." Paul, also the apostle, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, is basically expounding on Psalm 110, where it says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool. And now Paul, the apostle, is explaining to us the grandeur of what that means. That Jesus was raised from the dead, took his seat at the right hand of the Father, and his enemies are under his feet. He'll come back victoriously in his return, and all power His name's above every name. Even King David? Yes, even King David. His name's exalted above all. And that's what Paul's expressing. He expresses something very similar in Philippians chapter 2, where he says, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men, and being found in appearance as a man. He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore, God also has highly exalted him and given him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and of those on earth and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. It's our exalted Lord Jesus Christ. And this is what he's trying to probe the leadership here, and the common people are listening as well, that Jesus is wanting them to think, who is this Messiah who is to come? Because he's standing right there in their midst, and they have too low of a view of who Jesus Christ is. Much like the world we live in has way too low of a view of who Jesus Christ is. Usually when I share the good news of the gospel with somebody that really has never heard it before, but they've heard of Jesus, they know something of Him, they know the church sets up something out in front at Christmas time, and it's this little baby, or maybe it's a live nativity scene, and they don't understand who Jesus is. And I know I've shared this with you before, but I remember I taught a Bible study a long time ago, down at Paw Paw, And we had four or five people coming and none of them knew the Lord. But they were curious. And I was teaching and I was slowly explaining. We were going through the Gospel of John. And I remember one of the ladies goes, Are you telling me that Jesus is God? I said, yes, man, that's exactly what I'm telling you. Jesus is God. He humbled himself. He became a man at the incarnation. He's always been God. And he was raised from the dead, and he's been exalted. He carried humanity to the highest place. Jesus now, through his incarnation, now fully God, fully man, in the ascension, carries humanity to the right hand of God. Psalm 8 talks about how God made man a little lower than the angels. Jesus, in his humanity, raised humanity up to the highest place. The Bible says amazing things. It's almost hard for me to wrap my mind around, but that he is, in a sense, our elder brother. That Jesus, it's not a shame to call us brothers and brethren. He took flesh upon himself. He's so identified with us that he entered into this sinful world as a human being. He was a pre-born child in the womb of Mary. You talk about bringing honor to the pre-born movement of pro-life. And then he was born into this world in a dirty stall, and he lived out perfection. Never sinned and died for sinners like you and me, and was raised to the highest place in his exaltation. It's an amazing story, and Jesus is just trying to get them to think about this. When the church was birthed, Day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit's poured out. And they preach. Listen to what Peter preaches. I'm not going to read you the whole sermon because it's kind of long. But this is part of the sermon. He says, therefore being exalted to the right hand of God. Was this the message that the church had to share with people? It was. And it still is. Therefore, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, do you hear what he's saying? But he said himself, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Therefore, Peter concludes, therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. It was that aha moment. And remember, they were cut to the heart. What do we need to do? What do we do? And Peter doesn't say, well, there's nothing you can do. He says, no, it's been done for you. Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. In other words, embrace Christ by faith is what Peter said to him. So our second little vignette, Jesus now is going to teach. And it's very, very much boiled down in Mark's gospel, where you could go over to Matthew and read a whole chapter of what Jesus had to say about the Pharisees and the scribes. But here in Mark, Mark kind of condenses it down to a couple of things. And so verse 38 to 40 says, then he said to them in his teaching, Beware of the scribes, who desire to go around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts, who devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation. That passage really should cause anybody who preaches or teaches to pause. And to not just go, look at those scribes. But to think of what Jesus is saying here, because these scribes were the experts in the law. These scribes were the lawyers. These scribes were the teachers. If you didn't quite understand an Old Testament passage, it was a scribe who you would go to that would end any debate on it. They would have the answer of what that passage meant. They were brought into court cases where somebody had a dispute about how should we take care of this or that issue according to the law of Moses. The scribe is the one who would come and say this is how you interpret this. This is how you decide this particular case. That's what these scribes were. They were the teachers. And you think, well that's Old Testament. Well, you ladies are about to study the book of James. James chapter 3 verse 1, and it's kind of shocking, James is discouraging the church from everybody wanting to be a teacher. And that sounds odd, doesn't it? But James says, My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. That's a lot. I've heard people before, when we're going to question a man before he's ordained into the ministry, and I've heard, you know, as you're talking to him and questioning him, I've heard people who've pastored for many years talking to the young man who feels like he's being led into ministry say, is there anything else you can do? Is there any other vocation that maybe you're called to, not this vocation? Is there some other thing you can do? And then I've heard men say, a second question, what if we tell you, no, we don't think you were called and we don't ordain you, what will you do? And the answer everybody's looking for is, I'll preach the gospel anyway, because God's called me to preach the gospel. Why are we so hard on people? And that happened to me when I was ordained. Why are we so hard? We're not trying to be mean. It's because we're just conveying how high of an office that is. And you're going to stand before your Lord for how you lived your life and how you taught people. You painted a picture of who God is, who Jesus Christ is. Was it accurate? Because we will stand before the Lord and give an answer for that. And that's what he's saying here. So this gives me great pause when I see this. Not so much to talk about the scribes, but to ask me, myself, am I like these scribes? Because Jesus says they're going to receive a great condemnation because of how they carried about themselves. And you can see within what Jesus points out, it's just a few things in Mark's gospel. You can see the pretense and the pride, the arrogance in these men just with what Jesus mentions here. He says they like to wear long robes. Nobody told them they had to do that. They chose to do that because they looked like royalty. They looked like the priests who carried out the work of the Lord. And they chose to wear these long robes to be publicly recognized as the scholar. It's a pride issue. He says they love the greetings in the marketplace. They want to be recognized for who they are in that office. Matthew, when he's telling us the same section of scripture, he says, they love the greetings in the marketplaces and to be called by men, Rabbi, Rabbi. They love that. They loved that, because they weren't humble men. Now, I told you last week, not every single scribe fit this category, but Jesus is condemning the office as a whole, because it had gone so far away from what God desires, which is for us to be humble. Humble and loving. They had departed from that. It says they loved to have the best seat in the synagogue. That seat would have been up near where the scroll was read, maybe sitting right here. Not watching the person who's reading the text out of the Torah for the day, but sitting there in that place of honor, watching you. As you're listening to the scroll being read, that seat of honor. Oh, we have so-and-so here with us today. Please come up and take the seat. And they just loved that with their big robe. And they'd walk up and take the seat of honor. They loved that. He says they also loved the best seats at the feasts. They would have that seat of honor and they loved that. I think they would have been indignant had they not been told, you need to come up and take this seat of honor. I mean, you're the scribe. You're the expert of the law. You're the lawyer. You take this seat of honor at the feast. Which is exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught us. Jesus, and I'll read you this, Luke 14 verse 8, Jesus is teaching here. He says, and this is good for us to hear, to know this, that we remain humble, but it says, When you're invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him. and he who invited you and him come and say to you, give place to this man. And then you begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you're invited, go and sit down in the lowest place so that when he who invited you comes, he may see you and say, friend, Go up higher, then you'll have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. I had a humbling experience this morning. It just came to my mind. I was making fun of my wife. We were just teasing. And she forgot something. I said, see, it's already started. You're forgetting things. And two seconds, I was still half asleep. And two seconds later, I went out to the kitchen to make oatmeal. And I couldn't find the oatmeal. And I was looking, and you ever look for something and you know it's there, and you're like, I'm blind to it, I can't see it on this shelf with all this other stuff. I know it's there. So I called my wife, and I said, can you see the oatmeal? I know it's right in front of me, and I just can't see it. Am I missing this? And she said, Larry, you already put it on the countertop next to your bowl. No, I'd already took the oatmeal out. And I told her, I said, God did that to humble me. God did that to humble me. And God will do things to humble us, and we ought to thank him for that, that we don't get so puffed up with ourselves. I told you the story, some of you heard this before, but I was at a theological conference many years ago. And you probably, I don't know if you ever heard this name, but Michael Horton is a theologian. He's a professor at Westminster out in California. And he was there. And I get his monthly publications, which are kind of weighty. And it's not like a simple little devotional. It's deep stuff. And so he's just, in my opinion, he's a brilliant theologian. And we were blessed, Karen and I. We were asked if we'd like to go to lunch with him and a couple other pastors. And I was so excited. So we went. I got to talk to him before we sat down for the lunch. And I sat down. And they had just a regular round table, kind of like we have in our basement here. And then there was the head table, a little bit elevated, where the honored guests would be and then we could ask questions. So I'm sitting down and I'm just chitchatting and Mike Horton sits down right next to me and we're just talking. He's got his elbows on the table and he's talking to everybody. And I just remember one of the pastors said, Mr. Horton, I think you're supposed to be sitting up there. in the honored seat. And he goes, oh, I didn't know. And he got up and went up there. And I thought, that's exactly what Jesus taught. That you don't just sit there and presume that I should be honored. Everybody should honor me. James warns about this. I won't study it with you. But James chapter 2, he gets into this of how we treat people that come into the church. You know, because James was saying that the church was taking people that were rich, and of course they could give a nice donation to the church, and honored them and gave them the best seat in the house. Whereas somebody would come in poor and maybe had holes in their jeans or whatever, and would tell them, you can just sit here on the floor. And James says, you shouldn't do that. We shouldn't be making those kind of discernments and judgments. Which is why everybody's got about the same seat in the house when you come to church. That's right out of scripture. And then lastly, he said that these scribes were devouring, well two more things, but they were devouring widow's houses. I'm going to take you down a little bit of a path of a little study I did. It's amazing how much God has to say about widows in the Bible. God cares about widows. If I got anything else out of my study yesterday, it was God cares about widows, and he expects us to do the same. That's all through scripture. And here, I read a lot of commentaries, and I don't think anybody exactly knows what they were doing. I'll read you what MacArthur thought on it. John MacArthur said, scribes often served as estate planners for widows, which gave them opportunity to convince distraught widows that they would be serving God by supporting the temple or the scribe's own holy work. In either case, the scribe benefited monetarily and effectively robbed the widow of her husband's legacy to her. I can tell you that's not something you want to do because God has strong words about somebody that would mistreat a widow. And it shocks me. Because we've had widows in this church that have come and said, you know, somebody tried to scam me yesterday. And more than once. And nothing gets my blood boiling more than somebody to pick up the phone and call somebody because they know they're elderly or they know they're a widow and trying to scam them. God has a special place in hell for people like that. I'm just saying. Because God has a lot to say. And that's just me. I'll read you a scripture in a minute here that supports that. And then the last thing Jesus talked about was their long prayers. And they're praying these, you know, they're skilled in rhetoric. You know, they just love to hear themselves talk. And they're not even praying to God. They're praying so everybody else in the room would hear them pray and say, well, nobody prays like brother so-and-so. You know, that's not why we're to pray. We're to go to the Lord who already knows what we need and make our requests and all of that and give him honor. But they were praying to be heard by men. So I jotted down a couple things I learned from that. One, Jesus denounces all sinful cravings to be honored above everybody else. Jesus condemns using religion to make financial gain. And you'll see that in the New Testament frequently. That pastors are not to be in the pulpit to make, what King James always said, filthy lucre. We're not to be doing it for money. That's not the motivation. All religious charlatans will receive a greater condemnation. And I jotted down, beloved, we must remain humble and enter the kingdom as little children. That's just all through the Scriptures. J.D. Jones kind of took this in the direction I was thinking as a warning to us, and to me particularly as a pastor. J.D. Jones says, there are no scribes or Pharisees in these days of ours, but the sin which called down upon scribes and Pharisees, this stern indictment, exists still. The religious pretender, the counterfeit Christian is alive still. Indeed, it will profit us all in the face of this great indictment to fall on our knees and ask, Lord, is it I? Am I this guy? He says, these shall receive a greater condemnation, greater than that of open avowed notorious sinners, greater than that of the publicans and the harlots and sinners whom these scribes cast out. It is a singular thing that Christ's sternest words were reserved not for the open and notorious sinners, but for the hypocrites, The sinners who wore the mask of goodness, sham religion, false goodness, was, in our Lord's eyes, worse than open badness, and it would receive greater condemnation. None of us is likely to be reckoned amongst the publicans and sinners, but it is possible that some of us may fall under the condemnation of these scribes." And he took it right where I did. I had read this and I was studying. I went out for my walk. And it was before I read what J.D. Joes said, and I thought the same thing. I thought, is it I, Lord? Am I this guy? There but for the grace of God. May he keep us humble, that we could be useful in the Master's hands. I was reading a little piece in Our Daily Bread about false religion and how it has such a negative impact on people, even people that would later come to the Lord savingly. And I'll just read this to you. It says, the 19th century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard identified two kinds of religion. Religion A, and religion B. The first is faith in name only. It's the practice of attending church without genuine faith in the living Lord. Religion B, on the other hand, is a life-transforming, destiny-changing experience. It's a definite commitment to the crucified and risen Savior, which establishes an ongoing personal relationship between a forgiven sinner and a gracious God. This difference explains why, for many years, British author C.S. Lewis had such a great difficulty in becoming a Christian. Religion A had blinded him to Religion B. According to his brother Warren, his conversion was, quote, no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow, steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness, an illness that had its origins in our childhood and the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political churchgoing of Ulster, and the similar dull emptiness of compulsory church during our school days. False religion, a just in-name only religion, no deep-rooted relationship to the dying and risen Savior, had almost numbed, according to his brother C.S. Lewis, from a living, vivacious relationship with the living Lord. So we have to be cautious of these things. And then lastly, of these three little vignettes, the widow's donation, Says in verse 41, Now Jesus sat opposite the treasury and saw how the people put money into the treasury, and many who were rich put in much. Then one poor widow came and threw in two mites, which makes a quadrants. So he called his disciples to himself and said to them, Assuredly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all those who have given to the treasury. For they all put in out of their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, put in all that she had, her whole livelihood." One of the things I took away from that is how Jesus observes what everybody else misses. And it's interesting sometimes, you're at the mall or whatever, and if you're just kind of sitting around, a lot of times I don't like shopping, so I'm sitting on the bench with the other old guys, waiting for my wife to come out. And you're just kind of observing what's going on around you. And you can pick up on all kinds of stuff. And that's what Jesus is doing here. He says that she's poor. He recognizes that. He knows she's a widow. She gave all that she had, her entire livelihood. Now, some of this might have been coming from his deity, that he knows some of these deep probing things. He knows how much she donates exactly, says two mites. In original Greek, that's a lepta. A lepta, this will help us a lot. I'm going to use all these coin words that we don't know what any of them really are. But a lepta, which is 1 64th of a denarius. And I think most of us have heard before, denarius was a day's wages. So I did the math and thought, OK, well, if an average wage, I don't know what it is anymore, I say $20 an hour, then what she had there, that coin, would have been about a quarter. So she might have had like a quarter left before she starved to death or whatever it might be. So she donates this. Now Mark here is the one who tells us, he's trying to help us out to understand what this might is. So he tells us it's a quadrant. Does that help you at all? Now remember, Mark's audience was Roman, so he uses, he says, well that equals this much, and he uses a Latin word, because the Romans that he was originally writing to would have known what that is. But if you just put it in your mind, it's about a quarter, maybe a little bit less than a quarter, that she gave. God knows all of this, and God knows all of that about you, and everything that you do. Everything we do that's not so good and everything you think, well nobody ever saw that I did this. I never got any thank you for that. God sees it. God knows. And God observed this. Jesus observed this and he knows. Psalm 139 for the chief musician A Psalm of David says, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there's not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it all together. He knows what I'm going to say next, before I say it. Because God's God. He knows us that thoroughly. And Jesus recognizes something here. And He calls His disciples. He sees it as a teachable moment. Verse 43, so He called His disciples to Himself. And that was like, listen up, I'm about to teach you something very important here. And what He tells them is, many gave some, the rich dropped in large sums, but She gave it all. She gave it all. And I think here, It's an illustration of this widow's faith in God's provision for her. That it's okay. God will take care of me. I can make this donation. I think it's a symbol of her love for the Lord. That she donated like she did, trusting that God would provide. That God will take care of it. You know, the old preachers used to say, you can't out-give God. God will take care of you. Here's a couple of the passages I was looking at yesterday. Psalm 68.5 says, A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy habitation. God is a defender of widows. He's a father to the fatherless. There's a strong warning in Exodus. Listen to this. Exodus 22 says in verse 22, You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child, if you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to me. This is God talking. I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will become hot, and I will kill you with the sword. Your wives shall be widows, and your children will become fatherless. That's not mincing words. God's not playing around with how we treat widows or those who don't have a father. Psalm 146.9 says, the Lord watches over the strangers. He relieves the fatherless and widow, but the way of the wicked, he turns upside down. And one more for you. Proverbs 15.25 says, the Lord will destroy the house of the proud, but he will establish the boundary of the widow. So God cares about widows. Remember that, because we should have the same heart that our Lord has towards people that are vulnerable. And I think that's partially why God cares so much, because they're vulnerable. Thomas A. Kempis wrote, A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver. Let me read that again. That's a great quote. A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver. And I think that's what Jesus is pointing out here. And it's not that the rich that gave much did something wrong. Somebody said, you know, God judges our giving by not what we give but how much we keep. That might be part of a theme here too. But I think it was the love. I think it was the love of the giver that Jesus is putting on display and teaching his disciples. Look how much she loved. She gave everything she had, trusting that God would be her defender and would provide for her. She gave it all. And she's been enshrined in scripture forever because of that. Because of the great love with which she loved her Lord. And I thought, and my final thought, and we'll wrap up, is that isn't that what the Lord Jesus did? He didn't give some. He didn't come and just teach and minister and say, well, this world is just too wicked. You know, they didn't even know who I was. Nobody really honored me and fly back to heaven. He gave his entire life. The sufferings that our Lord went through. Not just physical. Physical is horrible. I mean, you can watch movies where they try to depict what Jesus went through physically. I've heard people do sermons about what Jesus went through physically, and it's horrible what He endured to go and die for our sins. But what we can't see in those movies is what He actually took upon Himself, which was sin. He didn't become a sinner, He bore our sin in His body, and He took upon Himself the entirety of the wrath of God that was against us on that cross. He gave everything. Jesus said in Mark 10.45, For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many. Let's end there. Our Father and our God, we thank you for your word. Lord Jesus, we thank you for your ministry, your teaching. We thank you for your obedience to the Father, for your death on the cross. Lord, we thank you that you didn't remain in that tomb, but you rose again victoriously. You died for our sin. You were raised for our justification. And Lord, we are grateful for that. Father, we pray that you'd help us to think on these things that we've studied today. Lord, do that work that only you can do. Lord, let us be changed because we spent time with you and your Word. We thank you, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen.