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Monday, September 12, 2022

The Year of Jubilee - Nothing to Prove

Introduction
Today’s message is for anyone who ever felt they didn’t measure up or prove themselves.  If you’ve ever felt criticized, misunderstood, underappreciated, or devalued, Jesus has Good News for you today.  Jesus also has Good News for people who are puffed up with pride—thinking they are better than other people.  It may be a hard word—one that takes you down a notch—but it’s a good word because it can help you stop measuring yourself according to the false standards of the world and see yourself the way Jesus sees you—the way you really are. 

To help us hear God’s Word today, we continue our study of the Year of Jubilee.  In ancient Israel in the Bible, every 50 years the priest would blow a sacrificial ram’s horn on the day of atonement and proclaim a Year of Jubilee.  The Year of Jubilee was an incredibly special year.  There was no agricultural work during the Jubilee year.  Everyone was given a year off to celebrate and worship the Lord.  Slaves were also set free.  Listen to Leviticus 25:39-41. 

Leviticus 25:39-41
39 “If one of your fellow Israelites falls into poverty and is forced to sell himself to you, do not treat him as a slave. 40 Treat him instead as a hired worker or as a temporary resident who lives with you, and he will serve you only until the Year of Jubilee. 41 At that time he and his children will no longer be obligated to you, and they will return to their clans and go back to the land originally allotted to their ancestors. 

Slavery and Freedom
Life was precarious in ancient Israel.  If you had a bad year or made some bad decisions, if a drought or a swarm of locusts or some other pest destroyed your crop, or maybe foreign invaders raided your land and stole your harvest, you could lose it all. There were so many ways to fall on hard times and there were no government run welfare programs, disability checks, social security, or unemployment benefits.  If you found yourself destitute, one of the few ways to survive might be to sell your land.  Then you had no way to grow food to eat.  So you probably had to sell a family member (or even yourself) into slavery to survive.  It was degrading, but it could happen to anyone and at least slavery was a way to survive because you would be fed and sheltered and protected by your master. 

Slavery is not God’s will for His people.  We only have one Master—the Lord God.  He is a good Master who is fair and truly cares about our wellbeing.  Our Master in Heaven never uses or abuses us, but always makes sure we have what we need when we are faithful. 

Unfortunately, slavery is a fact life.  It was a literal fact of life in ancient Israel.  However, lest we think too highly of ourselves in our modern times, recognize that a kind of slavery is alive and well in America.  The average American adult today is over $58,000 in debt. 

Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.  By this standard, the average American is deeply enslaved to debt.

Debt and slavery were stark and literal realities in ancient Israel, but  everyone’s debts were forgiven and every slave was released on the Year of Jubilee.  People returned to their own family’s land.  All of life was reset to normal and everything was made right again.  Everyone could make a fresh start.

This was wonderful, but also required some adjustments to people’s attitudes toward each other.  You might have grown accustomed to having and thinking of your neighbor as your slave.  Maybe they'd been your slave for decades.  Then after the ram’s horn announced the Year of Jubilee, your neighbor was set free.  They moved back to their family land and were free and equal to you in every way—both in status and in possessions.  Can you imagine how awkward that could be--especially if you’d been misused or degraded or abused you slave unfairly.  

Or perhaps you had been a slave to your neighbor for many years—always dependent on them, always having to serve their wants and needs, always accustomed to treating and seeing them as your superior.  Now the year of Jubilee comes and you are free.  You have spent years in humiliation and shame, but now you are your neighbor’s equal again.  You need to look each other in the eyes with no pride or humiliation. I’m sure it was quite an adjustment.

No one likes to be humbled.  No one wants to be thought of as “less than”.  We want to have pride about our life and our family.  We want others to be proud of us and maybe we even admire us.  It feels good. 

Two Great Lies
There are two great lies the world tells.  The first lie is “You measure up!”  We like to hear that lie.  It feels good.  We want to be cool, popular, liked, admired.  When people affirm us, we feel valued and appreciated.  We feel like we matter.  It’s a good feeling.  It's a lie because the world's measurements are based on a faulty ruler.  Tey measure us by worldly criteria.

The second lie the world tells is “You don’t measure up.”  This lie is the other side of the coin from the first lie.  If you don’t meet the world’s false criteria, you are unimportant, unwanted, unvalued, and dismissed.  Many people spend a lot of their time trying to establish and maintain the image that they measure up to society's standards.  In fact, much of the debt we see in our society—debt that enslaves us—is acquired as we try to measure up to the world’s arbitrary standards of who does and does not matter.

Do you wear the right clothes?  Do you have a nice car?  Do you live in a proper house? Do you have the right education?  If not, there is always a credit card company, a lender, a mortgage company, or a student loan available to “help” you acquire the “things” the world says you need in order to be important and respected in our society.  And so people trade their freedom for debt (and slavery) so that they can feel like they matter. 

Jesus’ disciples were certainly ambitious for greatness.  They wanted to measure up.  They jockeyed for power and position, even as they walked with their humble master because they each wanted to be the greatest disciple.  

Mark 9:33-35
33 After they arrived at Capernaum and settled in a house, Jesus asked his disciples, “What were you discussing out on the road?” 34 But they didn’t answer, because they had been arguing about which of them was the greatest. 35 He sat down, called the twelve disciples over to him, and said, “Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else.”

Measured by the Cross
Jesus’ truth is that greatness is not measured by the world’s standards.  We are measured by the cross.  Jesus says, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”  And then he proved this truth by His own actions.  He washed His stubborn, prideful disciples feet.  This is the is the true measure of a person's greatness.

We are not measured by the world’s false standards, which change with the whims of fashion and people’s fickle imaginations.  We are measured by God’s eternal standard of Jesus Christ--who left the glory of Heaven, took the humble position of a slave, and even died a criminal's death on the cross (not for His own sins but for ours). 

That means two important things for us.  First, it means we don’t measure up. Romans’ 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glorious standard of God.”  We all fall short.  We’ve failed.  No matter how much the world tells us or we tell ourselves, “We are good.  We measure up,” the truth is we don’t.  That may sound depressing, but there is more to the story.  This bad news makes God's Good News so good. 

Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”  That means, Christ makes up the difference for us when we put our faith in Him.

An Invitation
In the Year of Jubilee in ancient Israel, everyone who was a slave was set free.  And everyone who was a slave master was also set free—set free from the burden of thinking themselves better than anyone else.  The Jubilee restored everyone to a right relationship with each other and with God, the true Lord. 

Jesus is the Great Jubilee.  He is the Lamb of God and the ram's horn that came to proclaim the time of the Lord’s favor has come.  Jesus proclaims that everyone is free from all kinds of enslavement—whether it be enslavement to sin or debt or to chasing the world’s fantasy about what it means to be important.

When we are blind, Jesus helps us see that we are not better than we think we are nor are we worse than we think are.  Jesus helps us see who we really are.  We are God’s precious children.  He loved us so much that Jesus died on the cross so we could be set free.

Jesus sets us free from the feeling that we’ve got to prove ourselves to anyone.  Jesus has already proven us.  He made you the way you are.  He loves you as you are.  He invites you to repent of you sin and trust in Him to save you and give you eternal value.  Jesus invites you to follow Him and to serve as He served.

Won’t you accept His call to repent and be set free today?  I hope you will.  You can.  Pray something like this and then find a group of Christians to help mentor you as you walk with Christ daily.  Pray:

Lord come in and take control of my life.  Fill me up full of your wonderful grace.  Cleanse my heart and my wretched old soul.  I choose You as Lord today.  Save me and help me to walk with You and be a servant like you, every day. Amen.

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