Episode 1675: Power

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Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining me on episode 1,675 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast

Ben Guttmann: I'm Ben Guttman. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence, and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to communicate our message with simplicity is key, and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, with my friend Scott Maderer.

Scott Maderer: Everyone. Those that we think deserve it, and especially those who we think do not. That's choosing life. That's speaking life. That's what Jesus is calling for us to be every day.

Ben Guttmann: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the

Scott Maderer: [00:01:00] Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling.

In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence

Ben Guttmann: so that you can impact the world

Scott Maderer: In today's Spiritual Foundation episode, I talk about Exodus 1:8 through 2:10 and Matthew 16:13-20. I talk about how the central choice we all have is how power and leadership are aligned, and also share how we are also given a choice to recognize our identity in that of God Exodus chapter one, verses eight through [00:02:00] chapter two, verse ten says, "Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.

He said to his people, 'Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them or they will increase and in the event of war join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.' Therefore, they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.

They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians subjugated the Israelites to hard servitude and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and every kind of field labor.

They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them. The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 'When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she [00:03:00] shall live.'

But the midwives feared God. They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, 'Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?' And the midwives said to Pharaoh, 'Because the Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.'

So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, 'Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.' Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman.

The woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen [00:04:00] to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. 'This must be one of the Hebrew's children,' she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, 'Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?'

Then Pharaoh's daughter said to her, 'Yes.' So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, 'Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.' So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son.

She named him Moses because she said, 'I drew him out of the water.'" Matthew chapter 16, verses 13 through 20 says, "Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, 'Who do people say that the Son of Man is?' And they said, 'Some say John the Baptist, but [00:05:00] others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.'

And he said to them, 'But who do you say that I am?' And Simon Peter answered, 'You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.' And Jesus answered him, 'Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.' Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah." Like always, these two texts are about a lot of different things, but one of the key things they're about is power, and a second is identity.

In Exodus, we find a ruler who governed out of fear and threats, but the [00:06:00] powerless, or those that seemed like they should have been powerless, thwarted him. And in Matthew, Jesus asked, "Who do you say that I am?" If you think about it, power and leadership are two things that are closely aligned in our minds and in our hearts.

We think what is power for leadership? Is it the ability for the leader to do whatever they want to do? Throw them into the river, like it says in Exodus. I mean, after all, think about it. Does-- How is it possible that a leader would be so afraid of immigrants that he would recommend throwing them into the river?

And yet this was the edict. He told all his people, "Whenever you see a Hebrew baby boy, throw him in the river." He basically called up mob action, calling on prejudice and suspicion, fear-mongering, and threats. Now, of [00:07:00] course, he let the girls live, and why was that? Was it because in his mind, girls couldn't do much?

I mean, no one worries about the power of girls, right? Is that enough? Maybe it's because no one could be so mean to kill the baby girls, right? Not sure what sentiment it was that caused the Pharaoh to spare the girls. He probably just didn't think they were capable of causing trouble. And if you think about it, that means he wasn't paying attention because his first plan, the two women, the midwives, got in the way of that plan and ultimately, a woman, his daughter, caused his ultimate downfall.

Pharaoh was misaligned, off base in thinking about power. He was trying to take a source of life, the Nile River, and turn it into a place of death, and ultimately his plan [00:08:00] didn't work. He wanted midwives, bringers of life, to be instruments of death, and it didn't work. He wanted the little girls that he didn't even think were worthy of consideration.

He thought of them as powerless, and yet they had the real power It doesn't mean that humans can't turn things to evil even when God wants them to be good. We certainly seem to have that ability. But it does mean that those that recognize and fear God, like the midwives did... And by the way, this isn't fear as in they were afraid of what God would do to them over the, what the Pharaoh would do to them.

It means they trusted in God's power more than they trusted in Pharaoh's power. It means that those that fear God, if, if they use those blessings, if they're willing to work [00:09:00] for life and not for death, that ultimately it turns back towards good It's about choosing. It's about choosing the kind of work you do.

Are you doing work of death or work of life? That is the message. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the TV show and the radio program, "The Lone Ranger," but I do. And in it, this hero would ride in, save the day, and then ride away, and people would say, "Who was that masked man?" Now, if you think about it, if you look at the mask that he wore and the horse that he rode and everything else, people should have been able to tell who it is.

If you look at comic books and think about the secret identity thing it's pretty obvious that people should be able to see through it, and in fact, that's kind of become a trope in modern comic books. [00:10:00] There's all sorts of reasons why they would keep a secret identity, maybe to protect those that are close to them, maybe other reasons.

And that kind of echoes into the Matthew passage where Jesus ends it with, "Don't tell anyone who I really am." Maybe he was looking out for us, right? He knows his followers are going to have a difficult time, so he's saying, "Don't let anyone know. Keep it to yourself. Keep yourself safe." But it's also recognizing an important moment.

This text or versions of it appear in three of the four gospels. So something important seems to be going on. Is this moment about Jesus or is it about the disciples? And Matthew seems to make it about the disciples. He has a longer conversation between Jesus and Peter in his version, turning it into a teaching moment for the disciples [00:11:00] and obviously for us.

Not about this is the moment that we declare who Jesus really is. No, this is an insider moment. This is a community moment In fact, in this passage is one of only two uses of the word church in the Gospels. The other occurs later in Matthew when Jesus tells us of the purpose of the church. So for those of us that believe we are the church, this has to be an important message of identity of the church.

It tells us about the identity of Jesus, it tells us about the identity of Peter, but it also tells us about the identity of the church. Jesus says, "Who do others say that I am?" And then, "Who do you say that I am?" And Peter got it right, 'cause Jesus says so. "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."

He's saying Jesus is the one we've been looking [00:12:00] for. Jesus is the one we need, even if we aren't aware of that need. You are the Messiah. You are the one who comes from God. You are the Son of the living God. And Peter declares it, and he declares that Jesus is the one who connects and brings humans together.

Jesus is the reconciling moment. But that's not all, right? It can't be just about the identity of Jesus or because of the identity of Jesus. Instead, it's about how recognizing the identity of Jesus should transform the disciples and us. It should change us from individual followers to a new community of faith under Christ, and that's why we're different.

Because of that claim that Christ is Lord, our identity becomes wrapped up in the person of Christ [00:13:00] And who then is the church? What is the nature of the church? Jesus later tells Peter that if you accept Christ, you're transformed, and he recognizes it right here. In fact, this may be the moment where Simon came to be called Peter.

Peter doesn't appear to have been used as a name before this historical figure. In this passage, Simon is identified as Simon Peter even before D- Jesus calls him Peter. So maybe that was his nickname, or maybe that was maybe even a, a mean name, like calling him a, a box of rocks or dumb as a rock, 'cause Peter means rock.

But Jesus takes something that might have been a nickname or a sign of derision and turns it into a name of honor and says, "You're the keystone. [00:14:00] You're the rock upon build-- which I'll build my church. You're the foundation." And that's what we're called to be as the church. We're called to be the builder, the materials, and the rock, the foundation that it rests on.

That's what we're called to do. Things will come and go. The gates of Hades will not prevail against it, being the church. It, it-- the things of death, said another way, will not come against us. The moments of death. Why? Because the church will choose things of life. That is the foundational moment. Not a particular denomination, not a particular flavor, but the church, the people that are the followers of Christ And those attacks from those other moments won't succeed if we choose [00:15:00] life.

Because that is the power that he's talking about. When it says we have the keys of the binding and the loosening, that is about the power of life. This isn't being gatekeepers. This isn't about who's in and who's out. This isn't about the, being ones that set the rules, though often that's how that's argued.

It's really about recognizing that we have in our hands the, uh, knowledge and identity of Christ, and we have the ability to teach and to interpret and to share and to invite and to welcome everyone. Those that we think deserve it, and especially those who we think do not. That's choosing life. That's speaking life.

That's what Jesus is calling for us to be every [00:16:00] day. Thanks for listening.

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