So I want to start the message with a question. And before you raise your hand, because I would love it if you you would raise your hand if this applies to you. I want to give some parameters. So hold off on the hand raising. I want to know if any of you have ever been significantly underpaid. What I want to say, you're already raising hands. Everyone's raising their hands. Couple parameters. Hold on. Number one, if your employer's in the room, really think about if you want to raise your hand or not. That's the first parameter. Number two, I'm not talking about a situation where you're really young and inexperienced, and so you have a job where maybe there are people who do the same thing you do and they make more, but they have a lot more experience and knowledge than you, and you're kind of in a season where you're just learning that and the pay will come one day. I'm not talking about a decision where you decide to actually take a pay cut to go work for something that you're passionate about. It's more of a cause than a career, and so you're willing to be paid less to do it. And I'm not talking about you taking a temporary pay cut because you're part of like a startup and you're counting on the long-term success and you're gonna make it up on that end. I'm just talking about a situation at any point in your life where you worked for an organization, for a company, for a person that drastically undervalued you and maybe everyone and paid you way less than you should have been paid. Has anyone ever been underpaid? All right, quite a few hands. Follow-up question. Has anyone ever been overpaid? Like, a couple people raising their hands, there's fewer hands going up. Like I'm talking if if my employer knew what I was actually worth, if my employer knew what I actually produce, they would come, they would take thousands of dollars off of my salary, and I would say, yeah, that's probably about right. Anyone want to raise your hand for that one? It's a few. If your employer's in the room, by the way, I mean, raise your hand if you want to be honest, but just be careful. Fewer hands for the second than than for the first. It's interesting, wages, payments, salaries, things like that, they they illustrate, or at least bring to light, something that's very deep within us as people, and that's that's a belief in fairness. We we like things to be fair, and we hate it when things are not are not fair. I have four kids, and three of them can talk. One, he's he's working on it, he's he's real young, and he doesn't have a lot of time to talk, to be honest. He's gonna have a hard time getting words in in our family. Um but it's interesting because I don't think my children have ever heard my wife or I run through the house screaming it's not fair. I don't think that's a behavior they have they have ever observed one time. I can't remember a time that I got mad at home and went, it's just not fair. I can't remember my wife doing that. And yet, all three of my children who can speak have said that on a near daily basis for what seems like years now. Like they're obsessed with fairness. This last week school started back for Cherokee County, and I've got two in school. I've got a boy in the fourth grade, and my daughter just started kindergarten. I put her on the bus on Thursday, and like a tear shed. It's my girl, she's going to school. I will literally kill someone if they like, if there's, I'm just, I wouldn't literally kill them, but I mean I'd be tempted at the very least. Like, it's my girl, my one girl. And I'll never forget the the night before school, bedtime really kicks in hard when school's going on, and and my oldest boy gets to stay up 30 minutes later than his his sister, who's four years younger, and she can't handle that. Like she she she literally is protesting that night. Why? Why does why does my older brother get to stay up? He can stay up for 30 more minutes, and I said, Yes, he does. And she says, That's not fair. He has to wake up at the same time I wake up. And I said, That's correct. And he needs to stay up later than I do. That is also correct. It's not fair, it's not fair. And we had a long conversation, and uh I think she's a she's a genius because by the end of it it was his bedtime. So she actually just, you know, worked that out. But she's she's obsessed with fairness. I think all of us are. And this morning we're we're we're gonna look at a teaching of Jesus, a very important teaching of Jesus that really answers the question for us: is God fair? And it's a teaching that centers around some people's wages and whether or not they're they're underpaid. We're asking the question this morning, is God's kingdom fair? Is fairness a value in the kingdom of heaven? For some context, we're in a series called A King in His Kingdom. It's very important for us as Jesus followers. I know not all of us are Jesus followers, but those of us who would say, I follow Jesus, it's very important that we know what Jesus actually said. One of the tragedies of kind of modern Christianity is that we tend to be far more familiar with what Jesus did than with what he said. And that's that's not a good thing because what that means is we love Jesus, we're fans of Jesus, we kind of go, yeah, Jesus, but then we live our lives in ways that don't line up with the things Jesus actually taught, and we may not even be aware of that. We have to be just as familiar with what our king said as we are with what he did. And so what we're doing is we're in this series, we're studying the teachings of Jesus. In fact, this morning we get really into the nuts and bolts of the teachings of Jesus. And if you look at the teachings of Jesus, there's this one theme that runs through all of it, and it's the kingdom. He's always talking in kingdom terms. Matthew chapter 4, verse 17. Very early in Jesus' ministry, it says, From then on, Jesus began to preach, repent of your sins and turn to God, for the kingdom of heaven is near. He's always talking about the kingdom. That was like the thesis statement of his ministry. He's always saying, the kingdom of heaven's like this, the kingdom of heaven's like that. He uses illustrations, we call those parables, to teach us key points about the kingdom. What Jesus is really trying to do is he's trying to get us to become accustomed to the culture of the kingdom of God. Every kingdom, every nation on this earth has a unique culture, values certain things. How many of us would say that we value being on time and value other people being on time? Punctuality is important. Yeah, we're Americans. We expect things to start on time. We we really, really do. Like if you go to a movie that says it starts at 7 and it's 7.02, you've got all these people in the room who are antsy. They're like, what is going on? It's been two minutes. It says 7 o'clock, that's false advertising. I'm gonna get my money back. If the movie doesn't start in the next three minutes, 7 o'clock. We value punctuality. That's part of our American culture. But that is not something that everyone in the world values. Spend some time in South America and you'll learn that everything's like an ish, everything. Like what time's dinner? Five. You get there at five, you eat at 6:30, and it's it's fine. No one's freaking out because they're like, yeah, it's basically the same as five. And you're like, no, it's not. But they just meant, you know, nighttime-ish. They have different values. And the thing about cultural values is that if you go to a place like South America and you go in with the expectations of your culture, you're gonna be disappointed on a constant basis. I believe that many believers get frustrated with what's happening in their lives, almost feeling sometimes like God isn't following through on the things that he's supposed to be doing. But the issue is is that they're trying to have God operate within their culture, their values. And when we give our lives to Jesus, we become part of his kingdom. What we have to do is adjust to his culture, his values. And if we don't, we're just gonna be frustrated in our lives. God doesn't want you frustrated. So Jesus does this amazing thing by through through story after story teaching us the values and the culture of the kingdom of heaven. And we get to learn, and if we adjust appropriately, if we adopt God's values and we live our lives that way, things change. Things actually transform for us in really powerful ways. And so today we're gonna jump into this story that Jesus tells in Matthew chapter 20, verses 1 through 16. He says, For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and to those he said, You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you. So they went in. Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour and did the same thing, and about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around. And he said to them, Why have you been standing here idle all day long? They said to him, Because no one hired us. He said to them, You go into the vineyard too. And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first. When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. When those hired first came, they thought they would receive more. But each of them also received a denarius. And when they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, saying, These last men have worked only one hour, and you've made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day. But he answered and said to one of them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go. But I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous? So the last shall be first, and the first last. Now, just out of curiosity, and again, raise your hand with honesty, how many of you feel like the guys who got hired first were treated unfairly? Like there's just at least part of you that's like, I mean, I get what the guy says, he can do what he wants with his money, but like that's not fair. I can tell you what my daughter would say. I can promise you what my five-year-old little girl would say if she was in that situation. That is not fair. It's not, it's not fair. It's a really interesting teaching. Jesus says something in that teaching that he said pretty often that the first will be last, the last will be first. This is his way of illustrating that God's kingdom just works so differently than this world, that it's upside down. In fact, oftentimes his kingdom is called the upside down kingdom because it's just take everything that this world values, flip it on its head, and that's how Jesus operates. This is a really, really powerful story, and it has a lot of meaning for us if we can wrap our minds around it. But to do that, we have to understand the context. When we study scripture, when we read the Bible, we see chapters, we see verses. What you have to realize is those were added hundreds of years later, and they're good. They're good because they help us segment, they help us reference. But but originally those chapter breaks, they weren't there. So sometimes what happens is if you start at the beginning of a chapter, you see what you're reading as if it's like independent of other things. That's how most chapter books work. But that's not how this story works. Sometimes those chapter breaks happen in moments that cause us to separate two things that actually went together. And so I've heard pastors say it this way: if you ever see the word therefore, ask yourself, what's the therefore, therefore? And then back up a little bit, right? And so this begins with Jesus saying, for the kingdom of heaven. Well, why is that for there? What's he talking about? What's the context? And if you turn back to Matthew 19, you find a very, very powerful story. And we don't have to put that up quite yet. Leave that down for a second, because I want to set it up. So, Matthew 19, you have this story of a man that's often called the rich young ruler. Very interesting story. This man comes up to Jesus and he says, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus has a dialogue with him, and ultimately the way the dialogue goes, at first Jesus says, Why do you call me good? Only God's good, and the man acknowledges that. And then Jesus says, Well, you you like, you know the law, you know the rules. He was a Jewish man, part of the Jewish faith. And Jesus lists a few of the Jewish laws, and he says, just do those things. And the man says, Yeah, I've done that. I've done that. And it's interesting because Jesus begins by getting the man to admit that only God is good, and then a few seconds later he's like, Oh, I'm good. I'm good. He's already tripped himself up. But Jesus says, Okay, if you've done all that, and then this gets really cool, he says, and this man's very wealthy, he says, Sell everything you have, sell it all. Then give all your money away to the poor. Now come follow me. And the man's heart sinks, and he can't do it because he's just so attached to what he has, and he walks away saddened. Now, the disciples who were there, their ears would have perked up when Jesus said what he said to this man about now come follow me, because what Jesus was doing with the rich young ruler was the exact same thing that he did with the disciples when he called them to follow him. If you look at the story of Jesus calling Peter and James and John the fishermen, he goes up to them and he tells them to drop their nets, to let go of their earthly identity. And he says, and I will make you fishers of men. He says, I'll take what you do on this earth and I'll give it eternal value. And then he says the exact words, now come follow me. So here's this rich young ruler, and he says, Hey, sell all your possessions, give it away to the poor, drop your nets. And then he says, I'll make you rich in heaven. He says, I'll give what you've been doing on this earth eternal value. Now come follow me. He's asking this man to be one of his disciples. Had this man said yes, we would know his name. He may have written scripture. And the disciples might have been freaking out a little bit because this guy, he's kind of like, he's kind of legit. He's wealthy, he's successful, he's very different than the rest of the disciples. And you have to understand that they're comparing themselves to him and they're going, like, oh no, is one of us about to get cut? Like, because if this guy becomes one of the disciples, he's surely so successful, he's so, he's obviously smart, he's he's blessed by God, he's wealthy, surely, he's gonna outrank us. They're comparing themselves to this guy, and they don't see themselves as measuring up. And you see that because after this man leaves, Jesus says, Hey, it's actually really hard for rich people to enter my kingdom. They're just too in love with this world. And the disciples who have been comparing themselves to this man, going, we don't stack up to him, they're like, Well, then who in the world could possibly measure up? And all of a sudden, Peter has this thought, and he's like, Hey, we're not like that guy. We gave up everything that we had, we dropped our nets. And so Peter has this conversation with Jesus, Matthew 19, 27. Then Peter said to him, We've given up everything to follow you. What will we get? And see, now what Peter's doing is the comparison with the rich young ruler has flipped. At first they're comparing themselves to the rich young ruler going, we don't measure up to this guy. Now they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're better than this guy. Because look what we did, Jesus. What will we get? Jesus replied, I assure you that then the w when the world is made new and the Son of Man sits upon his glorious throne, you who have been my followers will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who's given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or property for my sake will receive a hundred times as much in return and will inherit eternal life. But many who are the greatest now will be the least important then, and those who seem least important now will be the greatest then. The first will be last, the last will be first. And then Jesus jumps into this parable to further illustrate his point. He says, For the kingdom of heaven is like a man who went to hire workers for his field. The context here is really important. What you have is the disciples essentially asking Jesus, hey, I'm gonna get my fair share, right? Like when it all works out, it's all said and done, I'm gonna get my fair share. I just want to make sure, Jesus, that that you give us what we deserve. And Jesus says, yes and no. He says, like, guys, don't worry. When everything works out in the end and I'm reigning in fullness, yeah, yeah, you're gonna you're gonna be glorified and and blessed. Yeah, but look, there's gonna be a lot of others who come after you. And they're gonna they're gonna serve me too. And they're gonna make sacrifices too. And they're gonna they're gonna have relationships that that don't work because of the fact that they follow me. And they're gonna give up property and money for my kingdom. And so, guys, yeah, you're gonna be blessed, but don't go down this fairness track because you're gonna see a lot of people blessed. Like a lot of people blessed. And if you have this scarcity mentality where you're worried about you getting what you deserve, and what if someone else takes a little bit of what's yours? You're gonna be very disappointed in the kingdom of heaven. Because it doesn't really work that way. See, in Jesus' parable, the disciples, they're the first workers, they're the first workers. And I don't know where we are in that whole timeline, but we're not first. We're 2,000 years later. So I don't know if we're at the end or two-thirds of the way there, but we're we're somewhere way down the line. And when we read this parable, we should really see ourselves like the ones hired toward the end. The fact that we can sit in this room and worship together and talk about Jesus and not be afraid of our lives is actually a very unique thing. It's not the way it's always been. Our ability to do this has been paid for by vast amounts of persecution and sacrifice. And yet, Jesus tells us that just like those who have gone before us, even those like the disciples who gave up everything, we're going to receive the same reward.

So I have a question for you. Is that fair? And the answer is no. It's not fair. But it's but it's good.

See, the reality is we we overvalue fairness. We really do. We overvalue fairness. That was illustrated in my conversation with Lily on on Wednesday night when she was so mad about Liam getting to stay up 30 minutes later because as the conversation went on, I said, Well, let's you a question, Lily. You want things to be fair? She's like, yes. And I was emotionally manipulating her at this point, because I can do that. Um I'm like, I'm I'm leading her down this path, half joking. So I'm like, you want it to be fair? Yes. All right, let's make things fair. Your brother Eli, who is one, goes to bed at 6 p.m. every night. And he has to take a two-hour nap in the middle of the day. You don't have to take a two-hour nap, you get to stay up till 7:30. So to make things fair, you're gonna start going to bed at 6, and you have to take a two-hour nap. And she's like, No, I don't want that to happen. I'm like, don't worry, I'll make Liam do it too. That way it's it's all I want it to be fair. So we'll make things fair. And she's like, that's not what I meant. I'm like, oh, so you don't really value fairness all that much. And I said, look, Lily, if I did that, I would be being fair. But I wouldn't be just, and I wouldn't be good. Don't don't overvalue fairness. Don't worry too much about what you deserve. Because the truth is, in God's kingdom, you don't want what you deserve. Like you really don't. You don't want what you deserve. And God doesn't give us what we deserve. He gives us so much more than that. In fact, there's some interesting details in this story, this parable that we skip over because here we are 2,000 years later. A lot of things don't quite have the meaning that they would have had if we were the original disciples. And if you understand some of the nuances of the story Jesus tells you, see it. For example, he tells the men who worked the first hour in the Jewish calendar, the day actually started not at midnight, but when the sun rose. And then, like, that that's that's what happens. So these guys, when it says the first hour, they're being hired at dawn and they're working until the sun goes down. They're working 12 hours. And he promised them a certain amount of payment, and it's a denarius. Now, some of your translations will say a day's wages, and that's both accurate and not. The beautiful thing about scripture is we have lots of translations, and they all sort of specialize in different things. You don't have to worry about your translation being being horrible or anything like that. If it's one of the main ones, it's it's good, but they all do some different things. So, the New Living Translation, it puts things in really normal day-to-day language. We use that a lot, and in ways that we we understand, because we don't get paid in denarius, right? None of us even really know what a denarius is, so it just translates a daily wage. And that's good. That helps us understand what it's talking about. But that daily wage was a denarius, and something gets lost in that translation, and that's that a denarius was what a wealthy person would make in a day. It's what a skilled person would make in a day. A soldier got paid a denarius a day, the Romans took care of their soldiers. Someone who was really educated could expect to make a denarius a day. This is actually a picture of a Roman denarius. And it was a silver coin. It was worth originally, the reason it's called the denarius, D-E-N means 10, it was worth 10 of a smaller bronze coin called an Assarius. And so this is a picture of a Roman Assarius. You guys can bring up the extra, there you go. It's smaller, like rougher. Umriginally, denarius worth 10 of those, and by the time Jesus is around, a denarius is worth 16 a sorry. And so, unskilled laborers, the guys that Jesus tells this story about, guys who are just day laborers that are gonna work for whoever hires them, no, no one would have ever paid them a denarius for a day's work. No one. It's ludicrous. And the second Jesus said that, his disciples would have looked at each other like, what? It'd be like if I was talking to you and I said, Hey, I wanted to get my car washed this week, so I saw some guys and I walked up to and said, Hey, I'll pay a thousand dollars to wash my car, you'd be like, What, what? Why? That makes no sense. You can do it yourself for basically free. Or you could go to a car wash, pay like 10, 15 bucks, get it done pretty well. And if you're one of those really crazy people who I don't mean this in a negative way, sorry, uh, really passionate people. Not crazy, passionate. Who wants your car like perfect? You can get it detailed, and that's gonna be like a hundred bucks, but it's gonna be immaculate. You should never pay a thousand dollars to get your car washed. It just doesn't make any sense. The disciples would have had the same exact thought the moment they heard Jesus say that this man agreed to pay them a denarius for the day, because a denarius was was more than a day laborer could hope to make in a week. So he's already paying them far more than market value, like far more. They should have been paid a few asari. He pays them a denarius. And then it comes to the end of the day, and those guys get a denarius too. And if you you see that detail, it paints the story in a little bit of a different light. You feel a little less sorry for the first workers, right? Because basically what that means is they're complaining at the end of the day, and they're basically saying to the the owner, they're saying, hey, those guys got a full week's wages and they only had to work an hour. We got a full week's wages and we only had to, we had to work like a whole day. And if you complain that way, it just doesn't quite have the same impact. If you read this story and you see a denarius as minimum wage, then yeah, it actually looks like really unfair. Because they all got the minimum. But what Jesus is illustrating is that right off the bat, for those first workers, they were already vastly overpaid, given far more than they should have been given. What we have to understand in the kingdom of God is that we are all overpaid. Every single one of us. We're overpaid. God is so, he's so generous. Deuteronomy 7.9, understand therefore that the Lord your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations and lavishes his unfailing love on those who love him and obey his commands. God is he is kind, he is generous. In fact, the number one word used to describe God in the Old Testament is kind. God doesn't get portrayed that way in the Old Testament that often because people like to pick certain stories out and really highlight those, but the number one attribute of God described in the Old Testament is kindness. And he lavishes his kindness on us. It's not minimum wage, it's not what we've earned, it's not what we deserve, it's far more than that. It's generous. Psalm 31, 19, how great is the goodness you have stored up for those who fear you. You lavish it on those who come to you for protection, blessing them before the watching world. Again, there's that word lavish. Do you understand that if you've given your life to Jesus, the love of God has been lavished upon you, the favor of God has been lavished upon you. Ephesians 1, 7 through 8. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding. We don't deserve that. That's not fair. It is not fair that my sin was paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ. It is not fair that Jesus, the perfect, blameless, sinless Son of God, died a death on a cross, and I get to live life basking in the favor of God the Father. That I actually get to call God my Father. Jesus calls God Father, we call God Father. That's not fair. But it's good. It's good. That's the way the kingdom of God works. And so, practically speaking, this is how parables work, and we're going to study a lot of parables in this series as we learn about the kingdom. You can take a lot of things away from this. But parables always have one main point that they're trying to drive home. They're rich, so you can take things away from this parable, like, don't compare yourselves to others. The thing that makes these guys miserable is not the payment they received. They were overjoyed to be paid a denarius for the day. At the beginning of the day, they're looking at each other like we're gonna get a denarius. This guy's either generous or stupid. He's given all of us a denarius. This is awesome. And then by the end of the day, they're upset. Why? Because they compare themselves to someone else. Comparison is always a destructive force. Because we rarely compare ourselves to the right things or the right people. And so if you live your life comparing yourself to others, you're either going to be filled with pride or filled with regret that shouldn't be there. So don't compare yourself to others. If you want to compare yourself to someone, compare yourself to Jesus. And we all find ourselves in the same spot when we compare ourselves to Him. You can also take the practical takeaway that you should be excited for other people's blessings. Very often people only get excited when they get blessed. They get something good, they're happy, someone else gets something good, they're kind of mad, right? And we've all had that experience. You've all had the experience where like social media makes this all the more worse, right? You open up your Facebook page or whatever you use and uh and you see a picture of someone and they've just received a blessing and they're like kind of bragging about it on social media, which is annoying. Um, but you have that moment where you might even like hit the like button, which you don't like it. You know? You're like, I'm so happy for you. And if if they could hear your tone, what you're really feeling is like, why isn't this happening to me? If you're only excited about the blessings you receive, you will experience so little joy. But if you can be excited for the blessings of those around you, your joy will grow exponentially. You'll be you'll be so happy. People look at you like, why are you so happy? I'm just so excited for what God did for that guy. And you're like, you're you're kind of crazy. But I wish I had that. That's a takeaway we could have from this story. Man, if they could have only been excited for the blessings of those guys who who came in at the 11th hour. But the main point, the main point, parables always have one main point, is that God's kingdom is more than fair. See, when we say the phrase it's not fair, we always mean less than fair. But if something's more than fair, it's it's not fair, right? I've never heard someone complain about a blessing by saying it's not fair. When I waited tables in college, if I would have gotten a really bad tip, I might have thought, that's not fair. But when I got really good tips, I never protested. Like there were times I got really good tips, and I never once went to the person and said, Ho, hold on, you must take this tip back. It's not fair. It's way more. That never happened. But if you're overpaid, you've been treated unfairly. It's just in a really good way. And that's where we all stand with Jesus. That's where we all stand with God. He has been rich and generous and kind to us. We are all overpaid. We should, we should acknowledge that. We should be excited about that. Like we should be so we should be so overjoyed at the fact that we have not been given what we deserve. We don't deserve to be called God's children. We don't deserve to have a relationship with him. We don't deserve his favor. We don't deserve his Holy Spirit in our lives. But he gave that to us, and we should be so overjoyed and excited and humbled by that fact. So much so that it makes us not worry about what's happening in someone else's life and whether or not we're getting our fair share. We're getting way more than that. And so this week, for the rest of your life, hopefully, just devalue fairness a little bit. You really don't want things to be fair. You want things to be generous. You want things to be good, so be good and be generous. Those are kingdom values. Fairness is not, it's not a huge value in the kingdom of heaven. God's gonna make things right, he is just. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is he is lavish, he is generous. And so live that way. Be generous with your time, be generous with your encouragement. So often we're generous with criticism, but selfish with encouragement. No, no, no. Be generous with encouragement, be generous with love, be generous with your energy. Like give it all. Even in situations where the person you're giving it to maybe doesn't deserve it. I I know I use this as an analogy a lot, but it's just it's good because a lot of us go from here and we we go eat. If you have a horrible waiter or waitress, give them a great tip today. Not because they deserve it, but because you're living in the kingdom of heaven, not the kingdom of this earth. And we've been given more than we deserve, so give more than they deserve. Watch what happens when you do that. Be generous in every way you can imagine because God values generosity. His kingdom is about generosity. So be generous. Make sense?