‍SUMMARY KEYWORDS

jesus, god, worship, woman, alabaster flask, life, disciples, sacrifice, meal, world, place, ointment, leper, year, simon, incredible, feels, extravagant, church, easter.

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SPEAKER

Phil EuBank

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Hey, Good Morning, Menlo church. Welcome to our series The Path of Surrender that we started a few weeks ago in our sort of season of Lent, where we are preparing to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus together at Easter. A special welcome to our Bay Area campuses in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Saratoga, those of you joining us online, wherever you're watching from today, we're so glad that you have chosen to spend part of your morning and your weekend with us. If this is your first time joining us I know that that represents maybe a big risk for you of dipping your toe into the waters of faith. And I just want to say, Wow, I'm so thankful that you've chosen to do that. You I hope we'll find that this is a community of people who want to know you, who wants you to be a part of this community. So no matter what your experience of church has been in the past, Menlo really could be something that God has for you, in your present and your future.

Now, before we go any further, I do need to address just kind of an elephant in the room a little bit. We've been in California for a little over a year. And when we got here last year, it was raining a lot, a lot. And everyone said to me, like every campus, we would go visit San Mateo Mountain View Saratoga, here in Menlo Park and be like, Oh, Phil, this is so unusual. It never rains like this. And then this year, I'm hearing a lot of people say, Phil, this is so unusual. And I'm not calling you liars. But I do want to know what you think the word unusual means. And if we end up in year, three of this next year, I think this now has become usual. So just, I just needed to get that off of my chest today as we got started.

This series that we're diving back into is really a chance for us to walk alongside Jesus in his final week of earthly ministry on his way to the cross. And if for you, maybe you grew up in a context where the only times that you ever went to church were Christmas and Easter, and then we're kind of one-day experiences, this entire idea of Lent and a season these 40 days leading up to Easter can feel a little disorienting. But I hope that this has given you a chance to have this, maybe, greater conversation with God and His people about what God wants to do in and through your life. Maybe for you that's fasting from something over the course of these 40 days

where you're exchanging your appetite for that thing for a deeper appetite in God. Maybe for you, you're joining us in this devotional that we put together and put on the YouVersion Bible app, I hope you are. But no matter where and how you're engaging in this, I hope it helps Easter to be more than just a day of celebration, but really a season of expectation for what God can do in and through your life as you get closer to him.

Now, before we get started, I'm going to pray for us. And if you've never been here before, never heard me speak. Before I speak I pray kneeling. And part of the reason for that comes from a passage that we are going to study together today, that God is worthy of our extravagant and humble worship before him. So no matter where you are in your own faith process right now, no matter where you would describe your relationship with God or church, would you humble yourself in the quiet of your heart for just a moment as we go to God together? Let's pray.

God, I am so cognizant of just the different walks of life that walk into this room and campuses all around the Bay Area who log on and God they're there. They need something from you.

They're looking for something they're longing for something. And God would you help us to discover that together? Would you help us to find out who you really are. And because of that, who we really are, that we would live and learn, and walk out of this place different because of it. God thank you for this time that we have together would you use it to shape us and glorify you in Jesus name, Amen.

Now, February just ended and was a little longer thanks to the leap year. But February marks our nation's official Black History Month. And with it we learned a lot from those who have fought for equality throughout our nation's history from the black community. As a matter of fact, Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 and escaped it in 1849. Instead of doing something that we would have all understood by simply just beginning a new life away from the one that she had fled, she spent the next decade making 13 trips to Maryland to rescue friends and family. She would go on to ultimately offer critical support instructions, to see more than 700 people freed from slavery along the Underground Railroad. Reflecting on her life, Harriet once said, “I said to the Lord, I'm going to hold steady on to you. And I know that you will see me through.” In the midst of a life and circumstances personally and as a nation, she showed incredible resolve to fight for her own freedom and for the freedom of others. Now while that work of achieving equality for everyone in our nation isn't done, we have made progress because of leaders just like Harriet Tubman who have brought their best into the mess that they found themselves inside of. The moments of their lives that could feel so intimidating, they kept trusting God through it.

I don't know what the obstacles in your life feel like. But I hope that you can take inspiration from a woman who, like all of us wasn't perfect. And yet God used her to bring real and meaningful change in the world by trusting God with decisions of great weight and even potential risk.

Maybe you feel that today. Maybe you're facing what feels like insurmountable odds, you don't know where to begin, every direction feels impossible. The challenges of your world and the world feel irreversible, and your best feels like it just won't be enough. As a matter of fact, if you were honest, you're not even really sure where to start. In the scene that we're going to dive into, in Jesus final week of earthly ministry, we meet a woman who demonstrates incredible poise and trust with her most prized possession. It feels so countercultural that Jesus’ own disciples spoke up to stop it. But it raises this really important question for us that Jesus was basically asking his disciples, which is “Does God get your best, or what's left?” And it's so easy to justify and rationalize, I immediately want to rationalize and justify when this question

surfaces in my own heart. But the story we're about to look at should challenge all of us in new ways. Even if it's an old passage you've studied many times before.

Jesus often pushed back against what was normal, or even appealing in the society of the day. And at a very unique dinner that we're going to enter into we see when Jesus meal gets interrupted, maybe you can think of a time where you were planning on having this really nice and sweet meal and something or someone changed that. When Graer Our oldest who is 14, now was a baby, my parents offered to take Alisa and I and our young family to dinner, I selected a nice restaurant. But I didn't realize until we got there with our infant, how nice it was. Everyone was really kind, but we were out of place. We were in clothes that were too casual, and we had a baby. So it was kind of the hat trick. Somewhere between the bread course and the salad course, I was walking around the restaurant to keep Graer calm and not crying, which I'm sure the other guests in the restaurant loved that I was doing right? It doesn't take a ton in our lives to disrupt this challenge for us where there's a disconnect between what I expect and what I experience, and I can become very frustrated and disappointed with the disconnect. But that was never the case for Jesus. Jesus always had important people around him, he always had important things in front of him. And he always made space. Matthew's biography of Jesus life that we've been walking through over these last few weeks. It shares the story this way it says “Now, when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon, the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask, a very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at the table.”

Now, it's likely that Jesus was in the area of Bethany for several days in the final week of His earthly ministry. And there's a possibility that something like this scene actually happened multiple times, or at least that the disciples all recorded different details. But Matthew's account gives us some unique perspective as we figure out how to apply this in our own lives. Even when Jesus voluntarily embraced the limitations of humanity by entering human history to live a perfect life, maintaining his divinity without leveraging it to undermine his humanity. He was still patient and willing to be interrupted. Isn't that incredible? And I can struggle when my kids wake me up too early. That's the patience of the creator of the universe the patience of your heavenly Father.

See a terminally ill woman, a father desperate for healing for his dying daughter, exuberant kids, judgmental religious people, entitled followers and worshipping woman, Jesus was kind and patient to all of their interruptions. Here in the days leading up to his arrest, he sits down to have a meal with someone named Simon, the leper and before you wonder, like is that just how people named their last names like was “Simon the,” and then how bad do your parents have to hate you to make that your last name? That's not exactly what we see here. Simon had probably been a leper until Jesus healed him nd we expect that because you didn't really invite people to your house for dinner, if you actively had leprosy, think like peak COVID, you know, you're gonna have somebody come over to your house. So this was probably someone that Jesus had actually healed. And while, this was still his name as the way people knew him, because Simon was the most common name for a man in this region at this time. So it was important for the people reading it at the time to know which Simon they're talking about that he actually exists.

For us, it's a little less about the specific person. And it's more about the fact that this Simon, the leper was willing to host Jesus for a meal in a week while there would have been lots of people excited about that, increasingly, there would have been a lot of people very angry about that, especially the religious leaders. This meal, like many others, would have likely been in a partially covered courtyard, think like your backyard in California, but with no fences, and everybody in the neighborhood could hear that a meal was taking place. And maybe the word had spread throughout the neighborhood that this was this Rabbi Jesus. Remember that guy that all of the crowds showed up for that incredible entrance into Jerusalem, you know, and so people likely drifted into the outskirts of this meal. Over the course of the meal, Simon the lepers probably getting annoyed, because he thought, This is my moment with Jesus, this is my time to be able to have a personal conversation. And while he might have been annoyed, Jesus wasn't.

At one point, as I'm sure the meal is getting more and more crowded, they run out of plates, a woman comes up with an alabaster flask. This is a container made of precious stones, that likely could have only been opened and broken one time. And inside of it was this ointment that was likely the most valuable thing she had. Oftentimes it would be an heirloom, or it would be used as the dowry for her future husband, and she has broken it open. Some of these were worth up to a year of someone's wages. And so this was extravagant, this was unthinkable, this was inefficient. There were better things that could have done with that, but she pours it over Jesus’ head. And she would have likely finished by anointing Jesus feet with it, and Jesus is the creator of the universe, but he did not have clean feet 2000 years ago, around Simon, the lepers table.

The process that she underwent actually to put this ointment over Jesus, it mirrored, and Jesus will tell us that in just a minute, it mirrored what people would do to immerse the body of a corpse to prepare it for burial. They didn't understand the parallel, they didn't understand the connection. But Jesus did. See, depending on how many times something like this has happened to Jesus, and there's some indication that it happened more than once. We aren't entirely sure who this woman in Matthew's account of the story is. But it is a powerful picture of extravagant worship, where she doesn't give God what's left. She doesn't give God what's convenient. She gives Jesus her best. Her love for Jesus is so profound that this sacrifice that no one asked for she freely gave. And that's really what true worship is. It's not saying God, what do I have to do? It's when you and I live out of this overflow of God, what can I do in worshipping you? Maybe you have like a list of questions for God. I have people all the time that will say something like, “well, when I get to heaven, I have a list of questions.” Okay.

“I have things I want to talk to God about.” And I bet that this woman probably had some unanswered questions too. But in the presence of Jesus, it all changed. Maybe she had heard or maybe even seen, or perhaps experienced this miracle-working power of Jesus teaching and healing in recent days. And so she was clearly more interested in this moment of this self- sacrificial act of worship, than she was in inquisition or accusation that she might have brought in or thought about or still wanted answers from God. She leads with worship.

And keep in mind, she's doing all this and Jesus hasn't died yet. Jesus hasn't come back from the grave yet. She is worshipping Jesus with her most prized possession for what he had already done, and already said, for who he had revealed himself to be already. The amazing thing for us is that we have Jesus’ sacrifice in our history in our rearview mirror, not our future. Jesus lived this perfect life in your in my place because we can't. He died for us and then he came back from the grave so that we can turn from our way, believe and receive the gift he's made available and choose to follow him now and forever and we could experience forever with Him starting now and going on for eternity. We know all that. She just hoped all that.

It's no wonder the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Rome, with these famous words based on all of that he says, “I appeal to you, therefore brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living, sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Paul was trying to clarify that just because the sacrificial system of the Jewish people

found in the Hebrew scriptures, that they had been living out generation after generation after generation, that they had to do in hopes that following the rules would get them to God, were sacrifices that they made were temporary, that sacrifices were still relevant to this early group of Christians, and they are still relevant to you and me as well. This woman is our prime example of demonstrating this important truth of our faith. See, the difference between the sacrifices of the Hebrew scriptures and our sacrifices is that they sacrificed animals against their will, in the hope of temporary forgiveness. But it was all a shadow, it was a picture of what was to come.

We willingly sacrifice things in our own lives out of gratitude for the permanent and perfect sacrifice of Jesus for all people. It was always the setup.

Classic pastor and author Charles Spurgeon, he puts it like this. He says, “it is our duty and our privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men or women and find preservation but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed. We are to spend and to be spent not to lay ourselves up in lavender and nurse, our flesh.” I don't know about you, but there are plenty of times I can read something like that and go, whew. Uh oh.

See the problem with living sacrifice is, when you kill an animal and you lay it on the altar, the animal can't get up. Living sacrifices, we lay ourselves on the altar for God's use of our lives, we bring our best, but how often do we get up from the altar and walk away? We can decide one day to worship Jesus from a place of gratitude and pour out our lives for him like this woman did. And the next day or if we're honest, maybe the next minute, remove ourselves from the altar and go back to the self-seeking priorities that are all around us and actually justifiable.

Maybe you have never worshipped Jesus the way that this woman did. Your worship is always at the edges, always with the extra, always from the margin. Maybe her worship to you, it feels like it went too far. She gave too much. But can I share something with you, you have never given Jesus anything that wasn't already his.

See, we live in a time and a place where how you can acquire things more and more is the goal. But the teachings of Jesus and the Bible more broadly, do not teach the idea that you and I are owners. It's that we are stewards. We are managers. We are money managers, time managers, relationship managers, career managers, technology managers of God in this world, you will not take any of it with you. And before you ask, no, I'm not about to take an offering, although I thought about it. But you should know Jesus is so passionate about this in our life, because he knows what holds true in our life with how we spend the best of our life. Jesus says that this place is “where your treasure is there your heart will be also,” if Jesus doesn't have access to your alabaster flask, to your workplace, to your key relationships, to those classrooms, to that boardroom to that bank account to that house to those possessions, he doesn't have access to your heart. So the reason that Jesus wants access to that stuff, because he wants access to you, because your life will be fully and finally satisfied only in Him.

But don't be too hard on yourself. We're about to see some people who didn't understand this, but seemed like they should have. Some people who had a really hard time answering this question, Does God get your best? Or what's left that should have thought this question is coming. They had been walking with Jesus for a long time. The woman that we just saw is someone who probably is from Bethany, and had maybe seen or heard Jesus from a distance, maybe for as little as just a few days. But Jesus is traveling with his disciples, a group of men that had been with him every day for three years. And they still needed reminding of what they were really doing. In the next few verses we see when Jesus reinforces the mission. Now I spent the first decade or so in ministry working very closely with students. I love students. I love how following Jesus is not as complicated for them, they have less baggage about their possessions or sunk cost bias of their career or their education. If they sense God calling them to do something. They are passionately in love with Jesus, and they are in.

One place that I saw this happen most tangibly was when I would take students on missions trips around the world. And there are good ways and bad ways to do short-term missions. But I remember one time, we took a large group of students to Guatemala, and as we got down to Guatemala, there was this incredible opportunity for students to work alongside teachers and staff at a school there. Now early on in the trip, everyone was excited to be there and for the work that they were in the middle of, but as the week wore on the students who came with an expectation that they were going on a vacation to a new place, that got more and more tired, more and more disillusioned, more and more disappointed, more and more disengaged. So about halfway through the week, we had to have sort of a reinforcement conversation where we reminded everybody “Hey, we are not on vacation. We are on mission.”

Students rallied that week. And actually, a couple of those students felt called from it to a life of full-time vocational ministry, like doing ministry as their job, because God had done something in their life, that week, they remembered who they were and why they were there. But it's easy to forget, it's easy to slip into comfort, and to pull ourselves off the altar of self-sacrifice, from a place of personal worship, and back to the assumption of consumption and the culture of comfort that's all around us. Jesus’ disciples, they show us the very same thing here, says,” And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor. But Jesus aware of this said to them, Why do you trouble the woman, for she has done a beautiful thing to me, for you always have the pore with you. But you will not always have me. And pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. Truly I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done, we'll also be told, and memory of her.”

The way that Matthew sort of tells this story, what it seems like is happening is that at one point, there is this woman who is anointing Jesus, from the alabaster flask with this incredible act of extravagant love and worship. And the disciples are grumbling. They aren't talking to Jesus, they're talking about Jesus, they aren't talking to this woman, they're talking about this woman. As a matter of fact, they're gossiping. And I don't know about you, it's kind of reassuring that even Jesus disciples needed some help with that one, right? They raised a really good point about the perfume though, right? Maybe some of you have thought about that, as you've read a story like this, couldn't they have used the money to help the needy around them? Maybe you felt that in church at times you look around and it feels like things are over the top are unnecessary. And you wonder, why don't we just put all of this money into helping the marginalized in the world and in our community? Now, Jesus has a couple of reasons for it. I'm gonna give you one more.

Jesus has one answer. He says that he knows the motives of the people talking. John actually describes very uniquely, that Judas, who is in charge of the money, his motivation was actually that he just wanted more money that he could sort of pilfer from the coffers of the disciples before he would sell Jesus out to the religious leaders that would eventually get him arrested, convicted, and executed. So they weren't coming to this with like, very pure motives. But there was this kind of problem that happens for them that I think can happen for all of us, which is that self-righteous gossip is often a cover for selfish compromise, we will often justify our bad behavior are bad actions, because we'll look at someone that feels like they've gone over the top ah, question their motives. I'll question the wisdom of that. Why are they giving that to God? Why are they so over the top about Jesus, that's what they were doing, even after walking with Jesus for three years.

The second part is we kind of twist sometimes, but Jesus says that we will always have under resourced people around us. And so some people will say, see, that's why we don't really have to do very much in our world because this is an intractable problem. We actually can't solve the problems of our world, that's a reality of a broken world. But anytime that someone does that, just I would just say in general, anytime you hear someone quote Jesus in a way that doesn't feel like Jesus, go read what else Jesus said, usually in the same sentence, Jesus says, you'll always have them with you. And then it goes on and says, and you won't always have me with you.

So Jesus is saying, This is a unique moment, there's actually this incredible legacy that God is going to create because of her act of worship in the midst of this. Of course, we should have compassion on people who are under resourced. Of course, we should have compassion on people who are underserved. Of course, we should care in a world that is broken and hurting, we should bring the compassion and the conviction of Jesus all the time.

I would also say that in global history, we have never had a greater philanthropic movement of people to solve the problems of our world, as we do in the people that love and follow Jesus. Never, not even close, not a second place. And the way that that happens is that followers of Jesus, love and worship Jesus together, that that movement out there doesn't happen without a movement of God in here. And so what is the benefit of this? Well, it's that God would do something in us that he might do something through us that could be so much greater collectively than it is individually. And is there a tension here? Absolutely. Are there abuses to what can happen to levels of extravagance and church and ministry? Absolutely, that we need to always be aware of. But I think this idea of how we worship God and grow in God and how we help a hurting world, we don't pick one of those. We bring both of those.

Think about the libraries, the museums, the monuments that exist to honor the legacies and financial generosity of people in our world. How many of them, do you even know the name of how many of them will be there 2,000 years ago, and this woman with only one year's wage of someone 2,000 years ago, Jesus says, every time you talk about the good news of Jesus, as you're preparing for Easter, you're going to people are going to remember this story. And they're going to remember this woman's leadership to demonstrate worship. And so here we are, we're doing exactly what Jesus predicted 2,000 years ago,

He encourages this woman that wherever the gospel gets spread the Good News of Jesus, what he's done for us, that her story is going to get spread too. This moment of extravagant love, the sacrifice for Jesus. I don't know what the meal they were eating was what it tasted like, I don't know the fragrance of what this ointment smelled like, I don't know what the disciples were wearing, or how long it had been since they had slept. But I do know one thing. This woman was crying and not like a cute cry, you know, a cute cry, right? Very cute. It was an ugly cry. Like over the top. Like, oh, I'm uncomfortable. Not do you need a tissue? But do you need like a box of tissues? Do you want me to leave the room kind of cry.

And the ugly cry, it's when our emotions have welled up, it's usually about way more than the thing that sort of tipped us over the edge. It's the stuff we've pushed down and in over and over, and now you can't hold it in anymore. And once the once the tap has been opened, you can't turn it off. She had probably trapped a lot of pain, very deep for a long time as a first-century woman and hear this Jewish carpenter turned rabbi had changed everything. Maybe even just over the course of a few days, when other people had said she didn't matter couldn't add value, and would never know the life that her heart dreamed of Jesus, maybe even with just a look, offered a kind of compassion and a vision for a different kingdom, that she was welcomed into. A kingdom with no second-class citizens, the kingdom that God still invites you and me into today, a kingdom where men and women rich and poor, young and old, educated and uneducated, leaders and followers, skeptics and saints are all invited to join because they are all image bearers of the Divine with infinite dignity, value and worth. That was true 2000 years ago. It's true today.

Remember, Jesus hasn't died yet. He hasn't risen yet. This was her worship before Easter Sunday. Can you imagine? Maybe if she was one of the hundreds of people that interacted with a risen Savior, Jesus in His risen body, what her worship would have looked like then. Can you imagine?

Now think about your worship, not just what it sounds like when you sing but how it looks when you live? If you decided to follow Jesus, your life is a mission trip. It is not primarily about your comfort. You are on a mission wherever you live, work, learn and play and maybe, maybe today you just needed that reminder and that's why you're here. We are all swimming in the waters of cultural compromise and the assumption of consumption is everywhere around us. The systems that you are living in will promise you that fulfillment is found on the other side of the next upgrade, the next promotion, the next possession. But that's not actually true. And it's not who you are. It's not what Jesus has called you to. Who you are, and Jesus should be the truest thing about you. And as you worship Him, you bring hope to everyone you meet, because you show them that there's another way to live, and there's another kingdom to live for. So let's pray. Let's pray that God brings us the same conviction to worship God that he gave to this woman at a dinner party some 2,000 years ago.

Menlo, Easter, is not just about a day that we celebrate. It's about this incredible kingdom that we anticipate that we look for and that we long to see in our world today. Would you pray with me?

God, thank you so much. Thank you for this incredible picture of what it means to extravagantly pour out worship to you. God, whatever our alabaster flask is right now whatever that thing is that the voice of the disciples from this moment; “it's too much it's, it's over the top, that's irresponsible.” God, would you show us that thing? Would you show us that step? Would you show us that direction? And God would you give us the awareness of what it looks like to worship you profoundly and deeply with that? God, there are so many excuses, we can make so many excuses I can make.

God I pray that you will help us to push past those to see the work that only you can do in our lives and through our lives for a world that desperately needs to know you. Thank you for the incredible legacy of this woman. I pray that we would honor it in the way we live today. It's in Jesus name. Amen.

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