Up to this point, we have seen the birth of Jesus.
We’ve watched Him fulfill prophecy after prophecy that all show that He is the Savior that God promised to send in the Old Testament.
He is the Messiah that we have been waiting for since Genesis chapter 3.
One prophecy after another shows that Jesus is exactly who we’ve been waiting for.
Jesus is born. He grows up, and He goes out, and He’s baptized by John the Baptist.
And when He is baptized, the voice of the Father comes down from heaven and says:
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
—Matthew 3:17 (WEB)
That is another messianic title.
He says, “I promised that I would send a Savior who would be My beloved Son, and this is Him. This is My beloved Son.”
Then the Holy Spirit comes down from heaven and rests on the shoulders of Jesus in the form of a dove.
Once again, in the Old Testament, God said, “I am sending a Savior, a Messiah, and My Spirit will rest on that Savior.”
So when the Spirit comes down from heaven and rests on Jesus, everyone watching would see that and say, “Jesus is the beloved Son. Jesus is the one the Spirit rests on. He is that Savior that we have been waiting for.”
And so Jesus launches His ministry.
The Kingdom of God Is Breaking Into Our World
He goes out, and He starts preaching about the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is the fulfillment of God’s promise to one day redeem humanity and restore the world.
We live in a fallen and broken world.
We live in a fallen kingdom that has been marred and distorted by sin.
When we rebelled against God in the garden, it broke the world, and it plunged the kingdom of this world into chaos and disorder and darkness.
And we live out the consequences of that chaos and disorder and darkness every single day of our lives.
We live in a world filled with sickness, a world filled with injustice, a world filled with poverty, with grief, with loss, with evil, all of it.
These are the consequences of the fall, and we are living them out every single day.
And yet the Lord says in Genesis 3, “I am going to send someone. I am going to send a descendant of Adam and Eve. I am going to send someone into the world. It’s going to be a human who is going to crush the head of the devil, who is going to destroy the forces of darkness, who is going to fix everything we’ve broken. The Savior is going to redeem humanity and restore the world.”
If you understand that core promise, then you understand the entire story of the Bible.
The whole story of the Bible, from Genesis all the way through Revelation, is the story of God working in the world to redeem humanity and restore the world.
And in one way after another in these early chapters of Matthew, Matthew is showing us that Jesus is that promised Savior.
And as the promised Savior, Jesus is bringing God’s kingdom into our midst.
When He says, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” or, “The kingdom of God is near,” or, “The kingdom of God is in your midst,” what He’s saying is, “Through Me, through Jesus, through My ministry, through My saving work on the cross, I am causing God’s rule and God’s reign to break through into our fallen and broken world.”
He is bringing God’s kingdom to us.
So we don’t just go away to God’s kingdom when we die.
The Lord’s Prayer says, “Let Your kingdom”—what?—”come. Let Your kingdom come to us.”
Jesus is bringing the kingdom of God to eclipse the fallen and broken kingdom of our world.
Come Follow Me
In the Sermon on the Mount, He laid out what it looks like to live as God’s kingdom people, and He said, “Now come follow Me. Come be My disciples. Come follow Me, and I will make you fishers of people.”
He says, “When you come and become My disciple, you are going to join Me in My kingdom work. You are going to join Me in My mission in the world. You are going to go and find the lost and the broken and the hurting and the struggling and introduce them to the God who wants to redeem them and restore them.”
And that is the calling that He has placed on every single one of us as followers of Jesus.
You and I are disciples of Jesus.
You and I are Christ’s kingdom workers.
The 12 disciples that we read about in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the disciples and kingdom workers of Jesus in A.D. 31, 32, 33.
We are the disciples and kingdom workers of Jesus in A.D. 2025.
That is the story the Gospel of Matthew has told up to this point, and we are continuing on in that story as we read Matthew 8.
The Savior King
We’re picking up right where chapter 7 left off.
He has just finished preaching the Sermon on the Mount.
He comes down from the mountain, and there are massive crowds gathering around Him, desperate to follow Him.
There are massive crowds gathering around Him, and they are asking not only to hear Him teach and preach more, they are asking Him to act.
They’re asking Him to act on their behalf.
They are bringing their sick.
They are bringing their injured.
They are bringing their demon-possessed, and they are laying them at the feet of Jesus and saying, “We heard everything You just said. We know that You can heal them because we know that You are the Savior King we’ve been waiting for.”
The word Messiah means “anointed one.”
That is the literal translation of Messiah.
But when the word Messiah says “anointed one,” it means the one anointed to be our Savior and our King.
God has a kingdom.
To be part of that kingdom, we need to be saved by the Savior.
But that kingdom has a King.
Who is the King of the kingdom?
It’s Jesus.
Jesus is our Savior, and Jesus is our King.
When Jesus redeems humanity and restores the world, He is taking the throne of this world back for Himself the way that it belongs.
We don’t belong on the throne of this world.
Satan does not belong on the throne of this world.
Jesus belongs on the throne of this world.
He is the rightful King.
He is the rightful heir.
He is the rightful ruler over all of creation.
And as this crowd gathers around Jesus, as He comes down from the mountain where He’s just given this sermon on how to live as His kingdom people, they say, “We want to be Your kingdom people, and we want to see Your kingship in action.”
They say, “I have a sick brother. I want You to heal him. I have a maimed sister. I want You to heal her. I have a paralyzed mother. I want You to heal her. I have a chronically ill son. I want You to heal him.”
They start bringing their sick and their injured and their maimed and their possessed, and they bring them to Jesus, and He starts healing them.
He starts demonstrating His kingly authority.
1. Jesus Has God’s Kingly Authority Over Sickness and Health
A leper comes to Him.
That is someone with a skin condition that is debilitating, and he comes to Him, and Jesus touches this leper.
He wasn’t supposed to touch that leper because leprosy, at least that form of leprosy, was contagious.
So lepers had to live quarantined.
They had to live sectioned off from everyone else.
They lived these isolated lives.
They lived these lives far away from the community.
They were outcasts and outsiders because of their leprosy.
But Jesus goes, and He touches this leper.
But instead of the leper passing his leprosy on to Jesus, instead of that leper making Jesus unclean, Jesus’s touch makes that leper clean.
Jesus has authority over that leper’s leprosy, and as King, He commands that leprosy to go, and it goes.
He commands that leprosy to leave, and it leaves.
So Jesus has authority to heal this man of leprosy.
Next up, He goes over to Peter’s house, one of His first disciples, and Peter’s mom is desperately sick.
She is on her deathbed.
Nowadays, when you have a fever, you have a bad couple days.
At that point in time, when you had an illness bad enough to give you a fever, a lot of times you went down to bed, and you never got back up.
But Jesus goes, and He touches Peter’s mom, and He says, “Be healed,” and she is healed.
He has King authority over her sickness, and He tells that sickness to go, and it goes.
And then He finds a Roman centurion, and this Roman centurion has a servant who is paralyzed.
He’s gotten some kind of sickness that has given him full-body paralysis.
And Jesus goes, and He says to that paralysis, “Be healed,” and it is healed.
By His kingly authority, his paralysis is healed.
In fact, Jesus didn’t even have to go to the house of the centurion.
The centurion came and found Him in the street and talked to Him, and right then and there, Jesus said:
“Go your way. Let it be done for you as you have believed.”
—Matthew 8:13 (WEB)
Once upon a time, there were plenty of Jewish healers, and there were plenty of occult healers and stuff, but they had to perform elaborate rituals and other things like that in order to bring out any kind of healing.
But Jesus doesn’t have to do any of that.
Jesus doesn’t have to perform a ritual.
He doesn’t have to do an elaborate song and dance.
All He has to do is speak out of His kingly authority and say, “Sickness, be gone. Paralysis, be gone,” and they are healed.
Jesus has God’s kingly authority over sickness and health.
2. Jesus Has God’s Kingly Authority Over the Weather
At the same time, in Matthew chapter 8, we see that Jesus has God’s kingly authority over the weather.
He has God’s kingly authority over the environment.
He has God’s kingly authority over weather patterns.
They’re in this boat.
They’re sailing across the lake to get to another place where they’re going to be preaching and teaching and ministering.
And as that’s happening, there is a storm that is so violent and so intense that it’s going to capsize the ship.
They are all going to die.
Everybody starts freaking out, but Jesus isn’t freaking out.
They wake Him up, and they say, “Hey, don’t You care that we are about to get swallowed up by the sea?”
And Jesus doesn’t dignify their panic with a response or a defense.
All He does is get up, and He rebukes the winds and the sea, and they’re still.
And His disciples are astounded.
“What kind of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
—Matthew 8:27 (WEB)
More and more, they see this is not just a great prophet.
This is not just a great teacher.
This is not just a great servant of the Lord.
This man is so much more.
He is a Savior, but He is not the kind of Savior we expected.
He is our King, but He is not the kind of King we expected.
He has God’s kingly authority over the winds and the waves and the sea and the environment and the weather patterns.
This is the kind of authority that only God Himself can bear.
3. Jesus Has God’s Kingly Authority Over the Forces of Darkness
Jesus has God’s kingly authority even over demons and the forces of darkness.
They go to a place called Gadara or Gasa.
It’s not entirely clear from the Greek text that we have.
Those are two places with a very similar name, and it could be either one based on the Greek manuscripts that we have.
But they go to either Gadara or Gasa.
It really doesn’t matter.
And they meet two demon-possessed men, and Jesus commands the demons to go out of this man, and the demons obey.
The demons cower in fear at this great God-King, Jesus.
The demons are horrified when He shows up.
The demons start panicking when He shows up.
The demons start begging Jesus to go easy on them when He shows up.
Jesus has God’s kingly authority over even the demons and the forces of darkness and evil spirits.
When Jesus says, “Go out of this man,” they go out of that man.
Once again, in the ancient world, there were Jewish exorcists, and there were pagan occult exorcists.
But the thing they all had in common is that they had to do elaborate rituals.
They had to do an elaborate kind of exorcism liturgy.
Even to this day, generally speaking, Christians who perform exorcisms, most of the time they use something like the Roman Rite.
It’s a specially designed liturgy.
It’s a specially designed ritual that is meant to help you cast out demons and so on and so forth.
That’s still the case in almost every culture in the world and almost every religion in the world.
And yet Jesus does not have to do any of that.
Jesus goes to this demon that has oppressed and possessed this man for who knows how long, and He says:
“Go!”
—Matthew 8:32 (WEB)
And the demon doesn’t ask twice.
The demon just does it.
He immediately complies because Jesus bears God’s kingly authority over everything.
There Is No Corner of Existence That Jesus Is Not King Over
The point that Matthew is making when he records these stories and puts them together for us is that Jesus is the King of the kingdom.
Jesus is the rightful King over all.
Jesus sits enthroned over all of creation, and He is the absolute King and ruler over all of existence.
There is no corner of existence that Jesus is not King over.
He bears God’s absolute divine authority in all things.
So at this point in the story, you would expect Jesus is about to march into Jerusalem, sit down on the throne in the temple, take up His rightful place as King over all, crush all of His enemies, and start ruling with an iron fist for good.
That is what you would expect right about here in the story, isn’t it?
But that is not what Jesus does.
Instead, He finishes up healing the sick, casting out the demons, quieting the winds and the waves, and then He turns around to everyone looking at Him, and He says, “Do Me a favor. Don’t tell anybody about this yet.”
He says, “Hold off. It is not time for everyone to know about this yet. I need you to keep quiet about what I just did.”
Why would He do that?
Jesus Is Not the Kind of King They Expected
There’s a handful of reasons.
One is that He spends the next three years fundamentally reorienting how we understand what it means to be the Messiah and the Savior.
The ancient Jews expected the Savior and the Messiah to come and destroy Rome and then take up the throne of Israel and then subjugate every other nation so that they all had to serve Israel.
That’s what they were expecting.
That’s what they were looking for.
But that is not the kind of King Jesus is.
That is not the kind of Savior Jesus is.
So Jesus has to spend the next three years fundamentally reteaching them what it means for Him to be the Savior, what it means to be the Messiah.
He has to spend the next three years fundamentally changing the way that they understand all of this.
He says, “I am not here to conquer everybody else. I am here to bless everybody else. I am here to redeem and restore everybody else.”
But at exactly the same time, He tells everyone not to spread the word about what He’s done and what He’s taught quite yet because if word gets out too quickly, He won’t have time to finish what He started.
If word gets out too quickly, He won’t have time to finish training His disciples.
He won’t have time to finish teaching us what the kingdom of God is truly like.
He won’t have time to finish teaching us who God truly is, what God truly wants, what God is truly like.
Because if word gets out this quickly about everything He has done and taught, then He is going to get killed very soon.
He’s going to get crucified very soon.
Jesus waited three years before He allowed it to be fully, widely known exactly who He is and what He is, because the moment that gets out, the leadership in Jerusalem was going to kill Him because He poses a threat to their power and their prestige.
Just like Herod tried to kill Jesus when He was an infant, the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem are going to try to kill Jesus as an adult once it becomes apparent who and what He is.
And they are going to succeed because that is part of God’s divinely ordained plan to redeem us and restore us.
But it is not time for that to happen yet.
So Jesus looks at this man cleansed of his leprosy, and He says:
“See that you tell nobody.”
—Matthew 8:4 (WEB)
Jesus is the great and glorious King over all creation, but He is not the kind of King that we expected.
Count the Cost of Following Jesus
And so He keeps on doing one shocking thing after another.
Specifically, He starts turning people away when they offer to follow Him.
People start crowding around Jesus.
They see Him healing the sick.
They see Him casting out demons.
They see Him commanding the winds and the waves.
They see Him teaching with the authority of God on the mountaintop, and they say, “I want to follow that guy.”
They say, “I want to be His disciple.”
They say, “I want to learn from that guy. I want to know what He has to say. I want Him to be my Rabbi and my teacher.”
So they start lining up to follow Him.
But when they do that, instead of saying, “Yeah, come on. Hurry in. I’m so glad. We want to get as many followers as possible,” He says, “Wait a second,” and He starts warning them.
He starts, I guess you could say, testing them.
Jesus isn’t what you would call attractional.
An attractional church or an attractional ministry or an attractional person is someone who does everything they can possibly do to attract as many people as they possibly can, no matter what it costs.
So they will water down their teaching as much as they have to to get as many people in the door as possible.
They will compromise on the Word of God in as many ways as they need to to get as many butts as they can in the seats, to get as many people tithing into the pot, and so on and so forth, as possible.
They will abandon the truth.
They will leave behind important commands that God has given us and so on and so forth in order to be liked and accepted by as many people as possible because they’re trying to build the biggest group, the biggest church, the biggest ministry that they possibly can.
Jesus did not work like that.
When someone said they wanted to follow Him, He didn’t say, “Oh yes, please. Thank God. Oh man, I was worried we weren’t going to have enough followers.”
Instead, He says, “Okay, that’s good. I want you to, but you need to know exactly what this is going to mean. You need to know exactly how this is going to affect you. You need to know exactly what this is going to cost you, and you need to count the cost.”
Jesus wanted people to know exactly what they were signing up for.
He didn’t do bait and switch.
He didn’t act like everything was going to be nice and easy and then suddenly bait them with heavy demands.
He told them, “Following Me will be hard. Following Me will be difficult. Following Me will cost you so much of your convenience, so much of your comfort, so much of your life, because you are following the true King in a world that rejects and opposes Him. You are following the true King in a fallen and broken kingdom that is in rebellion against Him.”
He says, “You need to know exactly what you are signing up for if you are going to be My disciple.”
“The Son of Man Has Nowhere to Lay His Head”
We get two examples.
First, a scribe comes and says, “I will follow You wherever You go.”
He’s saying, “I want to be Your disciple. I want to be one of Your disciples.”
And Jesus says, “Okay, but you need to know, if you come follow Me, you’re going to spend a whole lot of your life basically homeless.”
“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
—Matthew 8:20 (WEB)
He says, “If you come follow Me, there’s going to be a lot of nights where you have no place to lay your head. You’re going to spend a lot of nights sleeping outside right next to Me. You are going to spend a lot of nights sleeping in partially covered caves. You are going to spend a lot of days having nothing to eat. You are going to spend a lot of your time with no money. You are going to spend a lot of your time with absolutely none of the comforts of this life. That’s what it’s going to cost to follow Me.”
We don’t know what the scribe did.
We don’t know if he followed Him or if he went home.
But Jesus told him the cost, and He said, “Count the cost.”
He’s saying, “If you are going to be My disciple, it is going to take total commitment. You need to be devoted enough to My kingdom and My kingdom work and My kingship and My ministry and the mission God has sent us into the world for that you are willing to face homelessness and hunger and poverty and struggle.”
“Let the Dead Bury Their Own Dead”
And number two, another man comes up and says, “I want to follow You. I want to be Your disciple. I want You to be my teacher and my Rabbi and my King and my Savior, but can You give me a year or two before I come?”
He says, “First, let me go bury my father.”
Now, to be clear, this is not a situation where his father just died and they haven’t done the funeral yet.
That is not how Jewish burials and funerals worked.
In ancient Israel in the first century, when you died, they put you in the ground the day you died.
They put you in the ground before nightfall after your death.
So if this guy’s dad is dead, he is already in the ground.
But the fact that he’s even asking this means either A, his dad has been dead for a while, or B, his dad’s not dead yet.
He says, “Let me live out the rest of my dad’s life, and then I’ll come follow You.”
He says, “Let me take care of my aging father for the next few years, and then once he kicks the bucket, then I will come and be Your disciple. Then I will join Your kingdom ministry. Then I will begin doing Your kingdom work and mission alongside You. But right now, I’ve just got some family obligations. I’ve got some mundane obligations I’ve got to take care of.”
And Jesus says:
“Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
—Matthew 8:22 (WEB)
What is He saying?
He’s not literally saying that this man shouldn’t bother to bury his father.
He’s not literally saying that this man shouldn’t take care of his aging father.
Remember, Jesus likes to use shocking illustrations.
He likes to use exaggeration, hyperbole, because it shocks us into remembering and understanding.
What is He saying?
He’s saying, “If you won’t come follow Me wholeheartedly right now, you’re not going to come follow Me wholeheartedly in a year or two when your dad dies either.”
He says, “You’re putting it off. It’s not because of your responsibilities.”
He says, “You’re putting it off because you’re not totally committed. So you need to decide: are you in or are you out?”
Are We In or Are We Out?
And that is the same question that all of us have to face as disciples of Jesus.
Are we in or are we out?
The modern American church, modern American Christianity, is very much a half-in Christianity.
We want to follow Jesus without having to actually follow Him, right?
We want to follow Jesus without it disrupting our lives in any way.
We want to follow Jesus without it robbing us of comfort in any way.
We want to follow Jesus in a way that doesn’t cause us to have to change anything about our lives.
We want to follow Jesus without ever having to talk about our faith ever.
How are you going to do that, right?
What does that even mean?
We want to follow Jesus while maintaining our primary loyalty and our primary devotion to worldly things in this life: our comfort, our wealth, our power, our routine, and so on and so forth.
We are like this man who says, “Yes, I’m going to come follow You, but give me several years. Let my dad die first. Then I’ll come and follow You once it’s convenient for me.”
The question Jesus poses to us is:
“Are you in or not?”
Mount Zion Baptist Church - Louisburg, NC 
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