Friends Church Sermons

I want to start today by admitting to you that I really struggled with this passage of scripture this week. I read it over and over from different perspectives. I read a dozen commentaries and searched for sermons written by others. It is possible to pull some select verses from this passage and create many sermons – the unpardonable sin, out of the abundance of the heart, seeking for signs – but all of those seemed to me to take the passage out of its context. As we have studied the book of Matthew I have tried to be true to what I believe Matthew (and God) intended when it was originally written. I am going to do the same today. Up to this point Matthew has presented to his primarily Jewish audience the evidence for Jesus as King of Israel. We now come to the conflict. His audience is having to deal with what we looked at last week; a confrontation between the Pharisees view of the Torah and Jesus view. They can’t both be right. Either Jesus broke the law and was not of God or He kept the law and is showing