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[AI Generated transcript]

Mark chapter 2 beginning in verse 23 and we'll go through chapter 3 verse 6.

I'm going to read the text here as we start.

This is one Sabbath.

He was going through the grain fields and as they made their way, the disciples began to pluck heads of grain.

And the Pharisees were saying to him, look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?

And he said to them, have you never read what David did?

When he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him.

And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

And again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand, and they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him.

And he said to the man with the withered hand, Come here.

And he said to them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?

But they were silent.

And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, Stretch out your hand.

He stretched it out and his hand was restored.

The Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

We often think of Jesus as this one who came and he brought peace and love and all these good things to the earth.

That Jesus was a reconciler, that Jesus was coming to bring peace to divisions that existed.

But Jesus, he tells us elsewhere in the Gospels that he actually came to bring a sword.

He came to divide.

And the late John Stott was a British preacher.

He wrote a book one time, the subtitle of which was Christ the Controversialist.

Jesus in the Gospels is very often not only at the center of controversy,

If you read carefully, he is seeking out controversy in order to make a point.

And that's I think what we see here in this text, especially as we get into the second part.

The first part sets up a story where there is a

There's a controversy that takes place and he's at the center of it, but then to make the point, to illustrate the point that he makes in the first part, we get the story of the second.

Christ is seeking out controversy in order to drive his point home.

And Mark chapter 2 verse 1 through chapter 3 verse 6 is a set of five controversies.

We've looked at the first three already, verses 1 through 12 of chapter 2.

He claims to have the authority of God.

He has the authority to forgive sins.

And that's an authority that the Pharisees know belongs only to God.

And so they are outraged that Jesus would put himself on the level of God.

And then in what we looked at last week, verses 13 through 17, Jesus

creates a controversy by spending time with tax collectors and sinners.

And they say, well, that's not the sort of person that a teacher of the law, that a rabbi should spend time with.

And Jesus says, actually, that's exactly who I should be spending time with.

I didn't come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners.

In verses 18 to 22, they come at him because, well, your disciples don't fast the way that the disciples of John or the disciples of the Pharisees do.

And Jesus says,

Actually, they shouldn't be fasting right now because the bridegroom is here and so the

There's this old form of religion that you've built up around what God actually told you to do.

And you've got basically these old wineskins.

And if we try to pour the new wine of the new covenant with Christ into those old w