Matthew 13:53-58. Prophet | Lee Gatiss | 260830 | Whoever has ears

Well, have you ever had that experience where you're sitting in a class or a talk of some kind on a topic that you think you already know? Within a few minutes, you realize you've kind of stopped listening.

You recognize all the terminology.

You roughly know where it's going.

You've come across this stuff before.

And so without really deciding to, you just stop engaging.

You switch off.

You're still there, but you're not really taking it in anymore.

There are some things you stop listening to because you already know them.

Maybe even in a sermon.

Maybe even in this sermon, you've already kind of mentally switched off and you're thinking about dinner.

And the danger is not that you've never heard these things before, but that you've heard them so often that you stopped really listening.

And that may be one of the greatest dangers when it comes to Jesus.

Not that we've never encountered him.

but that we assume we already know him.

We know the story.

We know the language.

We know how it goes.

And so without quite realizing it, we stop listening.

Well, here in this passage in Matthew 13, if you've closed your Bibles, it's page 980.

Here in Matthew 13, Jesus returns to a place where everybody thinks they know him.

And what happens there, it's not a kind of loud rejection from strangers, outsiders, but it's something more insidious and more dangerous.

They see him.

They hear him.

And yet, they miss him completely.

So the warning in this passage is this.