[Note: This sermon expounds Matthew 12:46–50, with Luke 8:19–21 and Luke 11:27–28. Delivered 21 May 1978, Montreal.]
Today we come to Matthew chapter 12 verses 46 to 50 in our weekly systematic exposition of the Lord's teaching. On the previous occasion we studied verses 43 to 45 and saw the importance of being filled with the Spirit of God — that we cannot leave our lives empty, that unless we are filled with the Spirit of God we will soon fall victim to the powers of the evil one. Today we read: while the Lord Jesus was still speaking to the people, his mother and brothers stood outside asking to speak to him. But he replied: "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" Stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said: "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother."
The parallel passage in Luke 8:19–21 adds that a great crowd was surrounding the Lord Jesus as he taught, so that his relatives could not get near him. When told of their presence, his reply is: "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it." Comparing the two passages is very illuminating: in Matthew, "whoever does the will of my Father"; in Luke, "those who hear the word of God and do it." By comparing scripture with scripture, we see that the will of God and the word of God are shown to be parallel to each other — to do God's will is to hear his word and do it. Luke 11:27–28 adds one more voice: a woman in the crowd called out, "Blessed is the womb that bore you," and the Lord Jesus replied, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it." The consistent teaching is unmistakable.
Notice the context. The Lord Jesus is in the middle of teaching the great crowd when his relatives come and interrupt him, sending someone through the crowd to get his attention while he has not yet finished speaking. That is quite typical of relatives — they always think they have a special claim on you regardless of what you are doing. The fact that he was teaching God's word, and that a great crowd was eagerly listening, did not deter them at all. The Lord Jesus then gives his reply: "Who is my brother and mother but he who does the will of God?" The first thing to observe is that in the kingdom of God, blood relationship, physical relationship, and external relationships are of no significance. The only thing that matters in the kingdom of God is God's will — only one thing, and nothing else.
This teaching refutes a great deal of the error in Roman Catholic doctrine, which imagines that Mary has some special status in the church because of her being the physical mother of Jesus. On that basis, she has no special status at all — not in scripture, and certainly not in the Lord's teaching. This does not mean that the Lord Jesus does not love his mother or honor her in human terms — of course he does. But in the kingdom of God, in terms of salvation, a physical relationship to Jesus is no passport whatsoever. Physical relationship, blood relationship, constitutes no claim in the kingdom of God.
Now, what is God's will? First let me establish this clearly: nobody enters into salvation except through doing God's will — that is scriptural teaching, not mine. You will not be saved because you believe the right doctrines, because you belong to the right church, because you are a good evangelical. Believing the right doctrines will get you into the evangelical church, or the Anglican church, or the Catholic church — but not into the kingdom of God. The Lord Jesus makes this very plain in Matthew 7:21: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father." Not even doing miracles, speaking in tongues, or mighty works in Jesus' name will get you into the kingdom of God — the people in Matthew 7 did all those things, and Jesus says to them, "Depart from me, I never knew you." Only one thing matters in the kingdom of God: doing his will.
Why must you do God's will to be saved? Because God gives his Holy Spirit only to those who obey him, as Acts 5:32 plainly states. And Romans 8 tells us that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ do not belong to Christ. You do not need to be a logician to work that out: if you are to have the Holy Spirit, you must obey; and only those who have the Holy Spirit belong to Christ; therefore only those who obey Christ truly belong to him. Ask yourself right now, if you consider yourself a Christian: are you truly obeying God's will? If you think that because you have the right doctrines you will get to heaven, I must disillusion you — not on my authority but on the scriptural teaching. You need to say from your heart: Lord, by your grace, I will do your will — all of it.
Why should we want to do God's will? Because we trust him and we love him. You do someone's will because you trust that person's judgment or because you love them, or both. We do God's will because we trust his wisdom, his knowledge, his understanding — we can have absolute confidence that his judgment is never wrong. And we do it because we love him. As 1 John says: "His commandments are not burdensome." When you do something for someone you love, there is no burden in it; it is a pleasure and a delight. As Hebrews 10 says: "I delight to do your will, O God." Moreover, God's will for me is always good will — everything that God does is designed for my well-being and welfare. Never think that when God says "do not do this," he is trying to withhold something good from you. As the psalmist says, "He withholds no good thing from those who love him." God gives every good thing to us; his prohibitions are always designed for our protection and our flourishing.
How do we know God's will that we may do it? John 4:34 shows us the Lord Jesus' own pattern: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his purpose." God's word is the food and God's Spirit is the water. In Matthew 4:4, Jesus said to Satan: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." And in John 7:37–38, he says: "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink" — and there he was speaking about the Holy Spirit. God's word is the food we eat; the Spirit of God is the living water we drink. The two always work together: the Holy Spirit makes plain to me the meaning of God's word, and God's word teaches me to continue in obedience to the Spirit.
The one requirement is this: you must come before God with unconditional commitment before you can truly know his will. Many people want to know God's will first and then decide whether to do it. If God says "go to the Congo," it is too hot; if "go to the Arctic," it is too cold — what they really want is to remain in the temperate zone and call it God's will. But God will tell you nothing in that case, because it is your will making all the decisions, not God's. Come before him with a sincere, unconditional: Lord, if it is the Congo or the Arctic or the temperate zone, wherever you want to send me — I will go, because I delight to do your will. If you can honestly say that, I guarantee you will never have trouble knowing what his will is. He has never left me in the dark about his will because by God's grace I have had one commitment: whatever his will is, I will do it.
The Lord's teaching is not concerned with external performances. The Pharisees and scribes asked: what does "do not work on the Sabbath" mean? Is cooking work? Yes — so no cooking on Sabbath. Is walking work? After much deliberation they decided that walking more than 1,500 yards was work, less than that was not. And so doing God's will became a religious system of external rules. We have done exactly the same today: no smoking, no drinking, no cinema, read your Bible ten minutes a day, attend church punctually — and that is Christianity. What has happened to us? We have ended up in precisely the same place as the Pharisees and scribes, with a religion of external performances. But the Lord's teaching is not about this at all. Doing God's will is first and foremost an attitude of the heart toward God — the inner harmony of your will with his will. That is what we shall examine further in Part B.
# The Will of God — Matthew 12:46–50 (Part B) — Spiritual vs. Religious; the Galatian Warning; Head Covering Exegesis; Cost of Obedience
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Matthew 12:46–50, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 21 May 1978, Montreal.]
In the scriptural teaching, the will of God is always something spiritual. What the Lord Jesus means by doing God's will is that your will harmonizes with his will at the innermost depth of your being — the deep inner harmony of your innermost being with God. That is spiritual union in the Bible. If you find within your heart a sweet, joyful submission and obedience to God's will, you know what it is to be a Christian, because it comes from the depth of your being and has nothing to do with external observances in the first place. Anyone who imagines that doing God's will is simply a matter of external performances has not begun to understand what the Lord Jesus is teaching here. The Lord Jesus is not concerned with these externals — and neither is the Apostle Paul.
Paul is greatly concerned about slipping away from spirituality into religiosity, and there is a world of difference between the two. Being religious is not the same thing as being spiritual. The Pharisees made exactly this mistake: they thought that because they were religious, they were spiritual, and therefore guaranteed entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The whole letter of Galatians concerns essentially one point — the danger of moving away from the spiritual to the religious. In Galatians 4:10–11, Paul identifies the first sign of spiritual degeneration as the externalizing of religion into outward observances, and says immediately: "I am afraid I have labored over you in vain." Not just wasted effort — your salvation is at stake. In Galatians 5:4: "You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by external observances; you have fallen away from grace." And in Galatians 3:3: "Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?" Religion is of the flesh, simply external, simply human performance. The Galatians had started in the Spirit and were now ending in external observances.
I want to illustrate this point with an exegetical example from 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, the famous passage about whether women should cover their heads in worship. Some sisters came here from Ontario and promptly pulled out scarves and covered their heads, based on the instructions of two Bible teachers who said this passage requires it. And even our good friend Watchman Nee — who has written many excellent things and done much excellent work — required all women in his congregations to wear veils on the basis of this passage. I have no personal quarrel with these sisters or these teachers; they desire to do God's will, which is to their credit. But they have missed the spiritual principle, and the exegetical errors are fundamental.
First, if they had read carefully, they would have noticed that these words apply only to married women. Verse 3 states: "The head of a woman is her husband." These sisters, none of whom were married, had not even noticed that the passage applies only to married women — it says nothing whatsoever about unmarried women. Whether you look at the Jewish background of the time or simply at the text itself, the same conclusion follows: the passage is about the wife's relationship to her husband, not about all women in relation to all men. There is no scriptural teaching that every woman is subject to every man; there is scriptural teaching that the wife is subject to her husband.
Second, examining verses 4, 5, and 13, this covering applies only to the times of prayer and prophecy, not to general conduct during the service. Paul says: "Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head; any woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head." The subject is consistently prayer and prophecy — specific times of direct relationship with God. Curiously, the sisters from Ontario covered their heads while sitting in the congregation but removed their covering when praying, which is precisely the opposite of what Paul says.
Third, Paul in Romans 14 says explicitly: "The kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." Do you think Paul, who says Christianity has nothing to do with external observances like food and drink, suddenly reverses himself and says it does have to do with what you put on your head? Once you externalize religion to that degree, you fall immediately into the trap of casuistry — how big must the covering be? Is this piece of paper covering enough? What about a smaller piece? This is precisely the same trap as "how many yards may you walk on the Sabbath" — once you enter it, you cannot get out. The Pharisees made their phylacteries broad to demonstrate their obedience; do we want to follow the same logic with hats and veils?
Fourth, and most decisive from an exegetical standpoint: the Greek noun for "covering" or "veil" does not occur once in this entire passage. I checked through back and forth and could find no noun referring to a covering, a hat, a veil, or anything of the kind. There is only the verb "to cover." And the one place where Paul might have used a noun for covering — verse 10, often translated "a woman ought to have a veil on her head" — Paul uses the Greek word exousia, which means "authority." The word exousia never means a veil or head covering under any circumstances; I verified this in Liddell and Scott, the most authoritative Greek dictionary, over two thousand pages. Paul is not concerned with a thing, a noun, an object placed on the head — he is concerned with an action, an attitude: the attitude of being subject to authority. A woman who does not live in genuine submission to her husband from the heart is as disgraceful in God's eyes as a shaved woman would be disgraceful in men's eyes. This is also stated explicitly by Peter in 1 Peter 3:3–4, where a meek and obedient spirit is described as "very precious in God's sight" — not precious in man's sight, but in God's sight. And also notice: verse 15 says the woman already has a covering in the form of her hair, "for hair is given to her for a covering." If she already has a covering, why does she need another one? Whatever you place on your head proves absolutely nothing about the attitude of your heart toward your husband, and it is ludicrous to suppose otherwise. It humbles us that people of the stature of Watchman Nee could make such a mistake — it shows us how far wrong you can go when you miss one spiritual principle.
Now brothers and sisters, doing God's will has nothing to do with external observances in the first place. It is the deep inner harmony of our heart with God's heart — our minds corresponding to his mind, our soul corresponding to his life. Notice also the cost of obedience in this very passage: when the Lord Jesus said, "Who is my mother and brothers but he who does the will of God?" — did his relatives not feel offended? He had, in a sense, disclaimed their claim upon him in front of the entire crowd. That is the cost of doing God's will: you must speak the truth even when it is offensive, even when people misunderstand, even when they reject what you say. The Lord Jesus spoke the truth that day, and it must have stung. But notice the long-term outcome: his brother James, who was among those who came to interrupt him that day, eventually came to faith and became the leader of the church in Jerusalem. The Word of God may be painful to hear at the time, but it accomplishes its purpose.
One closing word about Mary. Mary is honored — we will honor Mary — not because she is Jesus' mother by the flesh, but because she is one who did God's will. In Luke 1:38, when the Spirit came upon her and she was to conceive the Lord Jesus, she said: "Be it done to me according to your word; behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord." There is the obedience — at the cost of her reputation, facing the risk of being misunderstood and accused — she said: be it done to me according to your will. But the lesson to us is this: obedience to God's will once is not sufficient. It is a continuing doing of God's will. Even Mary had to be reminded of this, for here she was interrupting the Lord in his teaching. Those recently baptized were obedient to God in that act — praise God for it. But do not sit back and say, "I was obedient to God; now I am settled for the rest of my life." Not so fast. Obedience to God is a continuing process, on and on. You have just begun — now you are on the road, so keep going. Let us be quiet before God in prayer.