Sometimes when I was young and living at home with my whole family as a kid, my parents would

walk out of the house and they would give us a list of things to do, instructions, a laundry

list, get all these projects done, or whatever.

Other times they would leave the house and they would deal with us not in terms of what

they wanted us to do, but they would leave us with a mental list of how they wanted

us to be.

They would sit down, they would take an extra minute or two and they would coach us

on how to treat each other, how to think of each other, how to think of our vestedness

in the family and in each other's lives, and they would give us a thing or two, like honesty

and integrity, patience and grace, kindness and encouragement, stuff like that.

They would throw out, it was always two words, it's weird, it just occurred to me for

the first time.

They would throw this stuff out and the idea was exemplify this while we are gone and

if you live by these principles, you don't need all of our other rules because you're

probably going to get it right.

So much of this stuff centered around a diminishing of our own pride and our own insistence

on getting our way and an elevation of the value of the other two siblings in the family.

Likewise, when we get to chapter 18 of the book of Matthew, it is time for Jesus to have

that conversation with his inner circle of disciples, presumably with the intention

that that conversation would be passed along to successive people who signed up to be a

part of the kingdom and to follow Jesus.

So in the book of Matthew, you have got five great big speeches of Jesus that divide

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