I want to begin by talking about crowd dynamics.
There's something about crowds, if you've ever been in one, that
feels powerful when you're in them.
When a crowd is with you on your side, it's like electric, right?
And, and it feels like you're on the right side of history.
It feels like truth. But one thing I've noticed, and
history has proven us is that crowds are incredibly unstable.
Would you agree? Take, for instance, LeBron
James. LeBron was a hometown hero in
Cleveland, right? He was the Chosen 1 and people
adored him. But then in 2010, he announced
what was called the Decision that he was, quote, taking his
talents to South Beach. In other words, he was changing
teams and going to beautiful Miami.
The reaction was not pleasant. OK, Suddenly jerseys of LeBron
were being burned in the streets.
No joke. Fans who once celebrated him
were furious. They were angry.
They felt betrayed. How could he?
And it was the same player, same talent, same person, but a
completely different crowd response, right?
And then what happened A few years later?
He came back to Cleveland and everyone loved him again, right?
The crowds swinging back and forth.
That is how crowds work, right? They're they're driven by
emotion, by the narrative around them and by momentum.
When things feel good, the crowd celebrates.
Yeah, woo Hoo, we're in the right.
But when things feel off, they turn on you quickly and they can
turn fast. Crowds go from admiration to
ridicule, from loyalty to outrage, from cheering to
tearing someone down. And when you're in the crowd,
you feel justified When you're in the midst of it, right?
You feel like you're part of the truth.
But crowds are often less about the truth.
And quite honestly, being part of a crowd means it's more about
what your wants and desires are and having your expectations get
met. Mark Twain was famous for this
quote. He said whenever you find
yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and
reflect, right? It's time to pause and reflect.
There's some wisdom there. I think the reality is this,
maybe you've sensed it is that our culture is fickle.
It changes its mind. It's swayed easily by the
opinions of the age. And then what makes matters
worse is that we live in what's called the digital age, meaning
we have social media and YouTube and Facebook.
We have algorithms that are feeding off of our interests and
then repeating back the things that we already believe or the
interests we already have. So it perpetuates this sort of
crowd mentality of being swung deeper and deeper into
groupthink. So the question for us today is
how can we move from from being people who are fickle to
faithful? How can we become people who are
rooted in trust rather than just being tossed and forth by the
trends that we see all over the place?
Well, today is is the beginning of what's called Holy Week,
where we celebrate Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
And if you have your Bibles, we encourage you to turn to Matthew
chapter 21, Matthew 21. It's the first Gospel, first
book of the New Testament. We always encourage physical
Bibles, but it'll be on the side screens as well for you.
If you don't have that today, you can also pull out your
phones if you'd like. Matthew 21 We're going to be in
verse one through 7 and again this is again the kick off of
what we call Holy Week leading up to the events of the cross
and eventually the the resurrection here.
And the story kicks off in verse one here.
Chapter 21 says as they approached Jerusalem and came to
Beth Bethpage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent 2 disciples
saying to them go to the village ahead of you and at once you
will find a donkey tied there with her colt by her untie them
and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you,
say that the Lord needs them and he will send them right away.
This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet.
So Matthew's interpreting the events here and he calls back to
a prophecy which says, say to daughter Zion, see your king
comes to you gentle and riding on a donkey on a colt, the full
of a donkey. The disciples went and did as
Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the
colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on.
All right, let's pause there in the story.
So first we see that Jesus kind of supernatural, he's telling
them to go and find a donkey or a colt for for him to ride on
into Jerusalem. And again Matthew calls back to
the prophecy hundreds of years before in Zechariah 99, which
says rejoice greatly, daughter Zion, shout daughter Jerusalem.
This is the personification of the city of Jerusalem, the
Israelites, God's chosen people. And it continues.
The prophecy says, see, your king comes to you righteous and
victorious, lowly in riding on a donkey, on a colt, the full of a
donkey. So here this prophecy is a bit
unusual. It's talking about a king riding
in for victory, but he's not riding on a War Horse like you
might typically expect. Instead, he's riding on a colt
or a donkey. What's that all about?
Well, traditionally these this this image of rulers riding in
on on donkeys was imagery of peace.
It was a kind of the transportation during peacetime.
We see it, for instance, when David is about to anoint his son
Solomon as king. He sends a mule to him and has
him ride in on a mule, a donkey. We continue on in verse 8.
A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others
cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.
The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed
shouted Hosanna to the Son of David.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the
highest heaven. When Jesus entered Jerusalem,
the whole city was stirred and asked, Who is this?
Can you feel the energy of the crowd in this in this narrative?
What we see here is that people are laying their cloaks down and
they're raising, as we see in the Gospel of John, they're
they're raising and waving palm branches, which is significant
as well. Cloaks would be something you,
if you were lay down your cloak, it was sort of acknowledging
that there was royalty in front of you.
So you'd lay your cloak down in front of them.
And palm branches, This is interesting.
Palm branches symbolized for the Jewish people both victory and
nationalism. So it's a victory for the Jewish
people. For instance, decades before
there was something called the Maccabean revolt, where the Jews
were being oppressed and they weren't allowed to practice
their religion. They were essentially kicked out
of Jerusalem. And the Maccabean revolt is when
the Jews revolted against the powers.
They took back the temple and took back Jerusalem, and they
had a mighty military victory. And so after that victory, what
did they grab? Palm branches.
And the tradition goes that they went around the city after this
mighty victory, reclaiming their territory with palm branches,
waving it in victory. You catching some context here?
We don't have a great picture of this in our culture, but maybe
the closest thing we can maybe think of would be like waving A
Revolutionary War flag. The same kind of imagery that's
evoked out of us where it's we're, we're claiming our
territory, we are fighting back against the oppressive rulers
and the powers that are over us. When we see a flag like this,
which would be the precursor to what we have now as the American
flag, we we kind of get it. This is a victory flag.
This is a flag of liberation and of freedom.
And so palm branches would have maybe carried A somewhat
somewhat similar significance to the Jewish people at this time.
They're waving palm branches saying, we're going to do it
again. We're going to reclaim
Jerusalem, reclaim God's city for him.
And So what do they shout? Hosanna, hosanna, which means,
oh, save us or save Now this comes from Psalm 118 called the
halal. And in that passage in Psalm
118, it says, Lord save us, Grant US success.
Isn't that interesting? What kind of success?
Victory over the oppressor. Save us from the overlords that
are above us. Save us from who?
Well, in this case, in the 1st century, the Jewish people were
under the oppression of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire was had sort of their their boots on the Jewish
people. They were heavily taxing them.
They weren't allowing the freedoms that the Jewish people
were were desiring. And so they were saying, save us
now from the oppression of Rome, set us free, set us right, Lift
us back up into power. So you can imagine in this
story, the city is at like a fever pitch.
I mean, you can just feel the energy that's getting caught up
in in this moment. It's like a powder keg that's
about to be lit. The city is vibrating at the
expectation that this Jesus is going to lead them into victory
over Rome. And so here you have the
religious leaders who are present in the crowds.
You have the Jewish people, you have maybe people from the, the
diaspora, the the spread out Jewish people who are coming
back for Passover. This is a mixed bag.
And the energy is electric. Have you guys ever been caught
up, swept up in the in the in the crowd before, swept up in a
moment before? Most of us have, right?
How many of you like, got a little bit swept up with like,
Iowa going to the Sweet 16, right?
You're all like, oh, here we go, right.
You didn't care a week ago. But then they won and you're
like, oh, yeah, here we go. I'm an Iowa fan again, OK, we
all get swept up in the crowds, right?
Even in even in 2020 on more serious matters, right?
Like, boy, you had the election and then you had like the murder
of George Floyd, and then you had COVID and, and the crowds
were swinging one way and the other and everyone seemed to get
swept up in it. It's really easy to do.
And here we see the crowds being swept up into the sort of
frenzy. And what we see Jesus doing is
he's intentionally revealing himself as the Messiah from
their scriptures, the Messiah who has prophesied about many,
many decades before. In other words, this story that
Jesus riding in on a colt is basically him giving a self
disclosure to Israel saying, Yep, I'm he, I'm the Messiah.
Jesus is coming in and he is very clearly signaling I am the
fulfillment of the prophecies. I am the fulfillment of the king
of the line of David. I am the high priest who's
coming in. I am the prophet you've been
waiting for. He's all of these things in
Matthew 21. So Jesus was clearly revealing
that he was indeed the messianic king that they've been waiting
for in the line of David, that he was the king who would bring
victory and liberation. So they shouted, oh, save, save
us, we're ready. But Jesus wouldn't bring the
type of freedom and victory that they were expecting.
Jesus was bringing a different kind of freedom, a different
kind of victory. So what we see here is this
moment, it sparked more than just the hopes of the people.
What it did was it actually like began and it triggered a sort of
of chain of events that took place that unfolded eventually
leading Jesus to be tried and to be killed.
You see, in the crowd were the religious leaders, and when they
saw Jesus coming and claiming to be this Messiah, it ignited all
sorts of hatred and jealousy. They were very much threatened
by his power. It says this in John 12.
The the Pharisees and religious leaders, they said, see, this is
getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has
gone after him. You can hear the frustration in
their voice. They're angry about this.
And eventually the crowds began to get fed up too, apparently.
I mean, after all, he rides in on Sunday, Palm Sunday.
Today he rides in and they're expecting freedom, save now.
But then Monday rolls around. Rome's still in power.
Tuesday rolls around. Where's this Jesus guy?
Wednesday rolls around. They're starting to lose hope.
Thursday was this just another false Messiah, another false
promise? They're starting to get fed up,
I would imagine, and this would eventually lead to Jesus being
arrested and tried this sort of mockery of justice, breaking all
sorts of religious laws at the time.
He's put in front of the religious courts and eventually
in front of Pilate. And this is what it says in
Matthew 27. This is at Jesus's trial. 27
verse 11 says, meanwhile, Jesus stood before the governor and
the governor asked him, are you the king of the Jews?
That language is really significant.
Are you the king of the Jews? You have said so Jesus replied
on and on and on. The accusations are being lobbed
and thrown against Jesus, and you can almost have this sense
that the Roman officials are trying to like bail him out,
trying to find any way to release him.
But the crowds are so adamant that he be punished that in
verse 22 Pilot says, what shall I do then with Jesus, who is
called the Messiah? They all answered, Crucify him,
crucify him. It's almost as as if in unison,
the crowds now are rallied against him, shouting for
justice, and they're now saying crucify him.
In just a few short days, catch this, the crowds went from
shouting Hosanna to shouting crucify him.
Their hype turned to hatred and the fickle crowds went from
shouts of exaltation to shouts of execution.
You see their unmet expectations.
The unmet expectations of the crowd caused their hearts to now
turn against Jesus. And what we see here is we see
them taking to the streets, They're burning their LeBron
jerseys in the worst way. They're calling for justice.
They've turned on Christ. Let me ask you today, have you
ever had an an expectation that didn't get met?
Have you ever experienced that level of disappointment in your
own life? Maybe it was, you know, a job
where you worked really hard, you did all the right things,
you did everything your boss asked for, hoping for that
promotion. And who gets it?
Someone else sweeps in and takes it from you.
Maybe for others of you, you know, you, you, you were raised
in church and you, you did everything you can to raise your
kids right and, and bring them to church and teach them about
Jesus. But once they became of age,
they, they went and now they're not even living for God at all.
The disappointment that comes with that maybe for others, you
know, you, you, you heard about marriage kind of curing your
loneliness, but now you've gotten into and you realize
there's just kind of a different kind of loneliness or a
different kind of thing that's going on inside of your heart
that hasn't fulfilled all of your dreams, whatever it is.
We all know the feeling of, of expectations not being met and
the frustration that comes with that.
And so for the Jewish people, for the crowds here in Matthew
21, you know, they're likely saying something like, Jesus,
you were supposed to be the king.
You were supposed to be the one that saves us.
Where's the victory? Where's the hope?
Where's the liberation from Rome?
What we see is that the crowds are blinded by tunnel vision.
They can only see what their, what their hearts wanted to see.
They were so focused on their own people, the Jewish people.
They were so focused on their own problems that they began to
pick and choose the prophecies that they wanted most.
And Jesus responds to the reaction of the crowds and
Luke's, Luke's gospel and chapter 19, it says when Jesus
drew near and saw the city, what does he do?
He wept over it. He's crying for the city, for
the people. He wept over it, saying if you,
even you, had known on this day what would bring you peace, but
now they are hidden from your eyes.
If they'd only understood what was about to bring them true and
lasting peace, but it was hidden from them.
In other words, the crowds were missing the bigger picture that
there was a better peace coming, but they couldn't see it because
of their own hopes and dreams and expectations.
They're so focused on their own desires, their own people coming
back into power, that they missed it.
What they failed to see was that Jesus was indeed king, but not
just king of the Jews. You see, Jesus's Kingdom is for
all nations, for all times. In Genesis 12, the blessing to
Abraham was that all peoples on earth would be blessed through
the Israelites. In Isaiah 56, the Israelite was
meant to be called a House of prayer for who?
All nations. And Daniel 7 it says that all
peoples of every language would enter into this lasting Kingdom.
And and in Matthew 24, Jesus himself said that the Kingdom
would be preached to the whole world.
The Kingdom wasn't just for the Jews in the 1st century.
The Kingdom is for all nations and for all times.
They also failed to see that Jesus would indeed be
victorious. But it wasn't over just the
Roman oppressors at the time. Instead, it was something
better. Jesus would be victorious over
sin, over Satan, over death and over hell by the accomplished
work on the cross. You see, the Jewish people, they
they loved the prophecies about power.
They loved the prophecies about them being elevated and lifted
high and delivered and set free. They loved the prophecies about
abundance. But it seems as if they forgot
about the prophecies as the Messiah being a suffering
servant. Isaiah 53.
He was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
The punishment that brought us peace was on him.
It's by his wounds that we're healed.
You see what's happening here? Let me put it this way.
The crowds wanted the Davidic warrior Jesus, not the gentle
king of Zechariah or the suffering servant of Isaiah.
They failed to see the full picture of Jesus Messiah, the
full picture of of this Kingdom that was coming.
Indeed it was here that would be for all nations.
And instead they were picking and choosing based on their own
desires, based on their own hopes, their own dreams about
who this Jesus was. And I, I wonder today, I wonder
today if we do the same thing. I wonder if we pick and choose
the bits and parts of Jesus that we want to fulfill our own
desires, our hopes, our expectations of how God should
perform for us. I wonder if our faith becomes
fickle and brittle when God doesn't meet our expectations of
Him. I know, I've been through that.
What we see here is that the crowds have a narrow vision of
self concern and false expectation.
They're expecting one thing, and Jesus didn't deliver in the way
they'd hoped. They were so focused instead on
just like improving their own circumstances, improving their
situation for their own people, for their time.
Let me put it this way. You see, the crowds are glad to
follow Jesus on the triumphant Rd., but they don't follow him
on the road to the cross. They're glad to be walking along
the road in victory with Jesus. They're glad to say yes,
Hosanna, we are ready. We are here, we are now.
But instead of walking on the road of sorrows, the Via del
Rosa with Jesus, they just send him down it and they don't
follow him there. How often do we get
disappointed, you guys? When, when, when God doesn't
improve our lives. It's just reality and we're so
tempted. I think maybe not, maybe not out
loud, but I think sometimes we're tempted in these moments
where God doesn't meet our expectations to, to say things
like, oh man, God must not care. We may even go as far as to say,
well, God must not exist. So instead I'm going to do my
own thing. If God doesn't seem to be
interested in helping my situations, then I'm just going
to improve my situation for myself.
I'm going to run my own race. I'm going to do my own thing.
This is a very human temptation that that process, look, that
process is real. Deconstruction in the process of
reconstructing is real. That takes time.
I'm not trying to undermine any of that here today.
As a matter of fact, I think sometimes, sometimes we've had
some false promises that it have even been given by the church
historically. You know, for me, I grew up in
church and there was something called purity culture, which is
the idea that if you, if you lived in alignment with God's
plan for, for sexuality, that, that one day when you finally
did get married, that God would bring you the perfect spouse and
you'd get married and you would have the best love life you've
ever experienced. And marriage would just be all
Peaches and all roses all the time, right?
And that was kind of, that was kind of the explicit message or
not so explicit message that we kind of all grew up with, right?
And the reality is that's not always the case.
That's not always the case. Sometimes marriage is difficult
and it requires it requires A nurturing and requires
intentionality and requires skill.
Some in in the faith tradition promise health, wealth.
If all you did is just name it and claim it, right?
You want blessing in your life. You just got to pray more.
You just got to give to the church more.
He's got to do XYZ more. What happens when you don't
actually get the things that you're praying for?
What happens when you don't have wealth or you don't have health?
Well, well, it's probably not the, the pastor's fault or the
church's fault, and it can't be God's fault.
So what do we say? We say, well, then it must be my
fault. I must be the one that's
sinning. I must be the one that's wrong.
So even the church, I think in the past has, has given, given
these false promises for things that that God never promised.
So we want to acknowledge that. And please hear me today like
I'm all for God's plan for our bodies and sexuality.
I do believe there's blessing on the other side of living God's
way in that regard. And, and I do believe that God
is our provider. I do believe we can pray and our
Father hears us and answers us, but it's not a formula.
So I'm all for those things. But the point is this, we have
to be careful to not set our hearts on things that God never
actually promised. We have to be careful to not get
swept up with the crowd expecting God to overthrow Rome
when he never actually promised to do that in 33 AD.
If if our if the extent of our desires is just to have, you
know, a great sex life when we're married or to just have
lots of money. Like we need to re evaluate our
desires. We need to be aiming a little
higher for something a little bit better.
They wanted Jesus to do something for them in that
moment, but they forgot that Jesus was riding on a donkey,
not a War Horse symbolic of peace.
Yes, he had the victory, but it was not the victory they
expected. So presence Church, how can we
go from being fickle to faithful?
And how can we be a people of faith who are rooted in trust in
both the highs and the lows of life?
I want to give you a few quick things as we focus our time for
the rest of the sermon. Number one, I think first and
foremost, we have to learn to refocus our priorities to Jesus,
refocus all of our priorities to him.
Augustine was considered one of the church fathers, very widely
respected. He he talked about what was
called disordered loves. And basically what he's talking
about with disordered loves is the misalignment of our
affections towards lesser things and basically how often we,
like, really care about things that that don't matter.
Ever cared about something that didn't really matter?
I do it all the time. OK.
Yeah. We all do this.
Our hearts are prone to attach love to things that don't
matter. And kind of the point of this is
to say, as humans, we go wrong not by loving bad things, but by
loving good things in the wrong order.
You catch that? So it's not that we just chase
sinful desires and fleshly things that are, that are
harmful to us sometimes, and you know this, sometimes we actually
chase good things, but we, we, we elevate them over God.
We prioritize them in the wrong order.
We got to refocus our priorities, priorities on Jesus
alone. So if we were to like bust out
your calendar right now on your phone or like your whatever,
like what would your calendar say about your priorities right
now? It's kind of kind of telling,
isn't it? What does it say about what you
care most about? And how can we refocus back to
Jesus #2 we have to learn as a church to cultivate a single
minded devotion to Jesus, a single minded devotion to the
King Jesus. This verse has been just jumping
out at me all this week. It's found in Psalm 8611.
I love it. Trying to memorize it.
It's not going great, but I'm, I'm working on it.
Psalm 8611 says, teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on
your faithfulness. I love this.
Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.
I love that line. Give me an undivided heart.
Is that Your desire here this morning?
Do you wish to have an undivided heart, to not have your, your
desires and your attention and your your priorities pulled in
every which way? Do you wish to have an undivided
heart for God this morning? Cultivate a single minded
devotion to King Jesus and not the fake Jesus, by the way, not
that just the Jesus that we prefer, right?
There's no just taking partial prophecies like the Jewish
people maybe have may have done here.
There's no such just taking the parts of Jesus that we like and
leaving the rest for somebody else that is not compatible with
the Christian faith. And, and the, the caution is
this like the caution is this. When we pick and choose the
Jesus that we like, you can find different groups that will
support that version of Jesus. You can find different churches
that will just support your version of Jesus and the parts
of him that you like. And, and more than that, you can
find the right podcast that you like.
The algorithm is happy to continue feeding those things if
you want. You can find the Jesus that is
all loving with no accountability, or you can find
that Jesus who is all truth, no grace, and fire and brimstone.
You can find those two Jesus's if you really look for them.
The devil in our culture is glad to fill your algorithm with a
partial picture of Jesus that you prefer because he knows
it'll mean partial discipleship in a lukewarm faith.
Enemies glad to show you part of Jesus, keep you worshiping just
part of him. Guys, we need the real Jesus,
the Jesus who said I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, I
fulfill every prophecy. I'm not only the King of David,
I am the high priest and I am the prophet.
I'm all of them. This is the full picture of
Jesus that we worship. He is the way.
And the good news is this. The real Jesus is actually the
Jesus that your heart is deeply longing for.
Because He's the Jesus that brings peace.
He's the tell us. He is the perfection.
He is the one we look to. He is our example.
He is the perfect representation of God Himself.
When we pick and choose, we miss out on some of the beauty of who
Jesus is. So we cultivate a single minded
devotion to that Jesus King Jesus.
And so as we've been in this series, you know, called Wisdom
in the Desert, we've been talking about actual, real life
disciplines, you know, practicing things like prayer
and solitude and humility. And I think as a church, we have
to learn how to bring the lessons of the wilderness into
our actual lives, practicing A devoted mindset to Christ #3 and
I'm going to begin to kind of land the plane here.
Number 3 is that we need to release unmet expectations to
Jesus. Do you have any ways you were
expecting God to show up and he just hasn't yet?
What would it look like for you to release those unmet
expectations over to the Lord Church?
There can be deep pain, deep confusion when God doesn't show
up the way that we hoped. I get it.
If you go through a job loss, you go through a death in the
family. Maybe you've been praying.
God, please bring me a mate. And yet you're still living the
life of singleness. Not by choice.
Maybe it's infertility or a miscarriage.
Or you know you've been praying and wanting new life in your
life, and yet it doesn't seem like God is hearing you or
answering. Or maybe your body doesn't
function the way you'd want it or look the way you want it.
Maybe you've tried to make friendships and it just doesn't
seem to be happening. Or maybe you're just having
trouble making ends meet. Whatever it is, whatever those
expectations are, are you willing to release them?
Are you willing to release them over to God?
With my kids, so often there, there's, there's, they get their
hearts so set on the thing that they want.
And then when they don't get it, they get so devastated and
disappointment. And there's something I've been
trying to say to them. I don't know if it's sticking at
all, but I, I, I sometimes sit them down and I say, hey, what
do we say when we're disappointed?
What do we say when we're disappointed?
It's going to be OK. That's what we say.
We say it's going to be OK Why? Because they're still loved,
they're still cared for, and life is still going to bring
good things to them. God is still going to bless
them. It's going to be OK.
Psalm 90 says satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing
love. What if we could be a church
that like every morning, we could just be like deeply
satisfied and the fact that God loves us that that all of our
desires, all of the things we want and hope for and all of our
expectations could just kind of like come underneath the
umbrella of God's unfailing infinite love for everyone of
us. What if we just reorient our
hearts devotion back to him, a single minded focus of Jesus,
But it would mean it would mean releasing those disappointments
back to God. And and maybe there's someone in
the room today. Maybe there's a few of you who
like, if you're honest, you, you almost maybe even need to repent
of some of the bitterness and frustration you've had towards
God today. And maybe your prayer today is
simple, something like God, I, I forgive you for that thing.
It's not that God needs forgiveness.
He didn't do anything wrong. But let's be honest, sometimes
it feels like he did something wrong.
That's, that's, that's a normal human emotion.
So what does it look like to release that over to the Lord?
Repent and release any bitterness, any frustration, any
resentment that you have in your heart and just say, God, I'm
laying it all down. And I'm, I'm, I'm choosing to
choosing to forego all these other desires in hopes that I
get you release those unmet expectations to God Church.
There are so many times where I'm I look back at my life and
I'm so glad God didn't give me what I wanted in the moment.
You ever experienced that. I'm so glad he didn't just sweep
me out of that difficult moment and make my life perfect because
it's in that wilderness that the refinement happens.
It's in that that desert place where the real testing and the
work and the refinement takes place in our hearts.
I had someone ask me that just this last week.
They asked me, Ben, do you, have you, have you found yourself to
be out of place or you're joyful about what you went through in
2020? When you or you're joyful about
having to see your wife go through cancer, having to see
her go through chemotherapy, having to worry and stress and
take care of the kids on your own.
Have you, have you found yourself to be at a place with
joy with that? It's a bold question to ask, by
the way. And I thought about it for a
little bit and I think my answer was something like, quite
honestly, yeah. I think I, I think I'm at a
place where I'm, I may not be glad it happened, but I, I am,
I'm grateful it happened. And I think I said something
like, how else would have God shaped us?
How else would he have refined us?
How else would he be have shown His faithfulness and His
goodness and His love for us in that moment?
The things I learned in that wilderness are going to serve me
for the rest of eternity. The work He did when my
expectations weren't met, when it almost seemed like the
prayers were getting answered. The work He did in the heart.
And those moments I wouldn't trade for anything.
And boy, it's so hard to like have that attitude and that that
mindset when you're in it, isn't it?
It's so hard to have that when you're in the midst of
suffering. And I don't want to undermine or
downplay any of that. Boy, we went through a process.
If you know our story, just ask Susan.
Like we went through a process with that.
But I can honestly say, I think, I think I can say thank you God,
thank you God, because you're still good and you're still
worthy of all of our praise. There's a famous prayer called
the Serenity prayer, famous with Alcoholics Anonymous by Reinhold
Nieber. There's the famous version, but
his, his daughter actually says that this was, this was the
original version that he penned down, which I really appreciate.
It says this says God give us the grace to accept with
serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to
change the things that should be changed in the wisdom to
distinguish the one from the other.
Maybe there are some of you today who need extra grace today
from God to have peace about the things in your life that can't
be changed. The prayer goes on to say,
living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.
Wow, accepting hardship has the pathway to peace.
When I think about the Jews in the triumphant triumphal entry,
the question in my mind, I just have to wonder like, what if
they had gotten what they wanted in their minds?
What if they had just gotten what they expected from Jesus?
What if Jesus had come and he overthrew Rome and now the
Jewish people were in in power? And what if Jesus never actually
had to die on Good Friday? Well, then we wouldn't have the
victory of salvation and the atonement of sins.
We wouldn't have the blood of the cross.
We wouldn't have the empowerment and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We wouldn't have atonement for all men, for all times and all
places. If they had gotten what they
wanted in that moment, we wouldn't have any of that.
So I'm glad their expectations weren't met because God was
doing something so much bigger, so much bigger than they could
ever fathom. Jesus's vision was for much
grander than what they had pictured.
He would provide a way not just for the Jews to be liberated
from captivity, but for all men to be liberated for all time
from captivity. How many times and are are our
expectations and desires of God narrowly focused on our short
term improvements of our lives and to our circumstances when we
should be focusing on the full scope of what God is doing
around us and the full scope of the Kingdom?
Jesus's Kingdom is for all people at all times.
But Jesus gives us the encouragement in John 16.
I've told you these things so that you may have peace in this
world. You will have trouble, but take
heart. I have overcome the world.
Your grief will turn to joy. So church, take heart, whatever
the struggle is, whatever you're going through, God will use it.
So today on Palm Sunday, we can shout hosanna because he has
saved us not just from a difficult life, not just from
difficult circumstances, but Jesus the King, the Lord has
saved us from death. We can lay down our cloaks to
the King of Kings and his Kingdom that has come.
Jesus indeed has won the victory and we get the freedom.
Church. See him riding on a colt.
He comes bringing us the peace that we all ultimately are
longing for. Hosanna to the highest.
This is Jesus and we worship Him.