Palm Sunday 2021: JESUS CARRIES AND CONQUERS OUR SIN | Isaiah 53:3-6

Around my house, my kids, they uh love to listen to audiobooks.

That's especially true of Spencer.

Uh and Spencer especially loves to listen to stories about those little g gods of Greek mythology.

And he especially loves those stories as they're told through the eyes of a modern character named Percy Jackson.

Maybe uh your kids or grandkids or you have read those Percy Jackson stories yourself.

And so Spencer's habit is this um he'll listen to a Percy Jackson story, or he will listen to a Greek myth, and then he'll be like, Dad, Dad, I want to tell you about it.

And so then he quizzes me on the story and he finds out what I don't know, and then he informs me about what I should know, right?

Um, like most kids, they like to point out what their parents don't know in life.

Um and one of the things that he's taught me, one of the things that I've learned is that central to these stories of Greek myth is a 10-year conflict uh between two rival, uh, for lack of a better description, gangs of gods.

On one side of the conflict are the gods known as the Olympians, and on the other side of the conflict are the gods known as the Titans.

And at the end of that uh 10-year conflict, the Olympians prevail over the Titans.

And the chief god of the Olympians is the god named Zeus.

Now, to punish the Titans, what Zeus does is he banishes all of the Titans but one.

And the one Titan that he doesn't banish, well, he has an extra special punishment that he will receive.

That last remaining Titan is the Titan named Atlas, and Zeus condemns Atlas for the remainder of his life, for all of eternity, to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders.

He is going to carry earth on his shoulders.

He will hold it there.

That marble statue from the uh second century AD depicts the eternal fate of Atlas.

And just look at that because it's that story of Atlas where we now have coined the phrase, the weight of the world.

The weight of the world, it describes a circumstance in life where a person carries a burden.

And not just any burden, a burden that is impossible to carry, where it feels like everything in life is collapsing in on them and it's all coming down to them.

It's a moment in life, uh, think of it this way, it's a moment in life uh when a person needs to make a decision, and they know that it's like a no-win situation, because no matter this decision that they make, they are going to hurt someone that they care about in that moment, that person is bearing and feeling the weight of the world.

Or another example would be a person has a big kind of qualifying exam coming up, and they feel as if their future hangs in the balance.

Like if I if I pass it, everything's gonna turn out okay, but if I don't pass it, then everything falls apart.

And in the days leading up to that exam, that person is carrying uh the weight of the world.

Or it's that moment in life where you are trying to help your parent as they are aging, while at the same time you're navigating your own health crisis.

Or you can see a person in their eyes sometimes that they are bearing the weight of the world, right?

It's the look in a single mom's eyes who isn't sure if she can put food on the table this week.

Or it's the look in a child's eyes who who, when they go home at night, they know that when they go to bed, um the only sound that they're gonna remember as they fall asleep is just those of an angry shout.

In those moments, and everyone that I described, what we know is that uh life surely does imitate art sometimes, doesn't it?

Like we all know what it's like uh to grimace like Atlas and to feel that crushing weight of the world on our shoulders.

Now, according to scientists, the actual weight of the world is something like 1.3 uh times 10 to the 25th pounds.

So maybe planet Earth, the reason it's so heavy is because it just like needs to go to healthworks.

Or better yet, planet fitness.

That makes more sense, right?

The first service thought that joke was really humorous, Spencer Langston.

Um, a couple years ago I used this same illustration or similar version of it, and afterwards Spencer came up to me, hey hey, I've got a joke for you, and he was like, Earth needs to go to Planet Fitness, and we share the same sense of humor.

And Spencer remembered it, and it was hilarious.

So these other people are not funny, my brother.

Just so you know.

They are very boring, super boring, and we are fun.

F-U-N, capital F, capital U, capital N fun.

So that that figure, 1.3 times 10 to the 25th, that accounts for like almost 8 billion people uh who live on planet Earth.

It accounts for the core of the earth that's composed of iron.

It accounts for all the trees and shrubs and grasses that that grow and dot the landscape of the earth.

But there's one figure that that 1.3 times 10 to the 25th doesn't account for.

It can't account for the crushing weight of sin.

You see, it's the presence of sin in the world that leads to the world weighing on us.

It's because things are broken.

It's because um things are not as God intended that they should function in this way, that the world feels like it is so often too much.

You know, every situation that I described just a couple minutes ago, um, in each of those moments you feel the crushing weight of sin.

You do.

You know that no-win decision that I talked about?

It's not that the decision is a sin.

It's just that any moment that there's a fissure or a fracture in a relationship, that's because of the crushing weight of sin.

Like God desires people to dwell in wholeness with one another.

Or that, you know, talk about a qualifying exam.

That person who lives in total self-reliance and believes like everything boils down to them and they hold their own future in their hand.

Well, the reason that moment feels like too much is because they don't hold the future in their hands.

It's just further evidence of the crushing weight of sin.

Or when we are sick or we watch our parents grow old, that reminder of our frailty and our own mortality, again, another reminder of the crushing weight of sin.

But the crushing weight of sin, we shouldn't just think about it in terms of circumstances that surround us.

It's also something that is in each of us.

It's all the stuff, the wrong stuff that we do and the good stuff that goes undone.

And when it comes to sin, whether it's out there or in here, um, there's no way to kind of weight it in seriousness.

When it comes to sin, there isn't one category of sins that are misdemeanors and another category of sins that are felonies.

Um because sin, its result is always the same.

Sin crushes.

Sin crushes.

It crushes individuals, it crushes families, it crushes communities.

That's why Proverbs 11:5 says that the wicked fall beneath their load of sin.

Proverbs 11:5

And in some of your eyes this morning, I can see that you know all too well the weight of sin, and that sin crushes.

It's crushing your own life, it's crushing the life of someone you hold dear, a family member, a friend.

Or maybe on the level of your soul you feel the crushing weight of sin.

For an individual sin, it obliterates self-worth on the level of a family.

Uh sin can tear apart a marriage in a community, uh, sin can leave neighbors at odds with one another.

And it's that presence of sin in the world, which means that the weight of the world is far too much for any one of us to bear on our own.

We cannot do it.

Our backs will break.

The for ourselves will fall to the ground.

But praise God, there is good news.

There is one who can bear the weight of the world.

There is one who can carry and conquer our sin.

And his name is Jesus Christ.

The one who the people of Jerusalem welcomed on that first Palm Sunday into their city and celebrated Hosanna.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, who rode on the on the back of a colt.

That same Jesus.

That Jesus they welcomed to be their victor.

He conquered because he carried their sin to the cross.

And this morning, really simply what we want to be reminded of is the work of Jesus Christ in this world and in your life.

And if you never put your faith in Jesus Christ to be reminded or to learn for the first time what Jesus has done for you.

That Jesus carried and conquered our sin.

And that's not just the message of the New Testament.

It's a message we also find in the pages of the old.

Listen to these words written by the prophet Isaiah.

In Isaiah chapter 53, beginning in verse 3, the prophet puts it this way: He says, He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

Isaiah 53 · chapter mention

We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.

He was despised and we did not care.

Yet it was our weakness he carried.

It was our sorrows that weighed him down.

And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins.

But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so we could be whole.

He was whipped so we could be healed.

All of us like sheep have strayed away.

We have left God's paths to follow our own, yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.

Isaiah, he writes these words at a moment in the life of God's people when the weight of the world rested heavy on them.

The first people who read and heard these words, they were living in Babylonian exile.

And so every day of their existence was just kind of this perpetual reminder that what?

Sin crushes.

For generations, God's people had embraced sin.

They had refused to repent of their sin.

And so God allows, He sends the Babylonian armies to Jerusalem.

And those armies, they breach and they crush the walls of the city.

They breach and they crush the temple sanctuary.

They breach and they crush homes that contain families and futures.

Everything the people had known is gone.

In fact, the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, over and over and over again, what the prophet describes is he describes that singular fact that sin crushes.

But then in Isaiah 40, something glorious occurs, a shift in Isaiah's vision and his focus emerges.

And that shift continues into chapter 53 and all the way to the final chapter and the final verse of this very long book.

Isaiah wants us to know near the end, he wants us to know that sin does not have the final word.

Yes, sin does crush, but sin, there is a remedy for that sin because God sends a servant.

Then we meet that servant in Isaiah chapter 52 near the very end.

Isaiah 52 · chapter mention

This is what Isaiah says when he introduces him.

He says, See my servant will prosper, he will be highly exalted.

Hear one more time.

See my servant will prosper.

He will be highly exalted.

In the ancient world, just like our own world, um, exaltation was a reflection of a person's power.

A victorious soldier would lay waste to another army, and so his fellow soldiers they would celebrate him, they would exalt him, they would hold him in high regard.

Or a ruling king.

He possesses immense wealth and a powerful army.

He would be exalted.

The people of his nation would look at him with adoring eyes, they would sing his praises, but that's not the path God's servant will walk.

This servant will not be looked upon with regard.

Isaiah says, this servant will what?

He will be rejected.

He will not be looked upon and adored.

Instead, people will turn their faces from him because they can't see, uh, stand to see the side of his face.

It's just far too painful.

You see, the path that God's servant walks, it leads to exaltation.

But before he reaches exaltation, the path passes through humiliation.

And it's for that reason that the earliest Christians, when they heard Isaiah 52 and 53 and the chapters that follow, uh, they realized and they connected God's servant to God's Son.

That the servant Isaiah talks about is ultimately fulfilled in God's Son, Jesus Christ.

And listen, the exaltation of Jesus, he will be exalted, he is exalted, he does sit at the right hand of God the Father, before he will be exalted to heaven, he will pass through the humiliation of the cross.

Because Jesus carried our sin.

Isaiah, he talks about sin first in terms of weakness and sorrow.

And what that tells us is that uh when Jesus went to the cross, what he carried, at least in part, were the diseases and the afflictions that ravage our bodies.

So think of it this way: think of those stories told about Jesus in the Gospels.

When Jesus goes to the cross, he carried with him the blindness of Bartimaeus.

When Jesus went to the cross, he carried with him the stigma of the one who was afflicted with leprosy.

Or to bring it into the modern world, when Jesus went to the cross, he carried with him cancer and COVID-19.

And Jesus carries with him those afflictions, those weaknesses to the cross, because in his kingdom there will be no more disease or death or sorrow or grief.

Those things that bring death in our world that remind us of our frailty and mortality, Jesus wants to put an end to them at the cross.

He carries those things to the cross.

And yes, listen, in the present, those things still bring suffering in our life.

And they bring pain in our life.

But in the pain and in the suffering, Isaiah, the prophet, he would just say, Lift your eyes to the one who carried it to the end.

Look at Jesus.

Because your death and your disease will not have the final word in his kingdom.

But Jesus not only carries those signs of sin that we see through, you know, affliction and weakness, those signs of sin that are out there, he carries with him the sin that is present in here.

He was pierced for our rebellion, Isaiah writes.

That word pierced it, it always reminds me of the crucifixion of Jesus.

It reminds me, I hear that word pierced, and I automatically I think of the spikes driven into Jesus' wrist and feet.

I think of the thorns that pierced Jesus' brow.

And throughout Scripture, thorns, they represent the consequence of our sin.

All the way back in the Garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve disobey God, God he curses the ground.

And what does he promise?

He says that the ground will produce thorns.

Not lilies, not grass, not even weeds.

The ground will produce thorns.

As it turns out, the sins of the heart produce the thorns of the land.

Thorns that one day would be gathered together, woven together, made into a crown, and placed on a head.

Jesus wears a crown of thorns because on that day he carries the consequence of our sin.

Every thorn, a painful reminder of the sin that lurks in the human heart.

The sin of pride, there's a thorn for that that digs deep into the brow of Jesus.

The sin of greed, there's a thorn for that that digs deep into the brow of Jesus.

The sin of self-righteousness, another thorn, digging deep into the brow of Jesus.

In this one, it makes blood just pour down into his eyes.

The sin of selfishness, another thorn, digging deep into his brow.

You name a sin, and there is a thorn for it.

Because at the cross, the Father laid upon Jesus the sins of us all.

The sins of us all.

That's what Isaiah says.

And I want you to think about that phrase.

Isaiah says that Jesus carries not just the sins of some, but the sin of all.

Jesus carries not just the sin of a select few, but the sin of us all.

Just think about that.

Jesus carries everyone's sin.

And here's the reason why.

He doesn't want anyone to be crushed by the weight of sin.

So here's what this means for you and I.

In life, we we see a fellow believer, we have an interaction with them around town, we we go to their home, we see them at the coffee shop or at the grocery store, and we can tell, like we look into their eyes that they are carrying the weight of the world in that moment.

And maybe we follow it up with a text message or a phone call, and it comes to find out they're kind of living in the past with a decision that wasn't right, or maybe they're dealing with something in the present, a mistake, a sin that they've committed.

And in that moment, what do we do?

We point their attention to Jesus Christ.

And we remind them that Jesus carried the sin of everyone to the cross.

He doesn't want you to bear as his friend and as his disciple the weight, the crushing weight of that sin any longer.

Yes, repent.

Yes, confess, and he will forgive and he will say, Move on.

Serve me.

I've got the weight.

I carried it, I was crushed by it.

Yeah, Jesus.

Was crushed by our sin.

He didn't just carry our sin.

He was crushed by it.

He took his last breath from the cross and died.

Or maybe there's just a friend in your life, a neighbor, a colleague.

And you look in their eyes and you can tell they are bearing the crushing weight of sin.

Every time you see them, it just looks like Atlas is walking around the city streets.

Introduce them to Jesus.

Introduce them to the one who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he could do it, and they cannot.

Or maybe in your life, there's someone in your life who is crushed, who is carrying the weight of the world because of the sin of someone else perpetrated against them.

Right?

Someone willingly and thoughtfully acted against them, not for their good, but for their harm.

Like they willingly sought to say those words, to perform that deed, to bring them down, to cause them pain and to cause them hurt.

And you see it in their eyes.

Like they are wearing that affliction in that moment.

And when we see that, I think as Jesus' followers and friends, what we need to do in part is we need to like become like truly the body of Christ.

Like people who are the strong shoulders of Jesus Christ to try to lift that burden for a moment.

Not because we can save someone, but in that moment we can temporarily and try to lift a burden and point them to the one who carried and takes care of that ultimate burden of sin.

That's the story of the servant.

The story of the servant who bears our affliction, pierced for our rebellion, and bore the sins of us all.

Now, listen, it's not enough, listen, that Jesus simply carried our sin.

Or that then he was crushed by our sin.

Jesus, he also conquers our sin.

Listen to what Isaiah writes later on in chapter 53.

This is Isaiah 53, 12.

It says, this I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier because he exposed himself to death.

Jesus exposed himself to death.

His friends placed his lifeless body into an empty tomb.

And think about it.

In those moments when Jesus cries out and breathes his last, when his friends take down his body, dress his body, lay his body in the tomb, his friends don't think that he is a victorious soldier.

They believe he is a defeated soldier.

But the Father will give him the honor.

And the honor that Jesus receives is his resurrection from the dead.

The resurrection of Jesus is the first fruit.

It's the moment that reminds us that there will be a day when God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, raises all of those who are in Christ Jesus and brings us into the fullness of his paradise and of his kingdom, where the crushing weight of sin is no more.

You know, an epitaph for a person is a really powerful thing.

Those words we say about a person that you put on their tombstone after they pass away, it kind of summarizes their greatest accomplishment, their achievement, what they should be known for and remembered for in life.

Martin Luther King Jr., he on his epitaph, it reads, free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, I am free at last.

What would be a good epitaph for Jesus?

How should we remember Jesus?

How should we summarize his greatest accomplishment?

And there are a lot of options, but I think a good one would definitely be Jesus carried and conquered our sin.

Like to remember Jesus that way.

Jesus carried and conquered our sin.

Because that simple statement, what it does is it points us to the empty cross and it points us to the empty tomb.

It points us to those two places that remind us that we don't have to carry the crushing weight of our sin any longer.

Jesus did.

Because at the cross there is forgiveness of sin.

And when we look to the empty tomb, there is victory over sin.

If we're gonna remember anything this morning, we just need to remember what Jesus has accomplished.

What God's servant, who is God's son, has done for the world.

Like as God's uh followers, as friends and followers of Jesus, listen, some of us are carrying around a great and a crushing weight in our life.

And Jesus, he just wants you to be reminded of his gospel.

He wants you to look to his cross and to his tomb and say, Jesus carried it, he crushed it, he conquered it.

I can I can I can go on.

I can like have a new life.

I don't have to be controlled by the past.

I don't have to be dominated by sin in the present because of what Jesus did.

And there are others of us who, man, for our whole life we've just been carrying around.

We thought that was the way everybody had to live.

We thought there was no other way to be human in this world, other than to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, other than to feel that crushing weight of sin on a daily basis.

And God says there is a far better way.

I sent my servant, he is my son, his name is Jesus.

And that weight you are feeling today.

He's already carried it as far as he needed to go.

He carried it to the cross, he breathed his last, he was put in the tomb, and he rose again.

You don't have to be crushed by it anymore.

He was crushed for you.

And now he wants to offer you that gift of eternal life.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God and everlasting Father.

We are humbled to know that your servant came and he carried an unbearable weight so that we no longer had to carry it.

Thank you for demonstrating just how much you love us through Jesus.

Jesus, I want to pray for my brother or sister in Christ this morning.

And I'm asking that you would send the Holy Spirit into their space this morning where they're seated in the sanctuary at home and just to point their eyes to your cross, where you carried our burdens so we don't have to.

God, I pray for that person who hears my voice this morning, who thinks there is no other way.

Like they they just assume you have to be Atlas every single day with that giant globe on your shoulders and just it beating you down.

Lift their eyes to Jesus.

Point them to the one who will lift their burden.

And Jesus, we celebrate not just your cross, but also your victorious resurrection.

That because of your resurrection, we have hope.

We have a future.

Amen.

Would you stand as we sing?