Palm Sunday: Embracing His Identity

Uh we're taking a break from Daniel this week because today is Palm Sunday, the day we celebrate what's called the Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

And actually, when we get started back with Daniel in a couple of weeks, uh this these passages flow right back into Daniel 7.

It's pretty amazing uh having been able to read Daniel 7 and look at the triumphal entry and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus as we're getting ready for Easter coming up.

Uh but uh I was thinking about this this week.

When we hear of the triumphal entry, uh we have certain ideas in our mind of what triumphal looks like.

Maybe you've seen the videos of big military parades with high octane soldiers marching and they bring their military uh accoutrements out in front of grandstands filled with generals and uh military leaders and politicians, and that they pass by and order to awe and overwhelm the people.

And you know, that that seems triumphal and a little bit terrifying at the same time.

Maybe you've seen those inauguration videos of uh presidents where people are lining the street and cheering as the president rides through, or maybe you uh watched uh glued to the TV as Prince Charles uh became the king of England and was paraded through, and all the people lined the streets and cheered, or jeered, some of them, but mainly cheered.

Or maybe you remember viewing the Pope's Pope Mobile back in the 1980s, where uh Pope John Paul II would, and I remember seeing the Pope Mobile in these huge crowds of people and they're pressing in to touch the plastic, I guess.

I don't know what they were doing at that point, but uh touching the Pope.

Well, the prom uh if you have those things in mind, do you do you have those things in mind?

I hope not, because that's not the scene.

That's not the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem.

The promised king of the cosmos arrives at the city of the Lord, where the temple of the Lord is, to fulfill the mission of the Lord, to redeem the people of the Lord, and hardly anyone recognizes what is happening.

There's no high-stepping army, no media coverage, no Pope Mobile.

There's a donkey and a prophet and a ragtag group of hope-filled followers.

Doesn't quite seem triumphal in an Instagram world.

And today we're celebrating Palm Sunday, the week of Easter, with our eyes set on the cross, our hearts set on the Savior, and our hopes set on an empty tomb at the end of the week, in the beginning of the next week.

So let me invite you to stand as we read about the beginning of the week in which Jesus triumphed over sin and death and hell and Satan.

Satan, we're going to read in Matthew 21, 1 through 11.

Now, when they drew near to Jerusalem, they came to Bethej, to the Mount of Olives.

Then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her, untie them and bring them to me.

If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, The Lord needs them, and he will send them at once.

This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, Say to the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.

They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them.

Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road, and the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, Hosanna to the Son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest.

And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, Who is this?

And the crowd said, This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.

We are anticipating a far more spectacular return one day by Jesus.

This will suffice for now.

Let me invite you to bow your heads and close your eyes as we pray.

What would that have been like?

I don't know if in heaven there are uh the opportunities to watch things on video.

Uh that there were angels there with cameras recording the whole event.

I have no idea.

But I know that someday, one day, with my own eyes, I will see a greater and more glorious coming.

And so for that day we anticipate, and this day we look at, because it was the beginning of you sealing a people for yourself, um heading to the cross.

So we pray as your people this morning that you would guide us and direct us to contemplate your greatness, your glory, and your goodness and your love.

Bless us and be with us, we pray, as we look into your word this morning.

Lord, I pray for me.

Um I am but a man and I'm weary.

So I pray that you would be pleased to make your word powerful.

Please.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have a seat.

The ultrasound the doctor ordered showed something irregular on Hank's liver.

Hank was supposed to go in for an MRI on Friday, and he wouldn't get the result until Monday.

And uh he was not, he hadn't been feeling well for a few months.

Hank was 20.

At lunch with Hank, he admitted to me that he was scared.

He was a pastor's kid, so he knew some theology, and so he knew I was a campus minister, so he wanted to use his theological language, and this is what he said.

He said, I think that I don't really trust the sovereignty of God.

And I'd been listening to him for a while, and I replied and said, Hank, I think that you do believe in the sovereignty of God.

I think that you're having trouble believing in the goodness of God.

Palm Sunday is a picture of both the sovereignty and the goodness of God.

Now, having said that, this is not a sermon about the sovereignty and the goodness of God.

It's a look at the coming of the king into the world.

When Jesus showed up outside the gates of Jerusalem, the air became electric.

To the crowd as Jesus gathered, it was a celebration as Jesus was entering into the city.

The people took palm branches, they waved them, they laid their cloaks on the road.

Waving palm branches was a little bit like waving pom-poms at a football game today.

That was a little bit there, waving these things in the air as he's coming in, spreading their cloaks a little bit akin to rolling out the red carpet.

And the crowds were cheering, but they didn't know what we now know.

They did not know that in a week's time Jesus was going to be arrested.

They didn't know that just in a few days' time that Jesus was going to be crucified.

They didn't know that he was going to be laid into a tomb, and they did not know that on the Monday of that next week, or the Sunday of that next week, that Jesus was going to be resurrected from the dead.

They didn't know that.

And they didn't know that in a week and a little more time that Jesus was going to ascend to the right hand of God the Father Almighty and that he was going to be the King over all things.

They didn't know this.

So why were they cheering at this point?

They didn't know what we know.

They didn't understand all of these things.

So why were they gathering?

And the reason they were gathering was because they had an understanding of the identity of this person.

They might have been wrong about what they thought he was going to do, but they had these questions and leanings towards who he really was.

That they had the idea that he was someone who was coming to fix all the problems in the world and to set everything right.

Have you ever had that sense that you were powerless and you needed somebody to come and set things right?

To turn off the alarms that were blaring in your head all the time?

So Rebecca and I lived in a street uh called, just off a street called Itsequina Trail in Clemson, South Carolina, uh, when we did campus ministry.

And for whatever reason, we had so many people have accidents, and I've talked about this a little bit before.

We had people who got on during the snow, they slid off into our yard, and so they came and stayed in our house for a few hours.

Uh we had somebody who went off the road in the middle of the night.

We slept through the whole thing because we had had our first baby and it just happened.

We had another guy, we were talking about it this morning, and somehow he ended up in reverse in our camellia bushes down a hill.

And as he was walking off, I ran outside to see if I could help the guy, and he said, No, I don't need any help.

I said, No, you just had this accident.

I can see you've got you're bleeding.

He said, No, I don't need any help.

I said, I'm gonna call an ambulance.

He said, Buddy, I don't need another DUI.

And so, all kinds of things.

But the one that I remember most was it was in the middle of the night.

We were just we'd just gotten in the bed and we heard, and it was on a hill with a curve, and we heard a guy who who who it sounded like he just gunned the motor, like and then there was a silence for a second, and then a crashing sound.

And I knew that's not good because there was a bridge down there with a kind of a concrete pile on.

So I'm immediately out of the door, running down the hill to where he is.

It was a foggy night, so he probably hadn't seen what was really going on.

He hit it, and he was kind of like hunched over his steering wheel where the butt the bag had deployed, and I think I think it had deployed.

He was making his way out, and he was trying to light a cigarette, you know, and doing this.

And I said, But the whole time he's doing this, and I'm saying, Hey, are you okay?

His car alarm's just going, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.

And so we were, I was having trouble getting anything from it.

It was so loud and deafening, and I didn't know what to do.

Uh, you know, it's like, one, I've got to help this guy, and the car's making all this noise and it's interrupting my thought train.

What am I gonna do?

And then all of a sudden, this car pulled up coming from the other side in the fog light.

You know, he's got his lights from his truck kind of shining on us, and he just steps right in front of the lights.

It's just like all of a sudden he's like showing up, and he walks towards me and he gets to me.

He just reaches under the hood that's kind of like disattached and clicks something, which is the alarm, and then I glance at him, he's an off-duty paramedic.

He had been at this kind of scene before, he knew exactly what he was doing.

I was completely powerless, and the right person showed up at the right time.

That's the incarnation, that's the triumphal entry, that's the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But he's more than a paramedic.

He is what we would, what the Bible calls the Messiah or the Christ.

Now, that word Messiah or Christ has three references in the Old Testament.

There's prophet, priest, and king.

Prophet, priest, and king.

Prophet is the one who makes God's will known to the people.

The priest is the one who intercedes before God for the sins of the people.

And the king is the one who rules over God's people, enacts his will, and protects God's people.

And when Jesus was coming as the Messiah, as the Christ, he's embodying all three of these offices in his mind.

So the Christ as the Messiah held all three of these offices.

And in the minds of the Jews of Jesus' day, especially that of King.

So the Christ, and you heard it echoed through the passage, the Hosanna to the son of David, the Christ, the true king, the descendant of David, was coming into the ancestral city.

And there's this kind of sense that he's going to come and he's going to save them from the oppression of Rome, from all the detrimental and destructive powers and influences of the world.

So why were they thinking that Jesus was this Messiah?

Because they had heard the rumor.

Some of them had actually seen things with their own eyes.

They had heard or seen when Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead.

They had heard or seen when Jesus fed 5,000 people with a few measly crumbs of bread and fish.

They had heard or seen just over the hill coming into Jerusalem when Jesus healed a man who was blind.

So they had heard and seen all of these things, and they're thinking, could he be the Messiah?

All these miracles that are taking place.

And so Jesus said and did things that point to an identity bigger than just a prophet.

He forgave sins and proved he could do that by performing miracles.

There's something amazing about him.

So when Jesus came doing in the things he did and saying the things he said, the expect expectations of the common people is he's coming to set everything right.

I don't know if you can envision this, like you get on your news app or you're you still have an old-fashioned newspaper and you read about all these broken things that are taking place.

Wouldn't it be great if all of a sudden there's like a red stamp that came on and said, Jesus is taking care of that?

This is going to go away.

This is going to go away.

That's how they were feeling at this point.

Jesus will bring an end to suffering, to tyranny, to oppression, to hardship, to humiliation, to powerlessness, to fear.

And so the question is, is he that Messiah that we're thinking of?

And so Jesus was very kind of uh, he didn't really say what he was doing quite often.

There were very few times where he just said, Yes, I am the Messiah, or yes, I am the Christ.

To very few people did he let them in.

And so, but here he's doing something where he is cluing everybody in as yes, I am that Messiah.

And that's the donkey and the foal.

Jesus rode into town on a donkey.

Now, what's interesting is you read through the rest of the gospels, there's not really a, there's no point at which Jesus hails a cab.

You know, there's no point in which he rides anywhere on anything.

There's no record of that.

This is, uh, or at least not an animal.

He wrote a boat on the water.

This is quite intentional on Jesus' part because he was signifying his royal reality.

And he's fulfilling Zechariah chapter 9, verse 9, which reads this way: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.

Zechariah 9:9

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem.

Behold, your king is coming to you.

Righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

So he's signaling, Yes, I am that Messiah, but I am coming in peace.

Not just I'm coming to you in peace, but I'm coming to create peace for you.

So, can you get a sense of their longing, of the brokenness, of all of a sudden somebody steps into the light in the middle of the dark, and you can see the silhouette of light surrounding him, and you're figuring out, is this the guy?

Is he the one who can shut off the alarms in my head?

Is he the one who can who can heal the wounded?

Is it him?

And he's saying, Yes.

Now, he's a king.

But he's a king like no one other.

And I think that's a good thing for us right now.

Uh, we don't like kings uh in the United States.

That's part of our heritage, and it's part of who we are.

But that is precisely God's intent was to set up a cosmic king who has ultimate control, ultimate authority, and his will is going to be enacted.

Um, that's what Jesus came to do.

Now, we're gonna see in a couple of weeks when we get to Daniel chapter 7, he's talking about the kingdoms of the earth.

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

And when he uses the kingdoms of the earth, he's gonna sit talk about it in contrast to what kind of king Jesus is.

So the kingdoms of the earth are carnivorous, predatory animals.

And then Jesus is the Son of Man who's coming to do good for his people.

He is a king like no other.

And we see that.

Jesus has a character and compassion that we don't really see elsewhere, anywhere, really.

This is in Psalm 35, verse 11, and following.

Psalms 35:11

Now, this is a Psalm of David, and it's David was foreshadowing what Jesus was going to be like.

Just a little.

He couldn't, he wasn't a right, he wasn't nearly as righteous as Jesus, but he had aspects to him where he foreshadowed who Jesus was going to be.

And listen to this.

This is in Psalm 35, 11, and following.

Uh David is saying, Ruthless witnesses come forward.

They question me on things I know nothing about.

They repay me evil for good and leave my soul forlorn.

Yet when they were ill, I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting.

When my prayers returned to me unanswered, I went about mourning as though for my friend or brother.

I bowed my head in grief as though weeping for my mother.

But when I stumbled, they gathered in glee.

Attackers gathered against me when I was unaware.

You can hear the foreshadowing, right?

You can hear the even the foreshadowing of this part of Matthew.

Who does this?

Who weeps and prays and grieves for what's going on in the lives of their enemies?

We rejoice.

And we see that all the time in our political institutions that people are doing that.

Pundits and politicians scramble to take down anybody who's made a mistake as they're vying for power.

Not Jesus.

Jesus isn't like that.

Jesus calls out Jerusalem and then he weeps over Jerusalem and says, How I have longed to gather you, as a mother hand gathers her children, her chicks.

When it becomes apparent that his enemies were under God's judgment, the Bible says that Jesus gave his life for his enemies.

So why didn't he the king?

He's the king that we want.

So why did he not just announce himself as the king?

Hey everybody, I'm the king, I'm coming in.

Primarily for two reasons.

One is uh because there is a group of people there, the Jewish leaders, who want nothing more than a reason to kill him immediately on some sort of jacked-up charges.

They want to have a kangaroo court, and they eventually do at the end of this week.

We want to kill him and get him off of the landscape.

He's creating a problem for us.

So that's part of it.

If he had announced that coming in just outright, it would have been a problem.

And then again, in John 6.15, it says that the people who were benefiting, who had eaten when J when Jesus did the miracle of the loaves and fed these 5,000 people, people were saying, Let's go make him king by force.

Which, you know, that might have skipped a lot of steps in the midst of this.

And the key step that it would have skipped would have been the redemption of the people of God.

There wouldn't have been a cross in that.

If there's not a cross for Jesus for God's people, there's no crown, there's no kingdom, because there's no people to be king over.

So he's going to go to the cross.

He came to seek and to save that which was lost.

He came to give himself as a ransom for our sins.

There's no kingdom without a people, and there's no crown without a cross.

And that brings us to his mission.

It's not here in Matthew specifically.

Matthew does talk about it, but in Mark chapter 10, verse 33 to 34, Jesus is talking about this event, going into Jerusalem, what he's going to Jerusalem for.

Mark 10:33–34

He said, He said, See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him over to the Gentiles, and they will mock him and spit on him and flog him and kill him.

And after three days he will rise.

Then again, same chapter in verse 45.

For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So Jesus isn't sending other people's children to fight his battles.

He's taking him on himself our battle with sin and death and hell.

And he's going to defeat that.

And this passage uses a very important word.

It's the word ransom.

And it refers to a price paid to redeem a slave or a captive to pay for a crime.

We even talk about this today when we talk about paying our debt to society.

We have a sense that when you've committed a crime, there's a debt that's owed to make up for the thing that you have done.

So it means to pay redeem-pay to redeem a slave or a captive to pay for a crime.

And so Jesus, as the one who gave his life, is the one who takes away the debt of all of our sins.

He doesn't show us how we can conquer our sins.

He is a savior who has come to conquer and not simply an example.

And so what that means for us is this He has to redeem us because we can't redeem ourselves.

Jesus, who knows every human heart, only gave two options for people who are trying to earn their salvation by their own works.

There are only two.

One is this crippling shame and guilt because you realize you can't do it.

Or number two, loveless self-righteousness and guilt manipulation of other people.

Self-righteously looking at other people and constantly judging them and saying, Well, I may not be where you are, but I'm, you know, I'm here.

I may not be as good as some, but I'm better than a lot of other people.

And this is what the scripture says: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace.

That's the only way that any of us is going to be saved, and that's the way, the reason that Jesus has come, is to ransom us.

And the problem for many of us is we think somehow it's still up to me.

I've got to do this in some way.

And there's this old Greek myth, uh, the myth of Sisyphus.

Are y'all familiar with this?

Sisyphus was doomed throughout all of eternity to roll this big boulder up a hill.

And he could never make it to the top.

And just when he would get to the top, it would roll all the way down the hill, and he'd have to go down to the bottom of the hill and lift the boulder and carry it up the hill.

Now, I don't, uh it's been a bit since I've read Sisyphus.

But I imagine the gods made it where there's this kind of compulsion inside of him.

I just have to lift this hill.

Almost like a puppet.

He's being puppetized and he's lifting it up to the top of this hill.

But what if it's not that?

What if there's something inside of him that keeps telling him, I can do it?

I can do it.

I just need one more shot, and then I could do it.

I could do it.

That's the sin nature in us.

Is the sin nature in us not only leads us to do things that are bad, but to think somehow that we can secure our own salvation.

We don't need Jesus to do it, but we absolutely do.

It's in our will, it's in our determination, the curse of our pride, the curse to think that we can, but we can't.

And some of us have been there, and we keep you keep looking for that magic bullet.

You keep looking for that thing, if I can just pray enough, if I can go to the right seminar, if I can find the right uh disciplines in my life, if I can read my Bible more, pray more, if I can find the right technique, if I could give more, if I could just get over this thing that I did in the past, if I could get over this hump, you're looking for the magic bullet and it's just not gonna work.

You're just pushing that boulder up a hill.

And then if you eventually you're gonna say, okay, it's not that.

And this is your cycle.

Here's the cycle.

If you're doing that, here's the cycle.

Pretend obedience.

I'm gonna try obedience.

Then there's gonna be failure, and then there's gonna be self-recrimination.

Oh, I'm just a bad person.

Then there's gonna be guilt and shame and wallowing.

What's wrong with me that I can't do it?

And then you're going to resolve and determine to do better.

I'm gonna get back at that boulder and I'm gonna push that boulder up that hill.

And it never works.

It will never, ever work.

And this is why Jesus has come, because he's come to get us free of that shame of the morality.

Morality is a sham.

You kind of realize that, right?

It's a sham.

The Bible says there's no one righteous, not even one.

There's no one who understands, no one who seeks God, all have turned away, they've together become worthless.

To say that religion is about uh morals, that may be true.

But that's not what the gospel of Jesus Christ is about.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not about you doing something for God.

It's about what God has, God doing something for you in the person of Jesus Christ.

It's the exact opposite.

So it starts with that.

We've seen Jesus' mission here.

The true king is going to fight a battle we could never hope to win, and he's coming into the city, and he doesn't have, and we didn't read this, but he doesn't have his mind set on the palace where Herod is.

That's not where he is.

He's looking.

He's looking to the temple, and that's the first place he goes, because that's going to be the place where I'm going to offer the sacrifice for my people.

So what Jesus is doing here is bringing God's grace into our lives.

It's a rescue mission.

This is a paramedic kicking down a door.

There's power in the grace, there's grace in the message, and there's glory in this message.

I have sinned, but I have a champion, I have a savior, I have a king.

So what do we do with this?

On one hand, we don't do anything with this.

Because what the message of the gospel is, Jesus has done something for us, and we're called to believe that.

Because anything that we're trying to do to fix ourselves is not going to work.

You can change your external appearance.

You can change how you're living.

I'm going to do morals.

I'm going to be involved with this group.

I'm going to be involved with these disciplines.

But it's not going to do it.

We need this king who's coming into Jerusalem to save us.

Absolutely.

One of the most kind of graphic pictures I've ever heard of that, of somebody saying, if I could just fix the externals, that would fix my internals.

It was a story I heard years ago in campus ministry.

And uh I don't remember who told it, but I wish I could, I could.

I think it was at a RUF campus training at some point.

And there was a gathering like ours, a church.

And beforehand, there was a there was a gathering in the back where people could get donuts and coffee and those kind of things.

And this woman was back there.

And when you kind of looked a second time, you realized that's not a woman.

That's a man.

Broad shoulders, hands, Adam's apple, long hair, dressed as a woman.

And people avoided him, her.

Just kind of off to the side.

We don't know what to do with this person.

So finally, there was a woman that was in the church, and she went up to this person and said, I'm so-and-so.

Who are you?

I'm really glad you're here.

And they started to talk about their stories a little bit, to which the person, the post-operative transsexual person, said, I thought that having the operation would change the way I feel inside.

But it didn't.

That's why I'm here this morning.

It didn't work.

And I didn't know where else to go.

To which the woman responded, That's why we are all here.

We tried everything else.

And there is nowhere else for us to go.

There is something inside each of us that makes us feel shame.

And that's why Jesus is so important.

And then she told her story, her encounter with Jesus who heals, not in a judgmental way, not in a condemning way, but in a way that made it clear that Jesus receives all those who come to him in faith.

The prostitute and the Pharisee, the addict and the abused, the woman caught red-handed and the post-operative transsexual.

And then she said to this really broken person You don't have to hide who you are here.

We are here for one reason.

When we cried out to Jesus, Jesus responded in love.

And he receives with great welcome, he receives with great love.

He forgives with great forgiveness.

He embraces with great grace.

And what he's okay, so what do we do with that?

We believe it.

I believe that the only hope I have is in Jesus and He heals me.

He alone is going to heal me.

And he alone is going to heal you.

That's all I have to give you on a Sunday morning is Jesus.

That's it.

Jesus.

Not morals, not rules, not disciplines, but Jesus.

That's what we have.

And so what does it mean for us?

Well, it means at least this.

Lay down your cloak lay down your cloak before Jesus.

Roll out the red carpet of your life and say, Come into my life.

I need you.

I want you.

You're the only one who can heal me of this.

So what does that mean to have him in your life?

Well, the Bible talks about faith quite a bit.

Faith is, uh we just heard a podcast, and the guy was defining faith.

He said, faith is, of course, having no evidence.

And I thought, that is exactly wrong.

The Bible does, he even tried to quote a Bible verse.

I was like, that's not what that Bible verse says at all.

Faith is not that.

Historically, we'd say faith is knowledge, you have to know something to believe it, assent, you agree with it, and you trust it.

You live your life in agreement with it.

I'm now giving let me say it to you a different way.

Uh, one is uh to believe is to accept it as true.

So you base your life on it.

This is true, so I'm gonna base my life on it.

Number two, it's your greatest benefit, which means this is better than anything else.

So not only am I gonna base my life on it, I'm gonna remove all the other things in my life that I give priority to, and I'm gonna give this priority.

And this is the third thing.

I need it.

It is true, it's of greatest benefit, and I need it more than anything else.

And then you bring that into your life and live according to it consistently.

And what does that mean?

Well, of course, rules and laws.

No, it doesn't mean that.

It means that you go to Jesus with everything that's going on in your life.

I need you.

You're the king, you're the redeemer, you're the one, you're the prophet who makes God's will known.

You're the king who reigns over, directs your people and rescues your people, and you are the priest who intercedes before the Father for me all the time.

That's what it means.

I believe and trust you.

Can you do that?

What would that look like?

What would that look like for you?

Well, it it probably means, yeah, reading your Bible, praying, coming to worship, a lot of other things.

But it also might mean that trusting Jesus as the King, trusting Jesus as the prophet, trusting Jesus as the priest means that you go into the world and you take Jesus with you into those settings.

We had a friend when we were in Clemson, and he was a college professor at Clemson for his, you know, his adult career.

He'd been there for 20, 30 years, he retired.

And then all of a sudden he's in he's in the boat that a lot of retirees are in.

And he's like, What am I gonna do with my time?

Um, and he said he this he said this, I didn't say that.

He said, I don't want to just go play golf all the time.

That was him.

So it was just and so he sat together with me and I said, Well, what do you what what do you know?

How could you be a blessing to people?

He said, Well, I I I've been a teacher my whole life.

And I said, Well, how could you use that?

He said, I don't know.

But then he went and kind of beat the bushes and tried to figure out how he could do this.

So he actually got a job, and some people have tried that around here with Coleman and things.

It doesn't work because they have policies, I think, against it.

But at that point in time he could do this.

He went to uh Correctional Institute and he started a graduate, what is it, GED, the GED course there for people that were in prison.

And he he said it was an amazing thing because when he went in, he kind of went in as the expert, but he also had to go in some humility.

And he realized I have more to learn from these people in the prison about trusting Jesus than they're gonna learn from me about world history.

Because they know what it's like to be broken and to have a savior and to live according to that every day.

So, at one level, what does he do with that?

It's like I learned about Jesus in the midst of this, but on another level, saying, I'm laying my cloak on the ground for you.

You're the king.

Come into my life and direct me.

Assent, knowledge, trust.

That's what faith is.

Being captive, being convinced, captivated, and compelled.

I believe this, and it shapes every moment of my life.

So Jesus.

Jesus at the beginning of the week, he comes in to Jerusalem making a subversive claim that he's the cosmic king over everything.

Why should we trust any king?

Because this king was going to do something at the end of the week, give his life for his people.

Well, if he can die, then what are we gonna do with that?

Why should I trust somebody who can die?

He he dies like all other kings because this king, just a few days later, is going to come back having conquered our greatest enemy.

Sin, death, Satan, forever.

We have a king.

Let's pray to him now.