Luke 23:26-43

We're gonna be in Luke.

It's in your bulletin.

We're in Luke.

Luke 23, 26 through 43.

23, 26 through 43.

Everybody got it?

Alright, stand up there close to that mic.

Yes, sir.

As the soldiers led him away, they seized Simon from Serene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on and made him carry it behind Jesus.

A large number of people followed him, including women, who mourned and wailed for him.

Jesus turned and said to them, Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me.

Weep for yourselves and for your children.

For the time will come when you will say, Blessed are the childless women, the wounds that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.

Then they will say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills cover us.

For if people do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?

Two other men, both criminals, were also let out with him to be executed.

When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with criminals.

One on his right, the other on his left.

Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

And they divided up his clothes by casting lights.

The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him.

They said, He saved others.

Let him save himself if he is God's Messiah, the chosen one.

The soldiers also came up and mocked him.

They offered him wine, vinegar, and said, If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.

There was a written notice above him which read, This is the king of the Jews.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him.

Aren't you the Messiah?

Save yourself and us.

But the other criminal rebuked him.

He said.

Since you are under the same sentence, we are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.

But this man has done nothing wrong.

Then he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus answered him, Truly, I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.

It is now about noon, and darkness came over the land until three in the noon, afternoon.

For the sun stopped shining.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two.

Jesus called out with a loud voice, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

When he said this, he breathed his last.

So speak by your spirit through the text this morning.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

And thank you for reading the scripture for us this morning, Albert.

I didn't realize when I printed that out that I added 44 through 49, and that's a little bit further than where we're going to go this morning.

We're actually going to finish up at verse 43, and then we'll look at 49 through the end of 23 next week.

So we come to the cross.

If you've been with us for over a year, you know that we've been going through Luke verse by verse, and it really leads up to this point, the point of the cross.

What I want to do this morning is I want to go and just make some observations.

So you know that part of my attempt when I preach is to model for you an interpretive process so that when you're reading your Bible throughout the week, you know, morning by morning, you've got a good framework of understanding like what a good system for Bible study is.

And so in modeling that this morning, what we want to do first is we want to make some observations, right?

And then we want to ask some questions of the text and kind of answer, tie it into the big picture stuff that's going on with sacrifice and atonement.

And then we're going to make application to our lives.

And you'll notice in that progression that we're not just jumping right to application.

Sometimes you'll be in a conversation about the Bible and you'll hear people say, Well, you know what this means to me is this, or what this means, what this text means to me is this over here.

And different people will talk about what it means to them.

And you know what?

That's a secondary result from Scripture.

The primary thing that we want to look at when we're studying Scripture is what did it mean to the original recipients of the text?

What did it mean when the writer wrote it?

And we believe, as evangelical Christians, that the Holy Spirit inspired the writer, that God's writing through Luke this text for us.

And so we want to determine meaning, not for ourselves personally first.

We want to determine God's meaning for whoever it's intended for, and then we want to derive from that principles that we can apply to our life.

So let's make observations first, answer some questions, and then get into application.

So you'll notice that in this text, verses um 26 through 32 are the journey to the cross.

We have Cyrene, right?

Or we have Simon of Cyrene.

Um we have these different characters, but then what happens in verse 33?

Look there in front of you.

And I've printed it out, so you've got it in your bulletin, or maybe you have your own Bible in front of you.

But what happens in verse 33?

Verse 33 is the is the crucifixion.

Yeah.

Verse 33 is the crucifixion.

So that is, um, and you'll notice how it's written there just in verse 33.

Um, what does it say?

It says, when they came to the place called the skull, they crucified him there along with the criminals, one in his right and the other on his left.

It's that simple.

That's the crucifixion.

Um, the remainder of the text is the various interactions that took place at the foot of the cross.

At the foot of the cross.

So we'll get into that a little bit.

Also, we observe as we go through this text that Luke gives us a view of the different members of the crowd.

Do you see how many people are talked about in this text?

We have so many different characters.

We have Simon, who's from Cyrene.

That means that he's from northern Africa.

Uh he's a Libyan, right?

And so it's possible that he's Jewish, that he's there in Jerusalem because he is Jewish and for some reason he's uh been in Libya, but it's it's probable that he is that he's black, um, not African, American, but that he's he's African.

And um he's there for Passover, kind of like the Ethiopian eunuch, right, was in Jerusalem because he was just curious about Judaism.

And Simon is compelled to carry the cross beam for the cross.

The way that the crucifixion would work was that you would take the the um upright pillar, uh, the vertical pillar, and you'd plant it in the ground as a really kind of a strong fixture.

And then the criminal would carry the cross beam.

He would be nailed to that cross beam, and he would he would carry it to the site of the crucifixion.

And and Jesus carried it to the outer city limits, but then he's compelled, uh the soldiers compel um Simon to carry it the rest of the way.

In Mark 15, 21, it tells us that Simon has two sons, Alexander and Rufus, and it's probable that Mark mentions them because his audience that's receiving the account of Mark would have been familiar with them.

They would have known who Alexander and Rufus were because they were disciples.

So this is a um it's an interesting thing that Mark mentions along the way.

There's a rufus also in Romans, and we just don't have enough information to know if the Rufus that's living in Rome that Paul writes to, if that's the same Rufus that is here.

But but but nonetheless, it seems like this is probably the point at which Simon comes to faith.

He's just surprised and compelled.

It's literally a military term, he's drafted into service to carry the crossbeam of the cross.

So we have Simon, we have the women that are weeping, and they're told by Jesus to turn their pity, that their pity on him into rather self-concern.

That is followed by two substantiations in the text.

So if we were doing our observations where we're looking for structural laws and our flag words throughout the text, we would see that there's a two um fours, the word for this is the case.

So we see there he says, for the time will come.

And then he also says, for if people do these things when the tree is green.

In other words, Jesus is telling these women who are crying, stop pitying me.

That's not what's appropriate in this moment.

Stop pitying me, pity yourself.

Have a self-concern, knowing the time for the future destruction of Jerusalem.

Now, in the last seven days of Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem, he's explained these things.

He's already told his followers, and he's taught, that there's a day coming where Jerusalem is going to be destroyed.

And that's it, it wasn't missed on the Jews because in other accounts, as the Jews are accusing Jesus before the Sanhedrin, there's an accusation that Jesus said, Look, I'm going to destroy this temple and it's going to be rebuilt in three days.

He's referring to his body.

But there is, there, the crowd kind of mixed his prophetic message about the destruction of Jerusalem, not one stone being left on another, with this message about his body being destroyed as a temple and then being raised up.

So anyway, uh, Jesus tells these women, you need to, you need to be concerned for yourselves.

You need to be concerned for yourselves and what's going to take place in the future when Jerusalem is judged.

There's a thinking that goes like this: Jesus is the Messiah for Israel.

Jesus is the Messiah, and he comes as a fulfillment of Judaism.

And some theologians have said if the Jews would have received the work of Jesus, then the kingdom would have been ushered in.

And there's some reference to this maybe in Acts chapter 2, where there's times of refreshing that could have come in but didn't.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

The question is, is like in that kind of like the matrix or the version of like, uh, if history would have gone that way, how would have the work of the cross taken place?

I don't know.

But there's this there is this idea that that Jerusalem is only destroyed because of the Jews' rejection of Christ.

And so Jesus is telling these women, don't pity me.

And he says that to us as well.

We don't need to pity Jesus for the work of the cross.

It needs to have direct ramifications upon us.

So the women weeping.

Then we have the Jewish rulers who are sneering at him.

We have the soldiers in the story.

They're casting lots for Jesus' clothes.

Again, this is a prophetic fulfillment of Psalm 22.

And we have them mocking Jesus, saying, If you are the king, right?

Then we have the people.

We have the people, and then we have uh, and there's just the crowd that, and the people are said that they're just observing the scene.

And then finally we have the two criminals.

One is uh the two criminals, one is mocking the Messiah, and the other is penitent, saying we are getting what we deserve.

So lots of people in the text.

There's lots of action.

If you were going to go through, another way of kind of observing the text is just to put a box or some kind of indicator on the text of um the action words.

Just to kind of give you a sense of how this works in my own like personal Bible study.

My week on Mondays starts with me like copying and pasting the text, right?

So it looks like that.

And I do it in uh pencil or light pen, so you can't see it that well from where you're sitting.

But there's circles, there's like little symbols on the left-hand column.

So I paste it into a document, I justify it right and left, so I have a clean left.

I'm very like aesthetic in how I like to see it.

I space it out, so they're not, we've got lots of space to breathe.

And these symbols, like this is the structural laws that are in play, the boxes indicate um action, they're verbs.

I circle repeated words, I underline similar words.

So when we're talking about observation, I just have this kind of messy paper in your head, right?

This is where the that's kind of how the sermon develops uh for me personally as we're going through the text.

And then I bring that.

I I I probably should just preach off of that paper because that's kind of like where all of the just the things that the Lord lays on my heart throughout the week kind of come from.

And that goes in my coat pocket and my it's all banged up because it it travels with me throughout the week, you know.

So um there's action words in the text.

The other thing that's important to observe is that we have the seven sayings from the cross.

Have you heard of the seven sayings from the cross?

So we have two of the seven sayings.

You have to go to all four Gospels to kind of find the seven sayings, but two of the sayings, what?

Seven sayings from the cross.

Yes.

So these, the two that we have here, now Jesus speaks three times, but but once he's crucified, we have two sayings.

The first is, Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

That's the first one.

Father forgive them.

The second one is, truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.

Do you know some of the other what are some of the other um sayings?

It is finished, that's right.

What else?

Yes, he speaks, he tells uh John uh to care for for Mary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, yep.

Why why have you forsaken me, right?

I commit my answer.

Yeah, all of those.

Those are a part of the seven sayings of the cross.

We have two in Luke, right?

We have two here in the text where we're looking.

We we may encounter some next week.

So those are some of the things that we see going on, right?

We see, do you notice the plainness of the cross, right?

All of Old Testament history leads to the cross.

And yet it's one verse.

It just says in verse 33 when he came to the place called the skull, they crucified him there.

Golgotha, right?

They crucified him there.

That's it.

Like, that's the moment that all of human history has been waiting for since Adam and Eve are like, okay, we'll eat this fruit.

Like, all of history has been leading to this moment in verse 33.

Let's just step back, okay?

This is the second part of the sermon.

Um let's kind of take this broad view really quickly of redemptive history, right?

One of the things that we say is that there's a scarlet thread throughout history, and that scarlet thread is the is the idea that there's this one thread that goes through from the very beginning of history through the story of Israel and the prophets and the judges and all the way up to the time of Christ, and it's it's this redemptive thread that God is continually redeeming his people.

He's continually rescuing people from their self-inflicted calamity.

So we know God created the world in a perfect moral state.

Humans enjoyed uninterrupted union with God.

God placed, he said, you know, let there be light, and then he said, Let there be, you know, the firmament, and separate the water from the firmament, and then we have the animals and the birds, all these things are created, and God creates mankind in this perfect moral state.

And he gives Adam and Eve this instruction to not eat from the tree.

And yet Eve listens to the temptation of the serpent.

She takes the fruit, shares it with her husband Adam, and that's what we call the fall.

But before they did that, when they were given the warning, not only were they told, hey, don't eat the fruit, but they were said, in the day you eat it, you will surely die.

That's right.

So they eat the fruit, they rebel against God's word, and sin is brought into the world.

Now there's two kinds of deaths, and I sent you all an email last night with a video that kind of gives this overview, and I encourage you to watch that video on atonement and sacrifice, but it explains sin so well that sin has direct ramifications.

So when I sin, it has direct ramifications, but then it has a polluting effect upon the world.

So there's two kinds of death that happen from sin.

There's the immediate spiritual death.

In the moment that Adam and Eve ate that fruit, they were cut off from their relationship with God.

But then death affected everything else.

It affected bodies, it affected ecology, it affected relationships, it affected self-identity and purpose.

So there's this pollution of the good thing that God created, and there's been death over the whole earth, right?

There's been there's there's this just pervasiveness of death and suffering in the world because of sin.

Just consider the headlines, the brokenness from the headlines this week.

Right?

Planes are crashing with 160 people dying.

Trains are derailed and fall off their tracks.

It comes to light that the mayor is getting a sweetheart deal with book sales through the bar the college board that she sits on, right?

And it has this, it, you know, whether that's sin or not, it reflects a distrust, right, in leadership of like you're getting a backdoor deal on book sales, and you have this conflict of interest.

All of that is brokenness in the world, right?

We have an 11 year old boy who is shot on the playground with his mom.

And then we have St.

Patrick's Day today, but people celebrating it last night with their friends, and the next morning suffering a hangover and the gnawing emptiness of last night, right?

It was such a good Idea, right?

It was such a guy, we're gonna live it up, we're gonna party, you know, fell's point.

And you wake up this morning with that empty, gnawing sensation that you know it didn't fulfill, it didn't last.

Immediately, immediately, God implemented, once the fall took place with Adam and Eve, God implemented a long story, a very long story, about the rescue of the world.

From the very beginning.

Do you remember sin came in?

Adam and Eve were ashamed.

They were naked, they went and clothed themselves, they're hiding from the presence of God.

And God confronts them, but he also remedies sin.

He comes in and he clothes them.

He says, That I'm gonna deal with the serpent, that the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent.

There's this promise, this covenant that God is going to rectify what's wrong.

He gives them new instructions to follow, right?

He gives them covenant.

As Genesis unfolds, we get into Genesis 12, and God chooses for himself a people through Abraham.

And then as we get further into Genesis in Exodus, we have a defined constitution given to his people, right?

We call that the law.

And then as we go into Exodus, we see that God gives his chosen people a land, a common land, right?

You can't be a people without having a common heritage, a common constitution, and a common land.

And that's what God does.

Not just so that that group of people could be kind of the spoiled brats of earth.

No, because God wants to rescue the world through a chosen people, right?

He wants to say, I'm choosing you, Abraham, so that through you there's this blessing that can permeate the earth.

And so all of these steps played into the story of God rescuing humanity from sin and death.

They're like these puzzle pieces that are pointing to the greater work of redemption.

Last week I mentioned two passages that clearly explain the idea of atonement because it's not just good enough for God to circumstantially change where Israel was at to take them out of Egypt, but there's the issue of sin, right?

Sin is killing the world.

And so God institutes in Exodus 12, we have the Passover lamb.

And then we go into Leviticus and we have this idea.

Let me just read Leviticus 5, 14 through 19.

God tells Moses, these are the instructions that God gives to Moses.

He says, The Lord said to Moses, When anyone is unfaithful to the Lord, by sinning unintentionally in regard to any of the Lord's holy things, they are to bring to the Lord as a penalty a ram from the flock, one without any defect, and of the proper value in silver, according to the sanctuary shekel.

It is a guilt offering.

They must make restitution for what they have failed to do in regard to the holy things, pay an additional penalty of a fifth of its value, and give it to all the priests.

The priests will make atonement for them with the ram as a guilt offering, and they will be forgiven.

If anyone sins and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord's commands, even though they do not know it, they are guilty and they will be held responsible.

They are to bring to the priests as a guilt offering a ram from the flock, one without defect and of proper value.

It's very technical, it's surgical.

It's like here's how you're supposed to offer your ram before the Lord as a sacrifice to put away sin.

God's framing up with Israel the idea of sacrifice as a means of atonement throughout the Old Testament.

This innocent animal will die to mend your brokenness in the God-man relationship, right?

God wants this atonement, this mending of the relationship.

Now you say to me, Josh, I don't like how the Bible says that this works.

I don't like how atonement functions.

It doesn't make sense.

It seems primitive, right?

We're killing an animal.

What is this?

What is this?

Are we like cannibals?

Are we are we tribal?

What's going on with this whole idea of a living sacrifice?

But then my question to you is, well, in your mind, how would atonement work?

How would atonement work?

And you may say, well, I just want people to repay what they owe me.

You know, I just want people to think of the people that have injured you, the people that have sinned against you.

And you may think, well, the world would be righted if people would just say they're sorry and maybe they would just pay back what they owe.

But the Bible says that sin is so much more destructive and infectious than the simple balance street describing profit and loss.

When we talk about what people owe, we're actually describing an insurmountable debt beyond the world's ability to repay.

You know, the conversation right now with the U.S.'s debt is that we're at$22 trillion.

The breaking point is$24 trillion.

So we're getting point to a point that's that's dangerously high.

But imagine if your personal debt was$22 trillion.

How many of you are coming up with a plan?

You know, it's no Dave Ramsey's gonna get you out of that hole, right?

You're stuck, right?

And what the Bible teaches is that we each have an insurmountable debt.

It's not just a matter of I'm gonna just right the wrongs and I'm gonna pay back the people that I've hurt.

No, sin permeates, it defiles everything.

The Bible says that it infects everything.

Everything is warped by sin.

All pain and suffering in the world is the result of sin being present.

Think for a second about two stories that happened this week.

First of all, the college admission scandal, right?

These wealthy people who are buying their kids' way into college.

And so maybe at first you think, well, you know, we we caught the bad guys and we can we can um, you know, we can slap them on the wrist and they'll pay their debt to society and maybe they'll pay a fine.

But what does it do?

It undercuts, doesn't it undercut the fabric of society when people are cheating their way into admissions?

It undercuts society.

That's the result of sin.

It isn't something where it's just like we got the bad guys and everything's better.

No, it it causes in you a cynicism about college admission, it causes a question about these institutions.

Or how about this mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand?

Right?

Of 50 people being slaughtered, right?

It's just, and what happens?

Well, we got the guy, but does that make it all better?

If he's executed, which I don't think they do in New Zealand, but if he's executed, does that make it better?

No, those 50 people are gone, right?

The injury, the psychological injury, the pain, the suffering that is inflicted by that man upon that Muslim community is irreparable.

The world breaks, the sin of humanity breaks the fabric of the perfect world God created.

And so you may have an issue with an animal being sacrificed to atone for sin and then that culminating in a person dying on the cross.

But but when you realize the effect of sin, when you you realize the effect of sin, it's just everyone deserves to die.

So sin wrecks everything, right?

When it says in Romans 6.23 that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, yes, sin requires death.

It requires death.

So we have this death sentence as a result of sin, but God wants us to live in a relationship with Him, right?

Maybe the animal thing is like off on the side and it's like that's weird, I don't get that.

But it but we're able to agree on this principle that like my sin deserves death.

My sin deserves death.

But the God of the Bible says this I love you, and I want to be in relationship with you.

Well, then we have two conflicting things.

We have the justice of God and the love of God.

And so somehow sin has to be dealt with through death.

God wants to establish his kingdom with humanity populating that kingdom as functioning patrons.

Yet death is necessary because of sin, and yet God created humanity so that he could be in relationship with them.

God loves people, he wants to spend eternity with them.

So instead of all humanity dying to eternally pay for their sin, what if we could find a surrogate, a substitute, someone who could suffer death on behalf of humanity?

What if somebody could pay?

What if somebody could pay our debt through their death on our behalf?

And that's what John 3.16 says.

It says, God loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, should not die, but have eternal life.

So God sends his world, his son into the world to be that surrogate, to be the substitute.

And when John the Baptist sees his cousin Jesus come to him at the age of 30, and John's been baptizing people for repentance of sins, John looks at him and has this Holy Spirit moment and says, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Jesus comes into the world fulfilling this line of animal sacrifices and being the Lamb of God, the spotless Lamb of God that can take away the sins of the world.

And so we come to verse 33.

When they came to the place called the skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals, one on his right and the other on his left.

Let's make some application.

When we look at the cross, we shouldn't pity Jesus.

That's what he tells the women.

Don't pity me.

Instead, the cross should be symmetrical to our lives.

The idea of symmetry is that is the idea of pieces being made up exactly of similar parts facing each other or around an axis showing symmetry.

So when my door broke yesterday, my door handle, like the screw came out, right?

And I got lost, right?

I can't just go and pick up like a bolt and just stick it into the bottom.

Like I have to find a symmetrical screw to go into that hole, right?

To fix the doorknob.

The cross is symmetrical to our life, right?

It's a piece that fits, it has direct ramifications upon your life and my life.

Let's walk through a few of these.

First of all, the cross condemns our efforts to please God, our attempts to even the scales of justice by having more good in our life than bad, is rendered null and void.

Many people say, you know what, I'm just trying to do enough good that when God sees me, he won't judge me.

Like that there's more good at the end of my life than bad.

But do you remember Jesus in the garden?

He prays to the Father, knowing that the cross is ahead of him.

He says, Father, if there be any other way, take this cup from me.

Does God the Father say, okay, well, I figured out another way to save humanity and rescue them from their sin?

No, he doesn't.

Instead, Jesus says, I will do your will.

And he goes to the cross.

He submits himself to this process.

It is the only way for us to experience righteousness.

So the cross, what it does is it symbolizes that you and I cannot perform well enough to please God.

It condemns our efforts to please God well enough.

It shows the necessity for a substitute payment on our behalf.

Second of all, the cross reveals God's motif of bringing life from death, joy out of suffering, healing through pain.

As humans, we look at pain and we want to avoid it, right?

We want to see it down the road, and we're like, I'm taking a detour.

And yet the motif of God, the pattern of God is like, no, you suffer, and I'm going to bring life out of suffering.

I'm going to bring healing out of your sickness.

I'm going to bring joy out of the pain.

Right?

The writer of the Psalm says, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

You are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

God goes with us on the journey, and the pattern of God is that he leads us through painful circumstances because he wants to demonstrate his resurrection power through your life.

Third, the cross reveals the love of God for you and for me.

It testifies, it says to you this very moment that you are loved.

It doesn't matter what your dad told you, your mom told you, the bullies at school told you, what your boss told you this last week, or what your report card told you.

The cross says to you and I that you are loved.

You are loved by the one who created you.

You cannot avoid it.

The cross has already happened.

It testifies of the love of God.

In John 15, 13, before the cross, Jesus tells his disciples that there's no greater love that anyone has in this than to lay down one's life for his friends.

And you, dear brothers and sisters, are friends of God.

He has gone to the cross on your behalf.

You and I should meditate on the cross and sense the unending waves of God's love.

Fourth, I think we're on number four.

The cross should be our defense from condemnation.

Some of you are accused, and you hear the accusing voice in your head that you're not good enough, that you're a failure, that you're not living up to expectations.

Satan loves to deliver that message on your behalf, but then there's other, you know, we love to beat ourselves up, right?

Some of us are wired in that way.

But yet the cross is our defense from condemnation.

Sin was dealt with at the cross.

Our inadequacy, our fail, our frailty, our finiteness was all dealt with at the cross.

Jesus said, it is finished.

So when the devil attempts to condemn you by reminding you of your inadequacy, reminding you of your sin, you can point to the cross and say with confidence, it is finished.

It is finished.

That is the symbol of my innocence.

That's why we, that's why we one of the reasons why we wear the cross.

That's why in folklore, the cross is like even seen as a weapon against vampires, right?

It is this instrument that can oppose evil because it symbolizes the work of God within reality.

Fifth, the cross should be our confidence in prayer.

It should be our confidence in prayer.

The sin that stood in the way of our friendship with God has been taken out of the way.

So let the great conversation begin.

The conversation that we can have with God.

The writer of Hebrews says this in verse 19.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, right?

Do you see that?

He says, We have confidence to enter the holy place.

Back when you had like the um the temple, like if this was a temple, you would have like a curtain here, right?

And this would be the common area, and back here, behind the curtain, would be the Ark of the Covenant.

And only the priest could get into there, right?

And they would only go there once a year, and it would only be with sprinkling of the blood of bulls and goats that they could get in.

And yet it says that Jesus went into the holiest of all on our behalf as our high priest.

He ripped it open.

Literally, the veil was torn open so that you and I can go into the presence of God, the very presence of God, and we can pray.

We can enter with confidence the most holy place by the blood of Jesus.

He says in Hebrews, it's a new, it's a living way that is opened up for us.

The curtain, it's through the curtain that is his body.

Literally, his body was torn apart as if it were a curtain, and we're able to go in.

Let's close with this.

This week, this week, there were tickets that went on sale for the Harbor East fashion show.

Just in case you're interested, it's gonna happen at the end of April.

They rock off the street, and these ladies come out, and it's and men, you know, and they show off clothes.

It's a celebration of putting on clothes, changing one's appearance, covering naked bodies.

But back in the garden, Adam and Eve lived naked and open before God.

They didn't feel any sense of nakedness or shame.

But as soon as they ate the fruit, they felt unclothed.

And then God had to cover them with the first set of clothing.

God was the first fashion designer, right?

He was the first fashion designer, yeah.

Yeah.

But it was a picture.

It was a picture of what God was gonna do in this ultimate way related to sin.

Why, why was nakedness an issue for Adam?

And it was the first sense that something wasn't right.

I'm naked.

That's what Adam said.

I'm naked.

He tried to go cover himself up.

And God clothed them as a picture that Jesus someday is gonna come and he's going to put away our guilt.

He's gonna cover our guilt.

Literally, Paul says to the Ephesians, he says, put on Christ.

Literally, we step into the person of Christ as if we're putting on a piece of clothing, and that is what takes away our shame in the presence of God.

God clothes us in Christ so that we can walk in his presence.

Amen?

Let's pray together.

Lord, we are so grateful for you being that substitutionary payment on the cross that you shed your blood on our behalf, you paid for sin so that because we couldn't.

Like the debt was too big.

We can do some good stuff.

Lord, you want us to do good stuff.

But no good thing that we can do will put away the debt that we have before you as a holy God.

But you sent your son to pay for us.

Lord, would you would you by the work of your spirit apply these truths to our life, to our heart?

Work in us, we pray.

Thank you.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let's stand together and let's sing this final song.