Wisdom in the Desert (Week 7): Palm Sunday - From Fickle to Faithful

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

Matthew 21 · chapter mention

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.