Palms to Thorns

I want to talk to you this weekend about Palm Sunday.

And I've titled the message today, Palms to Thorns, and I think that this might make more sense to you in just a moment.

We'll get to that.

But I want to start off by going a little bit before Palm Sunday, a little bit before the occasion of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem, where the people gathered and they laid palm branches and their garments on the ground so that he could ride in on a donkey in this triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

But before that, in John 6, Jesus is there and the people come to him and they're trying to crown him as king, and he decides it's not time yet.

Let me show that to you.

In John chapter 6, verse 15, it says, Therefore, when Jesus perceived that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he departed again to the mountain by himself alone.

John 6:15

And so here he was, and he perceived that they were about to come to him and they were going to crown him as king, and he bolts.

He gets out of there and he goes to the mountains and he wants to be by himself.

And so in John 6, he leaves this place and he doesn't want to be crowned as king yet.

He doesn't feel that it is his time.

In John chapter 11 is when Lazarus dies.

John 11 · chapter mention

And Jesus receives word that Lazarus has passed away, and so Jesus decides to go back to that place to visit Mary and Martha in the grave of Lazarus.

And the disciples even say, weren't you just almost stoned whenever you were going that direction before?

And Jesus says, I must go back.

And so he goes back to that place and he meets Mary and Martha.

And when he sees the sorrow and the sadness on their face, he's grieved.

This is the place in the Bible where it says that Jesus wept.

That he sees the sadness that they felt over the death of Lazarus.

And in that moment he makes a decision, and it turns out to be a very crucial decision.

He raises Lazarus from the dead.

There was already a lot of heat on Jesus at this time, a lot of criticism, a lot of people coming against him.

The Pharisees were having a violent reaction to the works that he was doing.

And he makes a decision in that moment, knowing that we were never designed to die.

And he sees that sorrow and sadness, and he said his spirit was moved.

And so he raises Lazarus from the dead.

And that very act began a chain of events that led to Palm Sunday and then to his crucifixion.

It says that from that very moment he raised Lazarus from the dead, and the high priests and the Pharisees gathered in the Jewish council, and from that moment forward they began a plot to kill Jesus.

And so he makes this decision, he raises Lazarus from the dead, he goes into Palm Sunday, he chooses to go ahead and sit on the donkey and to ride into town.

And then when he gets into town, he says, The hour has come.

So he knew in that moment that when he raised Lazarus from the dead, he was making a commitment that it was about to be time and that he was about to accept the reality of his death.

You see, this is why I think this is so important.

Jesus here had avoided several times before allowing them to crown him as king.

Now he raises Lazarus from the dead.

He makes that choice, and then he makes the choice to allow them to crown him as king on that day of the entry into Jerusalem, and he makes that decision, knowing that it's going to end in his death, showing us yet again that he will always give his life in order to give us life.

Right there, from that moment, the crucial decision that changed everything was that he gave Lazarus his life back.

And he knew from that moment forward that it would cost him his own life.

It's a decision he's always been willing to make for us.

The whole reason why he came to this earth was so that he could die and give you life.

And so right there in that moment he makes that decision.

And then he comes into Jerusalem.

He chooses to sit on the donkey and to come into this place and have this triumphant entry.

And it can be found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but I want to show it to you in John chapter 12, verse 12.

John 12:12

It says, The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him and cried out, Hosanna.

Hosanna means save now.

Hosanna, save now.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel.

They're crowning him as king in this time.

Then Jesus, when he had found a young donkey, sat on it, as it is written, Fear not, daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt.

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him, and that they had done these things to him.

And so here in this moment, Jesus decides to sit on the donkey to enter into Jerusalem, and they are celebrating the coming of their king, the coming of their Messiah.

And at this time the Jewish people desperately needed a king.

You see, at that time they were still under the rule of the Roman Empire.

They were under Caesar's thumb.

They had been oppressed, beaten.

They had been killed.

Their people had wandered in the desert for 40 years, constantly looking for a land to call their own.

For God to be the reigning ruler over their land and their property and to set things right, to put them in their rightful place.

For God to bring justice to the world.

Have you ever felt like that?

That there's no justice in the world.

And if God would just show up and set things right, then everything would be the way it needs to be.

This is the way the Jewish people felt.

They needed a Messiah so desperately at that time.

They heard the news of Lazarus being raised from the dead, and so many people had seen it.

And so they come to this place, and many people had gathered in Jerusalem for a feast that happened to be going on that weekend.

And so they had gathered for this feast, and they know that Jesus is coming into Jerusalem.

They come out there and they cry out, Hosanna, save now, save us now, rescue us now.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

And they're crying out these things, waiting for him to come and to rescue them.

For him to be the king that they so desperately needed in that time.

He chooses to take on that role.

He chooses to sit on the donkey and to go into that triumphal entry.

The only problem was he didn't turn out to be exactly the king that they expected to get.

You see, the problem was that here they are crowning him as king and expecting him to overthrow the Roman rule to step into power, and just a few short days later, instead of setting on a throne, he's hanging from a cross.

Instead of wearing a crown of gold, he's wearing a crown of thorns.

And those very same people, instead of crying out, Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, now they're yelling, Crucify Him.

It's not so difficult for us to be in that same position as them.

It's not so difficult when we really think about it for us to come in here on a weekend where everything is going right and life seems good, to say Hosanna and to thank him for being the God that we want him to be, to give him palms, and then the very next weekend, when things aren't so great, to give him thorns.

When he doesn't show up for us the way that we expected him to, when he doesn't reign in our life the way we expected him to.

And so prophecies were being fulfilled right there in that moment.

One of those prophecies happens in Zechariah 9:9.

Zechariah 9:9

I want to show it to you right now.

It says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.

Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold, your king is coming to you.

He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a cult, the foal of a donkey.

Jesus made the choice to come in on a donkey.

Many kings in that time, when they would enter into a city, would come riding on a war horse, representing power and overthrowing and reigning and ruling.

Jesus comes in on a donkey which represents peace.

And so he rides in in that moment, telling everyone the type of king that he's going to be.

Yet it was missed by so many people.

It says there in John that the disciples did not realize that the prophecy was coming true until after Jesus has had risen.

And so in that moment, a prophecy is being fulfilled, Jesus is fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy.

Old Testament scripture is being quoted right there in that moment, and that prophecy is coming true.

Jesus is fulfilling that.

But the people were fulfilling a prophecy also.

I'll show that to you now.

It's in Psalm chapter 118, verse 25.

Psalms 118:25

It says, save now, which is to say, Hosanna, save now, I pray, O Lord.

O Lord, I pray, send now prosperity.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

We have blessed you from the house of the Lord.

Palm trees signified blessing.

A palm tree meant health, wealth, prosperity, exactly what they're asking for from God right there.

A common name at that time was Tamar.

You've heard the name Tamar.

That simply means palm tree.

Palm trees were so idolized at the time, they so represented good things that people would name their daughter after them.

Palm trees meant everything's gonna be alright.

He's gonna make everything alright, he's gonna bring us health and wealth and prosperity.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, and the palm branches were laid out so that not even the hoof of the animal that he was riding on would have to touch the ground.

So let me ask you a question.

We know the rest of the story.

We know that Jesus goes on then to be crucified.

In that moment, while he's being beaten and whipped, and then eventually hanging on the cross unto death, would we still call him blessed?

Did his blessing depart from him at that time?

Did it go away?

And then there's no question that Jesus was sent by God, the Father, and that he was blessed in all the time that he walked on the face of the earth.

His blessing did not depart from him.

But it's so easy for us to look at suffering and think that blessing and suffering are exactly the opposite.

And that false dichotomy is what leads us to blame God for our suffering here on earth.

You see, Jesus was blessed the entire time.

And in fact, he was perfectly in the will of God at that time.

But he was still gonna suffer.

He was still gonna go through difficult times.

He was still going to experience death.

And so we suffer.

Many times we we suffer in life, and suffering actually is a major contributor to atheism.

Because they say, if your God is so great, then how come you suffer such atrocities?

It might actually be that suffering is not so much what contributes to atheism, but our response to suffering.

Because we're so tempted to all of a sudden believe that when our suffering begins, God left.

That God wasn't a part of that, that he had no dealing in that.

That God wasn't there for us, that he departed from us.

And so many times we call ourselves blessed whenever we're experiencing good things, but whenever we're experiencing trial and tribulation and suffering, we can't call ourselves blessed anymore.

And the world has it backwards.

The world is so confused about this, the world would say, uh, you're not blessed because you're experiencing the circumstances that you're experiencing.

You see, you're you're not a hypocrite when you call yourself blessed, even though your life circumstances don't appear to be blessed.

You're a hypocrite when you stop calling yourself blessed just because your circumstances aren't so great.

You are blessed.

You are blessed by God, and the problem becomes when we start to try to define blessing as health, wealth, and prosperity.

You are blessed and chosen by God.

And so He has blessed you and He has chosen you.

We need to call ourselves blessed no matter what we're going through in this life.

Calling yourself blessed in a time of suffering is not a denial of your circumstances, it's an acknowledgement of his finished work on the cross.

And so you are blessed.

So we can look at an example of a lot of different people that were struggling through suffering in their life.

We can look at Paul, we can look uh at Job, we can look at many different people who suffered through different stages of their life.

There's one person, though, that I think would be the very best person for us to look at as how it pertains to how we ought to suffer through this life.

And that person is Jesus Christ Himself.

So I want to look at three phases that he went through.

I want to show you the different ways that he responded to the suffering that he would experience.

The first one was the prayer.

We all have a prayer similar to this, but let's take a look at Jesus' prayer.

This is the moment that he's in the garden and he knows what he's about to experience, and he prays, he cries out to God, and let's look at what he says.

In Luke chapter 22, verse 40, it says, And when he came to the place, he said to them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation.

Luke 22:40

And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.

Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.

And there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him.

And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

How many of you had a prayer like this?

God, please deliver me from what I'm going through right now.

We've all had this.

We've all had this time where we go, I don't understand what's happening to me right now, and I know what I'm going through right now isn't good.

I know that it's hurtful, that it's painful.

God, please take this from me.

Jesus was praying that same prayer, God, take this from me.

I don't want to do this.

Please take this from me.

We know exactly what happens next.

He still goes through the crucifixion.

In Hebrews chapter 5, verse 7, it says that Jesus' prayer was heard.

Hebrews 5:7

Now that blows my mind up.

I don't understand because here he prays, God, don't let me go through this.

And we know that he still goes through it.

And in Hebrews it says that his prayer was heard.

In essence, the the the the the word there, heard, it typically means that an answer was sent back to him.

So what was the answer?

For me, I believe that, as the scripture says there, that an angel was sent to him to strengthen him.

So let me tell you what I think it means for us.

God won't always deliver you out of the circumstances that you are experiencing, but he will always strengthen you to go through what he's calling you to go through.

How many times have we been going through something difficult?

We end up praying for God to remove it from us.

We go all the way through it and we go, well, God didn't answer my prayers.

And the truth is, he strengthened you and gave you everything you needed to be able to go through what he was calling you to.

Jesus was perfectly in God's will at that time.

He was destined to go through that moment, no matter how much he didn't want to go through it.

And God sends the angel to him and strengthens him.

He gives him the power and the strength to be able to go through what he was about to go through.

So Jesus goes through this time and God will do the same for us.

He will give us the strength to go through difficult times.

These times will be trying for us, but he will always be there for us.

And he will always give us the strength to go through what we must go through.

The second stage that Jesus went through and that we will go through many times in our life is the death.

In Matthew chapter 27, verse 45, this is the very next time we see Jesus speaking directly to God, and this time he's hanging from the cross.

Matthew 27:45

Matthew 27, verse 45 says, Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.

Matthew 27:45

And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lema sabotini.

And that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Now this is difficult for us to understand.

Martin Luther, it said one time, just threw up his hands and said, I can't understand it.

God forsakes God.

Jesus, still God, still divine, hanging from the cross, and he says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Now Jesus is quoting Psalm chapter 22 here, but never in the Bible we see Jesus quote scripture all the time in scripture.

Psalms 22 · chapter mention

Never do we see Jesus quoting scripture just so he can show that he knew the Old Testament.

Jesus was mourning and lamenting the loss that he was feeling in this moment.

Psalms is in many different areas of Psalms, over a third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament.

So we can go to plenty of Psalms and find where we're declaring God as a good God and He is reigning and ruling, but there are plenty of Psalms also that we can go to, and people are saying, God, why have you forsaken me?

God, where were you in this time?

Where were you during this time, this difficult time in my life?

But even harder to reconcile is Jesus himself saying it.

The writers don't really give us very much information.

It's dangerous to speculate too much about what Jesus was really saying in this time.

And so I want to give you just my opinion.

This is just my opinion of what was taking place.

But it says, From the sixth hour to the ninth hour, total darkness fell on the land.

And right after that is the moment where Jesus says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is just what I believe.

But I believe in that darkness that that is when the sins of the world were being placed on Jesus, and for the first time in his life, he experienced the separation from God that we experience.

Because of our sin, there's an extreme separation from God.

And when we hit these difficult times in our lives, it's so easy to say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Because he feels so far from us.

And Jesus in this moment is feeling a separation from God like he's never felt before.

His divine side is still perfectly connected to God, but his uh his his natural side, his physical side is feeling a separation from God.

He had a human uh side, he was fully God and fully man, and his human side was feeling the pain and the loss of that time, and he says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Listen, when you're going through a difficult time, it is perfectly fine for you to question where God is in that moment.

Don't ever feel guilty for calling out to God and saying, Where are you in this moment?

We have a uh a thing that we do in freedom ministry here where we go back to a difficult time in our life and we ask God, where were you in that moment?

And I promise you, he can handle your difficult questions.

I promise you, if you will go back to that place, experience the loss in the morning of that place, and ask God, where were you in that moment?

I need to hear from you, where were you?

And he will answer.

We're gonna, we're gonna, Kairos 2 is brand new for us this year, and we're gonna go through an extended period of time of being able to deal with the hurts and the losses that we've experienced in our life.

And if you've never taken, if you've had extreme loss in your life, and you've never been able to process those losses, I encourage you to go.

It is an amazing healing time, and we can't move forward from those difficult times until we go through that process.

Don't put it off any longer.

And so the second thing that we experience there is the death, and the third thing that we experience is the resurrection.

In order for us to experience the resurrection, though, the death must happen.

Right?

We don't call things resurrected if they never actually died.

So we must experience the death.

You have to allow exactly the way Jesus said it, not my will, Father, but yours be done.

You have to allow your will to die.

And as soon as you allow your will to die, that is where you leave room for God's will to thrive.

As soon as your will dies, then his can take over in a way that you wouldn't believe, you wouldn't understand.

The resurrection begins to take place in your life, but the death comes first.

Always the seed must die, be buried in the ground for new life to come up from that.

So you have to allow your will to die.

You have to pray your prayers in that way that God, I don't want to have to go through this, but not my will, but yours be done.

Listen, it's not your faith that dies.

It's not your believing in the miracle that dies.

It's not your believing that God does mighty and miraculous things because he does.

He heals.

He does incredible things.

It's not any of those areas that die.

It's your will that dies.

It's you saying, God, not my will, but yours be done.

And in that the resurrection takes place.

It doesn't always look the way that we expected it to.

For them, it didn't look that way.

Jesus did set in his reign and his rule on earth.

He did become the king of this earth again, but not the way that anybody expected it.

And so the resurrection does take place, but we first have to go through the difficult stages of the prayer and the death.

And then the resurrection comes in our lives.

And she said, I just need to take a nap.

So I was reading a book.

She laid her head on my chest and she was taking a nap, and I was reading.

And about 20 minutes into her nap, her uh body went completely stiff.

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she completely stopped breathing.

I remember shaking her and calling her name.

She was completely unresponsive, and I checked, and she wasn't breathing at all.

It stayed like that for what seemed like an eternity, but it was a few minutes, and then she began to convulse after that.

And I didn't know it at the time, but she was having a seizure.

One of many to come after that.

I will never forget.

We we gathered in the hospital room.

We prayed over her.

We said, God, we believe that this is not gonna happen again.

We believe that she will not have any more seizures.

And then yet, time and time again, she would have another seizure.

We struggled through this, we prayed, we believed that we got a word from God that she was gonna be healed.

One time I remember we were at home, and it was about two or three o'clock in the morning, and I woke up to the sound of her having a seizure, and she had bitten her tongue, and she was laying on her back, and she was choking on the blood that was coming from her tongue.

And I remember I laid her over on her side, and it was a few days later, but I realized in that moment, many times for my work, I travel.

What if I hadn't been there?

I was overwhelmed by fear.

And we prayed over and over and over again, God, take this from us.

While I'm at work all day, she's home with our two young children, and God, I don't want to think about what would happen if I wasn't there.

One time that was particularly difficult for us was uh when she was pregnant with our second child, our daughter, Willow.

She had a seizure while she was about seven or eight months pregnant.

We went into the hospital, and having a seizure while you're pregnant is uh not a very good thing.

And the neurologist came in.

I'll never forget what he said to us.

He said, I'm gonna put you on a medicine.

I've looked at all of your charts, I've looked at your file, I'm gonna put you on a medicine that's very hard on your body.

It's not a good uh thing for you.

It will deteriorate your bones, and it will be uh a medicine that's not very good for you.

And you can never have children again because you're gonna be on this medicine for the rest of your life, and it causes extreme birth defects if you get pregnant while you're taking it.

We had been thinking about stopping there at two children, anyways, but everything in me wanted to rise up against that and say, no, we don't believe that.

We don't accept this report that she's gonna be on this medicine for the rest of her life, that she's gonna be depending on this, that we won't be able to have children in the future because of this thing.

We don't accept that.

Now, these were decisions that we made on our own, but what kills me to this day is that even today she's still on that medicine, and we stopped having children after our second child.

I felt like, God, we lost.

What the enemy had brought against us, we lost in this time.

We tried to rise up against this, and here we lost.

I'll never forget, I was reading a scripture that says that for those who love God, they lack nothing good.

And I said, God, my wife's healing would be so good.

So either we don't love you enough, or you don't care enough for her to heal her.

I'll never forget, God asked me, son, what is good?

I said, My wife's healing.

That's what's good.

Do you see what we're going through?

Do you see what how difficult this is on us?

My wife's healing, that is what is good.

He asked me again, son, what is good?

And then I knew it.

I said, You're good.

He said, son, of what you're going through.

It brings you one inch closer to me, then it was good for you.

And all of that became so real just a couple weeks after he said that to me when my wife came to me.

She said, Through all of this, I have had to hold more tightly to the hem of his garment than I ever have before.

Last year at Pink Impact, we believed that God did bring healing to my wife, but it sure doesn't look the way I thought it would.

You know, if I were to take the medicine that she's taking, I've never had a seizure in my life.

If I were to take it and then try to stop at some point, it would probably trigger seizures in me.

So we have to be wise about this.

And so to this, to this day, she's still on the medicine, but that's not really what changed.

Honestly, that doesn't really matter to me as much anymore.

What changed is my perspective on what is good.

And I want us to be a body of believers that can truly call ourselves blessed no matter what our circumstances look like.

And I call ourselves blessed today because we're closer to God than we ever have been before, and we may still be walking this trial out in our lives, but I refuse to stop calling myself blessed just because of the circumstances that I'm experiencing in life.

I want to be exactly what God said to Paul.

Paul was saying, God, take this thorn from my side, and God said, Son, my grace is sufficient for you.

I want to be like Paul and be able to say, God's grace is sufficient for me.

The fact that he did complete his finished work on the cross, that's good enough for me.

And I call myself blessed today.

And we ought to be the same type of body of believers that can call ourselves blessed no matter what it is that we're going through.

I want to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes with me.

And in just a moment, I'm going to pray.

And then we're going to stand up and we're going to have the altar ministry team come forward.

And maybe today you want to pray with somebody and you want to be in agreement in prayer with them that your will needs to die in order to allow his to thrive.

Maybe you've had something that you've been hoping for and believing for for years.

Maybe it hasn't come to fruition yet, or maybe it's already passed.

Maybe there's no way that you can go back.

You feel like God didn't go through for you.

It was a death of a loved one or something that you went through.

You need to know where God was in that time.

We want to pray with you today.

Maybe you just need a resurrection in your life.

You need a resurrection in the area of your finances or a job.

We want to pray with you today.

We want to agree in prayer today that God is here and that he is made manifest in his time that he can heal, that he can show up, that there can be a resurrection in your life.

We want to pray with you today for that.

And so we're going to sing one more song.

And if you're staying at your seat, I want you to join into this song.

We're going to sing good, good father.

My question for you today is no matter what is going on in your life, can you cry out to him saying, God, you are a good, good father.

No matter what you provide for me, no matter what you give to me, you are a good, good father.

And I'm loved by you.

And so, Lord, right now, I just pray that you will draw every person who needs prayer up to the front today, Lord, that you will draw them to the front.

Lord, that every single person who needs to have a miracle in their lives, something where you show up and you do a mighty and miraculous thing in their life, Lord.

I pray they would come forward and receive prayer.

And Lord, today I pray that we as a body would go out of this place, calling ourselves blessed because of the work that you did on the cross.

I pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.