Matthew

Merry Christmas everybody! My name is Fort and I'm a junior partner at Grace. Now come and join me. This is going to be the best Christmas Eve service ever! I can't wait! I know because I've been here at Grace for my whole life. Thanks for watching. Merry Christmas, everybody. Bye. Well, Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope that you'll stand up and join us as we sing. guitar solo joyful and try Oh, come ye to Bethlehem Come and behold Him Born the King of angels Oh, come let us adore Him Oh, come let us adore Him Oh Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation. Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above. Glory to God all, oh Oh, come let us adore Him. Oh, come let us adore Him. Christ the Lord. Every nation will bow down before You. Every tongue will confess You are God. We worship and adore you. We worship and adore. this happy morning Oh oh Let's birth. Oh, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born. In a lonely manger, the humble Christ was born. And God sent a salvation, the blessed Christmas is born. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on new content That Jesus Christ is born. Go tell it on the mountain over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born. That Jesus Christ is born. is Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn King. Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled. Joyful all ye nations rise Join the triumph of the skies With angelic hosts proclaim Christ is born in Bethlehem Hark the herald angels sing is Lord in time behold him come offspring of a virgin's womb veiled in flesh the Godhead see hail incarnate deity pleased as man with men to dwell Jesus our Emmanuel Jesus But him, born Prince of Peace, hail the song of righteousness. Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. While he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, Bye. to the newborn king. Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn king. The first Noel the angel did say Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay. In fields where they lay keeping their sheep. On a cold winter's night that was so deep. Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, born is the King of Israel. They looked up and saw a star Shining in the east beyond them far Into the earth it gave great light and so it continued both day and night. Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, born is the king of israel is to our heavenly Lord that hath made heaven and earth of naught and with his blood mankind has brought Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel Born is the King of Israel Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel Born is the King of Israel In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place. While Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to their hometown to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea. To Bethlehem, the town of David. Because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary. He was pledged to be married to him. And was expecting a child. While they were there, the time out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born. He is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you. You will find a baby wrapped in cloths. Suddenly a great companion of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God, saying, Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God in the highest heavens and on His mother Mary laid down his sweet head. The wise men were led. Come see the baby and worship him. His name is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel, Holy One, Son of God, Savior of the world Come and adore Him On bended knee He came to ransom Someone like me What could I offer? What could I bring? Come and adore him. King of kings, his name is wonderful. Counselor, mighty God. Prince of peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel. Holy One, Son of God, Savior of the world. And the greatness of His reign will never end. Let there be peace on earth and all good will to men. Come, us worship him. Wonderful counselor. Mighty God. Prince of peace. Everlasting father. Emmanuel. Holy one. Son of God, Savior of the world. His name is Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel. You're the Holy One, Son of God, isn't a store-bought gift under the tree that we are waiting to open. We've been waiting. Waiting for something much more important. For hope to rise up. For love to embrace. For peace to invade. For joy to bubble up. In the midst of our waiting and longing, the prophet Isaiah from the Old Testament tells us, For unto us a child is born, a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. When we see it like this, we should remember that in our turbulent world, the government is on his shoulders. For he is our love, our highest governing power. And so right now, we light the central Christ candle because we have found our hope. We have discovered our love. We have realized our joy. We have encountered our peace. Today we celebrate joy to the world. The Lord is come. Choose today to step out of the darkness and into his marvelous light. And as we light this final candle, we ask you, light of the world, to light a fire within us, to burn this a part of your Christmas Eve. You know, earlier, the kids did a great job of reading the traditional Christmas story, and that's a great story. That's the big story. That's the one that we all care about on Christmas. That's what Christmas is all about, is the gift of God's Son, Jesus, the greatest gift that was ever given. But one of the things I like about that story, as we retell it over the years, is that we are actually in the habit of placing people in that story who were never a part of that story to begin with. We see this in our nativity scenes all over the place. If you go through your house or your mom's house or the front lawns of churches, we see these nativity scenes. And in those scenes, we see, of course, baby Jesus. We see Mary and Martha or Mary and Joseph, his parents. And then we see angels and we see shepherds. There's usually a donkey involved, and inevitably there's three wise men, right? And those nativities in symbol tell the story of Christmas. And it's always been interesting to me that we place the wise men at the manger of Jesus as part of the Christmas story, when in all actuality, they had nothing to do with Christmas. Not only are they not a part of the Christmas story, but they never even saw Jesus on a Christmas, let alone the first Christmas. And this is something that's always been interesting to me. It's kind of one of those little Bible facts that I've always thought was kind of neat, but I wasn't sure that it was very significant. But this year, as I was thinking about the Christmas message and rereading the Christmas story, I was reminded of this fact that we always place the wise men at Christmas, even though they weren't even a part of Christmas. And I began to reflect on that, and it became evident to me that there is something in the Christmas experience of the wise men that speaks absolutely to us and is representative of us. And so I thought we would take this Christmas Eve service, this Christmas Eve message, and focus on what Christmas meant to those wise men. I would almost say those three wise men, but we don't even know that that's true. We just traditionally say that there was three wise men because there was three gifts, but there could have been any number of wise men who came from the East. So let's look at the story of these men who came to fall on their face and worship Jesus. The only place we see the wise men is in Matthew chapter 2. So let's look at the beginning of this chapter when we miss all the time. Something that just tradition just glosses over. It's right there in the passage. It says, now after Jesus was born, this was years after Jesus was born, they come to Herod and they're looking for him, which means they were journeying to see him for a while. And it also tells us that unlike our nativity scenes reflect, they weren't at Christmas. And it's interesting to me that they weren't a part of Christmas, but that they came in later to find Jesus because for them, Christmas invited them to Jesus. They weren't a part of the first Christmas, so they didn't get to participate in seeing the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. No, they weren't participants in the first Christmas. Rather, Christmas for them was an invitation to Jesus. From the east, from very far off, from Iraq, Iran, India, China, somewhere in that region, Christmas, when Jesus was born and the guiding star over Bethlehem appeared, Christmas was an invitation to the wise men to come and find Jesus. They weren't there, but they were invited by Christmas, and in that way they represent all of us. And that way they represent all of who we are. I see the wise men now as representative of the rest of the world coming to Christ after he was born. We couldn't be there for the birth. We couldn't be there to celebrate the first Christmas. But the same invitation that the wise men received is the one that we are offered, an invitation to come and find Jesus. And I think in this story, they represent all of us. All of us who couldn't be there at that very first Christmas. All of us for whom Christmas is an invitation to our Savior to come and to find Him. And so if that's true, if the wise men in the Bible represent us, and Christmas is an invitation to us that they received as well, then what can we learn from their pursuit of Christ? Well, one of the first things we see based on clues in Scripture is that they searched for Jesus for nearly two years. We see that once they got there that King Herod was an evil king and he was afraid that Jesus would be the king of the Jews and take his throne away from him. So he had all the firstborns, all the sons ages three and younger killed in Israel. Which means that their journey was at least two years long before they found Jesus. Do you understand that that means the wise men searched for Jesus for two full years at minimum before they really experienced him? Before they really were able to worship him? Before they really were able to find him? I wonder how arduous that journey was. I wonder how many times they wanted to quit. I wonder how many nights the storms that came blocked out the light that was guiding them. I wonder how many conversations they had about turning around and going home. I wonder how many people called them ridiculous for their pursuit. I wonder how long it took them to work up the courage to leave and to go. Two years is a long time to search for one thing. But I love that they had to do that. I love that they searched for Jesus for two years before they experienced him. Because that search and the arduous nature of it and the necessary persistence of it is so true to life. Some of us experience Jesus like the shepherds did that night in the meadows. In the Christmas story that the children read, we're reminded that the shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night. And then the angels appeared in the sky and sang to them and ushered them over to the manger so they could see this baby Savior. And for some of us, our experience with Jesus is like that. We're minding our business, tending our flocks in the fields, and angels appear to us and they sing from on high and we're whisked into the presence of Jesus and we experience it right there in that moment. And some of us have stories like that where our experience of Jesus and our understanding of him and being swept away by him was just instantaneous. But for many of us, our stories with Jesus are a lot more like the wise men. We had to search, and we had to persist, and we had to overcome discouragement. And there were times when the storms of life might block out the light that is guiding us. There may have been times where we have wanted to quit. There may be times when we wanted to walk away. We may have had discussions with those around us about just going home and saying, this is too difficult. The truth of it is, we are told in Scripture to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We see in Scripture that there is this process where we grow closer to Jesus and that sometimes finding him is difficult. It's not that he's not there. It's not that he hides himself from us, but it's just more true to life that the search for Jesus is arduous, that it requires persistence. And it also makes me wonder about these men. How did they know to follow that light? How did they know that that star in the sky right there, that's the one, and we're going to follow that for two years. The only answer I can come up with is that to recognize the star, they had to listen to the voice of God that was in their lives. It's interesting to me that Herod and the men and women in his court could see the same star that the wise men saw. But when the wise men know that that was the star and the people in Herod's court didn't? I think the only difference is that the wise men were listening to the voice of God. I believe that Scripture teaches us that God has written himself on our souls. That our Creator God breathed in us spirit. He breathed into us the breath of life. And he gave us souls that yearn for him. He gave us souls that pine for him. He gave us souls that year. They listened to that yearning. And so they had the faith to follow the guiding light. And I'm comforted by the fact that that same yearning is written on our souls. Our souls were designed and intended to be united with Christ. Our souls yearn to be united with our Savior. And because of that, God always provides guiding lights. God always provides a flicker of hope. He always maintains a course of direction. He always beckons to us. He always invites. He never shuts the door. He never gets stamped out. His invitation never goes bad. He always shows us guiding light, sometimes in stars, sometimes in a flicker, sometimes in a pillar of fire, sometimes in a voice in our ear. But make no mistake about it, God? What did the wise men do when their journey was done and they're experiencing Jesus? Well, look at what offered Him themselves and they offered him their treasures. They immediately, haphazardly, without hesitation, offered themselves and their treasures to this baby Christ. And it wasn't, it's important to note, it wasn't out of the sense of ought. It wasn't out of obligation. It wasn't, well, I guess this is what we need to do now. It wasn't even out of a desire to placate this deity or to get God on their side or to endear Jesus to them. It wasn't for any of those things. It was this spontaneous and natural response to fall on their face and worship the creator of their soul and to rejoice that they had been united with their Savior and to offer everything that they were and everything that they had. That's the natural response when we encounter our Savior. I believe that so ardently that I would even say this. If we feel like we've experienced Jesus and our first inclination in that moment isn't to fall on our face and worship his majesty, isn't to be overwhelmed by his goodness and to celebrate his kindness, if our first response isn't to fall on our face and worship him and offer all that we have and all that we are, then we haven't yet fully experienced him. Maybe we have a notion of who he is. Maybe we have an idea or we've heard a teaching or we've seen a glimpse and our soul has lurched and responded. But if it's not this full, submissive worship, then we haven't yet experienced who Jesus is, and our search continues, and we have to keep looking for him. But I think it's interesting that we exist in this culture that ebbs and flows and is progressive and is conservative and cares about Christian values over here and over here, not so much, and sometimes it's hard to tell what those Christian values are, and we all experience this culture in different ways. But amidst all the changes in our culture over the years, Christmas stands as this guiding light every year. Every December, our culture stops and we focus on Christmas. It starts as soon as Halloween is done. Things get swept aside and we throw up the Christmas decorations and we start to decorate our house and we start to do all the things and we look forward to celebrating the holiday and Christmas music started in my house very early this year because I think 2020 needs a little extra Christmas. But if we'll sweep all the extra things away, what we see is that we live in this culture that has exalted Christmas, that God has strategically placed in the middle of our joint attention as this guiding light, as this beacon calling our souls home to Jesus. And what we have in Christmas is the same invitation that was offered to the wise men. We can't participate in the first Christmas. It's already happened, but in that light, in that star, in that very first Christmas was an invitation to come to their Savior. And the same invitation that was offered to the wise men is offered to you. It's offered to you right now, the opportunity to come and sit at the feet for whom your soul was created to desire. Now some of you have been looking forward to this all year. Some of you make it a habit to regularly sit and worship at the foot of your Savior. Some of you have been looking forward to Christmas because it allows you to celebrate the one that created you. It allows you to celebrate the one that saves you and who conquers death for you. It allows you to celebrate the one who loves you. You are already like the wise men. You have made your journey and you are experiencing Jesus and you are sitting at his feet and worshiping. And for you, I hope that this service is only a help in doing that. For others, we've tasted and we've seen. We've experienced Christ. Maybe even got glimpses of who He is. Maybe felt His warmth from time to time, but for one reason or another we've wandered off. And maybe we're a little bit further away from Him at the end of this year than we have been in previous years. Maybe we haven't paid attention to that light in a while, even as it beckons us back. My hope and prayer is that this Christmas you'll hear that invitation anew. And you'll turn and you'll take a step back towards your Savior. And you'll begin that search again. Or maybe we've never begun our search. Maybe we're like Herod in his court. And the light is there. The invitation has been extended. But we haven't been listening. So we don't hear it and we don't heed it. My prayer is that this Christmas would be the first time that you open your eyes to the beckoning of God. That you would listen to Him calling to your soul. That you would acknowledge that He is the one who created it. And that you would begin your journey towards Christ and experiencing Him. The great news is, if we seek him, we are promised that we will find him. We are told that if we ask, we will receive. That if we seek, we will find. That if we knock, the door will be opened to us. That's Jesus himself speaking to you. So my prayer this year for all of us listening is that we would heed the invitation of Christmas to come to our Savior. That this year we would take a step further in our journey. That we would take a step closer to Christ. And that all of you, whether it's right now in the service, whether it's this month, whether it's in months to come or years to come, but that all of you within the sound of my voice would have a moment where you fall at the feet of Jesus and you offer all that you are and all that you have and you worship him because you are experiencing your Savior. I hope that you know that Christmas is an invitation to do that. In just a few minutes, our great children's pastor, Erin Winston, is going to come with her family, and they're going to light the Christ candle to close out Advent. And when that flame lights on the wick, I hope that you will look at that and you will see that as God's guiding light. That you will see that as his invitation that he offered and extended to the wise men that he is extending to you in this moment to come and to be a part of Christmas and to come and to find your Savior and to know him and to fall down and worship him. I hope that you'll accept the invitation of Christmas this year. Let me pray for you. Father, thank you for always beckoning to us. Thank you for always inviting us, for always calling for us, for never giving up on us, even when we give up on you. May we, God, all who are listening, accept the invitation that you extend through the birth of your son in Christmas. May we be guided by your light. May we have the privilege of experiencing Christ. And may we be so overwhelmed by him when we find him that we fall on our feet and we worship. Father, I pray that through song and through reflection and through communion to come in this service that the rest of our time together would be a time where we sit at your feet and we worship with grateful hearts and spirits at the miracle of the invitation of Christmas. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for the greatest gift that's ever been given. It's in that gift's name we pray. Amen. are brightly shining, it is the breaks a new and glorious dawn. Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices. O night divine, O night when Christ was born. O night, O night Oh truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of praise in grateful chorus raise we Let all within us praise his holy name Christ is the Lord O praise his name forever Oh is proclaim fall on your knees oh hear the angel voices When Christ was born O Holy Night O Night Divine If you have been around Grace Raleigh on Christmas Eve in the past, you know that communion is a very special part of our evening. And we wanted this year to be no different. So we're going to give you the opportunity to participate in communion at home, giving us the opportunity as a body of believers to come together in fellowship and in communion. And so if you joined us and picked up a participation bag over the last week, you received in your participation package this cute little cup. This is what we will be using during communion. If, however, you were unable to pick up a participation package or you're joining us from somewhere, a different state maybe, and don't have access, then we ask that you take a journey into your kitchen and find some juice or some wine or some bread and then come back and join us. And while you're doing that, we will walk through a little tutorial on how to best utilize these cute little cups. So first of all on our cute cups there is a pointed side and if you bend it upward you will notice that there is a piece of aluminum foil and a piece of cellophane. The first thing that we want to do is take the piece of cellophane off. Underneath there, you will find your wafer or your bread, which we will use later. The next step is to then take your edge and to pull it back ever so slowly. And I caution you to do it slowly because if you just rip it off, you're liable to baptize the person sitting next to you or end up with a beautiful grape juice stain on your pretty carpet. So ever so slowly, pull back on the aluminum foil and you will reveal the juice that we will use in communion. And so now, I hope that those who have gone to the kitchen have returned. You have had the opportunity to open your elements. And now I'd like to prepare our hearts for this moment of communion by reading a piece of scripture from 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23 through 26. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is the body of Christ broken for you. Take and eat. The blood of Christ shed for you. Take and drink. And now I'd like to take the opportunity to pray for us. Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for moments like this when we have the opportunity to remember who you are and the sacrifices that you gave for us. Thank you also, Lord, that you give us the opportunity to come together as a body of believers. Even though we are separated and in our homes, we still feel that communion with you and with each other. And thank you, Lord, most of all, for loving us so much that you sent us your son on this very, very special night. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your son's most holy name that we pray. Amen. And now I would like to invite my family to join me on stage as we light the Advent candle. John 1, 1 through 5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Tonight we light the final candle of Advent, the Christ candle. This candle represents the light of life. It is the same light that we began talking about on that first Sunday of Advent when we spoke of this light crashing into the darkness of the world with the arrival of Jesus. It is his arrival, it is this precious child and the promised king that invites us to seek him, to follow him, and to become people who walk in and share his light. So therefore, go into the world with great joy, love, hope, and peace, knowing that he is with you on and go ahead and light them. Now, normally the worship team would sing Silent Night, but this year, being so strange, I thought it was fitting to show what it was like singing Silent Night last year. So here's some footage of Grace singing Silent Night in 2019, and we hope that in 2021, we can all be together again. Merry Christmas. All is calm, all is bright Round yon virgin, mother and child Holy infant so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace. Silent night, holy night, shepherds quake at the sight. Glories stream from heaven afar. Heavenly hosts sing alleluia. All sing hallelujah. Christ the Savior is born. Christ the Savior is born. Silent night, holy night. Son of God, love's pure light radiant peace from thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace Jesus Lord at thy birth Jesus Lord at thy birth Jesus Lord Merry Christmas, everyone. Heavenly Father, this has been a difficult year, a year fraught with challenges, hardships, isolation, tension, anger, and uncertainty. We know, Father, that you have seen your church and your people through more trying times, but for us, this year was hard. It was unlike any we've known. Yet in your word, you tell us to behold, for you are doing a new thing. You tell us that you make paths through the wilderness and streams in the desert. So even though at first glance it seems this year is one defined by pain and uncertainty, even though it may feel like we've been left alone to wander, God, we know that you are doing new things. You've done new things in the families of grace, allowing us to welcome new blessings into our homes. You've enabled couples to experience the life-giving fullness of holding their child for the first time. You've made it possible for children to feel the sense of privilege and responsibility that comes with being an older brother or sister. We see new things as this dark year has been brightened by announcements of children yet to come and blessings yet to experience. Even in a season of profound isolation, you've orchestrated the lives of those you love for our pleasure and your glory as parents saw the personification of years of prayers in the marriages you formed this year. We saw baptisms to celebrate and new families to welcome and small groups that tenaciously persisted. We do not deny that this year was trying and even for some of us, marked by loss. But we also acknowledge in that loss the years of profound gratitude for the time shared with those we love so much. More than that, we know that Christmas carries with it a promise that we will see them again. As this unique year comes to a close, we are more certain than ever of your presence and your goodness, bringing us together in socially distant circles and parking lots and driveways and backyards and drive-by birthday parties. Father, you've brushed away the fog of pain and uncertainty with moments of laughter and joy. We remember you on our soccer fields and baseball fields and Zoom calls and family outings and see you in the blessing of soul-warming friendships. After all that, we say thank you to our good Father. Thank you for the blessings in the midst of our struggles. Thank you for always making new paths for your children. Thank you for 2020 and all the new things it held and the future hope it has preserved. Amen. you

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Listen, I'm supposed to dive into a sermon, but before I do that, I just wanted to stop and celebrate what happened here last weekend. I feel like that was a big deal. Yeah. For those that don't know, last weekend, our series, we had a campaign series that culminated in a pledge Sunday, and we had a goal to have $1.5 million pledged in a weekend. And I kind of just quietly thought maybe if we could crest $800,000, that would be great. That would be a step in the right direction. And then you guys blew us away, and God blew us all away with the fact that we hit our goal. And now our pledges are up closer to 1.6 as they continue to come in throughout the week. And if you are here, I've heard, I've talked to some different folks who have said, oh man, I haven't had a chance to pledge yet. I didn't get mine in. Is that still going on? Absolutely. Absolutely it is. And please don't think, oh, we hit the goal. So my pledge isn't useful. That's not true. Everything we get above and beyond, we're just going to buy that much more of an expensive building and really leverage. Everything we get goes to step closer to getting out of debt and helps our payments be lower so that we can do more with the resources that we have. So every bit counts and every bit helps. And I just stand totally humbled at our God. And I also feel like I owe you guys an apology for underestimating your spirit of generosity, for being hesitant about whether or not we can do it? That's right, that's right. I must have had small faith. You guys expanded it. I know for me, it's an affirming moment. When I opened up the series, I opened it up by saying, God's hand has always been on this place, and we believe that it still is. And my goodness, did he affirm that. So before we continue on, I just wanted to stop and praise God together. So would you pray with me as we praise God for what he did? Lord, I know that a lot of us have given you exaltations this week, have praised you this week, have exclaimed towards you this week and just saying thank you for your hand being on this place. Thank you for caring about our little church. Thank you for caring about this community. God, we have faith in you. We have faith that you're guiding us in this direction, that you're inviting us down this path, and so we are here to walk with you. We are here to thank you. We are here in gratitude for you, God. May this church be a place that always honors you. Thank you for loving us and looking out for us. In Jesus' name, amen. I'm so excited for our new series because our new series is all about stories. And I think that stories are a big part of the human experience. I think we all love a good story and we really love good storytellers. You all probably have that person in your life that you can think of who, when they start to tell the story, the whole room leans in. Everybody at dinner stops. Have you ever been in a place where somebody, you're with one of those storytellers and they start telling a story at the end of the table and whoever you're talking to, you're just thinking, please hurry up. Like I want to hear this story. For me, it's a guy named Billy Bryce, just this big, huge bear of a man. Every time he tells a story, I'm leaned in, man. I just want to hear it because there's something about stories that just connects with us. There's something about a good story that we all pay attention to. The more I thought about it, the more I realized stories are so powerful because that's for millennia how we as people have transferred truth and values to the next generation. And stories are powerful because they're emotive and participatory. They invite us in. Rather than just giving us a list of facts or a bullet point of suggestions, stories invite us in. We empathize with the characters. We put ourselves in the story. We feel what the people in the story felt. It invites us in to participate and to feel what's going on in a way that just a cold list of facts doesn't necessarily. This is why stories are so powerful in driving home points. A friend of mine this week that is, he makes short films, he makes movies, his whole life is invested in story. I called him and I said, give me your best 30 seconds on why stories are so valuable to us. And he brought up a great point. He said the things that I did, the stories invite you in and that they're emotive, but he said that stories invite you to mine for your own truth. They invite you to find the truth within the story, to find what's being communicated, to find what the real point is and make it your own. Rather than someone just dictating to you a list of facts and things that are true, a story invites you in to mine for your own truth. And this, I think, is why Jesus so often taught in stories. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have a collection of teachings of Jesus that are called parables. A parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a point, typically a moral point. And Jesus was famous for teaching in these stories. To me, they're the greatest stories ever told by the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he told these stories to multiple audiences, and it would strike them all differently as they listened. To some, it was the Pharisees and they would hear the stories in a certain way. To some, it was common folks who were trying to figure things out and they would hear the story in a certain way. And then there was the disciples and they would hear in a certain way. And Jesus was always saying things like, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. He taught lessons in these stories so that you really wouldn't get it unless you were inclined to get it, unless you were open to the message of the story and to the hidden meanings of the parables. So for the next seven weeks, we're going to go through these stories of Jesus. We're going to look at the parables. I went through and basically just picked out my favorite ones, ones that I love, that have resonated for me over the years, that mean a whole lot to me. And the great thing about these parables is I'm going to tell them and I'm going to mine them for some truth that I think can serve all of us, but there's multiple applications to these. So you are invited to participate and come along and let these stories strike you however they would as we study them as a congregation together. So I'm excited to jump into these stories. I'm also just excited and relieved because I felt like in the campaign series, every week I had to like rally the troops for this new great vision of grace, and that was a lot of pressure. And now I just get to kind of open the Bible and be like, here's what I think it says. And that's way easier. So sermon prep this week was a lot of fun. I felt way less pressure. And this is one of my favorites. But before we dive into the parable this week, I wanted to preface it so that it hits us in the right way with something that I believe is common to the human experience. I think that to be a human is to feel the weight of expectation. To be a person, to be alive, to be human is to feel the weight of expectation. Here's what I mean. When I first started my career, when I went pro as a Christian, I worked at Greystone Church, which to be in ministry is just to be a professional Christian, and it's ridiculous, okay? We all have assigned roles, and you're going to see that as we go through this parable today. But when I started at Greystone, I think I was about 28, 29 years old, and I was the student pastor. I was the middle school pastor and the small groups pastor. And somewhere in there, I got invited to begin teaching on Sunday mornings. And as I did that, the more I did that, the more I taught on Sunday mornings, every time I would do that, people would come up to me afterwards and they would say, hey, what are your plans for your career? What do you want to do with your ministry? Do you want to be a senior pastor someday? Do you want to maybe plant your own church? Which in church world, I don't know if you know this, but if you're kind of entrepreneurial and you want to do your own thing, or if you're just a punk and you can't get along with anybody, then you go out and you plant your own church, right? That's what you do. And I always said, that looks like really hard work. You kind of parachute into a city, you get people to believe in you and give you money. And then you plant a church. And it seems like super hard work. And I said, I don't really think I'm wired to do that. But I don't know what I'm going to do. And people would ask me, are you going to plant a church? Are you going to be a senior pastor? Like, what are your goals? What do you want to do one day? And I just remember thinking, gosh, you know, I haven't really thought about it. Like, right now I have 150 kids. I'm trying to convince them that I know what I'm doing. I have no goals beyond trying to not screw up Sunday. That's all I got. But the more people would ask me, the more I felt like that was something I needed to think about. What are my goals for my life? What do I want to do? And I began to feel this weight of expectation. And the truth of it is, the weight of expectation that I felt is no different than what we all feel at different seasons in our life. When you're in college, the question when you meet anybody is, what's your major? What are you studying? Which begs the question, what do you want to become? What do you want to accomplish? What kind of person do you want to be? In your 20s and 30s, you're trying to figure out in your career, who am I? What am I going to do? What am I going to give myself to? What is my career going to look like? What are the expectations that are being placed on me? In your 40s and 50s, you begin to evaluate, how did I do? How's it going? Sometimes we do a mid-course correction. Sometimes we go, I'm nailing it. But we all feel this weight of expectation, this pressure to produce and to perform and to be. It reminds me of a comedian jokingly attributed a quote to Abraham Lincoln one time because all of Abraham Lincoln's quotes are so very simple. And so he made this one up, but I think it applies here. He says, whatever you are, be a good one. And I think we all feel that weight. Whatever you are, whatever role you find yourself in, if you're a daughter, be a good daughter. If you're a husband, be a good husband. If you're a teacher, be a good teacher. Whatever we are, we want to be a good one. We all feel this sense of responsibility and this weight of expectation that I'm supposed to accomplish something. I'm supposed to be something. I'm supposed to matter. And I think that that's an important thing to feel. It's a fair thing to feel. We should feel a weight of expectation. It's not good to drift through life never accomplishing anything. But to that weight of expectation, I think this story directly speaks. And this is probably my favorite parable. It's why we're kicking off the series with this one. This one is found in Matthew chapter 25, verses 14 through 30. I'm not going to read them all to you, but this is the parable. It's the parable of the talents. In the parable of the talents, Jesus is describing to the listeners the kingdom of God. And he says, the kingdom of God is like a master who assembles his servants. And he has three servants, and to one, he gives five talents, and to another, he gives two talents, and to another, he gives one talent. Scripture says, each according to his own ability. And he says, I'm going to leave. I'd like for you to invest these talents how you see fit. And a talent is just a denomination of money, okay? I'd like for you to invest this money how you see fit. And the master goes out of town for a long while, and he comes back. And when he comes back after being out of town for a while, he gathers the servants together, and he asks for his report. What'd you do? And the one with the five talents says, here, master, I know you to be a shrewd man, so I took the talents that you gave me, and I invested them, and I traded them in the marketplace, and here I have for you five more talents. So he hands back to him 10 talents. And the second servant does the same thing. He says, I knew you to be a shrewd man. You gave me two talents. I went, I invested them in the marketplace, and I traded, and now here are two more talents. He hands him back four talents. Each of them doubled the master's investment. And to each of them, the master says the exact same thing. Look at verse 21. It'll be up on the screen. After the one with the five talents gave him back 10 talents, two talents more, a total of four. He says the exact same thing. Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your master. It's the same response. And then he goes to the one that he gave one talent. And the one talent person responds this way. Master, I knew you to be a hard man reaping where you did not sow and gathering where. He's not the most capable employee, but at least he's got his money back. No harm, no foul. But that's not how the master responds. But his master answered him, you wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed. Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers and at my coming I should have received what was my own in interest. So he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with five and he says, whoever has much more will be given and you will receive nothing. And he kicks him out where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's an intense ending. I've always thought, man, I do not want to be that one talent servant. I do not want to be the one that takes what God gives me and buries it and gets in trouble for not producing. So we're going to come back to something in that story. We're going to come back to a statement that's made by the master, by Jesus. But before we do that, I don't want to miss the main point of this parable. The main point of this parable, what Jesus is driving at, if we want to do justice to it, I can't just blow by this. So the main point of this parable is the unavoidable truth that being a Christian means getting to work. That's the point of the parable. Being a believer, being in the kingdom of God, being a servant of the Lord means getting to work. It is an unavoidable truth. No one signs up to be a Christian and then just coasts the rest of their life like they're on a cruise ship or something at a buffet. We all have to get to work. So that weight of expectation that we talked about, that we all feel, is very real, and it comes from God himself. He places on us, if we are believers, he places on us a weight of expectation that we will get to work. Three weeks ago, I talked about some of this work when we talked about evangelism, and I shared with you the parable of the sower that scattered seed over four different surfaces, and the best surface, it took root, and the plant shot up, and what does Jesus say that the plants did? They reproduced 30, 60, and even 100-fold. And we said that's a tip of the cap to this weight of expectation that when we are believers, God expects us to reproduce ourselves. God expects us to share the gospel. He expects us to make disciples. We talked about the Great Commission the week before when we're told to make disciples, and we said, this is not optional. These are Jesus's marching orders to the church for the rest of time. Go and make disciples. Make no mistake about it. To be a Christian is to get to work, and there is a weight of expectation on each and every one of us who would claim faith to reproduce ourselves and others and to share the love of God with them. That's the point. But there is a beauty to this parable as we seek to bear up under this weight of expectation. And we see, I think, the beauty of this when we look at God's interactions with the five-talent servant and the two-talent servant. And we ask ourselves, okay, God does have an expectation of us. What is it? What are God's expectations of me? What are God's expectations of you? If we want to understand this, I think the first thing we need to do is be honest about the responsibilities that we've been given. The first thing we need to do is be honest about the talents that have been assigned to us. Be honest about the responsibilities that have been handed over to us. I think everybody reads the story and we go, man, I don't, I mean, I don't want to brag. There's a chance I'm a five-talent person. I think God's probably apportioned that to me. Maybe not. Maybe I'm this two-talent. I'm definitely not a one-talent. But here, let me help us all out, all right? Ain't nobody in here a five-talent person. Let's just get that off the table. One of the things we need to do in life is come to grips with the responsibilities that God has assigned to us. I think one of the damaging things we do in life and one of the damaging things we do in the church is we are a bunch of two-talent people running around disappointed in ourselves because we're not producing five-talent results when God never asked us to do that. So one of the first things we need to do is come to grips with the responsibilities that we've been assigned. If you look at the parable, who assigns the talents? The master does, according to their abilities. And if you take that a step further, in our life, who assigned, who gave us our abilities? God did. He's designed each of us. He's wired each of us. And he apportions to each of us responsibilities in his kingdom. But one of the worst things we can do is run around beating ourselves up because we're a two-talent person trying to produce five-talent results. I think of Metta this weekend. This weekend, we had our big student student event and we've got our great student pastor, Kyle, who's kind of heading that up. And we had about 40 kids participating in Metta. And in church world, we look at the way that Metta broke down and we tend to go, Kyle did the most. Kyle was the biggest deal. He had an impact on all 40 kids. He's the one that really nailed it with the responsibilities. And then we might look at the small group leaders and we go, they did good, but they did a little bit less. I think of a girl that we have, Jordan Shaw. She leads songs up here sometimes. She's a friend of ours. She's got two little kids. And her assignment for the weekend was to minister to a group of middle school girls, six to eight middle school girls. That was her assignment for the weekend. And what we're tempted to do, particularly in our American culture, is economize those things and say Kyle's impact was greater than Jordan's impact because Kyle impacted 40 and Jordan impacted eight. And I think that's entirely erroneous. Kyle is a single guy. He gets paid to do that. That's his job. That's what he has been assigned to do. Jordan did it for free. She left two kids at home. You know who the real hero of the weekend is? Dylan. Because he watched the kids to free her up to do that ministry, right? That was her responsibility for that weekend. And the difference she's going to make in the lives of those girls in a lot of ways is greater than the difference than Kyle is going to make. So it's not a value. It's not a numbers game. It's not a largeness of impact that we're comparing. It's simply what are the responsibilities that God has assigned to you? And to Kyle, he assigned the whole group. And to Jordan, he assigned a portion of the group. And I think the temptation is, if we're not even participating in something like that, is to degrade what we're doing even more. I think of Faith, who was over here. She left the service because her infant baby was fussing, and she knows that I'm easily distracted. And so she walked out, and it would be very easy for her to sit here and hear about Jordan investing herself in the lives of others, to hear about the great things that Kyle is doing, to see the people in charge of the food drive and think, gosh, I'm not doing anything for the kingdom. I'm not doing anything that matters. And to beat herself up for not returning the investment that God is making. But you know what she's doing? Her life is consumed with three kids. She's got Wyatt and Henry and a new baby, Katie. She can't see straight. She's probably not sleeping. And for now, for this season of life, those are the responsibilities that God has apportioned to her. It is not her responsibility to run around trying to impact everybody. She has those kids to think about now. I think so often we see five-talent people doing five-talent things, and we beat ourselves up because we're not doing that either. And that's the wrong way to think about it. The first thing we need to do under this weight of expectation is be realistic about what God has assigned to us right now. God has assigned to each of you, according to the way that he's wired you, according to the way that he's gifted you, he's assigned to each of you a ministry. It might be your kids. It might be a business. It might be a small group. It might be a single friend. But God has assigned to you responsibility of ministry. And your responsibility is to be realistic about what he's assigned you. And stop heaping guilt and pressure on yourself to do more outside of what God has asked you to do. And here's the really freeing part about that. Here's what I love about this parable. God's response to the five-talent person and the two-talent person. It's the exact same. It's the exact same. He doesn't look at the five-talent person and be like, whoa, you gave me 10 back. This is super impressive. Well done. You are a big deal in my kingdom. And the house that I'm making you in heaven is going to be nice. It's going to be on the lake. Two-talent person, thank you. Your community will have sidewalks. That's not how he does that. That's not how he does that. He says, well done, good and faithful servant. To both of them, you did the best you could with the resources that I gave you. And at the end of the day, that's the only weight of responsibility that we need to feel. We need to do the best we can with the resources that we've been given. In your season of life, in where you are, and the responsibilities that God has apportioned to you, your job, the weight of responsibility that you should feel, and the only weight of responsibility that you should feel, is to do the best you can with the resources that you've been given. If you're in your 20s and you're setting up life goals, you need to make it your goal that no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, no matter what God's apportioned to me, I want to know that I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. If we're in our 40s and our 50s and we're assessing how have I done so far, the question we need to be asking based on this parable is, can I honestly say I've done the best I can with the resources I've been given? If we're trying to figure out how good of parents we've been, if we're trying to set goals for how good of a husband or a wife we want to be, if we're trying to assess whether or not we're a good friend, the one question that matters is, have I done the best I can with the resources that I've been given? Have I honored God with the opportunities that he's given me? Have I been realistic about the responsibilities apportioned to me? And have I done the best I can with those responsibilities? That's why when people kept asking me that question early in my career, what is it that you wanna do with yourself?? Where do you think God's going to take you? My answer became, my goal is to hear well done, good and faithful servant. My only goal, the only thing I want in life, the only thing I want in my career, the only thing I want to hear about my efforts as a pastor, about my efforts as a husband, as a father, as a friend, the only thing I really want to hear is one day when I get to heaven and I finally get to see the face of Jesus, I want to hear him say, well done, good and faithful servant. I wanna know that I did the best I could with the resources that he gave me. And I wanna be so bold as to put that in front of you and let you make that your life goal. I don't know what your life goal is. I don't know what you came in here thinking you should do with your life. I don't know what your mantra has been, but if you don't have one, I would invite you to borrow that from me. That one day when we see the face of Jesus, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant. Let us not put any more pressure on ourselves. Let us feel no more weight of expectation than to simply honor God with the responsibilities that He's given us, with the gifts and abilities and the way that He's wired us to do what He's called us to do. Let us collectively make our life goals well done, good, and faithful servant. Can I tell you that frees you up from so much? Can I tell you it frees you up from so much pressure, from so much comparing, from so much, man, that mom is doing all of these things and I feel like I can't get my life together. That guy has eight side hustles and I don't have any. That person is crushing it in ministry and I don't feel like I'm doing anything. Let's stop doing that and playing the comparison game and just ask ourselves, am I doing the best I can with the resources that I've been given? One day when I see Jesus, will he tell me, well done, good and faithful servant? What if we make that our collective goal as a church? We're dreaming big dreams and we're moving forward and we're gonna build a building and it's gonna be bigger than this one and we all have hopes and yada, yada, yada. But what if instead of worrying about all of those things, what we worry about is week in and week out in our small groups, as we serve the kids, as we pass baskets, as we encourage one another, as we rally around one another. What if what we worry about is simply hearing those words from our Savior, well done, good and faithful servant. If we do that, He will say, you have been faithful with a few things. I'm going to trust you with more. I think it is one of the most freeing life goals and truths that we could have, and I would encourage you to adopt that as well. Let's pray, and then we'll celebrate communion together. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that we would accept the responsibilities that you've assigned to us. I pray that we would be comfortable and secure in knowing that we are working for you. We are working under your weight of expectations and no one else's. God, I pray that one day as we see your face, we would hear those incredible words, well done, good and faithful servant. I pray that those who are faithfully serving, faithfully giving, faithfully working and have been quietly for years, that you would bolster them, that you would be with them, that you would give them confidence and courage to continue walking in their quiet ways. Father, I pray that we would honor you, that we would do the best we can with everything that you give us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.