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Christ's Sacrifice ... And Ours!
March 16, 2008
Scripture Readings-
Old Testament – (God is in perfect control of history. Hundreds of years before Jesus rode into Jerusalem God moved Zechariah to write about what would happen on the first Palm Sunday.) Zechariah 9:9-11 Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.
Epistle – (Jesus, being God, being holy, being ruler of heaven and earth didn’t hang on to it. He gave it up and set it aside. He came to us as one of us and was the sacrifice that paid for our sins.) Philippians 2:5-11 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Gospel – (If you ever have someone in your life that is having trouble believing that Jesus really is God and that everything in the Bible is true, just direct them to this reading, it’s incredible. Jesus is able to say that He is going to Jerusalem, suffer, die and rise three days later and it happened just as He said it would.) Matthew 20:17-19 Now as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside and said to them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”
Sermon –
This Lenten season we’ve been doing something that I’ve not done in twenty years in ministry. The Bible tells us in 2 Corinthians 13:5 “Examine yourselves to see if you’re still in the faith; test yourselves.” So what we’ve been doing in the Wednesday Evening services during Lent is taking a test dealing with various Biblical concepts like good works, faith, and prayer and we’ve been testing ourselves. We’ve had so much fun doing it that we wanted to share the joy with you on this Palm Sunday morning. Today,we’re going to take a test and examine ourselves to see if we’re in the faith regarding sacrifice. Palm Sunday week is all about sacrifice, Jesus rode into Jerusalem with people shouting “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”, but by Thursday they were shouting, “Crucify him!” What happened? The people really didn’t understand this aspect of sacrifice, that Christ put who He was aside to suffer, die and pay for our sins so that we would be forever reconciled to God, so that we would forever know God’s help and peace in the difficult circumstances of life, and in the good times too!
So let’s examine ourselves this morning in regard to sacrifice. Here’s our test…
- Sacrificing for the Lord is optional. That’s why Lutherans don’t
give up something for Lent. T F
- God will use you as a sacrifice to accomplish His goals. T F
- Sometimes God calls us to sacrifice our emotions, feelings
and opinions. T F
- God rewards each and every sacrifice for Him. T F
- The stewardship sign-up sheets are a way God communicates
what my sacrifice could be. T F
Now for the answers -
Romans 12:1 tells us, “Therefore I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God- this is your spiritual act of worship.” It’s not that we serve God because we have to; we serve God because we grasp the greatness of God’s mercy, the depth of His sacrifice. God has offered us mercy; if He were to be perfectly just, He would pick all of us up right now and send us “you know where” because we have violated His command to be perfect. But God didn’t do that, He rode into Jerusalem, was the sacrifice on Good Friday, and paid for our sins and we know this because He rose from the dead. That’s God’s mercy; He sacrificed for us even though we don’t deserve it, even though we’ve offended him, even though we’ve sinned – and God hates sin! In light of God’s great mercy there’s only one thing we can say to that - “WOW! I can’t believe that He would take my sins, and pay for them! I can’t believe that He would offer me heaven! I can’t believe that He would let me approach Him in prayer! I can’t believe all the kindness and mercy He has shown to me! WOW!” That’s the WOW! Factor. And if you’re having trouble grasping the greatness of God’s mercy, please go to the Church library after the worship service and take out a copy of the video “Passion of the Christ”. Watching it will produce the WOW! Factor in you. The movie is very Biblical in respect to Christ’s suffering and when you graphically see the suffering Christ did for you, you will say “WOW! God, what can I do in response to what You did for me; how can I serve you?” We don’t serve God so that we can get into heaven, we already have that. We don’t serve God so that we can have God’s favor, we already have that, Jesus earned it for us, we serve Him because we are hit with WOW!
This is one thing that perhaps we haven’t grasped as Christians. Once you grasp this, all of a sudden things begin to fall into place and life begins to make sense. God uses us as a sacrifice to do His work here on earth. This explains why many times God sends us through things we don’t want to go through; this explains why trouble and hardships enter our lives. In John Chapter 9 Jesus healed the man born blind but people still did not believe that He really was God. So God had to crank it up a couple more notches. In John 11:4 Jesus points out that Lazarus was going to get sick and die to glorify God. Jesus needed to do something to help the people understand that He was really God; and next step after healing someone is raising someone from the dead! So Lazarus got sick and died. After Jesus heard that Lazarus was sick, He didn’t hurry, He let Lazarus die and lie in the grave four days! Lazarus was in the grave so long that when Jesus requested the stone before the tomb be rolled away, the people said, “It’s going to stink! This guy has been in there for four days!” But Jesus walked up to the tomb and said “Lazarus, come out!” and Lazarus got up and walked out. That’s how powerful God’s Word is. God needed a sacrifice, He needed someone to get sick and die and Jesus used Lazarus as a sacrifice to show that He really was God. This was Lazarus’s first sacrifice. Lazarus’s second sacrifice was coming back to life. If you’re a believer you know that upon death your soul and spirit go to heaven immediately. Lazarus had spent four days in heaven and had to come back. What a sacrifice! To show God’s glory, Lazarus had to come back, continue to live, eventually get sick and die all over again! What a sacrifice!
God used Job as a sacrifice. In Job Chapters 1 and 2, the devil came to God and said, “No wonder Job worships you, no wonder Job follows you, His life is pretty good! He’s wealthy, healthy, etc. etc. But if you take it away, Job will curse you to your face!” There’s the challenge and God is not going to roll over and play dead. He said to the devil, “OK, let’s do it. There’s my servant Job. You can do anything you want to him but you can’t kill him.” So the devil tormented Job and Job lost everything – health, wealth, family, everything; you name it, he lost it! But Job did not curse God, he said “The Lord gives, He takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord”. God won the bet because Job didn’t give in. Job understood the concept of being used as a sacrifice to do God’s work. If God used Job, He’s going to use you. If He used Lazarus, He’s going to use you. He’s going to use you as a sacrifice to get his work accomplished.
In Luke 13:1-5 the tower at Siloam fell and killed eighteen people. This is meaningful when we think about the crane that fell over yesterday in Manhattan and people died. We know the most important thing is that people repent and turn to Christ, that they confess their sins and believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior; without that when you die, you’re lost. And to emphasize to people that we could die at any moment and need to repent. God lets tragedies happen, things go wrong, and nothing works right. That’s what’s happening in Luke Chapter 13. Jesus said “Those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell, do you think they were worse sinners than all those others who were living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you also will perish.” God used those eighteen people as a sacrifice to remind us that life is short and we need to repent. A satellite could fall through the roof at any time and kill us all. I don’t mean to be gloomy, but it could happen! We have to be ready now to enter eternal life. God does use His people in various situations, sacrificing them, their possessions and sometimes their needs, in an effort to point people toward Christ. We may say that that is awfully mean of God, but look what He did with His own Son. Now that was a sacrifice! Expect God to do the same thing in your life and all of a sudden life will start making sense.
God not only sacrifices the material things in our lives, He also calls us to sacrifice our feelings, emotions and opinions. Where this comes up many times is when we are in conflict with people. There are some people here in church this morning that we haven’t seen for quite a while. Ken and Barbie are here this morning and we’re happy to see them! Ken and Barbie have been having some real conflict in their lives, they look happy, but there’s lots of conflict going on in their lives, don’t let those smiles fool you! Barbie did something that really irritated Ken, but she’s not really sure what she did. She went to Ken and said, “Ken, something’s bothering you. What’s wrong?” Ken said, “I can’t talk about it!” Barbie said, “But I obviously have done something that hurt you.” And Ken said again that he wasn’t ready to talk about it. Well, Ken should talk about it. If you have a conflict with someone, you had better be prepared to talk about it, to sit down face to face with the person and talk it out. If you say, “Well I just can’t handle it; emotionally I just can’t do it!”, it’s time to sacrifice the emotions and be reconciled. Sit down, talk it out and be reconciled – and it’s over! Or sometimes we say “I can’t forgive, I’m not ready to forgive, and I can’t do it.” The Bible says you have to be ready to forgive, because that’s what God does for us. When we sin, God never says “I’m not emotionally ready to handle your sins just now”. He says, “Forgiven!” A lot of times we have to sacrifice our hurts, our emotions, our feelings, our opinions to do what God’s Word tells us to do. Run your emotions, your opinions, and your feelings through God’s Word before you act. Sometimes we need to sacrifice those emotions and opinions and just forgive. And even though we don’t want to talk about it, sit down, talk it over, and be reconciled. That’s what God did for us.
Ephesians 4:32 says, “Forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.” It doesn’t say “forgive when you feel like it”; it doesn’t say “forgive when you’re emotionally healthy”, it says “forgive!” And how do we do that? Remember the four promises of forgiveness: 1) don’t dwell on it, 2) don’t talk to others about it,3) treat the person like it never happened, and 4) don’t let the situation stand in the way of your relationship with them. The four promises of forgiveness have nothing to do with feelings and emotions; do what the Bible says - sacrifice your feeling!
A lot of times people think that this Christianity stuff is not going to work because if we’re saved by faith, nobody is going to do good works, the world is going to be in havoc, everyone is going to be as bad as they want to be. But we do good works because of the WOW! Factor; in appreciation of what God has done for us. And remember that God promises to reward each and every good work that you do. Matthew 10:41, 42 Jesus says “Anyone who receives a prophet receives a prophet’s reward” (a reward for serving the Lord). “Anyone who receives a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.” God rewards every good thing that you do for him. We don’t do good deeds to earn God’s favor, we already have God’s favor; we don’t do good deeds to earn our way into heaven, we already have our place in heaven; we do good deeds in service to the Lord. If God only gave us eternal life in heaven that would be more than we could ever hope for; but He goes the extra mile. He says we can pray to Him and He promises to reward every good work. What a great God! WOW!
Peter was always complaining, thinking that someone was getting a better deal than he was. In Mark 10:28 Jesus was talking about sacrifice and Peter was very quick to point out “We’ve left everything to follow you Lord, and you’re forgetting about that!” Jesus said to Peter “I tell you the truth, no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields - and with them persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.” WOW! A hundred times! One act; a reward a hundred times for just one act! That’s God’s promise to you.
A while ago we studied “Common Deceptions” in a Bible Study and one of those common deceptions we studied was the phrase you can’t take it with you. It’s true, you can’t take your money, your clothes, your boat, or your car with you when you die but you can take your good works with you. In Revelation 14:13 Jesus says speaking of His followers “They will rest from their labors and their deeds follow them.” God rewards every good work you do a hundred times in this world or eternally in heaven. Hopefully at this point you are saying “This is a great God, I can’t believe that God did all this stuff for me – WOW! What can I do, Lord; I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Well, God’s got the answer for you. That’s the thing about our walk with God – it’s so easy!
All we need to do is do like Jesus did. Jesus, functioning according to his human nature knew what to do on a daily basis. We could say, “But He was God; He just knew what to do!” But remember He set all that aside (the Epistle reading from today) and faced life just as you and I face it. And He knew what He was supposed to do because in John 5:19 Jesus said, “I tell you the truth I do nothing by myself, I only do what I see the Father doing became whatever the Father does the Son does also.” You know what God wants you to do when you look around and see where God is working, what He is doing among us, what He is doing here at Trinity, what He is doing among the people at Trinity. and then you just join Him! You don’t have to come up with anything on your own, just see what is in place and join Him! Vacation Bible School is something God usually does in congregations for His ministry and for the kids. So that’s a no-brainer, sign up to help at Vacation Bible School; that’s where God is working. We didn’t have to come up with that idea on our own. And so that you know what else is available, where God is working and where to join Him, the Stewardship Committee compiled a list, and it’s in the Narthex. All we have to do is just sign up.
Don’t make your walk with God harder than it is. This week is about sacrifice. We know that the source of our sacrifice is Christ’s sacrifice for us and say, “WOW! I can’t believe what God did. Asking nothing in return, how can I serve you God?” Sacrifice is not to earn God’s favor; you can’t earn what you already have. God rewards each and every sacrifice you make. All of a sudden we find out what God is doing and life makes sense. We see how we fit in as His people, why sometimes life gets difficult, and why He’s calling us to sacrifice some things in our life so that the gospel will be spread. And through it all you get to know Christ. If you want to get to know your God, and God wants you to get to know Him inside and out that’s why He’s given us a Bible, you converse with Him and do those same things that God is doing. This week God sacrificed for us. When we sacrifice for God we’re doing the same thing He did and we get to know Him better.
Prayer –
Heavenly Father, Thank you for giving us the opportunity to be used by You as living sacrifices. Thank You Lord. WOW! What a great thing to be a sacrifice for You. In Jesus Name we pray, Amen.
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