Where’s Jesus

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

If you want to turn in your Bibles to John 12, we're going to be in John 12 today. Some of you may be familiar with Where's Waldo? Any Where's Waldo fans in the house? Okay, just a few. All right, can you find him? I'll give you like 15 seconds. Nice, nice, no, it's good. All right, Hollis, let's show him. Let's show him where he is. Boom, right there, okay, you missed him. The reason that Where's Waldo is difficult is because there's so much else going on. There's so many things that are similar to the real thing that it creates confusion, it creates distraction, and it is a puzzle after all. It doesn't look like a puzzle. on really a traditional puzzle, but that's kind of Where's Waldo in a nutshell. Today is Palm Sunday, and we are going to begin with a famous scene, but it might look a little different. I want to show you, this is kind of a Where's Waldo version of Palm Sunday, okay? And this is an actual, like

somebody actually made this to kind of have elements of Palm Sunday in it. It's not, obviously, it's not perfectly accurate. And there is a Waldo in there, although we will not look for him there. I think this is appropriate because when we look at the actual scene of Palm Sunday, it is really more like a puzzle than it is a scene. It's really a lot more like Where's Waldo in John 12. And I know it's a much talked about, it's a very familiar scene with the palm branches going down. And so I'm going to try to talk about maybe something else that's going on in that scene. And so we begin with the palm branches in John 12, starting in verse 12 and 13. It says, the next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So there's a large crowd. They hear Jesus coming. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him and were crying out,

Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel. Okay, so there's a large crowd there. That large crowd was probably at hundreds, if not thousands of people. And all of these hundreds of thousands of people are actively worshiping Jesus as the Messiah. They are quoting the Old Testament. Okay, they're quoting a minor prophet here. And the reason they're quoting, when it says, Hosanna, bless his name, who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel, they are saying this Jesus is the guy. He's the guy that we've been waiting for. He's the guy that had been pointed to for over a thousand years. He's the coming Messiah. He's the guy. He's it. And up until this point in the gospel of John, but up until this point in in Jesus's ministry, his popularity had never reached this height. Okay. He, at this point, he

just got the check mark on his Twitter account. Okay. Jesus became an influencer right then and there. Okay. This was his big break. People were chanting the Old Testament for him. He's a certified influencer. And from this larger scene in verses 12 and 13, we kind of zoom in tighter in verses 16 through 19. And I'm just going to survey that. We get a survey of reactions. Okay. So in verse 16, We see the disciples and they don't quite grasp what's going on. They're a little confused. In verse 17 and 18, we have the crowds of followers. So people that had seen Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead are kind of coming around him and they're like, yeah, this is the guy. This is the guy. So it's kind of the hype crowd. So, you know, hundreds of people that are his hype crowd, the disciples kind of confused. And then in verse 19, the most delicious part, right, the Pharisees, the arch enemies of

Jesus that are, they're just so frustrated, they're throwing their hands up and they're saying the whole world is gone after them. So again, verses 12 and 13, this large view that we're starting to get a little tighter in 16 through 19. And then in verse 20, we focus in on one particular sequence. And it's an odd sequence, but it helps us. So verses 20 through 22, it says, Now, among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So just a small group of this large, probably thousands of people, small group were Greeks. And so these small group of Greeks came to Philip, one of the disciples, who was from Dusseh, in Galilee, and asked him, sir, we wish to see Jesus. So Philip went and told Andrew, Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Okay, it's peculiar because we're kind of getting broad and then a little tighter and then now we're really tight. We're onto this really small group that has asked two disciples to go see Jesus. And

so now we're finally getting to Jesus. Okay, we're finally getting to see, really, we're finally getting to see Jesus react here. We don't know kind of what we're not really given to what his thought process is, as these people are chanting and waving palm branches, we're not really into his mind or what his position is or how he considers all of this. And so finally we get to see Jesus react and we halfway expect Jesus to kind of be caught up in it, or at least to, I don't know, acknowledge it in some capacity. That's not what we get. Verse 23. And Jesus answered, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be magnified, glorified.

And that should strike us as odd because he's talking about something that it's coming, it's going to come, it's not quite there yet. He says, it's time for the Son of Man to be glorified. And you kind of look around and you think, well, isn't that already happening? Isn't he already in his pinnacle moment? Isn't he already at the tip top of his glory? And so Jesus elaborates on this a little bit. And he says, verse 24, truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. So this is curious to us again, Jesus is talking about something very strange. Is he not going to acknowledge the crowds chanting the Old Testament in his name? Is he not going to stand triumphantly over the Pharisees? Is this not his glory?

Is this not what Jesus has been waiting for? Jesus goes on, verse 25, whoever loves his life will lose it. And whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. And as we listen to Jesus' words, as we go from this big crowd to the medium crowd, to that real tight scene where these Greeks want to talk to him, we look at Jesus and it's confusing. We don't understand. We find out as we listen that Jesus' attention is really somewhere else. It's really not there. In all the detail in this scene of people hailing Him as the Messiah, of His opponents giving up, we're playing where's Jesus? We're looking for Jesus in the whole scene in John 12, and He's not there. His mind is not there, His attention is not there, He's unfazed by all of it.

His attention seems to be captured by something else. And I can only speak for myself, but I can say with great confidence that if it were me, I would be basking in all of that. I would be loving every last second. I'd be squeezing that sponge to get all the glory out of it. These are the kind of moments that we live for, right? These are these glorious moments where we prevail over a trial where everybody congratulate us on our achievement. And you know, Craig Keller, we've already congratulated you, but I wanna say again, bro, you passed a really hard test, you passed with flying colors, and I gotta say, it must feel really good. It does, I'm sure it does. That's years of work, years of accomplishment, and you get to walk in there with men that are supposedly a lot smarter than you, and you get to show them how smart you are, and they say, congratulations,

passing flying colors. That's got to feel great. They are. They really are smart. That's good. That's a good moment. Everybody dreams of these moments, right, of finally being recognized for how incredible they are. This is the moments that movies and commercials are made of. Think about what a movie does. We don't watch a movie following around somebody who does nothing. I mean, that was Seinfeld, the TV show, but that was just an anomaly totally different. We don't really do that. We want to see movies, we want to see commercials that really give us that moment where we're finally congratulated for being such a hard worker, where we're finally recognized. In fact, in the absence of moments like this, we create these moments in our mind, and I'll prove it to you. I want you to think about a time when you have walked away from an unresolved argument. Maybe it was a fight with a spouse

or someone, a coworker or a boss. And as soon as you walk away from that fight, you're still kind of geeked up on it. You're still a little tense over it. And what do you start doing? You start replaying it in your mind. You start replaying that argument in your mind. You're playing that confrontation. And you finish that confrontation in your mind. And let me ask you, as you play it out in your head, who wins? You. Every time. Every time. That's your moment of glory. You're playing out your own victorious moment of what you should have said or how it should have gone or, man, if that would happen again, I'd be ready and I'd say it this way and it would be like, bam. Ooh. And everybody looking would just be like, oh my gosh. It's our moment of self glory. And we laugh. It's funny. We laugh because there's no way we're going to win all those arguments, right? There's no way we're right that much.

We just aren't. We are re-fallible human beings. We play out these moments of self-glory all the time where we sink the shot. What does every little boy dream of? It's sinking the winning shot, scoring the winning goal. We prevail. We make it. We triumph. These aren't bad things, but they are self-glory by definition. What we find in John 12 is a prime opportunity for self glory. And I really want you to understand this, so I want to give you Jesus' perspective. Let it sink in. Jesus spent the better part of three years publicly mocked, derided, lied about, scoffed at. He had the law looking for him when he had done nothing wrong. He lived away from the comforts of home. He had given up so much to do what the father had called him to do. He was justified in everything that he did and he said, but he was still made out to be a sinner. He was still made out to be

abandoned, a scoundrel, a drunkard, a glutton. He was still made out to be these things. And so this moment in John 12, it has to be tempting, at least a little bit, to indulge in some self glory for Jesus to jump up and say, see, I was right the whole time. You guys look stupid. And I'm the Messiah. Yeah, we could totally get behind that. In fact, some of us kind of wanted Jesus to do that, right? I want to say, look, the whole time, you look so dumb.

But yet, yet, in this moment, in this moment, Jesus doesn't do that. He has a different kind of glory in mind. He's got something different in mind. Let's look at verses 24 and 25 again. John 12, 24 and 25, truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Jesus is, he says, look, I'm not going for what's around me right now. I'm not going for that. I'm going for something bigger. I'm going for something greater. I'm not going for self glory. I want to be the seed that dies. Jesus says, I'm going to sacrifice. I'm going to be the one that's sacrifice. I'm not going to indulge in self-glory. Sacrifice is very different from self-glory. Sometimes it can look the same. So let me just, let's delineate a little bit. Sacrifice

Sacrifice is unpredictable long-term pain. Sacrifice is unpredictable long-term pain. Everybody's okay with pain for a little while. Everybody's okay with pain in the middle of the workout set, right? But if you're working out forever, that pain gets to be unbearable, okay? Everybody's okay with pain for a little while, but the longer it goes, the longer that pain sits in there, the more it costs you, the less your life looks like, the less your life looks the same as it used to, the more normal that you lose. That's the more that we begin to fear that we're going to lose our grip on what we hold most here. Sacrifice is painful. is facing pain without the comfort of knowing it will be quote, worth it. Sacrifice is facing that and not knowing if it's going to be worth it in the end. Self glory, however, is predictable and it is short term pain. Self glory is predictable and it's short term pain. So self glory would be going

out for like a 20 minute run and then bragging about how hard that 20 minute run was. Okay. That's self-gloring. Sacrifice is leaving home without knowing if you'll ever return. Sacrifice is putting it all on the line. Secondly, sacrifice has permanent cost. Permanent cost. You don't come back from sacrifice the same. The things you lose in the fire of a trial are gone. They're just gone and you've got to deal with that. That sacrifice. Life never returns to normal. South glory is cheap and deluding. South glory is cheap and deluding. Historically, people give things up for Lent. In fact, we're about to finish Lent in season. So a lot of times people give up something for Lent. They give up smoking. They give up red meat. they give up watching TV or watching things on their phone.

Self glory indulges in those things for the experience. It says, oh, I'm going to give up smoking to kind of see what it feels like. But there's always this reassurance that Lent is going to be over and they're going to go back to normal. There's always that assurance. Sacrifice is not just giving up something for Lent. sacrifice is soberly cutting off that which holds us back. Not knowing what life is gonna look like, not knowing how we're gonna cope. It's embracing a different future, even when you don't know what you're signing up for. And so many times in our lives, we have these choices between self glory and sacrifice.

And it's hard to discern if somebody's engaging in self glory or sacrifice, because they can look the same. 20 minute runs look like sacrifice, some of us. They look hard. And these are the choices that Jesus puts before us in verse 25. Says whoever loses his life, sorry, whoever loves his life will lose it. And whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Don't, he's saying don't choose self glory and lose your life. Choose sacrifice because sacrifice is salvation. Sacrifice is salvation. Hating your life, to use Jesus' terms, hating your life is the only way to save your life. And just so we are sober about the entire experience, Jesus draws this line in the sand in verse 26. He says, if anybody serves me, anyone serves me, he must follow me. And where I am, they're my servant. There will my servant be also, if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him."

So to be clear, Jesus has just said, if you want to follow me, you're going to have to hate your life. If you're going to follow me, you're going to suffer. And where Jesus is saying, where I go, people that follow me, they're there with me. In the middle of trial, in the middle of suffering, they're there with me. You must hate your life. On this front, I've got to be completely forthright and say that sacrifice can seem very disappointing to us. Extremely so. Sacrifice is disappointing because it is so backward from the world's economy. We just got out of a sermon series on the economy of Jesus. We spent time talking about it. And we said in Jesus' economy, there's a certain way that his kingdom is set up, a certain way that it works, where love begins with Jesus, that love is sacrificial, where gender follows a created order, where authority is real and it works toward unity, where ministry is highly

valued even though it's extremely difficult. And wealth is not about money, it's about contentment with godliness. And the world's economy works totally different than that. Where we find security and money, we find identity in self-esteem and in self-imaging, we find happiness in throwing off restraint. Look how free I am. I don't have to do anything. I'm so free that we aren't really used to. We just, we even as Christians, we're in this world and we're not used to someone saying, You're going to lose. You're going to like it. And that's the plan. That kind of knocks us back on our heels a little bit. We want to win. We want to have our moment of triumph. We want to play out the scenario and say, no, no, this is what I would have said. Here's how I come out on top. Here's how I win. Here's how I score the winning goal. And it's just jarring. When Jesus says you're going to lose, you're going to like it.

And that's the plan. The great theologian of our time, Mike Tyson, he was about to fight the biggest fight of his life, Evander Holyfield. And if you are even remotely familiar with boxing, you remember how that fight turned out, he ended up biting off Evander Holyfield's ear and losing the fights for disqualification. But before the fight, before the fight, Mike Tyson was asked about his fight with Commander Holyfield, and he's asked specifically about Holyfield's plan for the fight. He said, what do you think Holyfield's plan is? What are you going to do in response? Mike Tyson said this. Mike Tyson in the box with theologians said this. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Listen, that's a great quote. I don't care who you are. I don't care if it came from Mike Tyson. That's a great quote. got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Some of you have followed Jesus until you

got punched in the mouth. The level of disappointment that you embarked upon, you started following Jesus, everything's hunky-dory, everything's good, and then you just get punched in the out. The level of disappointment has left you dazed and confused. You don't know what to do next. Some of you, you're, I mean, you're just, you come to church because you don't understand anything else that you can do. You don't know how to gain confidence in your spiritual life. You don't understand what it is that the word is calling you to do. So you just kind of go to church and go, Okay, I mean, is this what's supposed to happen now? Some of you, some of you are not even sure that you're a Christian, you're just kind of here. And let me just say, God bless you, I'm glad you're here. That's great. But some of you are in such pain, such frustration. And it's because you were expecting moments of self glory.

You were expecting to win and you're not. In fact, you continually face sacrifice, you face loss. And it feels like God cheated you on that. When we look at Jesus facing sacrifice, it's a sober thing. We know in verses 24, 25, 26 that Jesus is definitely facing the cross. Here he is in 27. First part of 27, he says, He says, now my soul is troubled and what shall I say, Father, save me from this hour? Let me just help you with this. Jesus is being sarcastic.

The tone of this is saying, OK, now my soul is troubled, but what am I going to say? Father, save me from this hour? No, that's not what he's going to say. So Jesus is saying, should I exercise my opt out clause at this point? Should I? Should I say, save me? Some of you pray that exact same prayer, but without any irony at all. You pray, Father, save me. Don't make me face this sacrifice. Father, don't make me, don't let this situation cost too much for me. Don't make me lose something that I just got used to. Keep me safe. That's what you pray. That's what you hope for. That's what you're living toward. And that is not following Jesus. That's different. I'm not anti-safety, right? I'm not saying let's jump off buildings and see if Jesus catches us. That's not what I mean, okay? But Jesus says this prayer and he says,

here's the whole verse. He says, now my soul is troubled and what shall I say? Father saved me from this hour? But for this purpose, I have come to this hour. Jesus is saying, no, no, this is exactly, don't save me from it. This is exactly why I came. Verse 28, sorry, let me just read that together. Now my soul is troubled, what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour, but for this purpose, I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name. Jesus looks at the cross and he says, Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven. I have glorified it and I will glorify it again. We claim to follow Jesus and we wanna obey him. We wanna be part of a church. We want to make disciples. We desire the blessing of good things, but then we get punched in the mouth and we mistake that for a setback. Let me say it again. We want the blessing of good things.

We want to follow Jesus. And then when we do and we don't expect to get punched in the mouth, we don't expect to sacrifice, right? So we're following Jesus, we'll be bopping along. We get punched in the mouth, plan goes out the window. We don't know what to do now. Let me just help you here and say, when you follow Jesus, you will be punched in the mouth, proverbially. You might not actually get punched in the mouth, literally.

So, you know, you might pray and pray and pray and pray for a career change. And you didn't know that it was going to be this difficult. You didn't know that you were gonna have to pray for years. You thought you were gonna have to pray for weeks And God was going to close the door and open a window and sis bang boom, you've changed careers. Okay. That's, that's kind of what you thought was going to happen, but it's been years for you to pray and you don't know what to do with that. It feels like God's ignoring you. You're getting punched in the mouth and you're praying, please make it easier. And God's saying, I'm not going to make it easier. I'm going to bring this to fruition. You hang tight. You walk with me through this. It's going to happen. I've got some things to teach you. I'm going to meet you in the middle of that, but you will have to sacrifice.

You will face things that you didn't think you'd have to face and give up things that you thought you were going to have the rest of your life. Like maybe like your health and it ain't never coming back. Maybe for some of you who are single, you thought, you thought that person was the one. You thought that person was the one. And then you start hanging out a lot more. You know, you start getting like real committed. And then it just turns out that that whole enterprise is very painful. They're maybe they're real abusive or maybe they just ignore you or something. And you're saying, God saved me from this. I don't want it to be this hard. Or maybe you're praying, Jesus, I want my friends and family to know you. I want this coworker, I'm praying for this coworker, I want this neighbor to know you, I want, but Jesus, look, I want them to know you, and this is what we're thinking,

we don't actually pray this out loud. I don't want it to cost me too much. I still wanna live my life, however I wanna live it. I don't really wanna rearrange my schedule. I don't wanna give up the things that I'm used to doing. I just want you to drop my friends out of the sky and make them wanna be Christians. What we are doing when we do those things is that we are looking for salvation in all the wrong places. We dream up scenarios of self glory. We imagine what salvation could look like there. And we say, oh, keep me safe.

And that's not salvation. It's just not there. When we find this scene in John 12 and everything's going right, everything is going right for Jesus. Everything's kind of in play. It's on par, it's ready to go. And Jesus says, that's not it. That's not salvation. There's no salvation in self glory. I'm not going to parade over the Pharisees as they're throwing their hands up. I'm not doing any of that. In fact, it's time for me to begin to put some things that seemed really secure, like my ability to live forever, or my ability to live on this earth, right? My ability to continue ministering the way I was ministering before. Jesus gets all of that and he says, I'm going to sacrifice all of it, because that's what the Lord is calling me to do. Jesus' salvation is different than yours, maybe than your idea of salvation. It's different because salvation in Jesus

is to save other people, not himself. Our idea of salvation is to save ourselves and to spare ourselves some pain. Salvation, though, is born in us exactly when we are willing to lay our lives down for Jesus. This is what the Lord calls us to do. This is John 15, 13. So a little bit later, Jesus is talking with his disciples, and he says, greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. And this is our time of response. Just as we sing, as we pray, I just wanna encourage you. There are some of you that are...

Maybe you have just woken up to this fact. Maybe you have been reawoken to this fact, where this life that you're trying to live is just... You're just trying to manage how much pain you're feeling. Let me encourage you in Jesus Christ and say, just with all the compassion I can, that pain in your life is for you to face and find Jesus in the middle of it. That pain, I've walked with several people recently, they've been going through just some long-term pain, some of it's relational, some of it's health related, just long-term pain. And listen, there's a lot of kind of pain you can't take painkillers for. There's just some pain you just gotta live with, especially relational pain. And if you just spend your time running from that, it doesn't get better, it gets worse.

But in Christ, these people that I know, they've been able to just look at long-term pain and say, my life isn't going to be the same. My life isn't going to turn out like I thought it would. Everything's getting derailed. Everything's different. But Jesus wants to meet me in the middle of that. Some of you are going through pain. A lot of you are going through pain. And in the middle of all of that,

the Lord God in heaven has put that there and wants to meet you in the middle of it. My encouragement to you as we have our time of response, my encouragement to you, I'm going to be up here. My encouragement is to respond to what Jesus is doing in your life, to take a step. For some of you, that's going to mean asking for prayer of somebody right next to you. Maybe that's asking forgiveness for somebody right next to you. Maybe you have no idea what to do, and so you're going to ask somebody to pray for you. If you want somebody to pray for you, I'll be right up here. I'll be right on the front row, sitting right there. My encouragement, if you wanna come forward and receive prayer, you can, but you don't have to come forward to receive prayer. You receive it anywhere you want. If you wanna make a decision, if you wanna be baptized, if you want to become a member of our church,

then come on forward. If you're convinced, if you're like, yes, I need to walk with you, I need to be safe. I need to make a decision right now to follow him forever. And I haven't done that or I did a long time ago, and I don't know if it's stuck. That's fine, we can pray, come forward. I'm gonna be right here as we sing. So let's all stand. That the king of my heart, the mountain where I run, the fountain I drink from, Oh, it's my song Let the king of my heart Be the shadow where I hide The ransom from my life Oh, it's my song You are good Good Oh, you are good Oh, you are good Good, again Good Oh

Let the king of my heart be the wind inside my sails The anchor of the waves, oh it's my song Let the king of my heart find my veins The anchor of my days, oh it's my song And you are good Oh, are good, are good, are good You're never gonna let me down. You're never gonna let, never gonna let me down. You are good, are good, are good. Sing that again, you are good. You are good, are good, are good.

And you're...