All right, if you can turn your Bibles with me to Luke chapter 19. And I'm just going to read from 41 through 44, because I'm going to be dealing with not just this text, but the other Gospels about Palm Sunday. Luke chapter 19, 41 through 44. When he approached Jerusalem, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, "If you had known this day, even you the things which make for peace, but now they have been hidden from your eyes.

For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you and surround you and hem you in on every side. And they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your patience. We thank you, Lord God, that only by your grace that we're able to be sustained, persevere. Lord, we need you desperately. Help us, Lord God, to have our eyes open, to see you as you are. We pray, especially this week, help us, Lord, to recalibrate our thoughts, our mind, our lives, that we may not drift.

Help us, Lord God, to be able to confess our love for you, not simply with words, but with our lives. May this week be a blessing, Lord God, upon your church, as we are blessed and reminded that we would return it, Lord God, to you in glory and worship and praise.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. As I mentioned, this week, this Passion Week, is set apart so that our natural tendency to drift, that we could catch ourselves. So we've been studying the book of Hebrews, and the first two chapters is a warning against the church to simply not to neglect our salvation.

You don't have to do anything to drift. Drifting just simply means you sat on the boat and you're just enjoying the current. And when you do that, you find yourself a day, two days, a month, a year later, you find yourself so far and distant from God. And the word of God that you confess to believe is God's word no longer has any effect in your life.

Songs that you sing are just songs. The gathering of the church is just a social place. You've lost your purpose, you've lost your drive, you've lost your passion for Christ. And it didn't happen because a particular event, it didn't happen because you confess and say, "You know, I don't know if I believe this or not." You just got caught up with life, and you began to drift, and you didn't catch yourself when you saw your heart getting hardened.

That's why times like these are important for us as a church. To take some time to reflect, take additional time to catch. If I've been drifting away from Christ, to take a deeper look about what he has done and what that means to us. So hopefully by the end of the week, that again, that we would recalibrate our thoughts, our mind, our lives, that we would live our life in a reasonable response to the things that we confess.

Palm Sunday is a day that we typically celebrate the coming of the Messiah into Jerusalem. But we already know what happens at the end of this week. This huge celebration turns into the crucifixion of Christ, where the disciples were scared, they're scattering, and it leaves the community in utter confusion until the resurrection.

And then even after the resurrection, there's a lot of confusion, but the disciples are sent out. So we know what happens today, and we know how it concludes. You know, if you look at the Ten Commandments, the first commandment is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." And it's the first and the most important commandment, because this was a commandment that a lot of the world was struggling with.

At the core of human rebellion is desiring to worship a god of their own creation. But the second commandment is a commandment that I think is more tangible, that people wrestle with more. Remember what the second commandment is? "Thou shalt have no graven images, and worship it." Don't make graven images.

Don't make God in a graven image and then worship it. If you look at it initially, it sounds redundant, doesn't it? It basically sounds like, "Don't worship any other gods," and then, "Don't worship any other gods in the images." Why is that commandment there? Because every single one of the Ten Commandments is very unique.

But why the second commandment? Why does it seem like it repeats the same thing? Is it simply because worshipping other idols is important, and so he says it twice in a different manner for repetition? When I looked at it a bit more carefully, I realized the second commandment is probably the most tangible, is the most realistic and most practical of all the commandments.

Because if you look at the church, how many of you really wrestled with the temptation of being a Buddhist? Maybe some of you guys came from a Buddhist background and you converted. But after your conversion, in your walk with God, how many of you at even one time wrestled with, "Maybe I want to be a Hindu." Or, "I wrestled with wanting to be a Muslim." Now there are stories of very few people who may have walked with God at one point and converted to the Islamic faith or became a Buddhist.

But for the most part, 99.9% of professing Christians don't wrestle with this thought. When God says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." So we don't wrestle with that, for the most part. That is not something that we have a conversation. I don't think I've talked to a single person in the years that I've been in ministry trying to convince somebody not to convert to Buddhism or something else.

But the second commandment, "Thou shalt have no other graven images and worship it," is a commandment basically prohibiting worshipping God in your way. To declare God as God, but then creating this God into your image and worshipping a God. You may be calling him God, you may be calling him Yahweh, you may be calling him Jesus, but the Jesus that you follow or the people follow is a Jesus that they've created in their own mind.

That's where the rubber meets the road for most of us. You can confess Christ and you can sing songs about the gospel, but the way that we live our life, the way that we live our life, we can see that it is not the Christ of the Bible that is being worshipped, but it is a Christ that we've created in our own mind.

So I say, "You know what? I want a God who forgives us of sins, and no matter what I do, he forgives." And so they live their life pursuing the world, and then they've embraced certain aspects of who Jesus is. And then when the Bible begins to talk about warning about sin and about judgment, it's like, "Well, that can't be the God that I worship." And so the Jesus that is being worshipped is a Jesus that they've created in their own mind, but it's not the Jesus of the Bible.

We can be in danger in the other direction where Jesus is just a moralist and looking at everybody's behavior, "You're not doing this right, you're not doing that right," and constantly thinking that they're going to earn their righteousness before God, not realizing that it is not by our righteousness.

We cannot possibly get to God by our own righteousness, and that's why he came. And so the God that you may worship at that end is also not the God of the Bible. He is a God who is perfectly righteous and perfectly gracious at the same time. And any God that you've created, that you and I have created, that doesn't fit the God of the Bible, it is not the God that we're talking about here.

And the reason why I mention all this is because the Jews had an idea of who the Messiah was going to be. They were so excited about Jesus coming in that we call this Palm Sunday because palm branches were shaken and put on the ground, much like the way that we would celebrate at homecoming of a victorious army.

We don't see that when we see the soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War or the other wars, but you probably saw footages, black and white footages of World War II after they defeated the Nazis, and you see confetti coming down all over Manhattan, and the soldiers are waving their hands.

And so the palm branches, waving the palm branches was their version of confetti being thrown to celebrate victory. Now up to this point, nothing has happened yet, but there was that kind of excitement of Jesus coming, they already knew. This man raises people from the dead, he walks on water, he tells the storm to calm down and it stops.

If there was anybody that was going to give them hope, it was Jesus. And he made that very clear when he came in riding on a donkey because that was a fulfillment of a prophet that was given over 500 years before he showed up, that when the Messiah comes, he will come to you like a king riding on a donkey.

So he was declaring to the nation of Israel that he was that Messiah, he was that king who came to fulfill that promise. But not only were they shaking the palm branches, in Matthew 21 verse 8 it says they took their cloaks and laid it on the ground. What that basically meant was that they were surrendering their lives to this king.

The cloaks, remember, the cloaks at that time, most people, if they owned one, only owned one. So to take that and put it on the ground basically means that they're surrendering. We want you to be our king. You could imagine the excitement. In fact, in Matthew chapter 21 verse 10, Matthew describes the crowd as being stirred up.

The word for stirred up in Greek is "saizo" where we get the word seismic. Basically he's describing a shaking of the ground. Now this was all taking place during the Passover week, where even without the excitement of Messiah coming into town, it was the Passover week, it was the Jewish Independence Day.

So even in a regular Passover week, there would be, according to Jewish historians, over a million people gathered there. But now because of this extra excitement of Christ coming in, and especially right before he enters, he raises Lazarus from the dead, and this word began to spread. And so now people are coming into town to see if Jesus really is this Messiah that everybody's been talking about.

And did he actually raise Lazarus, a prominent member of a prominent family? Was he actually raised? So we don't know exactly what the number is, but if the average number was over a million, can you imagine what the crowd was like? So to say that there was a stir, an excitement over Jesus' coming, it would probably be an understatement.

But to really understand the excitement of the nation of Israel, you have to understand the history. When was the last time that you really wanted something and you had to wait for it? And the excitement of the day that when it came. Maybe when you were a teenager and you were going to get a car, and it could have been a piece of junk, but you were waiting because that car represents freedom, and maybe you went to go get it, or maybe you were going to get it, a used car, whatever it may be, to you it meant freedom, and you had to wait.

You got to get your license. So you remember what it was like, right? Whatever it may be, maybe it was your wedding day, maybe it was the coming of a child, first-born child, maybe it was a vacation, whatever it may be, it's something that you really long for that was actually going to happen.

So you can imagine or relate to a small degree possibly what the nation of Israel may have gone through. You have to remember that Israel was a covenant people. As soon as they started, when God started, God had a specific purpose for the nation of Israel. God promised Abraham and his descendants that he was going to bless them, make their land, he's going to give them land, he's going to give them descendants that they can count, and then through them he was going to bless all the other nations.

There was a very special covenant anointing upon Israel and their descendants. That's why when you read the story of Jacob and Esau, remember Jacob is a slippery one, he comes and he kind of maneuvers and gets his older brother to give him his birthright, and Esau being a hunter comes in and he's hungry and famished, and because he wants the porridge, he said, "Well, what is my birthright to me when I'm going to starve to death?" It's a little bit dramatic, right?

And so he trades his birthright in order to get the porridge, and as a result of that, there's a curse that comes upon him and his descendants for centuries. If you look at that, if you look into the New Testament, it says Esau was evil for doing this. But when you look at the actual story, I mean, how many of us would have thought, it's like, yeah, I mean, because inheritance, a birthright, is not going to be, you don't know, it could be 50 years from now, 100 years from now, but I'm starving now.

We could relate to Esau, in fact, Jacob is the one, he's the weasel who's like, you know, maneuvering and lying and conniving to get the birthright. But the reason why Jacob, even in his maneuvering, was considered righteous and Esau evil for what he did was because of the anointing upon this family.

See, this inheritance that was supposed to come to the firstborn was not just simply talking about wealth. It was not about the cattle or the land. What Esau was rejecting was the covenant promise that God made with this family. So when he says, "What is my birthright when I'm hungry?" He's basically saying, "All the promises of God, what is it good to me when I'm hungry now?" Israel was not like any other nation.

There was an anointing upon this nation that everybody knew, but God told them as they enter into the promised land, "If you keep my covenant and my commandments, God will bless you. But if you do not, there will be a curse upon you." So we know the history of Israel.

They go in, they begin to compromise, they chase after other gods, and as a result of that, punishment comes. First the Assyrians come, they drag their best men and women, and they literally torture them. That wasn't enough. The Babylonians come, and whatever was left of Israel, they take the other two tribes, and they take them into captivity.

There is a brief period of revival where King Cyrus, the Persian king, allows them to go back and reestablish the temple, reestablish the nation of Israel, but only a very small portion of Israel ever come back from Babylon. And it was nothing like what they were hoping for. Now if that wasn't enough, after that the Greeks come in and they conquer them, and after the Greeks, the Romans come in and conquer them.

During this whole period, in their frustration, in their dominance by secular nations, parents and grandparents kept on reminding each other. No matter how hard it gets, every prophet in the Old Testament reminds them that though you are judged now, God will send a king, and when he comes, he's going to establish an everlasting kingdom.

There's going to be honey that's going to overflow from the ground, that the beast, the lions in the land, will be lying in the ground, and without any turmoil. He's going to bring permanent peace. And so they reminded each other, no matter how hard the economy got, no matter how much they were suppressed, their hope was placed on this Messiah.

When he comes, everything is going to get better. You have to understand that in the midst of all the hundreds and hundreds of years of frustration and hundreds and hundreds of years reminding each other from great, great, great grandparents telling them one generation after another, when the Messiah comes, God's going to restore what he promised to Abraham.

He's going to make our nation great. So you can imagine the excitement about Jesus. It wasn't simply about that period. It was about the fulfillment of a nation that's been suppressed for generation after generation after generation. Now Romans were not the cruelest of all the other secular nations. The Assyrians were brutal.

They tore them apart. They raped and pillaged villages to scare any other nation that would say, "If you mess with us, this is going to happen." The Romans weren't as cruel as the Greeks. They forbade them from circumcision. It was illegal to circumcise. They set up an altar for their god at the temple that they were supposed to worship.

So they were cruel. Romans, on the other hand, on the surface, looked like they were kind of allowing certain things to happen. But you know, one of the things, I'm not going into too much detail about what it was like to be a Jew during the time of the Roman Empire, but remember in Matthew chapter 5, verse 41, Jesus says, "If someone asks you to go a mile, instead of just going a mile, go the extra mile." And the reason why Jesus gives that reference was there was a law that said that if a Roman soldier saw you on the street and he asked you to carry his armor, his sword, whatever it was that he was carrying, you were required by law to carry that for him.

You can imagine how easily that can be abused. A Roman soldier comes in and you're taking care of your children, and he says, "Take my stuff and walk a mile." You have to. It was by law. Jesus was referring to that. Instead of being angry over the situation, he says, "Go an extra mile.

Win him over by grace and kindness." But again, it's easier said than done, but imagine if that happened on a Sabbath. You're trying to keep the law, and you feel like you've kept the Sabbath well for so many years and all of a sudden a soldier comes on a Sabbath day and says, "You carry this." And so there was this tension between serving God and being obedient to Israel.

And if you look at all the questions that are asked of Jesus, it relates to that tension. We're trying to obey God, but then Romans won't allow us. How do we fulfill this? We have this coin. Who do we give it to? Do we give it to the temple?

And so all the questions pertain to this tension. It was miserable for the nation, especially if you were concerned about being obedient to the Old Testament. And that's why the Pharisees, you know, they all kind of figured out how to maneuver this. See, it's in this context. It says when Jesus came in, people were crying out, "Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest." And the word Hosanna literally means, "Save us.

Save us from this." And he's not simply talking about saving from the Romans. This is generational. Their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents told them every time, "The answer is the Messiah." When the Messiah comes, when the king is established, all of this is going to be wiped out. God is going to fulfill what he says to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12.

But here's the strange thing. In the midst of this celebration, confetti, cloaks being thrown on the ground, this excitement of finally, finally God has heard our prayers. Finally God is going to deliver us. Finally he's going to save us. And the ground is stirring because of excitement. And then right in the middle of all that, in Luke chapter 1941, it says, "When he," Jesus, "drew near and saw the city, he wept over it." Strange scene.

Everybody else celebrating, euphoria, excitement about what he's going to do. They all were imagining what it was going to look like. I mean, here's a man who could raise people from the dead. What is he going to do to the Romans? A countless number of times that the Jewish leaders wanted to catch him, and he just walks through the crowd, disappears.

Storm comes, and the disciples think that they're going to die. He just wakes up and he says, "Calm down." And even the storm calms down. What is he going to do to the Romans then? They came in to watch. They came in to participate. They came in to celebrate.

If there was any period of Israel's history where they had hope, it was now. And yet, the one that they placed their hope on in the middle of the celebration, this parade, it says, "He was weeping." There's only two places in the Bible where it says Jesus wept. This is obviously the second one.

The first time is when Jesus was standing in front of Lazarus' tomb, and after he died, he saw the weeping of the people, which is also very strange because he went there late on purpose. He allowed time to pass so that he can die. And he actually told them that he was going to raise him from the dead.

And yet, when he stood in front of Lazarus' grave, Jesus wept. Why did he weep? This is the question that if we do not answer, don't know the answer to this question, you can worship Jesus all your life and completely miss the point. If you were at a birthday party and everybody's singing "Happy Birthday," and the birthday boy is sitting there crying, it'd be weird for you to keep singing.

"Happy birthday to you," and then the guy is crying. And it's like, well, maybe he's happy. Maybe that's what you think. Maybe you'll just write it off as he's happy. But clearly he's not happy. He's not crying because he's happy. Something is wrong. Like, how many of us would just keep singing and then go cut the cake and smash it in his face and run around?

It'd be weird. An average person would stop and try to figure out what's going on. Why are you crying? What are we missing? What happened? Did something happen before you came? You try to at least ask and find out because clearly there's something you don't understand. But here, Jesus in the midst of this celebration, people going wild, throwing their clothes on the ground, and the Bible says that he was weeping, and yet nothing happens.

Nobody stops to ask him. Nobody stops to ask the question like, "Jesus, what are we missing?" Maybe people must have seen him because it's recorded here, but my guess is they saw him weeping. They didn't understand, so they just kind of kept going. So they probably had that in the back of their mind, and they really didn't realize what was happening until after, later on, they looked back and said, "Yes, Jesus did weep, and he remembered everything that he said." Jesus says in verse 42 why he was weeping.

Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. Scripture says that he was weeping because they completely missed why he came and who he was. They thought they knew. They thought they knew who he was.

They thought they knew why he came, and they were projecting all their hopes and dreams upon this Messiah. But the reason why Jesus was weeping was the Messiah that they wanted was not the Messiah that was coming in. And he knew that they would end up rejecting him when they found out that this was not him.

They have been breaking the second commandment all along. They made a graven image of God, and they were worshiping the false God all along in the name of Yahweh. They were waiting and eagerly anticipating of the coming of the Messiah, but the Messiah that they projected was a Messiah that they've created in their own minds.

It was not the Messiah that was promised in Scripture. And that's why they ended up rejecting him. They wanted him to fulfill all their dreams. How many of our Christian faith in our generation, in the name of Jesus, in the singing of the Gospels, in our membership in churches, is a pursuit of a God that we've created in our own mind?

And the reason why it's so deceptive is because it seems close. And that's what the danger of the second commandment is. First commandment is very crystal clear. Either you are with God or you are against God. But the breaking of the second commandment, it happens when we are deceived.

We give in to our own passions, our own desire, our own passion, our own pride. And we give in to it. We call him Jesus. We read the same Bible. We pursue seemingly on the surface, sing the same songs. Yet at the core, we make him into something that we want, rather than what the Scripture says.

You see, the Israelites constantly greeted each other by saying "shalom." And shalom basically means peace. But the word for shalom, the Hebrew word, shalom, basically means completion. And that's what they were looking for, a God to come and make them complete. In fact, the Midrash, Midrash basically is a commentary of the first five books of the Old Testament.

The Jewish scholars basically was helping interpret the meaning of their laws. And in the Midrash, this is how the law of God is summarized. All that is written in the Torah was written for the sake of shalom. Don't miss the significance of that. Because he's not saying a part, he's not saying a certain part of the law.

He's saying all of the law. In fact, the nation of Israel prided themselves of being the people of the law. So when the scholars studying the Old Testament says, "All of the law was written for the sake of peace." That kind of gives you some context of why the Israelites were saying shalom to one another.

It wasn't just an average greeting. It was all their hopes wrapped up in this word shalom. That when Messiah comes, he's going to bring the shalom. He's going to bring peace. And again, the root word for peace, for the word shalom, is shalem, which means completion. In other words, when he comes, he's going to bring perfection.

Whatever is lacking in our nation, whatever is lacking in our family, whatever is lacking in our education, whatever is lacking in our temple, in our worship, when he comes, he's going to bring the shalom. And so they've been waiting for him to come. You know what's interesting is, at the core of this word, peace and completion, is directly related to the word Sabbath.

In the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, when God created and he worked for six days, what does he do on the seventh day when the work is complete? He enters into the Sabbath. So the idea is work that leads to rest, completion. So the idea of Sabbath is to bring us to completion.

And that's how the Bible describes our salvation, that because of what Jesus has done, because he finished his work, he takes us into his Sabbath. That's why he says, "Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you what? Sabbath." That's why it says in the book of Hebrews later on, "Work hard to enter the what?

The Sabbath, to rest." So in this word, shalom, contains the Old Testament version of all that we know of the gospel in the New Testament. So the word shalom basically was a description of the Messiah who's going to come and fulfill this. But the problem was, what they thought to be shalom was off.

And that's what Jesus is saying. If they only knew what was going to bring peace, if they only knew what was truly going to bring peace, then judgment would not be coming. After that, he describes the destruction of Israel in AD 70, that is fulfilled exactly like Jesus says.

And that's why he was weeping, even in the midst of celebration and this euphoria, because he knew that at the end of this, judgment was coming upon Israel, not deliverance. The scripture describes, Isaiah 54 10, that the covenant he made with Israel was a covenant of peace. Judges 6 24, Jesus is called, God is called the Lord of peace.

First Thessalonians 5 23, God is called the God of peace. The preaching of the gospel, according to Paul, is preaching of peace to those who are far and to those who are near. Romans chapter 5 1 describes our salvation as having peace with God. And Jesus ultimately is called the Prince of Peace in Isaiah 9 verse 6.

This Palm Sunday is a very, very important day for Christians. It's not just the resurrection, because this day sets off the day that is going to either lead us to the cross and celebrate the resurrection of Christ, or Palm Sunday is the day that people reject Christ. Either the Jesus that we worship is the Jesus of the Bible, or it is a Jesus that we created in our own mind.

It doesn't matter what he said. It doesn't matter what he did. It doesn't matter how we got to the cross, because in the end, it doesn't change what I want from Jesus. You can live your whole life in church, calling his name Jesus, praying to Jesus, worshiping Jesus and have the same response of Christ weeping over our souls, because we did not understand what would bring peace.

Some followed him because he fed them. Some followed him because he healed them. Some followed him because he was powerful. He was like a rock star. Everywhere he went, there was a lot of activity. Some followed him because they thought they were going to benefit from his fame. But in the midst of following him, many missed him.

In John 1.10, it says, "He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him." I think the greatest tragedy of being in a Christianized nation is that that line between following the Christ of the Bible and the Christ that we've created has been blurred to the point where it's difficult for us to tell who is and is not following Jesus.

This Palm Sunday is for that purpose. It's for us to examine ourselves. Am I following Jesus, or am I following the Jesus I've created in my mind? Is this a cultural Christ or Christ of the Bible that I worship? Is this Christ that I worship, if I follow him, do I follow him to the cross, or do I follow him to glory?

Acts chapter 13.27, "For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him, nor understand the utterance of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him." A few recognize why he came. A few he anointed, and it is by the testimony of the few that we have the gospel here today.

But as it says in Acts 13.27, "Because they did not recognize him, they also fulfilled the prophecy by rejecting him, condemning him, and by their hands they crucified him." You and I will either be the recipients of what Christ has done on the cross, or we will participate in the sins of those who crucified him on that same cross.

In Isaiah 53, 4-6, it says, "Surely our grief he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgression, he was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed.

All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him." Let me conclude with this. All the activities that we're doing this week, again, it's for the purpose of reminding us, helping us not to drift.

If you've already drifted, it'd be a great opportunity this week to kind of catch yourself and recalibrate your heart and your life to get right with God. And those of you, maybe you're doing fine, but to strengthen what you already have so that it doesn't become weak and begin to stray.

But all of this, all of this that we're doing, everything that we do on Sunday, everything that we do this week is for the purpose of reminding us, this is not our home. Jesus did not die to make your business better. Jesus did not die to feed you because you're hungry.

Jesus did not die so that you can have a better marriage. Jesus did not die so that you can have a better career. Jesus did not die so that you can have better friends. Jesus did not die so that you can have a better retirement and you'd make wise choices in your investment so that you can get ahead in life with the help of Jesus.

That's not why Jesus died. He didn't save us from having a hard life in this world. He saved us so that we would not have a hard life in eternity. That even if our life during our period here is difficult, all of that to ultimately result in glory when He comes is not about this place.

I pray that our Lord would open our eyes to see that we're just sojourners just passing through. And the main thing that He saved us from is ourselves. The greatest enemy is not outside of us. It's our own sins. It's our own sins. It's our own pride. It's our own lust.

It's our own coveting. It's our own hatred and anger. He came to save us from ourselves. And until we recognize that, when we say, "Save us, O God! Save us, Hosanna!" we will be proclaiming the same thing that the multitudes did. And Jesus will be weeping over our souls because we completely missed the point.

I pray that each event of this week would cause us to see the depth of our sin that required the depth of His sacrifice. So that when we come into communion on Friday, that that communion table would break us. The significance of what He has done on Friday would not simply just pass us by like any other day.

That we would weep with Him, that we may celebrate with Him. Let's take some time to pray as we invite our worship team to come. My prayer is that today would prepare us for what's coming. I don't want you guys to think of it as like, "Okay, Sunday is over and then now what?" But the whole purpose of today's message is to get you ready for what's coming and to really set apart this week fast.

Put away certain things. Whatever it is that you normally do, it may not be sinful, but to commit this week to really get right and get on the right track with God. So let's pray and ask God to reveal those things. What should I do? What should I pursue in a tangible way?

Amen. (light music)