If you can turn your Bibles with me to Isaiah 61, and I'm going to be reading the first three verses. Again, starting last week, we want to help prepare us for Easter that's coming and for receiving the Messiah. And we want to look at the hope of the Messiah that was embedded into the Jewish culture.

And hopefully as we go through that, it will help us to prepare for Christ and what He came to do. So I'm looking at Isaiah 61, I'll be reading the first three verses. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to prisoners, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to grant those who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting, so they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord that He may be glorified.

That's right. Heavenly Father, we pray that your word would speak to us, sanctify us, rebuke us, encourage us and build us up as you are the potter and we are the clay. Make us Lord God into the image of Christ, that these words Lord would open our eyes to better prepare our hearts Lord for the work that you are doing.

In Jesus name we pray, amen. You know a few years back, you know I started to search the internet to find out like when is middle age? You know, it ranges all the way from 40 to mid-50s. And so I was like, mid-50s? Who lives up to 110? You know, but you know like whenever that is, I was looking it up because I could see you know people around me, some people in their mid-40s, some people in their early 50s kind of wrestling with you know what is the purpose of life and I understand going through that stage myself, I can understand why, especially men, I don't know you know, I don't have personal experience for females, but for men why they go through mid-life crisis.

And it's kind of like you kind of hit a point in your life where you start to think that the end is much more real than it was ever before, right? Not that it's not real in your 30s and 40s, but it's much more real. Okay, so is it going to be another 20 years?

Is it going to be another 30 years? However it may be, it's much sooner. We've lived more than we're going to live going forward. And so when that thought breaks in, the natural thought is what did I do with my life, right? The things that I've done, is this enough?

And so a lot of kind of like soul searching and maybe even discouragement and disappointment and so you know, people do strange things during that period to make them feel like a makeup or whatever it is, I'm just going to do it, you know. I think you know, depending on how much time and effort and energy and money that you spent to build that up and when you get disappointed, the degree of disappointment is greater.

So whether that may be, maybe some people who came from a difficult family thinking like you know, once I get married, you know, we're going to have a new life and then you get married and then realize the same difficulty that you saw when you were young, you start to see it in your marriage.

Or whether, whatever that may be, maybe in your kids. It's like, I'm going to make sure that my kids are going to have this and they're going to do your best. And then time passes by, you realize the struggle of just even raising kids. And so whatever it is that you put time and effort and money to invest in, and if it doesn't turn out the way that you wanted, the disappointment that comes in as a result of that.

Now all the disappointments that I could possibly think of, the national disappointment of the Messiah, I mean you can't be exaggerated how disappointed the Jews must have been when they thought to themselves that this is not the Messiah that they wanted. The same group that was so excited about Jesus being the Messiah ended up rejecting him at the end of his life when he was headed toward the cross.

The text that we looked at right now in Isaiah 61 verses 1-3 is probably one of the most clearest presentation of what the Messiah was going to do. In fact, this is the text that Jesus opens up at the beginning of his ministry. He goes into the synagogue in Nazareth right after he comes back down being tested for you know after 40 days of fasting.

This is the very first thing that he does when he starts his ministry. He opens up the text of Isaiah chapter 61 and then he reads this text and after he reads this messianic promise, he said, "Today this is fulfilled in me." He said, "I am that Messiah." So can you imagine the excitement?

So when he said that, some people looked at him and said, "Isn't this Joseph's son? How could he be the Messiah? We remember playing with him." Maybe some of the adults said, "We remember that kid. How can he be the Messiah?" And then some of them responded by saying, "Man, is he?

Could he possibly be?" So for the next three years of his ministry, they watched him carefully. Could he possibly be the Messiah? And everything that he did proved over and over again. So you remember when Jesus feeds the 5,000 that this stirring of the crowd got to the point where after he fed the 5,000, they were going to forcibly make him king.

And that's why Jesus was trying to escape the crowd because it wasn't time for him. But this is exactly the kind of king that you would want. If you were to imagine that the king was going to come and deliver you from the nation, I mean, he's humble, he's powerful, he's compassionate, he's caring.

People who had no hope, he started giving them hope by the thousands. So of course they would want him to be king. But that same crowd, one by one, begins to turn against him when Jesus began to tell them why he really came. "I'm giving you bread, but it's not the bread that I came to give.

I'm performing miracles, but this is not the reason. So that it's not simply so that the lame could walk." He said, "He performed all these miracles so that I can forgive you of your sins." And once they began to realize that maybe Jesus wasn't going to fulfill their dreams, one by one they began to lose them.

And then when he actually went to the cross, they said, "Oh, he really is giving his life up. He isn't going to fulfill these dreams." And so that same crowd that followed him for three years rejected him when he went to the cross. See, this hope of the Messiah for the king, it didn't start just with the nation of Israel.

In fact, it starts all the way in Genesis. In Genesis chapter 3, 15, right after the fall, God makes this promise, "I will put my enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. She shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel." And so the theologians call this proto-evangelium, basically means pre-gospel, that God said from the very beginning that he was going to send the seed of the woman and he's going to crush the head of the serpent.

You ever wonder why the Bible is filled with genealogies, right? I don't know if you've ever really given yourself to study these genealogies, but these genealogies are there for a reason. They're there because every genealogy is the record of God's fulfillment of this promise. So they're connecting that whoever is going to come down this line, that they have a clear record.

So they teach you, even though we may not fully understand, that when the Messiah shows up, they can have this record of who he is. That's why if you open up the book of Matthew, right, the first thing that you see in the book of Matthew is the genealogy, because this genealogy connects Jesus with the promise of the Davidic kingdom, with the promise that he made to Abraham, the promise that goes all the way back to the creation after the fall.

But you can understand the disappointment that after waiting for this Messiah to come, after not only just hundreds but thousands of years of waiting, that he didn't turn out to be what they thought he would be. You see, when Isaiah writes this, the book of Isaiah, he wrote it around 722 BC.

The northern kingdom has already fallen to the Assyrians. And so he writes this saying that now because of your sin, the southern kingdom, the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin, is also going to fall. And so he's predicting that the Babylonians that they were relying on to come and help him, they're the ones who are going to take you into captivity.

And so all the prophecies that are said about the judgment that's coming happens about 140 years after this book is written. So everything that he says actually gets fulfilled, that all their children get carried on to Babylon and eventually they adjust and they start to live. And again, you remember reading the book of Daniel and it tells us what their life was like in captivity.

But it wasn't short-lived. After them, the Persians came in. And then the Persians, during the Persian reign, because of God's work, and as Isaiah predicted, King Cyrus comes in and has compassion and says he allows them to go. But by that time, the Israelites have been so accustomed to staying where they are, only a very small percentage of them come back to build the second temple.

When they built the second temple, the people who remember the first temple were weeping. Because this could not be the fulfillment of that prophecy. How can this be? Because the glory of the second temple was nothing like what it was in the beginning. But the Bible says that the glory is going to far outweigh anything that they've seen up to that point.

So the older people realized that this could not be the fulfillment. And it was not. So their momentary excitement goes right back into despair. A couple hundred years later, Alexander the Great comes in and he comes and takes over and they're under their oppression for a couple hundred years.

And then after that, the Romans come in. And so for over 700 years, they've been waiting specifically for this prophecy to be fulfilled. You have to understand what their life was like, specifically under the Romans. Romans did their best to kind of keep the foreign nations that they conquered under submission.

And so they gave them enough freedom, allowed them to rule their little areas, but they also wanted to make sure that everyday life was a reminder to them who the boss was. So remember when Jesus tells in his parables and in his teaching, he says, "If they ask you to go a mile, go the second mile." The reason why he says that was because there was a Roman law that said if a Roman soldier, as he's walking down and he just gets tired, and he could just ask any Jew, he could just ask anybody, even if you're a young mother with small children, if he just got tired, by law, they had to drop what they were doing and carry at least a mile, by law.

And that's why he was saying, he's talking specifically to people in that culture, that instead of rebelling, go the second mile. And in fact, if you happen to be very religious and you were going to the temple, they set up a statue of Caesar outside. So even as you go to worship your God, the Romans made sure that every time you went to the temple, there was a reminder that our God is much more superior than yours.

And made them bow down to that in order to get to the temple. That's the oppression that they were living under. And I'm just scratching the surface. We could spend the whole Sunday just talking about the oppression that they were under. And for 700 years, every time they felt some sort of injustice, every time they went to the temple, every time a young mother or young man who had to carry all the equipment of the soldiers for a mile, they probably reminded each other, Messiah is coming.

One day Messiah is going to come. One day he's going to come and he's going to do everything that he had promised. And so it was that, that Jesus came and he read this. This is talking about me. I'm finally here. So you could understand the excitement that they were in.

And for three years, everything he did was to prove that that's who he was. See there was this longing in the Israelites that I cannot exaggerate. The amount of time, energy, tears that went into waiting for the Messiah. You know, if you read the Psalms, you probably remember at some point in the Psalm, you'll see the term "selah," right?

You guys remember there's "selah." If you don't, if you go back and read the Psalms, you'll see "selah" just scattered all throughout the Psalms. The theologians don't know exactly what that term means, right? There's no exact Hebrew interpretation of that. And so some have said that maybe it's a musical thing, like the intermission or maybe a crescendo, right?

Maybe when you get there, you're supposed to read it louder, right? Some people believe that. I think the common interpretation of "selah" is to kind of take a breather, take a break, right? To read that and kind of pause a second and then to read it. I think that what makes most sense is that it's kind of like a sighing.

It is a break, but it's not simply a break because it's a long Psalm and you need to breathe before you keep reading. But I believe "selah" basically is a deep sighing. Like when something, when you're thinking something deeply or emotionally, you're affected, you would … So the promises of Messiah.

You know, if you ever study through the book of Psalms, two-thirds of it is a groanings of Israel. "Where are you? Why do you let the wicked prosper?" Two-thirds of the Psalm is in some way is an expression of their pain. So all throughout the book of Psalms is a "selah," a groaning.

And I believe that's exactly what it is, the equivalent in the New Testament is this groaning that the Bible says that the Holy Spirit that's been deposited in us groans on our behalf with words that you and I cannot recognize. Groaning, sighing. The Holy Spirit in us is sighing.

Before we became Christian, the Holy Spirit is groaning to bring us to Christ. So in His groaning, justification is the deliverance of the penalty of sin. Sanctification is the deliverance from the power of sin. And glorification is the deliverance from the presence of sin. And so this groaning inside of us, the Holy Spirit, is sighing on our behalf in prayer that we would be justified.

And in our sanctification, in our wrestling with our flesh, in our constant desire to be right and then wrestling with our flesh, taking us other places, sighing. Oh, I've got to struggle with this again. Struggling with it again. Which creates in us the ultimate groaning. When will this end?

When is He going to come? When will we be delivered from the presence of this sin? So I believe that Selah all throughout the book of Psalms is a deep sighing. Lord, when are you coming? When will you come and answer this prayer? When will you wipe away our tears?

When will you deliver us from our enemies? So this groaning God has placed in their heart so that when the Messiah comes, that the celebration would match their groaning. This text that we're looking at in Psalm chapter 60, 1 to 3, gives us five things that He promises that I want to review.

First thing He says, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me." And the point of this is to separate Him from any other king, any other prophet. Because typically when anointing happens, it would be the previous king or the prophet or one of the priests would come and lay hands and anoint Him.

But He says when the Messiah comes, He will be directly anointed by God Himself. That God's Spirit is going to be upon Him. So if you remember, before Jesus reads this text in the synagogue in Luke chapter 4, remember what happens to Jesus? He gets baptized. Remember at baptism, heaven opens up and Jesus gets anointed and God the Father says, "This is my Son in whom I am in love." And so He was anointed and separated and then He goes up and gets tested.

And then right after that beginning of the ceremony, beginning of the text here, He reads it and says, "This is who I am." To be anointed by God means that He was unlike any other king, any other priest. That He was going to represent all the authority. Not somebody who was going to come and disappear.

Not like Moses, though he was a great leader, came and he had his own faults. Where he was disqualified to even enter into the promised land. Not like David who was a man after God's own heart who did great in the beginning, but at the tail end of it, he commits adultery and then he even becomes a murderer.

And as a result of that, he's not allowed to build a temple and his kingdom gets split. Solomon comes in, wisest man, builds a temple, but he chases after the world with all the knowledge that he has. And every king that came after them, majority of them, led the nation astray.

And the very few kings who were right with God started off well and then they kind of tapered off at the end. Hezekiah was one of those kings. If you were to name one of maybe like four kings that was good in Israel's history, Hezekiah would be one of them.

But remember Hezekiah in chapter 39, that at the end of his life, he started to align himself with the Babylonians because he forgot who God is. See, when he says, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me," he's saying he's going to be different than any other king.

God himself is going to be working through this man, this Messiah. Number two, he said he's going to bring good news to the afflicted. Some of your translations, they says poor, but that is a poor translation of that word. Because when you say poor, you also have been afflicted and hurt and damaged.

So you could be financially poor, yes, but this word carries a much more significant ... I can't send that. He's talking about people who have been afflicted. Living under oppression, but more specifically, more broadly, people who have been affected by sin. And that word, euangelion, the good news, right?

And you already know in the New Testament, the word gospel is euangelion, which literally means good news. That this one who has been anointed by God is going to come and he's going to be spreading the good news to those who are afflicted. Every single one of us has been afflicted by your own sins and the sins of others.

There's not a single person here. Some of us may be more aware of it than other people because we live in a fallen world. And because we live in a fallen world, your parents were fallen, your grandparents were fallen, your school teachers were fallen, and you were fallen. As a result of that, there are things that we have said and done that hurt other people.

And as a result of that, there's things that people have said and done that hurt us. So every human being that has been born in this life has been afflicted in one way or another. He said he came to bring good news. And then he goes on in number three, he says, "He sent me to bind up, to literally wrap up those who are brokenhearted." Psalm 34, 18, "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." It's much easier to build community with young people.

You don't have as much baggage. You have this idealism, "We're going to build a community. We're going to love each other. We're going to raise our children together. You know what I mean? We're going to take vacations together. We're going to open up Sunday schools and build schools." And by the time you get to a certain age, it's like, "Yeah, right.

With who? How do I trust them?" You sure you want our kids to be friends with those people? It's much harder to build community with older people because we've experienced more of this world of being disappointed, relationships not working out, leaders disappointing us. And so there's years and years of this kind of got piled up, and so it's naturally easier to be cynical.

We don't have the same kind of idealism when we were younger. That's what happens when you live in a fallen world. You know, when I was a young youth pastor, I heard a statistic that one in four girls experience some sort of molestation when they're young. One in four.

When I first heard that, I couldn't believe it. It's like, "Oh, maybe in some other communities, maybe in other parts of the world." But through the years, not only has that been confirmed, I think it's much larger than that because majority of the abuse that takes place happens within the home because you feel safe.

And so the things that are reported is one in four. So there are many of those instances that are never reported because it's sticky within the family. So can you imagine one in four child, and now it's male or female, has experienced some sort of sexual trauma when they were young?

And I remember trying to counsel through that. What can I possibly say to make this better? Just praying, like, "Lord, Holy Spirit, just bring transformation." Reading books, asking for help. What can I possibly do? What can I possibly say to counsel them, to give them hope? And after years of frustration, I came to the conclusion that the only one that could deliver them from this pain is Christ.

So the best that I can do is not to have the right words or the system or the accountability or the community, is to bring them to Christ. Every single one of us has experienced some sort of brokenness, either directly or indirectly through family. Christ says He will come.

Our Messiah is going to come, and He's going to bind up the brokenhearted. Every single one of these Jews, one way or another, have been oppressed for 700 plus years. Can you imagine the excitement when Jesus says, "I am the Messiah"? Finally. Then He says He's going to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners.

You know, today, when the president leaves office, one of the final things that he does is he uses his authority and power to pardon people who may be in jail and uses authority to do that. Sometimes there's a few, sometimes it can be many dozens of people. But in the ancient Near East, the practice was when the king would be anointed, and the very first thing that he does is he would release the prisoners.

Because he may not be in agreement with the previous king. Maybe the ones who were supporting him, they were the ones in prison. So it was custom that the people who were desperate to come out would be waiting for the next king to be anointed. Because that would be the first thing that he does.

So it is in that spirit, he says, when your king comes, he will deliver all those prisoners who have been bound. That the only hope that they had for the next king, the righteous king, to come and deliver them. And then he finally says to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.

It's clearly, this is in reference to the year of Jubilee that's mentioned in Leviticus chapter 25. The year of Jubilee, like in Jewish law, every seven years they were supposed to give the land rest. In order to recuperate. And then the seventh year they would do this again. But every seven times seven, after 49 years, the 50th year, it was declared to be the year of Jubilee.

Now, I don't have time to go through all of the things that are taught about the year of Jubilee, but let me just give you a quick summary of what they were to do at the year of Jubilee. All debts were canceled. Now, if you're in finance, or if you just, you know, pay attention to finance, how can this be?

All debts canceled. Can you imagine the bankers being stingy? He's like, next year's year of Jubilee, I can't lend you that. How can this possibly work? All land, it says number two, was returned to the original owners. So if you leased land, in the 50th year, you have to give it back.

All the slaves were free, without exception. All slaves were free. Everybody was given a fresh new beginning. Now this sounds good on paper, but how can this possibly work? Can you imagine what the economy would have looked like on their 49th year? Who would lend any money? Who would do any business?

But if you were a poor person, it's like, yeah, I'll take that. Take all the debt. See, the whole point of the year of Jubilee was to point to what was coming in Christ. Just like the cities of refuge, like all the amount of money and time and effort that went to build these streets.

And who used these streets? The people who killed accidentally. How many people used these roads? Like, so much money, time, and effort went into building these cities. For what purpose? So that every Jew, when they looked on the cities of refuge, they realized when the Messiah comes, he's going to build these cities for us.

So the whole point of the year of Jubilee is to remind us when the Messiah comes, this is what he's going to do. And so he said when the Messiah comes, all debt will be canceled. All slave will be set free. All the lands, and there's going to be a fresh start in his kingdom.

Why did they miss this? I mean, they were waiting for this for so long. And for three years, they followed him. Who else can walk on water? Who else can feed 5,000? Who else can tell the storm to stop, and it stops? Who else can raise the dead? So can you imagine the excitement when Jesus went into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, because there's a specific prophecy that says that your Messiah, the King, is going to ride on a donkey when he comes in.

And so Jesus chooses to ride on a donkey to fulfill that prophecy, to make a public declaration, I am he. If any of you had any doubt who I was, let this confirm. But that rejoicing turned into weeping when they realized that Jesus was actually going to the cross.

If you read the text that Jesus read in Luke chapter 4, 17 to 21, Jesus reads only a portion of this prophecy. He doesn't read verse 1 to 3. He only reads up to the middle of the second verse. And he says, he reads, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim the release of the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord." So if you read 61, that stops in the first line. The second part where it says, "And the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn." And then at the end of it, he says, "So that they will," at the end of verse 3, "So they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified." He doesn't read that part.

And there's a reason he doesn't read that part, because he doesn't fulfill that then. There's a second part of that fulfillment that's going to come at the end. But his first coming was to fulfill what he says in Isaiah 42. In verse 1 through 4, it says, "Behold, my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights, I have put my spirit upon him.

He will bring forth justice to the nations." How many of us think of Jesus' ministry as a ministry of justice? We don't. We think of it as a ministry of grace, compassion, love, gentleness, perseverance, and yet he says he came to bring justice. Did he change his mind? Did he think that maybe justice isn't what he wants anymore?

Well, he describes this justice in verse 2 and 3. "He will not cry out or raise his voice, nor make his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not extinguish. He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not be disheartened or crushed until he has established justice in this earth, and the coastlands will wait expectantly for his law." What justice is he referring to?

What is he referring to? The justice that he is referring to, the justice that he carried out at the cross. He absorbed the greatest injustice, the only person who can cry out to his Father, "Why have you done this to me?" There's not a single human being that could be in that position and dare to lift his eyes and say, "Why have you done this to me?" Because we know why he's doing that to us.

Because we deserve it. We rebelled against him. We've sinned against him. We sinned against one another. So when he does that, when he brings punishment, we can't open our mouth. Only the pure, perfect Jesus can cry out to his Father. Because the only person that was deserving of God's love was Jesus himself.

So the greatest injustice was absorbed by Christ in order that those with sin would be justified before God. That the unjust will become just. This is what they did not understand. Because they portrayed upon Christ their dreams, every suffering, that when Messiah's come he's going to deliver us from this.

If you had no legs, he's going to come bring us legs. If I'm blind, he's going to open up my eyes. If I'm in prison, he's going to release me. If I'm poor, he's going to feed me. But Jesus said he did all of that to show us that he had authority to forgive us of our sins.

Because it wasn't because of our lameness. It wasn't because of our blindness. It wasn't because of our empty stomachs. It was because of our sins. But they did not understand. And as a result, they rejected him. The very person and the only person that could truly give them life.

You know, among the Jews there are four different groups. The Essenes you don't see in the Bible. Because they just dropped out. We don't want to deal with this. You know, we've been waiting for him and dealing with the Romans and the Pharisees. And so they just packed up their bags and they went out to the desert and lived in a cave.

So they don't even know the Messiah came. They don't know because they're out there. There's people like that in our generation. They've neither rejected Christ nor are they passionately following Christ. They're just like, you know, I just don't know. I don't want to deal with it. And they're just going to live their life.

That was the Essenes. So we don't know much about them because they're not in the Bible. Because they're out in the desert. And then we have the Sadducees. Sadducees were the people basically given up. It's been 700 years since the promise. Maybe this is all just wishful thinking. So they were the liberals who've given up.

There's no angels. There's no resurrection. There's no miracles. Sad thing about the Sadducees were they're the ones who were the leading Israel at the time. They were the high priests. They were the members in the Sanhedrin. So when Jesus goes to the temple, it was the Sadducees who were running the temple.

And that's why the outside, they were selling stuff and people couldn't even worship because to them worship was just something that you did. It just wasn't important. It's not real. Because they didn't believe that anymore. So they were salvaging whatever they had on their face. So they were by name a Jew, but they didn't believe in any of that stuff.

If you go to Europe today, where Christianity has been for over a thousand plus years, that's exactly what it looks like. The leaders of the churches in Europe are people who've given up hope in Christ. They don't believe in the resurrection. They don't believe that Bible is God's word.

But yet they still have the signs up on the churches. But if you go in, they don't believe in any of that. So they're trying to salvage. You know what? Maybe we can be a good witness. Maybe we're good citizens and do good stuff and feed the poor and make this place a better life.

That's exactly what the Sadducees were doing. Because they no longer believed in the miracle of God. These were the Sadducees. And then you had the Zealots. Zealots were, you know what? He's not coming. And I don't know when he's going to come, but we can't wait. So we're going to get ready.

And so they were carrying around knives. And these are the guys. Remember when Pontius Pilate presented to the Jews, do you want Jesus, possibly the king of the Jews, or do you want Barabbas, the Zealot, who was caught in the middle of his insurrection to try to challenge us militarily?

Remember what they all cried out? I prefer to have Zealot. I prefer to have him militarily striking than this man who fooled us for three years, pretending to be our Messiah, and then he can't even get out of your hand. He's actually going to just give in like that?

We don't want that. Give us Barabbas. These were the guys who organized the army. And they went to battle with the Romans, and they come in, they crush them. So AD 70, Israel disappears because of these Zealots. The saddest of these groups are the Pharisees, because the Pharisees somehow convinced themselves that if they kept the law perfectly, that maybe then the Messiah would come.

So on top of all the laws that they had, they added more laws. We're going to do this, and we're going to do that. And they practiced it probably better than most Christians today. They proselytized. They made disciples. They gave every little thing that they had, they gave to the temple.

They memorized scripture. They prayed and fasted, some of them three times a week, because they believed that if they were righteous enough, that somehow God would show favor. The whole book of Romans was written to address these people. See, the whole purpose of the law was so that you would know why you need the Messiah.

The whole book of the law was to make sin utterly sinful. So at the end of that, you would be surrendered and beating your chest, like the tax collectors, and like the prostitutes. That whether you are a religious leader, whether you are a prostitute, when God is revealed, that they would be beating their chest.

How can I get them to heaven? But they fooled themselves to think that if they kept the law, and the extra laws that they had, that they had a better standing before God. And when Jesus came, He rebuked them more than anybody else. Instead of humbling them, the law made them proud.

And every single one of them rejected Christ because they projected on Him what they wanted the King to be. As we prepare for the resurrection, there's a glimpse of this in every single one of us. We want Him to fulfill certain things. Whatever frustration, whatever pain, whatever situation that we are in, why isn't God answering this prayer?

If you would just fix my marriage, if you would just fix my kids, if you would just fix my relationship, if you would just fix my circumstance, if you would just fix my business. And yet Jesus says, He who finds his life, He who lives hard, thinking that somehow if you do this, that you're going to have a better life, He said, we'll lose it.

He who loses his life for my sake, He will find it. You see, our inclination to live is what's killing us. Our inclination to be successful is what kills us. Our inclination to be better than our neighbors is what kills us, is what divides us. It's what causes war.

It's what causes divorce. It is until we die and we recognize that life is found in Him and Him alone. We could be blind just like the Jews and thinking that we're following Christ when we're really following the image that we've created of Him instead of the Christ of the Bible.

So my prayer is that as we prepare ourselves for the Palm Sunday and for Good Friday and resurrection that it would be an opportunity for us to look deeply, not only the Word of God, but our own passions. Even as a pastor, even as I preach the gospel, my desire to be somebody can easily creep in and it will ruin me.

So let's take some time to step back. Take the next three weeks to four weeks. Before we examine the world, before we examine the church, examine our own hearts. Where are we? Am I truly following Christ? Is there any blindness in me? Hopefully that will bring revival and refreshment in our hearts as we meet the Lord.

Let's take some time to pray as our worship team leads. Father, we come before you needing your grace again and again. Lord, I know we have brothers and sisters in this room even now are wrestling in prayer, dealing with hurt and pain, disappointment of living in this world. Open our eyes, Lord God, that we may see the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that our hope will be placed in Christ, in Christ alone.

Lord, help us, Lord God, to see who Christ is, that the groaning in our hearts, Lord God, would cause us to be justified, sanctified, ultimately glorified. Help us, Lord God, to fix our eyes upon Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.