good friday at traders point… ·...

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Transcript March 25, 2016

Good Friday at Traders Point Petie Kinder | Mark 15; Hebrews 12:1-2

Awesome. You guys can be seated. You guys sound good tonight! It’s Friday, you’ve got to save some of that for tomorrow and Sunday. I’m so glad to be with you. If this is your first time, welcome. My name is Petie and I’m one of the pastors here. I’m so excited to be celebrating Good Friday with you today. I want to start by reading from Mark 15, Mark’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus. So the words will be on the screen behind me. Focus your eyes, kind of focus your hearts, on this. It’s the reason we are gathered today—to remember and reflect on the death of Jesus. Mark 15, starting in verse 16, “And the soldiers led Him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. And they clothed Him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on Him. And they began to salute Him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they were striking His head with a reed and spitting on Him and kneeling down in homage to Him. And when they had mocked Him, they stripped Him of the purple cloak and put His own clothes on Him. And they led Him out to crucify Him. “And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry His cross. And they brought Him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). And they offered Him wine mixed with myrrh, but He did not take it. And they crucified Him and divided His garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. “And it was the third hour when they crucified Him. And the inscription of the charge against Him read, ‘The Kings of the Jews.’ And with Him they crucified two robbers, one on His right and one on His left. And those who passed by derided Him, wagging their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save Yourself, and come down from the cross!’ So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked Him to one another, saying, ‘He saved others; He cannot save Himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with Him also reviled Him. “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ And some of the bystanders hearing it said, ‘Behold, He is calling Elijah.’ And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to Him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take Him down.’” And verse 37 says, “And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed His last, …” I want to talk with you guys tonight about something that is a little different than you’d expect coming out of these verses, a little different than you’d expect about a death. I want to talk about joy tonight. And again I know that’s like the opposite of what you would anticipate hearing when we are talking

Good Friday at Traders Point March 25, 2016

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

about death, but I think what we are going to see is that there is a reason we call this Good Friday, that there actually is some great joy to be found. But we aren’t very good at joy. Like we, as a culture—we, as a Christian movement, we don’t really love joy. We aren’t great at it. In fact we let very, very small and insignificant things steal our joy and we do that all the time. For me the most recent joy stealer happened last weekend when an event happened that robbed the nation of joy: it was when IU defeated Kentucky in the tournament. The nation I speak of is the big, blue nation, which I am a part of. Hey, we’ve got a few here. That’s all right. I believe Kentucky is the greatest college basketball program in history but last week we lost to a great IU team. Was that a fun game? Tyler and Yogi going head-‐to-‐head, that was legit, that was awesome. So congrats to you Hoosiers, I love you guys, am excited for you guys, and I hope you do well tonight. I mean that, I genuinely do, mostly. But if you want to talk about joy, if you’d had a live stream of my living room during that game, you would not have seen joy. You would have seen something much more violent, much more violent. And maybe you saw this one picture, this one shot of a girl they brought up: the crying saxophone girl. Did anyone see this crying saxophone girl? When I saw that my first reaction was, “Wipe your tears and stop acting like that in front of the nation.” They already have the Lattner shot, the Walkford shot, and now they’ve got crying saxophone girl. We’re hosed. But she did accurately capture what I was feeling on the inside. I was so miserable. But my reaction to a loss—anytime Kentucky looses my coping mechanism is not crying it’s cleaning. So I just clean. I cleaned the kitchen, I vacuumed, I did laundry, I was just cleaning like crazy. I felt like if I didn’t clean, I’d destroy things. It was one of those two. So if you are a Hoosier tonight and things don’t go well, clean, just clean. It’s very therapeutic. I know it seems dumb to even talk about, but things like basketball steal our joy. Like it doesn’t take much these days for us to have our joy completely robbed. A bad conversation at work, a boss that comes in and says, “You need to do better at xyz,” and your joy is completely gone. It’s not like you lost your job, you’ve got to improve and your joy is gone. Have an argument with your spouse right before you walk out the door and your joy is gone, your day is ruined. Your child acts like a wild, crazy, Tasmanian devil in public and everyone looks at you like you can’t parent (I’m not speaking from personal experience) and you are thinking, “I’m just going to go insane,” and your joy is taken away. These things happen to us. Like someone cuts you off in traffic and your joy is taken away. It doesn’t take much to rob us of joy. And then when you combine that, our proclivity to let little things take our joy—when you combine that with actual tragedy, with actual difficult things that go on in our world that have the real potential to steal and threaten our joy: like what happened this past week in Brussels, like a divorce, like a job loss, like losing a loved one, like a son and daughter who decide to do their own thing, and go their own way, and they don’t want anything to do with you, and they don’t want to listen to your advice, and you don’t know what to do but to pray—when real stuff happens to steal our joy, no wonder we are pretty bad at



this. No wonder we’re not known as a joyful people, because we’ve got little things and big things that rob us of our joy. So my hope in talking tonight about the death of Jesus with you is that you might find a path to true joy. And that path to true joy, I know it is difficult to even think of. If you’re here and you struggle to find joy, I’m right there with you. There’ve been times in my life when I’ve even struggled with depression. And I know many in this room have struggled with that, where your emotions don’t match reality. Like what’s happening should elicit emotions in you, but you feel nothing. I’ve been there – Me Too. So if you struggle with joy tonight, you’re in the right place because the true path to joy centers upon a death. I know that’s such a weird thing to say, but I know you’ll see why here in just a minute. You see, if you were to look at Jesus’ situation, what we just read in Mark 15, Jesus’ situation— the last word you would ever think to describe what He was going through would be joy. He’d been abandoned by all of His followers. There were only a few left who stayed faithful to Him and stayed near Him as He was crucified. Most of them either betrayed Him for money, or they wouldn’t even admit that they knew Him. These people, whom He had poured His life into, His friends, had betrayed Him. His career came to a crashing end. This is Jesus. This is the guy who had thousands of people following Him, thousands of people fighting to get through the crowds to just sit at His feet, people pushing people aside just so they could touch the hem of His robe, people wrecking roofs so they could lower their friend in so they could sit at the feet of Jesus. This is a guy who had all the fame, all the success, all the following you could ever imagine, and now He found Himself alone and dying on a cross. And we didn’t even touch the physical pain of all this. You put any of us in a situation like this, and joy would not be the word you would use to describe us. We’d be ready to throw in the towel. But I want to read you a portion of Hebrews 12:2 that uses a really interesting word to describe what Jesus was going through, what was going on in His mind and His heart as He was crucified. Hebrews 12:2 reads like this. It says, “… Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, …” Jesus endured the cross because He had a joy that was set before Him. There was a joy that was going on in His mind and His heart. There was something set before Him that enabled Him to endure the cross. And this is similar to what you and I do on a daily basis, but on a smaller scale. We do this all the time, where we endure something difficult because we have something else in mind that is greater than that circumstance. So like this is why we go to amusement parks. We go to amusement parks, we ride roller coasters because there is that thrill. But you have to endure three hours in a line baking in the sun next to bratty kids who are like, “Are we there yet? How much longer?” You are sweating, everybody is sweating. It’s miserable, but you endure it because you have a thrill that’s set before you. You are like, “Man, I’ll go through this if it means I’ll get that 15 seconds of thrill I could never get anywhere else.” Like if you go to the gym or you are a person who eats healthy, you know what I am talking about. Why else would you to the gym and punish your body like that to the point of tears. When you’re body sweats it is crying. Stop! Just stop! You’re making your body cry. Why would you not eat double-‐stuffed Oreos and Zebra Cakes? Why would you do that if not for something that is set before you: the dream of



that summertime beach bod. You know what you’ve got in front of you. You’re trying to get there. If that’s you, we’ll have a pack of Zebra Cakes ready for you when you come back this way. We know it’s coming. In August you’ll be back. We do this all the time. We have something greater that motivates us. I know if you are here tonight and you are going through some suffering that you didn’t choose yourself, that’s real. There are people in this room right now—I know some of your stories—who are going through some things that they didn’t choose. Some suffering and some difficult circumstances that they had no say in. But the reason you’re able to get through those, the reason you are able to wake up and keep going and push through, is that you’ve got some sort of hope, some sort of vision for the future, some sort of desire, something set in front of you that’s motivating you to endure. And this is what was happening with Jesus. Jesus, according to Hebrews, “endured the cross because there was a great joy set before Him.” And on this Good Friday I get the privilege of telling you that the joy that was set before Him was His great love for you. The joy that was set before Jesus, that allowed Him to endure and keep going through this brutal murder, this wrongful murder, was His great love for you. It was the thought of seeing a lost son or a lost daughter be found again. It was the joy of seeing someone who was hopeless, helpless, and headed to hell become a redeemed son or a redeemed daughter of the King. His great love for you was the joy that was set before Him. And if you don’t believe me, believe Scripture. I want to read you a few verses that center us on this concept of God’s love. They’ll be on the screen behind me. 1 John 3:1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! …” Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God,” get this, “who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Romans 8:37-‐39 says, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” James 1:18, “He chose to give birth to us by giving us His true Word. And we, out of all creation, became His prized possession.” John 3:16, and you know this one, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” He so loved you and me that He gave His only Son to die for us. It was the great love of God for you and for me, even though we don’t deserve it that enabled Jesus to endure what He did. And I know when I say the phrase God’s love, God’s love is a phrase that doesn’t really hit us that hard anymore. The phrase has been hijacked by our culture, maybe numbed by the enemy and forgotten by our sinful nature. God’s love doesn’t really pack the punch you think it would. It seems like everybody



knows about God’s love. You can’t pick up a Hallmark card without it somehow talking about God’s love. It doesn’t matter what the thing you’re celebrating is, it’s like graduation—God’s love. It finds its way into everything. Oprah talks about God’s love. Everyone knows about God’s love. So it just hits us very numb. And it almost sounds like a soft, philosophical thing. It just doesn’t seem real. In fact, to prove this I googled God’s love this week. I googled it and the fourth image that came up on the google image search was this heart-‐shaped sunset. Yeah, that’s like God’s love, right? I guess. It’s kind of cool, I guess. It would make a great Facebook post, I guess. It’s also been photo-‐shopped and completely faked but let’s not talk about that. That’s what our culture thinks of when they think about God’s love, this soft sunset. Think about Easter for a second, this holiday we are celebrating right now. It’s the softest of all holidays. St. Patrick’s Day, you get to pinch somebody if they didn’t wear green. That’s awesome. Fourth of July, you blow up stuff. Thanksgiving you cook a bird. Christmas some weird guy breaks into your house and he doesn’t rob you, he gives you gifts. Then you get to Easter and it’s like a soft bunny brings you pastel colored eggs and you take a family photo with everyone wearing pastel colors. The end. It’s been robbed. Easter and Good Friday, these are the holidays that should be the most triumphant, the most victorious, the most bad-‐to-‐the-‐bone, the most bold holidays of all. We’re celebrating something that this world can’t even replicate. It is unbelievable. But yet God’s love seems to be softened to us for some reason. I would just say this to you guys: God’s love isn’t a soft, abstract concept it’s a strong, concrete statement made by the death of Jesus. His love is not a soft, abstract concept, it’s not a philosophical thing, and it’s not this intangible thing that you don’t even know what it is. It’s not like a heart-‐shaped sunset. No it is not a soft, abstract concept. It is a strong and concrete statement that has been made by the death of Jesus. When Jesus died on the cross God was saying, “You know what? I want the world to know that I loved them but I know they’ll never get it unless I show it to them. So I’m going to show it to them through the death of Jesus.” Paul says basically those exact words in Romans 5:8. He says this, “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He demonstrated it. He said, “I’m going to put the world on notice. This is what God’s love looks like.” God’s love looks like a man who was willing—for you, because He loves you—to be beaten, to be whipped until flesh was ripped off his body, to be kicked, to be punched, to be mutilated, to be beaten beyond anything we’ve ever experienced, to have a crown of thorns driven into His head that caused blood to pour down and pain, searing pain. God’s love looks like a man who was willing to be spit upon, and cussed at, and paraded through streets of people who hated Him. God’s love looks like a man who was willing to be lined up with criminals and thrown down on wooden cross beams, nails driven through His wrists and through His feet. That’s what God’s love looks like. God’s love looks like a man hoisted in the air, wrongfully convicted, wrongfully murdered for you and for me. God’s love is not a soft, abstract concept. It’s been proven. God put the world on notice. He said, “I love you so much and this is what it looks like.” So I would just ask you today, as a church, to not become



numb to God’s love. Don’t become numb to God’s love. This should alarm us. When you think of God’s love, it should wake you up. It should force you to just like second guess yourself. It should force you to say, “Wait a minute. Do I have the proper perspective on life?” God’s love should not be a “God loves me,” and move on. No. You cannot grow numb to this. I’ve seen this happen for too long. I’ve been in ministry for about 10 years now. And for 10 years I’ve seen people, pretty much at every age. It starts in the teenage years and it goes on through adulthood. I’ve seen people at every stage of life who act and function as if God’s love is the beginner course. It’s like Christianity 101. Okay, God loves me. That’s good. I believe it and I’ve heard it. Now I’m on to more deep and meaty truths and doctrines. But that’s not really how it works. J.D. Greer, an author and a pastor, put it this way, “The gospel is the pool, not the diving board.” God’s love for you is not the thing you accept in the beginning and then you graduate past. It’s not the diving board. It’s not the springboard for your faith. It’s not as if once you’ve heard about God’s love and then okay, you’ve accepted it, and then when we go and preach it again you’re like, “That must be for everyone else who hasn’t heard it yet, now I’m ready for my main course.” God’s love isn’t the appetizer. It’s the appetizer, it’s the salad, it’s the dinner rolls, it’s the main course, it’s the desert, it’s the wine, and it’s the whole deal. You see, true spiritual growth is not growing beyond the gospel it’s diving deeper into it. It’s diving deeper into God’s love. It’s like the one thing I cannot understand the more I grow in Christ, the more I follow Him, the more years I get behind me the more appalled I am at my own sinful nature and the more amazed I am that God actually loves me. The gospel is not the diving board into the pool and then you need to dig deeper into it. You need to focus on it. That’s the thing, man. If you want to find joy, if you struggle to find joy and you feel like everything is robbing you of your joy and it seems like once Monday hits you’ve completely forgotten about God, you’ve completely forgotten about Jesus, and you go on to being your full-‐of-‐mean-‐vibes person (that’s the best way I can describe you—you’ve got mean vibes all the time), if you are looking for joy you need to focus on God’s love. Hebrews, in the verse I already read to you earlier, actually says it in so many words. If you read the entire context, it says this starting in verse 1, “… let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely,” so anything in this world that is trying to steal your joy, let us lay it aside, “and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” no matter what life throws your way, no matter what tragedy, no matter what small thing the enemy tries to throw your way, “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus,” fixing your eyes on Jesus, “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Fix your eyes on Jesus if you struggle to find joy. Fix your eyes on His love for you expressed through His death on a cross. You see I think just as much as your other disciplines… For the believers in the room you know if you are going to follow Jesus there are some disciplines you’ve got to get in your life. You’ve got to read the Bible, you’ve got to pray, you’ve got to come to church, and you’ve got to get in a group. You need to start serving and you need to start sacrificing your money to the Lord so that you know money is not the Lord of your life. There are some disciplines you need to get going in your life.



I think along with all those disciplines you need to add one. I think you need to find a way to remind yourself every day of God’s love for you. I think that should be a disciplined, concerted effort of yours every single day. You should find some way to pause, and reflect, and remember, and snap yourself back into it. To realize you are loved by God, that you don’t deserve it, that you are not a lovely person but God loves you. The way my son’s Children’s Bible puts it is, “We are lovely because He loved us.” We didn’t deserve it. Well you need to find a way to remind yourself of that every single day. So for some of you, you need to get a little note card and write a verse on it to remind yourself that God loves you. You need to stick that thing on your dash. And when you are driving to work, at every stoplight you hit, every time traffic gets backed up look down at that verse and you focus on it, just don’t do it while you are driving. Just stay focused so no accidents come out of this message. Some of you need to write it on your mirror when you are getting ready in the morning. Remind yourself, “My beauty doesn’t come from outside. It doesn’t matter how I look to the rest of the world. What matters is that God loves me. That Jesus loved me enough to die for me.” Some of you need to set some alarms on your phone that are just going off left and right, every hour on the hour maybe. Nothing to it, just an alarm to say, “Remember Jesus, the King of the Universe, loves me.” I’m telling you that the first thing Satan wants to do in your life is to distract you and to make you forget that God loves you. That is his first task of the day. Anything he can do to make you forget that you are a loved child of God, that you are a redeemed son, a redeemed daughter of the Most High King if he can get you to forget that, man you’re easy pickins. He can take you down. You need to discipline yourself to focus on how much God loves you every single day. For me, over the past two or three months it’s been a song. There’s been a song that I’ve just not been able to get out of my head and I’ve not been able to shake it. I feel like it comes on my phone once a day, I’m on my computer at work and I’m clicking on it playing it once a day. I can’t move past it. It’s been the way I’ve been reminded of God’s love for me and for you. So I want to read you the lyrics of that song. It’s a little bit of an older song. It’s not old enough to be a hymn, but it’s not new enough to be cool. So it’s like that awkward 90s phase. Too real. It’s called How Deep the Father’s Love for Us and maybe you’re familiar with that song. But the lyrics go like this. It says: How deep the Father’s love for us, How vast beyond all measure, That He should give His only Son To make a wretch His treasure. Do you understand that that’s what we are here to celebrate? That you and I—we are a bunch of wretches who have been made His treasure. He died so that you and I will no longer be lost, and hopeless, and helpless, and headed to hell. I can’t even wrap my head around that. God’s love for you is so vast. It’s bigger than you can ever comprehend.



How great the pain of searing loss The Father turns His face away, As wounds which mar the Chosen One Bring many sons to glory. I can’t imagine putting one of my sons through what Jesus had to endure. I can’t imagine it. But God loved me enough to do that. And because of that it has brought many sons and many daughters to glory and we are filling this room right now. Behold the Man upon a cross, My sin upon His shoulders; Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice Call out among the scoffers. You see, when I read Mark 15 I’d like to think I wouldn’t be one of the ones nailing Jesus to the cross. I’d like to think I wouldn’t be one of the ones spitting at Jesus, insulting Him. I like to think if I were one of His disciples I wouldn’t have abandoned Him. But in all reality we know where we’d be: Ashamed, I’d hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers. The next verse personalizes it and brings it to here and now, to today. It says this: It was my sin that held Him there It wasn’t just the people who nailed Him there, it was my sin. It was your sin that held Him there. Until it was accomplished; His dying breath has brought me life I know that it is finished. And so because of that beautiful truth, the next verse says: I will not boast in anything, No gifts, no power, no wisdom; But I will boast in Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection. I’m not going to boast in a basketball team. I’m not going to boast in a career. I’m not going to boast in a bank account. I’m not going to boast in my family. I’m not going to boast in any talent or wisdom I think I have because none of it matters. None of it is mine anyway. I’m going to boast in one thing and one thing only with this life I’ve got. And it’s Jesus Christ, His death and His resurrection. That’s what this weekend is about. But that’s what every other day of the year is about too. The last verse, I love how this just sums it up. It says: Why should I gain from His reward? I cannot give an answer;



You see, Jesus, why should I gain from His reward? Jesus came and accomplished the mission. He accomplished it. He was sent here to live the life you and I could never live and to die the death we should have died. And He accomplished it, without flaw, without fault, without sin. He perfectly knocked it out of the park. He accomplished exactly what He was sent here to do. And now, just like we sang in the last song, He is seated at the right hand of God, at the throne of God, and He is crowned in glory. I love that phrase. He is crowned in glory. He is crowned in victory. He’s the man. It’s all about Him. He is the hero. He wins the day. He gets all the reward. But the craziness of the gospel is that somehow, someway, God found it good for me to gain from His reward. I don’t deserve that. You don’t deserve that. But somehow, someway God said, “I love them so much that I want them to gain from the reward of my Son.” It blows my mind. I can’t even give an answer for that. I can’t even understand it. But this I know with all my heart His wounds have paid my ransom. How Deep The Father’s Love For Us Stuart Townsend © 1995 Thankyou Music His wounds are the only way I am forgiven and free. So that’s why we’re here to focus on and to celebrate that tonight. And so I want everyone to stand with me. We’re going to move into a time of communion. We’re going to do it a little different tonight. There are stations all around the room; at the front, in the middle, at the back of the room. All around there are stations. Once I’m done praying I want you to feel free to go ahead and move to the station closest to you and take a piece of bread that represents Jesus’ body that was broken for you. Take a cup of juice that represents His blood that was shed for you. And that He did it all for the joy that was set before Him seeing you as a redeemed son or a redeemed daughter, that’s what kept Him going. My prayer is that during communion today you will reflect on how sinful we are and how God loves us. But my prayer is that it actually brings you to a great place of joy and that you walk out of here with a smile on your face because of how much God loves you ready to celebrate Easter this weekend. Let’s pray together. God we love You but it is nothing compared to how much You have loved us. We can’t even wrap our heads around Your love for us. It’s too incredible, it’s too big, it’s too wide, it’s too deep, there aren’t even words that can paint it properly God. You’ve been so good to us. So I pray for every person in this room. If they are believers right now, God, I pray that You would just hit them fresh with Your gospel, with Your love, that it wouldn’t be numb on them, that they would just feel it like never before, that they would be awakened to it. That they would know the depths of their sinfulness and the vastness of Your love, God. In these moments I pray that You might restore joy to some brokenhearted people right now because You endured way more than we even deserve and You’ve given us way more than we could ever deserve.



God for those in the room tonight who are not believers, who have not given their lives to You, I pray that something stirs within them and that they would come back tomorrow or Sunday as we celebrate the resurrection and that this might be the weekend that everything changes for them. That they give their lives to You and that we see some people in the baptistery as a result. God we love You and as we move into communion now meet us at the table, Father. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

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