The Triumphant Entry

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome this Palm Sunday. As we conclude our series called the Upside Down Kingdom, would you please pray with me? Lord God, we live in an upside down time and what a better time than this I can't think of to come to you on a day like this to welcome you as our king. Not the king that we've wanted, not the king that we thought of, not the kind of kingdom that we anticipated, but the kingdom of surprise and joy and service and sacrifice that you brought, Lord God. We are grateful to you. We lift up to you today our medical community in Southwest Florida as well as around our country and world right now. They're on the front lines of this epidemic and we pray, Lord God, that you would protect them and give them your peace and power this day. We pray, Lord, as we take a moment, well, as we are in our homes and away from so many of the distractions around us right now that we take this moment to just give it to you. I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart are acceptable to you, oh Lord, our God. You are our strength and our redeemer and we need you like never before. We recognize our need for you this day. So bless our time together in this word. We pray that you'd bless all the churches and gospel ministries across this world today and the ways that they are broadcasting your truth and your love and your grace. Give us both wisdom and courage and joy in the midst of the struggles and the trials that we are facing. All this we pray in your precious name, dear Jesus. Amen. As I stated, we are in this series. This is our last Sunday of the upside down kingdom as Jerusalem welcomed the king, Jesus. But what they thought they were getting and what Jesus was giving were two different things. The reality of this week, this last week, and the reality that we are in right now with more people facing this disease and the death, I am thankful that we didn't plan it, but it still happened that we were in this series because I think there is so much comfort, so much joy, so much peace that is offered by Jesus and his upside down kingdom and his upside down kingship. And we're going to see that today as we get into this text, which is taken from the gospel of Mark, once again, chapter 11, starting with verse one. Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, go into the village in front of you and immediately as you enter it, you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever sat, untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, why are you doing this? Say, the Lord has need of it and we'll send it back here immediately. And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street and they untied it. And Jesus standing there said to them, what are you doing untying the colt? And they told them what Jesus had said and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it and he sat on it. And many spread their cloaks on the road and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming king of our father, David, Hosanna in the highest. So from this text, we're going to explore two points today about the upside down nature of God's kingdom. First of all, what kind of a king is this Jesus? And then secondly, how do we enter that kingdom? What kind of a king is this Jesus? I dare say Jesus is a genius as how he has orchestrated his entry into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday. He's orchestrated it with all the details along the way. Some of them I just discovered this week as I kind of was studying this text and working through it and realizing, oh my goodness, Jesus, you just put it together amazingly intricately in almost a paradoxical way because the people of his day and age were expecting a Messiah. They wanted to see the glory of God come down. They wanted to see prosperity and beauty and honor and all these wonderful things. They wanted to be liberated from the Romans and all the foreigners. They wanted to see righteousness reign from Jerusalem and they expected it. In fact, they had read about it from their prophets for hundreds of years. They've been longing for that day and Jesus is coming in, following the path that he does, doing the things that he does to show them both what kind of a king he is and what kind of a kingdom it is and how one enters it. You see, actually just 200 years before Jesus entered Jerusalem, about that time, 200 years before, there was another triumphal entry into Jerusalem by a man named Simon Maccabeus. He had entered Jerusalem after he and his military, kind of guerrilla warfare conquest of the land of Palestine, kicking out the Seleucids, that ...