Committed

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. It's great to be here on this, what is traditionally called Palm Sunday. Some people call it the Sunday of the passion. I don't know if you've heard that term as well. And you think passion, do you realize that the Greek and the Latin that's behind the word passion is for suffering. And I don't know if you've loved anyone, you suffered. Okay. Really you do. When they go through things, right? When you see your child get hurt, it just eats you up inside, right? Because love is vulnerable and open. And so we see God's love and his passion for this world raw this week in the life of Jesus. And we're going to read a little of that, the Sunday of the passion, which is the passionate love of God that he opens him up and is exposed and is vulnerable to this world in such ways. And we're going to read this just a short part of Luke 23, but it might be worth you during the week to just read through the account of his crucifixion, okay? This last week of life. Here, Luke 23, it was now about the sixth hour, that's 12 noon. And there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour while the sun's light failed and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus called out with a loud voice, said, father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. And having said this, he breathed his last. Now as we stated a couple of weeks ago in this genius of Jesus series already in Luke chapter nine. So just think of that all the way in Luke chapter nine, it says that Jesus said his face to go towards Jerusalem. And from that point on, we see it's all about following Jesus. And then it's all about this week. And I don't know if you realize this, the four gospels are really not biographies. You know, a biography would spend a lot of time on, you know, it's kind of chronologically going through the whole life. And of the 30 some years of Jesus life, we don't know exactly how long he lived. It says he was about 30 when he started his public ministry. So that about 30 to 35, somewhere in there is how long he lived. Of the 33 years, one week is one third of most of the gospels this week, Palm Sunday through Easter. That's not a biography. It's more like a passion story with an introduction. And today we're going to see the passion, that love, that suffering love of Jesus Christ. And the question really is this, oh, so the genius of Jesus in this is that he is committed. That's our theme today, that he is committed to the father's will. He's committed to us. He has made a commitment way back at 951 to go to Jerusalem and he knows what's going on. This is predicted. And he tells the disciples three different, they don't get it, man. They do not get it. They're like the Keystone Cops. Now I just dated myself, but the Keystone Cops, they just bungle along the whole way along and they don't get it. They're clueless. Okay. I just redeemed myself with that. Okay. A little, okay, clueless, kind of ditzy along the way. They don't get it. And Jesus though, this is the plan all along. It doesn't seem like a plan. It seems foolish. It seems absurd. It seems to be an accident, a mistake. And yet it is genius. And we're going to talk about that. But the question is throughout this whole narrative, whether anybody really gets it, you know? And so that's the question Luke is really asking all the way along through this whole Palm Sunday through Easter time period. Do you get it? Do you know what's going on? Do you understand it? Do you get it? So Jesus on the cross, we didn't read this, but he cries out the first word from the cross, his father, forgive them for they do not know what they're doing. And he's really looking at the crowds who are hurling insults at him. And it's just chaotic and confusing and everything going on in front of him. And he basically says, father, they're looking right at me and they don't get it. Forgive them. They don't even know what's going on. But along the way, there are four different people or individuals or groups throughout this whole story that get it. And we're going to look at those because they get the genius. They get the genius of his commitment. They get the genius of who he is and what he's about. And it's astounding who gets it because it doesn't, well, it's not logical. Let's put it that way. You think the learned would get it? You think the people who, who have a cultural understanding of things, the people who would understand the whole Old Testament, they get it. They don't get it. Keystone cops, clueless, whatever you want to call them. They're kind of dumbfounded there. They don't get it. And you see everybody's hurling insults at Jesus. Everybody is rejecting him. The whole world seems to be turned against him. Even his disciples have fled. So most people aren't, but there are four that do. And so we're going to learn from this sermon, basically t...