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Palm Sunday: Luke 19:41-44, "Don't Miss Out", Pastor Nathan Williams · Clifford Baptist

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  Speaker A: Welcome to the March 29 sermon from Clifford Baptist Church, 6:35 Fletcher's Level Road in Amherst. Today's scripture is Luke, chapter 19, verses 41 through 44. And the sermon is entitled Don't Miss out, delivered today by Associate Pastor Nathan Williams.
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  Speaker B: I'm always honored to be able to open up God's Word with his church. And I hope you brought a copy of your word with you. And I encourage you to turn to Luke, chapter 19. That's where we'll be today. And I'll save names to protect the innocent. But as I was walking in about 11:58, someone asked me, am I going to talk about my illustrious basketball career given March Madness? And I could tell he had not read the title on the bulletin. It says, don't miss out. Because when I think about my basketball career, that's all I did was miss out. I wasn't tall enough. I didn't play on any good teams. My team had a losing streak. But today I want us to take time on Palm Sunday to step back and make sure that in the bustle of this time of year, we don't miss out on who Jesus is. I think we all know what it's like to miss out. I joke about my basketball ability, but we all know what it's like to miss an opportunity. Maybe for people in school, it's an extra credit assignment you didn't feel like doing, and then at the end of the semester, you really wish you had done it. Or many of us who are older, who see how successful certain businesses are that you could have invested in, you're like, well, my retirement would look a whole lot better if I just invested in 2000 in some technology company. I don't know what it is. There's maybe a relationship you didn't forgive and move past something, and it just splintered and fell apart. And we all know the rawness of what it's like when we miss out on something that really matters. And today, as we look in Luke 19, we're going to see Christ arriving in Jerusalem. A pinnacle moment in the story of the whole Bible. But it's also one of the most heartbreaking stories. We have Christ the Messiah, the one that we cry hosanna to, because God is salvation. Christ was salvation who had come to to his people. God had promised that he was going to bring hope and restoration to the whole world through a messiah that was to come. But as Jesus rides in, he's coming over the Mount of Olives, he's riding on a donkey's Colt, he's coming in. We all know that the disciples worshiped him. But in Luke 19, here we see that the Pharisees questioned what was going on. They seemed to resist Christ's coming. The God of the world in the flesh, bringing salvation for all, faced resistance. And I want us to see in Luke 19 only a few verses, verses 41 through 44, our Lord's response to people missing him, not acknowledging him for who he is. So let's read. Beginning in verse 41, it says, and when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, would that you even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace. But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation. Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, Lord, we praise you that you are mindful of us and make a way for us in Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray that your spirit will be with us, that your truth will sanctify us and make us in who you call us to be. That we won't just people who cry out your name, but we'll be people whose lives are transformed by your name and live every moment of it in the peace and the fullness of life you give. Help us to acknowledge who you are this morning in Jesus name. Amen. In this text is a strange little story in this flow of Luke's account about to go into the Holy Week. And we're familiar this time of year. We have Paul's Sunday where Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and then throughout Holy Week leading up to Good Friday, where Christ died on a cross and then three days later rose from the grave. This is the crux and the center and the foundation of our hope as believers. But I think there's a helpful reminder in the little details of Luke, who's writing down the accounts of eyewitnesses that saw the little expressions on Jesus face, what Jesus said, how he responded as this great week went along. And in these few verses, we see that Jerusalem faced judgment because they missed acknowledging their Christ. The Christ coming to bring salvation was missed. So Jerusalem, the holy city, the city of peace, faced judgment. That's a difficult thing. But today, as we behold Christ, I believe we'll see a picture into who he is, the fullness of who he is. And our challenge today is not to miss acknowledging Christ and all he is. An incomplete Christ is no Christ at all. I want us to see fully who our Lord is in this Palm Sunday, in this Holy Week, I encourage us to rest in our Christ, acknowledging Him and accepting him fully. Because Jesus charges these people with not knowing the time of their visitation. They didn't understand what Jesus had done and who he was. Let us not make the same mistake. May we acknowledge our Lord for who he is. There's three truths of Christ that we should acknowledge from this passage. And I'll give them to you up front. And we're going to work through this passage looking at each of them. We should acknowledge Christ's passion. We should acknowledge Christ peace. And we should acknowledge Christ's position. If we miss any of these, we have a piece of Christ, but not the whole Christ. And we need all of him to have hope. So let's look in verse 41. Anywhere that you see a little sneak peek into who Jesus is is worth just soaking up and focusing on. And in verse 41 we see some actions of Christ that are windows into his heart, into who he is, what his passion is, what motivates him, what drives him. And I want us to look at three verbs in verse 41. It says, and when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it. His a picture of how our Lord acted upon knowing that these people were missing Him. And each of them, each of these verbs I want us to look at. Show us his heart. Show us the heart and the intention and the passion of our Lord. The first one is that he came near. I think this is one of the beautiful graces of who our God is, is that though we don't deserve him, we have rejected him, we have turned away from Him. All of us push him away and go for second rate things. He still draws near to us. And in this very part of Jesus coming down into Jerusalem, he knew what was awaiting him. He had foretold it time and time again throughout his ministry. And here he knows that he is going to be faced with, with rejection, hardness, people pushing him away and people killing Him. But in his passion for them, in his heart for humanity, he still came near. Philippians 2 talks about the Lord not counting equality with God as something to be grasped, but he took on the form of a servant, even to the point of death. And we see that this action of Christ drawing near shows his passion for those he comes to save. I don't want us to miss that. It's not just this checkpoint. Each year we go through Holy Week and well, Jesus had to come so we could get to the cross. And no, Jesus chose to do each of these things out of his passion for his own. Don't miss it. The second verb is he saw or beheld the city. Eye contact is one thing in a conversation. Most of us know that when you talk to someone, you should look them in the eyes. But sometimes you have a conversation. I've talked with a few people like this. That it's more than them just looking at you. Like, I need to keep my pupils in this direction. No, it actually seems like they're listening and they see you and showing that they're invested in care. And I don't want to draw too much out of this one word where Jesus sees the city. But given the context of what he was coming to do, I believe he saw Jerusalem, saw the people in it for what they really were. The Gospels give many accounts of Jesus knowing what people were thinking and bringing it up. So I know when Jesus is coming into the city and he's going down from the Mount of Olives into the Kidron Valley up to the walls of Jerusalem, he's not just seeing a great massive temple that was expensive to build. He doesn't just see bustling droves of people coming into the holy place for the religious time of year. It was. He didn't just see how much money people had dedicated and put into the treasuries of this holy place. No, I think he actually saw the hearts and the minds and the intentions of those there. And he cared for them, desired relationship with them. Think in John 4, one of these examples where Jesus knew things about the woman at the well that the woman hadn't told him yet. And he used this knowledge of her sin not as a place of judgment in throwing her down, but a place of drawing near to her in offering her hope. Because I wonder, what did Jesus see when he looked at the city? I don't know. The scriptures don't tell us. But I think that what he saw, given the judgment that he gives this place, he saw people who cared more about power and control in religious circles than worship of God. People who were more focused on checking all the right boxes to self legitimize themselves or self glorify themselves to that they weren't open to actual relationship with God. They didn't really want God apart from what he could do for them in their circles of influence. And he saw a people, he saw a group of those who were focused on religious hardness. And they were comfortable in their religious traditions, comfortable in the religious patterns that they miss the revelation of God himself speaking to them. And we see Jesus heart in that. He doesn't go, oh, well, these people never can do much with them. No, he weeps. It's not just a random. He weeps. Jesus isn't a man who's insane or emotionally unregulated. He. He is a strong man, the strongest man to ever live. But he's a transparent and honest man. He wears the truth on his sleeves. His heart is broken knowing that people are missing who he was. And I think understanding the intentions of someone paints them in a new light. If I saw someone weeping, it would depend on who they were. If it was a politician trying to tell me something, or an actor telling me something, or a salesman telling me something, like, maybe they're using this to try to make them give in to what agenda they have. But if it's a friend of mine or a family member of mine who's weeping, okay, let me see what's going on here. And we see the heart of Christ and his weeping and his tears. One of three places in scripture where we see that our Lord weeps. One was when his friend Lazarus died. The shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. The second one is here, and the third is in Gethsemane as he is crying to the point of shedding blood over what was to come. But we see Jesus shows us his passion in his heart. He cared about the people he was coming to. Don't miss that your Lord cares for you. He is mindful of us. I don't understand why, but our Lord cares for us. He loves us. He is passionate towards us. And he comes near to us and sees us in our brokenness, Sees us for who we are. Yet he comes and offers us life. That is something we cannot miss. Or else our lives will be full of regret. I think as we have this knowledge, we see this glimpse of who Jesus is, we must make sure that. That we acknowledge him through embracing him with hearts of worship. Does seeing your Lord for who he is and his heart for you, his passion for you, give you joy and love and adoration for him? Or are you apathetic towards him? He's in your Sunday morning box. But he never gets into your heart, affecting your desires and your joys and where you go for happiness. But seeing that the God of the universe in the flesh came to die for you, to bring you life, the life that you don't deserve, does that give you Joy knowing that our Lord cares for us and makes me love him all the more. It also displaces and pushes out lies that all Jesus came to do was to establish a new set of rules that people had to follow or just place lies in our lives where we think that we need to meet all these standards to impress everyone else, to impress God and to be deserving of standing before God. No, the gospel is that we can never deserve that standing before God. But God in his heart for us, in his love for us, gives it to us. Seeing the heart and the passion of Christ can remove lies that we can stumble into. But we should allow this example, this heart of him to transform how we treat sin around us. We all know people, whether they're close to us or on the news, that are sinful, wicked. They do things that do not honor God. Our Lord's heart was one of he wept over it is ours one of just snobbery and sticking our nose up at it, saying, wow, those people over there, they really need to get a grip. They're not like me. Or are we filled with compassion, seeing that those in our lives that are still in sin, that are still struggling, still believing lies about what is true, do our hearts break as our Lord's heart breaks for them? We can't miss out on that because let's look into verse 42, because we see that we must not just acknowledge his passion, but we must acknowledge his peace. We see what Jesus says. He's weeping. I can see him trying to get a grip in order to put words together to tell people why he is so distraught. In verse 42, it says, saying, would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace. There's this awkward beginning phrase. Would you even you? It's emphasizing the people before him. It's not just a generic thing. No, even you. If you only knew the things that were here that could bring you peace. And I think some of the Old Testament scriptures that these people had, showing what the Messiah was coming to do. Give us a picture of what these things are. In Zechariah 9. 9, it talks about people rejoicing. It says, rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud. It says, behold, your king is coming to you righteous and having salvation. Is he humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. That's cited by New Testament authors of what Jesus is fulfilling. But the next verse goes on to say that he shall speak peace to the nations. Jesus was coming to Bring peace. It uses symbolic imagery. It talks about how great it was going to be. But this king coming not on a war horse, but on a donkey, was signifying the peace that had come and the peace that he was. Isaiah 9, 6 says that this Messiah would be a prince of peace. One of my favorite Old Testament prophecies is Micah, chapter five, talking about out of Bethlehem, the shepherd ruler who was to come. And it says, he will be their peace. This Messiah isn't just going to bring it about. This Messiah is going to be this peace. So Jesus in this place of. He's weeping over the people missing out on who he was. He's saying, if only you knew, even you, anybody in this room, anyone he was talking to, knew the things that would make for peace. Peace. He was saying, if only you knew, I was the peace you needed. I think part of the reason he was missed because the understanding of what this peace should be was twisted. They were hoping for a massive political ruler that would overthrow the Romans, throw them out, and give them this great sprawling empire for themselves, like in the days of Solomon. But God himself in the flesh was showing. No, there's a greater freedom. You need a greater kingdom for you to be a part of, a greater peace for you to have than just some political peace around you. But you need the peace of right relationship with God through what I can provide. And this Old Testament understanding of peace is not what I think we typically think of. We think of tranquility, but the Old Testament word shalom for peace is much more than that. I think we often can know what it's like to want peace. I've seen commercials. Or I can imagine the craziness of a mother at home, kids pulling on them at every side. A to do list that's unending, just wanting to create. Close the bathroom door, put on a nice scented candle, dim the lights, and take a nice warm bath. Does that sound like peace? Away from the noise, away from the rumbling, that emptiness of turmoil is not what the Old Testament word for peace is trying to communicate. But imagine a Thanksgiving dinner where everyone's in town, people talking, laughing over a good meal. There's no worry about being able to pay for the food. Everyone's in good health, everyone's doing well. The children running around playing are not fighting and beating each other up. They're getting along. That family member you're worried about isn't arguing with uncle you know who about something. There's actual peace and people getting along, and there's a fullness and a harmony and a greatness and a flourishing to what's going on. That's the type of peace Christ brings. It's a fullness and a flourishing of life, not just cutting out a few bad things. It's a positive movement, not a negative one. And Jesus is offering this when he comes. In Isaiah 53. 5, it doubles down on who our peace is. It's not certain, circumstances changing. In Isaiah 53. 5, it says, but he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his wounds we are healed. We can't miss acknowledging our Lord's peace, our Christ's peace. It's one that gives us the salvation we need, the fullness and the flourishing of life that isn't circumstantial, but is rooted in our ability to be able to be the people we were made to be in relationship with God. That might sound boring, that might sound dumb, but if you taste and see the beauty of our Lord, if you behold his heart and acknowledge his passion for you, if you see his spirit at work in your life and those around you, there's a peace that comes with the connection with Christ Jesus being your fullness of life, being your life, that you cannot get anywhere else. And it is beautiful. It's the gospel, it's the good news that we cannot miss. And Jesus was broken that these people did not acknowledge it. He goes on to be clear that while, yes, he has a passion for his people, he has peace to give. We see the third thing, that we must also acknowledge Christ, position who he is in his fullness. We see a clear line drawn by Christ, one that is wise for anyone in this room, anyone hearing this, to acknowledge of his role as God, as sovereign Lord, sovereign and just judge. He says, but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation. These are really hard words. The same Lord, the same Christ, full of love, weeping for those missing him, offering peace and fullness, is now pronouncing judgment on those who kind of dismiss him, then push him to the side. We see that we must acknowledge that our Lord is Lord. He is a just, righteous, holy God the Scripture describes as a consuming fire, but the same Bible we read about his love and his heart for us describes him as a consuming fire. And either that fire will purify us and set a blaze of passion in our life to live for him, or if we kind of dismiss and push him to the side, kind of say, well, Jesus is nice to kind of keep over here, but I'm not really going to take him too seriously. We might meet the fire that consumes because our position is not God, our position is not sovereign Lord. He is. He gives three stern warnings. One, that knowledge of him being able to know his peace can be hidden from your eyes. He says to these people, it's now going to be hidden from your eyes. And Romans chapter one echoes this. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to debased mind to do what ought not to be done. There comes a point where God gives people over to what they want. He lets them have if they want to push them away, don't want anything to do with Him. The Lord stops extending his grace to them and they become hardened, separated from Him. That's a fearful thing. I don't like talking about it, but it's true. To this Lord who loves us, who provides peace for us, we can't just kind of push him off to the side and say, well, I don't really need to worry about him till life gets hard. No, he is Lord. And we run the risk of being hardened and losing sight of him if we just go through the rhythms of life, even if the rhythms are showing up at church and we just kind of push them to the side and don't acknowledge him as our Christ. Second, and what takes up the most of this passage is the punishment of him removing the physical and societal bliss around these people. I believe here he's foretelling the coming of when Rome came and sacked and destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. where General Titus came around, surrounded the city, hemmed them in, about, came in and killed everyone in there, including their children. That's awful. And then he went through the effort of getting engineers together to push every stone where the temple was standing off. Jesus says not one stone will be left upon it. Their pride was this great building. Jesus said, all that's going to be gone. We can't amiss acknowledging his position as righteous and just judge and Lord of the universe, because he shows us the third thing, because you did not know the time of your visitation. He is a Lord who is his position as just ruler over time itself. He knows the timing of our life, how Long it will be, how short it will be, what opportunities we will have to know him and to be used by him when those opportunities will end and we will no longer have opportunities. That's why the Bible screams today is the day of salvation. Because our Lord, we must acknowledge our Christ's position as sovereign Lord and ruler of the universe and bend our knee and lives to Him. And in closing these three things, these three truths are like three legs to a stool. If you know a nice three legged stool, if you pull one leg out, you're falling down. We can't just have an incomplete Christ. We must acknowledge and behold all of Him. He is a Christ that is compassionate towards his people, loves them, cares for them, weeps over them when they miss Him. But he's also a Lord and a Christ who gives peace, the peace that your hearts desire and are restless until they find in Him. Don't run to other things for peace. Jesus isn't. And thirdly, we can't just have this nice fluffy image of a Savior who's like, well, he loves me, he'll give me peace. I'll go live my life. However, no, we must acknowledge his position as such sovereign Lord of the universe. And one day we'll have to stand before him and we get one of two things. We either get punishment or we get pardon. The only way to have pardon is by acknowledging him as your Lord and giving your life to him in living every part of your life for Him. So today, are you going to miss out on what your Lord wants to do in your life this week, what your Lord is offering you today? Don't keep on pushing him down the road. Turn to him today if you're a believer. We're about to move into a time of the Lord's Supper as we reflect on what our Christ has done. Don't miss out any part of who he is. Recommit and resubmit your life to him and let him use you this week as you set aside a holy week unto him, to behold our Lord and be used by him, because he is our peace. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I thank you that your Word shows us a full picture of who you are. Thank you Lord, for drawing near to us, for seeing us in our brokenness and having a heart of love towards us that gives us peace even when we don't deserve it. So Lord, I don't care who's in this room. I pray that each of us will lay aside religious shows or displays, but be open to your revelation, your truth and your spirit speaking to us and may we resubmit our lives to you in Jesus name. Amen.
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  Speaker A: Clifford Baptist Church invites you to join us for word worship every Sunday morning at 11am for more information about our church, please call our church office at 434-946-0555.