Lent Landscapes - 6 - Serving a Savior (Palm Sunday)

Scripture: Luke 19:28-40

Luke 19:28–40 NIV

28 After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, 30 “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ” 32 Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 They replied, “The Lord needs it.” 35 They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. 36 As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road. 37 When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: 38 “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” 39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” 40 “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

4/13/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Mission Moment

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

Blessing Box

Opening Prayer:

God of the covenant,

in the glory of the cross

your Son embraced the power of death

and broke its hold over your people.

In this time of repentance,

draw all people to yourself,

that we who confess Jesus as Lord

may put aside the deeds of death

and accept the life of your kingdom. Amen.

Serving a Savior

Following Jesus

The primary purpose of the season of Lent is to help us follow Jesus. We often tell people that being a Christian is an easy choice to make, simply choosing life over death. We told them that the commands of Jesus are not complicated. We are to love God and love others. But when we stop there when we neglect the great commission to teach them everything he taught and passed down to us. In the season of Lent, we remember that Jesus said anyone who wanted to be his disciple had to pick up their cross and follow him. (Luke 9:23)

If Lent had a theme verse, that would be it. Last year, we followed Jesus from the water to the cross. This year, we have followed Jesus across all the various landscapes he leads us. We don’t and won’t understand every part of the journey. But Jesus gives us just enough to see him ahead of us and help us bring others along with us. I hope you’ve grown closer to Jesus this season, and perhaps next year, we can focus on bringing someone along with us as we carry our crosses and follow Jesus to his cross.

We’ve reached Holy Week. We are almost to the end of this Lenten journey. Throughout the journey, we focused on ourselves and the various things we encounter. However, one of the things we encounter all along the way is other people. The disciples were never alone. And I don’t mean Jesus was always with them. I mean, they were always around each other. They struggle to get along with each other at times. They faced their fears, shared their joys, and grieved together for three years. They left their families and became a new family with Jesus, changing them forever.

It’s one thing to follow Jesus by yourself and not know where you are going or why. It’s a very different experience when you are trying to follow Jesus, and you interact with other people. I’m pretty confident Peter would not have boasted or made any of his unhelpful outbursts to Jesus if he did not have an audience watching him. We also tend to try to justify our actions about following Jesus when we have others with us, watching us.

It happens to us often because we usually don’t know or understand everything we do when we carry our crosses and follow Jesus. Serving our Savior means following Jesus even when what He is doing doesn’t make sense to us.

Prophecy

The disciples had been to Jerusalem before, but this time was different. Everyone noticed when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, calling him right out of the tomb, still covered in his burial clothes. The whispered comments about him being the Messiah were starting to be shouted by the hundreds of people who had seen and experienced the power of God in him. It was a tremendous situation, full of joy and apprehension.

As Jesus and the disciples drew near the suburban villages outside Jerusalem, Jesus sent two disciples on ahead with a special mission. They were to find a young donkey that had never been ridden and bring it back to Jesus. Presumably, they would know it had never been written because it would still be with its mother. And if anyone, including the donkey's owners, asked what they were doing, they were to say that the Lord needed it.

We don’t know if Jesus had talked to the owners ahead of time and planned this out, giving the disciples a secret password to share, or if God moved in the lives of those owners and led them to let go of this prized possession, trusting in God without knowing why. We don’t know for sure because the disciples didn’t know for sure. Everyone was running on faith and not trying to explain their actions because Jesus was clearly there among them, and they all heard what he was telling them to do. At the moment, they didn’t need to know why.

Afterward, they could look back and see the significance of the prophecy from Zechariah 9:9 lived out before their eyes.

9 Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!

Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!

See, your king comes to you,

righteous and victorious,

lowly and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

—The New International Version (Zec 9:9). (2011). Zondervan.

Afterward, they could see the significance of Jesus entering the city humbly, not riding in on a conquering war horse. Instead, he came in on the backs of those who were young, weak, and inexperienced and those who did not know what they were doing.

Jesus was prophecy in its simplest and clearest form. The New and Old Testament prophets sometimes struggled to understand the things they communicated to God‘s people. As Paul wrote in First Corinthians, it’s like staring into a dark glass. We can’t see things clearly, but we know later when we see Jesus face-to-face, our understanding will be made whole. But Jesus was not a prophet, struggling to share the word of God. He was the word of God. He was not the one that turned the light on in the darkness. He was the light.

So, the disciples found themselves living out the very prophecy that they struggled to understand. They were part of the story, even when they didn’t know it or understand it. And that’s what happens to us when Jesus calls us to be his disciples and we choose to say yes and follow him in faith.

Early Adopters

Every great movement started when one person shared an idea with someone else, and they agreed to go along with it, even if they didn’t fully understand it. If those two disciples had told Jesus no or refused to go through with his request because they didn’t understand the awkward situation they were put in, they might have canceled the parade. The prophecy would not have been fulfilled. Maybe Jesus would’ve found someone else to get the donkey. We won’t ever know because that’s not what happened. Those two said yes, and everything fell into place after them.

When we study movements among people, there is always a group called early adopters who jump on the bandwagon first and get the momentum going. In our passage today, the earliest adopters were the disciples. They had three years of experience with Jesus and were willing to trust him no matter what strange request he had. As the number of disciples grew over those three years, so did the number of early adopters. The way Jesus started out in the suburban villages of Jerusalem allowed him to bring a sizable crowd into a town that could have shut him down and kept him out at the gate, but the people were singing hosanna and waving their palm branches before they got to the city.

That is significant because we cannot expect people to follow faithfully, worship wholeheartedly, and break out into revival when we have not spent time building relationships with them. As you may recall, there have been many, many Christian celebrities and famous preachers who have been to and through Asbury University, but the most recent outpouring of worship, prayer, and movement of the Holy Spirit came through the words and prayers from one of their own campus pastors who worked with the students and knew them by name. He was feeding his sheep. Likewise, the world, our nation, and our community will not suddenly jump on board with us if we haven’t spent time getting to know them. And they won’t follow Jesus if they don’t know him either.

The Movement of God

They did everything right that day. It was fulfilling a prophecy, after all. They set up the parade, drew in the early adopters, built a crowd, gave them all something to hold in their hands, and sang a song that was repetitive with only one verse and a word chorus so that everybody could join in whether they had heard that song before or not. You’re also talking about a parade of hundreds of people, so I’m sure they were all off-key and off-rhythm, and nobody cared. They were worshiping God, praising him for the coming Messiah and their salvation, not performing, and no one knew who was leading the music. It wasn’t about the music. It was about celebrating Jesus.

It was about celebrating him as a messiah in a way that they didn’t really have the freedom to do. They were putting their lives on the line by going out in the streets and waving their palm branches. Honoring anyone as king besides the emperor or someone the emperor of Rome had appointed as King underneath him was an act of treason. The fact that it was rebellious probably made people even more excited and fervent in their worship.

The Jewish leaders were terrified. The Roman soldiers were anxious and were probably not looking forward to how many people they would have to kill if this mob and protests turned violent. They probably wondered if they would make it home that night. And here, amid all this built-up tension, I have to stop and ask: Why? The three years leading up to this did not have any citywide parades. There were some good sermons and parties of thousands of people passing fish sandwiches around, but Jesus typically calmed the storms. He didn't fire them up. Yet, he led and directed this whole explosive incident. The rest of the people really didn’t know what was going on. Why did he do it?

I think there’s a simple answer to this, but it’s not pretty. If you rewind the story back to where Jesus stood outside, Jerusalem, staring at the city, weeping for the love of all the people, and knowing what lay ahead for him, we know he was looking to the cross. We know that because that’s what he told us disciples. That was the outburst from Peter forbidding him to go there. For all of us who’ve been touched and blessed by Jesus, we have an allergic reaction to anything that involves his suffering.

But Jesus knew that the cross was his ultimate destination at the end of Holy Week. And he knew it wouldn’t count if he just went there himself. We had to be the ones that carried him there on our backs. And we had to do it together, not just a few people. We had to be the ones to nail him to that cross and hang him up with the criminals. We had to be the ones to reject him and deny him with one voice. And let’s face it, the best way to band people together and get them to do something huge and horrible is to drum their hopes, stir up their emotions, and then take a quick left turn at the end of the parade that no one expects, leaving them disappointed and angry.

Leading Us to the Cross

These past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be the church. I’ve been told and I have taught many times that the church is not a building. It’s the people. Coming into a building once a week, listening to sermons, and singing songs together does not necessarily make you at Christian. But I’m beginning to think people don’t necessarily make the church, either. You can get a group of people together and be a baseball team or a political party. People coming together can be a community, but that doesn’t make them a church. The Bible tells us that the church is the body of Christ. You take Jesus out of the leadership, and it’s no longer the church.

The people in Jerusalem saw how far they could fall over a few days — from worshiping Jesus as their coming king to seeing that the freedom in life he was bringing them was not an escape from death but was new life found on the other side of it, and they wanted nothing to do with him. The biggest revival Israel had seen in centuries died before it was born because Jesus didn’t live up to their expectations. He came to give us what we needed, not what we wanted, and we didn’t like that. No, if that’s the case, we’ll just come up with our own savior. We will make him in our own image. We can make sure he does what we want him to do. That’s the church of the people. That’s not the body of Christ.

I think Jesus went through all of that because every one of those people in the parade, including his disciples, maybe especially his disciples, needed to know how much sin ruled in their lives and could pull them away from him at the drop of a hat. They couldn’t accept his forgiveness until they knew they needed it. And by the end of that week, everyone knew they needed it.

We are no better than them. These past few years have not always brought out the best in us, and some of us have had to reflect on what we believe and how far we are willing to trust our Savior Jesus. We’ve given up money, time, and our strength. Some of you have lost friends and family because they wouldn’t follow you as you were following Jesus. And, having been through those parade moments as well, you’ve experienced some of those sharp, left, turns that Jesus has taken us down, and the disappointments that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why it hasn’t gotten easier yet.

But I suspect that some of you are beginning to see that our hearts will not change with a vote, a name change, or anything else that we do in our own strength. Martin Luther said,

“There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

We are no better than anyone else. We only know Jesus is better, and we are trusting him to make us more like him as we follow him wherever he leads us.

How closely are you following Jesus?

Can you hear his voice clearly above the crowd?

Are you ready and willing to go with him when he turns in an unexpected direction or asks you to serve in a way you don't fully understand?

Closing Prayer

Lord, it is time for us to turn our eyes to you. You call us to carry our crosses, and we don't know how. Help us this week to watch you carry yours, bearing all our sin and shame and giving us an example of how to carry the smaller cross you have placed before us. We know you did not love the cross, but you carried it for the love of us. Help us to carry our crosses for the love of you. In Your Holy Name. Amen.