Sermon Tone Analysis

Last week, we celebrated Easter here at Liberty Spring Christian Church and at Christian churches around the globe.

We all know, of course, that Easter is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead after his death on a cross at Calvary three days earlier.

And most of you probably know that the night before His crucifixion, Jesus shared a last meal — the Last Supper — with his disciples in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem.

This wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem during the weeks that preceded this meal.

He was intent on getting to Jerusalem, because He knew that God’s plan of salvation for fallen mankind would come to fruition there.

He knew, in fact, that the events of that Thursday night would conclude with His arrest and trial on false charges and that He would be crucified — murdered there in Jerusalem because of His claim to be the Son of God.

And yet, He headed there, knowing full well the suffering and torment that He was to face.

Now, Jesus had told the disciples that He must suffer and die and that He would rise again on the third day.

And he had told them that it would take place in Jerusalem.

And yet, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that they really got what was going on as they made their way to Jerusalem with Him in those last weeks before His death.

The fact is that throughout the Gospels the picture we see of the disciples is that they really didn’t understand what was going on most of the time.

They didn’t see the big picture of what Jesus was doing, perhaps because they were so focused on their own ideas of what they HOPED He was doing.

Judea was under Roman rule, and everyone hated the Romans, who frankly made it easy to hate them.

And so, the disciples, who by now had recognized that Jesus was who He said He was — the Son of God and the promised Savior of Israel — pretty much seemed to think that He was there to vanquish Rome and return the Promised Land of Israel to the Jews, God’s chosen people.

And I suspect that when Jesus rode that donkey into Jerusalem on the Sunday before His crucifixion — as the disciples saw the crowds gathered along the road, laying down their palm branches and singing out “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest!”

When they heard the crowd cheering Jesus in the traditional way the Hebrew people would have cheered a new king, they probably thought that Jesus would soon take His rightful place on the throne of David and drive the despised Roman occupiers out of the land.

And then Thursday rolled around, and it was time for supper.

But this wasn’t just any supper.

This was the first night of Passover, one of the holiest of Jewish holidays.

The Jewish people have been celebrating Passover for thousands of years.

In fact, this year’s Passover celebration concluded just yesterday.

Today, we’re going to break from our study of the church to talk about Passover and its relationship to the Lord’s Supper, which we will celebrate at the end of today’s service.

There are, of course, some differences between the two, but there are some similarities, as well, and I’m going to suggest to you that the similarities are intentional.

To understand the significance of Passover to the Jews of Jesus’ time and those today, as well, we must go back to where it started, in Egypt, almost 1,500 years before the night of the Last Supper.

The people of Israel had spent more than 400 years in Egypt, much of it as slaves under hard labor.

And Scripture records that God heard their cries of anguish, so He sent Moses as His agent to deliver His people from captivity.

You all know the story: Moses had pleaded with the pharaoh to let the people of Israel go, but the Egyptian leader just hardened his heart against God, no matter what terrors were brought down upon the people of that land.

And so God unleashed plagues over the land, and after each plague, the pharaoh just hardened his heart all the more against the Hebrew people.

Finally, Moses told him that all the back-and-forth between them was over.

There would be one more plague — just one more.

And then he told him what would happen.

Among the people of Israel, preparations were made for what would become the first Passover feast.

Turn with me to Exodus 12:21-32, and we’ll see what happened.

Throughout the Old Testament, we find different “types” for people and events that we see in the New Testament.

Moses, the great prophet, for instance, was a “type” for Jesus Christ.

He was a picture, a symbol exemplifying some of the characteristics of Jesus.

The Passover and the Jewish people’s escape from bondage are also types.

God gave His people these types to help them recognize the way He works.

He has always been about redeeming fallen mankind.

The Passover feast, itself, points forward to what we now know as the Lord’s Supper, and the people’s rescue from bondage is a type for how we are rescued from the bondage of sin by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

In fact, God called the Jewish people to celebrate Passover every year as a reminder of what He had done for them.

Similarly, when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we should be reminded of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Just as the people of Israel were spared the work of the death angel because they had spread the blood of a Passover lamb on their doorposts, we who have followed Christ are spared the wrath of God for our sins by the blood of the perfect Lamb of God.

Just as the lambs that were sacrificed saved the Jewish people from their slavery, we who were slaves to sin can be saved from our lost condition by the sacrifice that the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, made on a cross on Calvary.

John the Baptist recognized that Jesus would serve His people this way.

We see that in the Gospel of John.

When our Savior met with His disciples in the upper room of a home in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, just hours before his arrest and crucifixion, He told them that this was an important event for them.

We see in Luke’s account that he took the bread and the wine and shared it with them.

But none of the accounts of that meal mention the lamb that would have been part of every Passover celebration.

Jesus himself was the lamb who would be sacrificed.

And just as in Egypt, the sacrifice was necessary for the covering of sin.

This is an important point: The Lord’s Supper is, among other things, our reminder of the cost of our sins.

We probably don’t talk enough about sin in the modern church.

To be sure, it’s vitally important to talk about God’s grace, but we should never lose sight of the fact that His grace is demonstrated most clearly in its manifestation as a response to our sins.

Sin is missing God’s mark.

We know all about the 10 Commandments, but even if we have managed to keep all of them to the letter, each of us misses the mark in the spirit of those commandments.

Is there someone you just hate?

Jesus said you have as much as murdered that person.

Ever lusted after someone?

Jesus said you have as much as committed adultery with that person.

Have you ever disobeyed your parents?

Wished you had something of your neighbor’s?

Failed to help someone you could have helped?

Used the Lord’s name in vain?

Approached God with anything short of reverence?

Those are all sins.

Every one of us has sinned.

As the Apostle Paul put it:

And every one of us deserves punishment for our sins.

That punishment is the same today as it was in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate from the one forbidden tree — death.

Here’s Paul again:

Sin brought death into the world, and it still does.

It is because of sin that we all, unless Jesus comes back first, will experience physical death.

But there is a greater death that those who have not followed Jesus in faith will experience, and that is spiritual death — eternal separation from the God who made us to be in fellowship with Him.

The cost of our sins is death.

We sinners cannot stand in the presence of a perfect and holy God — not without some act on His part.

We cannot save ourselves.

Imagine you have waded into the mud.

It’s up to your hips.

That’s what it looks like when we’re stuck in our sins.

How can you save yourself?

The more you struggle against the mud, the more you become stuck.

No matter how many good things we do, there is nothing that we do that will release us from sin’s hold on us.

We need someone to pull us out of it.

And God, in His infinite grace and mercy, wants to do just that.

As David wrote:

God sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to live among us in perfect harmony with His Father’s will — to show us how mankind was supposed to live — and then to die as the perfect, once-for-all, sacrifice, paying the debt for our sins.

And in His great love for us and in His great desire for a relationship with each person who has been made in His image, God devised a plan whereby mankind could be rescued from the sin that enslaved us all.

Your sin separated you from God.

But God had a plan to bring you into fellowship with Him.

That plan called for His Son to die on a cross on Calvary, where He gained victory over sin.

And then He gained victory over death itself in His resurrection on the third day.

This is the message of the Gospel, the Good News that we recall and proclaim each time we partake of the Lord’s Supper.

You have heard me refer to the Lord’s Supper sometimes as the Eucharist.

The Greek word from which we derive “Eucharist” means “to give thanks.”

And just as the Jewish people give thanks to God during Passover for delivering them from slavery in Egypt, we give thanks to Him during communion for delivering we who follow Christ from our slavery to sin.

In a moment, we will celebrate the Lord’s Supper — we will give thanks to God for His Son’s sacrifice for us, for the body that was broken and the blood that was shed to cover our sins and save us from the justified wrath of a Holy God.

This is a meal of celebration as well as remembrance.