SPEAKER_00: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_01: Please take your Bible this morning to the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 16 as we look together at three verses.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to be in Matthew this morning, and in next Sunday, and Good Friday in 1 Corinthians 15 and Resurrection Sunday and 1 Corinthians 15.
SPEAKER_01: But they all fit together.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is leading us together to the foot of the cross and ultimately the empty tomb.
SPEAKER_01: Matthew chapter 16, beginning in verse 21, Matthew records for us from that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and on the third day be raised.
SPEAKER_01: And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, Far be it from you, Lord, this shall never happen to you.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus turned and said to Peter, get behind me, Satan.
SPEAKER_01: You are a hindrance to me.
SPEAKER_01: For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, as we come to your word this morning, may you enable us to set aside all of the things of this life, the things of man, and may our minds be able to focus on you, so that our spirits might be drawn to worship.
SPEAKER_01: In your name we pray, amen.
SPEAKER_01: We are approximately 1,990 years removed from this passage of scripture.
SPEAKER_01: We speak a different language, we have a different culture, we wear different clothes, and we have degraded moral sensibilities that have been bombarded by an additional 2,000 years of sin.
SPEAKER_01: We are happy if we are healthy, wealthy, and wise.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we we rarely think of a Messiah who is a political leader.
SPEAKER_01: We're pleased if we merely get a president who doesn't annoy us.
SPEAKER_01: Or who can at least have some constructive policies.
SPEAKER_01: Today we labor to keep our freedoms.
SPEAKER_01: We are far removed from Caesarea Philippi in verse 13 and Peter's declaration of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
SPEAKER_01: We are far removed from the dusty roads leading to Jerusalem, and we are far removed from the ignominy of a Roman cross.
SPEAKER_01: We may be far, far distant from the times and the place and the culture of this passage of Scripture, but that does not mean that the lessons it contains should have less impact on us.
SPEAKER_01: The fellowship of believers in the early church needed the impact of this passage just as much as the disciples who experienced it that very day.
SPEAKER_01: So too, we must go back to that time and that place and walk those dusty roads in order to fully appreciate what God in Christ has done for us.
SPEAKER_01: Now, by 30 AD, Israel had been under Roman occupation and rule for approximately 90 years.
SPEAKER_01: During those ninety years, the belief in and the expectation of God's Messiah returning in power and great glory and in the grandeur of a military defeat like King David would bring, that kind of belief took off like Elon Musk's SpaceX rockets.
SPEAKER_01: Because Israel desired to be free from foreign dominion.
SPEAKER_01: But while American independence was fought for and won, Israel repeatedly fought and was crushed.
SPEAKER_01: Each time a leader arose, the insurrections were crushed, were defeated and put down by the Roman armies.
SPEAKER_01: They had no hope of a grassroots movement rising up to thrust out the imperial invaders of Rome.
SPEAKER_01: Israel's only hope was God's promise of a Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: So as a result, there were many who arrived on the scene of Israel's history, claiming to be that promised one.
SPEAKER_01: Charismatic leaders arose often seeking to rid the promised land of the Romans, but each one, each one would be struck down, even crucified, for their defiance of the Roman military engine.
SPEAKER_01: Their followers were scattered, killed, and crucified along Judean roads.
SPEAKER_01: That's what Gamaliel, a leader in the Jewish high court, spoke of in the trial of the apostles mentioned in Acts chapter 5.
SPEAKER_01: Listen to what Gamaliel said.
SPEAKER_01: He said to his fellow leaders, Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these apostles, these men.
SPEAKER_01: For before these days, Tudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about 400, joined him.
SPEAKER_01: He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing.
SPEAKER_01: After him, Judas the Galilean rose up and drew away some of the people after him, and he too perished.
SPEAKER_01: And all who followed him were scattered.
SPEAKER_01: By the time that the apostles stood before Gamaliel, it was almost normal for Messiahs to rise up, gather a crowd, be killed, and it'd all be over.
SPEAKER_01: That was just the natural pattern that followed itself over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: But in the early years of the first century, the people were longing for some kind of direction from God, a word from the Lord, a prophet, something, anything.
SPEAKER_01: It had been a terribly long 400 years since Malachi.
SPEAKER_01: And onto that scene, onto that scene, out in the desert byways stepped a man named John.
SPEAKER_01: People were maybe a bit hesitant about him at first.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, who wouldn't be uncertain about a guy who ate grasshoppers?
SPEAKER_01: Besides that, he preached judgment and repentance and baptized people.
SPEAKER_01: But all of that character eventually began to remind them of the character of Old Testament prophets.
SPEAKER_01: And it did seem as though God was speaking through John the Baptizer.
SPEAKER_01: Here, at least, in John the Baptizer appeared one who was similar to those Old Testament prophets.
SPEAKER_01: And he drew crowds and crowds of people.
SPEAKER_01: And one of those people that came to John to be baptized was a man named Andrew.
SPEAKER_01: Gospel of John in chapter 1 tells us that Andrew came to John to be baptized, and he began to be a disciple of John until John pointed out another person to Andrew named Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And when Andrew saw Jesus and heard that he was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he left John and followed Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: One of the first things that Andrew did after beginning to follow Jesus was to go and tell his brother, quote, We have found the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And his brother was Peter.
SPEAKER_01: Peter joined Andrew in following Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: From the very beginning, then, Peter operated under the belief that Jesus is the promised Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And we are left to assume that Peter's view of the expected Messiah is just like everyone else's.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to be a charismatic leader who's going to draw a crowd to himself.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to draw in a group of military fighters.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to push out the Roman armies.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to bring back the golden years of Israel under King David.
SPEAKER_01: By the time Peter made his declaration in Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, he and the other disciples were convinced of at least two truths.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, Jesus is the long-anticipated Messiah, and two, he is God in the flesh, Emmanuel, God with us.
SPEAKER_01: If you put those two truths together, you combine them, you arrive at one inevitable conclusion in the first century Jewish mind.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is going to bring victory.
SPEAKER_01: And even mighty Rome cannot stand in his way.
SPEAKER_01: That's someone we can follow.
SPEAKER_01: After lifetimes of tyranny, freedom could be felt.
SPEAKER_01: And the disciples, with Peter at the forefront, would be the first participants in that victory and gaining the honor that came with it.
SPEAKER_01: But all of a sudden, things took a wrong turn down a one-way street.
SPEAKER_01: Because from that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: And he must suffer many things.
SPEAKER_01: From the elders, from the chief priests, from the scribes.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus, the Messiah, must be killed, and on the third day be raised.
SPEAKER_01: In a dramatic change of events, Jesus now announces a shift in priority.
SPEAKER_01: From that time on, Jesus' focus is no longer on the crowds of people that are clamoring to touch him, to be healed, that are asking for him to heal their blindness or their leprosy or to raise people from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: No longer is Jesus focused on the crowds of people.
SPEAKER_01: Now he's bringing it in, he's gathering in his disciples, he's narrowing the focus, and he's instructing his disciples on what's coming next.
SPEAKER_01: From now on, his concentration is on teaching his disciples privately on his way to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: And the first thing, the most important thing that they need to know is that Jesus, the Son of the living God, their Messiah, will die.
SPEAKER_01: More on that in Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: Now Matthew has hinted at this before.
SPEAKER_01: In chapter 12, verse 14, we read that the Pharisees had had such a strong reaction to Jesus that Matthew says they desired to destroy him.
SPEAKER_01: We saw in chapter 12 that Jesus mentions Jonah in the belly of the great fish as a sign toward which to look.
SPEAKER_01: He said, as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish three days and three nights, so Jesus would be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.
SPEAKER_01: Now remember, Matthew is writing this book two, three decades later.
SPEAKER_01: He knows the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: He knows the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: So he's putting all of these events together thematically to arrive at a specific place.
SPEAKER_01: Matthew's readers are two to three decades from these events.
SPEAKER_01: They know where these events are headed.
SPEAKER_01: For that matter, we know.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: We know where this is headed.
SPEAKER_01: We know that next Sunday is Palm Sunday.
SPEAKER_01: And we know that Palm Sunday is followed by Good Friday, and Good Friday is followed by Resurrection Sunday.
SPEAKER_01: But the disciples had none of that.
SPEAKER_01: Strip all of that from your thinking if you can and put yourselves in the sandals of the disciples who knew none of that.
SPEAKER_01: They are clueless.
SPEAKER_01: At this point, they're ignorant of the passage of scriptures that speak about a suffering servant.
SPEAKER_01: And so Jesus works to make it clear, perfectly clear to them.
SPEAKER_01: Jerusalem's down the road.
SPEAKER_01: And with it is Jesus' unimaginable, suffering, and incomprehensible, humiliating death.
SPEAKER_01: But it gets more surprising than that.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the most important and surprising truth is the necessity of this trip to the holy city.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a take it or leave it proposition.
SPEAKER_01: No, this is the first of several ironies in this passage.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus says, I must go.
SPEAKER_01: The irony of God's eternal plan is that the Messiah must go to Jerusalem, and he must go because he must die.
SPEAKER_01: This is a divine necessity.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus' plan is not the foolish design of a schizophrenic man with a death wish.
SPEAKER_01: He's not a foolhardy guy with delusional ideas of rescuing Israel from the iron grip of Rome.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is the determination of God the Son to fulfill the purpose of the Trinity from before time began.
SPEAKER_01: Peter would later speak of this in his first sermon in Acts chapter 2.
SPEAKER_01: He proclaimed to the Jewish crowds of that day that Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.
SPEAKER_01: And according to that definite plan and foreknowledge, he was crucified and killed at the hands of lawless men.
SPEAKER_01: In the mind and plan of the Godhead, this trip to Jerusalem to suffer at the hands of Israel's leaders and to be killed was not to be avoided.
SPEAKER_01: It was a necessity.
SPEAKER_01: And it's important that we take a moment and consider the importance of that truth for us.
SPEAKER_01: Scriptures tell us, we've already sung of it.
SPEAKER_01: The scriptures tell us that we've all sinned.
SPEAKER_01: And so we've earned the wages of our sin.
SPEAKER_01: Those wages, Romans 3 tells us, is death.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't owe us anything.
SPEAKER_01: But He will give us what we've earned.
SPEAKER_01: He does not owe us family, friends, support, encouragement, health, a job, a home, money.
SPEAKER_01: God does not owe us anything.
SPEAKER_01: But He will give us that for which we have labored.
SPEAKER_01: And that for which we have labored earns us our wages.
SPEAKER_01: And we have earned death.
SPEAKER_01: And those wages will be paid.
SPEAKER_01: How then do we reconcile?
SPEAKER_01: God not owing us a thing with this one word must.
SPEAKER_01: If we have earned death, then why must Jesus go to Jerusalem to die?
SPEAKER_01: If we are the ones that have earned our death, then why must Christ, the Son of the living God, die?
SPEAKER_01: Scripture answers that question for us in four words.
SPEAKER_01: God first loved us.
SPEAKER_01: Ephesians chapter 2, verses 4 and 5 tells us, but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, because it's by grace that you've been saved.
SPEAKER_01: And according to 2 Corinthians 5, 21, it is for our sake that Jesus faced Jerusalem and was made to be sin, even though he knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_01: But justice demands satisfaction.
SPEAKER_01: The wages of sin must be paid.
SPEAKER_01: Death must be exacted.
SPEAKER_01: Forgiveness of sins requires the shedding of blood.
SPEAKER_01: And you and I did nothing to merit this must.
SPEAKER_01: This is an act of God, an eternity past, determining what he would do, and then putting that plan into action, and that plan entered into human history in Matthew chapter one with the miraculous birth of a boy named Yahweh saves.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, who would save his people from their sins.
SPEAKER_01: Because of God's rich mercy, with which he loved us, Jesus must go.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus must suffer.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus must be killed.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus must be raised.
SPEAKER_01: The mind of a first century Jew would have frozen in mid-thought.
SPEAKER_01: Jaw dropped in astonished confusion.
SPEAKER_01: Because true messiahs didn't die.
SPEAKER_01: The false ones did.
SPEAKER_01: They'd even seen their false messiahs hung on crosses outside of Jewish cities.
SPEAKER_01: There was no slot in their thinking, no space in their mental filing system for a dead Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: Because messiahs lead people and nations to victory and freedom and ultimate peace.
SPEAKER_01: That's why at the end of the Gospels, at the beginning of Acts, the disciples are still asking Jesus, Lord, is it now that you're going to bring in the kingdom?
SPEAKER_01: Messiahs destroy enemies and rescue those in the grips of slavery.
SPEAKER_01: The true Messiah doesn't die.
SPEAKER_01: That's the very reason they're still under Roman.
SPEAKER_01: And rule.
SPEAKER_01: People claiming to be Messiahs fought against Rome and died.
SPEAKER_01: A pathway, known forever as the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering ending in the Messiah's death at the hands of pagan Rome was unacceptable in Judaism.
SPEAKER_01: Dead Messiah bordered on blasphemy.
SPEAKER_01: It was unthinkable that Jesus would expect his disciples to accept his death as God's plan after they had declared him to be God's promised Messiah and God's own son.
SPEAKER_01: They hadn't signed up to follow a foolish leader who would suffer and die.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus was simply out of his mind.
SPEAKER_01: So Peter, maybe he's speaking on behalf of the group again, we don't know, but he takes the lead once more, simply rejecting the divine plan for the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And that demonstrates to us the irony of Peter's service.
SPEAKER_01: Peter usurps his Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And by doing so, he's not Peter, the rock upon whom the church is built.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he's Peter, a rock of stumbling.
SPEAKER_01: We might say that at least Peter's bold in his ignorance.
SPEAKER_01: Not the killed.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps Peter thinks he can now speak for God or that he knows that the will of God, what the will of God is for his Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: So he says, Yeah, Jesus, you're out of your mind.
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you how it's really gonna be.
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't that sound like us sometimes?
SPEAKER_01: We usually don't have much room in our theology for suffering and for struggle in life.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have a place in our minds for sudden loss of a job or pain and suffering, the loss of a home, financial hardship, rejection of family, continued poor health, sudden death.
SPEAKER_01: And in those moments we can tend, like Peter, to reach out for Jesus and say, Jesus, you don't know what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01: We reject God's plan for our lives by thinking that we know better.
SPEAKER_01: We insist that somehow, somehow, this must not be right.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, I know you know everything and all, but you know, you messed up here.
SPEAKER_01: It amounts to a reversal of positions.
SPEAKER_01: When we do that, we assume a prerogative of lordship.
SPEAKER_01: It's an action that belongs to authority.
SPEAKER_01: But the slave never rebukes the master.
SPEAKER_01: The student does not rebuke the teacher, the follower never rebukes the Messiah, and the thing created never says to its creator, What have you done?
SPEAKER_01: But Peter, in a double-minded kind of way, calls Jesus Lord, takes him by the elbow, walks him away from the other disciples, and says, Oh, Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: Yet no.
SPEAKER_01: That's not gonna happen.
SPEAKER_01: And the amazing thing is, it's natural.
SPEAKER_01: It just comes as part of who Peter is.
SPEAKER_01: But isn't that what sin does to us?
SPEAKER_01: Sin puts us in the place of God.
SPEAKER_01: Says, yeah, no, this is the way it needs to be.
SPEAKER_01: Peter was rebuking the master.
SPEAKER_01: He was rebuking the teacher, the Messiah, and his very creator.
SPEAKER_01: And we stand in Peter's sandals when we place our desires and our thoughts and our programs ahead of God's, especially, especially as it relates to suffering and hardship and following Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And a side note, that's why the prosperity gospel is a gospel of Satan.
SPEAKER_01: Now, in Peter's mind, and presumably the other disciples as well, what Jesus has said here is horrific.
SPEAKER_01: It's a disaster.
SPEAKER_01: It's a catastrophe of such tremendous proportions that it has to be avoided at all costs.
SPEAKER_01: If victory over Rome and the subsequent freedom of national Israel is to be obtained, then Jesus must live at all costs.
SPEAKER_01: He must not die.
SPEAKER_01: But little does Peter know at this point that if Jesus does not die, then Peter cannot truly live.
SPEAKER_01: If Jesus does not die and rise from the dead, then we are still dead in our sins with no true life now and no hope for the future.
SPEAKER_01: Peter oversteps his bounds.
SPEAKER_01: For him to say, Lord, is to submit, not to command.
SPEAKER_01: And yet to turn around and then say, far be it from you, is to command, not to submit.
SPEAKER_01: Peter has this innate desire to submit to Jesus' leadership while at the same time telling him what to do.
SPEAKER_01: Far be it from you is an idiom.
SPEAKER_01: Meaning something like, may God be really gracious to you and not allow that to ever happen.
SPEAKER_01: But then Peter adds to it a double negative, which is the strongest way of saying, absolutely not.
SPEAKER_01: The old King James said, God forbid.
SPEAKER_01: This will never happen to you.
SPEAKER_01: No way, Peter was saying.
SPEAKER_01: Ever.
SPEAKER_01: Forget it.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, never speak of that again.
SPEAKER_01: It's not going to happen.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to allow this.
SPEAKER_01: Later in chapter 26 in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter follows through on his theology.
SPEAKER_01: See, bad theology leads to bad results.
SPEAKER_01: He tries to take off a servant's head.
SPEAKER_01: Somehow he misses and only takes off his ear.
SPEAKER_01: In Peter's mind, Jesus would not die.
SPEAKER_01: And if he had to usurp Jesus' leadership to keep that from happening, so be it.
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the most picturesque illustrations of a flagrant disregard for the revealed will of God found in Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus doesn't let it stand.
SPEAKER_01: He corrects it immediately.
SPEAKER_01: In what may be the most shocking statement made by Jesus, we see the irony of Peter's actions.
SPEAKER_01: He unwittingly becomes a tool of Satan.
SPEAKER_01: Peter placed his own flawed worldly theology in Jesus' way as a stumbling block.
SPEAKER_01: Because Jesus is saying things that don't mesh with what Peter believes to be true.
SPEAKER_01: Peter has perceived a Messiah as a military general with godlike powers, not a servant who would give his life as a ransom for many.
SPEAKER_01: Peter's picture was one of victory and celebration, not defeat.
SPEAKER_01: But by urging Jesus to take a different path, Peter unwittingly did exactly what Satan did in chapter 4.
SPEAKER_01: Satan sought to distract Jesus from his purpose, saying, No, the better thing for you, Jesus, is to take my way, take the devil's way.
SPEAKER_01: First, it was by not relying on the Father for his food, but doing it the devil's way by turning stone into bread.
SPEAKER_01: Then it was tempting Jesus to jump off a building and to test God's promise.
SPEAKER_01: And finally it was tempting Jesus to take Satan's way to be the world ruler rather than the Father's way.
SPEAKER_01: In chapter 4 of chapter 4, verse 10, Jesus finally says to Satan, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.
SPEAKER_01: And now in chapter 16, with the announcement of this dark cloud of suffering and death looming ahead, Peter becomes Satan's next tool to distract Jesus from his true mission.
SPEAKER_01: Just as Satan sought to turn Jesus away from God's intended purpose, so too Satan is now using Peter to lead away from God's purpose.
SPEAKER_01: Rather than functioning as the rock for the church, Peter becomes a rock of stumbling.
SPEAKER_01: A hindrance to Jesus' mission to save his people from their sins.
SPEAKER_01: Makes you wonder uncomfortably.
SPEAKER_01: How often we have been Satan's tools as he labors to upset God's purpose.
SPEAKER_01: It should.
SPEAKER_01: Functioning as Satan's tool.
SPEAKER_01: We are extremely arrogant and prideful if we would say, Yeah, I would never be in that position.
SPEAKER_01: Have our thoughts, our processing of our world, of our situations, our ideologies, even our theologies, our mistaken worldly influence theologies, ever put us in a place to impact God's purpose in a negative way?
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, maybe, probably.
SPEAKER_01: Victory and glory were paramount in the mind of a first century Jew.
SPEAKER_01: Pain and death and suffering, this kind of language, that wasn't part of the messianic vocabulary.
SPEAKER_01: But God's thoughts are not our thoughts, are they?
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah wrote God's words in Isaiah 55, my thoughts are not your thoughts.
SPEAKER_01: Neither are my ways your ways.
SPEAKER_01: For as the heavens are higher than the earth, and my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.
SPEAKER_01: And that statement comes two chapters after Isaiah 53.
SPEAKER_01: How interesting that God's higher thoughts and God's higher ways that are beyond anything that we could imagine are just a short distance away from these words.
SPEAKER_01: He was despised and rejected by men.
SPEAKER_01: A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
SPEAKER_01: As one from whom we would hide our faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.
SPEAKER_01: Surely, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
SPEAKER_01: We looked at him as stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.
SPEAKER_01: But he was pierced for our transgressions.
SPEAKER_01: He was crushed for our iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.
SPEAKER_01: And by his wounds we are healed.
SPEAKER_01: It never entered the disciples' minds at this point to connect Isaiah's prophecy with Jesus in that moment.
SPEAKER_01: It was a truth that was beyond their grasp.
SPEAKER_01: And in his reluctance to simply trust Jesus' words, Peter rejects them, becoming ensnared by Satan to do his will.
SPEAKER_01: Look at the very next verse, verse 24.
SPEAKER_01: Then Jesus says, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.
SPEAKER_01: How surprised would you be to hear Jesus continue on to say that anyone who desires to follow him must connect him with the path of suffering and follow him in that same path.
SPEAKER_01: Well no.
SPEAKER_01: It's one thing to follow the Messiah in a glorious death in a battle securing freedom and peace and glory for one's people.
SPEAKER_01: But to follow a Messiah to a shameful death on a Roman cross as a human disgrace and an abomination to God.
SPEAKER_01: Being a follower of Jesus means dying to ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Which, of course, ultimately leads to real life.
SPEAKER_01: More on that next week.
SPEAKER_01: But aren't we so often like Peter?
SPEAKER_01: Where we have our own thoughts, our own ideals, our own expectations of what life ought to be like, of what life ought to look like, of what God ought to do or what God ought not to do.
SPEAKER_01: And so we then take our desires, our life goals, our personal happiness, our satisfaction, even our own comfort, and we lay it ahead of the cross that Jesus says we must always carry.
SPEAKER_01: And somehow the words of Jesus that even the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head becomes a pillow on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And yet we are taught that Jesus set all of that aside to fulfill the Father's purpose.
SPEAKER_01: He faced the cross out of divine necessity because of his rich mercy with which he loved us.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray that God teaches us his thoughts so that we might think them, not the sinful, lowly thoughts of selfishness.
SPEAKER_01: What kind of transformed people would we be?
SPEAKER_01: What kind of transformed people would the church of God be if we truly died to ourselves to follow Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: We should be extremely thankful that Peter was wrong in his concept of messiahship.
SPEAKER_01: We should give thanks that Jesus must go to Jerusalem to suffer and to die, because in that our wages of death can be exchanged for the gift of life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
SPEAKER_01: I won't preach on it, but there's another irony that would be worthwhile to point out.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the irony of time.
SPEAKER_01: Peter ultimately got the message.
SPEAKER_01: It took a while.
SPEAKER_01: But listen to 1 Peter chapter 2, where Peter wrote to suffering people.
SPEAKER_01: He says, For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps.
SPEAKER_01: He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.
SPEAKER_01: When he was reviled, he did not revile in return.
SPEAKER_01: When he suffered, he did not threaten, but instead he continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
SPEAKER_01: And he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: For by his wounds you are healed.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: What a glorious truth.
SPEAKER_01: We bow before you in just humble thanks that you would take it upon yourself to complete the divine purpose.
SPEAKER_01: To see and to know and to purpose to go and to die.
SPEAKER_01: May we rest in your death and our behalf this morning, trusting in the cross of Christ as the ultimate demonstration of the riches of your mercy.
SPEAKER_01: Seen in your love for us, who, while we were yet sinners, you died for us.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.