Well, if you have your Bible, I want to invite you to turn with me to John chapter 12. That should be on page 899 of your Pew Bible. It's John chapter 12 and we're going to be exploring verses 12 through 19 together this morning. And I should point out to you as we make our way through John's gospel that we have reached a point in the gospel that is a pivotal juncture because we're seeing Jesus literally traveling down death row. It is just a matter of days from now where he is going to be crucified. But right now in this passage, we're going to be looking at today. He is making his way into Jerusalem and people are throwing a parade for him. They are thrilled to see him. They are desirous to crown him as king. But Jesus has come to bring a different message. He had a different mission than the people have expected. So Jesus comes to people and he is not meeting their expectations. And I would suggest to you that the issues that these people faced in their day are the same issues that we are facing in our day two thousand years later, where the Jesus that we so often are prone to want to believe is a Jesus of our own imagination, a Jesus who we expect to meet certain goals and desires that we have for our life that Jesus may have not come to meet. But I want to also suggest to you that the reason for that is that so many of us are settling for far too little. We're settling for something that is sub-Christian, sub-what Jesus has come to do for us, which is to bring us the delight and the joy of living in the light of the gospel and of our forgiveness of sins. So that is what we need to have at the back of our mind as we read this passage together this morning. So let's do it now. John chapter 12, beginning in verse 12 through verse 19, says this. The next day, the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel. And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it just as it is written, fear not, daughter of Zion. Behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's cold. His disciples do not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him. The crowd that had been with him, when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead, continued to bear witness. The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard that he had done this sign. So the Pharisees said to one another, you see that you were gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him. Amen, this is God's word to us this morning, and may he write the grace and the glory of that word upon all of us. Well, I have to tell you that one of the most frightening things that has ever happened to me in my entire life happened less than 24 hours after Rebecca and I got married. We were on the first day of being married. We had gone out to dinner. We were coming back, walking back down the street, and all of a sudden I see tears beginning to well up in Rebecca's eyes, and I'm not the most emotionally intune person on the planet, but I can tell the difference between tears of joy and tears of sadness and fear, and these were the tears of sadness and fear. So with all of the sensitivity that I could muster up at the time, I asked Rebecca, what is it that is bringing you sadness, what is wrong, and she looks at me with tears, just pouring down her cheeks and she says, I'm trapped forever. That was not how I imagined the first 24 hours of marriage going in any respect, but that is what I heard from her. It was an expectation that maybe she had just walked into a colossal landmine in her life, only 24 hours in. I'm trying to think of what the next 50 to 60 years of life will look like like that. Well she had an expectation. That expectation was built so much upon the marriage that she had witnessed in her own household growing up, which was with a father and a husband who spoke constant words of venom, who didn't have a gracious bone in his body who was the living definition of a liar and a cheat. And so hopefully Rebecca has found that the family that she is in now is not so much like the family that she grew up in. So sometimes when our expectations go unmet, it's a good thing because we expect so often that we're going to step into something that is going to bring us pain and sorrow and sadness and difficulty. And then we find that what we ended up stepping into actually ends up bringing us joy. And so that expectation that goes unmet is something that is joyful to us. But also we know the pain of stepping into something where we expect it to be a joyful situation, something that is going to bring great blessing and happiness and contentment in our life. And it turns out to be misery. Maybe that's true for you and your marriage. Maybe that's true for you and your vocation. Maybe some other area of our life, unmet expectations bring us grief and sadness and fear so on. Well, there are a couple reasons why our expectations for better or worse go unmet. And the first reason is an obvious one and it is that we cannot see into the future. We don't know what people are going to do. We don't know what kind of circumstances are going to come our way. And so we don't know that the outcome is actually going to be what we expect it to be. That's the obvious one. But the second one is that we so often are unable to see reality as it actually is. One plus one don't always equal to in our life. We have a clouded vision of things. There's a fog kind of hovering over our life and in front of our eyes. So reality can be at the back of the door right in front of us. But we're unable to see it clearly. So we have expectations of something happening that may not be in the plans at all. I cannot tell you how many paper shredders and garbage disposals I have damaged or destroyed because I treated them like a tree grinder. That is not seeing reality correctly. If you put things down in that they're not designed to do, that is not dealing with the reality of what they are designed for. But all of us have that problem. All of us have the problem of not being able to see reality as it actually is. And I would suggest to you that there are some people in this story who we see it who are going to discover as we move further in to John chapter 12 and further in to John's gospel to the very end of people who are his biggest fans. Jesus's biggest fans is greatest supporters, his closest followers who had expectations of Jesus that were based in no sort of reality whatsoever. They have created a Jesus of their own imagination, a Jesus who had come to fulfill their agenda. What they have already decided that they wanted for themselves rather than to carry out the mission that he came to carry out. Which is to redeem sinners, to take his people who were scattered off and to bring them back into himself, under Christ, under his authority, under his grace. That was his mission and they missed that completely. This is a Palm Sunday passage. The hymn that we sing at the beginning of our service, all glory, law and honor is an appropriate hymn for this particular passage. It's the Passover, so it's just a few days before Jesus's crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. What we can tell is that there were upwards of 2.7 million people in Jerusalem at this time. People from all over the place had descended upon Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. By now Jesus had gained quite a reputation, so many of these several hundreds of thousands and even several million people had come to know something about Jesus, of his reputation because Jesus was the one who had turned water into wine. He was the one who had walked on water. He's the one that fed the 5,000. He took a man who had been unable to walk his whole life and he said, get up, take your mat and walk and he was able to do so. Just a couple of weeks ago we saw that Jesus called Lazarus who was dead in the tomb for four days called him to come out of the tomb and alive and well he came. Jesus had gained quite a reputation by now and people were beginning to follow him because of the miracles. They saw something in Jesus that was wildly powerful and so he enters Jerusalem amongst a mass of people and there is a Jesus frenzy going on. The Passover was the most religious of all of the holidays but it was also the most patriotic of all the holidays and so they're waving palm branches. This is a patriotic thing to do, it'd be the equivalent of waving little American flags at a presidential motorcade or on a patriotic parade of some sort. So there's a frenzy going on there, they're singing the fight song. They're yelling hottie-tottie, they're doing the whole bit. They're thrilled to see Jesus and they're thrilled to see Jesus because they are expecting that he will be a king who will be able to come and to liberate them, liberate these people from the oppression that they have endured for so many years. Many of them their whole lifetime under the Romans who have just made their life miserable and just about every manifestation and so they want to crown him as that kind of king and what Jesus does in response is he goes and he finds a donkey, he's not the rider on the white horse yet, he finds a donkey which is a humble creature, it's not a creature of power, of force, of much authority, it's not a stunning animal, it's a, it would be the equivalent of a presidential motorcade where the president drives by in a 1992 Nissan Centra. Something particularly astonishing about that, Jesus doesn't meet their expectations and we see this time after time in John's gospel, time after time of the gospel and it's a profound issue in our own day and age as well, that even in the midst of exceptional opposition and there was exceptional opposition to Jesus at this point and there is in this day and age as well. There also heaps of people who are willing to follow after him to show some measure of great enthusiasm for Jesus and why not, he's performed these miracles, he's showed tremendous leadership and the religious leadership of the time was becoming wildly discontent with who Jesus was. In fact they were fearful of him that he was going to usurp their position of authority and so they go so over the top, the Pharisees do that we read in verse 19 that they say that the whole world has gone after Jesus, there's great enthusiasm for Jesus here and at the very least he is respected by most people. Most of the people you meet when you go to work in the morning or that you talk to in your neighborhood or just engage with in the community are going to be people who are going to show some measure of respect for Jesus. In the most religiously affiliated state in the country you are going to find very few people who have a negative view of who Jesus actually is. So they will give verbal expression that they have admiration for him but I think that I can stand on pretty solid ground biblically by saying that if people really zeroed into the true Jesus of Scripture and saw what he has to say about you and what he has to say about me, what he has to say about our condition and what the remedy to that condition is, there would be far fewer people who showed the same kind of admiration for Jesus after finding that out as they do now because Jesus isn't meeting their expectation. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey rather than riding in on a white stallion, he is saying that freedom, liberation, hope, forgiveness,
all of those things that we so desperately need at the very core of our being are going to come to us through laying hold of Jesus' humility and laying hold of his death. Those things don't come to us through physical strength and political power. They want to Jesus as a politician. A lot of Christians are very outspoken about their political views and in many cases there is some goodness to that. That's not all bad. We should be people who are standing up for truth and standing against injustice in our society. But when Christians speak in such a way that they sound so much more like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh than they do as Christians who have built a life on the Scriptures in the Gospel, that's a problem. That's a profound problem because it expresses to the world something that maybe we actually believe in our heart which is our greatest hope is actually going to come from liberating this world from all of the political menace that we experience in life. It's going to come from a president and a Congress who are the writer on a white horse when the reality is that our hope is in a savior who is a king who dies. What kind of king does that? It's not a picture of what we expect but that's what the king actually is. Jesus brings his kingdom into us by dying, by humbling himself. That's what the donkey represents. And so the people waving branches and shouting Hosanna were interested in freedom and respect and all of those things. They wanted to be liberated but they failed to understand that the greatest issue in their life that they needed to be liberated from was not the Romans, was not from something on the outside. It was from something on the inside. It was from the sin that was eating away at their very souls and that was driving them straight to the road of condemnation. And they didn't see that. That wasn't priority one in their lives. And so on that level Jesus does not fulfill their expectations. And when you and I take pains to discover what is really at the bottom of our life, what our hope is so fundamentally placed upon, we may find that in many respects Jesus isn't meeting our expectations either. See Jesus is all about building the kingdom. That's what he's about. But people then and people now so often fail to understand that Jesus's kingdom is not of this world. It's a kingdom not of this world and it's not built in the way that the kingdoms of this world are built. The kingdom that he is building is a kingdom that is built on the word of God and on the gospel being preached and believed in the hearts of his people bringing about a transformation within them that makes them no longer conform to the pattern of this world but transformed by the renewing of their mind. And so they become a grace-filled people. And that is the way in which they live as they go out into the community and live as we engage with our neighbors and in our families and in our friends and in what we do with our lives. That's how the kingdom of God is built. As that message is preached and believed by his people all kingdoms are built. All of them, all of them are built this way by defeating enemies that pose a threat to the kingdom. So all kingdoms are built. And so we see in this world the kingdoms are built by fighting an external enemy, an enemy on the outside. But when Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world he's telling us a few different things about how his kingdom is built. One thing he's telling us is that we are in a constant state of war. Christians are in a constant state of war. That is why when you look in Ephesians chapter 6 Paul is talking about us putting on the full armor of God. That's not an analogy that we would need to even hear or believe if we weren't in a place of war. And what that means is that there are things coming at us from the outside for sure but that are striking at our very identity in Christ. Striking upon what it is that we place our hope, our confidence, our security, seek salvation, seek justification from. And so the battle is constantly happening in our lives. If you believe that this is peace time you can rest assured that you are going to be pinned down right and left by the things coming at us in the world. Jesus is saying Christian you need to be prepared because you are in a state of war. But the second thing that he wants us to see here is that the battle that we are facing is a battle that is not fundamentally on the outside. It's a battle going on in the inside. It's going on in the inside at the level of our souls. It's happening in our hearts at our inherent nature to conform ourselves to another object of our affection rather than Jesus Christ. To find security in something else other than in Jesus Christ. It tells you this. It tells you that your president and your congress and your politicians are not your greatest enemy. That's what these people in this passage thought. They are not your greatest enemy. Your sin is your greatest enemy. It tells you even that a mosque being built at ground zero despite all of the issues involved with that is not the greatest problem. It is a symptom of the greatest problem. Don't miss that. He's telling you that our financial situations, which in many respects are perilous, our relationships, our marriages, our relationships with our children, those are not the biggest problem. Those are things that strike us at the level of our inward security. And so what do we seek? We seek salvation in order to feel secure. This is universal. And when we're struck at the source of our personal security, we are forced into the position of choosing this day who we will serve. Of discovering whether or not it is the Savior, the King who rides on a donkey to bear our curse and our sin in his flesh for us and raise again for the hope of glory that we will have. Or is it going to be in some plastic thing from the outside that we get that is here today gone tomorrow, that we are finding our security in? It pushes you to discover who is the true lover of your soul and what it is that you're building your life upon. And my friends, this is our day in, day out battle. This is your battle when you leave here today. It's your battle at work tomorrow, at 2.30 in the afternoon. It's your battle when you come home and you're with your children and you're with your spouse. It's your battle when you go to the doctor and he gives you a diagnosis that you don't want to hear of where your ultimate hope lies. That's what we're facing. The enemy is always trying to get you to believe the false proposition that your greatest problem is out there and not in here. That's what he's always trying to get you to believe. He's getting you to try to fear the Romans in this case. He's trying to get you to fear what other people think about you. He's trying to get you to fear some condition in your life, some circumstance that doesn't bring you all that much pleasure. But what he's saying is no, the greatest problem is at the level of your soul. That's your greatest need and that is what he has come to conquer. That's what he wants us to see. So do you see that? Here's the big question. Here's the practical issue that I want you to take with you and to think about. The practical thing is what are some of the big things in your life that you are seeking salvation from? The crowds here, they're shouting, Hosanna. Hosanna means save us. It means save us now. That's what they're expecting of Jesus Christ. So what is it that you are seeking salvation from? Let me spin this a little bit differently. What is it that you need to have in your life that you must have in order to be happy and to be satisfied? Maybe when you go to work, you want salvation from your discomfort, from your insecurity. So in order to be happy and satisfied, you need to get more respect out of your colleagues. You need greater success. You need more excitement and less nonsense to deal with. Maybe at home, you're seeking salvation from having to carry the burdens of family life. It's complex. And so to be happy and content, you find yourself relationally with drawing. You disengage relationally, emotionally from your spouse, from your children. And you cease to desire to seek to know their minds and their hearts. Maybe you just want salvation from your boredom in life. So many things come at you and they're just flat out dull. They have no taste. And so in order for you to be happy and satisfied, what you need is to be entertained more. You tell yourself that you need more experiences, more stuff in your life. I want to tell you this. This is the issue and these are the issues that I fight all the time, all the time of my life. You fight them all the time too. In one way or another, you and I fight these same battles, seeking some external cure to an inward issue within our lives. But what Jesus tells us is that he has come not to give us our best life now, not to fulfill our agenda for our own life. But he has come to give us joy by enabling us and reminding us that he has defeated the enemy within us, that he has defeated that enemy. And that's what this king riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is all about. He has come not to be a political savior. That's what the people are expecting. He has come not to be that, but he has come to be a spiritual one at the level of our souls. In fact, if you look with me at verse 24, this is not in the passage we read. But if you look down to this, we'll explore it more next week. Jesus says in verse 24, that unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. What that is is an illustration. It's an illustration that the seed has to actually go into the ground and die in order for a new shoot of wheat to come back up for life to happen. Death has to happen. That's what he's telling you that his mission is all about. That his mission is to come and to die in order to kill the enemy of sin within our lives and to give us eternal life with him. That's what he's come to do. The agenda that Christ has for his people is to do this, is to die. To take all of their sin. Everything that accuses them, that whole litany of stuff, that if you had to bring that before you, as you stood before the Father in the last day, he would say, away from me, I never knew you. Jesus comes and he takes that in his flesh. And he bears the curse for us. And he rises again to give us the hope of glory. And that's purely by grace alone. You have got to see that. You did not buy into a good sales pitch one day. What happened to you was that nothing but grace came to you when you deserve nothing but condemnation, period. And friends, when that begins to become your heartbeat, when that becomes the source that fuels you from the inside out, everything in your life begins to be transformed. Your relationships, your speech, how you spend your time, what you do with your money, what you do with all of the resources that you have in your life. Everything begins to change because grace is the fundamental principle upon what your life is built. That's why what he's trying to get you to see here. It's an identity that says, I am a vastly more colossal puss than I could ever imagine myself to be. I know maybe 2% maybe of the ugliness of my heart. And yet despite that, I have a Savior who comes to me and tells me that I am completely loved. I am completely accepted that nothing that I do or nothing that I avoid can add to or subtract from the love of God for me in the gospel. That's what he wants you to see and what it does is it allows you to live in your marriage with your children, with your parents, with your colleagues in every way in ways that show that that gospel reality is true in your life. See what that gospel does is it makes me secure so I don't have to hide and live in fear anymore. That king riding on a donkey to pay for my sins tells me that my blame was taken upon him and forgiveness was given to me. So how does that change the way in which I live with people who fail me? It makes me forgiving person when that's the reality of my life. It keeps me from having to hold on to a grudge that's actually just poisoning myself, burning away at my soul, eating away at me. What that king riding on a donkey to take my sin tells me is that I am a poor person. I am a person of greater poverty than anybody that I will ever see in any experience that I will ever have in my life. And what the king on a donkey did in taking my debt was not only pay my debt but fill me up with the riches of his glory by adopting me as his son by giving me the promise of an inheritance that will never perish or spoil or fade of grace that just never gets depleted in my account. See, I was poor but now I've been made rich. That's your promise to in the gospel. So when you engage with people who are poor, materially or otherwise, you can engage with them on the level of mercy because that's all you've received from him. It helps you to understand that even though a person hurts you, tries to rob you of your security, of your humanity, that we can let them off the hook and absorb that pain because we've been on a much tougher hook with Jesus Christ than anybody has ever been to us. And so we let them off that hook. It reminds me that I don't have to go out and seek revenge, that God is in control of that. Jesus did not come to us as his people and seek revenge for offending his glory. No, he just gave us grace. It helps me to see myself as a sinner, offensive to God, but who Christ pursued tenaciously, who he pursued with white hot zeal to make me his. So it allows me to live open-faced, outward-faced to my neighbor who in and of himself is disinterested in Christ doesn't even really care, pretty much indifferent. It allows me to live outward-faced and open with a gracious posture toward my family member who hates Jesus Christ and hates everything that Christianity is all about. It allows me to live outward and open-faced and with mercy towards my homosexual neighbor, not excusing belief, not excusing behavior in any way, but to come to them from the posture of I was a great sinner but had been given a even greater savior. That's the way we engage with people. The gospel helps me to see myself as part of the bride of Christ, for whom he died, the one who laid down his life for his bride, and it allows me to lay down my life for others as well. That gospel reminds me that I was a wandering child, that I was a prodigal son who squandered away all the grace and all the gifts that I'd been given, but through repentance he runs to me, he puts a robe on me, he puts a ring on my finger, he prepares a feast for me. That's the kind of love that you have in the gospel. Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Because if you do, you will stop seeking your greatest satisfaction from getting all the stuff that you've already told yourself that you need and from being dissatisfied when you don't get exactly what you want. Jesus doesn't always give us what we expect because what we expect it would be settling for far to us. It's settling for something cheap when he wants to give us the real genuine thing, the thing that changes us from the inside out, the way in which we live our lives all the time. He didn't meet your expectations, Christian, because he had a greater thing for you that you weren't even expecting. It's the gift of just having that hope, of that promise of grace fueling our lives in every way, of a savior who came on a donkey and blood and died for us. That's your hope, that's your hope that you need to take with you as you leave here today. If you don't believe it, you have a great promise. If you're here and you don't yet believe this, Scripture gives you a promise, and it gives you a promise that if you come to him, he will not cast you out. All of these things are true, but they are only true for God's people. They are only true for those who have come to him and repentance and faith, who have received that grace. The call to you is to receive that grace, and the call to those who have received it is to live in light of it. See it change you as you leave here this morning. Let's pray. Father, as we see you, it's unfathomable that you would be a king who we would expect to be the one on the white horse to conquer all of our outward problems in life, and yet you come and you ride on a donkey, on an animal of humility, and you come to do that to show that you will pay for your people's sins, that you will liberate them not from a political oppressor, but from an inward enemy, from a cancer that eats away at our souls. You have come to save us from that. You have given us forgiveness, but you have made us rich. You have made us abundantly wealthy, wealthier than anyone that we will ever know because you have given us the riches of your glory, the hope of heaven, the grace of the gospel. That's something that we didn't deserve, obviously. So let grace be what fuels our life. Let it change us from the inside out. Let it change our relationships, change how we work, change how we live our lives. Let it happen in our lives, not so we could put a star on our chart, but so that we could enjoy you, because that's what you created us for, to delight ourselves in the Lord, and to lay hold of your glory and grace. We got in us for Jesus' sake. Amen.