Palm Sunday reminds us that there are two ways to live:
The way of power, or the way of humility.
The way of control, or the way of surrender.
The way of selfish ambition, or the way of the cross.
It’s not about which one we believe in, it’s about which one are we living?
Because you can cheer for Jesus and still live like Pilate…
Jesus didn’t just come to be admired as a King He came to be followed.
Jesus came to demonstrate what His Kingdom is all about, and to show how those who would follow Him should live…
Todd Lester, the incoming Executive Director of Be In Christ Church of Canada, came to share a message with Elmvale Community Church
No matter what temptation you are dealing with, it falls into one of these three categories:
- Lust of the flesh - desire for physical pleasure (sex, food, drink, comfort)
- Lust of the eyes is our desire for possessions and wealth,
- The pride of life is our desire for prominence through power and position.
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind… these three things are what you are tempted with, what I am tempted with, what the first humans in the Garden were tempted with, and what Jesus was tempted with…
If being lost means the world has grown larger than your knowledge of it, then getting lost is a spiritual necessity. We will never experience growth in our personal life or experience true faith without stepping into unfamiliar territory.
The Bible is full of stories where God does His best work with people who are lost. In fact, God often calls people out of the status quo into the
wilderness both figuratively and literally…
Saint Augustine wrote, “The essence of sin is disordered love.”
Disordered loves means that we often love less-important things more, and more-important things less than we ought to, and this wrong prioritization leads to unhappiness and disorder in our lives. Here’s the question that bears repeating this morning: What do I possess that actually possesses me?
I want to challenge you to do something specific: Ask Jesus the question, “What thing in my life, aside from you, do I look to for comfort, identity, and protection?”
And when He brings something to mind, I challenge you to symbolically lay something down until Easter, as a desire to reorder your life’s loves…
Go and I will show you… We are asked to leave what’s safe and familiar and after we leave, THEN God shows us where we are going…
But that’s not how I want things to work… Before I go, I need the address. And then I’m given several different route options that I can choose that will lead to my destination… After I do all of that, I decide if I want to go…
I want to be in control. It’s my life… But the only way out of barrenness is to listen and obey. This is the only way out of a fruitless, bleak, drab existence. Go and I will show you is talking about the life of faith. A life lived in trust in God and obedience to God's word and God's way.
It’s a trade of the life I have that I’ve built for myself in exchange for the life that God imagines for me. But giving up control is scary, and it is hard, and it will cost us, and lead to uncertainty and it may lead to suffering…
The story of Babel serves as a reminder to the temptation that lives in every human heart. The temptation to settle into what feels safe, to build something that secures us, and to quietly make a name for ourselves while using God’s name to justify it.
In our context, the towers we build look like respectable lives, strong families, successful farms and businesses, good reputations, growing churches, and carefully managed futures. Babel reminds us that even things that seem good can become dangerous when they replace trust in God with control, self-sufficiency, and fear.
The hard truth of this passage is that God sometimes disrupts what we build not to punish us, but to rescue us from it. When God scattered the people, He was accomplishing His original blessing—to fill the earth with His glory. What felt like loss and confusion was grace at work.
When we step aside and humbly live lives in obedience to God and under His authority, His glory shines into the world through us… And instead of making a name for ourselves, we benefit from His glory shining out for the world to see…
From one family the world is scattered, and through one family the world is gathered again… All the nations on earth are within God’s covenantal concern and God is operating redemptively in each of these nations and cultures… His spirit and His promise are not absent from them, but from only one line can the redeemer, rescuer come…
Sometimes we assume that the only nation that God cares about in the Old Testament is Israel… but that isn’t the case. He focuses on Israel for the benefit and blessing of the rest of the nations…
God didn’t want humans to use violence to dominate so He gave them laws as restraints meant to slow humanity’s appetite to take, consume, and destroy. Scripture moves humans away from violence towards restraint. Away from vengeance and toward mercy. Away from reducing people to what they’ve done toward seeing them as God sees them. Human life is not sacred because of usefulness, productivity, strength, morality, nationality, race, age, or ability. Life is sacred because God has chosen to place His image there. And once God has declared something sacred, we don’t get to treat it as disposable.