But this is, of course, palm Sunday. Usually we read a scripture passage and talk about what's called the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ. Triumphal meaning triumph. Like victory, like he wins. And that story, of course, is where Jesus was coming in from the area of Jericho.

Now, if you have a Bible and it has maps in the back, you can kind of see where this is. Jericho is a few miles outside of Jerusalem. A good day's journey if you're on foot. For some of us. Oh, we still there?

Okay. For some of us, it'd be several days journey if you're on foot, fortunately. Man, is it really doing that still? I don't know what's going on with this thing. My batteries are good.

Everything's fine. Maybe it's when I sat up earlier and broke the wire on the chair. It could have been that. Anyway, all right, if it keeps messing up, I'll just grab a microphone from the piano. But anyway.

Okay, so this journey from Jericho to Jerusalem, it's uphill most of the way because Jerusalem is a higher elevation than everything around it. That's why the Jews always would say they were going up to Jerusalem and they went to Jerusalem. Jesus is on his way there from Jericho. And as he approaches the town of Bethany and Bethpage, they were like little sister villages that were right next to, to each other. As he approaches them.

And they're about 2 miles outside of Jerusalem is when he sent a couple of his disciples to go pick up a donkey. Depending on which of the four gospels you're reading, it might have been two donkeys, which actually makes sense. He wanted to ride on a donkey that had never been ridden on. So he takes this little one, the young one, the child donkey, the colt, the little one, and he's going to ride on that. But since it's never been ridden on, it might get a little bit crazy, it might freak out just a little bit.

It's not broken in. So he says, bring its mother along as well. She'll kind of help keep him calm and say, yeah, this is just your life from here on out, donkey. You know, like, you're going to be carrying people and stuff. You're a work animal.

But more than that, it was a peaceful animal. It wasn't a war animal. Let's talk about all that palm Sunday stuff at Sunday school after this. And for those of you that don't stay for that, your loss, I guess so, Jesus, though, here's some things that were going on before. Now, each of these gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they all kind of share a little bit of a different angle on it.

They share a little bit of a different little bits of the story that others don't share. They kind of each one fill in the blanks, and so you have to kind of keep flipping pages between them. But Jesus, just before he goes up from Jericho to Bethany and Bethpage and on into Jerusalem, he decides to stop off in Jericho. If you backed it up a little further, he had gone out into the wilderness area in a town of Ephraim, and he had gone there and spent quiet time in prayer. He knows what's coming down the road in front of him very soon, in just a few days.

And so he spent a lot of time away from the crowds. But as he entered into Jericho, and people recognized who he was, and these were people that were travelers on their journey to get to Jerusalem to get ready for the Passover. It was a big event. Everybody shows up for this from all over the place. There's a big pilgrimage event, and they show up from all over the place, and they would come early to cleanse themselves from their journey and be prepared to offer sacrifices and to worship God according to this Passover tradition.

And so as they go there, as Jesus goes there, he enters into Jericho, and there's this guy. Now, we love telling this story in our Sunday school classes. The wee little man named Zacchaeus, the tax collector, the guy that nobody likes. We still don't like tax collectors. You know, like, I used to know a couple people that worked for the IR's, and they were actually pretty nice, but you still didn't like the agency that they worked for, you know?

And so these tax collectors, these tax collectors weren't, nobody liked them too much. And here's Zacchaeus, and he's a chief tax collector. He's the top tier of tax collectors. He's a turncoat, to use a more modern phrase, which is still a couple hundred years old, but he's somebody that had decided to work for the enemy that was ruling over them for Rome. Rome is collecting taxes from the jewish people, and they don't like that.

And they're having to pay those taxes to a fellow jew, and they feud him as a traitor who had left the family, left the protection of everything that it meant to be one of God's chosen people. And Jesus sees this guy who's eager to see him, and he looks at him, who has climbed up in a tree to see over the crowd, to see Jesus. He says, zacchaeus, come down from that tree. I'm having dinner at your house tonight. Ooh, boy.

That started to get some of Jesus followers riled up immediately. Jesus didn't care. He went right in and said, you're the kind of people I want to be with, the kind of people who are hungry to know what God actually has in store for them, the kind of people who are willing to repent of their sin when they're confronted with true gospel, not the religion that man has made, not all the rules put forward, but they're excited when they come face to face with their savior. And so Zacchaeus has this meal with Jesus. Jesus never asks him for anything, never tells him anything about his sin or his life.

He doesn't do any of that stuff. He just sits down and shares a meal with him in his house. I bet the last time Zacchaeus had ever had anybody in his house that was a jew who wasn't a tax collector. In other words, the last time anybody that wasn't just like him had shown up to his house had been a long time. He'd been treated as a traitor, and he'd been abandoned by his own people.

But Jesus, when he leaves, first of all, he leaves with an offering from Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was so grateful that he says, here and now, lord, I give away half of my treasure, and if I've cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay it back four times over. Now, I believe, and I'm not the only one that believes this, that the person through which he was able to donate to minister to the poor was through the ministry of Jesus. And so he gave an offering to Jesus as Jesus is leaving, and Jesus says, you know, today what has happened here. He didn't say, today a wrong was made right.

He didn't say, today. A lot of money was given to a good cause. You know what he said today? This man has been restored, for he, too, is a son of Abraham. Salvation has come to this house.

That was what was important to Jesus, and that's still what's important today. After leaving there, Jesus is on his way, and there's so many people following along with him, and they know where he's headed. He's headed up to Jerusalem. He's headed there to prepare for the passover. They've been looking for him, wondering where he was at, because everybody else goes into Jerusalem to prepare and to get cleansed of anything along their way.

Jesus had gone out to the wilderness to prepare himself for what was coming, and so these people have been looking for him, and now he's had dinner with Zacchaeus, and now as he's heading on his way, there is. And again, depending on which gospel you read, one or two blind men, I'm guessing there was two, but one of them was a little more vocal or well known. They actually give us his name, Bartimaeus, which means son of Timaeus. Anytime it says bar, that means son of. So it's pretty simple.

Like son of Timaeus, his name is Bartimaeus. I don't know if his son was Bartimaeus. I don't know how that worked. You know, I'm not really sure. I'm not good with their language like that.

But Bartimaeus and this other guy, they're crying out, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on us. And everybody's like, shh. We don't care about you. I mean, I don't know that they said that, but that's what their words said. They said, hush down.

This is an important guy, and he's going to Jerusalem. Leave him alone. And Jesus said, call him over here. They called him over. By the way, have you ever noticed any of the times that somebody tries to push somebody away from Jesus?

He says, bring him here. The disciples of Jesus said, get these kids away from him. We don't want these kids messing up your time and your schedule. You're an important guy, Jesus. He says, bring the children here.

And he has them sit on his lap, and he talks with them here with Bartimaeus and this other guy, he's like, bring them here. And he says, guys, what would you like? What do you want? And they're like, hello, I'm blind. I've heard you can do something about that.

He says, sure, have your sight. And so they're rejoicing. So now there's more and more people following along Jesus as they know where he's going. Now he's approaching next, Bethany and Bethpage. And this is the city where his friend Lazarus had recently died.

And Jesus rose him up from the dead, from the grave, called him out of the tomb. And Jesus is still doing these things today. He's calling us out of death and into life. Amen. And Jesus approaching that, he's getting more and more people following him.

He sends his disciples ahead of him into town to get the donkey for him to ride on. And they go up through there, and these crowds are following him. The Pharisees, the scriptures tell us, the religious guys, the real radical nuts, the holy rollers, you know, these guys have had enough. And they're like, grumbling about how they want to kill Jesus. Now, to be clear, they started that grumbling real early on in Jesus ministry.

Like, real early on when Jesus starts talking, they start saying, we really need to kill this guy. I mean, we've probably been mad at somebody before, like in traffic or something, but I would almost say that probably none of us have said, I really want to kill that person. I mean, you might say it, like, as a joke, but you really don't mean it. You might not even say that. Like, some people would be like, oh, don't ever even make a joke about that.

Probably not. Probably best that you don't. But maybe you've said, I wouldn't be mad if that guy dropped dead. You know, like some of us, if you're being honest, you've been there before at some point, okay, they were plotting the death of Jesus all the way through. Jesus had been even.

They had tried in his own hometown to kill him because he had said that he was the Messiah. Actually, it wasn't even that he said he was the messiah. It was that he said he was the messiah who cared about gentiles, people who weren't jews. And when he said that, they didn't like that. They liked their ethnically pure religion and people, and they didn't want Jesus opening it up to the whole world.

But he says the scriptures point to this, that this was who I am called to, is everyone. And so that's when they had decided to kill Jesus. Now they've decided not only to kill Jesus, but Jesus and Lazarus. They want to kill Lazarus because people are believing in Jesus on account of the testimony of Lazarus. But there's no end to the killing in sight because there's a whole bunch of witnesses that saw Jesus bring Lazarus out of the tomb after he'd been dead four days, which is code for really dead.

Like, when you're dead for four days, you're dead dead. They're like, four days. Three days was the proof that you were dead. Four days was just icing on the cake. Like, this guy is not going to spring back from this, okay?

This is final for him. And so as the story's going, Jesus is riding on these. The donkeys, the palm branches, the cloaks, all that stuff. We'll talk a little bit more about a couple other things in Sunday school time today, but Jesus is going through this. He enters the temple.

As he rides into Jerusalem, he enters the temple. He looks around at everything he sees. Now, this isn't his first time at the temple, but this time is important. He looks around at everything he sees. The gospel authors don't tell us very much about that until later on in the story.

But clearly he's got a problem with what he sees when he goes to the temple. You ever wonder if jesus would have a problem. If he walked into church right now and said, what are you guys doing? Maybe this church, maybe another church. I don't know.

But is there anything that we do where Jesus would walk in and say, really? That that's what you thought I meant? Seriously, have you ever felt that way? I question that a lot. I'm the one that kind of, like, writes the stuff down.

Like, this is what we're doing, and I have to answer to that. Right? Like, with great power comes great responsibility or something. Wasn't that Spider Man? I don't know.

Anyway, that's where I first heard it. Anyway, it was on the Spider man movie.

So Jesus looks around and he sees all this stuff. And he says, can't deal with it tonight. I'm going out of town. See, he left the city, went out into the wilderness, spent the night in prayer, comes back in the morning, curses a fig tree that didn't have fruit on it. The fig tree withers.

And then he goes in and cleanses the temple. Now, we don't have time to talk about all that stuff. In fact, what we're going to look at is what happened right after, at least according to John, what happens right after Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. So we're going to pick up in John, chapter twelve, starting in verse 20. In John, chapter twelve, starting in verse 20, Jesus has just ridden into town.

I told you some details that happened after that, right? I told you about the, you know, cleansing the temple and all that. That stuff hasn't happened yet. As soon as Jesus, according to John's gospel, as soon as he rides into town. And the Pharisees want to put him to death.

But they know that that's going to be difficult. This happens in verse 20. Now, some Greeks were among those who had gone up to worship at the feast. So these people approached Philip, who is from Bethsaida in Galilee. And requested, sir, we would like to see Jesus.

Have you ever. Have you ever just focused on just that one line, that request that these men had? I focus on a lot. It's right if you look inside my office. And you're always welcome to kind of take a look in there.

But there's a little plaque right inside the door. And it has that quote on there from John 1221, sir, we would see Jesus. It says, it's a reminder to me as a minister, as a preacher, that what my job is is to help people see Christ in scripture and what he does, how he can interact with them in their life. These greek men, they were probably of jewish descent, but they were living in greek cities, and that had adopted a lot of greek cultures and customs. They were probably considered like second rate jews by the Jews that lived in Judea and Galilee.

But they said to Philip, sir, we would like to see Jesus. Philip went and told Andrew, and they both went and told Jesus. Jesus replied, the time has come for the son of man to be glorified. And I tell you the solemn truth. Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, he remains by itself alone.

But if it dies, it produces much grain. The one who loves his life destroys it, and the one who hates his life in this world guards it for eternal life. If anyone wants to serve me, he must follow me. And where I am, my servant will be too. If anyone serves me, the father will honor him.

Now my soul is greatly distressed. And what should I say? Father, deliver me from this hour. No. For this very reason, I have come to this hour.

Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven and said, I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. The crowd that stood there and heard the voice said that it had thundered. Others said that an angel had spoken to him. Jesus said, this voice has not come for my benefit, but for yours.

Now is the judgment of this world. And now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. Wow.

All along the way in Jesus ministry, he's told people not to talk about him too much. He's said things like, it's not my time. Or the gospel authors would give a little note that says, it wasn't Jesus time yet. The first time I think that that comes up is when Jesus is at a wedding celebration. This happens in the gospel of John in chapter two.

Jesus has had a wedding celebration in a town called Cana, and they ran out of wine. Now, Jesus mother was there, and she says, hey, they're out of wine. Like, okay. And, like, why is that? My problem, basically, is what he says.

He says, woman, what of me? And what of you? Like, what does this have to do with you or me? We're guests here. And she just.

She comes to the servant. She's like, just do whatever he tells you. Okay. And so Jesus says, all right, fine, I'll do it. But he had said his time hadn't come yet.

That's what his answer to her was. And yet he ends up doing this sign anyway and is considered a sign of who he is and what he's bringing. Wine representing new life, abundance, blessing. And so Jesus brings that to the party. And it's not just, like old and stale wine or no good wine.

It's good wine. It's the best wine. And the people that are served it are saying, wow, who brings out the good stuff at the end? Like, usually kind of cheaping it up a little after people have been drinking a lot, they can't really taste the difference between the good and the bad. And so you kind of get cheaper and give them the bad stuff after a while.

But, no, you've brought out the better wine later. It was actually considered for the host to do that. It would have been considered some kind of a compliment to his guests that way. So then you've got Jesus. You know, he had told his mother his time wasn't there yet.

Then there's people that he's healed. He would heal people. There were people that were crippled, that had never walked, and now they're walking for the first time in their life. There's people that are born blind or born unable to speak or hear, and he cures them of that. There's people who had demons in them, that they were possessed by an unclean and evil spirit, and he cast that out of them, and now they're able to live their life how God had created them to live.

And every single time, he told them, shh. Don't tell anyone. Now, we kind of look at that and we think, why in the world would that be the case? Why would Jesus not want this message to spread? Because his hour had not yet come.

His time had not come yet. And there was one time where Jesus did that, and that was the story of where he went to cast out the demons from the man who said there was a legion of demons inside of him. There was that many. And Jesus had gone across the sea of Galilee into a canaanite region and had cast all these demons out of the guy. They went into the herd of pigs.

The pigs rushed down into the water and drowned. The people from the town nearby came out and saw Jesus. They were pretty much scared to death, but also didn't like that Jesus was there, and they asked him to leave, even though they saw this man who was cleansed and in his right mind for the first time. And who knows how long that had been. Full of demons living in the tombs, naked and unable to be chained.

He could break chains with the strength that he had. It was crazy that they wouldn't want Jesus to stay. They see this man clothed in his right mind, and you'd think they would say, jesus, we need more of that. We need you to stay here and continue this great work. Instead, they asked him to leave.

And so he did leave, and the man begged to come with Jesus. But you know what Jesus said? No, but go and tell everyone in your hometown how much God has done for you. And so as he went into the. What's called the Decapolis, which means the ten cities, he goes into these ten towns, and he begins being an evangelist for Jesus.

Somebody that shares the good news is what an evangelist is. And he begins being an evangelist for Christ. Jesus didn't tell him to keep silent. He let him go and share that. That man was off in a pagan area.

He wasn't. He wasn't in the jewish region. And so anyway, as Jesus is doing that, he's telling everybody, shh. Don't tell anyone. Now is not the time.

And so he has these greek people that show up there. They come and find one of the disciples. They go and get another disciple on their team, and they say, jesus, we want to see Jesus and talk with him. And jesus ends up saying, well, he just kind of ignores them. He doesn't say anything about the Greeks.

We don't actually end up knowing if Jesus ever talks to the Greeks or not. We don't know if he ever has an audience with them. We don't know if anything is going on there or not, if he ever sees them. But they seem to be wanting to see Jesus. And so, of course, for the disciples, at least, they're thinking, we followed the winner.

Now this is going global. Like, we're not just stuck here in Judea and Galilee. This is like, the world wants to see Jesus now. And we are his disciples. We are his followers.

We backed the right team, you know, like, we jumped on the right team. Can you imagine that? There are families that might have thought they were a little bit crazy for what they had been doing, being a disciple of this guy for so long. And then now these greek people want to see him. People that have traveled from all over the place, now that they want to see Jesus, they're thinking, cool, our star is rising.

Like, we're doing great here. This is going to be good. And then what Jesus says, he says, a kernel of wheat, it won't really accomplish much unless it dies and falls to the ground. Now, what he's saying is you can eat a kernel of wheat and it's not going to go very far, right? Like, one little kernel of wheat isn't going to really fill you up.

It's not going to change much. It's just one little morsel of food. But if it dies, in other words, falls off the plant after the wheat dries up and it hits the ground, or if you collect it and put it in the ground and plant it and it sprouts, and then that sprout has many grains of wheat on it, that's when it grows, that's when it profits. That's when it's a real success. In other words, seed is no good in the bag.

If you have a bag of seed, but you don't sow it or scatter it, it doesn't do you much good. The only way that seed is beneficial is if it goes into the ground. Now, Jesus, I think, was talking about him being put in the ground in a tomb, but he's also talking about simply the idea of this life cycle, that if. If his life isn't given up, if his life isn't sacrificed, then we won't have the blessing of life from him. But there's a problem with this.

Perhaps as I read it, you saw it or heard it. I was telling this to my daughter at bedtime, and she said, dad, I'm confused. She said, am I really supposed to hate my life on this earth? Because that's what it said. He says, anyone who hates their life on this earth.

And she says, dad, I love God's creation. I mean, just yesterday we're driving and she said, I love the smell of the rain. Now, my wife has, like, some scentsy brand products, you know, and they try to imitate different smells and scents. Some of those are in the building. You might have picked up on a couple of them.

You know, we try to make it nice, but there's one that's like a fresh rain smell. Now, fresh rain, I explained to Emma, depends on where you're at when it rains. If you're in a city like, let's say, on a back alley somewhere that's got dumpsters and there's a restaurant with their grease trap, and cars have been leaking oil and things on the pavement, and it rains just a little bit, but doesn't like a Florida rain where it rains for just a couple minutes and then stops and then it is still hot. And everything starts to, like, steam up. It is foul and nasty smelling.

That is not a good fresh rain scent. But if you go out into a meadow or somewhere with a lot of flowers, or if there's trees in bloom and the rain starts hitting those and exciting the different scents that are on the nature that God has made, it smells wonderful. And so Emma was saying, she says, you know, God, God did a better job making a rain scent than the brand senci or glade or whoever could do. He says, God did a better job. And so she's saying, I enjoy God's creation.

I love living on this earth that he has made. Why should I hate my life on this earth? I said, oh, that's a good question.

I don't believe what Jesus is saying is to hate your life or end your life or disregard your life in the sense of looking at it as worthless or nothing. That's not what Jesus is saying about our lives. He doesn't. You have to have hatred towards your very existence. That's not it at all.

In fact, the scriptures tell us otherwise. You see, we've got word from God that says, I knit you together in your mother's womb. In other words, God was very intimately involved in creating who we are. We see the sanctity of life because of that. Jesus tells us things like the hope that he has in store for us, the plans that he has for us, the fact that he says all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

But when you misplace the value and purpose of your life in this world, you miss out on God's purpose for you. In other words, if you look too much at what you believe your purpose in this world is, and you don't pay attention to what God said, his purpose for you is then out on what he has for you. But when your life is given in service to Christ and to others, as far as for the sake, eternity of, when your life is given to others for the sake of eternity and for the sake of serving Christ, then you haven't misplaced your value on your life in this world, because you've been living your life for the world yet to come. You've been living your life for eternity's sake, and not for what we live here on this world. In the short span of time that we'll trod this earth, you're not living just for that.

The apostle Paul would say things like, I die daily, every day he dies. Now, that doesn't mean Paul goes like the heartbeat stops and comes back alive again. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is like what Jesus had said is, everyone who wants to be a follower of mine must take up their cross daily and follow me. Now, that was some brutal language to them.

Here we paint crosses all over stuff. We have it in our logos, and we adorn the buildings of churches with them. We wear jewelry, necklaces, wristbands, whatever it might be that have a cross on them is common. Is so common that we don't really stop and think about it too much. But when Jesus told his followers to pick up essentially what was considered a device of torture and murder and submission, to try to subjugate people, to realize that the authority of Rome was stronger than anything they could ever hope to overcome, when he says take up thing every day, to take up that cross every day, and to follow me, what Jesus is saying is, you have to put to death anything that drags you away from the life God has for you, anything that pulls you away from the perfect life that God has designed for you.

You need to put that to death. You have to die each and every day in those ways. Paul would also say in Galatians 220, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. He says in another place.

He tells us to make our bodies a living sacrifice. Sacrifices that were usually slaughtered and laid on an altar and consumed up by fire or roasted over the fire and given as a sacrifice. He's saying, you have to be a living sacrifice, not a sacrifice that has been dyed and drained of its blood and is useless anymore, but a sacrifice that each and every day is, is given up in service to God. And as we live our lives in service to God and in service of others, in light of eternity, we start to understand what God had in store for us. I was listening to a podcast, I think it was earlier this week or late last week, podcaster named Lex Friedman.

And his guest was Elon Musk, that you're probably familiar with him. He owns a ton of different things, and he's brilliant in a lot of ways and a little bit goofy in a lot of ways. And I don't think he's figured out life too well, but he's trying to figure out a lot of things about life, but I don't think he's gotten there yet. And it's amazing to me how some of these guys can be so brilliant and still dance around this. And the question came up from the host he said, what is it that you believe is the meaning of life?

As they talked about that, they're curious about the meaning of life, the purpose of human life. Now, for people that are involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, Neuralink is one of Elon Musk's dreams. To put a computer chip in the brain so that you can interface with it and not have to sit there and type on your phone. You can just think it, and it's there. It's serious.

Like he's planning on doing that very soon. I'm curious if he's actually already done that for himself and he's got the chip. I don't know. Anyway, they're sitting there talking about this, and I thought, for people that are involved so much in all these aspects of what we view as life, artificial intelligence or computer chips or whatever, they really don't have a clue about it, do they? For those of us who believe in Jesus Christ and have read the scriptures, it's quite simple what the meaning of life is.

It's not an out there concept that's hard to grasp. It's right here in our hearts. God has created us in his image. And for those who haven't yet realized that or recognized the image of God, because it's been tarnished by the ways of the world and by sin, it's up to us to help them see that and to say, God has purpose for you. God created you to reflect his nature and his image and his glory.

And as we understand that and start to live into that, we recognize that our own desires need to die out. But, you know, the thing is, those desires get replaced with godly desires. Those desires. It's not like we're missing something. Those desires end up getting replaced with a desire for Christ.

And I can tell you, as I've been on that journey, I can tell you that I'm not missing anything. I can tell you that the ways of the world that I've put behind me, the thoughts, the desires, those things don't hold anything over me anymore. That Christ is my goal and my dream and my desire, and that in Christ, I find the ultimate fulfillment for life, the purpose for life and the meaning of life. And as I live that, I understand that he has called me to lift him up to Jesus said, as for himself, if he is lifted up, he will draw all people to himself. Now he is speaking of his death on the cross, being lifted up above the earth on the cross.

But also the promise is that when we proclaim Christ to others, when we promote him or hold him high or lift him up in their sight, that that is the thing that will draw people to himself. You know, churches have been going through this for a long time, trying to figure out what does it take to grow, what does it take to reach more people, what does it take to do all these things? And Jesus simply says, if I'm lifted up, I will do the work of drawing people to myself. But this church, we continue doing that. We continue lifting Christ high, and we know that as we're faithful in, that Jesus is the one that draws others in.

We continue in prayer that he would work on our efforts, whether it was sending a little card out or whatever it might be. We continue to pray that his holy spirit would work in those efforts to bring others to salvation.

It's important that we're involved in the work of inviting others, of sharing the gospel with others, not just inviting them to church, but learning how to share our faith with other people, learning how to share witness of Jesus Christ with them. It's important that we study the word of God. You know, there's something new in here every day. And even if it doesn't feel like you're getting something out of it, keep reading. Keep reading.

Because God meets with us when we read his word. Keep spending time devoted to him in prayer. It's simple. It's a conversation that you have with God. And yet it's more than that.

We need a sense of awe and reverence as we approach God. Like Moses when he goes up to the burning bush and God speaks to him out of it, and he says, moses, take off your footwear. Take off your sandals. Take off your shoes. The ground you are on is holy ground.

When we walk through the doors of the church, we need a healthy awareness of the fact that we've invited the spirit of God here and that we don't want anything that would offend him or to push him out. Oh, not that he's easily offended. The thing that offends the spirit of God is when we say, well, I've kind of got this figured out, and I'm just going to come in here, I'm going to get my cup filled up and go out and just enjoy life. No, our purpose and our goal when we come in here is that we would commune with God and that we would send such a deep infilling of his presence, you know, if we could truly have that, if we could truly experience the presence of God, Elaine wouldn't have to get up on this piano. I wouldn't have to get up here nobody would have to do anything because we would just feel the presence of God with us and we would be repenting of sins.

We'd be up at the altars praying, crying, whatever it is. That's how we would be when we walk in the building and we need that honor, that revere, that reverence of the spirit of God in this place.

Jesus said that he would draw people to himself. The interesting thing was he had all people coming to him at that moment. These Greeks were showing up. But Jesus knew at this point finally now was his time. He said this time is why I came.

Not the time for the Greeks, not the time to kind of take this to the global level. But his time was in his sacrifice. The reason that Jesus came was to give his life up as a ransom for all who would accept it. That we would be cleansed of our sins, that we would be renewed and made new in him.