But I want to look at the death of Jesus as his life comes to a conclusion. There was something we mentioned, I believe, last week, where Jesus said, by the way, nobody takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord and I pick it back up again. I have the authority to do that. But what they put Jesus through and what he goes through in the wee hours of the morning, they had arrested him.

As we looked last week in the garden of Gethsemane, the They had arrested him there. Peter and the other apostles leave him. Peter denies him three times. And Jesus is on trial. He goes to multiple different trials where they keep moving him from one place to another, one ruler to another.

First is with the chief priests and the religious leaders of the people, of the Jewish leaders. Then they take him to Pilate, who's the Roman governor. And Pilate is in town with a show of force. Because it's the Passover celebration which commemorates when they left Egypt centuries before. And so he's worried about an uprising.

Somebody that would try to overthrow the government with their followers. So, of course, Pilate shows up with a whole bunch of soldiers and horsemen and a show of Roman power saying, don't mess with us. We will put down anything, any kind of revolt. So when the Jewish leaders bring someone to him that says, this man is the king of the Jews, he claims Pilate should be kind of. His ears should kind of be a little bit, you know, kind of prickled about that a little bit like, wait a minute, what now?

We gotta put a stop to this. But Pilate, who is not a good guy, he has no problem murdering Jewish people. He's done it multiple times just for his own whim and pleasure. It seems he was not known in history as a good king either. In fact, the Romans who put him in charge end up, like, doing away with him and saying no.

They yanked his authority from him. And so he wasn't good in any way. But it's an interesting story that we have with him. Because they bring Jesus to him and he ends up saying, I'm not so sure about this. I don't think you have much of a case here.

But he realizes where Jesus is from is Galilee. And Galilee is the territory of Herod, son of King Herod the Great. And he says, oh, well, I'll just kind of dump him off on Herod. It'll be his problem. Now Herod is happy.

Cause he'd wanted to see Jesus before. I mean, Jesus was a big deal. And Herod had heard a lot about Him. And he says, I'd kind of like to find out more. Not that he was interested in him for any religious reasons.

Just he was a popular guy and he'd like to know what was going on. So Herod gets to meet Jesus. Here's his case presented against him. Says, you're not saying anything. Okay, why don't you go back to Pilate?

So now he's on his fourth segment of his trial, and he goes back to Pilate, and Pilate is ready to release him. One of the gospels tells us that Pilate's wife sends him a note that says, don't have anything to do with that righteous man. I suffered a lot at night in a dream about him. And yet Pilate does the wrong thing anyway. It'd be easy to sit there and judge Pilate until we look in a mirror.

They put Jesus through all these trials. Every place he goes, they mock him. They stripped his clothing off of him, put a kingly robe on him just to make fun of him, saying, oh, you're the king. We'll treat you like a king. They beat him.

They put a helmet of thorns on his head and pound that in, and they mock him. And they hit him. And they say, oh, tell us who hit you. They blindfolded him so that he couldn't see it. All these things.

They abused Jesus. Then Pilate has him flogged. Now, it's not just a beating. It's not just a little bit of a rod or a whip. I mean, this is serious stuff that would rip the flesh apart.

And they do this to within an inch of his life. And then they said, it's time for you to carry your cross. Now, typically, what we're told is that the Romans would have the condemned prisoner carry the cross beam of their cross. It was quite heavy. And that he would have to carry that to the place of crucifixion.

And then they would nail him to it. They would hook the cross beam with the upright post. They would drop him in the ground. The post would go in a hole in the ground. They would drop him there, and they would crucify the person, Jesus, as he's on his way.

He's headed there and he stumbles. He's already been beaten so terribly that he doesn't have the strength to make it there. And so as he stumbles, they pick up a man who had been coming in from the country. It's still quite early in the morning. He'd been coming in from outside of the city with his two boys and his name is Simon of Cyrene.

And they bring him in. And his boys, the scripture tells us, is Rufus and Alexander. And sometimes you say, why is that even in there? What does it matter? They were known to the Christian community.

In fact, Paul greets somebody named Rufus in his letter to the Romans. And so we believe it's the same guy, these boys that had seen their father be conscripted by the Roman soldiers to put the beam of Jesus cross on him and to carry that, because they could force him to do that. The boys, and most likely their father, believed in Jesus Christ as savior and as Messiah and devoted their lives to him.

Jesus is nailed up to that cross. And we see these images sometimes where you've got the cross that's up really high, you know, and you kind of look up at the person. But that wasn't so. The archaeologists and historians tell us that they put the crosses very low, so you're almost at eye level with the person that was being crucified. They would strip them of all their clothes.

It was supposed to be very humiliating, very agonizing. It was supposed to take a long time, sometimes even days. And what would happen, and you might know this, but they would nail the person up with their arms outstretched and their feet crossed over, and they'd be there and. And it would stretch out where you couldn't get a full breath. And so you're constantly trying to push up with your feet so you can get a breath and then back down.

It was agonizing and excruciating. But more than that, people would mock you. They could spit on you. They might hit you. They might heap and hurl insults on you.

In fact, the two people next to Jesus, they crucified two other men, because why not make a spectacle out of it? If this man claims to be the king, then let's put somebody on his right and his left, like a king might have as their advisors. Except these men were crooked men. They were evil men. They were men who had committed their own crimes, and they truly did deserve the death penalty.

In fact, one of them admits that. And at first, they both begin to heap insults on Jesus, as probably the soldiers and the other religious leaders were doing. Jesus, he's there, but he's got followers of his, women that had cared for him. His own mother is there and has to see this and behold this.

I got to tell you, Roman soldiers were good at their job. Like anybody that wonders. You know, you might have heard somebody say, well, maybe he didn't really die. Anybody ever heard Something called the swoon theory. He was just.

He had swooned. He had just. You know, he had kind of like. Mostly like he was almost near death's door. But when they took him off the cross and they laid him in the nice, cool air of a damp tomb where he was placed, that the cool air revived him.

And somehow he got better in three days and just marched his way out, you know, rolled a heavy stone back, went past the guards, scared them to death, almost literally, and he went on his way. The problem with that is a couple things. One, it was the day before the Passover meal, and Pilate knew that the Jews were going to be preparing for that. So he decided to kind of be nice to him. And he says, hey, make sure these guys die today, that we don't want to stretch this out into the next day.

So. So he sent the soldiers to go and break the legs of the men on the crosses so they could not press up and get another breath and they would expire more quickly. They do that with the two men. But Jesus, he finds at this moment, had already died. And so what they did was they took their spear just to make sure, and they pierced him, came up through the side, pierced into his heart.

And the Bible tells us that blood and water gushed out. This would be a sign of organ failure, where the organs of Jesus had been shutting down. And as they did, that watery fluid collected around them. So when the soldier stabs them, water and blood come gushing out of Jesus. He is very much dead.

They were good at their job. And if they had failed to carry out a crucifixion fully, then they wouldn't have had a good evening. They would have been in quite the trouble. So they made sure that someone was dead. Jesus didn't swoon.

He didn't pass out. He died. But just before he had died, one of the men that was on the cross to the side of him that had been mocking him has a change of heart. He recognizes that there's something within Jesus that calls him to have a change in his life. He recognizes there's something about Jesus that is different.

And he says, jesus, I think you are who you say you are. Even though Pilate had put a sign up, probably mocking him above his head, that says, the King of the Jews, this man actually began to believe it. He said, jesus, when you come into your kingdom, would you remember me? Now, this is a man who has no hope of coming down from that cross. He has no hope of his life continuing on.

He's Looking to the afterlife, he's looking to the future and saying, jesus, I believe there is a future, and I believe in that future that you are in charge and I want to be on your team. Amen. So there was this understanding that the Jewish people had had for a long time, that there was a place where people go after they die. And that there's this afterlife place where. Where it's separated by this chasm or this crevice.

And then on one side is the bosom of Abraham. And that's where the righteous people that fear God go. On the other side, there's a place of torment where the people that hated God go and they stay there because in their hatred for God, they can do everything evil still that they want to do to each other. And it's a terrible place and you didn't want to end up there. And this man recognized that.

Even in his final few hours of breaths, he turned to Jesus as much as he could. He says, lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said, this day you will be with me in paradise.

There was a lot going on that day. During that time, Jesus, his mother was right there. Some of these women that had cared for him were there and in anguish, they're watching him die right in front of them. Most of the disciples have fled. John has showed up there.

The apostle that Jesus had a lot of affection for is there. He says, john, would you take care of my mother? Mother, look at John as your son now. He's going to take care of you in a way that I can no longer do. See, Jesus was taking care of one thing for her that no one else could do.

He was dying even for her sins. Now I know that there's. If you've had any background in the Catholic Church, they'll say, well, Mary was born sinless, she lived and died sinless, etc. Etc. I don't mean to offend you, although I did say to Daniel that I was probably going to offend some people today.

And so if it is right now, then so be it. I'm sorry, but Mary was not sinless. There's nothing in scripture that suggests that. There was nothing that makes us alludes to that. That is a human doctrine developed by people for whatever purposes, I do not know.

But the Scriptures in no way allude to that. And what they do tell us is that in Romans 3 it says, all people have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And so even for his own mother, Jesus died for her sins, Jesus died For the sins of everyone who would accept it. His grace is given to everyone, but it can only be applied to you if you come in faith, receiving it from Jesus Christ. And so even his own mother and these other women that were with him, he was dying for their sins and they're grieving over him.

But in the moments where he's dying in the final three hours of his life, it says that darkness came over the earth. I don't think it was over the whole earth. It was just over that region. This is God's judgment on sin itself, showing us the darkness that the depravity of sin brings into this world. This wasn't some kind of solar eclipse.

We can go back and prove that. There weren't any scheduled for then. This wasn't like some weird, you know, somebody said, well, maybe there was, maybe there was some kind of a volcano in the cloud of ashes and stuff. I believe had that been the case, they would have said there was a lot of ash in the sky and it blocked out the sun. No, no, this was not just the light dimmed.

This was darkness. God, through his supernatural ability, blocked the light from shining because they were killing the light of the world. Jesus, the light of the world is there dying in front of them. And God darkens the region. Not only that, but he rips open at the moment Jesus dies.

There's a curtain in the temple that blocks off where people are allowed to be in this room called the Holy of Holies, where it was the holiest place in the temple. And the high priest could only go in there once per year to offer atonement for the people. And the curtain is multiple inches thick. It's like a 4 inch thick woven curtain with different colors and things on it. And God ripped it from the top down to the bottom.

No man could do it. This was like a 30 foot tall curtain or something like that. Nobody could reach up there and do this. God did that. God was showing.

He says, atonement has been made once and for all now in the death of my son, atonement has been made. You see in this time where the Son of God is being crucified, we're told that he became sin for us. He didn't become a sinner, but he became sin. And sin itself was crucified and killed. At that point, there's darkness, there's a torn curtain.

All of this is going on. As these soldiers came to break the legs of the men and went to kill Jesus. One of them had heard Jesus cry out in a Loud voice, I believe he sang this. It was Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And as he sang this verse, it made the people around him that knew the psalms, it made them focus on the rest of that, which was a psalm written about when somebody feels forsaken by God. And Jesus here is singing this as his cry, as his prayer. There was a Roman centurion in charge of what was going on there. And as he witnessed all these things, heard what Jesus said as his final words, he exclaimed, truly this man was the Son of God. This is a cold, hardened man.

He's done many crucifixions. He's not known, I would think, for his compassion for those dying, that's not his job. He probably enjoys what he does. And yet he looks on this one man and says, I think we got something wrong here. He was the Son of God that day.

As Jesus goes to the place of the dead and he's in the bosom of Abraham, the Scriptures tell us that he made proclamation to the souls that were there. This is a question that has come up many times with people saying, well, did Jesus go to hell? Because the Bible says he went to hell. Well, that's a long discussion, a long topic. He didn't go to hell, the place of suffering, but he did go to hell or Hades, the place of the dead, the place where the soul went until the eternal judgment would happen.

And what he proclaimed there was salvation to those who had trusted God. And that also means condemnation to those who had turned their backs on God. And as he does that, he proclaims the salvation to those and says, there is coming a day because I have conquered over sin and death. And for those of you who have believed in me and trusted in me, even before he was born, there were people whose hope was in the coming Messiah. And so they had hoped in the Messiah.

And he says, I have come, I have conquered, and your salvation is secure. Amen.

It doesn't matter like that thief on the cross, the killer, the bad man on the cross that was being killed. It doesn't matter how long of a journey you've gone away from God. It doesn't matter if you've spent your life running from God or you've just, maybe for a while you've turned your back on him. Maybe there was a time where you walked with him, but for now you've been walking away from him. It doesn't matter how.

How long you've run from God or how far you've gone, because as that man shows us, he never got baptized. He never went through a Sunday school class or a catechism or anything like that. He never had any training. He probably didn't know all the right lingo or the right words. He probably still had a really foul mouth, like, who knows what?

But he made sure that he was going into eternity the right way. He says, jesus, I've done so much wrong in my life, and I've earned my condemnation on this Roman cross, but is there a way that I can be part of your kingdom? And that question blows my mind that somebody would even have the presence of mind to say that. Like saying, like, jesus, is there a way that I fit into your plan somewhere? Those of you who have been following Christ in your life, have you ever looked at the absurdity of the fact that he chose you?

Anyone? The rest of you are so perfect. Huh? Okay.

Like, there's got to be somebody better than me to do what he called me to do, right? Thanks for not amening that. But there's got to be, like, there's got to be a better way. I think of all the times where I had an opportunity to share the gospel or to show someone the love of Christ, and I failed at that, and I didn't do it. I think of the times on a Sunday afternoon if I allow myself to think about what I said, or when I'm processing the video to put online and make the devotionals out of it and all these things, and I'm like, oh, Lord, why didn't.

Why didn't I do that better? I could have said it this way, and it would have been more clear. I could have fit this thing in here. I got myself out of order. Like, why did I do that, God?

You got to have somebody with a better mouth than me. Thanks, honey.

Moses went through that before he committed to doing the ministry of God. God calls him to do this big thing, and he's like, I don't think so, God. That's not me. I'm not good at that.

And then God says, yeah, but I'm going to make you good at it. He says, well, you know, but I'm not good. My mouth isn't good. I'm not eloquent of speech. He says, who gave man his mouth?

You know? And Moses just keeps coming up with these problems, and God just keeps answering it and saying, but I've chosen you. I've called you, and you're the one that's going to do it.

So many times we look at our lives and we think there's no way. There's no way that God could use me. But maybe we can learn something from this guy that's next to Jesus on the cross. It's like I got nothing left to offer. I'm as good as dead right now.

I can't give you any support, any. Like, I can't fund you as a king. I can't support you as a servant to the king. I can't do anything. I'm useless to you, Jesus.

But is there room for me in your kingdom? And when Jesus says, today you'll be with me in paradise, I've just got to believe that if Jesus looks at it that way, then he looks at you in a way that you've never imagined. He says, I've died for you. There's a place for you in my kingdom, and there's work that you have to do that I'm going to call you to do.

I think back of that Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross and the effect that it had on his sons. These boys, we don't know exactly how old they were, but they witnessed what their father did carrying the cross of Jesus, even though he didn't volunteer. The Romans voluntold him. He gets voluntold, he's doing that. And those boys are still following along.

They're following their dad and they don't know what's going to happen. I bet they were really invested into the story of, like, who's this Jesus guy? Why is he so important? And the more they find out about it, they're like, our dad carried his cross, but he couldn't be the one that died on it. Simon of Cyrene, he couldn't be the one that died on the cross because he wasn't the holy, righteous and perfect son of God.

See, Simon could carry it. Simon could be that integral part of it. But even if they had nailed him up to it, his death wouldn't have mattered for you or for me, but because of who Jesus is, because he is the holy and righteous son of God. His death makes a difference for you. His death changes your life on this earth and in eternity.

But you have to accept that. You have to receive that from him. So the question that we have today, what we started out looking at, is what really happened to Jesus in his death? And we could have gone through a whole lot more of the medical stuff behind crucifixion and all the blood and gore the. That I didn't feel like getting into today.

But the question we end with is so what is happening to you? What's happening to you in light of Christ's death? How are you responding to that? The biggest question is, have you received him into your life as your savior? If you can honestly answer that and say, yes, Jesus is my Lord and Savior, I've been born again, I have a new life, then praise God and I celebrate that with you.

And if that's the case and that's all happened, but you say, you know what? I just don't know what to do from here. Like, I don't know how to grow closer to God. I don't know how to study His Word and to find out who he wants me to be. Then I'll tell you.

The good news is not only do we care so much about discipleship that we want to engage with you on that, but we're turning this building next door into a place called the discipleship place. It's going to focus on that. Because if Christ has died for you for your eternity, but also for your here and now, then you need to learn what it means to walk with him each and every day and how to grow in that faith. And so we want to help you out along the way for that. What is happening with you in light of eternity?

You've received Christ as your Savior, but are you living as if your calling, or your job is, is to tell more people about Jesus, to bring them along with you? You see, it's gonna be kind of boring if you're like, yay, I made it. Where's all my family and friends? Oh, you're supposed to share the gospel along the way. One of the ways we do that is in serving others.

One of the ways we do that is in sacrificing our lives so that others might know Christ. Some of your ambitions, some of your goals, some of your dreams might need to be put aside, at least for a time if Christ is calling you to serve him in a way right now that you have to be obedient to. So how have you received Christ's sacrifice on behalf of your life right now and for eternity? And how are you living for him and how are you serving Him? Because one of the things that I would not ever want to do at the end of my life is to look back and to realize that I took the free gift of salvation that Jesus Christ offered me, and I just kind of put it on a shelf and said, there, I'm saved.

I can look to that and know that I'm saved and I'm good and I'm done from here on out. There's so many ways and places that God calls us to serve him, and I want to help you find those out. We're going to offer over the next couple months, some opportunities for you to dig into that a little bit more and to dig into how you might serve Him. One of the things that we use as a a curriculum called Shape, which is your spiritual gifts, your heart, your abilities, your personality, and your experiences and how those work together to inform your kingdom purpose. That's just one of the tools we're going to be using over the next little while that kind of helps you get involved with serving in the Kingdom of God.

But for right now, keep your eyes open to what God's doing in your life. See who it is that's around you that he might call you to to be a blessing in their lives. And then, by all means, invite somebody to come next week when we celebrate our 80th anniversary. That's going to be a really neat time together. Amen.

Pastor Kendall's going to come up and close us out.

Sam.