Save Us Now

Today, I make a presentation of the gospel. I do this every Sunday with twists and turns, but today, I want you to understand and feel and experience the power of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. In fact, this week and next week, we will hear just about the depravity that is our lives and the glorious grace that sets us free from ourselves. I can’t express it any other way. This week, above all other weeks begins the celebration of good news, the coming king, triumphantly returning to his city, to his people, to be crowned horrifically by a crown of thorns and to be murdered as savagely imaginable. This is our celebration. This is our feast. This is our guilt. This is our LORD. So I make this point every week. But I think I have to start with that same point. God breathed life into us. He created us into his image and told us to be fruitful and multiple. This is Genesis 1:27. In fact, God tells us that we’re free to do whatever we want, just don’t eat from that tree in the middle of the garden. There was no law; there was no breaking of laws. This was simple advice—eat from the tree in the middle of the garden and find yourself ensnared by death. The human race made it about a whole half a chapter before it went south. Genesis 2: 16-17, 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” So this began a long history of human beings unable to help themselves and their own lives. If you really think about it, and I don’t care if you think the creation story is actual, fictional, mythological, or even allegorical, it actually doesn’t matter how you perceive the creation story, what matters is this: fundamentally the end game is the same—we’re impotent creatures who are unable on our own to do anything worthwhile. You don’t believe me, tell me what happened the last time you tried to do something great and what were the results of such actions? Better yet, since we’re all older now and all we do is lower our expectations so that all we have to do is wake up in the morning to really be proud of ourselves, let’s look at a 3 year old child. What happens when the 3 year old misbehaves? That’s right; you spank them and scold them. But here’s the kicker because it’s not that we scold children or punish children, but let’s look at what they try to do. They do exactly what you tell them not to do and then they have to audacity to try to lie to you. It’s like they climb up your kitchen counter and eat the cookies and breaks the cookie jar and when you confront them they say, “the dog did it!” The only problem is, you don’t own a dog! Yeah, this is us on a daily basis. A long time ago, during my degenerate high school years, I would occasionally cop some weed with some of my buddies, get high and just walk around on the street enjoying myself. Well, one afternoon, I did a horrible job getting unhigh on my way home and I had been walking home and my dad drives by in his car. He pulls over the car and asks me if I wanted a ride. I said “no thanks, I’m enjoying the air.” So he drives by and I’m still walking along and guess whose waiting for me at home? That’s right, my dad, and guess what’s in his hand, that’s right a hose. I told you the weather was nice, but it wasn’t that nice. He turns the hose onto high and hoses me down and says, “you like being high? I think you’ll also like being cold.” This was back in the 90s so child abuse was out of the question—there was no such thing. But you would think after that, I would learn my lesson. You would believe that I would stop smoking—I didn’t. I just pretended not to and tried to hide it, like most of us hide our secret sins, thinking that nobody else would know but me. But that’s not true. My pops knew, he just stopped saying anything about it. God knows, we’re not hiding anything—but we keep hiding our sin like we’re doing a good job hiding it. Creation tells us that we are a product of God’s love and despite owing Him the honor of our creation, we defiled it when we were deceived and tricked and instead of courageously facing the music, we pointed fingers and had somebody else take the blame. This ended up with everybody being punished for the crime of disobedience and scapegoating. Look at Abraham, he whored out his wife so he could save his own neck. I don’t know about you, but that is pathetic. Moses—he could have been the bad guy in CSI, he strangles somebody and then buries them in the shallows of the sand thinking he wouldn’t get caught. Then we have David, the mighty king of Israel’s golden age—dude sleeps with his general’s wife, then has the general killed and he’s a man after God’s own heart! We’re degenerate. Our lineage is degenerate. Our minds are degenerate. We can’t save ourselves. Let’s look at Matthew 21:9-16. 9 And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” 10 And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” 11 And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” 12 And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.” 14 And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. 15But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, 16 and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” Let me try to fill you in on what is going on. Jesus had just raised Lazarus from the dead. He was on his way to Jerusalem to attend the Passover feast. This was a big thing in Israel. They made pilgrimages back to the temple of God on special holidays to worship and to take care of religious business. So Jesus has a crowd following him. These people all witnessed Jesus saving Lazarus. It was incredible. Jesus wept. And then he tells Lazarus to come out of the tomb and Lazarus does. Then all these people now they’re following him, more than ever because he’s doing bonefied God’s impossible work. He is saving people who couldn’t save themselves. This is the gospel alive. I want to side track here for a little bit but this is where we sometimes get confused with what is and isn’t the gospel. We somehow and sometimes forget that we didn’t save ourselves by some type of behavioral modification. The same stupidity we were guilty of prior to our salvation moment, we’re still guilty of it after. It may have decreased in stupidity and most likely, we try harder not to do the things we did in our past, but nonetheless, we are still sinfully dumb tarts! I don’t know about you, but when God saved me, He didn’t say, “JKwon, you need to fix x, y, z before you can be on me team.” He didn’t say to me, “I want to use you for my glory JKwon, but you need to stop being a flirt, stop partying, and practice your mental math.” He didn’t say that to me. He said, “tag, you’re it.” He said, “here’s faith. Here’s my son Jesus.” That was it. Then God began to change my life. I went from the problem kid at church to the problematic kid who invited gangbangers to church. I don’t know why, but I did. It was from the moment I said to Jesus, “come save me, that he did without a long list of prerequisites.” So people are following Jesus after witnessing that Martha and Mary simply asked Jesus, “come save our brother” and he did. He did something nobody could do otherwise and it was done. So people saw that and started saying to him, “Hosanna—come save me, because we recognize who you are.” We did this verse with the shorties back at Christmas, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” The power of the gospel lies in recognizing that you can call on the name of Jesus and he will save you when you can’t and when nobody else can. Just cry out to him as he rides into your life bringing peace between you and God and becomes ruler of your heart like the king he was declared to be. This past week, I had the most ridiculous conversation with somebody and it irked the hell out of me. It irked me because I sat there, minding my own business and something plops down next to me and says, isn’t this Jonathan Kwon, pastor of Redemption Church. He said to me, “bro, I love what you’re doing with your quiet time, I read it every day.” And I say, “that’s great, I love to hear that it helps you in your walk, can you tell me where and what posts were most helpful?” He says, “all the time! I want to go to your church, but the people you got at Redemption are so sinful, with so many problems.” I started laughing like a mad man and actually hurt my back falling off my chair. I wanted to say, “dude, I write most of my quiet times about my shortcomings and failures and I’m the pastor in need of redemption, but I laughed.” But this is where most of us are in life aren’t we? We come to church and we don’t pray. We are faithless. We perform empty acts of piety thinking that we can do something with our lives. But we can’t. Jesus enters the temple after he comes rolling into town and here he is, overturning the status quo. He says, what we’ve been doing before can’t continue to happen. We, here at Redemption, can’t be about allowing things to continue on like nothing is changing. We can’t allow religion to continue on it’s path of same ole thing yesterday, today and tomorrow. We need to overthrow the old religious undertones and pray to God, asking for power to pour down into our hearts and our minds and our actions. Jesus is driving out from among us, the mentality of religion, as it is, and always will be, and some of us, if not all of us, have to break that mold and be holy like Jesus, not in this buying of pigeons and sacrifices, but in the way of knowing who God is to us and how we cry out to him for salvation and he saves us. Verse 14. When Jesus overturns righteousness on its head by overthrowing the sacrifice system set up to buy freedom by giving it out freely, those who could never even attempt to get salvation come to get healed and he heals them. The blind and the lame have no chance and no ability in the Jewish society that we know to come to the temple for salvation, but Jesus in his house heals them. He saves them. This is the power of God we are celebrating. God confuses those in power. God overturns what is and tell us to dream about what it should be. This is the power of the gospel. This is the power that we are celebrating. This is the power to whom we cry—save us! Save us because we cannot save ourselves. We here at Redemption must stop relying on ourselves for power. We must stop trying so desperately hard to adhere to a religion that cannot save us, to works that condemn us. We need to cry out to Jesus, our savior, we must cling to His power, His strength and His words—that is the only thing that saves us. 10 For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” 11 Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” – Galatians 3:10-11. I want to open Holy week for all of us to reflect on how we are living our spiritual lives. Are we living by faith, clinging into the salvific work of Jesus Christ in our lives as King of our lives or are we trying to buy salvation and sanctification through forced works? Are we joyfully loving the ministry in front of us or are we begrudgingly hating the fact we have to serve at all? This is the question. This is the call of Palm Sunday for all of us. Come lord, save us now.