The date is 1889. The place is Dodge City , Kansas . It’s high noon. From out of nowhere, the man in the white hat appears and leans against the building. He pulls a homemade cigarette out of his pocket and lights it with a match struck from the side of his pants leg. His eyes have the gaze of a predator seeking its prey. Just then, from out of the shadows appears the one whom he seeks. The other wears a black hat and black vest. His eyes dart nervously to and fro.
As a tumbleweed blows down the dirty street, the 2 men size each other up. The bustling city grows silent. The only thing one can hear is the sound of the men’s spurs and one’s own heartbeat. The shopkeeper closes his blinds. The mother shields the eyes of her young son as the 2 men draw closer. The sun glints off of the gun and badge of the big man in the white hat. The other seems enveloped in shadow.
They get closer to each other as they walk down the middle of the dusty street. Closer and closer until finally the man in black stops and stares. But the man in the white keeps walking. Slowly he continues until he is uncomfortably close to the man in black until he finally is not more than a step away. Like a flash, the man in the white hate shoots his hand out from his side and says, “Hey! How ya doing? My name is Marshall Dillon. I just came over to ask you over to my house for dinner tonight. Miss Kitty fixed some stew and we would just like to welcome you to town!”
So…what did you think about my story? I made it up myself. Were you a little disappointed? Were you expecting something else to happen? Now, we all disavow violence, right? But you have to admit that you were expecting, even hoping for something with a little more action at the end, weren’t you? You were expecting the good guy to shoot the bad guy. That’s just good storytelling.
But see, your assumptions made you misunderstand how the story would end. What you wanted to happen is what you expected to happen and when it didn’t happen you have to admit you were disappointed. How many times in life has that happened to you? How many times have you wanted something to happen and then you just started expecting it to happen and when it didn’t, you were left with a bad taste in your mouth. It made you bitter and hateful and wanting bad things to happen to those who let you down.
You are, of course, not the first to feel that way. Life is full of disappointments. It always has been. Life is rarely fair. And for a lot of people it is made more difficult by their faulty beliefs in Who God is and how He works. They have a misunderstanding of God and a misunderstanding of the relationship between God and man. I heard someone say just the other day that they weren’t a Christian because God had never done anything for them. That is a serious misunderstanding of God.
In today’s passage of scripture in John, the Jewish people have a serious misunderstanding of Who Jesus is and what His plans are. There are some big words being thrown around in conversations about Jesus here lately; words like “King” and even “Messiah”. People have seen him do incredible miracles including the miracle we looked at last week where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And so now they are thinking that surely if He has that kind of power then He could lead us out of bondage to the Romans. He could be our king. He could kill all the Romans and kill all the other enemies around us and He could finally bring peace to a nation that craved peace.
And not only would He be able to do those things, this would be a great time to do them. This was the time of Passover; a time of nationalistic celebration and pride and it would be the perfect time for Jesus to be crowned king and lead them to victory and salvation. Turn to John chapter 12 and let’s read verses 12-19.
The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem . They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna![a]” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the king of Israel !” 14 Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written: 15 “Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion ;see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.” 16 At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him. 17 Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. 18Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him. 19 So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”
Have you ever been misunderstood? Of course. We all have. Troy and Trey Pittman came over to my house the other day. Trey busted in first, of course, and headed straight to the kitchen to see if I had anything to eat. Troy came in a few seconds after and of course my dogs jumped all over him. He didn’t mind. He gets the same thing at his house. I thought he then pointed to the big dog, Bo, and Troy said,
“He needs a filipet.”
I said, “A what?”
“A filipet!”
I’m trying to figure out what a filipet is and why my dog needs one but you know how Troy is; I didn’t want to ask again but I had to.
“Troy, I don’t know what a filipet is.”
He looked at me like I was the crazy one. “A what?”, he asked.
“Whatever it is you said, I don’t know what it is!”
He sounded it out real plain this time. “A Phillips head! A Phillips head screwdriver!”
I finally understood what he said and I then turned around to go get it but stopped and asked, “But why does my dog need a Phillips head screwdriver?”
Again with the crazy person look. “I didn’t say your dog needed one. I need one. I’m going to tighten your door knob!”
Well, it’s one thing to be misunderstood because the other person speaks a different dialect of “Hillbilly” than I do. It’s another thing for the people of Israel to misunderstand Jesus and why He came to earth. They had the scriptures telling them what was going to happen. So they could have known and should have known. In fact, the author, the apostle John even admits in verse 16 that they did not even understand what was really happening and why and they didn’t understand it until after Jesus had been killed, buried and resurrected.
But what’s interesting here is that in their misunderstanding they played their own part in fulfilling the very scripture they should have known. As I said, this was the time of the Passover celebration, a time when the city of Jerusalem would be packed with people. Most of them would have heard about Jesus from His miracles and I’m sure many of them were there just to see if He would show up and do something again. They wanted Him to provide them with some healing or even just some entertainment.
Others were there because they saw Lazarus resurrected and wanted to see him. Still others were ready to crown Jesus as their king in anticipation of Him leading them to insurrection over the Romans. When they shouted “Hosanna”(which means “save now”) they weren’t wanting to be saved spiritually. They were wanting Jesus to do something for them here and now. They were excited because they thought Jesus would be the military king they had waited for. They misunderstood.
Some of us here this morning have a hard time believing that they couldn’t understand with everything they had been taught and told through the years and even by Jesus Himself. When they shouted to Him they were quoting Psalm 118:26-27. It says, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.From the house of the Lord we bless you. 27 The Lord is God,and he has made his light shine on us. With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession up to the horns of the altar.” So they knew the scriptures.
And then Jesus, again fulfilling scripture, makes it even plainer as he rides in on a donkey instead of a horse. A returning warrior king who was successful in battle would ride into town on a horse to show his might but a king who was coming for peace would ride a donkey. Jesus might as well have had a neon sign on his head telling His intentions but the people didn’t want to see it and so they didn’t. And we have a hard time believing that anybody would be that foolish. How could they have missed the signs?
I remember when I was in high school there was a kid who got mad at something as he was driving his car and in anger he swung his fist and hit the windshield of his car and shattered it. I rode home from school with a friend of mine the next day and we were laughing about it and saying how stupid he was to do such a thing. My friend, who was driving, said he couldn’t believe it because all the guy did was swing his fist like this and…and that’s when my friend shattered his own windshield. (True story, Mom.) J
We sit here this morning and too many of us are just here because we are waiting for God to do something for us. We want Him to come out like a gunslinger and shoot down all of our problems. We cry out to Him, “Save us, save us now!” We call Him King and we call Him Lord and we sing His praises and quote our favorite comforting scripture about how God has good things planned for us. And He does! Don’t hear me say that God doesn’t want good things for you. He loves you more than you can imagine.
But it is because of that unending, immeasurable love that he does not solve all of your problems and cure all of your ills and pay all your bills. Rick Warren said, “Jesus did not die on the cross just so we could live comfortable, well-adjusted lives. His purpose is far deeper: He wants to make us like himself before he takes us to heaven. This is our greatest privilege, our immediate responsibility and our ultimate destiny.”
The reason that I know that the Jewish people misunderstood Jesus was because in this passage they are wanting to crown Him king and yet in just a few days it is this same crowd who cries out, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” And isn’t that just like us? We sing the song 10,000 Reasons this morning about wanting to sing His praises for 10,000 years and then tomorrow when things go bad, yes, sometimes really bad, we have the nerve to say, “God, this isn’t fair! Who do You think You are?” We approach the Creator of the universe with a clenched fist. We go to the Redeemer and Sustainer with anger. We dare go before the throne of the great I AM with a puffed out chest and smart-alec phrases.
You’re not the first to go to God in the middle of a storm and be a smart-alec. Most of us would agree that Job in the Old Testament had some things to be upset about. And you might think Job would be glad to hear directly from God about why these things were happening. But after reading just a couple of verses in the 38th chapter, I don’t think so. “Who is this that darkens my counsel without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man!” And it goes downhill from there for old Job.
Job misunderstood the role of God in His life. It wasn’t that Job didn’t love God. He just didn’t have the knowledge he needed, as God pointed out. How much better for him it would have been had he simply answered as the 3 boys did in the book of Daniel. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were about to be burned to death in the furnace they said to the king, “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. 18 But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
We know He can…but even if He doesn’t! Let that sink in because those are some of the most profound words ever spoken by man. Those 3 young boys understood that God was not there to serve them. God wasn’t there to make them comfortable. God was glorifying Himself through them and in the process was making them more like Him.
I’m so tired of people not being comfortable with this or that. Where do we get the idea that we are supposed to be comfortable or that we have the right to comfort? I was looking at the website of another church in the area this week and on their page is a 2 minute video about their church. There were lots of people being interviewed about why they like that church and the things I heard over and over again were that “all my friends are here” and “I feel comfortable here.”
Brian Amerman came in not long after I saw that and I was telling him about it and he wisely said, “Isn’t that why people go to bars? So they can be with their friends and be comfortable?” If you are going to church because your friends are there and you feel comfortable there, well that’s good but it shouldn’t be the reason you go. Somebody that goes to church for those reasons has a misunderstanding of church and an even deeper misunderstanding of God. In fact, it’s my experience that it is when I start feeling comfortable in some situation that God usually chooses to take me out of that situation. Anybody else know that?
The reason that the people called Jesus “king” on one day and “blasphemer” the next was because they realized that following Jesus was going to be uncomfortable. He was not the gunslinger they wanted. They wanted a warrior who was going to make their lives more like they wanted but instead they realized that Jesus wasn’t there to make their lives better for them. He was there to make them better for life.
In fact, He wasn’t even going to make bad people good. He wanted to make dead people alive! He wanted then and He wants now for us to call Him King because servants serve a king. And a king is sovereign and can do anything He chooses without asking for permission or explaining why.
God wants every part of our lives. He wants every part of us to be like every part of Him. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on that donkey He was making a statement. Previously He had shunned the big crowds and the limelight saying that His time had not yet come but now it has come. Now is the time for people to take a side and say, “I choose Jesus. I may not understand His ways but I will not hold back any part of me. He can have my hopes and dreams, my thoughts, my habits, my language, my hobbies, my time and my money. And because He loves me so passionately I know He will provide everything I really need. But even if He doesn’t…I know He will but even if He doesn’t, still I will serve Him!”
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