Sermon Tone Analysis

Pray

Introduction

Since today is Palm Sunday and next Sunday is Easter Sunday where we are celebrating the resurrection, today we’re continuing to focus on the cross at Easter.

This Friday is Good Friday, which at first glance is kind of a strange name for the day, because the question perhaps on many people’s lips is - what is good about Good Friday?

What’s good about the excruciatingly painful death of Jesus Christ?

Is there anything good about what happened around 2000 years ago when Jesus was sentenced to death on a cross?

Or to put it another way, do we have any hope on Good Friday?

Of course, we know the answer to that - we spoke about it last week and we’ve preached on it every year since then.

But today we’re going to look at the hope that we have by looking at Psalm 22 and there are a few reasons for doing this.

The first reason for looking at Psalm 22 is because David, in Psalm 22 is feeling a lot like Jesus is feeling at his crucifixion – albeit to a much lesser extent - and I think we can all say that there are times that we feel like David feels in this psalm – even the best of us feel like David is feeling at some point in our lives.

Because although David is one of the biblical greats, he still cries out to God at times, and this Psalm is one of those times.

And let’s face it - no matter how strong we think we are - no matter how good a Christian we think we are, we still have times when we cry out to God in despair.

And in fact, this Psalm is a great reminder of the fact that that’s OK.

It’s OK to cry out to God in despair, because, as we’ll see - it helps us to remember our place before God.

The second reason for looking at Psalm 22 is because Jesus quotes from it just before he dies.

So on the cross, Jesus is pointing us to Psalm 22.

And the third reason for looking at Psalm 22 is because although verse 1 is what Jesus quotes, verse 7, verse 8, verse 16 and verse 18 all point forward to the crucifixion.

So what we are going to see is that in some ways David feels exactly the same way Jesus feels and so there are similarities between what Jesus went through and what David was going through.

And like I said, this psalm helps us to relate to David who was human and fallible, and it helps us therefore to relate to Jesus who was also fully human, but who was also INFALLIBLE...

He went through it too.

But we will also see that there is one big difference, and that big difference is what gives us hope – it’s that one big difference that makes Good Friday a very good day indeed.

Pause