Sermon Tone Analysis

Palm Sunday…Celebration day!

Chris Davis got a hit!

Day when Jesus shows up and becomes KING.

Not the sort of kingdom that the people were expecting…they were expecting a political kingdom…Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom.

We talked last week how you entered into this kingdom, by being born again, this week we are going to see how our lives can change when Jesus shows up, when we begin to live a kingdom life.

I’m not talking about our life in heaven, but our life on earth.

What marks the life of a person in the Kingdom of God?

In order to do that, I want us to stop and think for a moment, how this week will end....it’s far different from how the week begins.

It starts here with us waving palms…celebrating, singing HOSANNA!

But by the end of the week the lights will be out, the cross will be covered in death.

The king that was to deliver us is dead.

Killed for our sin.

This shouldn’t come to a surprise to us, but it does.

It does because this isn’t the way we think good stories should end…it’s not how things are supposed to work - the best person isn’t supposed to die.

If we didn’t have the whole Bible like we do, we would see the events of this week and never would we say this was a successful start to a new Kingdom.

It looks like a failure.

This should tell us something about how we measure success in the kingdom of God.

Tell me what a person believes and I’ll tell you what he’ll do.

How we measure success has a tremendous effect on how we live out lives.

EVEREST

Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer, tells the story of the ill-fated expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 1996.

In the book he mentions a member of the expedition named Yasuko Namba.

Ms. Namba was a 46-year-old Japanese FedEx employee with a passion for climbing.

She was an accomplished climber, having reached the summits of seven of the largest mountains on the planet.

The only one left for her to conquer was Everest, the tallest in the world.

She desperately wanted to get to the top of Everest as well.

This was her goal.

So much so that Krakauer, who was also a member of the expedition, tells how “Yasuko was totally focused on the top.

It was almost as if she was in a trance.

She pushed extremely hard, jostling her way past everyone to the front of the line.

She wanted to get to the top of Everest.”

Later that day, she made it.

She accomplished her goal.

She was the oldest person ever to make it to the highest point in the world.

Later that afternoon, however, Yasuko and the other climbers were caught in a blizzard.

And as the icy winds blew, Yasuko succumbed to the exhaustion of her climb and froze to death.

Yasuko Namba died agonizingly close in time and location to where she had gained her greatest prize.

This helps explain her tragic mistake.

According to Krakauer, Yasuko's fatal flaw was that she adopted the wrong goal.

Yasuko's goal had been to get to the top of the mountain.

What she wanted the most was to stand at the top of the world, and all of Japan cheered her when she did.

But this was the wrong goal, and a frequent and sometimes fatal mistake that climbers make.

The goal of climbing should never be to get to the top of a summit.

Successful climbers know that the goal is not to get to the top—it is to get back down to the bottom.

The tragedy is that Yasuko accomplished her goal.

Against incredible odds she made it to the top of the mountain.

But as she poured out her energy to get to the top, she did not save enough strength to make it back down.

Yasuko failed because she adopted the wrong goal.

John 3 - AMEN

Was she successful?

if the goal was to get to the top, then we have to say yes…if the goal was to get home, then we have to say NO.

How do we measure success?

How do you define success?

Often times we think of being a success as one who accomplishes something significant.

But when you think about it, success is much more than that.

Success is something internal quality.

Because we can reach a significant milestone and still be miserable…we wouldn’t call that true success…real success has an outward and an inward component.

We will learn something about this today in our text.

Let’s look:

“After this” tells us to remember just what happened.

Look back to see what just happened in the text?

Jesus explained to Nicodemus about the necessity of being born again.

That we, you and I, wouldn't be allowed to see, take part in, or experience the Kingdom of God without being born again.

We needed, not another physical birth, not a physical baptism, but we need to be born again in a spiritual birth to a spiritual life in order to be a Christian.

Jesus says this isn’t optional.

Remember, John is telling a story with one purpose, that those who read these words would believe.

He wrote at the end of the Gospel that if he wrote everything Jesus did, the world couldn’t hold the books that would be written…so being one of Jesus’s closest friends he selected these particular stories, these signs to clearly tell a story of the life of Jesus that would lead us to believe, to accept Jesus as the Lord of our life, for us to surrender to him, that we might be saved.

So back to the text.

John and Jesus were each in the Jordan river, within a few miles of each other.

JTB is near Salim, which means springs, where there was plenty of water.

They were there accustomed to drawing crowds of people wanting to be baptized for repentance.

Up comes a Jewish man and questions what they are doing, debating ceremonial washing.

IF you have been around many Jewish people, they love to argue and debate…sure that’s a stereotype and I probably shouldn’t do that, but I think this one is safe.

So when some fellow shows up to challenge why they are baptizing and what purpose it serves way out here in the desert, not even close to the temple, John’s disciples would certainly get defensive.

Somehow this also got them to thinking about this new bunch of Disciples.

Now look what was happening, the people were going over there, too.

They were beginning to see things change now that Jesus was in ministry; and they did not like it.

What’s going on.

You can hear some pride and jealousy in their words can’t you?

WE know what this is like don’t we.

When the new business comes into town and people start going there.

When people leave our church and start going there.

When our barber moves, when our restaurant closes.

What do we do…we criticize.

We gripe, we complain, we compare.

That’s exactly what’s going on here

Why do we take success personal?

Remember now, Jesus and JTB had already met a few times.

Previously, JTB had encouraged his disciples to go and join Jesus, some did, but not all of them.

Some of them had remained with JTB, faithful to him.

And these who remained were now jealous because they had been the ones who did the majority of the baptizing in the past.

If you were a disciple in that day, you took pride in your Rabbi.

You served him with, followed him, defended him, you talked like him, lived like him.

You tried to do everything the way he did.

You stuck by him when other disciples bailed out when a new teacher showed up.

When your Rabbi was disregarded, you took offense.

Now that their Rabbi’s ministry was losing steam, they were worried.

They were worried for their Rabbi, but they were also worried about themselves looking like failures.

Why did it bother them?

Because they had missed the point of their work.