Holy Week

 Matthew 21: 1-10

Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. ³ If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” ⁴ This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

⁵ “Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Behold, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
    on a colt,^[a] the foal of a beast of burden.’”

⁶ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. ⁷ They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. ⁸ Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 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.”

 

As we begin this week, it's important to remember a couple of things. One this week is a celebration that should occur throughout the year not just during one week, and two we should celebrate this week as a remembrance. It's also Passover week, (the feast of unleavened bread) The Jews were told as they left Egypt to remember the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt.

A couple of things that stand out to me about our passage for today. 1. Obedience both on the part of Jesus and also His disciples. 2. The donkey

Let's dig in a bit. verse 5 prophetically predicts who Jesus would ride into Jerusalem, it's from Zechariah 9:9, you see without this verse telling the Jews what to look for they wouldn't have been able to know that their Messiah was riding into Jerusalem, and "if" Jesus wasn't the Messiah this prophecy couldn't have been fulfilled. The second part to this is that Jesus of course being God in the form of man knew this and was obedient to fulfill this prophecy, the second part of the obedience we see here is that Jesus told the disciples where they needed to go to get the donkey and if anyone was to say anything what they were to reply. The disciples did as they were instructed they followed His instruction to the letter and Jesus later riding into Jerusalem.

For our second part the donkey...Jesus could have ridden on anything He like, personally I would have chosen a roaring lion, but that's me and I'm not God nor do I want to be. Jesus chose a donkey, this was a sign, you see in those days the Jews were being oppressed by the Romans. They really had no rights other than to survive and pay taxes. They were looking for a king someone who would save them from their earthly troubles. Don't we often do that? We will often run to Jesus when things get hard, I can't tell you all the times that someone has come to me saying, "If only God would save me, I'll do this or that, but only if He saves me." This my friends is the wrong mindset to take we shouldn't run to God just to save us from our earthly troubles, but rather to save us from our sin and the eternal damnation. This donkey represents so much for us, it represents that Jesus came to not just save us from earthly  trouble but our sin and earthly damnation in hell.

Philippians 2:7-- ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,^[a] being born in the likeness of men.

 It represents He came as a humble servant who was to be that ultimate sacrifice the one final sacrifice so that we can spend eternity with Him, worshiping Him forever. Sadly though so many won't see this sacrifice, they are going to miss the servant while looking for the bigger and better thing. 

My hope today is that you would look to the Lamb of God, the One who rode a donkey humbling Himself so we are saved from our sin, we only need to be obedient to the call and surrender ourselves to Him. God's Word says "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved..."Acts 16:31

If you have questions please reach out...leave a comment or send an email. 

Blessings

Nick

Love your neighbors Hebrews 13:1

 In my daily bible reading I've been in Hebrews my what a fantastic read. So much to help in my walk with Christ. Today I want to talk about 13:1

"Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entrained angels unawares." Heb. 13:1 esv

Have you ever ran into someone who you didn't know, that needed help, may have seen that was having a bad day, needed a tire changed, was homeless, or just seemed like they were struggling. This may have been an angel and you didn't  know it. Angels are among us here on earth. They walk around even though we don't know it, they don't show their true selves because it would frighten us. For purposes of what we're talking about today I'm going to keep it pretty simple, this is actually a deeper subject that down the road we'll get into. 

This verse is pretty straight forward. We are called as Christians to show hospitality to be generous with others. Even Jesus told us that as we do unto others we do unto Him. Matthew 22:39, "And a second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself." But we need  to stop for a second and look at the verse before, v. 37-38 says "And He said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and  with all your  mind. v. 38 This is the great and first commandment." This is the number one thing that we as Christians are supposed to do to love God with our whole heart. That's the number one thing nothing else matters if we don't do that, but Jesus follows up with the second, love your neighbor as ourselves. We all love ourselves right? It's pretty easy to do. I make sure I'm fed, have clean clothing, get what I need first. If we love God won't we be more likely to serve others? I would venture to guess that if we do truly love God we want to follow His commands. Who is your neighbor? Dictionary.com defines neighbor as: "a person who lives near another. a person or thing that is near another. one's fellow human being"...it's those next to us whether we know them or not, so when Jesus said to love your neighbor it means those who are near us, down the street, in our town/city, next door to our home.

The point of our focus verse is not that we should just show hospitality to someone because they could be an angel but that we should show people hosptialty because Jesus called us to show love regardless of whether they are an angel or not. In doing that we show the love of Christ. Our witness is less about our words and more about our actions. 

~Blessings

Nick

Sermon Notes Exodus 13:17-22

 Happy Thursday! 

I wanted to share my notes from my sermon from last night. I hope this blesses you as much as I blesses me. The book of Exodus is full of examples of having to trust God for guidance. What we have to learn is that while the Israelite's after leaving Egypt had the pillar of smoke during the day and the pillar of fire at night to follow. We don't have that same thing, we have the Holy Spirit, we have Gods word. Please reach out if you have any questions.

Exodus 13:17-22

 

I.                 Following God story; God will often call us to Step out in faith, to do that we have to learn to follow God, He’ll have your back! The whole book of Exodus has one central theme, as God’s people we need to follow after God. He will lead us, He will take care of us, He will be our guide. He will allow us to go through things that are uncomfortable to bring us to a place of complete reliance on Him. This evening we’re going to learn how God leads us, why He will sometimes take us the long route to get where we need to be.

II.                v. 17-18 God lead them away from the Philistines the long route.

a.      Why?

1.      Lest the people change their minds.

a.      Israel was not ready for war, having just left Egypt, and witnessing the power of God as He freed them as slaves, the Hebrews had some growing they had to do, they had to learn that their God would sustain them regardless of what seemed like would be a giant task.

b.       How do we know the Jews didn’t have that moxie, that grit that they would need to be able to go into battle, most importantly would be willing to rely on God to save them? Even though God had brought them out of Egypt with such power, they still were not ready for war. Let’s look ahead a little bit turn one chapter ahead to chapter 14 verses 11 (read or have one of the kids read) can see that they were not ready with a preview of the Red Sea, the spies that went to check out the land. (Deuteronomy 1:27) Looking ahead to the battles to come. The spies who went into the land of milk and honey, but they also saw giants. When they came out, they whined again about how God brought them out of Egypt to just kill them???

2.      Towards the Red Sea. The Long way.

a.      God sometimes will take us the long way, 2 reasons

1.      He has something He wants to teach us. God wants us to grow in something most importantly He wants us to grow closer to Him.

a.      Wouldn’t it be nice if life was a straight line? You really think so? But we know that It’s not. When you’re hiking on a trail is the trail ever straight? No? Right? It is always crooked, and if you’re going up a mountain it has switch backs, pop-outs, and really hard parts. But the end result when you get to the top is pretty amazing. Think about the  best view you’ve ever witnessed to get there was pretty rough, I know some of you maybe haven’t experienced it…yet, so think about a hard time or something hard that you accomplished and when you finally got your reward that you earned you knew that it was worth the work.

2.      The reason that God wants us  to grow closer to Him is so that He will get the glory not us. Have you ever felt like you were at the end of your rope and you had nothing left to hold on to? I can tell you that I’ve been there. There are times in my life especially when I was a teen living on my own that I didn’t know how I was going to accomplish something. And boom out of nowhere it was taken care of. The only explanation was God took care of what was going on, the only thing that I could do was to give Him the glory. You may in your life have something going on right now at school, or home, or your job, that it seems like you have no control over. I can tell you without a doubt that God is in control. Letter from Jesus

III.              v. 19 this is a fulfillment of God’s promise to save His people from Egypt.

a.      Another proof of the fulfillment of God’s promise to not leave the Jews in Egypt, even so much so that the bones of Joseph were not left there. So, looking at this here we can see that no one was left behind not even Joseph.

IV.              v. 20-22

a.      Etham was on the edge of the wilderness and one step closer to the Red Sea. the Hebrews are finally leaving Egypt getting out of dodge,

b.      What is the purpose of the fire and the smoke? There is a special reason that we’re going to learn here. The simple answer is that so the Israelite's have something to follow, I mean you because they just up until recently they were slaves but now they leave Egypt and don’t have any sense of direction, so we know the fire and smoke gave them something to look for, something to follow but there is a deeper meaning too, something that is for us.

1. Now we don’t have a pillar of fire or even a cloud of smoke to follow but God has given us some things that we can use to follow so we know that we’re heading in the right direction.  There are a lot of other influences in our lives today. Things that are trying to get us to follow what they are saying.

1.      His word. (“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet”. Psalms 119:105) Turn with me to        1 Tim. 3:16-17

2.      The Holy Spirit (Pentecost) John 16:7-8

a.      How do we know what we’re hearing is from the Holy Spirit is real? By knowing what God’s word says. God will never contradict His word. This is why it’s so important to know God’s word, to ready it and know what it says, to be a student of it

3.      Others (Paul follow me as I follow Christ) There is a challenge with this one because we are human which is why we need to be grounded in God’s word. If that person we’re following isn’t following Christ we’re going to know.

a.      I need all of you to remember there are a lot of influences in your lives today what are some of those? Is it social media, Netflix, twitter, your friends, or where ever you get your news. Those aren’t necessarily bad things but, you need to be wise about that stuff and run it through the lens of the Bible Gods word. We have a lot of noise and it’s easy to get caught up in things that will draw you away from Jesus. They aren’t blatant either usually it will seem like things that might be good but as you begin to dig deeper you need to be aware that it’s drawing you away from Christ and getting you to take your eyes of the fire and smoke.

Writing Again!

 It has been such a long time since I have written on this page and I feel like it is time to resurrect it and get back to writing. God has done an amazing work in my life over the last 10 years or so since I last posted. I'm not even sure if anyone still reads this page. But when you happen upon it, it's my prayer that you're blessed and that God would get the glory.

 

So lets start with an introduction. I'm Nick, I love Jesus and believe whole heartily that our sole purpose in life is to glorify God and make His name known (Matthew 28:19-20). It's my prayer that you would be blessed by reading this blog, that your life in Christ would grow deeper. (Titus 2:1-2)