Palm Sunday: Messiah's Humble Entry and Holy Week Invitation

And so I gotta ask, do you need the same type of hope that maybe other people you've seen have? Or do you know somebody else around you that needs hope? Is there somebody that's kicking around you that has seemed lost or really just maybe unfulfilled and has never gotten the invitation or really heard the good news? And I would say that if if Jesus really did fulfill all 300 of these prophecies, then all the other promises are true as well. So that's good news for us and it's good news for others. [00:48:47] (43 seconds)  #ProphecyBringsHope

Everything changes at that moment. And then when he comes into Jerusalem, people know. People heard about Jesus. People heard about the miracles he was doing in Galilee. People heard about the people that were being risen from the dead. People heard about all the prophecies that he fulfilled. The Jews would have absolutely known this person coming into Jerusalem on a donkey is not insignificant. And you got to know Easter today, two thousand years later, is still a commotion moment. [00:47:49] (35 seconds)  #PalmSundayCommotion

And what that represented is during that culture, just like in if you watch any of the old Roman movies, there would be a Roman parade when the victor came back from war, and the victory that would happen. And so they would lay down the palms and they'd lay down clothing, and this would represent the liberator coming, the person who fought for the Roman empire and came back, and they were celebrating him. So now Jesus comes, and the people lay down the palms, and they lay down the clothes on the donkey. Yet they don't understand what he's about to do. See, Jesus came to liberate humanity, but not in the way that we thought. [00:39:18] (43 seconds)  #HumbleLiberator

You would then go and blindfold one person and let them wander around Texas. The probability of them picking up that exact marked silver dollar coin is the same probability that Jesus would have fulfilled just those eight prophecies by accident. So you understand he didn't just do the eight, but he fulfilled all 300. And if that is true, then what are the odds that he did it by accident or that he really is the Messiah? And it's one thing to say, yeah, he can fulfill the prophecies that are within his control, but what about all of the prophecies that were outside of his control? Where we have to go is that Jesus was the Messiah. [00:36:19] (51 seconds)  #ProphecyProbability

And I wanna give you the invitation that this week, if you're a person of faith, try to do this week differently. Live it differently than you ever have before. Maybe spend more time into the scriptures than you normally do during the week. Maybe choose to fast from food for an entire day this week. What that does is when you fast, the hunger pangs remind you of the time you should be spending with God. And when we do it, we do it with purpose. So if you're praying for a neighbor, somebody who you hope would come to church or maybe you have a family member, somebody you think is just hopefully hopelessly gone, we fast and we pray and we hope for them. [00:50:16] (46 seconds)  #FastPrayServe

Now I think if I asked you that question today and this morning, do you feel like God didn't live up to your expectations? Because sometimes for us, as we go to church and we run into religious people, something will happen, you'll have a bad experience and we associate it with God. And so I can't help but ask the question, do you feel like you have a different expectation of Christ because of something that's happened at some point. Well, Easter is about a redefinition of God. You see the redefinition of God for the Jews was that their messiah was not gonna be as they thought. That instead of coming as a war hero, he was supposed to and did come in peace. [00:45:57] (46 seconds)  #ExpectationToPeace

Jesus fulfilled all eight of these. Now there's part of these prophecies that he could control, like for instance, getting a donkey and riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. That's a prophecy that you can control, but there's a whole lot of prophecies Jesus fulfilled that he could not control. Like the place that he was born in Bethlehem, or the fact that they went to Egypt for a season, or how he died. There's all these things that he fulfilled. And and what they said in ScienceWorks is that the probability of Jesus fulfilling just those eight prophecies alone by chance is one to the ten seventeenth power. [00:34:43] (47 seconds)  #UnlikelyByChance

I love data and evidence. For those who are maybe skeptics here today, maybe for you if the jury is still out, if you believe truly in Jesus to be the Messiah, I love that this bible we have here, I talk about how important it is that we understand what this bible is. It's not just a religious book, but it's the very living word of God. It's our standard of truth, but it's also accurate. I love to say that I don't have to defend the bible. It's been the most scrutinized book in the history of the world, and yet the more archaeology comes out and the more technology happens, it only continues to affirm the things in the bible. [00:31:17] (46 seconds)  #LivingWordEvidence

And so here, I wanna give you a little bit of religious data for people who are wondering, did Jesus is Jesus really the messiah? It's pretty interesting because Christians call Jesus the messiah or the anointed one, what the Messiah means. And the the Messiah is the central figure in the Jewish religion. They are the one that they are still waiting for today. They believe the Messiah is the one who will restore the nation of Israel and bring peace. And Jesus did that but not in the way they thought. [00:32:03] (36 seconds)  #MessiahReimagined

So it just goes so quickly how somebody can change their mind on how they think about somebody. And what happened to those Jews at the time is they felt like God didn't live up to their expectations. Still today, Jews, even though all 300 of the messianic prophecies have been fulfilled by Jesus, there's still thousands and thousands of Jews today that are waiting on the messiah, and many Christians ask why? Why don't they believe? Well, I think sometimes there could be spiritual blindness that's associated with it. And it's this moment where they thought God didn't live up to their expectations. [00:45:13] (44 seconds)  #SpiritualBlindness

Because one thing about donkeys is they're very humble. And the whole idea of the messiah coming into Jerusalem was this idea that this king and this conqueror was coming to upend the Roman empire. You see, you gotta understand their idea of the messiah was a national liberator. It was somebody who symbolized victory over everything that was oppression. And for the Jewish people at the time, oppression was the Roman government and the situation they were living in. And you can imagine the reason why, so you're sitting on a donkey, you come in, you're expecting a stallion, a white horse, he's decorated in gold. Yet this Jesus comes in on a donkey, and they begin to lay the clothes on the donkey and they begin to put palms down. [00:38:16] (62 seconds)  #DonkeySymbolism

So I wanna talk first about the prophecies. There's actually over 300 prophecies in the old testament that talk about the messiah. So over three different things the messiah needed to be or do to fully affirm that he was. And Jesus fulfilled not 50% of those prophecies, not 75% of the prophecies, not even 99% of the prophecies. Jesus fulfilled all 100% of the prophecies. And it's actually pretty pretty amazing because the probability of Jesus fulfilling just eight of the 300 is literally impossible. [00:32:40] (43 seconds)  #All300Fulfilled

Maybe for you it's just maybe stepping out for the first time and inviting somebody. But I would encourage you, don't live this week the same way you've done every other week. Set some time aside in a different way to focus on Christ. If it was really written that he was the messiah, then we ought to pause, spend some time together, and reflect because of all he's done for us. [00:51:01] (30 seconds)  #InviteAndReflect

You know, there's hope for us as Christians and there's hope for this world that Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies. It was written because we needed to know. Unless it's written down, we forget. It was written in this bible over 300 times of how we should see the messiah. How we should know when the messiah comes. Jesus Christ came to this earth and fulfilled all 300 prophecies. And then when he comes into Jerusalem, he begins to cause the same type of commotion that he causes when he's born in Bethlehem. [00:47:07] (37 seconds)  #WrittenHopeAndProof

I don't even know what that like, that's 100,000, million, trillion. I don't know what the next ones are, but that's a big big number. But essentially, it's one in the tenth to the seventeenth power that Jesus would have fulfilled those eight prophecies alone by chance. Because you you either did it by chance or you did it intentionally. And they were and the prophecies were fulfilled intentionally. Those are our two options. And he goes on to explain how rare this is. He says, to give you an idea, it would be the same as this illustration of if they it covered the entire state of Texas two feet deep with silver dollar coins, and then you would mark one coin differently. [00:35:30] (49 seconds)  #IntentionalNotChance