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“March
Forth”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Luke 13:31-35
“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”
We are being told this morning more about the true relationship Jesus
has with us, and more of what we should seek in our own spirit when we
want to be encountered by the very one we truly believe was resurrected
from the dead.
In this time of Lent, the forty days prior to the crucifixion of Jesus,
and then His being raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit,
what we desire in our hearts is to have a Spiritual experience with God
in a very meaningful way because of how important Easter is to us.
We have talked about repentance, realizing there are aspects of who we
are that we need to change in order to be in touch with how close God
really is to us. And we
have talked about sacrificing something—giving something up so that we
may have more intimate devotional time with God—where we read the
Bible in a spirit of prayer, open to God speaking to us in our hearts.
We are being taught by our very Lord, the true teacher in our lives,
that we will be open to seeing Him when we say, “Blessed is the one
who comes in the name of the Lord.”
That is what we need to learn more about us saying in our hearts.
“Open to seeing him” means having the proper perception of
Jesus, within our own faith, so that we truly will experience an
encounter with Him in such a way that the only explanation that we could
ever have is that we knew we were engaged with the resurrected Christ.
You may know that there is a documentary coming on the Discovery Channel
tonight that is trying to promote a tomb type container that was found
in the Middle East back in the 80’s, with possibly the deceased bodies
of the family of Jesus. The author of this documentary is trying to promote the
notion that the body of Jesus was in this tomb.
All the bones were buried in the ground, back during the 80’s,
by the local Israelite officials. Now,
the documentary is claiming that scientists can still do DNA tests
pertaining to certain chemicals left within the tomb kind of containers.
This whole situation has upset a lot of the Christian church.
Now, I truly do believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And actually science will never change my belief regarding my
faith in Christ. That does
not scare me at all. We do
not have faith in Christ because of human reasoning.
We have faith in Christ because it has been given to us as a gift
from God. But, I did ask
myself, “What could ever make me not believe in the resurrection?”
And my answer is, “Only Jesus.”
Only Jesus could show me that I may not be understanding the
resurrection the way I should. Jesus is alive. We
know that because He has spoken to us in our hearts, not because we have
come to believe based of intellectualism.
We have faith because we have been encountered by the Word of
God. God is alive through
Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.
We are being told that we will see him when we say in our hearts, that
blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
We will be more open to experience the reality of the living
Lord, our Savoir, and our brother in the person of Jesus Christ when we
help ourselves confess and believe that Jesus is the most blessed human
being in the history of this world because He came to us through the
choice, the plan, and the love of God the Father, who has loved us in
this very way.
There is no aspect of humanity, represented in this passage, who truly
understands who Jesus is. Herod
certainly does not know that Jesus has come in the name of the Lord.
Some of the Pharisees are against him; maybe we can take these at
their word and they are wanting to protect him from Herod’s threat. However, they probably do want to have him get out of their
role in the local religious situation.
Then Jesus speaks prophetically about Jerusalem.
The main city of the people of God’s choice is actually also
the place where even the prophets of God are killed.
And Jesus even speaks about how he, like a mother loving hen,
wants to take all the people of Jerusalem under his wings with love, and
still, it will be in Jerusalem that he will be put to death as other
prophets of God.
An enormous amount of analysis could be applied to every statement just
made about how Herod, the Pharisees, and the religious people of
Jerusalem misunderstood Jesus, and how each one of these mistakes could
find some kind of parallel in us at times.
But, we are being called by Jesus to march forth during this time
of Lent and work in our hearts to say, “Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord” so we may see Jesus with the eyes of our
hearts in his true life that he is with us today.
This is about us telling ourselves what we are to believe in our hearts. Jesus is real. He
is alive. He is the Son of
God. He has died for each
and every one of us. He has
included us in the relationship He has with God the Father.
He is closer to us that we are to ourselves. He is deep within our hearts.
He speaks God’s word to us.
His whole ministry is to show us and teach us and lead us to
experience these truths.
We are to hear this in human words and say yes to it, and in faith,
believe that Jesus Christ, who is alive, is going to open our eyes to
see this truth in a way that will be unique to who we are and where we
are in our lives.
Let us, during this time of Lent, march forth to the place in our hearts
were we truly believe and expect Jesus to bless us with a new experience
with him through the resurrection because He is the one blessed by God
the Father in our lives, and He is coming out in us, to show us more and
more of just how much God loves us.
Let us pray…
Amen
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