What kinds of victory make the biggest difference to us? Jack Saunders looks at the military victory many were hoping that Jesus would deliver, and how surprising it was that he brought a different kind of victory which would lead to new life for believers. Where in our lives would the ability to live and love like Jesus produce victory we need today?

This is a podcast from Severn Vinyard.

Good morning, everyone. It's great fun to be

here. We've got the young people in with us this morning. And I

did tell them, and some of you guys weren't there on Friday, if

you're getting really bored, you can throw stuff at me because

all of our youth team are away. So you have to put up with me

this morning. But guys, it's a privilege. It's good fun to be

here today. So I wonder who is the really competitive one in

your family? Now, if you're sat with your family, you can look

at them, you can give them that knowing stare, you know, the one

who nobody really wants to play against this person. Because

they'll either be miserable if they lose, or they'll be

insufferable if they win. Now, Rebecca and I, my wife sat on

the second row, we both fully know who that person is in our

family, but neither one of us is willing to admit it. And by the

way, if you can't think who that person is, it's you. Okay, just

to warn you. But the scary thing is when you have children, you

see it replicated in your children, that competitive edge.

The youth, we played laser fusion on Friday night, which is

just next door to this building. And I saw some competitive edges

coming out. Fin didn't think he'd be competitive. But he was.

And I did a classic youth worker fail in that I did win. I didn't

mean to, the first round. But I deliberately lost second time

just to spread it out a bit. But the reality is, we all like to

win, don't we? None of us like dealing with defeat. And when we

don't get a victory we were hoping for or expecting, it can

be extremely disappointing. So this week, guys, we're near the

end of a little series going through the book of Mark, and

it's a story, it's good news about Jesus, written down by

this guy called Mark, who's good friends with Peter, one of

Jesus's closest disciples, who told him a lot of the stories

which he wrote down about Jesus. And this week, if you're

following a traditional church calendar, it's the week before

Easter Sunday, and we're celebrating something called

Palm Sunday, that triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem a

week before his death. And I want to ask us a question of

what does victory, what does winning, really look like? What

does victory look like? And we've seen as we've been going

through the book of Mark, as a church, some snapshots, small

snapshots of Jesus's life, which Mark wrote down, all designed to

show that Jesus is the hero of a story. He's the hero of the

story of the people of God. And he's the hero that these people

of God, we call them the Jews now, the people of Israel had

always been waiting for. And the story of the people of God up to

this point of Jesus is one where they're continually oppressed

and beaten up and been taken over. And they were desperately

waiting for someone to come and bring them a victory over their

enemies. And it's into that story that Jesus appears. And

we've been tracking how Jesus has been challenging the

political and religious systems of his day. And he preached such

a radical message that said the true way to life to connection

with God, to life in its fullness, was totally different

from all the systems of the world. A couple of weeks ago,

Owen unpacked for us why that message was what got him killed,

his refusal to submit to the ways of the world, and to preach

this different message. But here's the thing, the Bible

makes really clear that whilst that message, that lifestyle,

got him killed, it was Jesus's choice to let them do it. See,

multiple times they tried to arrest Jesus, and he just walked

away. To John 10:18, Jesus says, "No one takes my life from me. I

lay it down of my own accord, I have authority to lay it down,

and authority to take it up again." We want to look at why

did Jesus choose to die? And why does it matter that a Jewish

carpenter turned religious teacher died on a Roman cross

2000 years ago? That's what we're gonna look at this

morning, but first of all, we're going to recap the story with a

little video that will introduce the story for us.

So we're walking through the Gospel

of Luke, and we've reached the end of Jesus's long road trip to

Jerusalem. He's arrived.

So he rides a donkey down the Mount of

Olives towards the city and all these crowds are forming and

people are singing, "Praise the King who comes in the name of

the Lord!" They're laying down their cloaks in front of him.

Yeah - why all this royal treatment?

Okay, so Israel's ancient prophets

promised that one day God Himself would arrive and rescue

his people and rule the world. Other times the prophet spoke

about a coming King who would ride into Jerusalem to bring

justice and peace.

So Jesus is activating all these

hopes that he's that King, and everyone's ecstatic.

Well, not everybody. The religious

leaders, they think Jesus is a threat to their power, and so

they're not happy. But even more striking, Jesus Himself is

distraught. He's actually weeping as he rides. Yeah. Why?

Well, Jesus can see what is coming. He knows that he won't

be accepted as Israel's king. And he knows that Israel will

keep going down a destructive path, neglecting the poor,

stirring up rebellion against their Roman oppressors. And he

knows that it will lead to death. It breaks his heart

and it riles him up. First thing he

does in Jerusalem is march into the temple courts, and he drives

out the money changers disrupting the entire

sacrificial system,

Yeah, he's staging a prophetic protest

and he stands in the centre of the courtyard shouting out words

from Israel, ancient prophets. This is supposed to be a place

of worship, but you've made it a den of rebels.

A den of rebels?

Yeah, he's quoting from the prophet

Jeremiah, who stood in this same spot, the centre of Israel's

religious and political power. And he offered the same critique

of Israel's leaders that they're rebellious and corrupt,

and they get the message and start

to plan to have him killed

which is no surprise to Jesus. In

fact, he planned that all of this would happen during

Passover.

This is the Holy Week when Jewish

people celebrate their ancient story of how God liberated them

from slavery, and invited them into a covenant relationship.

And so Jesus uses the symbols of

Passover to reveal the meaning of His coming death, the broken

bread was his broken body, and the wine was His blood that

would establish a new covenant relationship between God and

Israel, Jesus was going to die for his people and open up a new

way forward.

Okay, and a slightly dramatic bass in the

background. Great. So we see this amazing scene of Jesus

coming into Jerusalem, loud celebrations, and he's given

this victorious welcome of a king. It's like the rolling out

of the red carpet times 10. And they're shouting these two

phrases, "Hosanna!" and "Blessed is he who comes in the name of

the Lord, blessed is the coming Kingdom of our father David."

Now, these aren't just words. So they're not just words we sing

in worship songs. Hosanna has a specific meaning. It means "save

us now" or "liberate us". And it almost would have been like a

political rallying chant for the Jewish people. Every time, they

used it when they needed freeing and when they were oppressed.

And when they call on the son of David, they're referencing these

prophecies from hundreds of years ago, about the Messiah,

this hero who would come and bring a victory for Israel. The

thing is, they're expecting a certain type of victory. They're

expecting a military and a political victory. But the

picture Jesus was giving was not what the crowds were expecting.

You see, Palm Sunday and this entry into Jerusalem is a

fulfilment of a prophecy from Zechariah, around 500 years

before, and in that prophecy, we get some hints at the victory of

this hero would not be exactly like they expect. In Zechariah

9:10, it says, "Your king will come righteous and victorious,

lowly, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a

donkey." See, not on a great horse, not in front of a Grand

Army, but on a humble donkey. And it says "I will take away

the chariots from Ephraim on the war horses from Jerusalem, and

the battle bow will be broken." He basically says I'm going to

take away your weapons of warfare, like your tanks, your

helicopters, your missiles, you won't need them anymore. Because

this king will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will

extend from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the

earth. Because this king will bring a peace and a reign that

is total. You will not need military force anymore. And he

came in a way they didn't expect but they were correct. He was

the hero. He was the Messiah. He was the Saviour they needed and

he was about to bring the greatest victory the world would

ever see. It just wasn't going to look like how they expected.

The thing is, we all like to win. But it didn't take long for

that crowd, for many, to get disillusioned and disappointed,

because Jesus didn't fulfil their expectation of victory.

Less than a week later, many of them could have been found in a

different crowd calling for Jesus to be crucified. See,

their disillusionment, their confusion turned to anger and

even hatred towards Jesus. And I think there's a danger that we

place our expectation of victory onto Jesus - our expectations of

the good life, of victory, of what life should look like. And

then, when it doesn't turn out how we expect, we judge Jesus,

and we're angry at him because it didn't work out how we hoped.

And maybe we consciously or subconsciously expected becoming

a follower of Jesus would mean we didn't have to suffer, or

perhaps a certain amount of suffering that we should now be

exempt from, because we're followers of Jesus. And if

you're honest, maybe today, we're carrying some

disappointment. We've come out of two years of, no matter where

you are in the world, of some sort of trauma. And maybe it

doesn't feel like victory. Perhaps there's areas of your

life where you're stuck, there's habits you can't get free from.

Dan mentioned this a few weeks ago, you can go back and listen

to that talk. Maybe you're still carrying some brokenness from

your past. And it seems to stick with you, wherever you go. And

you thought the Christian life should be different. You thought

you should be free from this by now.

Firstly I think I think Jesus wants to encourage you. I think

Jesus is okay with questions. Jesus is okay with doubts. But I

think he's inviting us to come to him with those questions not

to go, "It didn't work out how I thought, I'm gonna turn away to

something else." I think Jesus is inviting you to come to him

and come to community with those doubts and with those questions.

And the second is to encourage you that this victory, Jesus

won, that he was coming into Jerusalem to bring, was way more

significant, way longer lasting, and way more powerful than those

people could have hoped or dreamed for. It didn't look that

way in the natural, but the consequences were eternal.

So what did Jesus win? Well, by definition, to win a battle, you

have to be competing, or contending for something. There

needs to be an enemy, or some sort of opposition. So the

battle Jesus came to fight for was for the whole human race. In

fact, it was for all of creation. We've all heard the

verse John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave His

one and only Son, Jesus." But that word "world", the Greek

word is Cosmos, it means it's all encompassing, all of

creation. It is where we get the word "cosmic" from. Because all

individuals in the human race have a problem. Because God gave

humanity charge of creation, creation then got affected with

that problem. And the problem is not just that we make mistakes.

The problem is we miss our purpose and our design as human

beings, to reflect God's image and to live in relationship with

him. It's what the Bible calls sin, that we go against our

design and our creation. And rather than living as part of

God's story, we try to be the main characters, we try to be in

charge of our own story. And the problem is our choices, our

choice to live as the rulers and leaders of our own life. And

perhaps we think by doing that we can be free, free to do

whatever we want. But the Bible tells us that, in fact, what

that does is it puts us into a form of slavery. And then a

power comes over your life that you can't fight off. No matter

how hard you try, no matter how much effort or religious

discipline, that history and the Bible shows us that the same

power that affects your relationships, affects your

thoughts, it affects your actions, and ultimately your

life itself, cannot be overcome. Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages

of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through

Christ Jesus." Now, when you hear that "wages of sin is

death", don't hear that there's an angry God in the sky, that

you messed up and he wants to strike you down. That is not

what the scripture is saying. No, it's saying there's a

consequence to sin. That there is a consequence of sin, because

sin separates you and cuts you off from the source of life. So

death results. So we're about to move, as you said, we're hoping

to try and move. Now when you come around to our house, which

hopefully many of you will once we've moved, if you see anything

green, and looks alive, it must be fake. And from IKEA. We have

tried. So we've kept three humans alive. You've got the

photo of two different plants, so everything would look like

that on the left, withered and dead. So we've tried for many

years, we've kept three little humans alive, that's about the

ceiling of our capacity for life in our household. We've managed

it, we fed them, they're living, they're here. But we've never

managed to keep anything green alive in about 12 years of

marriage. And the reason is, we put it in a plant, we leave it

there and we forget it exists. We think it was fake and realise

that one isn't. And it dies. Because we've cut it off from a

life. We've cut it off from its sustenance, from water and food

that would keep those things alive. Sin by its very nature is

the choice to live separated from God and His way of living.

And as a result, we get death. When we reject God, when we

choose to come out from under his way of living, what the

Bible calls his rule and his reign, his kingdom, where God is

present, where he's in charge, and we put ourselves by nature

under the rule and reign not of light but of darkness, where

darkness is in charge, and where darkness rules. And the problem

is, we become powerless to escape. What we need, what the

Jews needed back in Jesus' day, was a power greater than self

discipline, a power greater than the lie of sin, and a victory

against all those forces that would condemn us and hold us

back from life in God.

Colossians 1 says this, "For he (Jesus) rescued us from the

dominion of darkness and brought us into the Kingdom of the son

he loves." And how did he do it? Colossians 2:13 says, "When you

were dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh,

God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, He

cancelled the charge of our legal debt, which stood against

us and condemned us. He's taken it away, nailing it to the

cross. Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made

a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the

Cross." The Cross, which should have been this moment of

humiliation, of defeat, the writers of the New Testament

hold it up as this ultimate victory. We could look into the

mechanics and how does that work? How does that victory

work? And I'll let Owen do that because it's complicated. But

what matters is the end result. How do we know he did it? He

claimed to be able to do it. What matters is that Jesus went

into the grave for a fight. And he's the one who came out

living. Jesus won a victory over death and sin itself, which

means what is available to you and me is a power greater than

sin and death and darkness. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, if

Christ didn't rise from the dead, all of this -

Christianity, the history of the church - is meaningless. We

might as well go home and enjoy our roast dinners and the sun.

Really, if He didn't rise from the dead, this is meaningless.

But what if he did? If he did, then Paul says this - when we

die, our dying bodies will be transformed into bodies that

will never die. He says, "Death is swallowed up in victory. O

death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? For

sin is the sting that results in death and the law gives sin its

power. But, thank God, He gives us victory over sin and death

through our Lord Jesus Christ." Because of Jesus's victory,

there is now a power and a solution greater than sickness,

sin and death available to us. Final question - how? How do we

do it then? What does that mean for you and me? How do we do it?

Well, we do it the way Jesus did it. Jesus modelled a life for

us, a way to be followed. He did it by sacrificing himself. So we

do it by living a sacrificial life, not seeking our own

wellbeing and our own best choices but to live an

other-centred life. Jesus said in Matthew 16, "Whoever wants to

be my follower must deny themselves, take up their cross

and follow me, for whoever wants to save their life will lose it.

But whoever loses their life for me will find it." Jesus said to

find true life, the path to real life is not desperately trying

to claw onto things in this world and hold on to it tight.

Because that inevitably leads to trying to take from others. And

what we'll find is it's like trying to hold on to sand -

eventually it just slips through our fingers and our time runs

out. He says that way of living can't and won't last. He said

no, instead there's a different way of living, to live for God,

and for others. So Owen said that the purpose of this church

is not for this church. This church exists for the glory of

God and to serve the city, to serve the people, to love God

and to love others. It's why when we get baptised, a symbol

of entering into the family of the church, we symbolise that we

die. But we rise to a better and new life.

So what does it mean for us? You can say why, then, if Jesus won

that victory, do we still see things in this world? Well, I've

heard it described that the cross is like what D-Day was to

World War Two. It's the moment where victory was almost

assured. The battle was won. But they still had to fighting left

to be taken. See, we're living in a time where God's kingdom

has come. So his role and his reign comes in and through his

people who choose to live under it. But it's not fully come in

the world yet. And in the meantime, and we see this in the

news every day, we still see darkness, we still see sickness

and death at work. But, here's what I felt God's saying for us

today, we are no longer powerless to do nothing about

it. Because of the cross, because of this victory, real

victory,. we have tools and power to make a difference, to

do something about it, to see change in our lives, in our

families, and in our communities and our city. I think too often

we accept defeat. Too often we accept that there's darkness in

our lives, and around us, where we can stand and apply the

victory of Jesus. You don't need to accept that brokenness you've

carried since childhood. You don't. There is a power

available to you today to see a breakthrough. You know, if you

or someone in your family is struggling with sickness, we

believe in a God who cares, and who has power, who can and might

well intervene. And guys, where there's brokenness in our city,

in our communities, in your workplaces, I believe there's a

power today through the cross, through the victory of Jesus,

that can make a difference, that can see a kingdom of light break

in to where there's currently darkness, just like Christians

have done for 1000s of years. So a couple of ways I think we can

respond today. First of all, do you know Jesus? Doesn't matter

how long you've been in a church or sat on a Sunday morning. Do

you know Jesus as your Lord? Have you submitted to him and

say, actually, I want to live life your way? Or maybe there's

areas of your life you know you haven't quite given up? You're

like, well, God, you can have all those bits but not this one.

If he's king, if he's Lord, it means he's over all of it. But

actually, that way of living is so much better. He has life in

all its fullness. But if you do you know Jesus, where is there

an area? Is there an area you still need the victory? And

where is it God's put on your heart to bring that kingdom of

light instead of dark? I'm gonna pray. Jesus, we thank you for

your victorious entry, we thank you for your victory on the

cross. We thank you didn't win with military power or physical

force, that you came and lived a totally different life. I thank

you there's no problem in this room, there's no problem in this

city, that you don't have a solution for.

And Jesus, we invite you, we invite you even right now just

to convict us. The places we thought we'd find freedom by

doing it our way and, in fact, we've just bound ourselves up. I

want to thank you you're not standing here in condemnation.

You're standing there with freedom available to us, with

hope available to us. So Jesus, we just invite you to come. Holy

Spirit, we believe you're present but we want more of you.