‘What does victory look like?’ by Jack Saunders - 10 April 2022

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?

Find more about Mark’s gospel.

Transcript

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, 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?

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. In 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.

Bible Project narrator 1 4:49

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.

Bible Project narrator 2 5:01

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.

Bible Project narrator 1 5:12

Yeah - why all this royal treatment?

Bible Project narrator 2 5:14

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.

Bible Project narrator 1 5:28

So Jesus is activating all these hopes that he's that King, and everyone's ecstatic.

Bible Project narrator 2 5:33

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

Bible Project narrator 1 6:02

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,

Bible Project narrator 2 6:12

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.

Bible Project narrator 1 6:25

A den of rebels?

Bible Project narrator 2 6:26

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,

Bible Project narrator 1 6:38

and they get the message and start to plan to have him killed

Bible Project narrator 2 6:42

which is no surprise to Jesus. In fact, he planned that all of this would happen during Passover.

Bible Project narrator 1 6:47

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.

Bible Project narrator 2 6:56

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.

Jack Saunders 7:16

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, 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.