Matthew 2024

We're gonna read, Matthew chapter 27.

Matthew chapter 27, 32 to 44. So Jesus been in gethsemane, he was arrested. He was taken down by the San Hedrine. That's the religious people put on a, a kangaroo court, really, in the middle of the night, shouldn't have shouldn't have been going on there. And, then he's sent over to pilot, the Roman governor, and he's, beaten up, and mocked and whipped the Roman whipping.

So physically, this is this is big stuff he's gone through. And, the people have chosen a a murderer, in his place, Barabbas, and, they, as I say, they flog him and now they're sending him out to be crucified, and we pick up the story in verse 32. As they were going out, they met a man from Ireini named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. They came to a place called Golgotha, which means the place of the skull. There, they offered Jesus wine to drink mixed with gall.

But after tasting it, He refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. Above his head, they placed the written charge against him, this is Jesus, the king of the Jews. 2 rebels were crucified with him.

1 on his right and 1 on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, you, who are going to destroy the temple and build it in 3 day, save yourselves, come down from the cross if you are the son of god. In the same way, the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders mocked him. He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself. He's the king of Israel.

Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in god. Let god rescue him now if he wants him. For he said, I am the son of god. In the same way, the rebels who were crucified with him also, he insults on him.

Father god help us now help Joshua to open this passage up and touch our hearts. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Good evening. Very warm welcome to you if, this is your first time or you're just visiting us this evening, and warm welcome to the people on live stream. So as Pete mentioned, we've been going through the book of Matthew in our evening services.

And, last time, we were at the point where Jesus is handed over to be crucified. And that's the point at which we are picking up tonight. I'd like to begin by asking you a question. What is the heaviest weight that you've ever carried? In fact, what is the heaviest weight that anyone has ever lifted any human.

I looked into this, and I found that currently Hathor Bionson holds the world record on the deadlift. He lifted 510 kilogram and he's considered to be the strongest man or 1 of the strongest men in the world. I wonder if there's anyone here tonight who would fancy beating that record. If I do reckon you could lift maybe this pulpit and carry it to Richmond Park just in 1 go without any rest in between. Because there's a difference, isn't there between just picking something up for a few seconds and carrying it for a long period of time.

Now we know, don't we? That it's not always the guy with the biggest muscles who's the strongest in the deepest sense of the world because there's some weights there's some burdens that we can lug around with us for years, for decades, for a lifetime, that bigger biceps don't make any easier to carry. The weight of emotional hurt and anxiety, the strain of a broken heart, the crushing burden of a guilty conscience, The toil that long term health conditions can take for years and years or the weight of unrealized dreams and expectations that can feel like they're an anchor tied to our ankles weighing us down All of those things are things that we can carry around with us. So I wonder then if it's actually true, is mister Bjornsson's record the most impressive in history? Is he, as they say, the greatest of all time, or perhaps with no disrespect to him, might we find someone with a more impressive lifting record?

Someone who carried a much greater weight. So let's look at the passage tonight. We, if you'll if we see versus 32 to 37, I think what we see there is the weight, the weight of anguish and pain. Now this was a time, as it's described, a time of festivities in Jerusalem, which meant that there would be a lot of travelers coming in a lot of pilgrims visiting in from other countries. And in fact, in those crowds, among those crowds, are you.

You happen to be from a place called Irene, a place in modern day Libya. Your name happens to be Simon. Now you're enjoying the sights of Jerusalem, and 1 day you go out for a walk, an early morning walk. And as you do, you see there's a commotion going on. Now you're quite eager to get the full authentic Jerusalem experience because you paid for it.

You might as well get everything out of the trip. You might as well have interesting stories to tell your friends back home. When you return. But as you surge to the head of the crowd, you see a curious spectacle. You see there's these soldiers who are walking towards you in a procession, and they're all surrounding a man But this doesn't seem like the like a king with his retinue.

No. Because the man in the middle is actually quite pathetic. He's beaten down. He's bloodied. He's battered.

He doesn't look very impressive. He doesn't look like a king at all. You see blood running down his face, his hair, down his beard, down his back, his back is torn open, and you can see open flesh boons all over his body, and he's not an impressive sight because he's also struggling under a heavy weight of a cross. And as this procession comes towards you, there's a change. Suddenly, as they are passing by you, 1 of the soldiers stops, and he looks across at you.

And then suddenly he's pointing. Suddenly, there's rough hands that reach into the crowd and grab you, and they start pulling you towards them. Now at this point, things have gone on too far. You didn't sign up for this. None of the travel brochures mentioned anything about soldiers grabbing you in Jerusalem.

And yet, now they've pulled you, and they're making you, they're forcing you to carry the cross for this man. So that's what you do. You've got no choice. You carry the cross, and you carry it to a place. Called called Gatha, which means the place of the skull.

That's an ominous name. It's a befitting name for what's about to happen. But just as you finally put the cross down and start feeling a bit of relief, The prisoner's suffering is just about to start where your where where yours ends. See, his executioners offer him a drink. It's wine mixed with gold, but the prisoner refuses to drink it.

Then they take the cross that you've helped carry to golgotha, and they lay this prisoner called Jesus down on it. They lay him down on that injured back. They take his hands, and they stretch them out to both sides, and they tie him to the cross so that he has no way to wiggle out of this. Then you see 1 of the soldiers reach down into a pouch on his belt. He picks out a nail, a sharp nail, and he holds it over Jesus' wrist.

Then he takes a hammer, and the hammer descends down on Jesus' wrist. And so you see the nail, it's pushed all the way down through his nerves, through his flesh, and blood begins to spurt out where the nail goes in. The hammer shows no mercy. It pounds down on Jesus's wrist again and again and again and again until he is completely nailed to that piece of wood. And so we see that these hands, these hands, which are powerful enough to carry the whole world in them, they're now tied helplessly to a piece of wood.

Cruise of fiction, is 1 of the worst forms of death. It's 1 of the worst forms of executions, not just because of the excruciating pain that's involved. Not just because of the public humiliation, but because also of the time that it drags on for, people who are crucified are known to suffer for hours, and even days in some cases. The medical reason for death in crucifixions isn't blood loss. It isn't actually the the most common reason is asphyxiation, being unable to breathe.

As you stand there and you look up at the cross, you see this man suffering. Jesus is struggling to breathe because you see he's hanging there by his arms. And what that means is that his lungs start to collapse. And so in order to take a breath properly in, he has to push himself up. But as he pushes himself, he's actually pushing himself on his legs and his back, which are already badly injured.

And so he can't hold that position for too long. And so it's too much agony. So he has to slump down again. But as soon as he slumps down again, he's now struggling to breathe again. So he has to push himself up despite the pain, despite the agony that's burning in his back.

He has to keep pushing himself up only for a few seconds to barely catch a breath before he has to collapse down again because he can't breathe. And so that cycle, that cycle of suffocation and physical torment continues. It continues for hours, for hours until he breathes his last breath. The people on that hill, though, they don't seem to be too bothered. The soldiers who've just crucified Jesus, they're playing a game.

1 of them says, I like this block's clothes. I'm gonna keep him. The other 1 says, well, why should you get to have him? We all woke up early this morning. They're all working overtime for this crucifixion.

Why should you get to keep them? And that's when the sergeant replies, quit you squabbling. We're going to do this the right way. We're going to play lots for his clothes. And so they do.

They sit down. They board Jesus struggling to breathe. The life slowly ebbing out of him, and they take his clothes. But then you notice something that perhaps earlier in all the horror that's going on, that's something that you missed, which is that they've actually nailed a charge over his head. And this charge says something.

It says the reason for why Jesus has been put on this cross. And you look at it because you're wondering what could this man have possibly done to warrant a death that is so terrible. And you read the words, this is Jesus, king of the Jews. We ask this evening, about the heaviest weight that you've ever carried or that anyone's ever carried, it's estimated that the kinds of crosses that so that the Romans used to use to crucify people, a full cross would have co would have weighed around 300 pounds or 136 kilograms. Now there's some debate about whether the prisoners being crucified would carry the full cross with them or just the cross section which would have weighed around 50 kilograms.

But either way, whether it was 50, kilograms or 136, it's still a heavy weight that Jesus was carrying on his back. And he's been carrying this after he's been through blood loss and shock and trauma. So it's actually no surprise that at this point, he's exhausted. He's exhausted from the flogging he's received and all of the beatings. And so the screen is too great, and they pull in this man, Simon, into Coral, carry the cross for Jesus.

Now the gospel of Mark actually goes into a bit more detail about who Simon is. It mentions Simon by calling him the father of Alexander and Rufus. The way that that is written may make us think that Mark expected his readers to recognize who those guys were. They were meant to read that and go, yeah, Alexander. Yeah.

I know Alexander, he he serves in the set up team at church. So it is possible. We don't know for sure, but it is possible that Simon came to faith at some point, and he raised his sons in the church. He may have gone from being forced by the Romans for being compelled as this verse says to carry the cross to choosing to voluntarily carry his cross. And that's important because this is how Jesus describes being a Christian.

In Mark, he says whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. Being a Christian means following the example that Jesus has so clearly set out for us. It means saying yes to Jesus, but it also means saying no. It means saying no to our selfish desires. It means submitting ourselves not to our references, but to gods.

It means walking on that path, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard. Pete was telling us this morning about an example from the pilgrims progress where Christian and hopeful who are 2 of the characters, see the 2 roads in front of them. 1 of them is the will of god, and the other 1 is, the the bypass, I think it's called. And Christian and hopeful choose the bypass because the bypass looks more comfortable. It's more green and leafy.

It's more straight and it's more, it looks an easier walk. But the other side, the will of god is rocky and full of potholes and uneven. But as a and even when we are walking on uneven ground, we can take courage from the fact that we're not walking alone. Jesus is walking right there with us. Now verse 34 describes that they gave Jesus wine to drink.

It says they offered him wine to drink mixed with gold. After tasting it, he refused to drink it. Now there there was a custom was done because there's a custom in that time that when when someone is being crucified, they're given a pain deadening medication to take some the edge off. Jesus, although he is thirsty, desperately thirsty, he's been under arrest all night, he's been beaten, he's lost a lot of blood, yet he refuses to take this drink. He refuses to take the easy way out from what lies before him.

He's not gonna take the easy road out from what god has put in front of him to accomplish. Now I don't think that less pain would have made Jesus Jesus' work on the cross any less effective. No. But even though we don't see all of the details in this passage, in other passages in the other gospels, we see Jesus do a number of different things. We see him minister to 1 of the thieves on the cross that's along there with him.

He asks 1 of his disciples to look after his mother. He makes several statements and pronouncements that are a fulfillment of prophecy. In order to do all of this, he would have needed to be fully conscious and in control of his faculties. Also look at verse 35. It says when they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

It narrows down the full horror of the crucifixion, and it compresses it in 1 verse. And yet, there's so much there. See, the Psalms have various lines which say, your hands have made and fashioned me. The Samus says you formed my in inward parts. You have knitted me together in my mother's booms.

I don't think the soldiers realized it that morning, but the very hands that they were nailing to the cross with the hands of the son of god, the second person of the trinity, the very 1 who had knit each 1 of them together in their mother's booms. At this point, things aren't looking too hopeful. Are they? They're looking quite bleak, in fact. He's hanging there.

All hope seems to be lost, and yet based on what we read in Psalms 22, there's a a clue here that shows us that all is actually going according to god's plan. You see, in Psalm 22, we'd read about how the cast lord for his garments. And that, alongside many other things in that form and in the old testament, are prophecies. The prophecies given by God that show us that what is happening is part of god's plan. This these prophecies were written down thousands of years, thousands of years before Jesus died, but thousands of years also before he was even born.

The cross isn't some emergency that god has to somehow deal with. It doesn't take god by surprise. It isn't something that he has to risk mitigate against. No. The cross has been plan a all alone.

You also see in verse 36. It says the soldiers sitting down, they kept watch over him there. Now this shows us a number of things. Firstly, it does show us that Jesus really did die on the cross. There's lots of religions and cults including Islam which say, Jesus didn't actually die on the cross.

Something happened. We won't go into that, but basically Jesus did die on the cross physically because the soldiers who crucified him were not rookies. They weren't some inexperienced people who didn't know what someone dying on a cross looked like. In fact, crucifixion was fairly commonplace under the Roman Empire. And so they would have crucified hundreds of prisoners potentially before they got to Jesus.

They wouldn't have been tricked or hoodwinked. But I wonder as well when they sat and they looked up at him there, what did they see? As you sit here tonight, and you look up at the cross, who do you see? What do you see? That brings us to our second point.

So secondly, we see here the weight of dishonor and shame and we read verses 38 to 42, and we 44. And we saw several things that these guys are saying. They're saying things like you who are going to destroy the temple, build it in 3 days. Save yourself. Come down from the cross if you are the son of god.

42. He saved others. They said, he can't save himself. He's the king of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.

43. He trusts in god. Let god rescue him now if he wants him for. He said, I am the son of god. It's clear in these verses that a lot of the people surrounding that cross in Gorgatha, what they're seeing.

They're seeing a loser. They're seeing someone who's dying a shameful and pathetic death. Now it's interesting that in these verses, we actually see the broad cross section of society, every class, every section, being united in their division for Jesus. We see everyone from the highest religious leaders in the land, to soldiers, to just random passes by on their morning commutes, they're all mocking Jesus. I don't know what your morning commute is like, but especially if you travel into Central London, sometimes it can feel like people are so, you know, have these serious looks on their faces and they're so focused on what they're going.

That if in the corner of the station, there was a crucifixion happening, nobody would even notice because they're so focused on where they were having to go. But apparently, the people in Jesus' days were different. They must have had some sort of flexible working arrangement or something because they decide to take time out of their day to not just stop and watch. They aren't just gawking. They're also blaspheming.

When capital punishment is being administered out when someone is being put to death, even today, it's not unusual for religious leaders to be present because the religious leaders are there usually to perform last rites to support the prisoner who's just going to be given the death penalty, they're trying to prepare them to face death. And at this crucifixion, we also see religious leaders present. But they're not actually there. To administer last rites for Jesus, they're there to revile Jesus. The Bible tells us in John chapter 1 that all that through Christ, all things are made.

And nothing was made without him. It says in him is life. They were using these guys were using the very breath that he had put into their lungs to mock him. They were mocking the 1 who had given them life. They were using the to the they were using their words, their tongues, to yell out mocking taunts to the 1 who had spoken their entire world into existence.

Every scoffer in Golgartha had been brought into the into existence by the very 1 that they were choosing to scoff at. So that raises the question for us. Who do we see when we look at the cross? And what do we think when we think of the cross? Is it something that we should be ashamed of?

See, the Bible does tell us that it is foolishness. The cross is foolishness to the people of this world. But the bible also tells us that god is perfectly holy. He cannot ignore sin. He cannot just blink at it.

He cannot pretend that he doesn't see sin because in god is no corruption. If he chooses to ignore sin, then he is corrupt. He's not just. He's not holy, and there is darkness in him. But god has no darkness, and so we who are tainted by sin, so completely filthy that we couldn't possibly be even in the presence of our creator for 1 second without being annihilated, the rebels against god deserving death just like these 2 rebels in verse 38, the 2 rebels were crucified with him.

They were crucified because they deserve to be on crosses. Jesus was crucified as an innocent man, but we like them deserve death. And god is infinitely just and in his infinite justice, he demands payment for our sins, but he's also merciful and in his infinite mercy, He makes he provides the payment for our sins through Christ. The cross is what gets us across from the chasm of sin that separates unholy rebels from a holy perfect god. So there is Jesus.

Jesus is dying. He's dying the most humiliating, degrading death that anyone could die. He's been betrayed by the people closest to him. He's been scourged. These whips that the Romans would use to scourge their prisoners often had bones and hooks at the end of them that would cut into people's skins and rip skin away.

So it isn't a gentle beating that he had. He's been mocked. He's been stripped naked publicly, and he is now being crucified. So what makes Jesus's death so degrading? Is it just the fact that he has suffered?

Is it the fact that he has been rejected by the ones he came to save. Yes. But it's not just the suffering and the humiliation from the mocking crowd that is that makes this so difficult. It's also the fact that he is totally innocent. He is undeserving of the death that he is receiving, and yet he stays there, and he receives the death of a guilty man.

What a burden he's carrying on that cross. And maybe you're here tonight, and you are a question. And we often have the temptation don't we are thinking that if only we'd been alive back in Jesus' day, we would have been loyal. But at least I've thought this in the past. I've thought that if I was there, I wouldn't pay any attention to what Peter was doing or what any of the other disciples were doing.

I'd be the 1 who'd stay faithful to the end. And yet, not only would I not have been faithful, I would have actually been right there in the mocking crowd mocking Jesus. And not only would I have been there mocking Jesus, you all would have been there, had you been there mocking Jesus? How can I say that? Well, the Bible tells us that Jesus died for our sins.

For your sins and mine, those nails were driven into his hands. We, you and I, we might as well be the ones crucifying him. We every time we look and we see and we choose pride of our forgiveness, every time we choose greed over compassion, every time we put ourselves above Jesus every single time that we worship idols instead of the true living god. Every time we don't live in accordance with our profession of faith, what is it that we are doing? Except making a mockery out of the death of Jesus.

Thirdly, we also see here the weight of forgiveness and grace. Notice in verse 42. He saved others, they said. So even in their mocking, they cannot deny the fact that he saved others. So they are willing to acknowledge it to an extent, and yet They marvel, they're saying, how is it that this 1 who saved others is not able seems so totally powerless to save himself.

See, they were missing a very important truth. It is exactly and precisely because that he was the son of god that he couldn't come down from the cross. It is because he saves others that he cannot save himself. It is exactly because he puts his trust in god that god will not rescue him. See, the only way to keep us off the cross is for Jesus to stay on it.

God not rescuing Jesus makes it possible for god to rescue the rest of humanity. And all we need to do to be rescued is to put our trust in him. So Jesus is there, and he endures shame so that you and I would not be crushed under the burden of sin of of shame. He carries sin, and he defeats sin so that you and I do not have to live in slavery to sin. He accepts our punishment so that we might get to share in the reward that he has earned.

Now the people at the crucifixion, they had certain expectations from Jesus, didn't they? They expected Jesus if he was a true Messiah to be able to save himself. But you see, the true savior doesn't come to save himself. He comes to save and not to be saved. Maybe they expected Jesus to be some kind of political revolutionary.

Maybe they thought that Ahir is 1 who will finally free us. He will be a great freedom fighter, and he will liberate us from the oppressive Roman regime. Maybe they thought he would be a social justice leader, and he would continue to serve the poor and feed them and look after the marginalized and the and the down trodden. And yet, that is not who Jesus was. Maybe they expected someone who would make Judea great again, restore some national pride in the country of David.

And yet, that's not what he did. See, the problem here is that their vision of Jesus It's not too grand. Their expectations from Jesus are not too lofty, so lofty that he could never live up to them. The truth is that their expectations from Jesus are so low that he refuses to stoop down to live down to them. See, the problem is that they're not thinking big enough.

Jesus didn't come simply so that he could lead some small armed rebellion in the backwater of the Roman Empire? No. In fact, what do we see in history? From this point in just a few hundred years, the Roman Empire that has withstood every opposition defeated every other army defeated any challenger to its absolute power is brought down, and it takes the knee to King Jesus. How does this happen?

Does this happen because of some strategic brilliance? Does this happen because the disciples are busy in the upper room studying the art of war? No. It happens simply from the proclamation of the gospel, the gospel that has power to bring down the most powerful empire in the world. It's the same gospel that authoritarian regimes in Iran, in North North Korea in China, even today cannot stop.

See, the problem, the issue that the people had who expected Jesus to be a prosperity preacher who would give them wealth and who would show them how they could be more healthy is that their vision was not too radical. It's not radical enough. See, Jesus isn't here He didn't come down just to heal your cold or even your COVID infection. See, he certainly has the power to do those things. And yet, he is doing something accomplishing something on that cross that is far greater than just that.

He is there. He's hanging there to conquer sin. He's suffering to defeat death itself. And that that is the difference between biblical Christianity and every other religion, every other ideology, every other philosophy in the world. See, in religions with, who have multiple gods or polytheistic religions, you see human beings portrayed as the playthings of the gods.

In Islam, human beings are considered to be the slaves of Allah. In communism, it's perfectly acceptable for millions to be slaughtered. To save the collective nation state. In fascism, it's all about the state and the race, and the individual created in the image of god has no value. Christianity has a very different view.

In the Bible, god doesn't toy with man, he becomes 1. In Christianity, millions do not need to be wiped out to be purged to satiate the blood lust of some evil dictator. Here, Christ the king, the all powerful king descends and sheds his blood to purge away the sins of millions and to save our souls. King Jesus doesn't burden up his subjects with unjust burdens that they would never be able to carry. No.

He voluntarily takes the load off of our backs and carries the suffering that we deserve to carry for us. Now recently in the news, and I'm not sure if you, guys would have seen this, but there was a news story about an American protester who were shorted by authorities. Now there's a lot of things there, and I have no wish whatsoever to get into the political side of those things, but there was an interesting tweet that resulted, which I think would be interesting for us to to look at. This was from a political commentator, and these are all his words that I'm about to read out. So these are these are not my words.

These are his words just to just to tell you that. Anyway, he says about Renee Good, the protester who died. He says she gave her life to protect 68 IQ, somali scammers who couldn't give less of a crap about her. The most disgraceful and humiliating end a person could possibly meet. That's all from his tweet, by the way.

Now we can feel all kinds of ways about that, and I would suggest that it would be helpful if we lay aside our feelings for a moment and just focus on some of the things that this is showing us. See, for for 1 thing, we often have this temptation over here about how the cross is irrelevant because you see, that is separated from us by 2000 years. And we now, as a society, as a species, have so evolved and this is so we live in a kinder gentler world. And so these things that we see in this passage, they simply couldn't happen today. Nobody would mock someone who's died a horrific death.

And yet this new story is 1 example. There was also the death of Charlie Kirk, and he was mocked by a lot of people when he died. And so there's on social media, you'll see a lot of people doing similar things to what these people were doing, mocking a horrifying death. But then there's the whole aspect of the crucifixion itself. It's such a gory and gruesome picture, isn't it?

Why do we need to talk to people about this? Shouldn't Christianity 2 just get rid of the cross? Should we be ashamed of the cross? Why should we talk about this blood and this suffering? It's just not cool, is it?

It's not very sophisticated. It's not very cultured or civilized. So I looked up the last recorded crucifixion in history. And when I looked it up, I was expecting it to be somewhere around maybe the third fourth century, you know, when the Roman Empire fell, I expected crucifixion to have gone away with that because it's associated with the Roman Empire. The most recent recorded crucifixion in history happened in AD 2024.

See, in Yemen, there's a group of rebels called the Houthis they're not just some ragtag army. They have, court system. And 1 of their courts sentenced a prisoner to death. ISIS in their heyday were executing people by the hundreds in the 20 tens, in the mid 20 tens by crucifixion. But it's not just terrorist groups, Saudi Arabia, which is a country that is an ally of the West in April of 20 19, crucified someone as a punishment.

So I don't see how we could possibly say that the crosses is relevant or outdated when the cars that we drove here in may have been powered by fuel that originated in a country, which has crucifixions to this day. But beyond all of that, let's look at the question that was asked. See, who would die for a low IQ somalian scammer? See, in this passage, we do see someone who would do exactly that. See, we we know of someone, in fact, who would die a more degrading, more humiliating death than Renee good, someone who was a better good, someone who was a more perfect good.

Who shed his innocent blood for guilty somalian scammers. He accepted death for Australian arsonists. He was killed for Korean kidnappers. He went on the cross for Chinese counterfeiters for French foragers, for for jurors, for Bangladeshi burglars, for English extortionists, and American You see, no matter what we where we come from, no matter how educated, how low IQ or high IQ, we might think we are. We all need a savior.

The rich and the poor alike, both the person who has 7 zeros in their bank account balance and the person whose bank account balance reads only 1 0. Both of those men, both of those women need Jesus. How heavy I wonder is the sin of all of the Brits, the sin of all of the Somalia, the sin of all of the Indians, the sin of all of humanity put together. How amazing as well is the grace, the grace of god, how weighty is it that it's able to cover this sin? This evening, we asked about the heaviest weight that's ever been carried.

See, the vast majority of people in this room would struggle to lift a weight that even that's even half of the world record 510 kilograms. But the fact is there's no 1 recorded on this planet who could lift 515 kilograms. See, the weight of our sins though is far heavier than just half a ton. In fact, the sins of all of the people who've ever lived on this planet throughout history, the sins of all of them cumulated together is actually far heavier than the weight of the planet itself. And there is only 1 who is strong enough to carry that.

He saw in this passage, Simon, and he's carrying a heavy cross to Gogatha. That good Friday morning, he may have got a good workout in. And yet, if he really did choose to voluntarily carry his cross for the rest of his life, no matter what lay before him, no matter what he might have gone through, His actual burden would have been very light. And we know that because we see an invitation from Jesus in matthew 11. He says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. So if you're here tonight and you feel like you've been lugging around a heavy burden with you, the burden of anxiety, the burden of guilt, the burden of depression, whatever burden you're carrying. Stop. Stop trying to bear it all yourself.

See, you will not be able to lift it, and I will not be able to lift it because our PB records are personal bests. Are nowhere near good enough. If we keep relying on our own strength, all we will get as an achievement is a crushed soul. Instead, as we see in scripture, come to the 1 who's strong enough, come to Jesus and put your trust in Jesus. He has carried the weight for you.

And tonight, he is welcoming you. He's inviting you with open arms to come to him. But every invitation demands a response. So how are you going to respond to Jesus? Where are you going to do with the man that you see hanging on that cross?