Father, we need Your Spirit more and more to remind us of the perfect work of Jesus and how quick we are to hear those fears.

Lord, be sure that we’re lost to You or we won’t make it home, Lord. How wonderful that You say You will not lose any of Your own and that Jesus will keep us. So we thank You for that truth. We thank You for Your keeping power this morning. We pray our faith all the more would be grown in it.

We bless Your name. We pray our tithe, our offering, whether we give in the box or we give online, Lord, that You would multiply it. You would use it for Your kingdom and continually sustain and grow us in providence and lead us to do all Your will for Your glory. And we just pray You would speak to us now through Your Word. We just pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen. Thank you, Chase and Rebecca, for leading us this morning.

No one wants to sit up here this morning. You’re doing a big move on me. So I usually try to come back here so I’m not spitting on whoever’s right there. So, it’s alright.

We’re going to be in Matthew 16, verses 21-28. If you want to turn there with me in your Bibles, Matthew 16. Matthew 16, verses 21-28.

Starting in verse 21, Matthew writes, From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, Far be it from You, Lord. This shall never happen to You. But He turned and said to Peter, Get behind Me, Satan. You’re a hindrance to Me. If you are not setting your minds on the things of God, but on the things of man, then Jesus told His disciples, If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what would profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom. The late theologian R.C. Sproul once said, The grand paradox of the Christian faith is that we are saved both by God and from God. We are saved both by God and from God.

And I think that Peter and the disciples are discovering how shallow their understanding of the Jewish Messiah really is. It sounds like, to them, a paradox. A suffering Messiah. A suffering Savior. They are encountering Jesus. They say that and they don’t know what to do with it. That Jesus would say He would suffer. And it makes us, with Peter and with the apostles, ask the question, Is Jesus to me the Messiah He is? Or is Jesus the Savior and Messiah that I want Him to be? Because if we’re truly Christ’s disciples, I want my whole mind, and my whole life to be submitted to Jesus the Messiah and discover what it means that He’s a suffering Messiah and follow Him. The paradox of a suffering Messiah. That’s what I want us to see this morning.

Jesus says from that time, from that time Jesus began to show His disciples He must go to Jerusalem and suffer.

And the elders, the chief priests, the scribes, they would kill Him. And on the third day, He would be raised. So kind of the tone of Jesus’ ministry is starting to change. Remember, we’ve kind of been on this spiritual high, if you will. A lot of great ministry happening. Pretty much everyone loves Jesus. But now He’s starting to say to His 12 disciples,

Here’s really, fellas, the explicit reason I’ve been doing this ministry. Here’s why I’ve come to earth. Climax of my ministry. He says, I’m going to be killed. And Jesus doesn’t say, I may be killed. Like, hey, if we don’t do enough good PR and some people get upset and they mob us or maybe we can’t raise enough money to get a big enough security team. I may get killed if y’all can’t figure out how to protect me. Jesus doesn’t say that. You can render the must, it is necessary. So Jesus says, I’m going and it is necessary that I be killed. It’s a must. And not only is He going to be killed, He says, I’m going to go to Jerusalem and be killed. That place in ancient Israel that was the very epicenter of religious life where the Ark of the Covenant of God was, the place where God’s presence rested in Jerusalem, where Solomon’s temple was built in Jerusalem, where the great King David reigned there in Jerusalem. So the very epicenter of where God should be most glorified and honored is the place, Jesus says, because God’s Son will be slaughtered. He said it must happen. But He says just as confidently as He says I must be killed, He says I will be raised. I must be killed, I will be raised.

Two necessary and passive actions happening to Jesus. I will be killed. I will be raised. And for Jesus’ disciples, as puzzled as they are, it’s necessary for them and for us today as Christ’s disciples to have really a robust answer to that question. Why must Christ’s life and ministry climax to the point of a bloody crucifixion?

If we’re going to understand the paradox of a suffering Messiah, we must believe and understand Jesus lived to die. Jesus lived to die. And if you come across someone, maybe who has a very loose relationship with the church, or they’re not a Christian at all, but they’re just friendly to spirituality, and so they’re just fine with the person of Jesus, or maybe somebody goes to church and has really bad theology, a very popular answer you would get to that question, why did Jesus die? It would have something to do with Jesus being the highest example of love. Jesus is the highest ideal ethic. Jesus shows us what it really looks like to sacrifice for other people. Now, that’s not false. It’s just not the whole answer. It lacks the real preciousness for why Jesus was slaughtered. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul says, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures. He was buried and raised on the third day in accordance with what? The Scriptures. The Scriptures. So what do the Scriptures say? Well, we go back to the garden. And what do we have in the garden? We have a sin problem in the garden. Adam and Eve, once they sin against God, they don’t have an example problem. They’re not lacking an example of love. They still have God is God. They have a sin problem on their hands. We come to Abraham and God says, Through you, Abraham, I’m going to bless the nations. And we get some picture of that blessing because Abraham has this one son and Abraham has this one son. And God says, Abraham, go sacrifice your son to me. Yet, last minute, God stops Abraham and he spares Isaac. But it’s a picture of a son to come who won’t be spared. And we get to the law. God gives the people a law. And Paul says, The law was your tutor. It was your guardian. It was your teacher. So what better example could you have of what it means to love God and love people than the law itself? Yet, the law was what? Constantly broken, wasn’t it? They had the very best example in the law. Yet, constantly they found out we don’t have an example problem. We have a sin problem. And then when we come to the prophet Isaiah, and this is the very height of Israel’s immorality. This is the height of their sin. Isaiah does not say, Hey, Israel, though you’re so immoral and against God, don’t worry. God’s going to send you a better example someday. That’s what y’all need is an even better example than the law. No, the law showed us God’s heart. Here’s what Isaiah says God will send. In Isaiah 53, verse 3, he says, He was despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief as one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed Him not. Surely, Jesus has borne our griefs and He’s carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed Him stricken. He was smitten by God. He was afflicted, but He was pierced. For what? An example? No, He was pierced for our transgressions. Jesus was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with His wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned to everyone to His own way and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquities of our sins. The iniquities of our sins. The iniquities of us all. Friends, we don’t have an example problem. We have a sin problem. And if you want to dumb down Christianity where it’s just a set of loose morals and ethics and you just kind of want to be guiding principles for your life or guiding principles for government or perhaps you just want a spiritual guru to just give you some points of how you can be a better you, you’re in good company today. You can find that. But if you want,

someone to save your soul from its sins,

turn to Jesus.

Because you need a Savior for your sins. That’s what you need. The great error in seeing Jesus as nothing more than a moral example is that you and I don’t have the legs to follow Him. In the same way the people in the Old Testament couldn’t obey the law. We simply don’t have the heart to truly obey Jesus. Remember what Jesus said way back in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, when it comes to the law, you must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. You must be perfect. You must exceed, He said, the righteousness of the Pharisees.

So we cannot follow the best of examples. We’ll always come short of God’s standard. From the garden to the flood when the world was so evil, to Abraham to the law, to David, all the way to the cross, God’s message has been, you need, you need a blood sacrifice. That’s what you and I need. And let me say to you this morning, in Christ Jesus, that is what we have.

We don’t need someone to show us the way of love. What we need is someone to be the way of love. And so Jesus was through His broken body and His spilled blood. If Jesus is not that for us alone, friends, the life and times of Jesus, of Nazareth, might as well be fiction. And I like good fiction. I think fiction can be the best of teachers. It has a way of talking to us about reality and giving us certain truths we wouldn’t learn just by being told them. And you think about C.S. Lewis and John Bunyan, they’re masters of telling stories to kind of point us to God and point us to greater truths. And think about even just secular stories in our society, how book series, they bring in millions of dollars and they become movies and those bring in, hundreds of millions of dollars. Because we love stories and even it’s just general principles of truth that resonate with people. We just love stories.

But it doesn’t address the greatest issue of your heart. Friends, what you and I need, languishing under the wrath of God, is not a fictitious moral example. We don’t even need a real moral example.

Languishing under the wrath of God, under the condemnation of the law, we need a blood, a blood sacrifice.

I need someone who can take my debt of immorality that I owe to a perfectly moral God and save me. That’s what I need.

Jesus, He was the only clean, pure, moral, righteous sacrifice who didn’t just show love as an example, but was love in the great exchange. The great exchange of all your sin, for all His righteousness. He bore all our transgressions. The Apostle Peter says, in 1 Peter chapter 3, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God. So that’s why you love the Gospel. That’s why there’s so much power in Jesus saying to His disciples, fellas, I’m going to be killed. Because we need to be made clean. We need to be made new. I need Jesus’ Spirit to convict me. I’m a lawbreaker. In other words, I can’t follow good examples. But then I also need Jesus’ Spirit to comfort me. Jesus has paid the price for your sins. Friends, you might as well be a statue of stone if religion, if Christianity is nothing more than a bunch of do’s and don’ts and ethics. And morals to help you because you cannot take one footstep in the right direction.

What we need is the sacrifice of Jesus to wash us clean. And this was in the heart of God even before time to give up His moral Son for an immoral people. That’s the joy. That’s the preciousness of the Gospel of Jesus. It’s God at work in me, not me at work in me. Me at work in me is no good. I just go in circles. But Jesus, what does He do? He takes me to the Father. He makes me new. He makes me right. He makes me clean.

My dad, my grandma, my dad’s mom, she passed away a couple years ago and they just recently got the wheel all divvied out. Each of the kids got a couple rental houses. My grandfather had a ton of real estate. So my dad got these rental houses and on one of these rental houses he got, he found that there was a shed with all these old motorcycles in there. And he told me this and he sent me a picture. I thought, this is awesome. I’m going to get these motorcycles and I’m just going to, you know, like buff them up and replace some things and I’m going to have this really cool old vintage motorcycle. And so Cameron came over and we’re, you know, changing oil and doing things and this is going to be so cool and nothing.

It’s not going to be so easy just to, you know, polish some chrome and change some wheels and you got a motorcycle. You got a motorcycle. I know this much about remaking an engine. I know this much about taking something that’s completely broken and no good and making it new. And that’s so often, friends, the way that we wrongly hear the gospel. Tell me I need to be polished. You know, give me a shrink to tell me how I can be modified and improved. But don’t tell me I need to die out completely and come back from scratch a new thing. See, that offends you, doesn’t it? It offends us to our core to hear all of us was covered under the blood and all of us must want to be completely washed away by the blood of Jesus and come back as a spiritually new creation in Christ.

So I want to say to you this morning, let your dignity be drowned in the blood of Jesus. Your pride. The part of you that says, yes, I’m bad, but I’m not so bad, am I? Yes, you are so bad. Well, yes, I’m sure I’ve lied, but I’ve not done as bad things as other people. Friend, James says, if you failed in one point of the law, you failed in the entire law. We are all equally under the wrath of God and we all need to get on our knees in humility and say, Jesus, I need you to completely remake me in yourself. It’s pride that keeps you from seeing the joy and the gift of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Secondly, don’t stop being amazed by the doctrine of the atonement. That Jesus has covered all your sin. That Jesus became a curse for you so that you can be blessed. I think when we stop being amazed by the atonement, our worship dries up. Evangelism dries up. Peace dries up. Joy dries up. But when I see how deep and how wide the blood of Christ was, I know that I’m not alone. To take away all my sins for all time and it’s nothing I did. It’s all what Christ did and we sang it in that song earlier. Then I’m ready to worship and I’m ready to tell people about it and in the worst of my despairs. No, Jesus is my peace because I know He atoned for me and my joy is in what’s to come. Don’t stop being amazed by the atonement. A robust view of the atonement is a fuel for a life of obedience and worship.

Look at that. Verse 22.

It says, And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, Far be it from you, Lord.

This shall never happen to you. But He turned and said to Peter, Get behind Me, Satan. You’re a hindrance to Me. You’re not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. Now, remember,

Peter had just, you know, he got a real, you know, a real puff up. Remember Jesus said, Peter, blessed are you because the Father has revealed to you that I am the Messiah and on this rock, Peter, I’m going to build my church. You can think, Peter’s probably feeling pretty good about himself. If there’s ever a time to feel good about yourself, it would be then. Peter feels a little too good about himself because he takes a step, he shouldn’t take. He goes in a direction he shouldn’t go. He puts himself as Christ’s master. He thinks he’s going to school Jesus about what Jesus does and doesn’t need to do and he needs to be taken down a few notches.

But it’s important to remember in this, I want us to see, remember Matthew’s Gospel out of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is the most Jewish Gospel. Okay? Now, for a Jew, the idea of a Messiah, it’s got nothing but grandiose ideas attached to it. This person who’s perfect and they’re going to conquer God’s enemies and establish, you know, a time and era even better than the golden age back in David’s time and that prosperity’s never going to end and we’re going to live at peace with God forever. So that’s all that they’ve got going about this Messiah coming. So imagine like the shock they’re in when this Messiah, they’ve been following, he’s going to take them where they want to go, says, okay, I’m going to die now. You can imagine the shock of their Jewish system. Like, no, you’re going to be a Messiah. You’re going to be the greater King David.

Jesus is messing up Peter’s plans for Peter. You see what’s happening here?

Peter sees a certain glory for himself in Christ. Surely he loves Jesus. But Peter, how are you going to build your church on me if you’re dead? We’ve got plans, Jesus. There’s things going on that I want to see happen for me. Dying wasn’t part of the plan. Reigning, that was the plan.

And Jesus says to Peter, probably what shocked Peter, he says, get behind me, Satan. The person who just previously was called the rock, for making the good confession, is now, he calls him Satan. Peter is so playing the role that Satan would play in saying the words that Satan would say that Jesus just says, hey, Satan, get behind me. And I think this is a precious passage here, not because Peter, you know, is getting the kick in the pants he needs, he is, but because it shows us, one, how kind God is in that He doesn’t throw us out when we have, have an imperfect understanding of who He is and who we are in Him. You know, this wasn’t, alright, Peter, you’re out of the twelve. Yeah, He gets put in His place, but God’s not done with Him. So how kind is God to be patient with us as we don’t understand everything as we’re following Jesus? But secondly, and I think this is what’s really precious about this, is we see the very real humanity of Jesus here. Right? Because this is the second time where Jesus has had to say this. He said it the first time to Satan in the wilderness, get behind me, Satan. Because what was happening? Jesus’ very real humanity was being tested. Jesus had a very real, vulnerable humanity. And Jesus is warring with everything He’s got not for that humanity to be corrupted. Peter’s doing the same thing. He’s drawing Jesus to go in a direction other than the direction than the will of the Father. And so He’s got to say, no, Peter, you are leading me in a direction apart from the will of God. And I think that’s, I think that’s precious because it reminds us, friends, of what Christ accomplished for us. He became a very real human. He became the Savior that we need.

Well, one theologian, Robert Godfrey, said, if Jesus didn’t have a human will as well as a divine will, it would be very difficult to see Him as truly and fully human. We know He has a divine will because He was the Logos from all eternity and the Second Coming. He was the Second Person in the Trinity. So that is His will. That’s His divine will. If He has only one will, it’s just the divine, and that would mean He did not have a fully human nature because He wouldn’t have a fully human will. So you see what Jesus is doing. He’s conforming that human will to the Father’s. So it makes so much sense, doesn’t it, why Peter is, or why, Jesus is speaking in such harsh terms with Peter. Peter, you’re tempting me to disobey the mission of God. You’re tempting me in this moment to not be the Savior you need because you don’t need some Greek demigod. You need a flesh and blood human to save you. That’s what Jesus is doing, and that’s what Peter is calling Him away from. The plan of God was to be killed, be raised, inherit eternal glory. Okay? Be spared was not part of the plan.

Jesus did not come to be their version of a Jewish Messiah. He didn’t come to fulfill their godless fantasies. Jesus came to bring the Messianic age God’s way. God’s way. And I think that that should elicit from us all the praise that Jesus was a real human and He was a sinless human. What it should do also, friends, is it shows us the example of the way we should go.

Yes, Jesus is the unique sacrifice for us, but once we have seen Christ as that unique sacrifice who is alone taking away our sins, then we must see Christ as our example. Then we must follow in His footsteps. Paul says in Colossians chapter 3, Set your minds on things above, not on things that are on the earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ, in God. Jesus very clearly spells out what that looks like to set our minds on the things of God, not man. Look back in verse 24 in Matthew. He says, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross. Possessive. You have to carry your own cross and follow me. Whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for me will find it. For what would it profit a man if he gains the whole world? And forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? The Christian life is that, isn’t it? It’s the Christ’s Christian life. I’m living my life in the way and manner of Christ. And if I’m doing that, that means that I can wholeheartedly by the power of the Spirit push off sinful fleeting pleasures that come and tell me that they can make me happy. Push off sinful indulgences. Push off even what’s not necessarily wrong. It’s just not what God has called me to in my life. Recall earlier in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry where the disciples come and they say, Jesus, the people are waiting. Let’s go do all this ministry. They’re all excited. And Jesus says, No, no, that’s not why I’ve come. I’ve come to preach the gospel.

Jesus says, If you want to reign with me, you first, must suffer with me. You must suffer the loss of all things according to God’s purpose and will. So why would Jesus tell us to carry a cross if He’s already carried it? Because I thought that was the beauty of the gospel that Jesus carried this cross all the way up to Calvary and He died and that dealt with my sins. So why do I need to do it? Why do you need to do it? Need to do it. Because Christ calls us to identify with Him in His death and resurrection. While my soul and your soul is safe in heaven and God sees us as His own, friends, you and I are stuck in these old, wicked, sinful bodies and until God calls us home, we must suffer them. We must suffer all that the world would tell us is good. We must suffer the desire to sin. We must suffer and through that suffering be raised up to glory. Jesus is calling us to walk in His footsteps. Walk in His footsteps. Walk in His footsteps. He’s calling us to suffer the loss of the world that we would inherit what the Apostle Paul calls the eternal weight of glory.

Jesus says, would you forfeit your own soul for the present happiness you could have? Would you forfeit your own soul for your own wisdom? Would you forfeit your own soul for even all the good things that you could find in life?

I want to ask you, are you a cross? Are you a cross-bearing disciple? Are you a cross-bearing disciple? It’s one thing to say, oh, you’re a disciple of the teachings of Jesus, but I think it’s quite another to say you daily pick up what is an instrument of death and you die. You die to you and you live in the Spirit and you’re doing what Jesus tells you to do and you’re living for a home that you have not yet seen with your own eyes. And you’re willing to part with anything that threatens the hope of heaven.

Anything that would swallow up your affections for Jesus.

One commentator says, discipleship is a doing of what is right no matter how irksome the privations, no matter how great the dangers. You probably heard of John Wesley. John Wesley was a very famous theologian and the founder of the Methodist church. And John Wesley was a very smart man. He was a scholar. He had a great love for music. He had a great love for architecture. Yet he spent the majority of his life in a horse saddle, traveling around. In fact, it’s been said, no one has traveled more square miles, no one has preached more sermons to more people than John Wesley.

Once when John Wesley came into the beautiful grounds of an English nobleman, he said, I too have a relish for these things, but there is another world. And there’s so much wisdom in that because you think about music and architecture. Those aren’t bad things, are they? Well, certainly not. They’re not bad things. But this is where you and I have to take a fine-tooth comb to our own personal lives and say, Jesus, what’s my life supposed to look like? Because imagine, which is not too hypothetical, an architect who doesn’t know Christ comes to saving faith. Okay? Well, said architect doesn’t know Christ. He does not feel like he should stop being an architect. God has called him to be a witness in his line of work. And there are other things that he must struggle with in his life. And he reads this story about John Wesley and goes, oh, John Wesley wasn’t an architect because God called him to be a traveling missionary. Does that mean I must do that? No, that’s what the Holy Spirit told John Wesley to do. You see? So it’s very important not to say, the Spirit’s told me Christians can only live in a house that costs this much money and you can only wear this and you can do this and this is what, and what I end up doing is trying to be the Holy Spirit for other people. Right? So this is why you carrying your cross means you are daily seeking the Spirit. So Lord, what does it look like for me to die to myself? How do I die to my sins? What are the good things in my life that are stealing my affection and keeping me from doing and being what you’ve called me to do? Jesus says, you must daily, daily, oh, the word daily, He says, you must daily, carry your cross and you must die to yourself and you must follow me.

Are you okay with God messing up your plans?

That’s the question, isn’t it?

I’ve been doing a worship, I think I’ve told you, on Tuesday nights for this missions seminar thing called Perspectives and they had a lady come in and she had this people group. She was dead set on going to be a missionary too and she was going to go overseas. She did the training and last minute, she was getting ready to go and she was given an opportunity to reach that same people group in New York. She was like, hey, there’s all kinds of these people in New York. You go up here and reach these people. We need somebody to lead it and she immediately said, like, no, I’m not going to do that because I’m going overseas to where they actually live and through prayer, after being so sure of herself, oh, God wants me to go minister to these people in New York. He doesn’t want me to go and you say, well, that’s a wonderful thing to fly across the world and be like a missionary there. Yeah, but that’s not what God told her to do. God was saying, no, I want you to go to New York. So you see how bearing your cross and discovering God’s will for your own life is so important. Lord, what are you leading me to? What are you calling me to in my life?

Verse 27, Jesus says, for the Son of Man is going to come with His angels in the glory of His Father and then He will repay each person according to what? He has done. So the paradox of the suffering Savior, friends, it’s not a paradox at all, is it? It’s the only kind of Savior there is. It was God’s plan even before time began for Jesus to suffer to be our unique Savior so we could, because of His saving power and the power of His Spirit, follow in His footsteps and suffer with Him, suffer for Him that we too would receive and inherit all the glory in the heavenly places forevermore. Are you carrying your cross? Are you following the suffering Savior, the suffering Messiah? Would you pray with me?

Father, we pray this morning that our hearts and our minds would be lifted to

see Jesus on the cross

and see it not as an act of charity, not as an example, but as a gift, as what we need to know You. And Lord, to never get over the wonder and the glory

of knowing, Lord, that You have given Your all, You have given the very blood of Your Son to be our salvation.

And Lord, just as much as we see that and know that, we pray that we wouldn’t fail to live for it, to with Jesus suffer the loss of the world, suffer the present, suffer the temporary, that we would have the joy, that we would have the glory that has to be in eternity to come.

Lord, so convict us where we need conviction. Show us where, Lord, where we’re apathetic, for the things of God. We’re obsessed with small little idols in our lives. We worry. We get fixated on this or that. Lord, safety on the future. There’s so many things that just hold on to our hearts. We just want to be obedient disciples and just daily carry our cross and just say, I’m following Jesus today. I’m dying to me today. I’m obeying Jesus today.

Lord, just show us

how good You are, Lord, just to keep us, wash us clean, forgive us.

Lord, in Your Spirit, lead us onward together as we follow You, knowing, sure that You’re going to bring us home to glory. We just praise You for that and we love You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.