Our gospel reading is actually going to be our sermon text for this evening, and that's Luke chapter 19 verses 28 through 48, and I would invite you to stand not only for the reading of God's Word, but for the reading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you're using the Pew Bible, again, that's found on page 878 and 879. This is the word of the Lord. And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. And when he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent to the disciples saying, go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, why are you untying it? You shall say this, The Lord has need of it. So those who were sent went away and found it just as He had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, Why are you untying the colt? And they said, The Lord has need of it. And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest. And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, Teacher, rebuke your disciples. He answered, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out. And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you, and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.' And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him. They did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Let us sing the doxology in response. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below. Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. You may be seated. Well, the reformer John Calvin is often credited with what is called, in formal theology at least, the threefold office of Christ, prophet, priest, and king. Now, I first learned of these categories when I was in seminary, and it was mind-blowing and such a joyful experience because it gave me a greater vision of who Christ is. And not only who Christ is, but who Christ is to us. But in examining this text before us tonight, I have grown to appreciate all the more this quote by C.H. Spurgeon. He says this, he says, I believe nothing merely because Calvin taught it, but because I have found his teaching in the word of God. And that is so true. We believe nothing because Calvin taught it, but we believe it because we find it in the word of God. And I hope you will say that by the end of our sermon tonight, that you will be able to see clearly Christ in this threefold office, Christ as king, Christ as prophet and Christ as priest. This is a marvelous section of Scripture here. We have three massively significant redemptive historical moments. In verses 28 through 40, you have Jesus' triumphal entry. We typically preach on this on Palm Sunday. In verses 41 through 44, you have Jesus' mournful and tear-filled lament and weeping for Jerusalem. And in verses 45 through 48, you have Jesus's cleansing of the temple. And each of these texts are worthy of a sermon, individually, or maybe even several sermons. But what I want to do this evening, I think, is narrow enough for one sermon, maybe. But what I want to do, and my objective tonight is this, that I want to show you the connection between Jesus, the character and ministry of Jesus, and this threefold office of prophet, priest, and king in these texts. And I want to highlight the way in which Jesus exercises his authority in those offices in each of these texts. I believe we'll see that in verses 28 through 40, Jesus is king. In verses 41 through 44, we will see Jesus as prophet, And in verses 45 through 48, we will see Jesus as priest. In each of these sects, Jesus fulfills these offices by kind of gathering up Old Testament imagery, material, and prophecy. And in doing so, he shows us what kind of king he is, what kind of prophet he is, what kind of priest he is. And that's really what we want to know. We don't want to know just that Jesus was a king, that he was a prophet, or that he was a priest. We want to know what kind of king, what kind of prophet, and what kind of priest. Because it is in knowing how Jesus fulfills those offices that then the affections of our hearts are stirred up for Jesus. And it is my conviction, I believe, that when we see this, when we see how Jesus exercises his authority in these offices, we then will come to know him better, love him more, and desire to serve him more faithfully because, brothers and sisters, he is not just a king, a prophet, a priest, he is our king, and our prophet, and our priest. So that is our objective, let me pray for the Lord's help to that end. Almighty God, we thank you for the great privilege of being called your sons and daughters Lord, we recognize it is not a privilege that we have earned by strength of our own might, nor by merit. It is that which has come to us only by the work and ministry of Christ Jesus. And Lord, we are here tonight to hang on the words of Jesus. We're here to see Christ. So Lord, I pray that you would hide me behind the cross of Jesus. That He would hide me behind these offices of Christ, behind the person and work of Christ, so that in these descriptions we would not be bored with intellectual information that fills our brains, but that we would be stirred to great affection for our Savior in our hearts. This is a work that you alone can do, Lord. So we pray that you would do it. Sanctify us in the truth. Your word is truth. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, if you've ever seen a coronation, and I would guess that some of you probably have, you know it's quite an event, quite a spectacle. All the important people of the city are gathered together. You have all the highest religious authorities in the land and everybody there is decked out in regal and often colorful robes. There's always trumpets, lots of trumpets. It's a fantastic and fanfaric event. And what's striking is that this scene is almost nothing like that. that Jesus' triumphal entry is almost nothing like that. And I say almost because there are a few commonalities, and let me point those out to you here. We see here in this passage that everything about this coronation of Jesus in His triumphal entry is perfectly planned. It's planned to a degree of perfection, down to some of the most minute possible details. We also do have a king here, though it is not a king and not a coronation of a king that we would expect. It is not glorious in the way that we think of glory. But we do have a king and he is indeed glorious. We also then see that this king is accompanied by praise and honor and acclaim. Those at least are some things that this account shares in common with the coronation. But it strikes me as odd that one of the first things that happens here to get this whole coronation ceremony started is that Jesus here tells his disciples, he asks them to go into the village where they're going to find a colt that's been tied up and there to untie it and bring it to him. And he says specifically that this is a colt upon which no one has ever sat. Now, my first question in studying this text was how in the world would Jesus know that unless he was the son of God? that you will go into this village and you will find a cult tied to a post, a cult upon which no one has ever ridden. And what an experience that must have been for the disciples, you know, first to hear that command and then to go and to find the cult exactly as Jesus had described. planning to the degree of perfection. But the wonder goes on because, as you might expect, that colt belonged to somebody. And so, naturally, if strangers come up and start untying your donkey, you might be a little bit distressed, you might have some questions for those folks. So the owners, we're told in this text, begin to ask the disciples, why are you untying the colt? And Jesus gives his disciples a few simple words for explanation. And somehow, this suffices. The owners protest at first, why are you untying the colt? And Jesus says to his disciples, tell them this, simply, the Lord has need of it. The Lord has need of it. The King has need of it. And you get zero protest from the owners. No protest. And we see there, even there, there's authority in the title of Jesus. that by the very speaking of the title, Lord, the Lord has need of it, that these people were willing to give up their cult. I hope to meet those owners someday. We're not told who they are, but I hope to find them somewhere in the halls of heaven and just ask them, what went through your heart and mind at that moment? It seems to me, even though it's ordinary, it seems to me to be a profound statement of belief that they would be willing just to say, okay, sure, the Lord has need of it. And they don't ask which Lord because they've been told it's the Lord who needs it. So what kind of king do we have here? We have a king with authority, a king who knows things that nobody else should know. But the deeper significance of this event is not the wonder that we might experience in seeing this, how Jesus knew about the cult or the authority of the name. The deeper significance of this moment is its fulfillment of a very, very specific Old Testament prophecy. And you know this. Zechariah 9.9 says this, and it's entitled, the ESV gives it a nice subtitle there, The Coming King of Zion. And here's what it says. It says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! For behold, your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. So do you see the specificity there in that prophecy? It's not just a donkey, it's a colt. Quite literally the weakest and most humble animal that a king could possibly ride on. This is the exact opposite of what you would expect any conquering king to want for his steed. And I'm not trying to be silly, but the imagery that came into my mind here as I was reading this, this is like the Lord Farquaad version of a coronation. If you know who I'm speaking about, maybe you do, maybe you don't. But it would almost appear as a kind of joke or sham. What do you mean you have a king and he's going to ride on a coal? Right? A foal of a donkey. It would seem so strange. It's so far from the image of what we would conjure up in terms of a conquering king. If I asked, for example, the children to draw for me an image of a conquering king, I don't think they would put that conquering king on a donkey. Certainly not on a colt. But what kind of king is our savior? What does the scripture say to us about who Jesus is? What kind of king is he? Well, the prophecy there, and not just the prophecy, but take that prophecy with the character and ministry of Jesus. It shows us a king that is humble. It shows us a king that is gentle, who's lowly. He had no outward form or beauty that we should behold Him or esteem Him. There's nothing about Jesus and His outward person that would make us to glory in Him. And yet, He is a King. Yet, He conquers. We have some privilege of knowing the end of the story. But what an encouragement, even as Jesus ascends the holy hill of Mount Zion here to face the coming darkness, the hour of darkness, and to die a bloody death on the cross. What an encouragement to know that it is the humility of Jesus displayed here that will ultimately be the end of death. That's your conquering king, who conquers by way of humility. who conquers by way of humble obedience to the Father. And so with that, we ought to banish any thought that humility is weakness. Humility is not weak. Humility conquered death. Jesus never raised a sword. His followers did, but Jesus never raised a sword. How did he conquer? Humble obedience to God the Father. And what did that humble obedience to the will of God achieve? It achieved peace. Peace with God. Who is this king? He is king of Salem. He is king of peace. He, humble king that he is, he will usher in the long-awaited, long-desired shalom of the people of God. The crown upon the head of King Jesus is his obedience to the Father, and in that crown are many jewels of many sons and many daughters. Do you realize that we, brothers and sisters, as believers, are like Jesus' spoils of war? Jewels set in His crown of obedience, the glory of His office fulfilled. Let me just read a few more verses from Zechariah 9 here. If you don't believe me on that point, it says this, for his people. His arrow will go forth like lightning. The Lord God will sound the trumpet. There we get our trumpets. And he will march forth in the whirlwinds of the south. And on that day, the Lord their God will save them as the flock of his people. For like the jewels of a crown, they shall shine on his land. For how great is his goodness and how great his beauty. Now, I don't think Zachariah is saying there that he's not contradicting Isaiah that Christ has outward beauty. He's saying the beauty of Christ is his humility. Humble obedience is beautiful to God the Father, and it is powerful. Christ's glory is not bound up in anything external. His glory His glory is obedience to the will of God, submitting himself to the will of God, submitting himself even to the point of death that we might live. And this is why he approaches Jerusalem. This is his moment to be crowned, and not with a crown of gold, but with a crown of what? Thorns. To become a curse for us. So what kind of king, brothers and sisters? A king who suffers. A king who suffers for the sake of his people. The wicked say to us throughout the scriptures, they say to us even today, you serve a dead king. Your God does not exist. You serve a dead king. And we say back to that, no, we serve a risen king. A dying and rising king. A victorious king. Because we know, we are privileged to know, even as Jesus approaches Jerusalem here and approaches the moment of the cross, we know the outcome of the cross. Death could not hold him. Death could not bind him. And neither will it bind you. You see, someday we're going to wear crowns as well. You realize that? Someday we're going to wear crowns as well, but they will not be crowns of our own glory or crowns even of our obedience. What are our good works but filthy rags, but the crown that we will wear will be the glory of Christ's obedience. We're told in Romans that we'll be co-heirs with him, but we are only co-heirs because he reigns, because he conquered. He takes the lowly road that we in him might be exalted. What lessons we can learn from that? And we await the return of the king, don't we? He's coming back. And when he does, we will sing as with the disciples here, like they could do no other. Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest. I wonder if you heard in that, even the similarities to the song of the angels in Luke 2. Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom God is pleased. Glory and peace. It's been Jesus's ministry from the beginning. And he was a king in his lowly birth in the manger, just as he is a king now, humble, mounted on a donkey. And that ought to make us sing. That ought to make us sing. No one born of God should be able to keep silent at the image of our glorious and humble King. How can we keep from singing ought to be our response. They ought to have to restrain us. I don't care if we're Presbyterian or not. We ought to be bursting at the bonds with praise. And that's what Jesus is saying about the rocks here. He's saying, if I command my disciples to be silent in this moment, that there would be such a force and compelling energy that the very stones would burst open into song. Because that's how creation responds to this humble king. So what is our response to be? We're to sing. We're to praise. And our praise now is to be a reflection of what our praise will be when he returns. We're not idle while we wait for the return of the King, we praise now, we sing now, we triumph in the glory of Christ now. Yes, it is a time of suffering and service, it is a time in which we're called to be also humble in our obedience to the will of God, but we are also to remember that glory is coming, the glory of Emmanuel's land, the inheritance that he has secured for us. Isaiah says this, This is what we ought to be doing as we wait for the return of the King. He says, prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight his paths, fill every valley, lower every mountain, make straight his paths, trot out the rough places that all flesh may see the salvation of God. That's what we do in our worship. Do you see that? We lower every mountain, we fill every valley with praise, praise of our King. So what kind of king is King Jesus? The one to whom every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. The striking imagery continues in this passage as Jerusalem begins to come into view. Jesus comes down from the Mount of Olives and then begins to make his way up onto a little bit of a hill and The city comes into view, and very interestingly in the text here, we see in verse 41 that Jesus, as he draws near to the city and as he beholds the city, he begins to weep. Begins to weep. This is abrupt and strange. The Greek word that is used here of Jesus weeping, it means quite literally audible sobbing. This is the kind of like shoulder shaking, weeping that is visible and audible. And so we move from this kind of uncontainable praise for Jesus to now uncontainable sorrow from Jesus. And it must have been strange. It must have been strange for the disciples and for those there witnessing to go from a moment of elation and praise and singing and joy to all of a sudden Jesus is weeping. It's as strange as it would be for a newly wedded bride who stands at the altar there with her husband and begins to weep uncontrollably for sorrow. It would be uncomfortable and awkward. Why is Jesus weeping? What was it that had so struck Jesus? This is, after all, a triumphal entry. How do we go from songs of praise to weeping and lament? Well, I think it's the very songs the disciples were singing. What are they singing of? They're singing of peace. The people are crying out as they throw down olive branches before Jesus, Hosanna. They're crying out for salvation. But Jesus, he looks and he sees a city that knows nothing of peace. If we look with the eyes of Jesus, not as man sees, but if we look to the heart of the city, which Jesus is going to make his way to, he's going to the temple. He's going to the center of the city. And what will he find? He will find hardened stone, not peace. Jesus was not fooled by the greatness of Jerusalem with its mighty walls. He saw its brokenness and he saw its refusal to acknowledge that brokenness. city of peace it was called, but a city of peace it was not. And this is why Jesus weeps and he cries out in a loud voice. He says, would that you, even you had known on this day, the things that make for peace. And the repetition there is a way of expressing endearment. Jesus loves Jerusalem. He loves the city. He loves the people and he desired mercy for them. This is the heart of a prophet. It is a heart that is grieved by sin, but it is a heart that desires mercy for the people. I'm convinced that what we see here in Jesus is the sorrow of Jeremiah, who many years before this, also looking upon the city of Jerusalem, penned these words. He writes, my joy is gone. Grief is upon me. My heart is sick within me. Behold the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land. Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her king not in her? Why have they provoked me to anger with their carved images and their foreign idols? The time of the harvest is past. The summer is ended and we are not saved. Listen to this. For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded. I mourn and dismay has taken hold of me. Oh, that my head wore many waters and my eyes, a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. I think that's what Jesus is weeping about. He weeps over the hardness, the heart of his people. He came to his own. And what does John say? His own did not receive him. Christ is holding His hands outward to the people, offering Himself as in the words of another prophet. Isaiah says this in 65 too, All day long I have spread out My hands to you, a rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good. In just a few chapters earlier, this is not the first time that Jesus has wept over Jerusalem. In Luke 13, Jesus again, in another audible lament, He says this, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing. Have you ever thought about Jesus in that way? That's a scriptural way to think about Jesus. He compares himself to the likes of a mother bird, whose very instinct compels her to gather together her young, to protect them, to nurture them, to watch over them. That is Jesus's desire for the people. That is Jesus's desire for you. You see, we may be sitting here tonight, not realizing that Jesus here is not only weeping for Jerusalem, but he weeps for all those who of hardness of heart pursue after sin rather than coming to his open arms. Yes, I'm talking to us. We're believers. Yes, but we sin. Our regenerated hearts are still sometimes led into sin. We still, because of the hardness of our heart, refuse to follow after the ways of the Lord. We are prone to wander, as the hymn says, prone to leave the God we love. But Jesus does not cast us off. He weeps for us to return. And he doesn't desire to forgive us just because of a legal standing that we have in our justification. We should not think only of Jesus having to forgive us because we are justified before the Lord, but Jesus forgives us out of love. Because his desire is for our good, he weeps to see us freed from the influence of sin and he offers himself fully and totally to that end. So don't look at Jesus weeping here only in the context of Jerusalem. Don't look at Jesus here as weeping for the people out there. The heart of Jesus here is for sinners and you and I, may we hear it again, are sinners in need of grace and the love of Jesus Christ. He loves us, he deeply loves us, and that I think is why he weeps. He weeps to see us return. He weeps because he knows that sin brings judgment. Sin brings destruction. Just listen to the same passage in Isaiah that I quoted from a few moments ago. This is chapter 65. He says, But you who forsake the Lord, who forget my holy mountain, who set a table for fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for destiny, I will destine you to the sword. And all of you shall bow down to the slaughter, because when I called, you did not answer. When I spoke, you did not listen, but you did what was evil in my eyes and chose what I did not delight in. And we need to understand that that's what we do every time we sin. Every time we sin, we choose what God does not delight in. And it brings judgment. It brings shame. It brings burdens upon us that Jesus does not wish us to bear. And he stands with open arms saying, come to me. This judgment that Jesus speaks of here in this passage, in verses 43 through 44, is a judgment that would come just 40 years after Jesus spoke these words. Isn't it interesting that the times of patience in Scripture often come in fours? Have you thought about that? The Amorites are given 400 years to repent and turn from their wickedness. 400 years before the Lord would bring his people into the Promised Land. Before that judgment, there's a time of patience. Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years to learn the consequences of unbelief. Here, Jerusalem is given 40 years to understand what it meant to reject the Savior who had come to their very gates. Why were they to be judged? Why were they to be judged? Because it says here they did not know the time of their visitation. That is, they did not know the hour of the Messiah. They did not see what Zechariah saw. Do you remember his prophecy from Luke chapter 2? What does he say? He says that it is the sunrise who has come to visit us from on high. Who was he speaking of? He was speaking of the baby Jesus. But it was that visitation that they failed to see and failed to recognize. They failed to acknowledge Christ as Lord. And so in 40 years, the Roman armies would come and they would do exactly what Jesus has described. They would surround Jerusalem, besiege it, build barricades until its citizens were nearly eating each other. invaded the city, its citizens were brutally killed, and the magnificent stones that the disciples would even point to as they walked out of the temple, that every stone was thrown down, cast down, and burned. And that is not just a significant historical event. We shouldn't see that and say even that Jesus there has proved to be a true prophet. Do you know what the test of a true prophet is in Deuteronomy 18? If he says something will happen and it happens, he's a prophet of the Lord. Well, clearly Christ is a prophet of the Lord. But I want you to see that the significance of this judgment goes beyond that because it is significant in light of eternal judgment as well. That's what it was a picture of. What kind of prophet is Jesus then? He's a prophet who boldly declares the word and will of God, but he is also a prophet whose heart burns and breaks for the salvation of the lost. He warns of judgment, but he warns with compassion. And that's the balance we need, isn't it? That we need to boldly and unashamedly proclaim the word of the Lord. We need to tell people about the judgment that is coming, but we don't tell them with clenched fists. We tell them with bleeding hearts. Who will weep for the lost if not us? Who will seek out the lost if not us? Who will share the hope of the gospel with the lost if not us? And so if we are to be prophetic in the spirit of Jesus, we cannot be filled with malice or hatred towards the lost. We cannot cast them aside in indifference, nor can we be what I think is more often our tendency, cynical. We need to warn and we need to do so with tenderness and tears and hearts full of compassion. We need to pray for the forgiveness of those who are straying. We need to desire their repentance. And I cannot find a more convicting image of this point than the image of our Savior, who at the moment that they are driving the nails into his hands, cries out, forgive them for they know not what they do. He was praying for them while they were putting him to death. And surely, I'm thinking as I'm studying this, surely the heart of those Roman soldiers had to be as hard as stone, for how could you drive the nail through somebody's hand who was praying for your forgiveness? But we see, don't we, that that is the history of the Christian church, that throughout the ages, Christians have been slaughtered and killed, all the while praying for the salvation of those who are doing the killing. That is what it means to be a prophet in the spirit of Jesus. It is to desire, to seek, and to pray for, and to yearn for the forgiveness and redemption of the lost. For they know not what they do. Would that you, even you Jerusalem, and what names we could put there, would that you know on this day the things that make for peace. We come to our final section here in the cleansing of the temple, and we see that Jesus is not only king and prophet, he is also priest. He is a priest who burns with the holiness and righteous fury of God. Look at verses 45 through 48 with me. We see that Jesus goes to the heart of the city. He enters into the temple and he begins to drive out the money changers and the extortioners and those who sold and were making a profit in the house of the Lord. And it's quite interesting that in John's account of this event, we're told that the disciples at that moment remembered a very strange and specific quotation from Psalm 69. And that quotation is this, zeal for your house will consume me. This tells us where the fury of Jesus here is coming from. And it's not uncontrollable rage like we might experience. Jesus is in total control of his emotions. You can be sure of that. But he rages with a fiery zeal for the house of the Lord. Jesus is zealous. He is righteously angry for what I think are these two reasons. He is zealous for the sanctity, the sacredness of the house of the Lord. And he is zealous for the function of the house of God. You know, we've said to you before, you know that the temple was God's dwelling place. It was His house, His abiding place among His people. It was to be set apart from the other dwelling places. It sat in the middle of the camp. And if you remember, even from all the instructions that are given, about the tabernacle in Exodus. Caleb will get there. You know, you remember it was designed someday. It was designed though, the tabernacle was designed to the very minute details to image the throne room of God in heaven. Everything was commanded with specificity and everything was to be holy, sacred, and set apart. But what has the dwelling place of God now become in Jerusalem? It might as well be the New York Stock Exchange. A den of thieves and robbers, Jesus calls it, full of noise. Can you imagine the sound of bartering, coarse jokes, coins clinking and falling to the ground, people clamoring all about to get their needed animals for the sacrifices of the temple, food and animal feces probably covering the ground. Is it any wonder that Christ, who is the high priest of God, would enter into that and see that and not be furious that the house of his father was being treated so? And what did Jesus care about there? He cared about the sacredness, the holiness of God. Because the way that we treat the church, the way that we treat God's house, says a lot about what we think about the holiness of God. And I do think we've lost something of the sacredness of the church today. From the attitude of worship, even down to the very architecture of church buildings today, for whatever reason, we've decided that a warehouse somehow communicates the glory and transcendence of God. But the old cathedrals were often constructed to image the cross. They're often in the form of the cross, and they were designed to draw your wonder. They were bright with light, huge windows, wide open, echoing transcendent spaces. Why? To communicate something about the sacredness of gathered worship. R.C. Sproul, during his time at St. Andrew's Chapel, he had printed on the front of his bulletin every week, where you would see it before you began worship, these words. It says, quote, we cross the threshold of the secular into the sacred. From the common to the uncommon, from the profane to the holy. Now, I'm not saying we need to go back to building cathedrals. I'm not saying we ought to take torches and pitchforks to our building here and start over. That's not what I mean. Christians have worshipped everywhere, gloriously, even in the catacombs. But what we must understand about gathered worship is that we're standing on holy ground. Yes, this stained carpet, less stained now that Jack has cleaned it up, this stained carpet is holy ground, not because of where we are, but because of whose presence we're in. We've got to recover something of the sacredness of what we're doing here. I don't care if it's the evening service or the morning service or if, God forbid, we start doing services on Saturday. The point is that we're coming before a holy God and that ought to affect the way that we think about what we're doing here. That's what Jesus was zealous for. That's what I want to be zealous for and am not zealous enough for, the holiness of God, the sacredness of worshiping him. Because I love comfort, don't you? We want to be comfortable. Isaiah wasn't comfortable standing before the glory of the Lord, but he was in awe. He was worshipful. Jesus would tolerate nothing that would hinder people from experiencing the presence of God. Perhaps that's a good principle for us to use, that there ought to be no stumbling block in the way that we worship. There ought to be no stumbling block that would hinder people from coming to the Lord. And Lord, if we are in our speech and the way that we do things, if we are an obstacle, Lord, fix us. Jesus here burns zealously because, as he says, he desired that the house of God should be as it was designed to be, a house of prayer, a house of communion, of fellowship with God, a place Like what's described in Isaiah chapter 2, a holy mountain of the Lord, where the nations would be drawn to it, taught from it, they would hear the word of the Lord. In John's account, I know I need to finish, in John's account, around this same time as Jesus here is cleansing the temple, there is a group of Greeks that come to Jesus. They say something fascinating to him. They come to Philip first. They say, sir, we wish to see Jesus. And what's fascinating is that at that moment, Jesus then says, now is the time for the Son of Man to be lifted up. Because we see already the gospel breaking out to the Gentiles. We see Acts beginning before Acts has been written and taken place. The Gentiles are ready to see Christ. And isn't that what we should give the world today in our worship? Not us, but Jesus. That's what the temple is about. That's what the church is about. But understand even that Jesus here is not just a priest in the house of God. He is also himself the house of God. Jesus is our dwelling place. And as priest, he removes every obstacle between us and the Father. And he does that to establish communion through himself. Jesus gives us access. And so we can say, I think rightly, that Jesus rages against all obstacles and enemies that would hinder our access to the Father. Jesus rages against anything that would hinder our access to the Word of God. And I think this is made clear in verses 47 and 48. Jesus cleanses the temple. And what does he do? What does he immediately begin to do there in the temple? He teaches. He begins to teach. He begins to preach the word. And if we do nothing else, let's keep doing that until our bones dry out. Let's preach the word. Let's preach the word of Christ. Let's demonstrate the Word of Christ. We as believers are also priests in God's house carrying the Word to the nations. And so if we do nothing else, let's give the world the Word. The Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. I love the description. I'll end with this. I love the description. of the people in verse 28. Look what it says. I'm sorry, verse 48. It says that the Pharisees, the enemies of Jesus, they were seeking to destroy him, but they couldn't do anything. Why? Because the people were hanging on Jesus's words. And that's what we do here, isn't it? We come here to hang on Jesus's words. That is why he cleansed the temple. That is why he hung on the cross. The lamb was hung on the cross so that we could hang on him. This is our king, our prophet, and our priest. I hope you've been given some glimpse of Christ this evening. But I want you to know it finally, that all of these together show one, I think, wonderful fact. And I'm going to say it as I always do in the words of a hymn. Jesus is the lover of our souls. Other refuge have I none, I helpless hang on thee. All my trust on thee is stayed. For you, O Lord, keep him in perfect peace, whose mind and heart are stayed on thee. Let's pray. Oh Lord, we thank you for your patience with us. We thank you for Christ Jesus, his work as king, to prophet and priest, and all in obedience to you and all for our sake. He is the author, finisher, perfecter, founder of our faith. So set our eyes on Christ. Help us to see him more fully, more wonderfully displayed in your word, and help us, Lord, to carry that word to the world. There are still those who are saying, we wish to see Jesus. Lord, may we show him to them. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.