But if we forget God, there is an incredible eternal price to be paid. And as we look at Matthew 27, and that's where we're going to go as we finish our six week study called The Quest for the King, as we've studied the life of Jesus, we are reminded in Scripture over and over again, do not forget the Lord. In fact, Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 12, he says, remember your creator. And then David says, Later, remember the benefits of the Lord your God. Now, how in the world do you forget God? I can understand forgetting a lot of things, but how do we ever forget God? And yet it happens all the time. And when he says to remember, he's not just saying and acknowledging, oh, yeah, I think there's a God out there somewhere. It means that I'm going to change how I live my life. Because if you're here to celebrate what I'm here to celebrate, the fact that God took on human flesh in the form of Jesus, he lived on the earth, lived a sinless life, and yet he went to an old rugged cross and died for my sins and for yours. That's something that's not easily forgotten. But if we do forget, there are high consequences involved. So today we're here to remember. We're here to remember the price that was paid for us, to remember that the sacrifice was made because he loved us so much. So if you'll stand with me, we're going to start in Matthew 27, beginning in verse 27. Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. Hail, King of the Jews! They spit on him and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they'd mocked him, they ripped the robe off and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. Then you read of the crucifixion, of the death and the burial. Verse 62. The next day, the one after preparation day, the chief priest and the Pharisees went to Pilate. Sir, we remember that while he was still alive, that deceiver said after three days I will rise again. So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first. Take a guard, Pilate answered. Go and make the tomb as secure as you know how. So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard. After the Sabbath at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you're looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He's not here. He's risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples he's risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him. Now, I've told you. So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid, yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. Greetings, he said. They came to him and clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me. Father, I pray that as we open up this word that you would encourage us tonight. There are some people here tonight at the end of the ropes, needing some hope, needing some encouragement, needing to know that there is a God who loves them. There are others here that have drifted from the faith that need to be pulled back and got some of us that just need to be shaken awake. So, Lord, I pray that through the power of your word that you would speak to us tonight in Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated. We dare not forget the price that was paid for us. Because it it came at a great personal price to Jesus so that we would remember. And that's as Charles shared earlier, the communion is a part of that. Do this in remembrance of me, that this is to be an ongoing event where we're constantly remembering what the Lord has done for us. And what I've just shared with you at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, is a reminder to us of some of the character traits of the God that we worship. The first we want to look at there in verse 27 is that we have a suffering Savior. Now, normally on Easter weekend, you wouldn't deal with this subject. You just go right to the resurrection. But I think sometimes we go so quickly to the resurrection that we don't stop and take a look at the price that it cost Jesus to get us that open door into heaven. I like what one writer has said. He said, if it doesn't matter to you, it's not going to matter to anyone else. And that's true of public speaking. It's true in your job. It's true if you're a salesman. But it was very true of Jesus. And what Jesus went through is proof that he cares about each one of us. So if you're here tonight and you're thinking, OK, that's good for for the for the pretty people, but you don't know what I've done and where I've been and the stuff that's gone on in my life. You read Isaiah 53. It was written 700 years before Jesus was born. And you look at that prophecy and he reminds us that he was dying for the very worst of us, the worst of every one of us. and the best in every one of us, because without a suffering Savior, there would have been no open door to heaven. So we read about the beating. We read about the whip that ripped the flesh out of his back. We read about the blood loss. We read about the public humiliation, being stripped, being being mocked as a king and then having the robe ripped off again and all of the physical torment that he went through. But all of that torment was nothing compared to the fact that he was taking our sin upon himself. He was suffering by taking all of our lives and all of our evil deeds, our addictions, our worthless thoughts, murder, rape, whatever the sin is in our life. He took it all on himself. And it says in that last verse that they crucified him. Now, the word better translated is to be impaled. And that's probably the reality of what happened. It was a vicious, vicious death. It cost Jesus everything he had physically, emotionally and spiritually to give his life for us. Psalm 22 was written a thousand years before this story was written and a thousand years before crucifixion had ever been invented. And you can read about how the crucifixion was going to take place. I like what Andrew Carnegie said. He said, you can take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floor. You could take away all my factories and leave my people and soon we'll have a new and better factory. You see, throughout the ages, people have tried to destroy Christianity. They've tried to hurt the church. They've they've killed the pastors. They've they've destroyed the missionaries. They've done everything possible, but they cannot stop the key figure in Christianity. And that's Jesus himself. Now, there are people trying to undermine that, too. There are places that you can go where they don't want to talk about what Christianity is all about now. You meet in a church building, but you go there and they don't want to talk about the cross. They don't want to talk about the punishment that Jesus took. They don't want to talk about the blood that was shed because that's not that doesn't make for a very pretty religion. Christianity is not a pretty religion. It's brutal. What Jesus paid for our sin was a brutal price. But without the blood and without the cross, we have no faith. There is no Christianity. Without that cross and without the resurrection, we're here wasting our time. Christianity is about Jesus. And despite what everybody's tried to do to the church through the ages and continue in the modern media today, Jesus still works and he's doing very well. So how does the suffering Savior impact us? Well, number one, when you accept Jesus as your Savior, you're no longer guilty of sin. Now, I don't know what that means to each of you, but I do know what it means to me. It means that when I stand before God, there's not going to be any pictures. You know, you saw you saw the close ups going on there. Can you imagine a close up of you and your life and you're standing with God and every evil thought, deed, word, everything going by? And God said, can you explain that? Can you explain that? Can you explain that? If you're in Jesus, all the movies have been erased. All the tapes have been destroyed. The chalkboard has been wiped clean. Now, why anybody wouldn't accept Jesus is beyond my understanding. If you've not made peace with the Lord, don't go home without Him, because Jesus' suffering made a way for me to have that chalkboard wiped clean. Number two, I no longer have a right to my own life. Once you become a follower of Christ, it is about surrendering who we are to who the Lord is. It means now I live for him. So when changes need to be made, when you're reading your Bible and you realize, oh, this has got to be changed in my life, I need to fix this. It's not about me arguing. It's about me being obedient. So many people today want to throw in that little clause, but I believe in the Bible, but I think times have changed. I think the culture is different. No, look, either the Bible is the word of God or it's not. You can't have it both ways. And if it is, then we surrender to what it says and we're obedient to it. And that leads us to number three. And that is I no longer have a right to complain. Ouch. I don't know about you, but. Even after 30 years of following Christ, there's times when I get into whining and griping and moaning. Things don't go the way I want. Why isn't this right? And why doesn't that happen? You don't have that right anymore because you and I don't belong to ourselves. Jesus has already paid the price. And I'll ask you this. How many of you have suffered what Jesus suffered? He paid the price for us. Philippians three, verse 13 reminds us, don't forget to forget about your sins. The second trait we want to look at is that we have a scriptural savior. It's in verses 62 to 66. Mark, Chapter 10. Jesus said he came with a mission, a purpose. He said, I came to seek and to save those who were lost. Not to build fancy buildings, not to have a cathedral, not for us to look good, not for us to build a pretty religion, but to seek and save those who were lost, those who were not prepared for heaven. Now, it's so important that you pay attention to Jesus mission statement here, because his purpose was to rescue each one of us. And when you look at verse 62, Jesus made the Jewish leaders really nervous. Now, these are the people that crucified him. These are the people that encouraged the Romans, crucify him, crucify him. They're the ones that had the mock trial. And then it says there in verse 62, they went to Pilate and they said, sir, we remember when this guy was still alive, he said in three days he's coming back from the dead. And if you let that happen, it's going to be a worse deception than what happened to begin with. Now, I don't know about you, but If you came up to me and said, hey, Joe, I'm dying on Friday, but I'll be back Monday. I'm probably not going to worry a whole lot about it. All right. I'm just not going to put a whole lot of stock in that in that response. But these guys know the scripture. You see, the fact that Jesus is scriptural is so powerful here because these Jewish leaders that sentenced Jesus to death, they know the scriptures themselves. And they know full well what Genesis 3, and Isaiah 7, and Isaiah 9, and Isaiah 53, and Zechariah 11, and Micah 5. They are very aware of all of the prophecies, and they know that Jesus has fulfilled them. There's only one missing. And these guys are scared. Because even though they've gone through with this and they've killed Jesus, the reality is still hanging over them, and Pilate, even Pilate, has an interesting statement. He said, well, you can have your guards and you make it as secure as you know how good luck is really what he was saying to them. And he sent them out. I don't know if you've ever seen a guard in the cemetery. I've only seen one in Washington. And that's ceremonial. They're not guarding it so that somebody won't come and steal the body, but they actually posted guards in the cemetery. Now, lest you think this is some kind of a game that was being played. Maybe they went to sleep, maybe they went off and got drunk. The Roman centurions understood if the person you're guarding, if anything happens to them, you die. There is no trial. There is no court martial. They say the guy we entrusted you with, you failed your task. You're dead. End of the story. These guys were not playing. All right. If there was any way they could have avoided this, they would have avoided it. But they knew that Jesus was playing by the book. If you remember back at Christmastime, we had a tragedy in our county when the tornadoes came through the land and through Daytona and a lot of people died, a lot of destructions. And I remember the headlines the next day in the paper. It said ten seconds to live. And I thought, you know, what do you do when you got ten seconds to live? You don't have time to make any decisions at that point. You better hope that before that moment comes in your life and in my life, that you've made a decision to follow a scriptural Savior who has prepared heaven for us in a scriptural way, because there's no time for second guessing. So what do we gain by having a scriptural Savior? Number one, confidence in salvation. I always make people nervous when I talk about this. Well, how do you know you're going to heaven and I'm not? Well, the Bible makes it very plain because I don't base my faith on my feelings. I base my faith on what the Bible says. Now, look. That's why for the last six weeks, I've been telling you, read your Bible. You need more than what I can give you. You need more than what your Sunday school teacher can give you. So we've got we've got Bibles stacked up out in the lobby. If you don't have a Bible, you stop by our guest relations desk. We're going to give one to everybody who needs one this Easter weekend, because we want you to have God's word. And you go home and read the story of Jesus for yourself. But in First John, chapter five, he makes it very simple. How do you know if you're saved? Well, John says it this way. He said, if you have Jesus, you have life. If you don't have Jesus. You don't have life. Now, he didn't say you believe there is a Jesus. He said you have Jesus. It means you've accepted Jesus as your savior so you can have confidence in your salvation. Secondly, you can have confidence in your relationship. Some of you are still saying, yeah, but can that be for me? Absolutely, it's for all of us. When you read Isaiah 53, you realize that he died for the sin of all of mankind, all of our ugliness, all of the evilness, evilness in every single one of us, and that Jesus loves us so much. God, the Father, wanted us with him so badly that he was willing to let Jesus suffer the way he did so that we could have a relationship again with the Father. And then thirdly, we can have confidence in our transformation. Isaiah 53, four said that Jesus would take our infirmities. He would take away our sins. So the transformation is there. It's not Jesus. Will you take away my sins? The answer is yes. You and I simply have to surrender to him and say, I want this change to take place in my life again in Isaiah 53 and verse 11. It says that he would suffer and as he suffered, he would justify many as he bore our iniquities. That's all of our sin, all of our evil. And the third trait is that we have a supernatural savior. Now, if you're like me, I like superheroes. My house, there's usually some kind of a superhero movie that that somebody's watching. But, you know, superheroes even have some weaknesses. Superman had a weakness. What was it? Kryptonite. Very good comic book fans. Kryptonite. Batman also had a weakness. This one's a little harder to detect, but I noticed it. It's those black tights that he wears. You can't be a superhero when we're tight. I just don't see how that works. But anyway, Jesus also had a weakness. So how could God have a weakness? His weakness was that he loved you and me. He loved us more than he loved himself. And in Philippians, chapter two, he explains that beginning in verse six, who being in the very nature, God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. He was God. But he said, even though I can have everything, I can hang on to heaven. He said he humbled himself, making himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, becoming like you and me. and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. His weakness was simply his love for all of us. And when you get into chapter 28 that I read to you, you begin to see all the miraculous taking place. That's where we see the resurrection unfolding. You see the angels came down and rolled the stone away. And they didn't roll the stone away so Jesus could get out. It was so the women could get in because Jesus was already gone. And it says that the angels confronted the guards and it says the guards fell down like dead men. And I want to point out to you that this is not God that they're being confronted with. This is an angel. This is simply a messenger of God, one of the heavenly angels that is there. And at the at just at the. sight of an angel, these two guards fall down like dead men at the very risk of their own life. And then the conversation goes on that Jesus is not here. He's been raised from the dead and he finally appears in front of the women and the women fall down and they worship him and they grab a hold of him because they realize that that final prophecy has been fulfilled and they don't want to lose him again. And I hope that you and I have that kind of passion for God, that this is not a once a year event, or this is not a when it feels like an event. But this is something that I've got to do so that I never forget who my God is. Mary didn't want to let go of Jesus. And then Jesus makes an interesting statement there in the last verse. In verse 10, he said, he said, don't don't hold on to me anymore. Don't be afraid. But go tell the apostles what's happened. Tell them I've raised from the dead and I'll be meeting with him shortly. That's an interesting phrase. Really, what Jesus says is stop crying, guys. It's happened. The victory is here. There's no reason to cry anymore. Just go tell everybody you can about what has happened. Now, if you're still a doubter and you're saying, I don't know if this story is true or not, you need to know that these twelve men, these twelve disciples, every one of them gave their lives. They were all killed in brutal ways. For what they knew to be truth. These women went and told them about it, and then two thousand years later, here we sit celebrating Jesus, because one person has told another person who's told another person, and here we are. And Paul wrote to Titus and said, he said, make the Savior make the Savior attractive. Well, that's what Mary did when she went to tell him that he was raised from the dead. It's what the disciples did when they went out to plant churches. And it's what you and I do today as we work with our neighbors and co-workers and friends. We make Jesus look good and show them that he is indeed a supernatural savior. So what benefits are ours by having a supernatural savior? He is God. That's what he proved when he came back from the dead. And if he's God, he can deal with my sin and with yours. If we'll humbly come to him and confess our sin and we will accept him as our Savior. Secondly, he is God so he can deal with others. Everybody's got somebody that you just wish wasn't in your life. Maybe it's a boss. Maybe it's a coworker. Maybe right now it's a spouse. But there's somebody in your life that you're just saying, I just need to I need vengeance on them. And you say, you know what? Because there is a God like this, he can handle it. He's big enough to handle it. And then thirdly, he is God. He can even deal with my doubts. And some of you might be here today and you're still not convinced it's OK. That's why we're giving you Bibles, because we believe when you read the Bible for yourself and you let God work on your heart, that God will begin to prove himself true to you. Isaiah 43, verse 11, we're reminded that apart from God, there is no say no savior recently. A great St. Louis Cardinal pitcher died. His name was Max Lanier. He pitched back in the 1940s, pitched in three different World Series for the Cardinals, and he died at age 91. And when they buried him, they found out that in his will, the one thing that he asked for was to be buried in the St. Louis Cardinals hat. Now, you know, to me, that makes me very proud. Now, maybe you're not a Cardinal fan, but you've got your own hat that you're planning to get buried in, and that's OK. That's all right. But you know, what I asked myself was, when I come to the end of my life, what's going to be buried with me? What is it that I've left behind? What kind of a legacy am I leaving so that when I go, they can say, you know what? This is what's going with him when he goes. What kind of hatch are you going to be buried with? Because if we forget God, we're probably going to get a whole lot of other things wrong in our life if we remember the Lord. We'll get a lot of things right. Father, I thank you for the folks that have come out tonight to celebrate. To celebrate the resurrected Christ, to not forget. God, we pray for those who are still lost, those who are doubting, those who are struggling with their faith. We pray, God, that you would prepare their hearts to learn truth. God, for those who need to come back to you. who have drifted away, that this might be the time that they would do that as well. We pray, Lord, that You would bring fruit from Your Word. In Jesus' name, Amen. Precious redeemer and friend Who would have thought that a lamb could Rescue the souls of men Oh, you've rescued the souls of men Counselor, comforter, keeper Spirit, we long to embrace You offer hope when our hope's found Hopelessly lost away Oh, we've hopelessly lost our way You are the one that we praise You are the one we adore You give the healing and grace Heart's always number four Oh, heart's always number four Almighty infinite Father Faithfully loving your love Here in our weakness you find us Falling before your throne Oh, we're falling before your throne You are the one that we praise You are the one we adore You give the healing and grace that comes always from the Lord Oh, our heart's always on the floor. You are the one that we pray. You are the one we adore. You give the healing and grace.