Luke 2332 through 43.
Two others who were criminals were led away to be put to death with him,
and when they came to the place that is called the skull, there
they crucified him and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
And Jesus said, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
And they cast lots to divide his garments.
And the people stood by watching.
But the rulers scoffed at him, saying he saved others.
Let him save himself.
If he is the Christ of God, his chosen one.
The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying,
if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.
There was an inscription over him.
This is the King of the Jews.
One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying,
are you not the Christ?
Save yourself and us.
But the other rebuked him, saying, do you not fear God,
since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.
But this man has done nothing wrong.
And he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
And he said to him, truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.
Everybody, good morning and welcome.
I am, I'm really, really glad that you're here.
We have been in a series we're calling Jesus the Redeemer.
We've been moving through the Gospel of Luke the last couple times.
I've preached.
I've mentioned that even with some of the most spectacular stories
about Jesus, Luke is surprisingly brief with two times ago
I preached on Jesus raising the widow's son from the dead.
He raised somebody from the dead.
Amazing, incredible.
Everybody in that town
will be telling that story at every party for the rest of their lives.
Right.
Luke tells that story in six verses.
Six verses.
The last time I preached, I preached on Jesus calming the storm.
The disciples are caught in a storm that is so fierce.
They think they're going to die and they wake Jesus up.
And Jesus shushes the storm
and the disciples freak out,
and they end up saying, what kind of man is this?
That even the wind and the waves obey him
for verses and so on.
Luke took to tell that story four verses.
Now we get to the last week of Jesus life from Palm Sunday
to Easter, and everything slows up.
And to tell this story,
Luke takes a whopping 312 verses.
How about this?
The last 12 hours of Jesus life, from the time he's arrested
in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the time he breathed his last breath on the cross,
79 verse.
And I tell you that because it's it's one of the
the more remarkable things about the way
the gospel writers cover Jesus life.
And it's one of the things that makes Jesus stand out from all other
religious leaders, every other religious leaders, a teacher
like Confucius and Buddha Muhammad.
So when somebody covers their life, they cover their teaching.
They don't cover their death.
But Jesus claimed to be the Redeemer,
the one with the power
to rescue, to save, to set us free.
And that meant
we needed a cross, an empty tomb,
and a resurrection.
That's why every gospel writer will blow through miracle after miracle.
Four verses, five verses, six verses.
And then they all slow up for this week
that we call the Passion Week,
because Jesus death and resurrection is his purpose for coming.
Everything else is Prolog.
Make no mistake, Jesus Christ didn't come to be a teacher.
He came to be a sacrifice.
He came to die.
And this is our ninth week of our series.
And we are finally to the place where Jesus redeems absolutely,
completely, eternally, where Luke chapter 23.
So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn there, Luke chapter 23 and,
pull it up on your phone or on a tablet, or if you want to use
one of our Bibles, it's on page 830, page 830.
In the passage we just had read to us,
there are three men who are dying,
and each of them speaks,
and we have something to learn from each of them.
And so here are my three points.
The first dying man misses the Redeemer
the first time and misses the Redeemer.
The second dying man finds the Redeemer,
and the third dying man is the Redeemer.
All right.
First.
The first dying man misses the Redeemer.
This is really easy to do.
He he makes two mistakes.
He listens to the wrong crowd,
and he looks for the wrong evidence.
When I say he listens to the wrong crowd,
this is what he says in verse 39.
Says one of the criminals who were hanged
railed at him, saying, are you not the Christ?
Save yourself and us.
This version says that he railed at Jesus.
Another version says that he, hurled insults at Jesus.
Now, he wasn't hurling insults around all willy nilly.
He wasn't insulting the soldiers who were crucify him or the crowd
that was watching.
He wasn't hurling insults at the other criminal.
It was all focused on Jesus.
And the reason is because
everybody was talking about Jesus and this is what they were saying.
This is verses 35 through 37,
it says, and the people stood by watching,
but the rulers scoffed at him, saying he saved others.
Let him save himself.
If he's the Christ of God, the Chosen one.
The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying,
if you're the King of the Jews, save yourself now
this is interesting because everyone was mocking Jesus.
The religious leaders were mocking him
and the the secular irreligious soldiers were also mocking him.
Everybody.
This is like finding an issue that Republicans and Democrats all agree on.
All right.
If you find a policy that all the Republicans and all the Democrats agree
on, it'd be very easy to agree with that policy.
Now, in that time, the religious leaders were mocking
Jesus because they were saying, if you're the Christ, if you're
the Messiah, the one who is sent to redeem, you wouldn't be hanging up.
You can't even save yourself, let alone save anyone else.
The cross didn't make sense to them.
And for the soldiers, they're looking at Jesus and saying, you.
You call yourself a king with power and authority.
If you were a king with power
and authority, you wouldn't be where you are right now.
It just didn't make sense to them.
Nowadays, a
secular person, irreligious person
will look at Jesus and the resurrection won't make sense to them.
They'll say, we are.
We are more, scientific.
We're not. We're not as gullible as they were back then.
We don't.
We know people don't rise from the dead.
And it doesn't make any sense that Jesus claims to be the only way to God.
It just doesn't make sense
for religious person.
They believe that being good is the way to get to God.
I've talked to people before and they say, let me get this straight.
You're saying that 70 can live a terrible life, do whatever they want,
and at the end of their lives, if they put their faith in Jesus,
then everything is forgiven.
Is that what you're telling me? It just didn't.
Doesn't make sense. Grace doesn't make sense to them.
For this guy, he was listening to the crowd,
and so he joined in and insulting and mocking Jesus.
In some ways, becoming a real Christian means
you have to be an independent thinker.
You gotta look at it yourself,
not listen to what everybody else
is saying.
That's the first mistake he makes.
The second mistake he makes is he looks for the wrong evidence.
And this is really easy to do.
What what he does.
He's in a desperate situation, right?
He says to Jesus, you want me to believe in you then?
Then get me down off the cross.
Then save me from this.
Answer, this request for me, and then I will follow you.
It's so easy to do that.
There are a lot of people that I've talked to that either
don't believe in Jesus or who have stopped believing in Jesus
because they're in a desperate situation, and they prayed a prayer
and Jesus did not answer that prayer, and that was the evidence
they were looking at.
And now they say they don't believe in Jesus.
But in
the Gospel of Matthew, there's a really interesting thing that happens.
Jesus has been healing people and teaching and doing all a bunch of Jesus stuff
and some religious leaders come up to Jesus and they say, Jesus, give us a sign.
What they're saying is, listen, we're going to give you a litmus test.
You do what we ask you to do, then we all
believe you are who you say you are.
And Jesus responds like this.
He says, only an evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign.
No sign will be given to you except this
the sign of Jonah.
Just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days.
So the Son of Man will be in the depths of the earth for three days.
You and Jesus say,
he said, I will give you everything.
I will give everyone the same evidence that I am the Redeemer.
And that's the resurrection.
Look for that.
Listen,
if you're here
and you have struggled with Jesus
because you prayed a prayer one
time of desperation
and you say, I pray.
I don't believe in Jesus because I prayed for my mom and she still died,
or I prayed for my child, or I prayed for my friend.
So I want to be very compassionate.
My heart breaks for you
and I don't know why Jesus didn't answer that prayer,
but I don't want to leave you there.
I want to tell you you.
You're looking at the wrong evidence.
Don't make that mistake.
Jesus has said, I will give you evidence to show
that I love you, to show that I am the Redeemer,
and that evidence
is the cross and the resurrection.
So if you're here and that's you, don't miss next week.
Don't miss next week.
All right.
So the first dying man, he misses the Redeemer
because he listens to the wrong crowd
and he looks for the wrong evidence.
The second dying man finds the Redeemer.
And just like the first dying man misses the Redeemer for two reasons.
The second dying man finds the Redeemer for two reasons.
And the first is that he he sees Jesus
as an end, not a means to an end.
And this is what I mean.
Sometimes it's easy to look at Jesus as somebody that you
you bring into your life to, to help you get what you want to get out of life.
Yeah.
To be the one that helps you achieve what you want to achieve, help
you have the family you want to have, help you have the life that you want to have.
Some of you can tell if you're using Jesus as a means to an end.
By the way you pray.
Now, I don't mean to say that every time you ask Jesus for something,
you're making him an end and not are, a means to an end.
Not the end itself, but let me just give you a shallow example.
You know, when I was in high school,
being a basketball player was really, really important to me.
I my identity was wrapped up with being a basketball player.
And I remember I never prayed more fervently
than when I was on the free throw line at a critical time.
And again,
I was just going, oh Jesus, please just give me this one.
Just, you know, because what I was saying is, Jesus,
I need you to preserve my identity in basketball.
Will you do that for me?
That was using him
as a means to an end.
Maybe the the better way you can figure out if that's what you're
doing with Jesus is how you respond when he doesn't answer your prayer.
Not what you pray for, but how you respond when he does.
Like that first
dying man, he says to Jesus, this is what I want you to do for me.
Get me, get me out of this trouble.
Give me the life that I want.
Then I'll believe in you.
But this second dying man.
He doesn't say that. He didn't even ask to get off the cross.
What he says to Jesus is Jesus.
I can deal with this trouble
as long as I can be with you.
Give me any life you want to give me.
Just stay with me.
Just be with me.
You see?
You see the difference in what he was doing.
He was saying to Jesus, I want you to be my life now.
Give me the life that I want to have.
That's the first thing
that the that the second dying man does.
The second thing that he does is he he admits what he deserves.
And this must have been really, really difficult, I think, because,
he was being crucified by Romans and,
he was being he was not a Roman,
I can tell you he was not a Roman citizen
because it was illegal to crucify a Roman citizen.
They considered it to debasing, to cruel,
to painful for a Roman citizen to endure.
So this guy was being crucified by a dominant culture.
And I tell you that it must have been difficult for him to just admit and say,
I'm getting what I deserve,
because this is what I know.
There's a victim inside of all of us.
There's a victim inside of me just waiting for something.
Like if I was that guy would be really difficult for me not to say.
Listen. Sure, sure.
I did something wrong.
But if I was a Roman citizen, I wouldn't be getting crucified.
This is crazy.
Why am I the one that's getting. Why?
Why can't I get treated like everybody else?
This is what I give me.
A sliver of injustice.
I'll be a little bit victimized.
Give me a lot of injustice.
Holy cow, it's on.
I'm also pretty good at rationalizing my own actions.
You might be to.
I'll give you a way that, you know, if you've ever started
a sentence by saying, I may not be perfect, but hey,
what you're saying is I.
I'm holding on to this little sliver to justify myself.
You know, Pastor Zach gave a sermon a few weeks ago.
We use the metaphor of justifying yourself like being a raft in a pool.
And as long as you're hanging on to the raft and all,
you can't have the Savior.
You have to let go of any sliver of just of self-justification and begin
to say, throw up your hand and say, now I need a Savior.
Any kind of justifying yourself,
you'll miss the Redeemer.
This guy says to Jesus.
This is what I deserve.
And what he's saying is,
I'm getting what I deserve.
Can I still be with you?
I'm getting what I deserve.
Do you still
want me?
Do you still want me?
And then the the final dying
man finally speaks.
Jesus finally says this
in the last verse of the passage, verse 43.
It says, And he said to him, truly I say to you,
today you will be with me in Paradise.
You know, it's easy to read that and just think, oh, that is wonderful.
What Jesus is telling him is that he's going to go to heaven, right?
Which that's true, but that's not the most wonderful thing that Jesus has said.
What Jesus says to him is the most wonderful thing
is this today you'll be with me.
You're with me.
And the reason that is so wonderful is that the night before,
Jesus prayed a prayer.
It's recorded in John chapter 17.
In that prayer, he's saying to God, I'm about to go to be glorified.
I'm about to go to the cross
so that
these the ones who follow me, might be with me.
And then you can love them with the same love
that you love me with.
It's incredible what he said,
what Jesus is saying to this
second dying man
is this I'm about to be glorified.
I'm about to be exalted.
I'm about to accomplish salvation,
and I can guarantee you this.
You will be with me because I'm doing because of
what I'm doing right here, right now.
The saying said, I want you to know
that you will be where I am.
You will never get what you deserve from God because I'm getting what you
deserve right now so you can get what I deserve, which is Paradise.
And the reason that Jesus can be so certain
of that is his confidence.
This is important not in the mercy of God,
but in the justice of God.
You know, I memorized a verse when I was a little kid,
but I don't think I understood it really until just a couple of years ago.
It's in first, John.
This is what it says.
First John one nine if we confess our sins,
he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
He says that he is faithful and just not faithful and merciful.
God wasn't saying to this dying man, you're going to be with me.
And when we get before God,
I will make a plea on your behalf for God to be merciful to you.
That's not what he's saying.
He said, you're going to be with me, which means, don't we?
When we come before God,
I will say to the all holy God,
I know your justice,
and I know that every sin must be paid for.
He's with me,
and I paid for his sin.
And I know because of your justice you would never demand
both of us pay for the same sin.
And I paid for all of his sin,
so he is forgiven.
He is set free.
He is rescued.
He is redeemed.
Do you see?
There are three men who are dying.
One dying man misses
the Redeemer because he he he's listening to the wrong crowd.
He's looking for the wrong evidence.
If that's you.
Do not miss the Redeemer, the second Redeemer.
Fine.
Or the second dying man finds the Redeemer
because he sees Jesus
as an end, not a means to an end, says Jesus.
Give me any kind of life you want to give me, as long as I can be with you.
Do you still want me?
And Jesus says,
I want you,
and you will be with me.
So amazing
is Jesus the Redeemer, who redeems absolutely,
completely, eternally,
and because of what he does on the cross
and then three days later, resurrects.
He says to each one of you,
today you can be with me,
be with him.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven, I come to you and I am.
I'm so grateful.
I'm grateful that every gospel writer
slows up
and takes the time to tell this story,
because this is the story that changes everything.
I pray for
every person here that those of us
who have put our trust in you will be renewed again
and just wonder at the price that you paid
so that we could be with you.
And I pray for those
who have struggled, who've looked for the wrong evidence. And
I pray that this might be a time
where they trust you
and find Jesus their Redeemer.
Thanks for giving us such a wonderful Savior.
We pray this in his name. Amen.