Restoration...Not Power

Summary:

The sermon “Restoration Not Power” emphasizes the importance of seeking restoration and unity over the pursuit of power and control. It draws on the example of Jesus, who sacrificed himself out of love rather than seeking dominance. The sermon encourages believers to practice self-love, engage in peacemaking, and exhibit divine hospitality by embracing diversity and sitting with others without seeking control. It also highlights the destructive nature of seeking power, both historically and in contemporary contexts, advocating instead for a life modeled after Christ’s humility and service   .

Transcript:

That is quite the story. I just whispered to Jonathan over there, that girl that did the dancing that went to her mom and said, Hey, what do you want? And said that girl's probably like 12 years old or very young, so I could not imagine, first of all, my daughter coming to me and then asking for somebody's head and then presenting it to me. I think it's not a great time in the history of the Kingdom of Israel and Judea and even the Roman Empire, but here we are. I mean, this is the real life power struggles that people want to hold on to and they want to gather by any means possible or keep by any means possible. I hope there is something that stuck out to you in that reading a word phrase, thought or idea, and if that did stick out to you, think about that as we're praying through this and speaking through these teachings that maybe there's more clarity that you can seek in that.

My name is Jeremy. I did forget to introduce myself and usually I do not get to preach two weeks in a row, but here I am and it's such a cool thing to be able to continue the story from last week into this week because it is just the second half or the next section of chapter six of Mark, which we looked at last week. And the first question that I had asked myself is, have you ever made a promise that you wish you had not made or ever asked, agreed to something that you immediately regretted or even down the line regretted? It could be something simple like, sure, I would love for you to bring the macaroni and cheese to the cookout knowing that they're not a very good macaroni and cheese maker. Or if you have ever had a spouse or somebody you live with leave on vacation and you say, I promise I'll get the whole house cleaned while you're gone.

I promise I'll do that before you're back. Or this may be just me, but I would love to wake up early on a Saturday morning to come to this event at seven o'clock in the morning. It'd be my favorite thing in the world to do, or I will totally tell the truth, ferry to make an extra stop. It's your house because she and I went to college together and we're old buddies and I'll make sure she comes back around to get you what you deserve in your compensation. Little lies, right? I mean, these are truths, promises that you make that probably don't have a grand impact in a lot of the world, or there could be larger promises you make like I promise to take on this responsibility at work and you're not prepared or able or capable to, or you make big promises like when you buy a house or you rent a house. I promise to pay this every month and in return you'll make sure I have a Place to live. You promise to love someone for the rest of Their life or to care for somebody for the rest of their life. You swear an oath to serve in the military that enters into a season of violence and killing you. Make a promise to Care For living things or not living things like land and pets and Other people or Children or spouses or your parents or extended family. You make these promises That Sometimes are really difficult and challenging to Keep or I promise to love the Lord God with all my heart, soul, and mind. That's pretty easy. It's easy To love God, But then Likewise, Love your neighbor As yourself. Very difficult.

Those are promises you mak  when you agree To follow the ways Of Jesus. I mean maybe even the promise of I promise to love myself so I can love other people is a very difficult Promise to make. These Are big promises That Have lasting consequences, and the reason we're talking about promises is because Herod Makes a big promise in the story that We just read. But before we get there, just a recap of lastweek, This is Jesus Is going around and healing people and he goes back to Nazareth and he can't do much there. He only heals a coupl Of people And then he sends out his disciples into the surrounding areas and gives them command to preach the good news, to tell people that the kingdom of God is near and they do that. And if it's not welcome, they're just supposed To Dust their feet off and move on to the next spot. And Jesus is kind of building a following for himself. So much so that people are starting to take notice. We talked last week about How He started with just a couple people and then he grew into a larger group and so much so that they're filling out rooms that then the religious leaders and the teachers of the law took notice and were kind of questioning him and challenging him and trying to get his family to hold him back to not keep doing what he was doing. They thought he was Crazy, But now Jesus Is showing up on the radar of the next Level. He's going up to now Herod Antipas Who is Kind of the king of that Little Region that he is in, and They open up this Scripture Here With kind of a guessing game of wh  Jesus is. Now, this happens all the time when we are fascinated by somebody, somebody who's making a big splash somewhere, especially If you watch Any news and something tragic happens immediately all the speculations start to happen of who a person is, where they're from, what's their name, what are they like, what was their history, what's their family like, All that stuff. We love to speculate about who people are.

And so this is no different. Jesus is out here healing people, driving out spirits, driving out demons. He's got this crowd that's starting to follow him and the guest's like, oh, John the Baptist, is it Elijah who's supposed to be coming back? Is it one of these prophets or judges that are supposed to be coming here to judge this nation? Who is it? But here, auntie Pass makes a declaration, I would guess, of fear, and he says, no, this is John the Baptist. He says in verse 16, but here had heard this. He said, John whom I beheaded has been raised from the dead. That's a very powerful statement of superstition, probably at his point or I mean great fear of a haunting of some sort because king, this king Herod did something that I don't think he was very proud of and he was regretful for and he feared that it was coming back to bite him in the butts.

King Herod, this king Herod, you might recognize the name King Herod, and I'm going to probably flip back and forth as best I can. I'm going to keep calling this guy Antipas, okay? Because King Herod the great is from Jesus's youth. Jesus, when he was born before he was born, the star, the Christmas story, the star appears in the sky and these people from the east come and they come to King Herod the great and they say, Hey, where is this new king of the Jews? And he's like, what are you talking about? Who are you to come here? I am the king here. I have this all figured out. I know what I'm doing, but tell me more about this. Tell me more about this king of the Jews that you guys have discovered that I need to know about so I can go worship him.
And this great story, we tell it every Christmas time about King Herd, the grape, well king herd, the grape had a couple of kids, well, not a couple. He had a bunch of kids from different people, and one of those people was King Herd, auntie Pass, or from now on Auntie Pass. And he is not the same, but he's a son. So he probably grew up in this environment of conspiracy, of fear of people overthrowing him because being a king back in the day is not like it is today. Kings a lot of times nowadays are ceremonial queens or ceremonial. They don't have a lot of power. Not a lot of people are trying to overthrow them. But back here and these days, if you could conquer the king, you got to be the king. And so king herd the great already was fearful of that.

There was angst and fear. So he and the Matthew story, the gospel story of Christmas time, couldn't find Jesus. So what did he do? He killed all the boys that were two years and younger in the Bethlehem area. So through fear and wanting to hold onto this power and to hold onto everything that he had chooses mass murder. So fear leads to violence, holding onto power through this violence, paranoia. That's what the word I was looking for. There's poor paranoia in the household of Herod. And so Herod, the great, the king that ruled during Jesus' birth has kids. We get Herod Antipas here.

He really here. We mentioned King Herod. Antipas is a king. I don't even think he was really a king. He liked to call himself a king, but he wasn't really necessarily a king. He only got one fourth of his father's land. Once his dad died, he got one fourth of the kingdom. He was known as a tetra, T-E-T-R-A-C HT R. Yeah, a big word for you today, which means one fourth. So he had one fourth of his father's kingdom. And really it wasn't even like he had total control of that area, which includes a Galilee. He was essentially an agent state of Rome. So Rome was really the big people in charge. So King Herod Antipas was very smart. He built stuff up. He got to rule this little kingdom, this little area as best he could, but he also was fearful of losing power and desire to keep it, especially since he was only given a fourth of what he thought he had.

And because King had the rate, had many sons, he was going to give the whole kingdom to two of them and they got killed. That's kind of what happens in war and stuff. They got killed and then he was going to give it to somebody else. But then auntie passed said, no, give it to me. So it was all this infighting until finally at the end he gets one forces as a kingdom. So he's already fearful because he doesn't have as much as he wanted or he thought he deserved or he needed. He was in competition with many of his brothers, some half brothers, some full brothers. And so he wanted to have the power, the ultimate say. And so he was married to this lady named Fa Fa, who is the daughter of a neighboring kingdom. And the reason I mention this is because these marriages were often arranged by the powers that be in order to broker trust and friendship and cooperation, and basically to avoid war, we'll marry these two families together and we'll bring great prosperity between both of them.

And it's not like the lovey-dovey stuff that we know today as marriage and just falling in love for the rest of your life. This is a contractual agreement, and they were married for 20 years. That's a long time to be in an arranged marriage. And it ended because he went to go visit his brother who was just living as a normal non ruling person, a civilian, and he fell in love with his brother's wife and his brother's wife happened to fall in love with him and he divorced her. He divorced his current wife, fa to marry Herods his brother's wife who also left her husband, and now it's messy. It's a whole messy relationship. It ended up costing. This is to show you kind of long-term effects. This ended up costing Antipas his life because his old father-in-law was not very happy that his son-in-law had divorced his daughter.

And so he ended up coming through and killing him a couple years later. But this is just again, another instance of holding onto power. This was an antipas idea of holding onto power. He was married so Rome could control the area next to what they already had. So power through coercion, through contracts, through treating people as objects is not an uncommon theme here. And so Auntie Pass was he ruled over a very important area where a lot of smart people came from. A lot of Jewish scholars came from this area. They ended up training a lot of people there. I think I had mentioned in a sermon a couple months ago that all the people that were in that Galilean area were well educated in the law and the rules and the rituals of Judaism. So when Jesus is asking people to follow him in this area, he's not asking just like dummies to come follow him.

He's asking smart people to come and follow him. And so Auntie pass rules over this place, and John the Baptist happens to be in this area. John the Baptist we know is related to Jesus, but most importantly, he is the crazy guy that lives in the wilderness that is baptizing people and asking them to repent for their sins and dunking 'em in water. And he makes the great proclamation that Jesus is coming, the one who comes after me is going to baptize in the Holy Spirit and I only baptize in water. He's proclaiming the way of Jesus. And this is from all the way back from before they were born, John the Baptist had essentially a prophecy, a prayer, a calling put on his life. So they thought that he's a really big deal. They didn't really know who Jesus was. King Herod feared Jesus.

Remember he killed all the little boys in that area because he feared something he didn't know yet. But Jesus, he wasn't really on the radar. Like John the Baptist was living out in the woods proclaiming the way of redemption was coming. And so he goes to Antipas and he says, Hey, what you're doing is not right. This marriage you have is not good. For two reasons. One odious was his niece. So there's the family aspect of it that's his niece not supposed to be really marrying within your family like that and it's evil because that was your brother's wife that you essentially stole from him. Odious was not happy that John the Baptist was proclaiming these things to Antipas and she conspired with him and got him put into jail. And so John the Baptist is in jail, and right after that, Jesus starts his ministry.

Just think that's a fascinating little tidbit. John the Baptist goes into jail and Jesus says, I'm going to call my first disciples and let's get to work. And so this is where we pick up here that Auntie passes, he knows what he did, has something to do with John the Baptist. And the holding onto power has something to do with these feelings. He's feeling this feeling of somebody's coming after me, somebody with great power is in my kingdom. I don't really know what's going on. I just know it's something special and I should worry about it. And I forgot to mention that one of the reasons they put John the Baptist in jail was because he was afraid and HEROs was a little bit afraid that he was going to cause an uprising. John the Baptist had a lot of sway. He was a prophet.
He proclaimed things. People believed him. He was trustworthy. And so a large Jewish population in his kingdom is being influenced by a man who's saying, this person, the ruler we have here is wrong. And what he's doing is unethical and bad. He's like, I can't have that. People are going to get upset. They're going to start rebelling and they're not going to trust me, so let's put 'em in jail. And so here's where we get to in this scripture starting at 16, but when Herod heard this, he said, John whom I beheaded has been raised from the dead, and here's where a flashback starts. So we can see how bad his transgression of holding onto power played out for Herod himself had given orders to have John arrested and he had him bound and put in prison. He did this because of Herods his brother, Philip's wife whom he had married for.

John had been saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. So Herods nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him, but she was not able to because Herod feared John and protected him knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When heard, heard John, he was greatly puzzled. Yet he liked to listen to him. And I just think that's a fascinating verse right there because he feared greatly the influence of John the Baptist. He feared him because he knew that he was an influential man. He knew that what he was saying affected people. It puzzled him greatly. But the truth was interesting to him. He just liked to listen to John the Baptist. So he already knew even in his mind that killing this man was going to be a big deal. So he didn't do it maybe partly for his own fascination, and I think Auntie Pass kind of, he enjoyed having people that were interested him. And so we'll talk about that when he has Jesus crucified. But okay, so pick him back up.

Harod heard John. He was greatly puzzled, yet he likes to listen to in verse 21, finally, the opportune time came on his birthday. Herod gave a banquet for high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. When the daughter of Harus came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests. The king said to the girl, ask me for anything you want and I'll give it to you. And he promised her with an oath, whatever you ask, I will give you up to half my kingdom. She went out and asked her mother, what shall I ask for?

And the mother, there's no dialogue in between. She quickly answers the head of John the Baptist, and once the girl hurried in to the king with the request, I want you to give me right now, the head of John the Baptist on a platter, the king was greatly distressed because of his oath and his dinner guests. He did not want to refuse her, so he immediately sent an executioner with others to bring John's head. The men went beheaded John in the prison and brought back his head on a platter. He presented it to the girl and she gave it to her mother. On hearing of this, John's disciples came and took his body and laid it in a tomb. There was no hesitation from the mother of this young girl to have somebody killed with the power of the kingdom, the power of the state in order to preserve her relationship and in order to preserve order.

And I mean quite selfishly just because she didn't like what he had to say. And I just think it's a fascinating thing that she had all this power so fast and no hesitation. And it was antipas who had the hesitation of what was right and what was wrong. And in his mind, Antipas could not refuse. He couldn't refuse this thing that he did not want to do, that he felt sorry for of killing John the Baptist because he foolishly made this promise, but then he foolishly made an oath to back it up. He put a guarantee on it and then he did it in front of all these people that he had to have listened to him and respect him, the rich, the military leaders, the elite of his little fiefdom. He could not back down because of this promise he made like his father heard the great was so set on preserving his power that he was willing to use his power to kill, to kill people who were innocent.

John the Baptist. All he did was speak truth. He killed innocent people because he needed and felt like he had to hold on to power. Like I said earlier, he already thought John the Baptist, he already had him locked up because he was fearful that his condemnation would lead to an uprising of sorts amongst that large Jewish and smart Jewish constituency. And the thing is Auntie Pass was raised Jewish. I was looking at this Herod the Great, his family had converted to Judaism and he followed the Jewish rituals as best as he could, and he was kind of wishy-washy. He used it when it was beneficial to him and he ignored it when it was not Auntie Pass even more so he upheld certain things. It seems like he didn't put his image on a coin because that was against Jewish law. But I mean he divorced his wife without consulting anybody. He picked and chose which parts of the religion to follow.
I think to me, it reminded me of looking around our world today and the Christians that pick and choose different aspects to follow when it best suits them in order to stay in power and to stay in control. So he knew what he did was wrong. He knew that there was power in John the Baptist name. He just didn't know that he killed the wrong man because John the Baptist, while the Proclaimer and going forward was influential, what he should have been worried about was Jesus. But holding onto the power, holding onto power for the sake of power is contrary to the path of Christ. And Matthew, I'm going to turn to Matthew. I don't have it up on the screen, but I'll read it to you. Matthew chapter 20 is a very good story about people seeking power simply to have the power when it was going to be influential and important for them.

This is Matthew chapter 20, verses 25 through 28. Where we're at here is Jesus predicts his death for a third time in this part of this gospel. And then this mother, the mother of Zedi sons came to Jesus with her sons and kneeling down after favor of Jesus. She says, what is it do you want? And she said, grant, that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right hand and the other at your left make my sons be in the positions and seats of power. And Jesus responds, you don't know what you're asking. And I just said to them, you will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit in my right or left is not for me to grant these places belong to those whom they have been prepared for by my father. And so when the 10 other disciples heard about this request, they were very upset.
And so he calls 'em all together and this is Jesus's teaching about what it means to follow him. You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their high officials exercise authority over them, but not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be your slave. Just as a son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many holding on to power the pursuit of power and glory is not the way of Jesus because that's not what Jesus himself did. Jesus went to the cross in an act of love and that is how he showed leadership. That's how he influenced so many people because it wasn't done out of self-preservation or for glorification of Jesus, the human as going to be the next ruler of Roman Israel, but as God who loves his creation so very much, and unlike here, the Great or Antipas or Harus or Caesar Augustus, who's the one who kind of put all this into place as the leader of Rome, the religious leaders who used their people as things to be manipulated or bartered or even killed to maintain power, Jesus offered his life for others.

One of the most famous passages in all of scripture is John three 16, and I'm sure most of you can just recite it from memory, but I'm going to read it and I'm going to include probably my favorite verse in the whole Bible, which is John three 17, and this is what it says. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Jesus was not in the business of using violence and hate to influence others. Jesus came in a mission of love to call people back to the kingdom of God. I think this story is so powerful in today's world because everyone, this is a big brush I'm painting with, but everyone is seeking power and the best way for them to get it is to follow blindly into the jaws of destruction and into the jaws of the world.
And it's easier and easier to do. We don't think like, oh, I'm going to try to be the most influential person I'm going to take over the world. We seek influence and power and control in the smallest aspects of our lives. If you have social media and you post something online, you're trying to show how great you have it all together, little things like that is even difficult to root out. I mean, I think of the allegiances we have made as a nation to protect one another through the promise of power and violence and might think about all the politicians who seek to divide us through inflamed rhetoric which makes regular people begin to resent one another only for them to offer no solutions of unity or coming together. And then when the approval rates of Congress are at all time lows, we don't change anything because it can't be the people that we voted in are the bad ones.

We think about the people who abuse their positions of authority to hide and cover up crimes against children. We think of those with power who routinely harass people to a point where there are mass protest and subsequent violent riots. We think of Christians who spew hate and condemnation in all in the name of asserting their superiority over others and give your coworkers who throw anyone and everyone under the bus just to get a leg up in corporate America and on and on and on. And it's not just other people. I think about the times where I get defensive and lash out because I feel like I am being attacked. I think about the times where I label people as other and find ways to keep them out of the us and out of the kingdom of God intentionally or even unintentionally. We all like to have control in some form or fashion, but the question I have to ask and I ask myself is that desire for control hurting other people.

I understand, don't get me wrong, that laying down your life and submitting to the ways of Jesus is a very difficult thing to do. It's hard. It led Jesus to death. It led Jesus to the cross. Now we know that Jesus conquered death and has risen from the grave, and there's this eternal promise or this promise of eternal worshiping of the creator of the universe in which the new life. But right now, it's hard. It is hard to follow in the ways of Jesus sometimes because we have to give up a lot of control and a lot of power and a lot of influence that we think we have in the name of allowing Gods to have the influence of our lives and ultimately the world around us. So what do we do? I think we seek restoration, not power as the pursuit of power often leads to violence.

We seek restoration of ourselves. First, you have to love yourself, and then we seek restoration of others through the mission of peacemaking or calling people into the fullness of God. We show divine hospitality by sitting at the tables of others. There's kids back there talking about hospitality and how we can welcome people into our spaces and be great hosts, and that's wonderful. And the next step is you have to learn to be a good guest and sit in the presence of other people where you have no control and there's no power. You just get to sit there and enjoy the moment and be with another creation of God. We see beauty. We try, I hope to see the beauty and the diversity of creation. Oftentimes we use what is different about us to create some arbitrary line in the sand that says, we're different enough that I can treat you poorly.

And so this past couple months ago, I went to Southern California as one of my classes and part of one of the days we went to Tijuana and a big part of this class is hospitality and peacemaking and the other. And so we went across the border and we met with a church leader over there, and part of it was just exposure to a different culture, but understanding kind of the truth of what's happening in that area and just to be in the presence of other people. And so I took some pictures. I put 'em up here on the screen. You can just scroll through. That is on the American side. You can see this big swath of land. There's like nothing there. There's like a park, but nobody's allowed to go there anymore. And on the other side you can kind of see the fence in the distance, but there's a bull fighting ring, which is not a bull fighting ring anymore, and then a small island in the back.

Next picture is the wall that extends into the ocean about 50 feet, so that's on the Mexico side, so it goes out and you can swim around it I guess, but it's very, very dangerous and if you get around, you're going to get picked up. Anyways, the next picture is the wall from the Mexican side and there's a park right there and there's kids playing and running around. It's beautifully decorated. There's some pictures I can't put up there because there's bad words and pictures and stuff because they have protests about things that we have protests against here, but this is fun to be in a park amongst other people. The next picture is the lady on the right is in my cohort. She's a pastor in New York, and the guy on the left is the ministry leader we met there. He shared testimony and preached in Spanish out there and she translated into English, and that has a very cruel thing to see.

The next picture is that thing in the back is a border marker that marks the border of Mexico and the USA. And right in front of that, we set up a space to take communion as a group of people, as classmates, as a cohort, but then also other people who came to just listen to the story. And the next picture is those are the hands on the right of somebody that just came up to listen. Nobody knew him and he's one of three or four that came just to take communion after hearing these words, and I think as I reflect on that time as I was driving around, we asked how did this impact you? How did going over the border impact you driving around and what I shared was driving through different parts of Tijuana, which is this huge city that is divided by 30 foot walls, sometimes double layered, huge swaths of land border patrol agents.

It looked like once you're past that, it looked like driving through different parts of Dallas, like there was no difference in my mind driving around the bus and what I was thinking is how arbitrary this wall was, how many millions and hundreds of million dollars we spent in this wall. When you're on the ground interacting with people and sharing the love of Jesus and taking communion together, it's all the same. The people that were there were no different than I was except they spoke primarily Spanish and they lived in Mexico. There was no superiority. It was humbling, but it was it very frustrating the process to get over there just to go and commune with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And so when we see the difference in other people and we don't see that as something to be brought down or torn apart, we really get to start to see the beauty in the creation of God.

I have this quote from a book that I'll put up there, a book by John Kins and Jerry Wigger. They write this, when God created diversity was inevitable, we see diversity etched into the created order and plants and animals, the four seasons and the unique personalities and fingerprints of humanity. Creation was and is saturated in diversity and God called it good. Thus, conflicts doesn't happen because of diversity. There must be something more and there is something more. It is the quest for power and the pursuit of dominance for our own personal glorification and not kingdom peacemaking.

Auntie PAs could have said he was the leader at the time. He could have said, no, I'm not going to execute John the Baptist, or No, I'm not going to arrest John the Baptist. He had the power. Instead, he chose violence and confinement and wielding his power to hold somebody else down. King Herod had the power, the great king, Herod the Great had the power not to execute. All the boys who were two years and younger, Antipas had the power when Jesus was coming to be crucified. Pontius Pilate, I have no reason to execute this man. And NPA says, well, these people that I'm leading, they want him to be executed. He called Jesus in front of him and said, Hey, do some of those cool miracles he's been doing around here. And he wasn't. He's not a clown. I mean, he didn't do that.

And so that made him mad because he did not play the part that Antipas wanted him to, and so much so that it actually this Jesus in his not doing anything and not performing in the way they wanted him to, caused conscious Pilate and antipas to become friends. How about that? Two people who were diabolically opposed because of power struggle became friends over somebody who was seeking truth and love and preaching the goodness of God as it was there. Now I say, how can we exploit the differences in one another and order to get an upper edge in this world? To me, that is a sign of the antichrist to seek division, to conquer others is totally against the way of Christ. Christ draws people in. The Holy Spirit is going before us to work in the world. God is nowhere or God is everywhere despite us being there or not.

So the Spirit goes before us and God's presence is present. And so what in the world is our witness when we seek to divide one another and use any grace that has been given to us just to withhold it from others? Thanks God for the grace. Thank you Jesus for dying for my sins. That's good enough for me. I don't want anybody else to have it. Thanks. What in the world? What does that say to the rest of the world? It says, we have something really good. We have the power. Now we have the space that you can come into or maybe we'll kick you out of it if we don't like you enough, but don't be like those seeking power to rule the world. Seek the wisdom and leadership of the Holy Spirit so we look more and more and more like Christ every single day, that the fruit of the spirit would manifest itself in our lives so that we look like good representatives of Jesus Christ in our world, seeking love to draw people in towards God and not to separate and divide in the name of God.

One of the practices we do at Journey to remember that and to I hope humble ourselves is we come to the table of communion, the Lord's supper. Jesus, on the night he was betrayed where somebody chose violence and money and power over the radical message of Jesus. He stood up and he broke bread and he gave things, said, this is my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Then after supper, he took the cup and he said, this cup is a new covenant in my blood. Shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Whenever you do this, you proclaim my name until I come back again. That was on the night that he was betrayed, that he offered this great feast and thanksgiving and selfless service to invite other people in. So when we come to the table, I hope you recognize that. I hope that you appreciate that this was passed down for generations and generation and is an act of surrender because Jesus surrendered his life with the cross for us