4 Days that Changed the World | The Turning Point | John 12:20-36 | Week 1

"

We are starting a new series today that we are calling "4 Days That Changed the World."  Sometimes a walk has a way of changing things.  I did a wedding yesterday --- those doors in the back of the worship center opened, and a bride walked down the aisle to be received by her groom.  Anecdotally, it was a 'Cook' marrying a 'Hunter.'  By the end of the wedding, it was two had become one.  Some walks change everything.  March 21, 1965:  Martin Luther King, Jr., and a number of his civil rights workers with him, left from the city of Selma, Alabama to march to Montgomery, to fight for the right for African-Americans to vote.  They'd been turned back two times already, but this time they had the backing of President Johnson.  He had given his support to the march.  Instead of having armed guards there to turn them back, they were there to protect the marchers as they embarked on a 54-mile walk.  When they got to Montgomery, Dr. King gave one of his most famous speeches.  It was summarized by the phrase "How Long, Not Long."  In that speech he said, "Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.  We are moving to the land of freedom."  On August 6, 1965, African-Americans were given the right to vote in this country.

Some marches change everything.  It was March 29, AD 33.  Jesus of Nazareth got on the back of a colt to ride into Jerusalem.  We call it 'The Triumphal Entry.'  It started the clock ticking on a week that has changed the world that we live in.  Maybe in more ways than we recognize, that week changed everything!  The reason you have Sundays off as part of your weekend?  It's because Jesus rose from the grave on a Sunday.  It used to be that followers of Christ, until Christianity was the religion in the Roman empire, would go to church before work, early in the morning, before the sun came up, to worship, then go to work.  Because Sunday was just like every other day in the week.  THIS changed everything!  We now have a weekend.  It changed more than that.  Over the next few messages, we're going to wrestle with these four days, these 96 hours that changed the world.  My hope is that over the next week, the Spirit of God invites you into this story to know it better, but maybe knowing IT better, we would be known.  That we might not just regurgitate it and the facts of what happened. We're going to wrestle with questions like:  Why did Jesus die?  Why did Jesus have to die?  Who killed Jesus?  Who did Jesus "pay off" for the debt of sin?  What was that all about?  Please come back.  We're going to wrestle with a new type of influence. . . .an influence of love.  We're going to talk about 'he descended to the dead' or 'he descended to hell.'  What does that mean?  On Easter morning, we're going to celebrate the fact that what Jesus does on Easter morning changes definitively the world we live in.  It's a march that changes everything...."