Introduction:
We Choose Barabbas Because (Matthew 27:15-23):
- We are too Self-centered (Matt 27:17-18).
- We are too willing to Listen to others (Matt 27:19-20).
- We are too eager to Worship idols .
John 19:15 - "They cried out, Away with him, away with him, crucify him! Pilate said to them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar."
How Do We Stop Choosing Barabbas?
Jeremiah 29:13 - "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart."
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
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All right.
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Thanks for that introduction, Andrew.
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Appreciate that, bud.
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Before we get started, I just want to pull the curtain back a little bit as to what goes in to the four of us getting up here during July.
00:14-00:24
So we start back in January, and once a month we get together and we meet, and we try to -- Jeff shows us how to break down a passage, how to figure out what it's talking about.
00:24-00:25
We do outlines.
00:25-01:03
We go through different things every week, and then we rehearse, and then finally in we get up and do this. So I've been working on this passage for six months since January, okay? And I feel like God's really been taking me through different paths through this message, really trying to narrow it down to present it to you and give God's Word to you accurately. For six months that's been going on. And then Darren, big Darren, that sings up here, sitting in his living room one day, God reveals the same thing that took six months to reveal to me, revealed to him in five minutes.
01:04-01:05
And he put it on Facebook.
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So I just took Darren's post and printed it out, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
01:15-01:17
All right, are you guys ready to hear what God revealed to me?
01:18-01:19
All right, let's pray before we do that.
01:20-01:22
Father, I thank you for this day.
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I thank you for this opportunity to be here.
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God, I'm humbled.
01:29-01:31
Father, give me the words to say.
01:32-01:34
Let them not be my words, but your words.
01:36-01:39
God, please help this to touch each and every person here as it has touched me.
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In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
01:46-01:53
So early on in Sarah and I's marriage, we had decided that we got to a point where we wanted to buy a new car.
01:54-01:56
It knew to us it was going to be used.
01:56-01:57
We couldn't afford a new car.
01:59-02:01
But we had our checklist of things we wanted.
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You know, the main three things we wanted was low miles, fully loaded, and in the right price.
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And we had a couple other things.
02:12-02:16
But to be honest, what we wanted was a car that everybody would turn their heads and look at.
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When we pulled into church on Sundays, we wanted everybody to go, wow, look at that.
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Because that's why you go to church.
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(audience laughing)
02:26-02:27
Amen, right?
02:30-02:30
So we were all excited.
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I think we'd been married maybe a year or two at the time.
02:34-02:36
So we're looking online, we would go to dealerships, whatnot.
02:38-02:47
So this one time we came upon an ad and it was if God had taken our prayers to him 'cause we'd asked him to give us that perfect flashy car.
02:48-02:51
And it was as if he had dropped it in our laps.
02:52-02:57
And we're looking one night on a very reputable website where no scams ever happen, Craigslist.
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So this car comes up, two years old, very low miles, fully loaded for $3,000.
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Boom, deal of a lifetime.
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And they were willing to ship for free.
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It's perfect.
03:19-03:26
It was if God perfectly made that ad for us or some 12-year-old with Photoshop in his mom's basement.
03:29-03:30
But that was our car.
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We wanted it.
03:31-03:37
And everybody around us is going, "Guys, you do know this is completely fake, right?" "No, no, no.
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This is the car for us.
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This is the car we want.
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This is ours.
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God made it for us." And everybody's going, "Guys, pay attention.
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This is not real." We had convinced ourselves that everybody just didn't want us to have a deal of a lifetime.
03:54-03:56
They were jealous of this awesome car we were going to get.
03:59-04:03
I'm not going to lie, we came embarrassingly close to pulling the trigger on that.
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Luckily for us, we didn't.
04:08-04:14
But deep down inside, Sarah and I knew that choice was wrong, but we wanted to do it anyway.
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We intentionally were making the wrong choice.
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Why?
04:17-04:44
remember what we wanted to do, probably because we were stubborn and we wanted to prove that at 22 years old we knew what we were doing. But we'll do that, right? We'll do that in a lot of areas in our life. We'll intentionally make the wrong choice, even when we know it's wrong. We'll do it anyway. Why? It's for always a myriad of reasons. But we'll do it. If you're honest with me, there's been a time in your life that you've done that.
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The passage we're going to go over today is about a choice that was made almost 2,000 years ago.
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And the people that made that choice intentionally made the wrong choice.
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And even though that was made all those years ago, we're still making that same choice today.
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So let's look at this.
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We're in Matthew 27, verses 15 through 23.
05:16-05:23
And just to set the scene for a little bit, we're kind of stepping right into the middle of the road where Jesus is going to the cross.
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He's been arrested, people have questioned Him, and we're picking it up right where Pilate is talking to the crowd.
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And at this time, this is the Roman Empire that we all learned about in the history books.
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They had conquered a lot of the world, and in that, Israel was under that.
05:43-05:55
And so the Israel leaders, the Jewish leaders, the elders, the spiritual leaders of the Jews, they had a very corrupt relationship with the government, or with the Roman government.
05:56-06:02
So there was all kinds of behind locked doors deals going on and things like that.
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But it's important that you understand that as we go through this.
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So let's pick it up in verse 15.
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"Now at the feast, the governor was custom to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. And they had this notorious prisoner called Barabbas. Let's just pause right there for one second. So this guy Barabbas, the best way I can describe this guy is a terrorist.
06:29-06:48
He's an anarchist. We all know what that's like right now. We see that going on in our own country. But he's a terrorist. That's not something I really have to explain to a lot of people. He's a bad guy and both sides needed this guy removed. Both the Jewish people and the Roman people. He caused problems across the board.
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So that's who Barabbas is. Let's pick it up in 17. So when they gathered Pilate said to them, "Whom do you want me to release for you? Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ, for he knew it was out of envy that they had delivered him up.
07:08-07:25
Besides, while Pilate was sitting on his judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, "Have nothing to do with this righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream." Now the chief priests and elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.
07:26-07:31
The governor again said to them, "Which of these two do you want me to release to you?
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And they said, "Barabbas." Pilate said to them, "Then what shall I do with Jesus, who is Christ?" And they all said, "Let him be crucified." And he said, "Why?
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What evil has he done?" But they shouted all the more, almost a riot type.
07:51-08:01
"Let him be crucified." Church, there's a lot of heavy content in this passage.
08:02-08:08
But I want to focus on the choice that was made by the crowd and the Jewish leaders.
08:11-08:17
And as I was studying this, I tried to put myself in the shoes of different characters in this passage.
08:17-08:20
And one that I kept kind of focusing on was Pilate.
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Pilate's this arrogant guy.
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He thought he was big stuff.
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And if you asked him, he would have told you he was big stuff.
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And he needed a win.
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Because if we read earlier, he had done some pretty bad stuff to the Jewish people, and he needed this win.
08:39-08:40
So this kind of fell into his lap.
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Here's this guy Barabbas that was already arrested.
08:43-08:46
He was going to destroy Barabbas one way or the other.
08:47-08:51
But then he had this guy Jesus that the Jewish leadership didn't really like.
08:53-08:55
but he was going to give them a prisoner.
08:56-09:06
And I kind of picture him almost coming out, you know, thinking the crowd's cheering for him, and really not, you know, and kind of throwing up like, "Hey, you guys want me to release a prisoner?
09:06-09:14
Here's this guy that none of us like." Or you can have Jesus that you guys just don't like as a person.
09:14-09:15
He hasn't done anything, you just don't like him.
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And I kind of picture him almost turning his back and walking away.
09:19-09:26
And when they said Barabbas, him almost stopping in his tracks and being like, "What'd you just say to me? Barabbas?
09:28-10:03
Do you...terrorist Barabbas? You want him?" But Jesus hasn't done anything. He even says that. He says, "Why? What evil has he done?" And they ignored it and just said, "Crucify him. Give us Jesus." And we see later, not to be a spoiler alert, but he gave them Jesus and washed his hands and said, "Whatever, I don't want to be a part of this." But I want to focus on the choice that they made.
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They chose Barabbas over Jesus.
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And when I've read this before, I've always kind of sat there and go, "How in the world did they pick Barabbas?" this terrorist, this evil person that had murdered people, that was so disruptive in everything.
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How did they choose for rabbits?
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And they were supposed to, they just didn't like Jesus, and they should have known who he was as the spiritual leaders.
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They should have known that prophecy was being fulfilled, and they didn't care.
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They wanted him out of their life because they didn't like what he was saying.
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He was calling them out for their hypocrisy.
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He didn't, they did not like that.
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And the scripture tells us three reasons that they chose Barabbas.
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And those church are the same three reasons that we continue to choose Barabbas.
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You might say, Ryan, we don't, we're not choosing Barabbas.
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That happened 2000 years ago.
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Now here's the thing, and this is what God revealed to me, and when he revealed this to me, this entire passage changed.
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'Cause Barabbas represents sin.
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And when you see Barabbas that way, if you would look into your own life, you see that we choose sin every day over Jesus.
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So yes, we choose Barabbas.
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We continually choose Barabbas for the exact same reasons the Jews did.
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So let's look at those three reasons.
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We're going to look at those, and at the end, I'm going to offer a solution how to stop choosing Barabbas.
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Let's go to verse 18.
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We choose Barabbas because we are too self-centered.
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In verse 18, actually, let's back up to 17.
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"So when they gathered, Pilate said to them, 'Whom do you want me to release to you, Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ?' For he knew it was out of envy that they had delivered him up." Be honest with me again.
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Have you ever made a choice because of jealousy, because of envy, because of self-centeredness.
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We live in this world that focuses on me, me, me, me.
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Social media is all about me.
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We put our family photos up on Facebook, you know, white shirt, khaki shorts, look at us on the beach.
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I know my family and I went to the beach twice, but we didn't dress like that.
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And there's nothing wrong with putting pictures on Facebook.
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That's not what I'm saying.
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But you get my point, everything's focused on me.
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And when it's not focused on me, I get jealous and I'll do everything to get myself back at the center of focus.
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We do that at work.
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Why is that guy getting a promotion and I'm not?
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I work so much harder than that person.
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I'm so much better at my job and they got a promotion and I didn't.
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Or I don't get treated fair enough, so I'm gonna leave and go to another job where the grass is greener.
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and I never take time to focus on what Jesus wants me to do.
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We'll do that in our own marriages.
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Husbands, we'll look at other wives and go, why doesn't my wife treat me like that?
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Wives will do the same thing.
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That wife's husband treats her like a princess.
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Why doesn't my husband treat me that way?
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So you know what?
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I'm gonna get out of this marriage and I'm gonna go find a new one.
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Why am I going through this hard time and my fellow Christian is not going through this hard time?
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I'll remove myself from that and I'll get mine.
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So my life is better.
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And we do that so many times because it's all about me.
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And I would rather listen and try to dictate the score and dictate what I'm gonna do rather than listen to Jesus and follow his path.
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Church, if we would follow Jesus' path that he has laid out for us, the blessing on the other side of that is gonna be so much greater than anything we can imagine.
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But no, we wanna dictate what happens.
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And maybe Jesus has you in that difficult position because he's trying to show you something.
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He has you going through that difficult relationship because of the blessing he has on the other side that you won't get if you don't follow his path.
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His blessings are always better.
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But envy, jealousy, and self-centeredness stop those blessings from happening and they destroy our relationship with Jesus.
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Let's go back to the text.
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Point number two, we choose Barabbas because we are too willing to listen to others.
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Verse 19 and 20 are going to show us two examples of this.
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Verse 19, "Besides, while he was sitting on his judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, 'Have nothing to do with this righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.'" Then in verse 20, "Now the chief priests and elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus." Husbands, wives, we look at verse 19.
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We see Pilate's wife putting peer pressure on him.
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Have you ever done that? Husbands?
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Ever made a decision because your wife wanted it?
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Don't send me emails about that.
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Why? Our husbands, have we ever done that?
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Or wives, have you ever done that?
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Made a decision just because your husband wanted it and never took time to listen to what God had you to say.
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Peer pressure is not something I have to explain in great lengths.
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We see peer pressure from the first day of grade school to the day we go in the grave.
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There is peer pressure all of us.
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And we see that in 19 and 20.
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We see it happening in the home, and then we see it happening in public settings.
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Peer pressure right now is happening so much in our country.
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Every day, the media is telling, "Believe this or you're this." No, no, no, believe this or you're this.
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If you don't believe this, that automatically makes you this.
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And if you don't, well, then I just hate you.
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I want nothing to do with you.
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You can't have this unless you admit to this.
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Peer pressure is everywhere.
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And oftentimes we'll go along with it.
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Why?
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Because we're more afraid of our fellow human beings than we are of being out of perfect harmony with Jesus Christ.
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Our relationship with Jesus should be so strong and so good, it doesn't matter what people are telling us.
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That we should just go, "Listen, whatever you do to me, I don't care because it's far less than me being out of perfect harmony with my Lord and Savior." You might say, "You don't understand.
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I get it at home, I get it at work, I get it everywhere you go." I may not understand, but Jesus does.
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And he proved it as he was standing there in this crowd, is going, "Change what you say or we're going to murder you." We see that in the previous chapter.
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And God just stood there and said, "I will not, because my father is telling me I must do this.
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And what you're telling me to do is a direct violation to what my father wants me to do.
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And I cannot do that.
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I cannot go against my father.
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And he did.
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He stood there and eventually was murdered for us.
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But oftentimes, oftentimes we're so afraid of our human race, we're more afraid of our human race than disappointing God.
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And we'll choose to go with peer pressure because it's easy.
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And that's so shameful.
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So shameful for us.
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Let's go to the third point.
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And for this, I'm actually going to jump over to John 19.15.
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And John's telling the exact same story that Matthew's telling us.
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But the way that John worded it is so applicable for this third point that I wanted to use it.
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So John 19, 15, it's gonna be on the screen.
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They cried out, the crowd, they cried out, away with him, away with him, crucify him.
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Pilate said to them, shall I crucify your king?
20:00-20:05
And the chief priest answered, we have no king but Caesar.
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Wow. Church, understand what they're saying. The Jewish people hated Caesar.
20:16-20:30
They hated him. And they said, "I'd rather put Caesar in front of Jesus." My sworn enemy, the person I hate, I will put in front of Jesus.
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In church, that is idolatry.
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Anything that you put in front of Jesus that is more of a priority in your life than Jesus, that's an idol.
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So my third point, we follow or we choose Barabbas because we are too eager to worship idols.
20:54-21:08
And oftentimes when we think of idols, we think of these little golden statues or a Buddha type, or we think addiction or greed, substance abuse, pornography.
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But let me tell you a story about an idol that I had in my life and to be honest I didn't really even know I had it.
21:20-21:33
So we have, Sarah and I have three children. We have our oldest child is a girl, our youngest child is a girl and right in the middle is my poor son. He's five, he's six years old now.
21:36-22:13
Full of life, full of energy. But when, his name's Milo. When Milo was three years old, I'm sorry, three months old, he went into the hospital with a respiratory virus. No, it wasn't coronavirus. It was RSV. And we had actually gone through this a year before with my oldest daughter. She had it. She was in the hospital for a few days and she was released. Everything was fine. But with Milo, he went in and we expected to be in there for a few days. Three weeks later, we still weren't out of the hospital.
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And it was a roller coaster of emotions going through that.
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Some of you experienced that with us when it went through.
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I know Jeff was there, Murph, you were there.
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And there was times where it was, "Hey, you might go home tomorrow.
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Hey, Milo might never leave the hospital.
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Hey, we got it figured out.
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We have no idea what's going on." And just this roller coaster of never knowing what was going to happen to my son, my boy.
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And I remember one day, in one of the just lowest points that we were, going to work the one day, working on a job site, and I had, I remember having my sunglasses on and just tears flowing down my face, just crying out to God, going, "God, don't take my son from me.
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I don't care what else you do, don't take my son from me." And in this moment of just deep, deep prayer, and just blocking all the noise out, I remember hearing a voice going, "Ryan, that's not your son, that's mine." And having to break down and say, "Father, if you take my boy, I'm okay with it, and I'll praise you." I had turned Milo into an idol.
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You may say, "Ryan, that's just you being a dad, loving your kid." No, because what I told God was, "God, I'll follow you anywhere, but not to my son's grave.
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You can do anything to me.
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I will do anything for you.
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Don't you take my family." My family became more important to me than anything else.
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And here's the truth, my wife of 13 years, my beautiful kids, they haven't done for me, but my Lord and Savior did.
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Not even close.
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My family was my idol.
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And until I got them behind Jesus Christ, my relationship wasn't going to go any further.
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We were always going to be limited because Sarah, Zoe, Milo, and Avery were more important to me than Jesus Christ.
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An idol is anything that is your number one priority over Jesus Christ.
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And you have to get to the point where either A, you have to remove that idol completely from your life, or in my case, I can't remove my family, but I have to reprioritize where they are in my life.
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Because Jesus will not thrive in my life if he's not the most important person to me.
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But oftentimes, we as Christians are more willing to put anything in front of Jesus, including Barabbas.
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And I know these three points have been a lot of bam, bam, bam.
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We're bad people.
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You know, we're too self-centered.
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We fall to peer pressure.
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We have idols in our lives.
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But before we close, I want to offer you a solution.
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How do we stop choosing Barabbas?
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Or that answer is found in Jeremiah 29, 13.
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Jesus is talking and he says, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
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Come at me with everything you have.
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Make me the number one priority in your life.
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Get in the gospel.
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Search for me.
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Find me.
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He's not hiding.
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All he's doing is come after me with everything you have.
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If you don't go to church here, that's okay.
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Understand that for the past year, we have been going through a study in the gospel of John that is entitled "Knowing Jesus." Not with your head, with your heart.
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the heart for Jesus, that He is everything to us.
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And my relationship with Jesus is the most important thing.
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But what we want to do oftentimes as Christians is we want to do two things with Jesus.
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Either we make Him this unattainable, mythical, magical creature that's unapproachable, and we can never go to it, so why even try?
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Why even try?
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Or we make him this grandfatherly type thing, sitting in a rocking chair.
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He's, you know, "Oh, shucks," kind of person.
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By the way, if I hear one more person say, "The big man upstairs," I'm going to open hand slap him.
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There needs to be respect for Jesus, for God.
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He's not this grandfatherly person.
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He's not this mythical, magical creature.
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He's our Father that sent His Son and put Him in the hands people he created to be tortured and mutilated for us so that we could spend eternity with God.
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Because if that doesn't happen, the second we step into holiness, if Jesus' death hadn't made us holy, when we step into heaven, we're destroyed because God can't be around holiness.
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And the only way that happens is Jesus Christ coming to this earth and dying.
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And God was willing to do what I wasn't willing to do.
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And he went to his son's grave.
28:24-28:29
He watched his son get mutilated by the very clay that he made.
28:32-28:56
And he said, "Here, do what you will with him, because it's the only way you're going to get to me." If we truly, truly know who God is and have a real relationship with God, it becomes increasingly more difficult to choose anything but Jesus.
28:56-29:01
So when the two choices are put in front of us, we have Jesus or Barabbas, it's just, "Bam, get out of here.
29:01-29:07
I don't need Barabbas because I'm automatically going to choose Jesus because I've put my self-centeredness aside.
29:08-29:12
I'm done listening to peer pressure and Jesus is number one in my life.
29:16-29:21
But until we get to that point, we will continue to choose Barabbas.
29:22-29:24
We will continue to choose sin.
29:28-29:37
When we became children of God, we were given the ability, through Jesus Christ, to say no to sin.
29:40-29:43
We just have to not choose Barabbas and choose Jesus.
29:46-29:54
So church, leaving here today, who will you choose from now on?
29:56-29:57
Jesus or Barabbas?
29:59-29:59
Let's pray.
30:02-30:04
Father, I thank You for this day.
30:05-30:08
Thank you for this opportunity to stand up here today.
30:11-30:13
And Father, I wanna pray for two people.
30:15-30:31
Number one, I wanna pray for the people that may not even know you as their Lord and Savior, who have no idea what it's like to choose Jesus for the first time, who have been choosing Barabbas every time.
30:33-30:40
Father, I beg you, please do not let them leave here today without getting that taken care of.
30:43-30:54
Secondly, Father, I wanna pray for my fellow Christians and God, I am the number one culprit of this, of choosing Barabbas over you.
30:55-31:01
Father, I pray that from this day going forward, we choose Jesus.
31:02-31:04
both as individuals and as a church.
31:06-31:09
I thank you, Father, for your grace.
31:13-31:18
Father, please bless this church, and bless our weeks going forward.
31:19-31:21
In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.
Small Group Discussion
Read Matthew 27:15-23
What was your big takeaway from this week’s sermon?
As Christians we know that God's plan is better for us and we will be fully blessed if we follow his path. Why do we continue to follow our own self ambitions and try to solve “bad” situations ourselves?
Read Matthew 26:59-66. We see that Jesus did not crumble under the most severe form of peer pressure, why is it so important that we know God's Word and stand for what is right in our current culture? How can we use God's Word to resist peer pressure?
Typically we think of idols as addictions or greed, but an idol is anything in your life that takes Jesus from being your first priority? How can you recognize an idol in your life? What is something you have allowed to take priority over your walk with Christ? How can you remove or realign those priorities?
Breakout
Pray for each other to work on their relationship with Jesus. Be honest about your walk. Share the areas you’re good and share your areas of weakness.