Summary
Pastor Safrit begins the Easter Sunday sermon by exploring the significance of Jesus' final words on the cross, specifically focusing on Luke 23:34, where Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." He emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, urging believers to lift their voices in prayer and follow Christ's example in forgiving others. The sermon highlights that true freedom comes from accepting God's forgiveness and extending it to those who have wronged us, encouraging the congregation to reflect on their own need for forgiveness and the power it holds in their lives.
Welcome and Introduction
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Well, I'm excited this morning to be able to begin our final word series,
the final sayings of Jesus on the cross, and if you have a kid that wants to go to a children's church, you can be dismissed at this time. But if you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Luke chapter 23 this morning.
We're going to look at one verse, but some of the surrounding verses as well, and as you're turning to Luke chapter 23, verse 34 is where we'll be at, we think of last words and final words, as I've said so often before, of how they can be so memorable in our life.
And so I want to do some, I did a little Google search of some famous people's last words.
And so I just pulled out three, and over the next couple of weeks, we're going to explore some of these other last words of Jesus, but I want you to begin to think through this. How many have ever heard of the name P.T. Barnum, of the Barnum and Bailey Circus?
This is his last words. He was the founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, movie out about it. This way he said, last words, what were today's prophets?
And then he breathed his last breath and died. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, this way he said, the best of all is God is with us. And he breathed his last breath and died. Karl Marx, the father of communism, said, go on, get out.
Last words are for fools who haven't said enough. So last words are memorable. And as we think of Jesus's last words this morning and over the next seven weeks,
we're going to look at Luke chapter 23, verse 34 this morning, and you can remain seated. It says this, then Jesus said,
Father, forgive them because they do not know what they're doing. And they divided his clothes and cast lots. Father, we love you.
I pray that you'll be with us this morning as we study your word, as we study what you've done for us, as we celebrate the risen Savior this morning.
Lord, it's just a wonderful day and I just love you for it and I thank you for what you've done. Be with this service in your name we pray. Amen.
The very first words of Jesus on the cross as he's heading to the cross is forgiveness. Forgiveness.
As I was reading through that and as I was studying through that, John chapter 20, this isn't back there guys, but John chapter 20, verse 21 through 23 says, Jesus said unto them again,
peace be unto you. As the Father has sent me, so also I send you. And after saying this, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any,
they are forgiven them. And if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Jesus commands us to forgive others. His last words as he's going to the cross is forgiveness.
I came across this poem. I wanted to read it. It says, Calvary is the place where man did his worst and God did his best. Calvary is the place where faith is justified, hope assured, and love conquers all.
Calvary is the place where the Savior's heart of love is constrained to man's heart of rebellion.
Calvary is the place where hell unleashed her fury and God released all of heaven's forgiveness.
Calvary is the place where Satan rejoiced in death and the Savior rejoiced in offering his life so that mankind might have the means to escape death.
Significance of Jesus' Words
Everything about Calvary is significant. The words that Jesus spoke on the cross are even more monumentous. And Jesus spoke three times before darkness appeared. He spoke three times after the darkness of the earth and once while darkness was upon the earth.
We enter this scene which leads us to the saving death of Christ on a cross of Calvary and the justification of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ in that garden tomb as we'll celebrate here in a minute with communion.
But it's important to remember that our Lord went to this cross to die in a place as our substitute. He went to die as our substitute.
He did not die merely to serve as an example, but he did not die to serve as a sacrifice for religion. He died as a sacrifice for sin. He said, I'm coming to redeem sinners of their sin.
And Jesus' last words and teaching words help us to handle difficult times in life.
We're going to go through times, as I spoke this morning at our sunrise service, where we sometimes see that there is no hope left in the world, where all hope seems lost, as some of the disciples did that three days after the tomb where they were hiding in an upper room.
And yet there was still hope there. There was still hope available for them.
And so if you have your Bibles open, we're going to sort of walk through the leading up to this moment where Jesus says, Father, forgive them.
In Luke chapter 23, verses 20 to 25, it says, Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus.
Pilate was ready to release him, and they kept shouting, Crucify him! Crucify him! And a third time they said this, he asked them, Why?
What evil has this man done? I found no guilt deserving death. Therefore punish and release him. But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted,
and released the man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection and a murderer for whom they had asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. As I was reading that verse and thinking through, as we sort of go through this, we'll pause here. As Jesus was standing up there,
God can sometimes use evil men's deeds to accomplish his will.
Sometimes God's will is accomplished through the evil deeds of other people. As hard as that is for us to understand, as hard as that is for us to comprehend in our mind, God says, I'm going to sometimes use the evil means of other people
to accomplish what I have to do. As we continue on, verse 26 and 27, And as they led him away, they seized one, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country and laid on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. They followed him, a great multitude of people and women,
who were mourning and lamenting for him. I thought about this as I was reading that. The crowd followed him.
They were weeping and they were crying and they were looking at Jesus. And Jesus was looking back at them, as we see here in verse 30, as we continue in verse 28. But turning to them. I want to think of this. Jesus, he's just been beat.
The kids made the crown of thorns and you saw them come in. He was bleeding.
One part of scripture says he was unrecognizable to man. And in this moment, in the moment where he was suffering the most, the most amount of torture, Romans did an immense amount of study to find the most horrific way to kill someone with the most amount of punishment.
I want to explain what the crucifixion was for a moment. The crucifixion was not just a cross we put around our neck. They wanted to find the way that someone could suffer the absolute most. So let me give you the second most tormented way that someone would die in the Roman time.
The Romans would take a 55-gallon barrel. And they would fill that 55-gallon barrel halfway full with nails and glass and thorns and anything that would cause damage to the body. They would take it up to the highest point of a hill. They would put that person in there and they would close the lid.
They would turn it on its side and they would roll that barrel down the hill. When the barrel would get to the bottom of the hill, they would open the lid and they would pull the person out and they would show everyone what that person looked like.
And if he was still alive, they'd put him back in, carry him to the top of the hill, and they would do it over and over and over again. That was the second most tormented way someone would die in a Roman execution.
The first, which is the hardest way for someone to die, was the Roman crucifixion. And that's what Jesus was going after. That's what Jesus was going to. And in this moment of suffering, after being beat, after being spit on, after being hit over and over again, he turns to them in verse 28.
Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed. For they will begin to say to the mountains, follow us, and to the hills, cover us.
For they do these things when the wood is green, and what will happen when it's dry. In Jesus' deepest, hardest moment of humanity, he turns to others, and he says, don't weep for me.
Weep for those that are around me. It is so counterculture of how life is in our day.
We go through heartaches, we go through problems, and we want people to weep with us. We want people to pray with us, and we're going to look at that. But Jesus is saying, no, no, no, no. Don't weep for me. Weep for others.
And then we get to this scene of Calvary in verse 32 and verse 33, and two others who were criminals were led away to be put to death with him. And they came to the place that is called the skull, and there they crucified him.
And the criminals, one on his right hand and one on his left hand,
Responding to Hurt
and Jesus said unto them, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And they cast lots and divided his garments.
What do you do? Our question this morning, what do you do when you have been hurt by others? You see, Jesus is our example all throughout Scripture of how we should respond when other people hurt us, when other people attack us, when other people become our enemies,
Jesus says, let me model for you how you should respond.
And so we take our text here, and we take a couple of points, and I won't be long this morning, but I want us to understand the gravity of what Jesus was saying here when he said, Father, forgive them.
The first thing we see here is we must lift your voice and pray to the Father. Lift your voice and pray to the Father. Father, Jesus in this moment, he prayed for the very ones that placed him on the cross.
And he cried out for them in his execution. He said, Father, forgive them. Look at the words here. Forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.
There's people here. I imagine as Jesus is saying this, he's thinking of the Jewish leaders that begin to pay people to rebel against him, that begin to turn against him. And he's thinking about those Jewish leaders, and he says, Father, forgive them. They need forgiveness today.
I'm thinking of the Roman soldiers that were whipping him and over and over would whip him. And in that moment, he looks up and he says, Father, those soldiers, they need forgiveness. Forgive them. I'm thinking of the Pilate,
the man in charge, the governor, who did everything he could for this not to happen, but then he still gave over to the people. He says, Father, Pilate, Pilate needs forgiveness as well.
Forgive him too. I'm thinking of the people that as Jesus was walking down with that cross and they would see him and they would begin to mock him and they'd spit on him. They degraded him as a dog. He said, Father, they need you as well. They need forgiveness. Father, forgive them.
And it doesn't stop there. He adds one more they there because that they begins to encapsulate me.
He says, Father, I'm looking ahead and I'm seeing James and he needs forgiveness too. Father, forgive him.
And it doesn't end there. It continues to me and it continues to you and it continues to all of us in here because we're part of this story. We're part of the story of forgiveness. And when Jesus was there,
he said, I am thinking of you individually. You could put your name here. Then Jesus said, Father, forgive James because he does not know what he's doing.
We can each and every one of us put our name in here and we can see that in Jesus' darkest moment, he lifts his voice and prays to the Father for each and every one of us because Jesus cares for us. Jesus starts out with his ministry with this.
Listen to Matthew chapter five, verse 44. He says, I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you and do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despisefully use you and persecute you. Jesus started his ministry knowing that this was going to happen.
And so this is what he said. He said, men,
women that are around, as I give this Sermon on the Mount, his first massive public address, he says there's going to be people that do harm to you and instead do good back to them. When they need help, you forgive them and you pray for them because they're going to despisefully use you.
Christ as Our Example
They're going to persecute you and yet you should pray for them. And in this moment of him on the cross, he stands strong on the cross and he says, I'm praying in the same way to those who have despitefully used me.
Those who just came to me for the miracles. Those that just came to me and then forsook me. I'm praying for those because they only came to me for the good.
And so the first thing we must do is we must lift our voice and pray to the Father. But not only that, we have to look at the biblical pattern to follow.
We have to look at this pattern of Jesus and what it looks like and I put some blanks there. You can sort of write whatever you want. I'm going to give some specific scripture here as we look at four examples.
The first is this, Christ himself as the example to us. In 1 Peter 2, 21,
this is what it says. Let me put that verse up on the screen. For this, you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps.
Christ is saying here, look at, as Paul, as Peter is saying this to the church, he's saying, look to Jesus as the example. Follow in his steps. Hard days will come and when they come, look to Christ. Look to our example in those moments.
Acts chapter 7, verses 59 and 60, we see here the example of Stephen. Stephen, that first deacon who was put to death and it says, as they were stoning Stephen, Jesus took the example of Jesus and what did he do? He called out, Lord, receive my spirit. Next verse, men.
And falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold the sins against them.
When they have said this, when he had said this, he fell asleep. He used Jesus as his model. As he was being killed, as he was being persecuted, he said, I'm going to do what Jesus did and I'm going to say, don't hold the sin against them. In other words, forgive them.
Look at what Paul says, what Paul was saying to Timothy here in 2 Timothy 4, 16. At my first offense, no one stood by me. Everyone left me. Everyone deserted me. Everyone was gone. But may it not be counted against them.
Again, may it not be charged against them. Again, he's saying, forgive them.
And then again, we look at the soldiers here as Jesus gives this model because they do not know what they're doing.
And this ultimately is describing all of human sin. It is describing all of what humanity does. All sin, we don't know what's going to happen. Even when sin is calculated and executed precisely,
no one really knows the depths of destruction, of sin, or the degree of devastating damage to people.
Think about it in your own life and in your own family. I say this often as I speak to teenagers as they live a life and they may say, well, Pastor James, no one, if I do something wrong, it's not going to really affect anyone.
And I say, well, just let's look around and let's see what happens if someone in your life were to sin. Let's take a school teacher or a coach or a pastor or someone that was influential in your area and all of a sudden they fell into sin. Something bad happened to them.
What then happens? Well, there's a family that's destroyed. So take a coach for an example.
There's a whole team that was looking to that coach as their example and now that whole team is fractured. Well, not only is there a team there, there's families of each and every one of those teammates. And those teammates are now, and those families are now destroyed
because we're blinded by what Satan can do. And oftentimes we, as young people and we as adults, we need to look and we need to see the destructiveness of sin and the degree of devastation that can happen to it and we must avoid it at all costs.
Even though we don't know what we're doing, we must avoid it at all costs. One person said it, I could not find the author of this. He said, ignorance is no excuse for sin, but it makes it forgivable.
Ignorance and Forgiveness
Ignorance is no excuse for sin, but it makes it forgivable. 1 Timothy 1.13 says this, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, this is Paul speaking, an arrogant man, but I received mercy because I acted out of ignorance and unbelief. God's mercy is to give us forgiveness for our sins.
And he said, it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you've done, forgiveness is still there. Forgiveness is still there to be offered. Right?
As a parent, you can recognize this as a kid grows older and older, they make mistakes and you say, well,
the kid may even think this is my last mistake, I'm not going to be forgiven of this. And all of a sudden that parent brings them in and with loving arms cares for them and loves them and wraps them up and says, I forgive you, it's okay.
I was listening to a friend of mine, we did an interview on one of our podcasts just recently and he said that he had missed 18 days straight of school as a teenager in high school.
And he came home one day and his dad called him over there and he said, hey son, come by and swing on the swing with me. He sat down, he said, how was school, son?
He said, I looked at him and said, dad's school is school. And he said, my dad began to talk and he said, son, you're a liar. Point blank. He said, dad figured it out.
He said, son, I found out the school called me today and said, you missed 18 days straight.
He said, as a junior in high school, as a pastor's son, as someone who was almost wanting attention from my dad at times, he said, I began to lay my head down and I began to think
he's going to pull out a switch and he's going to begin to beat me and we're going to go on because it's what happens in life. He said, he looked at me and he said, son,
I want you to know no matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter what you take my name and you do with it, when you're at the bottom of your rope and at the end of the barrel, look to your left because I'll be there waiting for you.
He said, in that moment, my heart broke, my mind broke of, I was expecting
persecution, I was expecting torture, I was expecting punishment from my dad and what does he give me? He gives me mercy because he saw Jesus
and he said, mercy is needed in this situation. He said, from that day on, I turned my life around.
Finding Power in Forgiveness
Now he's a pastor about an hour and a half from here because the biblical pattern that Jesus gives us is when you've been hurt, offer forgiveness.
The last and final thing this morning, learn to find the power in forgiveness. Learn to find the power in forgiveness. So many Christians harbor bitterness. They harbor resentment and forgiveness is the one thing in life that helps us move forward.
The one thing in life that we can use to help us move forward is forgiveness. We need to experience the forgiveness, the freedom of forgiveness.
Freedom is there for us but only thing that bitterness and that hatred and resentment offers us is bondage. Ephesians 4.32 says this,
and be kind and compassionate one to another, forgiving one another just as God also forgave you in Christ.
Oftentimes, and I've been there as an 18-year-old boy when my mom and dad had a divorce, I harbored massive amounts of bitterness and resentment toward my mom.
Things I said, I wish I would have never said. Things I did that I wish I would have never did. And oftentimes, it's so hard for us to see forgiveness and it's so hard for us to offer forgiveness because we never have fully received the forgiveness of God in ourselves.
You see, we've got to admit that we're a sinner. We've got to admit that we've done wrong. We've got to accept responsibility for our sin. And it's asking Jesus to forgive us of our sins. 1 John 1.9,
very familiar verse. You probably could quote it in here. If we confess our sins, God,
He is faithful and righteous to forgive our sins and to do what? To cleanse us from all unrighteousness because Christ offers forgiveness and there's power in forgiveness and when we learn to find the power in forgiveness, our life can go from bondage to freedom.
From someone who is held down to someone who has the freedom in Christ to do things that they never thought possible. And ultimately, today is one of the greatest days for you to find that forgiveness.
As Terry comes and plays, I came across this story that I thought was so fitting because so often times in our life we get to this point where we don't really know what to do or how to go forward.
But years ago, way before my time, I think Hilda was just a young lady and Vicki was in her prime at this time but Andrew Jackson was the president of the United States.
And a man was given a court trial and he was being condemned to die. President Jackson offered him a pardon but the man that was convicted of this crime refused the pardon. Prison attorneys or prison authorities,
the attorney general of the United States and others met with this man and tried to convince him to accept the pardon.
They tried to impress upon him that it would not only spare his life but if he did not accept this pardon it would be an insult to the president. And the man still refused time after time after time.
The attorney general consulted with the Supreme Court, went all the way to the Supreme Court and he said what legal authority do I have to force this man to receive this pardon? And the Supreme Court ruled that the pardon was merely a printed statement until the man accepted it.
He rejected the pardon and he died. Oftentimes in our life
we get to this point where we have been given a pardon from Jesus. He says I'm forgiving you of everything. But it's on us to accept that pardon.
If we never accept it it's just a printed piece of paper in the Bible that has no effect on us.
It's only to the point where we say yes Father I'm going to forgive I'm going to accept this forgiveness I'm going to accept this pardon in my life. It's only at that time when it takes effect. we this morning have a decision to make. Christ offers this pardon to all people
and we have a choice to either accept it or to reject it.
We've had this conversation with our children over and over again and one of the things I like to say is if we're struggling with what if we've ever accepted this is where are we at today? Don't think back on some decisions you may have made but where are you at today?
Is it settled today in your heart that you know that Jesus died for our sins that he sat on that cross and he said forgive them
Command to Forgive Others
they don't know what they're doing or have we never heard and accepted and then ultimately this is the hard part of this whole thing you ready? Because we have been forgiven by God we are commanded to forgive others
and often we don't do that second part. We harbor bitterness we harbor hate we harbor anger and we don't offer the forgiveness that Christ gave to us. So this morning church
I don't know where you're at I don't know if you've never accepted Jesus or you've got forgiveness that you need to give to others
but wherever you're at this morning respond as you see fit whether you come to the altar whether you pray in your seat whether you pray sitting down it doesn't matter where we go or what we do it matters about where our heart is and where we're turning to Jesus.
Father we love you we thank you for what you've done Lord I
as Logan said I'm unworthy to stand up here I'm unworthy to be able to give this message this morning but God you gave me forgiveness
as a five year old boy I accepted that forgiveness and Lord I pray that you would help us this morning as there may be one here that doesn't know you that today would be the day they come to
know you maybe it's on their drive home or at the dinner table or even at night tonight when they're sitting with their mom and dad Lord they come to know you but Lord be with us this morning maybe there's someone here that's harboring
resentment bitterness and anger in their life and ultimately it's a tool of the devil I pray that you would help us to move forward
and offer forgiveness and not to harbor that Lord we love you in your name we pray amen thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week you
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