Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Luke 23:44-49, focusing on Jesus' final words, "Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit." He emphasizes that Jesus voluntarily and victoriously surrendered His life to God, encouraging believers to call upon the Lord, connect their concerns with Him, and commit their lives to His care. The sermon highlights the importance of trusting God in difficult times and living a life of surrender, reminding the congregation that true safety and hope are found in God's hands.
Welcome and Church Information
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. Wonderful singing choir. If you have your Bibles, it will be in Luke chapter 23, verse 44-49.
If you have a child that wants to go to a children's church that's available at this time, you can dismiss them now. As you return to Luke chapter 23, we'll recap what we've studied over the last couple of weeks. We are in a series of the seven final words,
the sayings of our Savior. Two weeks ago, we looked at Father, forgive them, and we talked about that. What do we do when we've been hurt by others? How do we respond? How is our actions? What is our personification when others hurt us?
And we looked at Jesus' response in that moment. Last week, we talked about the two criminals on the cross and how the one looked and asked that question to be forgiven.
And Jesus said, today you'll be with me in paradise. And we looked at when we have been given pain, how do we give hope to others? Again, how do we think of others? And today, we'll be looking at the statement, Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.
And as we've done every other week, we want to give some opening final statements, final words of famous people in history.
And I appreciate some of you that have sent me some of these famous words and people that you appreciate.
And so if you have any of those, send them to me and we'll try to work them in over the next couple of weeks as we continue this. But the famous words of Bob Marley, famous singer, many people may know.
He died at age 36. And this is what he said, money can't buy life.
Even he realized that as much money as you can make, as much wealth that you'll have in life, it will not be able to buy life any longer.
The final words of Queen Elizabeth I said this, all of my possessions are for a moment of time. She was willing in the moment of her last breath to give up all of what she had, the monarchy, the wealth, the riches, for another moment in time.
Not another lifetime, but just another moment to live. I always say his last name wrong. Leonard Nimoy.
He was Spock off of Star Trek. How many of you watch Star Trek? Okay, my dad's a huge Star Trek fan. Anything Star, we watch Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars.
I knew them all. All sci-fi, I knew it. So I knew Spock well. And this was his last words, and he ends with live long and prosper, just in case you didn't know. But this is how he ends his last words in life. He said, a life is like a garden.
Perfect moments can be hard, but not preserved except in memory.
And then he said LLP, which is live long and prosper. That's how he ended his life. And so final words there. Last one, the final words of Nostradamus. The famous philosopher Nostradamus said this, tomorrow at sunrise, I shall be no longer here.
He knew that his life was coming to an end. He knew that his life was fading away, and he began to make those preparations.
And so Nostradamus made those last words. I came across this story as I was studying this week. I thought it was fantastic because I'm married, and I have a wife, and you guys know this. And most of you in here are married as well. And men, you'll appreciate this.
There's a cemetery in England, and there's a grave marker that has the inscriptions, she died for want of things.
Right? How many women in here have an Amazon list, okay, that you want to one day have people buy things for you? And right beside that grave marker was who we assume is the husband, and it said this, he died trying to give her those things. Right?
Oftentimes our life is revolving around the things we get, a birthday party, a wish list, a Christmas, and we're in birthday season right now.
We've got March and June and August, so during this time we've got a lot of birthdays. We've got a birthday party this afternoon we're going to. And so indeed so many people in our lives, we live only for the things of the world,
only to one day die to be ushered into the presence of God and face judgment, leaving all the earthly things behind us.
We can't take things with us. The only thing we can take is our soul and those who we tell the gospel to.
And one day we'll stand there in heaven and we'll be ushered in if we believe in Jesus, and we'll have those that are around us that we had a part in leading to the Lord.
Those are the gifts that we get to receive, the gifts that we do for the sake of the gospel that we will one day in turn back to the Lord and give those crowns back to Him.
And so as we look at this and we look at Jesus' final words that Luke has inscribed here, as Luke concludes here, he lays out what Jesus said.
And I want to bring our attention to a couple of people in way of introduction, but Luke chapter 23, if you've got your place there, we'll stand and read the scripture and open in prayer. The Bible says, Verse 47, Father, we thank you again for this day.
Be with me as I preach your word. Lord, as we learn from what our Savior said here on these last words, as he breathed his last and how people responded. Lord, help us to honor you this morning. In your name we pray. Amen.
You may be seated. So we see here Jesus in his final moments as Luke recalls, and we'll look at some of the other statements over the next couple of weeks, but Luke entails three of these final statements right here back to back to back.
And he gets here to this last part, and darkness came across the land, and the sun was gone. And at this moment, Jesus is standing there, and he makes this statement, Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.
And as we think of that, and I want you to think about those hands. He says in your hands, and we're going to really dive into that here in just a minute.
But right before that, it goes on, and it says that there's three people standing around in this moment. I want you to think about where you would be at in this situation. It starts out, and it says that the centurion was standing there.
And when the centurion saw this, this would have been a soldier who had a thousand men underneath him. The centurion looked here, and he made this statement, this man really was righteous.
And he began to glorify God. Only one person here in this story saw this in this moment and began to glorify God. Only one. It was the pagan Gentile Roman centurion.
He saw it, and he said, this man is righteous. This man truly is the Son of God.
And as we look through that, Matthew says it like this in Matthew 17, 27, 54. And when the centurion saw these things, and they were keeping watch over Jesus, they saw an earthquake, and these things that happened, and they were terrified and said, truly, this is the Son of God.
The centurion also, in Mark, says this when he said his last, Mark recorded that he said, truly, this man was the Son of God. So we see three different accounts where these three writers said that the centurion looked and saw that Jesus was righteous and glorified God in that moment.
I wonder if that would have been us. If we would have sat there and we would have said that Jesus was righteous, or would we have been the second person here, the crowd? The crowd was standing here, and the crowds were gathered around, it says, for the spectacle. Right? A Roman persecution.
And you see where the crucifixion site was. All around there is now a bus station.
Imagine, would the Romans would have wanted Jesus to be in a place that would have been open to public, in an intersection where everyone would have seen what was going on.
And the crowd began to gather, and they began to see what was going on, and they saw the inscription above his head where it said, this is the King of the Jews. And the crowds began to look at him, and in this moment, they struck their chest in a moment of honor, saying,
yeah, he deserves it. That's what the crowd walked away saying. He deserved it. We got our way. He got his way. And they struck their chest. But then we see these third people. These are the Christ followers.
These are the ones that was with Jesus for three and a half years, who spent time with him, who loved him, who was there when he healed the blind man, who was there when he fed 5,000 people,
who was there when, as Terry was saying here just a minute ago, as he gave the Sermon on the Mount, as he was instructing them, they would have been there.
And now they're standing here as Jesus has been crucified, and look at where they stood. They stood at a distance watching these things.
Because they were fearful if they got close, they would also be the ones that would be crucified. They stood at a distance simply watching.
Oftentimes, we as Christians stand from a distance, and we watch what's going on, and we say, well, Lord, I want to be a part of it, but I'm just going to stand from a distance. I'm going to back up. I'm going to be there, but I'm going to be from a distance.
We see that Christ doesn't honor that. He wants us to be intimately involved. He wants us to be a part of what's going on. And as I began studying this and began thinking about Jesus' death, I really thought of two ways to sum up what Jesus did in two simple statements.
Jesus' Voluntary Sacrifice
The first is this. Jesus gave up his life voluntarily.
You see, what held Jesus to the cross was not the nails that he was crucified to, but it was the love for you and for me. John 10 verse 18 says this. No one takes their life from me, but I lay down it for my own.
I have the right to lay it down, and I have the right to take it up again, and I receive this command from my Father. This is Jesus talking to his disciples, and he's saying, no one's going to take my life,
but I'm going to lay it down voluntarily. And when I lay it down voluntarily, I will one day bring it back to life. You see, this is why we observe communion.
We had it two weeks ago because it is an honoring of Jesus laying down his life, an honor of Jesus saying, I'm going to voluntarily lay it down, and we remember that bread, and we remember that cup as
we take that, and we begin to say that Jesus laid down his life on Good Friday. They took his life from him
so that he would bring it back to life on Easter Sunday. Not only did he give it up voluntarily, but he gave it up victoriously. Look here in verse 46 again, and he called out with a loud voice, Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.
As I thought about this, and as I thought about my life in ministry over the last 12 years, I can remember the very first death that I was a part of. A guy's name was Haas Pickerel. Okay?
They went by Haas. I honestly don't know what his actual real name was, but everybody just called him Haas. Everyone from everyone who ever met him. And so we actually did his funeral, and it was printed Haas. It didn't even print his real name because no one knew what his real name was.
He just always went by Haas. I remember sitting at Haas' house, and we had played a round of golf before, and we're hanging out there, and he looked at me, and in his weak voice, he looked up and very quietly, very calmly just said, Pastor James, my life's coming to an end.
I'm ready to go see Jesus. It was calm. It was quiet.
It wasn't a lot of energy. He didn't have a lot of energy in that moment.
My last death that I sat beside, and I watched this man take his last breath, was just a couple of years ago. He was in the hospital room,
and David was his name, and David was laying there in the hospital bed in a ventilator. David had very little energy, and it was his last moment where he was actually awake and able to communicate.
David looked at me with his wife there and his daughter there, and he looked at me, and he pointed to me.
He sort of mouthed Pastor James, and he pointed us to his chest. He said, I love you. And then he said, Pastor James, I love God.
Not audibly, but I could tell what he was saying. There wasn't a loud moment here. It was quiet. It was a moment of somberness.
He knew his life was coming to an end, and in the moment when Jesus' life was coming to an end, I want you to put yourself in this moment. He didn't call out quietly.
It says he called out with a loud voice that would have caused extruciating pain for him to do this, and he said, Father, in your hands, I entrust my spirit.
It says when he said that, he gave up his last. You see, Jesus confidently and loudly entrusted and commended his spirit into the Father's hands. As we've looked the last two weeks, when we've been hurt, we offer forgiveness.
Surrendering to God
When you have pain, we give hope to others, but when you're at your wit's end, we must surrender to God because that's what Jesus did.
He was at his end, he was at his moments of notice, and he said, the only thing I can do is surrender to God. Paul said it like this, I die daily.
Do we surrender daily? When Jesus was on the cross, and he came to the end of his hardships, he came to the end of his life, he confidently committed himself to the Father.
As I was thinking through this, and thinking through this thought of surrender, my mind went to probably one of the most famous songs ever written, I surrender all. A man who wrote this song in the late 18th century,
I think that's how he did it, it was late 1800s, I don't know if I got my actual terminology there right,
his name was Judson DeVernton, if I said that right. He lived in the late 50s, 1850s, and he died in 1939.
Judson wrote this song, and he was in a moment of excruciating decision making in his life.
He was only up and up as far as a doctor, and he was teaching at Hillsdale College, and he had this opportunity to teach, and to give his life to art, and to give his life to what meant was going to be, I mean, he was going to be a famous person.
He was going to teach at the highest level, he was going to have all this grander, all these doctorates, and titles behind his name, and he came to a moment, an intersection of his life, of what am I going to do?
Because he also had the opportunity to write songs, and worship evangelism, and worship, and teach others how to lead music.
And he said in his own words, he said, I came to the moment where I had to make a decision, and in this moment, I knew I had to surrender to God. And right shortly after that, he wrote the song, All to Jesus, I surrender all.
All to him, I freely give. I will ever love and trust him in his presence, I'll daily live. I surrender all, I surrender all, all to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.
You know the song well. Jesus said in Luke chapter 9, verse 23, and he said unto them all, if anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily,
and follow me. You see, there will be times in our lives where we must simply come to the end of ourselves, and say, God, I'm going to trust in you. Listen to what the psalmist says in Psalms 107.
He says that others went out into the ships and sea, conducting trade on a vast water. They saw the Lord work, his wondrous works in the deep, and he spoke, and arised a stormy wind,
and stirred the waves of the sea, rising them up to the sky, sinking down into the depths, and their courage melted away in anguish. They reeled, and they staggered like a drunkard, and all their skills was useless.
And the way that King James says it, it's at their wit's end. And at their wit's end, when everything was lost, and everything was gone, it says, they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out into their distress. And he stilled the storm to a whisper,
and the waves of the seas were hushed. As I was reading through that, I'm thinking, how often do we get to this moment in our life where we've done everything we can, where we're reeling away, and we're trying to get the boat back to safety, and
we've done everything we can, and we begin to be weak in our own selves. We begin to, all of our skills that we've been trained in are useless. And then that's when we turn to Jesus.
It's like Jesus is like, no, no, no, when you begin that trial, turn to me. But he knows our humanity. He knows that we turn to him at the end. And yet, he still comes. Yet, he still gives us peace in those times.
And so, as we look at Jesus as our model, Jesus as he's giving these words, what does Jesus do when he's at his wit's end? I wrote down three ways to trust God in a difficult time. The first is this, call upon the Lord. Look at what Jesus did. He said the word,
Father. Father. He said, I don't know what else to do, and so at this moment, I'm going to run to the one that I know I can be trusted.
Trusting in God's Hands
I'm going to run to the one that knows my deepest desires, the one that knows what I'm going through, and he says, Father, into your hands I trust my spirit. Think about this, as he breathes his last breath, the Lord Jesus had an intimate relationship with the Father.
He had this moment where he could come in and say, Dad, Abba, Father. Dad, Dad, I need you today.
Oftentimes, if you've been a dad and you've got kids, you'll know this, or as a son, you would have done this. Something happens, and you get a pain or an injury, and you run to Dad, and you say, Dad, I need you.
I often think about a couple of different instances, and in this moment, my mind is going to when Jade was just a little kid, maybe five or six years old, and she was just riding a bike, and at
our parstons, we had this massive little hill that went down and then turned into the parsonage,
and Brody, he was the daredevil, and he's riding his bike and seeing how fast he can go, and he's like, Jade, you need to try it. So Jade at six is like, sure, I'll trust my big brother,
and so she jumps on there, and she begins to ride her bike, and she gets down to the bottom, and she couldn't quite stop, and so she went to stop, and she went and turned, and the bike went, and then she went into the pavement,
pavement in her face, pavement in her arms, pavement on her legs, and all of a sudden, she's screaming, we run outside, we figure out what's going on, and she runs up there, and she doesn't run and say, Mom, she runs and says, Dad, I need you.
Dad, I'm hurting, and I could give story after story of how this happens, because when we have an intimate relationship with our Father, we know who we can go to.
When Jesus makes this statement on the cross, to us, it doesn't mean a lot. To us, it's just okay, He's given His final words, but to a Jewish person, they would have immediately recognized that this was Psalms 31.5.
Listen to Psalms 31.5, and tell me if it sounds familiar to you. Into your hands, I entrust my spirit. You have redeemed me, Lord God of truth.
Jesus making this statement was a statement to the Jewish people that He was at His end, because He was giving the last words of what many Jewish people would have done on their final deathbed. And He's given this statement, He's saying, Into your hands,
I entrust my spirit. He's calling upon the Lord, and when difficult times come,
church, we must understand that the first thing we must do is not the last thing, but the first thing is call upon the Lord and say, God, I need you to come, and I need you to work in this situation.
But not only do we call upon the Lord, but what we need to do is we need to connect our concerns with the Lord. Look at how He continues. Father, into your hands.
The concerns of life, the concerns of what's going on, how often do we lay at night and we begin to just continue, think over the things that are going on in our life, and we continue to just melt
in our mind of what's going on and how are we going to be able to do this, how are we going to figure it out, how are we going to make ends meet, how are we going to get
the bills paid, how are we going to get the kids to school, and all these other things that we have going on. We must get to the point where we can connect our concerns with God and understand and know that God can handle anything that I give Him.
God can handle everything that I give Him. You see, Jesus cried out with a loud voice knowing that He would handle it, and He said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Think about this. He used the word hands here. Think about the last hands that He just experienced.
The hands of the soldiers that whipped Him. The hands of the soldiers that beat Him. The hands of the ones that were around Him that slapped Him. The hands of the ones that abused Him. The hands of the ones that jabbed the crown of thorns in His hands.
The hands of the soldiers that just stabbed Him while He was naked. The hands of the ones that nailed Him to the cross. That's the last hands that touched Him. And in this moment, he says, God, I am committing my life, my soul into your hands. Bible says in Jeremiah 17, 7,
blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. Psalms 146, 3,
don't put your confidence in powerful people because there's no help there. And Psalms 118, 8 says, it is better for you to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in people.
One of the greatest questions I get in my life is this, who are you going to trust? I have to often say this to people. I have to say this to my kids. I have to say this to my wife. I have to say this to myself.
Who are we going to trust? Three simple questions I sort of wrote down is, who has your best interest at heart? Who knows everything and is perfect?
And who will never lie to you? The simple answer, if you didn't know, I'll give you the cliff notes. It's God, right? He knows everything. He's perfect.
He's never going to lie to us. He has our best interest at heart. The Father's hands are the safest place in the universe.
We did a complete study through the book of Colossians when I first got here. Colossians 117 reminds you of this moment here. He is before all things, and by him, all things are held together.
Because Christ is the center of everything, and Christ is the one that holds it together. And when we think about what we will experience when we get to heaven, we experience this. As our friends of the Crast and Crown says, the only scars in heavens are the hands and the feet of Jesus.
Because when we connect our concerns with the Lord, his hands have been there. He experienced loss. He experienced hurt. He experienced rejection. He experienced joy. He experienced conversion. He experienced these things here on earth.
And so, therefore, we can trust in him, and we can connect to him. But not only do we call, not only do we connect, but now we must commit our life to the Lord. Surrender our life unto the Lord. As it says here, I entrust my spirit.
God is doing things that we cannot see. God is working in ways that we may never know. Right? And as we go through our life, as we study what God has done for us, we will look back and we will say, God, I didn't know you were doing that in that moment. But you were.
Hannah, just the other day, was sharing with me how the search committee even came across my name.
And even called me to be here. And how the ones that were on that did not even have my name to call. And yet the Lord worked that out in a mysterious, miraculous way.
Because when we begin to entrust our spirit, when we begin to entrust our life unto the Lord, we will understand that he is working all things for his good and for his glory.
One day your heart will stop, but your spirit will go on into eternity to either live with God one day or to be separated, God, for the rest of eternity. And Jesus is saying here, Father, in your hands I commit my spirit. One simple verse.
But what it's truly allowing us to do is allowing us to prepare to live our lives for eternity for him. And it gives us the confidence to have the confidence in God that only he can give.
Conclusion and Call to Trust
If only we'll trust in him. If only we'll surrender to him. And oftentimes we don't.
As Terry comes and plays as we conclude, this final word of Jesus here in Luke is not just to cry, just to say when someone was dying, but it was a statement to say every day for the rest of our life. Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.
God, I'm going to call upon your name. I'm going to confidently give my concerns to you and I'm going to connect them to you. And then I'm going to commit my life to the Lord fully.
I quoted a lot of Psalms today. I want to read entirety here the five verses of Psalms 31. It says this, I run to you, God. I run for dear life.
Imagine sometimes we'll be in this situation. And the psalmist says, Do not let me down.
Take me seriously at this time. Get down to my level and listen. And Lord, don't procrastinate.
Your granite is hiding in a hiding place and your high cliff nest a place to safety. In verses 3 through 5, You are my cave to hide in. My cliffs to climb.
Be my safe leader. Be my true mountain guide. Free me from the hidden traps. And I want to hide in you. I've put my life in your hands. You won't drop me and you'll never let me down.
When we truly get to this point where we understand that the only person we can go to is God. The only person that we can run to is His loving arms and His loving hands.
This is the moment when we get to the moment and we say, I'm going to surrender all. Not just in salvation. Not just in trusting in you to one day go to heaven.
But in every situation of our life. We get laid off at work. God, I'm going to trust you. We get diagnosed with a rare cancer. God, I'm going to trust you. We get diagnosed with some weird form of whatever it may be. God, I'm going to trust in you.
And it's easy to say in this moment. And I understand it's harder to do in the moment. But yet God is calling us to trust in Him and run to Him. As the psalmist says, to run for dear life.
It's the kid that's playing outside in the woods. And he sees the snake out there.
Or he sees the animal that's coming to attack him. And he runs as fast as he can to get to safety. This is what Jesus is saying we've got to do in an everyday moment. Run to Him for safety. Run to Him for dear life.
Invitation for Salvation
Because He is the only one that is able to give us life. And to give us the shelter that we need. So church, I don't know this morning if you're sitting here today. And you've never trusted Him as your Savior. Maybe today is the day. Maybe you're just trusting yourself every single day.
And you haven't thought about the Lord. And you haven't committed your ways into Him. And maybe today is the day where you're going to say, God, I want to recommit, resurrender my life. So that you will be the ultimate control in my life. Whatever it may be,
the altars will be open. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Lord, I'm honored every time I get to get up here and open your word. I'm unworthy to do it. But God, you are so worthy. Lord, you've given us this grace.
You've given us this mercy that we don't deserve. But yet we've been given it.
Lord, if there's one here that doesn't know you, let it be today that they come to know you. Lord, if there's one here that just hasn't fully trusted and surrendered and they're holding on to things, help it be the day today where they come and fully trust in you.
God, your will be done today. In your name we pray. Amen.
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