Father, Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

So today is Palm Sunday. Normally we would be studying Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which happens just one week before his resurrection. So we called it earlier Holy Week. And it's the high point on the Christian calendar where Jesus enters into Jerusalem in triumph, riding on a donkey with the people, crying out, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Hosanna to the son of David. And they lay their palm branches and stuff down on the ground for him as a welcome into the city. And then a lot happens in that week. He goes from being welcomed into the city with great joy and great excitement to having eaten the last supper with his disciples, having been betrayed by Judas, having been arrested by night, tried by night, and hauled off to Pilate to be killed.

and then to be crucified. All of that happens in the span of a week, in addition to him being in the temple prior to that, cleansing the temple and teaching. And so everything is coming to a head. And if I tell you the truth, I often find this week, these series of events, very hard to preach. And the reason they're hard to preach for me is not because of the content. It's because of the lack of context often when we study these things. When we consider the death of Jesus Christ, How can we do it justice? How can we understand the lead up to it, the weight and the sorrow that he felt, that he endured on our behalf in one week? Or even a Good Friday service that's shorter than, you know, not even a 45-minute sermon, but maybe a 30-minute sermon. How can we get into what's going on there? What if we don't come to the Good Friday service and then we don't even hear that part of it, we just come to Easter? How can we do this event?

in human history. It's the greatest, most significant event in all of human history. How can we do its service in just a couple of short sermons? And so this is why I often find Easter hard to preach on. Because I always feel like I can barely even scratch the surface and then we're done. And so this year, I haven't had that sensation. I've been more eager to preach these services because we've been preaching through Luke and we've been leading right up to Jesus' death and his resurrection. About four months ago, I actually sat down and laid out the rest of the sermons that we have in Luke, when they're going to fall. Because I knew that Jesus' death and his resurrection, as Luke records, it was going to line up kind of closely to Easter. And so what I didn't want to do was preach Jesus' resurrection on Easter Sunday and then the next week preach his death again. So I thought that would be kind of disturbing, jolting for us.

And so I laid out our sermons to where Easter Sunday in Luke, we're actually preaching Luke's account of his resurrection. And if you've been here over the last couple of months, you know that it's been a fairly heavy or difficult time in our study of the gospel of Luke because all of Jesus' life is coming to its head. The opposition and those who hate him are exposing themselves and strengthening their knees to kill him. And you start to see the opposition and feel the resistance that he's up against. And it's been heavy, it's been hard, and I think it's been good for us to have more than one or two weeks considering Jesus' death and why he had to die and why they killed him and how it all went down. And so this week, we're going to be studying Jesus' death. I know it's Palm Sunday, but we're going to be studying Jesus' death. Last week, or two weeks ago rather, we studied his crucifixion, his interaction with the thief on the cross. And this week, we come to his death.

where he actually breathes out his last and he dies. And my hope is that it'll help prepare our hearts to worship and to celebrate and to rejoice in and to grow ultimately as we gather next week to remember and to proclaim his victory over the grave. And so this week we have to see the grave. And my intention is not to hide anything, any of it from you and to tell you it actually was a good thing or an easy thing. And also not to say, well, it just had to be done. He just had to die. I want us to see the intense grief and sorrow that Jesus bore as he hung on the cross. But I want you to remember, even though we're not going to get to it this week, that that's not the end of the story. The grave couldn't contain him. Death could not hold him. And so even as we remember and as we grieve, we will gather next week to remember. So would you please join me in standing now as we read Luke's account of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. It was now about the sixth hour and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour because the sun was obscured and the veil of the temple was torn in two. And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Having said this, he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had happened, he began praising God. saying, Certainly this man was innocent. And all the crowds who came together for this spectacle, when they observed what had happened, began to return, beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who accompanied him from Galilee were standing at a distance, seeing these things. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So two weeks ago, we studied Jesus' crucifixion and his interaction with the thief on the cross.

And this week we're going to see the end of all of it. We're going to see his death. There are two things I want to draw our attention to this morning. The first is Jesus' final statement. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And the second is the response of the people to his death. Now when you study this in Luke, Luke leaves out certain things that happened, certain things that Jesus said, certain things that were done that Matthew and Mark and sometimes the Apostle John record. And so for context, I want you to know that this statement that Luke records, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, is not all that Jesus said on the cross. It's the last thing he said on the cross. But before he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, he cries out to God. And he says to him, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And this context is especially important for us because of our temptation to cultivate ignorance regarding death. If I were to ask you, you know,

Is it good or healthy or do any of you possess a particular interest in the process of dying? Joe smiles because he thinks I'm talking about being a doctor, but you're not into medicine because you like death. You're into medicine because you hate it, right? Right, Christian? So who of us wants to study death? Who of us wants to be intimately acquainted with the pain and the agony and the misery and the sorrow of death? Who among us likes to go to funerals and thinks this is where I want to spend my time? Even though scripture tells us it's better to be in the house of mourning than the house of rejoicing. Death is not something that we want to pay attention to. It's not something that we want to learn about. It's something that we know is coming, but we would like to cultivate ignorance surrounding it. And so when we read Luke's account, he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. It would be easy for us to think that this is a sweet or controlled or measured thing that Jesus says. But when you look at my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

all of a sudden you're shocked out of your comfort and you realize nobody says that sort of thing because they thought it would be a good thing to say. This will be my parting words. Why have you hated me and condemned me to death? These are not sweet things. These are not happy things. These are not easy things to say. And so Jesus' agony was at its climax and he exclaimed these final words that Matthew and Mark record. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? His Father whom he'd known from eternity past. has turned his face away from him, has poured out all of his wrath and all of his judgment for the sins of all of his people throughout all time. And this is the context of Jesus crying out, saying, why have you forsaken me? Why have you turned away from me? I'm your son. He's feeling the full weight of his father's judgment. I'm sure many of you have been in circumstances where the filters come off. And I don't mean in anger. You know, sometimes you get angry and you say things without...

giving attention to whether you ought to say them or not. But I mean grief. Where all of a sudden, there's no filter between your heart, your mind, and what comes out your mouth. You simply say what your heart is enduring. You understand the difference between crying, and then we can escalate crying and we can call it weeping. And if we escalate weeping, we call it wailing. When we cry, we don't want people to see that we cry. So we just kind of stuff it down. And when we weep, we'll do it quietly. We cry, and people can see that we're crying, but they know not to come talk to us because whoever wants to share their grief. But when you wail, you cry, and you holler, and you yell, and you express with all of your being your sorrow. There's no longer any filter. You're no longer concerned with who's around or what they might think or any of that. You're overcome with grief.

And this is the sort of grief, the sort of environment, the sort of intensity that Jesus is enduring on the cross, only it's not at the death of a loved one. It's at the full displeasure and judgment of his Father God being poured out on him. And so he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As he's dying. And so it's important that we remember this because then right on the heels of that, then he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And he breathes his last. He dies. These are his final words. And if we were just to look at Luke's account, we may be tempted. And it may seem strange to you, but I'm tempted. And I believe that you would be tempted to think that these are sweet words that Jesus is saying. And they're the final words that he says in the agony of death, standing in the full judgment of his Father. These are not sweet words. These are painful words. These are hard words. And yet, these are faithful words.

One of the things that we have to see here in Jesus' pain and his agony is the relationship between suffering and faith. Because there's nothing like suffering, even unto death. You'll face nothing more difficult than that, to cause your faith to stumble. Satan doesn't observe your pain and your agony and say, oh, they're having a hard time, let me back off. No. When you're suffering and when you're weak, that is when he piles on. That is when he comes after you. That is when difficulty... is piled upon difficulty, hardship upon hardship, grief upon grief. At the time that you're most vulnerable, you feel the most weak, unable to stand, the temptations arise, and they're often stronger than they've ever been. So how do faith and suffering interact? And so I'm going to ask you a question. I suspect the answer is no, but maybe someone will say yes. The answer is no for me. Have you guys seen on the northern shores of California, You know how it's all rocky and cliffs? You can't really fish, there's no beaches. It's all just really, it's rough shore, steep, and then the water just crashes against it. All these big heavy waves are just always coming at it. It's not the kind of place you go swimming because you'll get sucked out to sea and then it'll push you back and just kind of beat you against the rocks until you die. Not the kind of place you want to get in the water, right? Now there are some people who like to go fishing in those sorts of places. And I'm sitting here thinking, you know, I would never want to be in that water.

Because it would kill me. Because I have to live on the surface of the water where it's very, very rough. Right? And recently I saw a video of a guy who was fishing in a place like that. And he had a GoPro on. And he actually got sucked into the water. And he had his GoPro on. And what you see, and there's all these waves. Like he's trying to get on the rocks and the waves are pulling him back. And so you're watching an intense video. And then all of a sudden, He just swims down to the bottom. And he's in probably 15, 20 feet of water. And he swims down there, and he's got his video, and he's looking at all of these beautiful fish swimming down there in these rocks. And these fish are completely unaffected by what's going on up on the top. They're just living their life, eating each other, doing their thing. And this is a picture of faith and suffering.

On the surface, there's suffering. It's not the kind of place you want to be. You don't want to have your boat there. You don't want to swim there. You think people are strange. You don't even want to fish there. But down underneath it, there's stability. There's peace. There's steadiness. There's life. And so down underneath the raging waves of suffering, faith exists. And it's possible, and I would argue more than possible, it's necessary that that faith remain unmoved, remain unchanged, even as the suffering's going on. That this is what you see in Jesus as he's dying on the cross. That he's enduring the most awful pain that anyone has ever endured. No one has suffered as Jesus has suffered. And yet his faith remains strong. It remains steady. It remains solid. And because of that, he's able to say, at the point of death, Father, into your hands.

I commit my spirit. Even in his death, Jesus draws near to his Father. I wanted to say to his God, but it's worthwhile noting that Scripture is very helpful to us in the words that it actually uses. When he complains of his agony and his pain, he says, my God, my God. Now, is his God his Father? Certainly. But it matters that he addresses him this way. My God, my God. And then as he comes to his final word, he says, Father. Not Lord. Not God, not creator, not judge, Father. And these are faithful words because in the midst of all of his suffering and all of his pain, he draws near to his Father in heaven. And he lays out for us an example of what we ought to do in the midst of suffering. But it's only possible if while the waves are crashing, the faith is stable. That even in the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our pain and our grief, we say, Father God. Jesus isn't the only one who does this.

Stephen, as he's being stoned for preaching, as he's being killed in Acts 7, the end of the chapter 59 and following, it says, And so I don't want you to think that when we look at Jesus and we see his example on the cross, you go, well, that's not for me. He's perfect. Stephen was a sinner just like you, and his words as he died were almost identical to Jesus. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Don't hold it against them, a man like you and I. These men, Jesus and Stephen, they draw near to God in their adversity. They don't distance themselves. The fires of faith in their heart burn stronger as their suffering intensifies. As I said earlier, temptations abound in these times, especially in these times.

Jesus died and he rose again that you and I wouldn't be continued to be enslaved to the wiles of our heart. As each one of us consider this, we think, well, that's what I want to be. I hope by faith that when I face this end, when this happens to me, that I'll respond with faith. When I look at the suffering of Stephen or I look at the pain of Jesus, I think, how did they ever do it? How could I do it? Could I do it? Lord, help me to do it. Help me to finish well. Help the last words out of my mouth to be words of faith. Because I can't look to myself and my own strength and say, yeah, I think I'll finish well. Go sprain your ankle really badly and just think, yeah, I've got to live with that for a couple of weeks. You can't walk, you can't talk, it hurts. You can't stand, you can't sit, you can't do anything. It just hurts. And the temptations, even with that minor sort of pain, comparatively speaking, how strong the temptation is to be angry that you have to endure it.

And this is just a sprained ankle. It's much more difficult things to bear. That will get better. But even at that level, our temptations are strong to withdraw from God, to be angry. And maybe it's not physical pain. Maybe it's in your marriage. Maybe it's at work. Maybe it's your finances. Maybe it's your health. Maybe it's your kids. Each one of us has endured pain. And each one of us will endure more pain. And what I want you to see is that each one of these things are the little things. That we need to be faithful and we need to seek faithfulness in to prepare us for the big things. That we would finish well, that we would end well. That our words would match Jesus' words. That our words would match Stephen's words. That we would finish the race well. That we would receive the prize. The end of Psalm 31 says this. And this will make a little more sense. I'll open it up to you in just a minute. The end of Psalm 31, David writes, Oh, love the Lord, all you his godly ones.

The Lord preserves the faithful and fully recompenses the proud doer. So you see blessing and cursing, right? Preserves the faithful, fully recompenses the proud doer. What's he going to do to the proud doer? He's going to strike him down. Love the Lord, all you godly ones. The Lord preserves the faithful and fully recompenses the proud doer. Be strong and let your heart take courage. All you who hope in the Lord. Now you might be inclined to read that and go, well, those are nice words. King David was very poetic. He had a way with them, but it's not the whole story. In fact, earlier in Psalm 31, David's writing, and David wrote Psalm 31 as all of his enemies were out to get him. He didn't know who was his friend. He didn't know who was his enemy. He was in the middle of battle, and they were trying to kill him. And in the middle of that, up in verse 5, Psalm 31, verse 5, he says, Into your hand I commit my spirit.

You have ransomed me, O Lord, God of truth. Now, as Jesus is dying on the cross, what does he say? He says exactly what David said. Into your hand I commit my spirit. David, who everyone's gunning for, everyone's trying to kill, this is another example. Everyone's after him. How's he to rest? How's he not to get bitter? How's he to live? By entrusting his spirit into the hands of his father. And so you have Jesus saying, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Stephen saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. David, into your hands I commit my spirit. And you see in all of these men faith in the midst of pain, calmness underneath the turmoil. I want you to consider for a minute, when suffering is coming, when death is imminent, what do we want to pray?

Do you notice that none of these men pray for their lives to be saved? And it's worth us noting that they don't pray for their lives to be saved. And the reason they don't pray for their lives to be saved is not because they don't value their life. This is not the case. If they didn't value their life, David wouldn't be hiding in caves, Stephen wouldn't have spoke the way he did, and Jesus wouldn't have gone into Jerusalem. Or rather, I should say, Jesus wouldn't have stayed away from Jerusalem so long if he valued his life. He would have just gone in and been... been killed. He wouldn't have been hiding up on the Mount of Olives, having to have Judas come betray his hiding place. These men valued their life, but they valued something more than their lives. They valued the condition of their soul. They valued their spirit. They cared more, especially as they faced death, that God, their Father, would care for and tend to their souls, their spirits. They didn't understand death

Even a death such as Jesus suffers, an innocent death, even as a centurion says, certainly this man was innocent. In Matthew and Mark, he says, surely this was the Son of God. He was innocent. He was righteous. He didn't deserve to die. Even that kind of death, these men did not understand death to be the removal of God's care and provision. That's a simple thing for me to say, but it's a very important thing for us to understand. Death is both an enemy, that each one of us will face. And we need to prepare our hearts and minds as much as best as we're able to prepare is to face it the way Jesus did, the way Stephen did, the way David did. It is an enemy. And yet death is not the abandonment of God. In our death, God does not abandon us, forsake us, or turn his face away from us. These men understood that death was their entrance into glory and into rest.

And we have to share this understanding of it. While it's an enemy to be conquered, we have strong hope that it has been conquered and that because of Jesus' victory over it, we will have victory over it if we believe in him. Paul speaks this way in Philippians chapter one. He says, for to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. And in case we, you know, if we don't understand what he means by that, he goes into detail. He says, but if I am to live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me. And I do not know which one to choose. And he's speaking of life and death. But I am hard pressed from both directions. I don't know whether I want to live or die. I don't know which would be better. To live means fruitful service. But I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ. I have a desire to be freed from this body and all the pain and the agony and the misery that comes with it. I want to be perfect. I want to live in God's presence. And I'm hard pressed from both directions. I don't know which to choose.

For I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, for that is very much better. Good English there, right? Very much better. Excessively and exceedingly the better outcome. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. And I don't know which to choose, says Paul, for death is very much better. But so long, he says, as I'm here, I'll be fruitful. And so the faith that these men possessed, Jesus, Stephen, King David, Paul, was a faith that saw beyond the grave and said that there's hope and there's glory and there's rest and there's reward and there's justice and there's joy on the other side of the Jordan. And so if we think that our current life is of more value than our eternal life, then the things we see Jesus say here, will lose its appeal to us. It will become intimidating. It will be like a bitter taste in our mouth. It won't be attractive to us anymore. We'll say, I don't know that that's for me. Whether we say that out loud with our mouths, or we say that out loud with our actions, or we say that simply in our hearts. Every one of us is reckoning in our hearts and in our minds whether this is for us. Whether death is our entrance into glory, or whether death is the thing to be opposed at all costs.

And if we find in our hearts that death is to be opposed at all costs, what we are finding in our hearts is our love for this world and our desire to be interacting with and living in and amongst the sin that dwells in us and dwells around us. We're saying we prefer this. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go right now. Why? To quote an old-ish country song? Why? Because we don't love God like we ought to. But Jesus here does love his father, and he does want to be with him. The same for Stephen, the same for David, the same for Paul. Hebrews 12, 1 through 3 says this, Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us. This is our love for the world. This is our desire to be here, to put off.

holiness, to put off obedience, to put off faithfulness. Let us lay aside every encumbrance and sin which so easily entangles us and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. And you understand at every race there's a finish line, right? And that is death. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Let's not turn aside and take another path, stop running. Let's not pull up short of the finish line with our faithfulness. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus. the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself. Consider him. As you run, consider him and his death. Consider him so that you have endurance and you don't fall short. You don't stop too soon.

Consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. What you see in Jesus' words on the cross, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, is you see one crossing the finish line well. You see the bar set for you. Jesus crossed that line, set that bar, because of the joy set before him. This is what Hebrews tells us. He persevered because of the joy set before him of being reunited with his Father. and enjoying the glory of heaven for all eternity. And these things laid just beyond his grave. And so he cries out, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And having said this, he breathed his last. He died. And so now you come to the response of the people, all these people who are watching it. Jesus' death is not a private thing. Everyone's around. Everyone sees. How do they respond? Well, this centurion, this Roman guard, this Gentile, this unbeliever, who's been commissioned by Pilate,

to kill Jesus on behalf of the Jews. He sees what's happened, and he says, well, it says first, he began praising God, and he said, certainly this man was innocent. Matthew says, surely he was the son of God. This word innocent can also be translated, and it's most commonly translated righteous, without guilt, holy, perfect, undeserving of this death. This man, this unbeliever, who's not spent his time growing up in church, not spent his time being taught the word of God, saw by the actions, by the events, he saw that Jesus was innocent. He saw that his death was unjust. And his response was to praise God. He saw Jesus' interaction with the thief on the cross. He saw Jesus before Pilate. He saw Jesus being hauled in in the middle of the night by Judas and his band of thugs.

And when he sees him die, he says, certainly this man was innocent, undeserving of these things. And so he glorifies God and he testifies to this truth that Jesus did not deserve to die. And then you've got the crowds who've come together to see this spectacle, as was common then. And I've noted in previous sermons, it's foreign to our culture. In our culture, we would not go on to go see a death. We don't even want to go to testify to the resurrection at funerals these days. But it was common at this time, people would go to observe. The executions. And so all the crowds who came together for this spectacle, when they observed what had happened, they began to return beating their breasts. Now we don't know with detail who these people were exactly. Undoubtedly some of them were the people who cried out, crucify him, crucify him. And inevitably in this crowd there were also those who wept over Jesus as he carried his cross. And they watched. And they joined in with the centurion in their own way, having seen that this man,

This holy man, this righteous man has been put to death. They go home grieved, sad, beating their breasts like the sinner in the temple. Have mercy on me, a sinner, beating his breast, not even lifting his face up to heaven. Contrast it with the righteous Pharisee. Thank you, Lord, that I'm not like him, a sinner. The crowds understood what they had done, that they'd killed an innocent man. And so they go home beating their breasts. And finally, you have all of Jesus' acquaintances and the women who accompanied him from Galilee. They were standing at a distance and they saw these things. Now these acquaintances and these women, these are the only ones of his followers who didn't abandon him. You'll note that it doesn't say anything about the apostles here or the 12 disciples because Peter was the boldest of all of them and even he abandoned Jesus. Having been in the...

court of the high priest when he's confronted by the little girl and the soldiers and they say, you were with him. He says, no, no, no. And then the rooster crows. And what's he do? He leaves. He grieves. And there's no time for him to get back. This happens in the dark. And as soon as the light comes, they haul Jesus off the pilot. And by noon, by the sixth hour, Jesus is dying on the cross. There's no time. All of his disciples are gone. His acquaintances and these women. They're the only ones there to observe it. They're the only ones that were willing to be affiliated with Jesus. And they were the only ones who had the faith to see their Lord put to death. You remember at the beginning, I said, we don't want to see this stuff. Who of us wants to study death? Who of us wants to watch Jesus hang on a cross, naked, bleeding, and dying?